Recently in Awards Category

NOTE: This entry has been updated to clarify the beneficiary of the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards and to complete a sentence I, uh, forgot to finish last night.

So I'm a little behind in my blogging... Well, I have an excuse or two. First of all, I have a new gig! That's right, the Rabbi has gone and gotten hisself some legitimate employment. Or at least some legitimate part time employment with a really cool start up. It's a company called Cinelan and we're a short film distribution and syndication company. Check out the website and you'll see what I mean. It's really cool!

The other reason is that I went and got myself sick with the influenza. That's right. The good money I paid for a flu shot this year did me diddly since I went and got sick, anyway. Not only that, but I got sick at the exact worst time. Smack dab in the middle of SXSW. Lovely. Thanks are due, however, to my angels of mercy Mike Tully and Agnes Varnum, who both came by with soup and medicines!

Add to that getting stuck overnight in Fort Worth on the way down due to snow in Dallas and this has been a rocky trip. (Stay tuned for pix of the rattlesnake cakes that SXSW Film Festival producer Matt Dentler and I ate, though!)

Not only that, I am trying to get my apartment in shape to be sold. HUGE job. So to paraphrase Crash Davis, I'm dealing with a lot of shit!

Due to the aforementioned snow, I missed what was apparently a pretty amazing party at Lance Armstrong's house. This, I was not happy about. It was a pre-party for the Texas Film Hall of Fame awards ceremony, which I was able to attend the following night and it was a dandy of a night. An annual benefit for the Austin Film Society (and not an official SXSW do), the cocktails, dinner, ceremony and auction are held each year at Austin Studios, a couple of miles north of the downtown Austin area. This year's honorees were ZZ Top, Morgan Fairchild, Mike Judge, Jayne Mansfield (accepted by her daughter, Mariska Hargitay) and Urban Cowboy (accepted by Deborah Winger) and the night was hosted by non other that former CBS anchor and new legend (and born/bred Texan) Dan Rather. He's way cool!

The evening went far more smoothly than most events of this size and it was actually pretty fun. Not only that, they served their pre-show cocktails in actual glassware, something some film companies should think about (I'm looking at you, Miramax!).

Here, John Person and Eugene Hernandez have a chat before the ceremony. That's variety.com managing editor Michael Jones' hand on the left.

Mariska Hargitay's speech in honor of her late mother was genuinely touching and towards the end she teared up pretty good. So did I.

More pix after the jump.

My apologies for my lack in posting, of late. Been sick (more on that in a subsequent post...I know you're all waiting with baited breath) and got a new gig (ditto). Anyway, I am leaping (temporarily) over SXSW (I'll be back there, I promise) to write a little something about the triumph that was the first annual Cinema Eye Honors.

Held at Manhattan's IFC Center, the evening was a triumph for all involved and came off with nary a hitch. Cinema Eye Honors co-chairs Thom Powers and AJ Schnack were consummate hosts and the show was well produced by Pamela Cohn. Coming in at just under two hours, the program even included a short panel discussion moderated by Powers with directors Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), Esther B. Robinson (A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory), Manda Bala (Send a Bullet's Jason Kohn and Pernille Rose Grønkjær (The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun).

There was one odd and profoundly disturbing facet to the evening, one noted by several of us in attendance. Wither the distributors? With the exception of IFC's Lizzie Nastro, no one remembers seeing anyone from any nominated distributor, including ThinkFilm (12 nominations), Zeitgeist (9 nods) or Magnolia (5). That's appalling behavior IMHO and just more fuel for the "distributors don't care about docs" argument. All of those companies are based in New York and how hard would it have been to send a rep or two to the IFC Center to partake in the celebration on this important night? If this isn't accurate (there were a lot of people there and it's possible we missed someone) please let me know and I'll correct the record. Apparently reps for Zeitgeist were in the house. My bad.

Kohn's excellent film was the big winner on the night, picking up three awards, including Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking, as well as awards for its editing and cinematography. For a complete winners wrap up, check out indieWIRE's piece on the evening.

Kohn also had many of the best quotes of the night, including screeds on good docs being over looked and making his film "out of anger." When he was at the Sao Paulo International Documentary Film Festival he saw Marshall Curry's Street Fight screen to a near empty house while patrons were viewing....inferior product, elsewhere and it pissed him off.

He also pointed out that the Honors themselves were themselves born out of anger and he was right. I know, I was there. Over the course of a car ride at last November's Denver Film Festival, as AJ read the list of exceptional nonfiction films that had been excluded from the Academy's documentary short list, the level of disbelief and furor in the car rose. Well, AJ decided to do something about that and like a Busby Berkeley movie, 4 short months later, there we all were, gathered in a theater toasting the excellence in nonfiction filmmaking for 2007.

