Monthly Archives: February 2011

My Oscar predictions

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This year’s Oscars have a pretty good selection of films up for awards; it’s so good, in fact, that I worry a bit that the next six months will see nothing but crap released (bit of a worry when you run a cinema).  Whereas the Golden Globes were reduced to nominating The Tourist, and the BAFTAs managed to miss the fact that Winter’s Bone had even been released, the Oscars have managed to avoid any obvious omissions, and are pretty low on undeserving nominations.  I’ve seen all the Best Picture nominees except The Kids Are All Right, so I’m having a crack at predicting the results of the major awards.
I’ll start with the no brainers.  Natalie Portman clearly has Best Actress in the bag, and that’s in a year when she had a lot of strong competition (after Edinburgh this year I was certain Jennifer Lawrence had already nailed it).  She’s the perfect candidate in that great things have been predicted for her since Leon, but she’s never really given the performance everyone thought she was capable of (possibly because the right role just hasn’t come along).  Black Swan itself may be love it or hate it (I loved it myself) but most would agree this is a triumphant turn by someone who always seems like a nice person.  I don’t think anyone (well, maybe Annette Bening) would begrudge her the award.
Similarly, it seems pretty clear that it’s Colin Firth’s turn.  He’s come close before, so he’s shown patience and earned his spurs.  And he is genuinely very good in The King’s Speech. 

As for the rest, I would like to see The Social Network run off with the bulk of categories.  However, it’s facing the twin threat of a reliable, very well made, traditional British costume drama on one side and a reliable, very well made, traditional American costume drama on the other (King’s Speech and True Grit).  I might be wrong, but I suspect the Academy hive mind will share the awards out between these two, though I wouldn’t want to guess which will get Best Picture, with a smattering for the others.  Aaron Sorkin should get something for the screenplay, but that could well be the lot.
The Supporting Actor/Actress awards are tougher to call.  This is The Fighter’s best chance of picking up an award (well, unless it gets Best Sound Editing or one of the others that nobody really cares about) so it’s supporters may well decide to concentrate their votes here.  However, I will be actively enraged if Christian Bale gets something for his manic, scene hogging turn.  I don’t care how close he is to the real person he’s playing; it’s too big for the film.  But they love giving Oscars to people who play real people, and Bale is generally seen as Oscar worthy.  Just not for this one, please.  Similarly, though I’ve been a fan of Melissa Leo since her time in Homicide: Life on the Street, her turn in The Fighter is pitched to match Bale’s, and therefore becomes part of the problem.
I would rather see John Hawkes rewarded for Winter’s Bone, and Hailee Steinfield for True Grit (even though she’s playing the lead and should not, therefore, be in this category).  But I wouldn’t be totally surprised if the King’s Speech juggernaut takes these as well.
For director I would pick David Fincher, but the Coens will probably take it, leaving Original Screenplay for The King’s Speech.  Not an ideal split, but at least the nominations are fairly spread over a good selection of films, so everyone will have something good to put on the DVD covers.

