Oscars Archives - Page 7 of 9 - Ramblin' with Roger

Mike Nichols

I found out about Mike Nichols’ death because my TV was possessed.

I don’t what surprised me more: that our college undergraduate intern knew who Mike Nichols was (he’s a film buff and LOVES The Graduate) or a guy I know in this thirties who knows a lot of stuff but didn’t recognize the name.

When I was growing up, it seemed that Mike Nichols and Elaine May were on the TV talk shows and variety shows all the time. This followed 306 performances on Broadway of An Evening with… for nine months in 1960 and 1961. “The LP album of the show won the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.” Here’s Nichols and May on the Jack Paar Show.

Nichols then got into directing plays on Broadway, winning several Tony Awards for Best Director of the original productions of Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue, among others. He also won Tonys for producing Annie, and later, for directing Spamalot and a revival of Death of a Salesman.

He got into directing movies, and his first attempt was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Watch the dance scene. His second directing attempt was The Graduate, for which he won his only Oscar. I’ve seen that movie, plus Catch-22, Working Girl, The Birdcage, Charlie Wilson’s War, plus Silkwood, Heartburn, and Postcards from the Edge, the latter three which he also produced. Here’s the hit song from Working Girl, Let the River Run by Carly Simon. Read Mike Nichols’ five rules for filmmaking.

Nichols’ two Emmys came from fairly serious fare: the TV movie Wit (2001) starring Emma Thompson, and the TV miniseries Angels in America from 2003. This means he is one of a dozen people to win the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony). He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003.

I found out about Mike Nichols’ death because my TV was possessed on Thursday morning. Usually, I watch two minutes of the CBS Morning News at 7 a.m., but the DVR was stuck on the ABC affiliate. The lead was about the death, a story that didn’t show up on my New York Times and LA Times news feed until a half-hour later. The news was released, after the story on the air, by the ABC News president. Diane Sawyer, former GMA and World News anchor, and Nichols’ wife of 26 years, apparently arranged an exclusive for her network, noted not as criticism but just an observation.

The GMA folks – heck, EVERYONE who knew him, such as Meryl Streep – said he was always “the smartest and most brilliant person in the room,” rather like his Nichols’ third cousin twice removed on his mother’s side, scientist Albert Einstein. But he also a wonderful raconteur, and I feel as though I would have enjoyed being in his presence.

Mike Nichols died of a heart attack a couple of weeks after his 83rd birthday.

Oscar predictions for the films of 2012

This should be Affleck’s. Or maybe Kathyrn Bigelow’s for Zero Dark Thirty. Neither were even nominated.

This is what I thought before the Oscar nominations came out: Lincoln would win Best Picture and Ben Affleck would win Best Director. Then Affleck inexplicably wasn’t even nominated for Best Director, though he was for Best Actor; he subsequently won Best Director in the Golden Globes, and more importantly, the Directors’ Guild. Now I’ve pretty much switched the two places. The picks here are who I THINK will win, not who I WANT; sometimes, such as in the Best Actress category, I haven’t seen enough of the performances to have a rooting interest.

* means I saw that movie

Best Actor:

Bradley Cooper – Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis – Lincoln
*Hugh Jackman – Les Miserables
Joaquin Phoenix – The Master
Denzel Washington – Flight

If there is a mortal lock this year, it’s Day-Lewis, who BECOMES Lincoln, just as he has inhabited every other role he’s played.

Best Actress

Jessica Chastain – Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva – Amour
Quvenzhané Wallis – Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Naomi Watts -The Impossible

Riva is old, not that well known and in a depressing movie, though she’s quite good. Wallis was SIX when she made HER movie. Watts just isn’t getting as much buzz as I would expect. So it’s between Chastain, reportedly good in a controversial film, and Lawrence, who was a blockbuster star this past year in The Hunger Games. I pick Lawrence.