Kick ass, AJ!

Friday marked the New York City premiere of Alex Gibney's Oscar-nominated documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, the rather grim story of a young Afghani goat herder and taxi driver named Dilawar who is mistakenly suspected of being a terrorist by our military intelligence. Brought into Bagram for interrogation, Dilawar is subsequently tortured and killed by his interrogators. The ThinkFilm release gets to the darker truths, namely that not only is the intelligence questionable in the first place but that the interrogators were, in fact, young soldiers utterly untrained and inexperienced in the ways of proper interrogation techniques.

Matters are made worse when the soldiers are encouraged by their superiors to go to any lengths to get their confessions. In addition to the now prosecuted soldiers, among the interview subjects are New York Times journalists, various academics, politicians, former military brass and, most notably, Gibney's own father who died during post-production. Frank Gibney, himself a former interrogator during World War II, best expresses the sense of outrage with the Bush Administration and as images of Bush, Cheney, Rumsefeld and Gonzalez flash across the screen it's hard not to squirm in your seat by your own sense of frustration. There doesn't seem to be any level of success when it comes to the administration's war on terrorism, itself an unforgivable reminder of those who perished on 9/11.

Gibney, who also directed the award-winning Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, recently met with journalists and described the challenges and rewards of making Taxi to the Dark Side. Here are a few of clips from that interview.

Clip #1: Gibney discusses his father Frank's experiences as an interrogator during WW II:

Usually, there is along, overblown awards show with famous presenters, "comedy bits" and my favorite, drunk presenters and winners (they've all been drinking for hours). However, due to the WGA strike, we've been spared the chaff and are given a short 1 hour press conference. Strikes me as not exactly a made for TV moment, but well, we'll see, won't we?

I'm not sure there's going to be a lot to blgo about, but for what it's worth, I'll be here!

Live Blog Follows.....:

So the majority of the year end awards have come and gone and since I haven't been keeping a running tally (I really should have been) I'm gonna give big ups to Movie City News for their obscenely comprehensive awards section. The thing is, the damn site's so comprehensive (The top 10 from the UC Gauntlet's Ryan Pike....300 at #6 and Transformers at #10? Really dude?) that anyone could pick and choose from the info and shape it to illustrate almost anything....except that 300 is the sixth best film of the year.

While it's clear that no single critics group can predict the Oscars (assuming they are the ne plus ultra of awards "season") some front runners are emerging in the race to fill out the nomination fields. The last to present their awards, the Oscars are still the "big show" and despite attempts by the Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globes to chip away at their luster, one is always drawn back to what Roger Avary said when accepting his Spirit Award for co-writing Pulp Fiction (and I may be paraphrasing, here...I was pretty drunk at the time): "This is really nice.... it won't fit up my butt as well as an Oscar, though." I can't think of a cruder way to put it, but yes, winning an Oscar is largely considered to be better, in every way, than winning a Spirit Award or Golden Globe.

As for the Globes, in nominating 12 films between their two best picture categories, they've proven themselves to be even more of a farce than in years past. Why not 14? Couldn't they find 7 musical/comedy films that "rated?" Speaking of the Musical/Comedy category, how is La Vie en Rose a musical? If every film that had music in it was considered a musical... And then there's the oddity of Persepolis. So the acclaimed Sony Pictures Classics release was good enough to be nominated for best foreign-language film, but not as best animated feature? So Bee Movie is a better film? (NOTE: I read somewhere that films can only be nominated for one "Best" category at the Globes, but can't confirm this, because the Globs don't seem to post their voting rules on their site). And whither The Counterfeiters? In my not-so-humble opinion, this film is clearly one of the best five foreign language films of the year, but it's getting no love from critics groups and very little press attention, possibly because Sony Classics isn't releasing it until next year. Will this affect its chances at the Academy Awards? I hope not, because it's an exceptional piece of work.

Saturday marked the first AFI Fest screening of upcoming IFC First Take release 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. The 2007 Cannes Palm d'Or winner (and prohibitive favorite for a best foreign language Oscar nod) has been getting rave reviews and since I missed it at the New York Film Festival last month, I decided I had to catch it here (and did so on Monday). I wish I'd seen it before the dinner so I could have told Mungiu what an extraordinary film he's made, but I suspect I'd not have been the first. More on this moving and delicate film in another post but as for the dinner, despite a few more attendees than planned for (extra tables were the order of the evening) the dinner was a pleasant gathering of friends new and old. The wine flowed and my head hurt the next morning.

