First the good news: “Shrek,” “Memento,” “Amelie.”
Now the bad news: nearly everything else.
This has been one long, lousy year at the movies. As Hollywood prepares to launch its holiday films — the crown jewels that are supposed to complete a by-now-lengthy list of Oscar-worthy performances and titles — the 5,722 esteemed voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences find themselves hard-pressed to come up with more than a handful of contenders in several major categories.
Can you think of five films with a legitimate case to be best picture? Well, neither can most of Hollywood.
That isn’t stopping the studios from jockeying release dates for their high-profile debuts, strategic strikes designed to improve the films’ chances of receiving a nomination on Feb. 12. (The awards ceremony is scheduled for March 24.) The claim that a soon-to-be released title is “generating Oscar buzz” is as inevitable as a publicist’s phone call.
Miramax, one of the savvier operators come awards season, is gearing up for the hard sell on “Amelie,” the Gallic feel-good hit (it grossed $40 million in France) about a Paris waitress who decides to change the lives of the people around her. Look for the film — which the distributor hopes to expand beyond art houses — to get both a best-picture and a foreign-language-film push.
Miramax also has Oscar-nomination hopes for “The Shipping News,” starring Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore, and directed by Lasse Halstrom (the academy-loves-him director of “The Cider House Rules” and “Chocolat); and “Kate & Leopold,” with Meg Ryan.
Indie standout
The New York-based Disney subsidiary is also prepping academy-consideration campaigns for Renee Zellweger (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and Nicole Kidman (the sleeper spooker “The Others”) in the actress category.
Speaking of Kidman, Twentieth Century Fox is positioning its adrenalized postmodern pop-opera “Moulin Rouge” for a best-picture nomination, and will re-release the lavish Baz Luhrmann-directed doozy Nov. 21 in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.
While tradition (and failing memories) dictate that fall and winter releases garner the most Oscar attention, an early-spring release that’s proved itself the Little Indie That Could is being talked up by industry types and academy members. “Memento,” Christopher Nolan’s deft backward mystery in which Guy Pearce plays a guy with no short-term memory, is the year’s most successful indie picture — $26 million in U.S. theaters.
Although Newmarket, the company that distributed it, is new to the game, the film is one of the few that people are actually embracing with enthusiasm. “Memento” has certainly led a charmed life thus far. No other distributor would touch the $5 million production when it was offered last year, scared off by its knotty puzzle of a plot. One big drawback: Newmarket’s budget — or lack thereof — for the all-important Oscar campaign.
“Marketing is such a vital element in an Oscar campaign that it’s no longer enough to simply have a good movie,” says Martin Grove, columnist for the Hollywood Reporter online. “You must have the right marketing push behind it.”
One production company head who spoke on condition of anonymity (it’s not kosher to be quoted about your own movie, for fear your praise will be discounted, or to talk up the competition, because, well, it’s the competition), singled out “Memento” and “Shrek” as the only Oscar-worthy pictures he’s seen.
`Monsters’ and `Shrek’ duel
As for “Shrek,” the computer-animated DreamWorks smash (starring an xenophobic ogre who learns to love) is considered the prime beneficiary of the academy’s newest category: best animated feature. Eight films need to be eligible for the category to be activated, and it looks as though the quorum will be met if members submit nominations for “Atlantis: The Lost Empire”; “Recess: School’s Out”; “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within”; “Cats & Dogs”; “Osmosis Jones”; “The Trumpet of the Swan” and “Monsters, Inc.” (Fox Searchlight is also likely to submit Richard Linklater’s R-rated “Waking Life,” a live-action film overlaid with computer animation.)
“If there are enough other entries … to make the category viable, then that would be great,” says Peter Docter, director of “Monsters, Inc.,” the Pixar/Disney romp. “Of course, for us, it will also be nerve-racking.”
If the animated-feature nomination comes to pass, look for a Disney-DreamWorks duel between “Monsters” and “Shrek.”