Best Supporting Actor

Alan Arkin – Argo
Robert De Niro -Silver Linings Playbook
Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Master
*Tommy Lee Jones – Lincoln
Christoph Waltz – Django Unchained

My personal favorite of the three I saw was Arkin. The smart money says Jones. I think the Academy will give Django something, and this may be the place. Yet it’s De Niro I’m going to pick because he’s DE NIRO.

Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams -The Master
Sally Field – Lincoln
Anne Hathaway – Les Miserables
Helen Hunt – The Sessions
*Jacki Weaver – Silver Linings Playbook

Anne Hathaway, who emoted greatly, is another mortal lock. Wish I’d seen the Hunt role.

Best Director

Steven Spielberg – Lincoln
Ang Lee – Life Of Pi
Michael Haneke – Amour
*David O. Russell -Silver Linings Playbook
Benh Zeitlin – Beasts Of The Southern Wild

This should be Affleck’s. Or maybe Kathyrn Bigelow’s for Zero Dark Thirty. Neither were even nominated, nor was Tarantino for Django; I’m really surprised Haneke and Zeitlen were. The only person other than Spielberg who has a chance is Lee, and that only if people saw it in 3D, rather than the 2D screeners Academy voters likely got.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Argo
Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Life Of Pi
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook

Lincoln or Argo? My preference is Argo, but my guess is Lincoln.

Best Original Screenplay

Amour
Django Unchained
Flight
Moonrise Kingdom (my review)
Zero Dark Thirty

Does this go to the movie about torture (ZDT) or Tarentino’s movie about slavery (Django)? I’m pulling for Moonrise Kingdom myself, but I’m guessing Zero.

Other picks:

Best Animated Feature Film: *Wreck-It Ralph (my review) over Brave
Best Cinematography: *Life Of Pi, another near-lock
Best Documentary: Searching For Sugar Man. I’ve seen none of them, but this one I know the story about an obscure US musician who hits it big in South Africa without even knowing it.
Best Film Editing: *Argo over Zero Dark Thirty
Best Foreign Film: *Amour. Mortal lock. A Best Picture nominee.
Best Makeup: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey over *Les Miserables
Best Original Song: Skyfall, because it was, Adele.
Best Short Film (Animated): *Paperman, because Disney was smart to make it widely available online and as the tease to Wreck-It Ralph. *Adam and Dog is lovingly rendered in watercolor, but it left me cold. Could win, I suppose.
Best Visual Effects: *Life Of Pi, deservedly so
The rest of the categories: I have no idea.

Best Picture (links to my reviews), with box office (from Box Office Mojo), and release date

Amour $4,081,541 12/19/2012
Argo $127,654,188 10/12/2012
Beasts of the Southern Wild $12,306,988 6/27/2012
Django Unchained $157,656,712 12/25/2012
Les Misérables $145,963,845 12/25/2012
Life of Pi $111,745,023 11/21/2012
Lincoln $176,962,546 11/9/2012
Silver Linings Playbook $100,870,102 11/16/2012
Zero Dark Thirty $89,047,400 12/19/2012

Argo was taut, interesting, and not too long. Its campaign has been excellent.. I don’t remember so many good box office films up for Best Pic in a while.
***
Predictions by The Huffington Post and Roger Ebert.

MOVIE REVIEWS: Oscar-nominated short animated films

From France, Dripped is about an art thief who really loves his work.

It’s rare that The Daughter has gone to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany; in fact, I’m not sure she’d EVER been there. While it is the preferred film venue for the Wife and me, it often has films not suitable for sensitive eight-year-olds. But the ads said that the films nominated for Academy Awards in the animated shorts category were “family-friendly.” This is useful to know because we saw last year’s entries, and A Morning Stroll most certainly NOT Daughter-friendly, to say the least.

