Academy Awards
Matt Wolf
Emmanuelle Riva travelled all the way to Los Angeles for that? I doubt I’m the only one whose heart went out to the radiant French actress, newly turned 86, as the 85th annual Academy Awards drew to a long and lumbering close well into its fourth hour. Sure, Lincoln star Daniel Day-Lewis made history, becoming the first actor to win three leading Oscar trophies, and Austria could celebrate both Django Unchained co-star Christoph Waltz’s second supporting actor Oscar in four years and the Foreign Film trophy for Austrian director Mikael Haneke and his French-language Amour.Michelle Obama even Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Given the quantity of uncertain outcomes, this year's Academy Awards guarantee excitement, and there's nothing better than an Oscars ceremony filled with surprises. Furthermore, the selection of films nominated this year are of a rare vintage. Today we turn our attention to the remaining major awards, with only one looking possible to confidently predict. These three categories are as remarkable for their omissions as they are their inclusions: the Best Actress category features both the oldest and youngest ever acting nominees and discussion of the Directing category has thus far focussed on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time is drawing nigh to mark those Oscar ballots, but what movie should one vote for as the year's best? While odds-makers have been busily touting one title over another, the less-vaunted fact about this year's shortlist is that relatively few stinkers have made the cut. Last year, for instance, saw the head-scratching inclusion of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close among the Best Picture candidates, while admirers of Martin Scorsese are still wondering how it is that a minor effort of his like The Departed went the distance in 2007 when such benchmark Scorsese offerings from a previous era Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Frank Capra called the Oscars “the most valuable, but least expensive, item of world-wide public relations ever invented by any industry”. They are, like it or not, the film awards against which all others are judged - even to the point that other countries’ film awards are scheduled in relation to the ceremony. Despite being the accepted mark of excellence, the Oscars are not a meritocracy. The choice of one art work/film product over another is, necessarily, irrational and Oscars' critics often say AMPAS members are too old and out of touch to cast such important votes.Whatever its flaws, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Whether Lincoln can pip frontrunner Argo to this year's Best Picture gong is in the hands of the Academy, but its 12 nominations are a notable achievement in director Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career. It's sometimes been easy to dismiss Spielberg as a sentimentalist, an entertainer first and an artist second but his films are pure cinema, and for every work of groundbreaking spectacle he's delivered something equally as thought-provoking.Over the years Spielberg's films have secured a not-to-be-balked-at nine Best Picture nominations, and his sterling stewardship has been rewarded with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
An intriguing aspect of this year’s battle for Oscar was the early assurance with which pundits placed Lincoln as their favourite for best film. Steven Spielberg's frontrunner merits recognition; what surprises is that no one has noted the significance if it were actually to win. For despite Hollywood’s long history of fine political films, in over 80 years only one has ever won the prize.That exception was All The King’s Men, in 1950. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Robert Rossen’s drama chronicled the rise and fall of Willie Stark, a once idealistic Southern lawyer turned Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A week from now he could be the all-time Oscar king. If Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in Lincoln wins him a third Best Actor award, it will send him clear of a thoroughbred field of nine past double-winners, Jack Nicholson, Spencer Tracy and Dustin Hoffman among them. Those other nine were all American. Uniquely for an Englishman, Day-Lewis isn’t politely respected in Hollywood for his theatrical technique, but matches the screen intensity and exhaustive Method of Brando and De Niro. Ever since his first Oscar as the cerebral palsy-afflicted Irish writer Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989 Read more ...
theartsdesk
Film fans will not need reminding that next weekend knees all over Tinseltown start quivering at the prospect of the Academy Awards. To get you in shape for the big night, theartsdesk is running a week's worth of Oscar-related features starting on Monday.On Monday Nick Hasted considers the film career of Daniel Day-Lewis, the star of Lincoln considered a dead cert to win his third Best Actor statuette having already snaffled the BAFTA last weekend. On Tuesday, Demetrios Matheou considers the political films in the light of Argo’s spectacular marriage of Hollywood and grim events in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sure, Les Miserables got eight nominations, including the expected acting nods for Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, and Daniel Day-Lewis is poised to make history as the first-ever three-time winner of the Best Actor Oscar, this time for a performance in Lincoln that ranks among his very best.But the 2013 Academy Award nominees are light on Brits and big on the American indy/European art-house circuit. Indeed, a far greater surprise than the failure of Tom Hooper to get a directing nod for Les Misérables, Hooper having been bypassed for a Bafta as well, was the strong showing made by Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Maybe it was host Billy Crystal at far from peak form. Or a surfeit of cringe-making shtick by too many presenters, including the distaff principals of Bridesmaids. Or the desperation that clung to the multiple on-air tributes to an art form whose very being was celebrated in the evening’s two major winners, Hugo and The Artist. But my God did the 84th annual Academy Awards need Meryl Streep by the time The Iron Lady was called to the stage as Best Actress in the penultimate award of the evening.I say that not just because Streep’s trophy for playing Margaret Thatcher – a surprise in a town Read more ...
theartsdesk
Every year before the Academy Awards speeches are tacitly composed, flowing gowns and priceless necklaces booked and no doubt small blameless animals slaughtered in the Roman style for good luck. Before the gladiators enter the ring, we at theartsdesk continue our novel take on the 2012 Oscars by allotting a category each and asked our film writers to sift through the nominations, tell you who they think will win, who they really would like to win, and who has been most egregiously overlooked by Oscar's overwhelmingly ageing white male judiciary. Will Meryl actually go home with her third Read more ...
Ismene Brown
First it's Golden Globes, then Oscars, or it's Grammys, then Brits - you can hardly go by a Sunday this time of year without another set of awards. But which ones count? Who are the judges?The experts on theartsdesk (judges, some of them - schmoozers, all of them) have come up with a comprehensive diary of the performing arts awards dinners (and glass-of-wine flybys) that you can attend during the year if you know the right people in theatre, film and TV. We also pooled our considerable experience as awards panellists to give you a credit rating for each - if you take the slightest notice of Read more ...