With Pixar’s newest blue-chip animated movie ‘‘Wall-E’’ hitting theaters Friday, the 2008 Oscar race is finally off and running.
It’s an unofficial starting gun, of course. Technically, any movie that’s had a commercial release of at least a week in Los Angeles County since the start of the year is eligible to compete. But the first half of the year rarely yields much in the way of Oscar fodder, and this year has been no exception.
New rule limits Oscar song contenders to two per film
Last time around, the Oscar songs category was three times ‘‘Enchanted’’ — a trick that may never be repeated.
The number of original songs that can be nominated from a single movie will now be limited to two, according to a rule change by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The academy’s governors approved the change late Tuesday.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. make an appearance on MTV's "Total Request Live" to promote the movie. Dig Robert's pocket accessory.(Peter Kramer/AP)
We went, we saw, we loved it. "Iron Man" is a triumph, finally making a comic-book movie not seem so forced, so obligatory. We chalk it up to the great casting — Robert Downey Jr. (who we never tire of seeing described as "the best actor of his generation") and The Dude (a hardly recognizable Jeff Bridges playing a thankfully non-alien villain) — and, OK, the schlub factor.
We also find it interesting that the Pop Watch bloggers at Entertainment Weekly have taken the populist stance and called for the Academy to do some hard thinking — and consider Downey Jr. for an Oscar nomination. At the very least, it would be refreshing to have a slate of nominees from films the country — i.e., those same TV viewers you keep lamenting aren't watching the Oscars anymore, in droves — has actually seen.
What do you think? Was "Iron Man" just good escapist fun, or is it deserving of the Ultimate Nod? Comment below...
Oscars opt to give new president the Tuesday spotlight
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — What’s more significant: the inauguration of a new U.S. president or the announcement of the year’s Oscar nominees? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided politics takes precedence, announcing today it has delayed the nominations announcement by two days.
Oscar nominees are usually revealed on a Tuesday about four weeks before the big show, which is typically held the last Sunday in February. For 2009, though, the targeted Tuesday — Jan. 20 — is Inauguration Day.
So the 81st annual Oscar nominees will be revealed Thursday, Jan. 22, and the Academy Awards will be presented Sunday, Feb. 22 — the earliest Oscars ever.
Diablo Cody, the Chicago-area ex-stripper who just won an Oscar for writing "Juno," is now a columnist for Entertainment Weekly magazine. In her latest missive, she sets the record straight about crying during her acceptance speech: “I get something stuck in my eye and am widely misinterpreted as weeping. Yeah, like I would cry in that situation. You punks obviously don’t know me. I’m tough. I would never break into ragged sobs on live television, and I would also never run off stage immediately afterward and blubber in front of the entire production crew and Helen Mirren."
Academy head cops to evolving movie industry, Oscars
Entertainment Weekly interviewed Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, following the news of the dismally low ratings for Sunday's Oscars. He acknowledges that a majority of the traditional viewers simply didn't tune in at all this year, and instead of casting blame to elements of the show or the writers strike, he concedes that, in the movie industry of the future, the Oscars may naturally be a smaller affair.
"Some of these movies are just too difficult for a mass audience, frankly," Davis says. "And if we have moved into an era where there's this dichotomy between big popular studio movies and smaller pictures for more specialized audiences, we may just have to get used to smaller audiences [for the Oscar telecast.] This could be a one-year blip but it doesn't look like one. It looks like something that has been developing over the past few years. It's as if the National Book Awards had to make a choice between giving awards to very serious fiction or to the most popular bestsellers. We've come to that point where there are two kinds of movies, and we're focusing on the ones which, almost by definition, aren't going to be blockbusters."
ABC’s broadcast of the 80th annual Academy Awards hit a ratings low with only 32 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media. Though Oscar ratings are often directly related to the popularity of the nominated films (and this year’s bunch were not box office sensations), many are calling for the academy to retool its broadcast. One of the first things the Oscars should re-examine is its Web site.
Studios now regularly promote their movies on the Web, (the success this winter of ‘‘Cloverfield’’ was partly based on a viral ad campaign). And the writers strike — which was primarily over revenue from material played online — proved just how much Hollywood is fixated on the Web. So why during its biggest night would Hollywood shun the Internet?
