She has to if she wants to write a gangsta rap script correctly. Also today: A sexy new Phantom, a twee indie movie gets turned into a twee regional musical, 3D sports!, and Baywatch alumni news.
All around town, producers whose often-fuzzy roles in bringing together the various elements necessary to get prestige projects before rolling cameras are throwing open their windows and offering up an exultant "Huzzah! to the Hollywood heavens, as the Academy has ever so slightly loosened its Draconian rules about the number of people allowed to storm the Kodak Theatre stage in the unlikely event of a Best Picture win. Reports the NY Times:
One of the last things we saw before we collapsed head-first into our laptop mere moments after the final credits rolled on the Oscar telecast was this press release from Access Hollywood, concerning the virtue-protecting jinx eventual Best Supporting Actor usurper Alan Arkin put on precocious co-star Abigail Breslin:
· Oscar FunTime: The Big Screen Little Screen invites you to participate in the kind of "Pick One Quirk From Column A, Then One From Column B" character work that's carried Little Miss Sunshine to multiple Academy Awards nominations.
· American Idol shocker! Contestant pees into toilet, has breasts!
· Now even minor league hockey teams are victimizing Britney Spears.
· Tired of Studio 60 video parodies? Mix it up with one about Heroes.
· Annals of Unauthorized Celebrity Endorsements: Alicia Silverstone and the Indian tongue scraper.
· The WGA awards Michael Arnd's Little Miss Sunshine screenplay their top award, as much for its quirky tragicomic dialogue as for the deftness with which it handled such highly plausible scenarios as Steve Carell, in a scene that gives added meaning to the term "convenience store," running into his former grad student at a Kwik-E-Mart in the middle of nowhere. The Departed took best adapted screenplay. [Variety]
· Helen Mirren snagged the BAFTA for best actress, Forest Whitaker best actor, and The Queen the year's best picture. Alan Arkin, sans fat-suit roles to siphon some of the acclaim, walks away with best supporting, as does Jennifer Hudson, who now officially shits bigger than Simon Cowell. [The Envelope]
· Clint Eastwood thinks Martin Scorsese has a good chance of winning the Oscar because "there is a lot of sympathy for him," but that he "always feel sorry for the others, because...they've worked very hard on their projects, too. I don't think any two people should be singled out." Five, on the other hand, are fine for singling out. [Reuters]
· The Visual Effects Society Awards (the Effexies?) gave Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest six prizes, including the two biggest. The ILM website has a ridiculously cool interactive demonstration of how they did it. [Variety, BoingBoing]
· Cars, Pixar's dark vision of an autopian future in which human beings are bred in subterranean farms and mulched for fuel, grabbed the top Annie award, but DreamWorks' Flushed Away, about the delighful rats who crawl out of toilets while you're going about your business, wins most Annies overall. [AnnieAwards.com]
· More 2007 Flackies highlights: CBS President Nina Tassler picked up the Television Showmanship Award, Sony's Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal won the Motion Picture Showmanship Award, and Bob Barker, accepting the ICG President's Award, reminded the crowd "to have your pets spayed and neutered," though the microphone was quickly turned off before he could go on to suggest doing the same for publicists. [Variety]
· An e-mailed conversation between Fox Searchlight's two nominated screenwriters, Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine) and Patrick Marber (Notes on a Scandal). It's billed as "dishy," but we've read it twice now and there isn't a single word about how Abigail Breslin is actually a 48-year-old woman with a growth deficiency. [The Envelope]
· Your completely unsubstantiated Oscars rumor of the day: Diana Ross has been approached to sing one of the three nominated Dreamgirls songs. [Starpulse]
· Honorary Oscar recipient Ennio Morricone thought he'd never win an Oscar, telling the AP, "I have received so many beautiful, incredible prizes, but there was a little hole. Maybe the Oscar fills the hole." Maybe he does, Ennio. Maybe he does. [AP]
· Our favorite Oscar headline of the day: "Botox-aided pianist: Oscar cocumentary nod a 'gas'" No, we are not kidding. [Jewish Journal]
· The Academy has finally caught wind of the blogowebs, and they'll just as soon set their petticoats on fire than let Oscarwatch.com confuse readers who might be searching for the official Oscar® blog that updates once every couple of weeks. [The Envelope, Oscarwatch]
