Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Philadelphia

Happy Birthday to Academy Award winner Bruce Springsteen. Many happy,rockin' returns of the day!

2009 Academy Award Nominations

The Dark Knight didn’t make the cut in the “big” Academy Award categories…save for the totally expected (and deserved) Best Supporting Actor nod for the late Heath Ledger…and neither did Clint Eastwood (I haven’t seen Gran Torino but a lot of critical buzz seemed to have it anointed to pick up Best Picture, Actor, and Director nominations) but Brad Pitt and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button scored big with 13 nominations.

Joining Benjamin Button in the Best Picture sweepstakes are Frost/Nixon (featuring Best Actor nominee Frank Langella), Milk (with Best Actor nominee Sean Penn), The Reader (starring Best Actress contender Kate Winslett), and the little-engine-that-could Slumdog Millionaire. The directors for these five films…David Fincher, Ron Howard, Gus Van Sant, Stephen Daldry, and Danny Boyle…are vying for Best Director honors.

Star power should be in abundance at the Oscar ceremony as the four acting categories features the likes of Meryl Streep (her 15^th nomination for her role in Doubt), Angelina Jolie (Changeling), Robert Downey, Jr. (Tropic Thunder), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt), Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), and this movie season’s comeback kid Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) and his co-star Oscar winner Marisa Tomei.

Bruce Springsteen won the Best Song category at the Golden Globes with his song from The Wrestler but he failed to pick up an Academy Award nomination in a Best Original Song category that, for some reason, features only three candidates: “Down to Earth” from Wall-E and two songs from Slumdog.

Pixar’s charming Wall-E seems to be the one to beat in the Best Animated Feature category that also features Bolt and Kung Fu Panda.

As none of the Best Picture nominees are real blockbusters I would guess that the ratings for the Academy Awards broadcast (on Sunday February 22^nd) won’t be significantly reversing the downward trend they’ve been on of late…but hey I’ll be watching :-)

The 80th Annual Academy Awards

A big night for the Coen brothers…three Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director(s), Best Adapted Screenplay)…and their movie, No Country for Old Men, on a sedate, kind of uninspired Academy Awards night.

The show itself was okay…Jon Stewart was pretty good (not great but he had a few nice moments) as the host…with decent enough musical numbers, relatively brief acceptance speeches, and perhaps a few too many montages (I’m guessing they put them together in case the writers’ strike was still going on and they needed to fill a lot of time and decided to go on and use them anyway.)

Everything about the 80^th Academy Awards show was…okay…nothing particularly memorable but nothing especially bad either. And hey they got it done in less than 3 ½ hours…gotta give ‘em credit for that :-)

The 79th Annual Academy Awards

Well that show was…something, wasn’t it…yikes…

(Every red state fear about Hollywood was confirmed as Al Gore…I kept expecting the crowd to break out into a chant of “Gore ‘08! Gore ‘08!” at any moment…got thanked [and lionized] more often than God did :-)

The show started off slowly…the cutesy self-congratulatory opening film…some tepid jokes from Ellen DeGeneres…the gospel choir bit that would have worked well on Ellen’s talk show but seemed more than a bit forced and out of place here…the first Oscar of the night for art direction (??) followed by a recap of the tech awards…and that was all before the first commercial break.

And things didn’t really go anywhere interesting from there. Certainly the only mildly amusing production number about comedy’s lack of representation in the Academy Awards didn’t help (no matter how hard Will Farrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly worked to try to sell it.) By the time the special effects “choir” hit the stage my eyes were glazing over.

The show was poorly paced…too many montages, too many shadow dancer things, too many Ellen bits that went nowhere near funny (she and her pantsuits tried hard, bless her heart, but it was only sporadically funny)…and something of a slog to get through.

Kudos to Martin Scorsese for finally getting one of the little golden guys (we can put that particular story to rest now) as well as to Melissa Etheridge and the Dreamgirls cast for breathing a little musical life into the proceedings.

The 79^th annual Academy Awards show was not a winner…hopefully they’ll get their act together for the 80^th and hit higher notes.

Oscar Nominations

So Oscar loved Dreamgirls…sorta. The musical snagged 8 nominations which is impressive enough…it is the most for any nominee this year…but 3 of those are all in the same category (Best Original Song for “Listen”, “Love You I Do”, and “Patience”) which will probably split the vote enough to allow Randy Newman (nominated for “Our Town” from Cars) or Melissa Etheridge (getting the nod for “I Need to Wake Up” from An Inconvenient Truth) to take that award.

Dreamgirls did pick up expected Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress nominations for Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson respectively.

Dreamgirls failed to join the group of Best Picture nominees which, instead, features Golden Globe winner Babel (which picked 7 nominations including two Best Supporting Actress nods) along with The Departed, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine (which also picked up Supporting Actor and Actress nods for wily vet Alan Arkin and young Abigail Breslin), and The Queen.

Four of the Best Director nominees come from those movies: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel), Stephen Frears (The Queen), perennial Oscar hopeful Martin Scorsese (The Departed…a 6^th loss would put Marty in a dubious category all his own), and Clint Eastwood (Letters from Iwo Jima…and the guy who denied Scorsese the last time they were both in this category: Eastwood taking the statuette with Million Dollar Baby while Scorsese and The Aviator went un-rewarded.) Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris were snubbed in this category in favor of United 93’s Paul Greengrass.