Whoopi Goldberg has accepted an apology from producer Gil Cates for not including her in a montage featuring Oscar hosts during Sunday’s Academy Awards telecast.
Cates called her Tuesday and ‘‘talked about the fact that he had made an oversight, pure and simple. He said, ‘You know I love you,’’’ Goldberg said today on ABC daytime talk show ‘‘The View.’’
No awards for Oscars montage editors: Where's Whoopi?!
Whoopi Goldberg seemed sad and choked up on ‘‘The View’’ on Monday when her fellow co-hosts discussed how she was not included in a montage featuring Oscar hosts during the Academy Awards telecast.
The 52-year-old Goldberg has received two Oscar nominations, winning for her role as Oda Mae Brown in 1990’s ‘‘Ghost.’’ She hosted the event in 1994, 1996, 1999 and 2002. She did, however, appear as an Oscar winner in a separate montage Sunday night.
Goldberg appeared stumped that the academy would leave her out of the one clip, as well as repeat host Steve Martin.
The Oscars death toll — where was Renfro? Scheider?
Every Oscars telecast includes the requisite "bring out your dead" moment, where the screen flips through movie clips of actors and other film industry folks who've died in the last year. But there's been a small uproar online last night and today about some notable exclusions from this year's death watch.
The Oscars are a ratings dud. Nielsen Media Research says preliminary ratings for the 80th annual Academy Awards telecast are 14 percent lower than the least-watched ceremony ever.
Of all the industry parties to celebrate the Academy Awards, one was notable for having very few women, no bar, and the best rides in town all parked outside — Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs and countless Lincoln Towncars.
The limo drivers who shuttle the stars to and from the Kodak Theatre spend Oscar night watching the telecast and eating dinner under heat lamps on a patio at the Hollywood Bowl while they wait for their clients.
‘‘Los Angeles doesn’t have enough limos for this event,’’ said Rick Ham, who has been driving limos for 26 years. ‘‘They call the companies in Orange County and San Diego to help out.’’
The red carpet has been rolled up, but what's happening today is one of the main reasons they do this whole Oscars thing to begin with. The awards, the glitz, maybe the clips — they got your attention, your interest is piqued, and now you're buying the DVDs.
Amazon.com, of course, has its own Oscars store, and the shiny discs are suddenly flying off the conveyor belts. According to the online retailer:
— The biggest jump in sales rank come from the surprise wins this year with "La Vie en Rose" up 1,850 percent and "Once" up 566 percent.
— A number of other films featured last night during the ceremony also experienced a jump in sales, including "There Will Be Blood" up 191 percent, "No Country for Old Men" up 170 percent, "Enchanted" up 116 percent and "Sweeney Todd" up 86 percent.
LOS ANGELES — With Vanity Fair sitting out this year’s celebrations, the belle of the Oscars parties was a piano playing Elton John.
The 60-year-old singer’s 16th annual viewing dinner and after-party benefiting the Elton John AIDS Foundation topped other bashes Sunday, with 750 guests and a bevy of A-list stars who sipped cocktails and feasted on a four-course meal under the Pacific Design Center’s red-draped tent.
Vanity Fair’s lavish, celebrity-drenched annual affair, typically the top Oscar-night party, was canceled weeks earlier, before the end of the writers strike.
Best actor winner Daniel Day-Lewis (‘‘There Will Be Blood’’) was asked whether he expected to receive complimentary milkshakes from now on wherever he goes.
He quipped, ‘‘I’m looking forward to getting all the complimentary milkshakes I can drink for the next 25 years or so.’’ He explained his kiss to fellow nominee George Clooney after his win this way: ‘‘he was the closest (nominee) to me. ... I kissed my wife and, in the interest of parity, I kissed George.’’
‘‘The Counterfeiters,’’ the Austrian tale of a master forger forced to work for Nazis in a concentration camp, won the foreign-language Oscar on Sunday.
Now it has to earn some respect.
The category’s five nominees had been overshadowed in weeks leading up to the ceremony by an uproar that severally critically-acclaimed films didn’t make the cut.