· More tidbits from this year's Oscar luncheon: A record 139 nominees showed up, Peter O'Toole got a standing ovation, and the entire cast of Babel can be clearly seen giving the shocker in the class portrait. [Variety]
· The Secret Black Oscars, which Forest Whitaker hinted at in a Newsweek interview, is "not a protest or a statement," he told a reporter at the luncheon. [Reuters]
· 19-time Oscar-nominated bridesmaid Kevin O'Connell, a sound mixer once again recognized for his work on Apocalypto, told fellow nominees never to give up: "I've saved all my acceptance speeches, all the ones I've written on the backs of napkins and programs. They are all in a drawer at home." Martin Scorsese smiled and nodded his head as he listened politely, then leaned over to Mark Wahlberg to whisper, "Do me a favor. If I become that guy, shoot me in the back of the head, will you?" [Hello]
· Thank you BBC, for bothering to report what they actually lunched on: "They dined on a menu of smoked salmon canape with dill mousse, Italian herb marinated breast of chicken and sorbets in a chocolate cup." As Abigail Breslin dove into the final course, Greg Kinnear leaned towards his Little Miss Sunshine co-star to warn her that the frozen dessert will make her too fat to win on Oscar night. [BBC]
While we're generally content to let our wrong-coasted siblings over at Gawker have all the adventures in contextual advertising, we ran across this Little Miss Sunshine For Your Consideration ad in rotation around today's story about What Went Wrong with Paramount/DreamWorks' Oscar campaign for Dreamgirls. (Refreshing the page a few times might also yield a peek at the Dreamgirls FYC spot fighting for too-little-too-late pageviews.) If you watch Fox Searchlight's animated attempt to rub in "Little Best Picture's" nomination triumph closely enough, you may be able to see a single, fleeting frame in which the Sunshine's drug-addled grandpa symbolically shoves Beyoncé out of the film's iconic VW bus.
· Winner Forest Whitaker remembers the lean days fondly: "I could live on somebody's couch and live on ramen. My friends and my family were more concerned than I was." Particularly the friends and family on whose couches he was dripping ramen broth for months at a time. [Variety]
· Curl up with Tom O'Neil, whose post-SAG awards video blog post delivered from his bed was only slightly less disturbing than the Carpetbagger's post in which he lamented Dreamgirls' best picture snub while sitting on the toilet. [The Envelope]
· Jonathan Dayton, co-director of Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture winner Little Miss Sunshine, explains his theory of good comedy: "For humor to really work, 25 percent of the people can't really get it. If it's really funny, not everyone will be in on the joke." So if you didn't find the movie hilarious, you now know it's because you're part of the quarter of the population incapable of getting it. [The Carpetbagger]
· Transcripts of some notable acceptance speeches, including Alec Baldwin's win for 30 Rock, in which he makes special mention of focus puller Jonathan, who "shaves six or eight years off my close-ups." [SAG Awards]
· Moments after a cloud of green smoke had dissipated, nominee and amateur illusionist Will Smith wowed red carpet photographers by successfully transforming his flamingo date into spouse Jada Pinkett-Smitt. [The Envelope]
· Asked if there's a chance of a Little Miss Sequel, screenwriter Michael Arndt admitted he "has been thinking of things," but that he wasn't sure audiences would want to go along for the re-animating grandpa ride. [THR]
Hollywood's Christmas Morning is finally here, the time when eager Oscar hopefuls rise at an obscenely early hour, rush downstairs in their footie pajamas, and hope to find the previous year's good career behavior validated with lovingly wrapped awards nominations left under the Academy's gilded tree; those deemed good enough for recognition spend the day fielding phone calls from the media, who ask difficult questions about how it feels to be on the receiving end of the golden shower of adoration offered by one's peers (invariably, it feels good! And it's an honor just to be nominated!), while the snubbed quickly retreat back up the stairs to their bedrooms, where they self-medicate their soul-crushing disappointment by swallowing handfuls of prescription painkillers, sobbing through their publicist's assurances that they're still so very, very pretty, and that in this day of the YouTubes, no one watches the Oscars anyway.