On Washington’s Birthday – which was when the Wife and I went last year; a holiday tradition? – the three of us sojourned to the cinema. In previous years, they just showed the movies, but this year, there were interspersed conversations with William Joyce and Brandon Oldenberg, who created last year’s well-deserved winner, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore [watch it]. In fact, one of these guys looked a bit like Lessmore. They talked about the struggle to get their film made and the surreality of Oscar night.

Maggie Simpson in The Longest Daycare

The youngest character in the long-running show I used to watch for the first eight or nine seasons, but seldom since then. It was interesting enough for the Wife and me, though the Daughter missed out on the significance of the Ayn Rand School for Toddlers; she liked the ending, though. The piece was OK, not distinct enough to be Oscar-worthy, though; my wife’s third favorite film of the bunch.

Adam and Dog

This retelling of the Creation is beautifully rendered as lovely watercolors. The sound of walking on the grass was terrific. There’s a guy whose opinion I value who said it was the best picture of the bunch, and he may be right. Yet the latter part of the story left me cold.

Fresh Guacomole [watch it]

Two minutes of stop motion zaniness is fun. My wife’s second-favorite of the films; third for the Daughter and me.

Head Over Heels

This is my second-favorite, and the Daughter’s. It’s from the UK, and uses quality Claymation to show a middle-aged couple whose relationship is in trouble because of the husband’s difficulties with gravity. Will they find a way to save the relationship?

Paperman [watch it]

Yet the Daughter and I still liked this seven-minute Disney offering the best, though we had seen it before; it was my wife’s favorite, and it was new to her. It looks old-fashioned in that it is hand-drawn, and in black and white (except for red lipstick); it is quite romantic.

(Another set of opinions.)

To fill out the program, there were three shorts that were “highly commended”:

Abiogenesis

From New Zealand, it’s another Creation story. But this art is computer-generated, and the story is futuristic. I wasn’t engaged until the very end.

Dripped

From France, it’s about an art thief who really loves his work. It’s surreal and manages to work several art styles – impressionism, cubism, abstract – into the storyline. “Dedicated to the memory of Jackson Pollock,” one has to think Pollock would have approved. This piece should have been a contender for the prize instead of Maggie Simpson.

The Gruffalo’s Child

The only piece with dialogue, and by far the longest short at 27 minutes, it is a CGI piece. It’s a follow-up, I understand, to a 2009 BBC Christmas special The Gruffalo. It’s nicely rendered and shares a message about the power of legends. It made my daughter a little nervous, though no cartoon animals were really harmed. Here’s a review.

One other point: both Adam and Dog, and, to a much lesser extent, Dripped, had men with full-frontal male nudity, and their members were obliquely rendered; it was actually distracting.

Traditions of baseball, comic books, and film

I hadn’t read the Comic Buyer’s Guide regularly since 1994, but I would usually buy a copy on Free Comic Book Day each May, just to check out what was new

I lost a dollar this week. A blogger I know bet that no one would be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and regrettably, he was right. Even allowing the “punishment” of those who allegedly took performance-enhancing drugs, there were plenty of qualified candidates (starting pitcher Jack Morris, the totally undervalued reliever Lee Smith, for two). This was an unfortunate outcome, and not so incidentally, will be lousy for tourism in Cooperstown this year.

Now, ironically, baseball will be expanding its drug-testing program.
***
To my surprise, I was quite sad to read that Comics Buyer’s Guide is folding in March. The usual reasons were stated: “decline in advertising and free content online.”

CBG was “started by Alan Light as The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom [in 1971], publishing monthly at first, then twice a month, then weekly…” By the time the newsprint magazine was acquired by Krause Publications in 1983 and changed its name, it had become the bible of the industry. It was like Variety was for entertainment or Billboard for music. Especially under Krause, the level of professionalism increased tremendously.

I started collecting comics in 1972, and when the Crystal Cave comic book store opened c. 1975 in New Paltz, I would buy the publication, scouring the ads for the best prices in back issue comics. That’s also where I first saw the classic comic renderings by my friend-to-be, Fred Hembeck.

