Recently in Awards Category

Long time friends Jon Voight and Burt Young share a moment during the often moving tribute to the late, great director Hal Ashby (Coming Home, Harold and Maude) at the 2009 Sarasota Film Festival. Voight and Young co-starred in Ashby's 1982 film Lookin' to Get Out, the director's cut of which was recently discovered in the UCLA Film Archives and world premiered in Sarasota the night before the tribute. Ashby's daughter Leigh MacManus was on hand to accept the SFF's Master of Cinema award on her father's behalf and gave a stirring thank you speech wherein she spoke of never knowing her father and how much the closing moments of Lookin' to Get Out meant to her. I won't spoil the film for you (director's cut out soon on Warner Home Video!), but suffice to say, there wasn't a dry eye in the house and both MacManus and Voight were brought to tears during the evening.

One of my favorite nights of the year on the festival circuit is the annual Texas Film Hall of Fame cocktails and dinner and auction. Don't ask me why I love it so much, I just do. Part of it is because it is a benefit for the Austin Film Society and I think they're a very worthy group. Also, the indieWIRE guys and I, along with other friends, like UT prof John and new SXSW Film Festival & Conference honcho Janet Pierson get to mingle, have some drinks, a dinner and watch a better than average awards ceremony and auction, which is cool, too. Last year Law & Order SVU's Mariska Hargitay was moved to tears when accepting for her mother, Jayne Mansfield.

This year's honorees include Wes Anderson's Rushmore, which is receiving the Tiffany & Co. Star of Texas Award, Larry Hagman, Powers Boothe, Catherine Hardwicke and Billy Bob Thornton. About Boothe a friend of mine once said: "They should create a TV channel for him and just call it Powers Boothe." I kind of agree.

Other expected guests for the evening include Dennis Quaid, Keith Carradine, John Cusack, Linda Gray, Kyle Chandler, Connie Britton, Brad Leland and Dana Wheeler-Nicholson who will host a new feature for the evening, Party in the Red Room with actor and writer Paul Saucido. This year's host is Thomas Haden Church.

From 2002-5, the event was hosted by former Texas Governor, the late Ann Richards who passed away in late 2006. In 2007 the award was emceed by Richards' close friend and 2001 inductee, Liz Smith and in Richards' honor, the organizers handed out some special party favors:

For the past several years, Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures have gotten together and distributed the Oscar nominated shorts in theaters around the country so the general public can see the nominated films that previously were only seen by members of the Academy and those of us lucky enough to watch films, long and short, for a living. For the past few years I've seen all or most of them and by and large, they are of high quality. I am a huge fan of short films and catch them as often as I can. Starting Friday, February 6th, many of you in the US, UK and Mexico can see these in the theater, a place that shorts are rarely seen.

This year's 5 nominated animated films are without exception, of high quality. All too often there's a weak link (See 2006's mawkish The Little Matchgirl) and all too often, an obvious winner (hint: Pixar). This year, however, the best film is not that obvious, although I suspect that Pixar will win due to name recognition, alone. It's not that I think they don't deserve it, just that it's not as obvious as years past. That's not to advise those of you filling out Oscar ballots to vote against Doug Sweetland's Presto (USA, 5 mins). Ignore a Pixar short at your own peril.

Of the four remaining animation nominees, Kunio Kato's Japanese 12 minute entry La Maison en Petits Cubes (Pieces of Love, Vol. 1) is the strongest, with its tale of a lonely widower, left to continually work to keep his head above water. While comparing animation techniques is like comparing painting styles, content is another thing and Kato's film is both moving and exquisitely drawn. The 3 minute French entry Oktapodi, directed by Julien Bocabeille, Francois-Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier and Emud Mokhberi wins the award for most directors per minute and is funny and cute, but I find it hard to believe it was one of the 5 best animated shorts of the year.

Rounding out the five entries are Konstantin Bronzit's Lavatory-Lovestory (Russia, 10 mins), a quite touching (and punny) look at love found in the unlikeliest of places, and UK directors Smith & Foulkes' This Way Up, is a darkly comedic and musical 9 minute piece about two undertakers that appears almost equally influenced by Tim Burton and Czech animation. To be honest, I am astonished that there's no Czech work nominated. They are among the best in the world! That said If you're a fan of short films and animation, you should do yourself a favor and see these films when they open tomorrow.

For more information on these and the live action shorts, click here. You'll be glad you did!

The National Board of Review, typically among the first critics groups to bestow end-of-year honors, announced their winners today, with Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire picking up the top film prize, and Clint Eastwood (Grand Torino) and Anne Hathaway (Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married) picking up the top acting awards. Best documentary went to James Marsh's Man on Wire. The complete list can be found on indieWIRE.com here.

I can't comment on Slumdog, Torino or Rachel as I haven't seen them yet but the general buzz around the Internet and the real world is that there is not one obvious frontrunner for best picture. No Titanic, no Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, no ....Cras.... Oh, right.

At any rate, no one has a breakaway prediction with most top three lists containing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk and Slumdog. From what I've heard of the first of these, there's a question as to whether or not the Academy is as sappy as it was back in 1994 when the excremental Forrest Gump picked up the award over Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption. Still boggles the mind....

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.