The oft-nominated (this is number 14 with 2 previous wins) Meryl Streep (The Devil Wears Prada) is among the Best Actress nominees along with Penelope Cruz (Volver), Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal), Kate Winslett (Little Children), and odds-on favorite Helen Mirren (The Queen).

Front-runner Forrest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) leads a Best Actor field that includes Leonardo DiCaprio (Blood Diamond), veteran Peter O’Toole (Venus…his 8^th nomination without a win thus far…another dubious record that might lead the often-sentimental Academy to make him a surprise “upset” winner), Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness), and semi-surprise nominee Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson).

Cultural phenomenon Borat had to settle for a Best Adapted Screenplay nod.

In a year when there seemingly dozens of animated movies the category still only features 3 nominees: Cars, Happy Feet, and Monster House.

The Academy Awards will be handed out on February 25^th in a ceremony hosted by Ellen Degeneres.

78th Annual Academy Awards

Okay, the fact that Crash won out over Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture was a bit of a surprise (especially after Ang Lee snagged the Best Director Oscar) but the biggest…and most whimsically amusing…surprise of the Academy Awards was the fact that they gave an Oscar to a song entitled “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”. In some ways it doesn’t get much cooler than that (though I’m guessing Dolly Parton didn’t find it that cool…)

The show itself was a bit tedious and anticlimactic (I guessed all of the winners…with the exceptions of the two mentioned above and the two short subjects…before the envelopes were opened and I doubt that I was alone in that.)

Jon Stewart, like Chris Rock last year, was okay…nowhere near great (he reined himself in to the point of being just this side of dull for large stretches of the evening), but okay. And thankfully they got the unavoidable Brokeback gag out of the way at the very beginning of the show with Billy Crystal and Chris Rock.

With no blockbusters (no Lord of the Rings: Return of the King or Titanic, for example) in the mix for the major awards I’m presuming the audience for the show was down in the ratings…and truthfully they didn’t miss much. Better luck next year, Academy.

(“It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”…heh. Priceless.)

Academy Award Nominations

Brokeback Mountain (see below) and George Clooney (see above) lead the pack in the race as the nominations for the 78th Academy Awards are announced and the chase for the precious Oscars is officially joined. Brokeback scored 8 nominations…including Best Picture…while Clooney got 3 nods all by himself (Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Good Night, and Good Luck as well as Best Supporting Actor for Syriana.)

Along with Brokeback Mountain, the other Best Picture nominees are Capote, Crash, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich. The directors of those movies…Ang Lee, Bennett Miller, Paul Haggis, Clooney, and Steven Spielberg…are vying for the Best Director prize.

Capote’s Philip Seymour Hoffman (see above) is probably the favorite in the Best Actor race for his portrayal of the titular writer. The other Nominees include Terence Howard (Hustle & Flow), Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain), Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line), and David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck).

Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line) and Felicity Huffman (Transamerica - see below) are the likely frontrunners for the Best Actress prize. Dame Judi Dench (Mrs. Henderson Presents), Keira Knightley (Pride and Prejudice), and (having survived the bomb that was Aeon Flux) Charlize Theron (North Country) will likely have to settle for being happy to have just been nominated.

The year’s biggest moneymaker, Star Wars: Episode 3-Revenge of the Sith, got just one nomination (for Best Makeup). It was shut out of the Best Visual Effects race by King Kong, The Chronicles of Narnia, and War of the Worlds.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong had to settle for a handful of technical nominations (Art Direction, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects) after being shut out of the major categories.

And for some reason there were only 3 (instead of the usual 5) Best Song nominations this year: “In the Deep” (from Crash), “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” (from Hustle and Flow), and Dolly Parton’s “Travelin’ Thru” (from Transamerica).

The Oscars will go to the winners on March 5th.

Random Notes (post-Oscars '05 edition)

Chris Rock was okay. Not great but okay. Hosting the Oscars is a tough gig and in my lifetime the only ones who made it look easy were Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, and Billy Crystal.

*****

Some of the nominees and winners must have felt like unwanted stepchildren...paraded out en masse onstage or made to give their acceptance speeches from the audience...but at least the producers kept the show moving.

*****

Bless you, Morgan Freeman, not only are you a great actor but you know how to deliver an acceptance speech...short, sweet, take a bow, vacate the stage (note to all winners on all televised awards shows: if your agent/producer/interior decorator/second cousin on your mother's side needs some love send them some flowers don't bore the rest of us to death with laundry lists of people you don't want to take the time to thank in person for whatever the hell they did to help you win the award.)

*****

One hopes that Beyonce got some extra swag for all of the singing, costume changes, and hairstyles she had to go through during the course of the evening.

*****

Marty, it's cool man. Altman, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Spike Lee, Bergman, Howard Hawks...the non-winners club is filled with some other pretty impressive names.

*****

Yo Mr. Penn, they're just JOKES, dude. Jude Law is a big boy and I would hope that his ego is not so fragile that he needed your humor-deficient self to defend his honor (after apparently fuming about it for two hours.)

*****

Annette Bening smiled radiantly and graciously in defeat but you just want to believe that should she and Ms. Swank ever share the nominee list again that Mrs. Beatty is going to have be held back from going all Tonya Harding on Miss Hilary.