Photos top to bottom: SXSW Film Festival producer Matt Dentler; editors in chief of indieWIRE.com and Screen International (l to R) Eugene Hernandez and Colin Brown...(Colin is not a giant and Eugene is not tiny. It's just a little forced perspective in action); The poster for the film.

Over on his blog, Eugene Hernandez has posted about Variety's pre-release of the winners of the recently concluded Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF), writing that his RSS reader had tipped him off "to a Variety story announcing the winners. Posted at 5:40 p.m. PT, the 109 word item named the two Target award winners nearly 3 hours before the filmmakers (and ceremony attendees) would find out."

This stinks on several levels.

Tipping filmmakers off to awards results before the ceremony takes place is in my opinion a high crime in our little circle of the universe. Several years ago I was at the awards ceremony of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, seated next to a competition filmmaker waiting for the awards to start when a journalist (we had all received the press release, but most of us kept our mouths shut) walked up to him and asked: "How does it feel to win the award?" The filmmaker, Pawel Pawlikowski who was attending with his wonderful film Last Resort, was confused and then slowly deflated as his excitement at winning $35,000 was somewhat dulled by someone's insensitivity. His joy was further diminished when before I could shut her up, the woman let it slip that his two leads had also won prizes. Had he not been a winner, it would have been even worse.

On another level, this portends badly for the future of our business. Where I or another blogger to blow off customarily agreed to rules like embargoes, we'd at the least get slapped on the wrist by being banned from an event or two or refused credentials. However, when a publication of the size and influence of Variety does it, what's the festival going to do? Ban Variety from covering its events?

This recently came in from the Shortbus mailing list. I'll confess, I voted for it out of blind loyalty to the film, not so much out of love for the site, but it is a fine site and you ought to go in and vote for it, too.

ATTENTION SHORTBUS PASSENGERS:

The SHORTBUS Official Movie Site and Salon has been nominated for the 11th Annual Webby Awards in the Movie and Film Category!

The "Oscars"® of the internet according to the New York Times, The Webby People's Voice honors excellence in 100+ categories including Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video and Mobile.

Register (so that it’s fair) & Vote for SHORTBUS by clicking here.

Voting Ends April 27 so get your votes in now!

UPDATE: Sorry. Broken links now fixed.

Maybe I'm just picking on a small town paper when I post this, but I just have to call attention to a little bit of Oscar-related silliness. Robert Horton, "longtime" film critic for the Everett, Washington Herald, a so-called expert (so-called by his own paper, natch) got 6 out of his 13 predictions correct. Six. Out of 13. For best picture he predicted The Queen. That's an "expert" prediction? The Queen was the only nominee that I was certain wasn't going to win!

12:41pm - Did you know that Helen Mirren's birth name is Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov, according to IMDb? How hot is that? Ok. Drunk now.

12:14pm - The Departed wins. Feh.

12:09pm - The least biggest surprise of the night. Marty wins. I am 18-5. It's a good year for me, but better for Marty!

11:55pm - Helen Mirren. Again, all class. I'm 16-5. Not too shabby, eh?

11:49pm - R.I.P. My favorite part of the show, really. Touching and it reminds us all of some poeple we've forgotten, even in the intervening year. This year seemed like one of particularly heavy losses.

John Travolta looks like a quail.

Nicole's hair should have been up.

J-Lo's dress....erm...yeah. No. Her husband looks like a smack addict.

Ok, folks! Here they are, my 2007 Oscar predictions. I usually do pretty well on my ballot but this year there are so many up in the air categories, so take this with a grain of salt! A "late contender" is someone who has made a late charge in "insider" perception. Mortal locks are in bold. I'll be following along and correcting my ballot as they are announced.

Alas, Sacha Baron Cohen will not be discussing co-star Ken Davitian's sweaty bollocks, or anything else for that matter, on the Oscar telecast this year, as he has declined to present an award, according to The Envelope (and presumably Borat was not invited). But what if Cohen wins for best adapted screenplay? "Ladies and Gentleman, in Kazakhstan we show the gratitude by kissing the bottoms of the whole audience!" Heh.

Ok, so from the beginning of the show, winners have been allowed to go on and on, thanking lawyers & agents, sons & daughters, directors & producers and co-stars & fellow nominees. That's fine. Some were funny, some were touching and some were fatuous, but not once did the director of the telecast play someone off. That is until Peter Morgan, winner for best screenplay - motion picture for The Queen dared open his speech with a mention of the effect that a mass, spontaneous peaceful protest by 2.2 million Londoners had in 1997. He spoke for about 40 seconds and all of a sudden, he mentions that he's being asked to wrap it up.

That's bullshit and shame on you, Golden Globes.

It's pronounced "Vice," not "Weiss." I mean, it is the Golden Globes. Shouldn't the guy know how to pronounce everyone's names?