Thursday, 14 December 2000

OSCAR REDUX: Given the e-mail I received, I thought I should clarify yesterday’s Oscar column. It was a column about change; it wasn’t the entire Oscar bite. I haven’t dumped Cast Away or Ellyn Burstyn or Almost Famous or any of the other movies I wrote about in the first Oscar column (THB 11/22), unless specifically noted. Cast Away, for example, hasn’t had a real opportunity to move in any direction since November. It did on Wednesday (see the NYFCC awards below), but there was no change to report. Likewise with Best Screenplay and Best Actress and on and on... yesterday’s was not a comprehensive list. Thanks.

HOW ’BOUT THEM NEW YORKERS: Yee haw!!! I couldn’t be happier with the New Yorkers this year. (I suppose they’d like to be addressed as the New York Film Critics Circle.) They not only managed to deliver a list of winners that had clear legitimacy... even I can’t argue with a single vote... but also spread the good news around quite a bit. Is Traffic my Best Film of 2000? Not sure yet. But I can’t argue against it for a second. Not only didn’t I flinch, I smiled. Broadly. They got behind You Can Count on Me by giving Best Screenplay to Ken Lonergan and Best Actress to Laura Linney. Works for me. My choices? Maybe not. But excellent choices. Tom Hanks for Best Actor? See the movie... you won’t be able to attack that call. I loved Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count on Me, but Benicio Del Toro deserves every award in the world for his work in Traffic. Marcia Gay Harden is always great and is great again in Pollock. (The big-balls choice would have been Ziyi Zhang for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but this is still a great choice for a great actors’ movie.) Crouching Tiger did get Best Cinematography (Peter Pau).

As planned, the awards were updated as they happened on the group’s website (www.nyfcc.org). But the joy of electronics was not nearly a compelling as the choices the group made in a year with many options.

WHAT’S NEXT?: This Saturday, the L.A. Film Critics vote for their award winners. Next Tuesday, the Broadcast Film Critics vote hits. Next Thursday, the Golden Globe nominees are announced. There will also be awards from Boston and Chicago, as well as other cities’ critic groups. And of course, Ebert & Roeper’s Memo to the Academy, in which I had the good fortune to participate last year. (Rich can improve his status with America’s critical community through a strong performance and insightful selections here.)

We now have NBR (a group that really needs to be re-thought and made legitimate by its most honorable members) going for Quills, and the New York critics going for Traffic. Will Los Angeles get Before Night Falls into play? Or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which continues to be ghettoized as a foreign-language film? (Kudos to the NYFCC, even if it was unintentional, for not doing the same.) We’ll see.

The Golden Globes have a real opportunity this year to be taken seriously and influence the Oscars. That means, with due respect to a great performance, no Jim Carrey for The Grinch... no Mel Gibson (in another great movie-star performance) for What Women Want... no Gladiator sweep... no Clint Eastwood directing nod for Space Cowboys. If they vote for the people they want to have seated at their tables, they will be ridiculed again... especially in this year of great, small movies. But they can rise above that.

Oscar nomination ballots go out on January 9. Those nominations must be returned with a postmark of no later than February 2. (The Academy language is "Polls close." In the past, that has meant a postmark. Given this election year, perhaps they will specify even more carefully. In any case, all ballots are counted by hand by Pricewaterhouse Coopers. No courts involved.)

The second wave of attempted manipulation by major organizations begins after February 28, the day when the final Oscar ballots go out. On March 4, the Writers Guild weighs in. On March 10, the Directors Guild announces. And on March 11, the SAG award nominations hit. Oscar voters must get their final ballots in on March 20.

And the winners are announced on March 25. Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel will host the first nine-hour Oscar broadcast in history (90 minutes just for the opening dance number).

TROUBLE IN PARADISE: Hollywood is kind of like life. No more so than on the financial side, where the recession started months ago. We are in the very early stages of another major transition in the financing of movies, as the European funders have suffered the same fate as everyone else who decided to own a piece of the Hollywood pie. The big secret they learned? The movie business sucks! The $1.8 billion by Titanic sounds great, but this business is really fought in the trenches of $10 million overruns on $40 million movies eating any profit that there might have been... and in the meanwhile, your $50 million in cash was stuck in the movie for a year before you got to see dollar one in return. Meanwhile, the studio is bleeding you dry in distribution charges because, no matter how unfair it is, you can’t get the 2,000 screens you need without them. Elie Samaha is now suing his financier for running out of money... but Elie’s deal was near its end anyway, and there weren’t a lot of folks who wanted to throw another $500 million his way. The resurrection of Vanja and Kassar has been neither as quick nor as grand as expected just a few months ago. And now, Kushner-Locke Co. has gone public about being in trouble with its bankers.

So, what’s next?

When Hollywood is in trouble, the business closes ranks. And as I’ve written before, the studios have already set things up to rely on a very small group of filmmakers with whom they feel comfortable and who have proven track records. After a couple of years of producers complaining that the studios have gone away from housekeeping deals, I now think that the return of the producer-driven studio has already begun. Of course, dead weight is dead weight, and guys like Arnold Koppelson are going to have to produce some movies if they want a home. "What have you done for me lately?" is the phrase that pays. But here we go. Studios are going to have to spend their own money and fill their pipelines with product that they can’t blame on their partners. Call it "The Return of Joel Silver." He has already reemerged as a key player for Warner Bros., with six films on the Warner Bros. schedule after just one in 2000. Yes, Village Roadshow is still a source of funding for WB, but it really comes down to dollars, not Samaha-like frontman activity. Warner Bros.–based producers have produced all the Village Roadshow movies and will continue to do so. Joe Roth will bring money to his relationship with Sony, but he’s Joe Roth. Rudin at Paramount and Bruckheimer at Disney are fully financed, in production, by the studios. So is Imagine at Universal. It’s a whole old world.

PAGE TWO: Mira-Muck & ROTD