Paramount Emperor Brad Grey is undoubtedly delighted with the 13 Oscar nominations earned by his pet project The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—truly an impressive haul for a movie no one actually liked.
We hope Santa brought everything you wanted (Wii porn), and nothing you didn't (tongue cancer, American Apparel giftcards). Your B.O., followed by the Top 5 Chinese Dishes Consumed Later by the Jews Who Saw Them:
Directors...They're Just Like US! David Fincher is one of the most exacting, visionary directors in Hollywood, having made iconic films like Se7en, Fight Club, and now The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Thus, when Empire sat him down to scribble his favorite movies of all time, we expected something a little less, well, AFI-y? Hey, sure, we like Citizen Kane and Lawrence of Arabia as much as anybody. But c'mon, Finch: throw us a curveball or two! Click through for the full-sized list. [/film]
Oscar-chasing Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein's convalescence from their bruising steel-cage Reader release-date squabble has left a tiny window open today for other awards hopefuls, a selection of which are scrambling through with varying degrees of aggression. But while the upstart Frozen River (a Defamer Attractions "Underdog" alum) is reportedly the first film to send out screeners to Academy voters, and while the controversial German pick for Best Foreign-Language Film, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, found mixed reviews upon its LA bow last Friday, the real witchcraft is wafting from a cauldron deep inside the Paramount lot. There, we're told, Brad Grey's ambition to exorcise DreamWorks and conjure awards-season glory for Brad Pitt yielded both the lovely Benjamin Button trailer after the jump and a closer, carefully vetted look at the 'Mount Spell Book.Which ultimately amounts to little more than succeeding without Steven Spielberg or Marvel's creative influence. But it will, as The NY Times reminds us, first depend on whether or not Grey can actually make people forget about Paramount Vantage less than a year after the label co-produced two Best Picture nominees before folding into the mother ship. How else to accomplish that, of course, but by courting both Oscar and audiences on the tenets of early 19th-century philosophy:
