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Tuesday 15 December 2015

How to win an acting Oscar

To win an acting Oscar, Academy members need to notice you and nominate you. How do you achieve this? Easy, get a lead or preferably a supporting role in a film by Woody Allen or David O Russell!

The two combined are awards nomination-generating machines. At the Oscars, performers in Woody Allen films have been nominated 17 times, and won seven times over the past 35 years. Of late, David O Russell's triple whammy of The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle have generated 11 acting noms.

Here's the Woody Allen nominations list with wins in bold:
  • Annie Hall: Actor (Allen himself), Actress (Diane Keaton)
  • Interiors: Actress (Geraldine Page), Supporting Actres (Maureen Stapleton)
  • Manhattan: Supporting Actress (Mariel Hemingway)
  • Hannah & Her Sisters: Supporting Actor (Michael Caine), Supporting Actress (Dianne Wiest)
  • Crimes & Misdemeanours: Supporting Actor (Martin Landau)
  • Husbands & Wives: Supporting Actress (Judy Davis)
  • Bullets Over Broadway: Supporting Actor (Chazz Palminteri), Supporting Actress (Dianne Wiest)
  • Mighty Aphrodite: Supporting Actress (Mira Sorvino)
  • Sweet & Lowdown: Actor (Sean Penn), Supporting Actress (Samantha Morton)
  • Vicky Cristina Barcelona: Supporting Actress (Penelope Cruz)
  • Blue Jasmine: Actress (Cate Blanchett), Supporting Actress (Sally Hawkins)
And here's the David O Russell list, again with wins in bold:
  • The Fighter: Supporting Actor (Christian Bale), Supporting Actress (Melissa Leo), Supporting Actress (Amy Adams)
  • Silver Linings Playbook: Actor (Bradley Cooper), Actress (Jennifer Lawrence), Supporting Actor (Robert de Niro), Supporting Actress (Jacki Weaver)
  • American Hustle: Actor (Christian Bale), Actress (Amy Adams), Supporting Actor (Bradley Cooper), Supporting Actress (Jennifer Lawrence)
Or of course you could clone Daniel Day Lewis (three wins from just five nominations), Meryl Streep (three wins from 19 nominations), or Cate Blanchett (three wins from six nominations, with a seventh nom surely to come for Carol).

Or simply make sure that you're in a film produced by Harvey Weinstein and/or The Weinstein Company!

Saturday 12 December 2015

When is a supporting actor not a supporting actor?

Every awards season throws up surprises and snubs, and usually at least one awards body will go off piste and treat an actor's excellent performance quite differently. Simply put, when is a supporting actor not a supporting actor?

Take a look at what's happened so far with the SAG and Golden Globe nominations:
  • Rooney Mara nominated for the Best Actress Globe, but SAG have placed her in the Supporting Actress category.
  • Alicia Vikander nominated for Best Actress at the Globes, but Best Supporting Actress in the SAG
  • Christian Bale is nominated for Best Actor at the Globes, but SAG have placed him in the Supporting Actor category
There have been lots of other similar cases in movie history:
  • Was Anthony Hopkins' role as Hannibal Lecter really a leading role and not a supporting one?
  • Was Alan Arkin in Argo a supporting actor or a cameo performance?
  • Surely Casey Affleck was a lead actor in the Assassination of Jesse James not a supporting actor?
  • Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love was surely a cameo not a supporting role?
Also, the 'Supporting' category is often used/abused to reward an ensemble by highlighting the performer most likely to get nominated: Ian McKellen in Lord of the Rings, for example.

The main cause of these confusions is voter apathy, certainly in the case of the Oscars. Stories are legion of Academy members asking their partners to vote for them, and of late, if you don't send screeners (DVDs) of a film to Academy members, it will not get nominated. So the herd do what they're told: Harvey Weinstein and his team push Rooney Mara for Supporting Actress, when she is clearly in a lead role, and she gets shortlisted in the 'wrong' category.

I say 'wrong' because it's clearly wrong to a film fan, but it makes good business sense for Harvey to ensure his two leading ladies are not competing against each other: surely Carol will make more money if it wins two Oscars for Blanchett and Mara in Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories respectively than if the two compete against each other and lose?

How does the Academy define leading and supporting roles? Rather conveniently, it doesn't. Here's what it says: "The determination as to whether a role is a leading or supporting role shall be made individually by members of the branch at the time of balloting."

Furthermore, it notes that if a performer achieves enough votes in a single category for each of more than one eligible performance, only one performance will make the cut. So no hope for Cate Blanchett in Truth then as her role in Carol will garner more votes. Ditto Michael Fassbender: his Macbeth is better than his Steve Jobs, but if Oscar is going to support one of those performances, it will be the Apple biopic.

Of course none of this explains how neither SAG nor the Globes nominated the outstanding female performer of the year, namely Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years...

Monday 7 December 2015

Cinemas: should they be bars that show films?

Cinemas used to be pantheons or sacred sites when I was young. Even going to the local 'fleapit' was an experience to be enjoyed. Visits to various Leicester Square venues in the late 70s to mid 80s were huge events: Empire Strikes Back at the Odeon and Dune at the Empire still longer lovingly in my memory.

That was the past; the future now looks like your average cinema will be a bar that shows films, if Screendaily's report on a recent debate can be relied upon. In brief, exhibitors don't want their businesses tied to the vagaries of the cyclical quality of content: their sites and staff cost money, and they can't rely on films consistently driving traffic through their doors, so they need people to visit their venues and spend when not seeing a film.

This future trend is more prevalent among indie chains (Curzon, etc) than the mass market players (Vues, Cineworlds, etc). As a Curzon member for several years now (I've visited Curzon venues 18 times this year, including Victoria, Soho, Mayfair and Bloomsbury), I feel able to comment on this first-hand. Curzon  has certainly invested in front-of-house at Soho, built the Victoria site and, depending on your viewpoint, butchered the old Renoir to create the Bloomsbury art-house multiplex (certainly the Renoir needed a decorative revamp, and while the Bloomsbury is a lovely new venue in terms of interior finish, the small auditoria and screens have not gone down well with long-time visitors that I know).

Soho always benefitted from its ground floor Konditor & Cook outlet, and I have used this cafe many times over the years in preference to Costas and Prets, etc, when not seeing films on the screens below. But there's no doubt that Curzon Soho is a cinema: I mean just look at the exterior, below! Yes, there's clearly a cafe behind the glass frontage, but the films being shown are detailed on the leading edge of the awning. Sometimes the glass frontage is decorated to coincide with a film promotion.



Now compare this with Curzon Victoria, below. I recognise that this site is all about what's below the visible ground floor and that there's a narrow frontage to play with, nevertheless does this shout 'I'm a cinema screening great films that you should be watching NOW'?



It's certainly tasteful and on-message, but what lies behind those shimmering curtains? Could you guess correctly, if you didn't know? And once downstairs, you're greeted with tasteful furnishings again and themed cocktails and choices of gin, and half a dozen disappointingly small auditoria.

It strikes me as perfect business sense that a cinema, particularly with an upscale audience, should seek to provide all that its clients need: not only the film, but also the drinks, tea and cake beforehand, the modern bistro meal, wine and cocktails after, and the DVD and book sales. But a cinema should be cinematic at heart, it should celebrate and venerate the theatrical exhibition of moving pictures, its primary focus should be the high quality presentation of film, backed up by excellent up-sell opportunities (the food and drinks, etc) - but the moment that the primary focus of the venue turns to the  concerns of non-film goers is a deeply concerning tipping point.

Of course, cinemas are fighting against the rising tide of quality TV, the shockingly short window between theatrical distribution and the retailing of the DVD, multimedia consumption, and quite simply the cost of cinema-going.

Let me illustrate that final and important point: the disparity between current VOD prices (equivalent to the cost of a West End cinema ticket in the early 90s) and the true cost of 'going to the cinema' (for me, that's the drive to the station car park and the ensuing fee, the train travel to Victoria, followed by Tube or bus to the cinema, then the cost of the film plus any nibbles and drinks and the return travel) is so great now - that's a ten-fold increase in my case - that I have to really want to see a film and it has to be on a big screen to make the trip worthwhile. So, I can justify a full IMAX presentation of a well-made blockbuster at the IMAX, but documentaries and small-scale dramas are best viewed at home for one-tenth of the price, I'm afraid.

Not every cinema can be a votive temple to film, but every cinema should strive to be this first and foremost.