In this morning’s roundup of Oscar news ‘n’ notes from around the web, the Academy hands out something besides statuettes.
The problem with staging something as high-profile as the Academy Awards is that people sometimes forget you do anything else. The Academy suffers that fate regularly, but the organizers of more than two dozen film festivals have reason to celebrate that AMPAS does more than just polish and dispense shiny statuettes: on Thursday the organization announced the 30 festivals (up from 24 last year) that will receive a total of $450,000 in grants. The Chicago International Film Festival is the beneficiary of the largest grant, a $50,000 installment in a three-year, $150,000 grant for its World Cinema Spotlight program; the San Francisco and Seattle International Film Festivals get $30,000 each. Other beneficiaries of the Academy’s largesse include the New Orleans Film Festival, Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, Aspen Shortsfest, Black Maria Film & Video Festival, the Saugatuck Children’s Film Festival and something called Damn! These Heels, which turns out to be a Salt Lake City-based lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender film festival. They cast quite a wide net, those Academy folks. (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
“Anguish and misery,” that’s the ticket for a Best Actress contender. So says Jeff Wells, who suggests that the practice of honoring only women whose characters suffer mightily should be ended so that Rachel McAdams (left) can squeeze into the race with her “irrepressible, never-say-die” character from the upcoming McAdams/Harrison Ford movie “Morning Glory.” To prove that such a shocking move would not be without precedent, he cites Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday,” Katherine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story,” Holly Hunter in “Broadcast News” and Diane Keaton in “Annie Hall” – though he concedes that those were all some time ago, and that the Oscar voters prefer a few bruises on their candidates these days. A reader then pokes a small hole in his argument by pointing out that Sandra Bullock wasn’t exactly a wellspring of misery in “The Blind Side” last year. (Hollywood Elsewhere)
On the male side of the ledger, David Poland identifies seven “undeniable” performances that’ll be trying to fit into the five slots in the Best Actor race: Javier Bardem in “Biutiful,” Robert Duvall in “Get Low,” Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network,” Colin Firth in “The King’s Speech” and James Franco in “127 Hours,” plus two (he’s not sure which two) from the yet-unseen trio of Jeff Bridges in “True Grit,” Mark Wahlberg in “The Fighter” and Jack Nicholson in “How Do You Know.” (I’d guess that Bridges is a safe bet, I hear that Wahlberg is seriously overshadowed by Christian Bale, and I have no idea about Nicholson.) “At least one actor whose performance this year might have won the Oscar in a different year will not even be going to the Kodak,” he promises. (Movie City News)
Glenn Kenny, the Premiere magazine vet newly named chief film critic for MSN Movies, teases his review of “Megamind” with a rather sterling backhanded compliment: “I have seen worse DreamWorks Animation films than ‘Megamind,’ a motion picture that is slightly less insistent than most of its peers in selling the peculiar worldview of Jeffrey Katzenberg.” The tease is on Kenny’s blog, Some Came Running; the full review resides at MSN, where you can learn that Kenny thinks “Megamind” is not bad even though it’s not really his thing, and that he’s less comfortable assessing the quality of a kids’ movie than he is detouring into What It Means: “I must say that what appears to be one of the film's core messages — which is that it's a good thing that poorly-socialized fanboy types don't have and can't get any kind of power at all, because if they did they'd become sorta like Hitler or something — is a potentially provocative one, and that certain regular Comic-Con attendees might take this conclusion as something of a compliment.” (MSN Movies