Of the swarm of highly touted — but thus far unseen — December releases perceived as Oscar candidates, the most legitimate may be “Ali,” Michael Mann’s biopic of the pugilist poet, with Will Smith (being talked up for an actor nod) in the title role.
And the candidates are . . .
“Ali” is scheduled to be released Dec. 25, which also happens to be the date for “A Beautiful Mind,” with Russell Crowe — last year’s best-actor winner — as John Forbes Nash Jr., the Nobel-winning math genius who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down,” which began as a Philadelphia Inquirer series by reporter Mark Bowden, will get its best-film Oscar launch in select cities on Dec. 28. The movie, which stars Josh Hartnett and Ewan McGregor, chronicles the United States’ failed military mission in Somalia in 1993.
Along with Smith and Crowe, contenders for top actor nominations include Spacey (“The Shipping News”); Denzel Washington, for his bristlingly nasty turn as a rogue cop in “Training Day”; Gene Hackman (“The Royal Tenenbaums,” from “Rushmore” auteur Wes Anderson); and Kevin Kline as the dying architect of “Life as a House.” Dark horses include Ben Kingsley for his ferocious performance in the spring’s slick English gangster flick, “Sexy Beast,” and the Australian Pearce, for his tricky job as “Memento’s” memory-impaired sleuth. And Billy Bob Thornton’s quiet man in the new “The Man Who Wasn’t There” is not to be discounted, especially since it comes from the Oscar-lucky Coen brothers.
On the distaff side, Kristin Scott Thomas is being mentioned for “Gosford Park,” Robert Altman’s 1930s English ensemble murder mystery, which really is getting good buzz. So is the drama “I Am Sam,” which is eliciting strong advance word for Michelle Pfeiffer’s work opposite Sean Penn, who plays a mentally challenged father seeking custody of his child. Pfeiffer is cast as his attorney. Sissy Spacek has been getting great praise for her work in the marital breakup drama “In the Bedroom” (Nov. 30), and Tilda Swinton has an outside shot for her work in “The Deep End,” playing a mother who covers up what she fears is a homicide perpetrated by her son.
Other femme candidates: Audrey Tautou, the French waif of “Amelie”; Kidman and Zellweger, and, possibly, Gwyneth Paltrow for her role in Anderson’s family comedy “The Royal Tenenbaums.”
Though not expected to get Oscar attention, there are scads more titles getting ready to push their way into the multiplexes between now and the end of the year. And if all they yield is an entertaining night out, well, hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Among the titles to look for soon are the dark comic crime thriller “Novocaine” starring Steve Martin Friday; and the Thanksgiving-Wednesday releases “Black Knight,” a Martin Lawrence comedy; “Sidewalks of New York,” an Ed Burns romancer; and “Spy Game,” a Robert Redford-Brad Pitt spy vehicle.
Surprises are possible
Next month, it starts all over again with Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Julia Roberts doing the Rat Pack thing in “Ocean’s Eleven” (Dec. 7); “Vanilla Sky,” a Tom Cruise-Penelope Cruz “roller-coaster ride of romance, comedy, suspicion, love, sex and dreams” (Dec. 14); the Tim Allen comedy “Joe Somebody” (Dec. 21); and “The Majestic” (also Dec. 21), a Capra-esque drama starring Jim Carrey as a Hollywood screenwriter during the McCarthy era.
It’s always possible that one of these populist titles could yield a surprise Oscar-caliber performance. Selling lots of tickets and good acting don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Which leads us to the really big question: How Oscar-meritable are the holiday’s season’s two hugely anticipated fantasy films, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (Friday) and “The Lord of the Rings” (Dec. 19)?
The former looms as a record-breaking moneymaker, and the one “Harry Potter” review so far — by Time magazine, whose parent company produced the film — has been positive. But will the movie have Oscar cred?
“Rings,” the first installment in director Peter Jackson’s ambitious adaptation of the revered J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, looks to be a much darker, more violent affair.
The 20 or so minutes New Line Cinema has screened for critics presents a wondrous view of Middle Earth, but begs the question: Is there real drama here?
With hope, by February, when the nominations are announced, the drama — and some good movies — will have been found.