When I started working at FantaCo in 1980, and we started publishing comic-book-related material, including material by Hembeck, we would dutifully mail our press releases to Don and Maggie Thompson. Sometimes they would use it, but often they would not. This was discouraging to some in the store, but it made me more determined to keep sending more and more info to them. Eventually, we became so “legitimate” that they would almost always report on our publication schedule. Indeed, I think that’s generally a lesson in dealing with the media: keep trying.

There was a lovely editorial written by Michael T. Gilbert shortly after Raoul Vezina, the artist who worked at FantaCo, had died in late 1983. I have that somewhere in the attic.

I hadn’t read CBG regularly since 1994 when I sold my collection, but I would usually buy a copy on Free Comic Book Day each May, if a copy could be found, just to check out what was new. It won’t be around for the next FCBD, though.

Mark Evanier has his own recollections.
***
I start my quixotic attempt to see most of the films nominated for an Academy Award in the major categories. I’ve seen three of the nine nominees for best picture: Argo, Les Miserables, and Lincoln. Beasts of the Southern Wild came and went, and I don’t know if Life of Pi is still around.

Almost certainly, the next film we’ll see will be Silver Linings Playbook, which would take the count of best actor, best supporting actor, and best supporting actress nominations I will have seen from two to three each; best director from one to two; and best actress from zero to one.

Movie Review: Les Miserables

A revelation in Les Miserables was Samantha Barks as Éponine; she played the part on the London stage, and she was wonderful in the film.

My wife and I were in Oneonta, NY for the holidays, visiting the parents-in-law. They watched the Daughter while The Wife and I went to the local mall to see the movie Les Miserables.

I should note that I have never seen the musical, though, in fact, we will later this spring. Missed the 1998 iteration of the film with Liam Neeson and Gerard Depardieu. Not familiar with the songs at all, except one. Didn’t even know the story beyond the fact that some character named Jean Valjean went to jail for a long time for stealing bread. I had read some reviews suggesting that it was wonderful, but others, such as the one by Ken Levine, indicated that some in the cast, notably Russell Crowe, playing Javert, the official who pursues Valjean, could not sing. It took me a while to figure it out: many of the more critical opinions were based on their notions of the characters based on what they experienced before.

The “big deal” about this film is that director Tom Hooper decided that the singing should be done “live” as they are acting. They don’t record it first and then lip-synch to the track, as is usually done, where the voices can be “sweetened.” And this movie is almost all singing; the amount of standard dialogue wouldn’t fill a Twitter tweet, someone quipped.

Apparently, Javert is generally played by a bass with a richer tone. Still, I thought Crowe was perfectly adequate, consistent with his character’s persona. To my surprise, I had a greater difficulty listening to Hugh Jackman, who played Valjean. I know he CAN sing; he’s been on Broadway, and I’ve seen him on the Tonys. Here, though, everything seemed high in his range, and it was exhausting for me to listen to after a while.

Give Anne Hathaway her Oscar now. Not only will she be nominated this week for Best Supporting Actress, but she will also win for playing Fantine. She sings “I Dreamed a Dream,” that song that made Susan Boyle famous, but the passion here was just staggering.

Some thought Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, as Monsieur and Madame Thénardier were too over-the-top goofy, but I found their first appearance, in particular, a welcome respite from the overwhelming gloominess of the story to that point.

Eddie Redmayne as Marius, a would-be suitor to Valjean’s ward, Cosette, was a better actor than singer. Amanda Seyfried as Cosette has a thin voice, though she had a limited amount to sing. However, a revelation was Samantha Barks as Éponine, who secretly loved Marius; she played the part on the London stage, and she was wonderful in the film. Aaron Tveit, as Enjolras, leader of the rebels, was very good, and I enjoyed Daniel Huttlestone as the boy Gavroche.

Still, I was moved at the end. At 158 minutes, it WAS too long, but the overarching story, as I understood it, of love, forgiveness, and sacrifice, came through.