A small lament for the death of FU

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This morning, like most other mornings, I went online via my phone to have a quick look at any new posts on Film Unlimited, the film section of The Guardian’s talkboards.  Only to find it wasn’t there.  Someone had killed it overnight.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised.  There were rumours about it a few years ago, and I had noticed the ‘talk’ link had recently disappeared from the menu of the main Guardian film site; but that’s happened before and FU survived, so I just altered my bookmarks and thought nothing more of it.  Little did I realise that the End Times were upon us.
I’ve been posting on FU for seven years (I remember my first post was on The Passion of the Christ, so it was easy to check the date).  I had tried to start earlier; I first registered during the BBC2 run of 24 season 2, because the thread for that show was hilarious and I wanted to join in.  Unfortunately the registration process took so baffling long that by the time Frank100 was up and running, the season had ended.
In that time, it’s been rare that I’ve gone more than 24 hours without checking in.  I haven’t always posted, but I’ve always been reading.  The number of regular posters in that time has always been fairly small, but that’s partly why I liked FU so  much – it was relatively easy to get to know who was who (although people would sometimes switch usernames, causing temporary confusion) and to tune in to the various in jokes.  Maybe that did make the place feel cliquey on occasion, but it was the right kind of cliquey, if you see what I mean (and newbies were hardly unwelcome, so long as they could get past being asked if they were Wolfie).  Some of those people I’ve since met in real life; others I’ve only spoken with on the boards, but they feel like friends anyway.
Some of my personal highlights since have been TV threads for Harper’s Island and the Andrew Lloyd Webber talent shows, being a temporary dictator, and occasionally finding hundreds of new posts on a thread and realising there’d been an almighty row overnight.  On the morning of the 7/7 attacks, FU was the best place to get updates on what was happening in central London.  People were always ready with advice, and when I received a misaddressed threatening letter from an amusingly inept stalker a few years ago my first thought was, “Ooh, I must tell people on FU about this.” The releases threads were saved, going back years, and only last week I tracked down the thread for The Ruins after watching that film for the first time on TV.  Good stuff was happening right up to the end, with the True Grit thread being busy yesterday.  All of it gone, presumably forever.  It’s hard to believe I’ll never be able to read that Lost in Translation thread again.
I’m sure the Graun had valid reasons for axing the Boards, and for doing so without any warning worthy of the term.  There are other places on the web to gather; I’ve followed a further dozen or so FUers on Twitter so far today, and most followed me back in minutes.  Nothing’s really changed, except that the Guardian has lost a little bit of my loyalty.  But I’m feeling a tiny bit bereft all the same.  

Paul

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An amiable ramble down the highways of UFOlogy, Paul has writers/stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost doing their geek bromance routine in America.  Blending the genre parodies of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead with Judd Apatow style frat comedy, it’s a likeable enough piece that could maybe have tried a little bit harder.
Edgar Wright being busy elsewhere, the director is Greg Mottola (Superbad and the excellent Adventureland), with fellow comedy regular Seth Rogen providing the voice of the titular Grey alien.  On the run from Jason Bateman’s Man in Black, Paul chances across Graeme Willy (Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Frost), two SF fans touring the UFO hotspots of America in a rented RV, and hotches a ride to the planned rendezvous with his people. 

The main reason Shaun and (to a slightly lesser extent) Hot Fuzz worked was because the scripts were good.  It didn’t matter if you’d never seen the films they riffed on, because the characters felt three dimensional, if broad.  Paul doesn’t hold up quite so well.  The two leads are affectionately drawn, but slightly too obvious: nervous around women, fond of comics, shielding themselves in fantasy.  It’s a little closer to the average person’s view of Comic Con attendees than it needs to be.  The matey camaraderie between the two helps (you suspect the trip is a dream come true for the actors as well as the characters).  The script also falls into the trap of quoting other films, verbally and visually, as a wink to the fanboys in the audience so frequently that it becomes irritating rather than funny. 

But these are minor points; my one major reservation about the script is that it takes the route of making the local small town folk the lads encounter to be bible and/or queer-bashing rednecks, which just feels lazy.  Worse, there’s a peculiar plot strand in which Paul proves to Simon Pegg’s love interest (Kristen Wiig) that God doesn’t exist, and all the beliefs she was raised with are wrong.  There’s no debate about this: the film takes it for granted that everyone watching will share this worldview and be ready to laugh at anyone who doesn’t.  It’s a peculiar attitude for a comedy to adopt, and one which will surely cost it some potential ticket sales, particular in the areas where it’s set (I can’t wait to read the capalert review). 

If you can get past that, there’s plenty of entertainment to be had.  A terrific support cast includes Sigourney Weaver, Jeffrey Tambor, and Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio as Bateman’s stooges.  These last two provide a lot of the biggest laughs.  And Paul himself is an impressive bit of CGI.
Paul is one of those films you can’t actively dislike, and it benefits greatly from picking up the pace in the last act.  It’s a shame that so many of the best gags are in the trailer, though there is some material on Paul’s influence on popular culture that I enjoyed a lot.  Overall, a fair crowdpleaser  that should find an audience among those with no religious sensibilities whatsoever.