In this morning’s roundup of Oscar news ‘n’ notes from around the web, a January Academy Awards is still a possibility someday, while an October frontrunner is a vulnerable frontrunner.
The Academy might move the 2012 Oscars from February to January. Or they might not. Unsurprisingly, given the media fuss that erupted in June when it was erroneously suggested that the change could happen in 2011, John Horn puts a spotlight on the logistics of the move, which COULD happen IF the Academy deems it necessary and IF a task force headed by AMPAS president Tom Sherak finds that it’s feasible. According to Horn, the move might involve announcing the Foreign-Language Film nominations later than the rest of the nominees, as well as using the Internet for voting and for the distribution of screeners. But it’s not a done deal, and one Academy official also says they might just keep the show where it is and do something else to make it more exciting. (Los Angeles Times)
If you want to follow the Oscar race on Twitter, Scott Feinberg would like to tell you where to go. He’s assembled an exhaustive list of movies in contention, with links to the Twitter accounts of anybody involved with each film, along with a roundup of “industry pundits.” Among the tidbits that can be gleaned by going through Feinberg’s list: Carey Mulligan has an account but has never tweeted; of the three main actors in “Stone,” the one who’s not on Twitter is, not surprisingly, Robert De Niro; Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t tweeted in almost seven months; and Armie Hammer (left) follows Tyler Winklevoss, who he plays in “The Social Network,” but Winklevoss doesn’t follow Hammer. One mistake: the Scott Cooper that Feinberg lists does not appear to be the Scott Cooper who appears in “Get Low” (and who directed “Crazy Heart”); this is a different, South African actor named Scott Cooper, who doesn’t seem to have anything to do with “Get Low” or this awards season. (ScottFeinberg.com)
All that talk about the Best Picture race boiling down to “The Social Network” vs. “The King’s Speech” means nothing but opportunity for rivals to sneak in and “seize the day,” says Kris Tapley, who examines the various routes to gold that might be followed by some of the other contenders. His conclusions: “True Grit” might pull off the “Million Dollar Baby” last-minute strategy … there’s no film positioned for success the way “Hurt Locker” was last year … Peter Weir’s “The Way Back” could still become a player. He says there’s “a lot of logs being tossed onto the blaze,” but wonders who’s going to run out of firewood first – while implying that the film most in danger of burning out too soon might be that Facebook flick, which he loves. (In Contention)
Sasha Stone also loves the Facebook flick, so she uses her “State of the Race” commentary to address the charges that have been made against “The Social Network” – that it’s ‘inaccurate, anti-geek, ignorant of the internet, racist and sexist.” I’d say she rebuts the sexism charge more efficiently than the inaccuracy charge: to posit that its critics think the movie “owed it to Zuckerberg to make him a nice guy” is to focus on a silly complaint while ignoring more substantial ones. But she does identify the key dynamic at work here, which is “the way you take down a film this strong is by changing the dialogue from ‘It’s so good’ to ‘it’s good, but it’s not THAT good.’” (Awards Daily)
