Oh, that darn Banksy. On the heels of a Sunset Blvd. billboard being taken down after the street artist painted on it, a Facebook page has been created to prevent his work in Westwood Village from being painted over. A YouTube video has also been posted showing the removal of the billboard. (TheWrap posted photos, including the one below, on Wednesday night.) Meanwhile, another work along Sunset has been boarded over (video here), though questions remain about whether the property owner plans to paint over it, or preserve it. And Owen Glieberman chimes in on the Academy's discomfort with the possibility of Banksy accepting an Oscar in disguise, calling AMPAS "churlish and not very sportsmanlike" by turning down "a rare opportunity … to wake up a notoriously too-staid ceremony." (Inside Movies)
Peter Knegt doesn't think the current crop of Oscar presenters – Nicole Kidman, Jeff Bridges, Reese Witherspoon – are all that exciting. In fact, his verdict is "classy but pretty darn boring." So he comes up with his own roster: Banksy and Mr. Brainwash, Bono and Julie Taymor, George Clooney and Lily Tomlin (presenting the clip from "The Fighter," with whose director they each had an altercation), Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen, Armie Hammer and the Winklevoss twins, Mel Gibson and Ricky Gervais, and some others no more likely to actually be called upon. (The Lost Boy)
I think the Daily Beast's Oscar Oracle needs a software update or something. In this week's installment of the site's data tracker, which "is designed to predict which films and individuals will win awards this season by continuously tracking mass opinion," "The King's Speech" has used momentum from its BAFTA wins to get the point where, they say, it "looks to surpass ['The Social Network'] next week." (Funny, I thought it did just that a couple of weeks ago.) And in the Best Director race, they say that Darren Aronofsky (!) has "a slight edge" over David Fincher. I wish you were right, Oracle, but you're nuts. (The Daily Beast)
The coming weekend will see three of the final four guild awards of the season: the American Cinema Editors ACE Eddie Awards and the Cinema Audio Society Awards on Saturday, and the Motion Picture Sound Editors on Sunday. (The Costume Designers Guild follows on Tuesday.) Kris Tapley looks at the first two of that weekend trio. He thinks the editors will go for "Inception" (which would be the first time a film not nominated for the Film Editing Oscar ever won this award), and that the CAS will do the same thing. And he doesn’t try to guess the MPSE. (In Contention)