· The 3,300 members of the Producers Guild of America surprised just about everyone by giving its top honor to Little Miss Sunshine, the little Sundance acquisition that could. With the PGA predicting the Best Picture Oscar 11 out of the past 17 years, a Crash-style upset for Sunshine isn't beyond the realm of possibility—nor is the requisite musical number, featuring interpretive dancers pirouetting on the roof of a VW bus as Sufjan Stevens strums "Chicago" on an acoustic guitar. [Variety]
· The GLAAD Media Awards nominated Little Miss Sunshine, The Night Listener, Running With Scissors, V for Vendetta, and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby for outstanding film in wide release. Ricky Bobby made the list presumably for the maturity with which the comedy portrayed the relationship between Sacha Baron Cohen's French Grand Prix champion and his poodle-trainer lover, played by Andy Richter. Despite its enthusiastic gay pride parade sequences and the great strides it made in humanizing the experiences of rubber-fist-dildo enthusiasts, Cohen's other effort this year, Borat, was egregiously overlooked. [THR]
· On the eve of the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominations announcement, Cohen admitted to a WGA Q&A audience that Borat, whose production notes originally read "there was no script," actually was the work of four writers, with up to 80% of the final film was comprised of scenes they "set out to accomplish." Still, all the studio saw was a five-page outline, not the secret, 60-page detailed master bible the filmmakers were working from. [The Envelope]
· The Directors Guild of America announced its short list of five nominees, including Martin Scorsese, Bill Condon, Stephen Frears, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and Little Miss Sunshine collaborators Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, leading us to wonder why we don't see more directing duos willing to evenly split their control-freak impulses. [MSNBC]
· Even publicists have awards! The nominees for the Maxwell Weinberg Award for the year's top publicity campaign include Borat, The Devil Wears Prada, Dreamgirls, Happy Feet, and United 93. World Trade Center's campaign, which voters felt relied too heavily on the solicitation of MySpace friendships and currying favor with Tila Tequila, was passed over for recognition. [Variety]
· The Scripter, an unusual award from the USC libraries that recognizes the achievement of both authors and the screenwriters who transform that source material into successful screen adaptions, have narrowed the field of nominees to the teams responsible for Children of Men, The Devil Wears Prada, The Illusionist, The Last King of Scotland, and Notes on a Scandal. [THR]
· Don't forget: Tomorrow is the deadline to get those Golden Globe ballots in, HFPA members! Oh, and for anyone who cares, the People's Choice Awards are tonight. [The Envelope]
In our ongoing effort to bring you the best of year end movie lists and awards—no critics' circle too far or too small!—another round-up:
· Chargers fans also love Clint Eastwood, as Letters From Iwo Jima is awarded best picture and Eastwood best director from the San Diego Film Critics Society. And while Helen Mirren once again gets top actress honors (her certificate, suitable for framing, is in the mail), they then proceed to throw several curveballs in the other acting categories, including Lili Taylor as best supporting actress for Factotum, Ray Winstone as best supporting actor for The Proposition, and Ken Takakura as best actor for his work in Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. From the title alone, that sounds to have been a lot more demanding a role than Mirren's, which mainly required her to sit around in a palace, sip tea, and act bitchy. [Variety]
· The Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards gave United 93 best picture, Mirren best actress, Forest Whitaker best actor, and Little Miss Sunshine best screenplay, proving stretching out Blind Melon's "No Rain" video into 100 minutes of indie movie quirk clichés was an idea whose time had come. [OscarWatch]
· indieWIRE's first annual Critics Poll—a descendant of the Village Voice poll— asked 107 North American film critics to assess the year's best, with a special eye to movies that may have been overlooked. Number One, and far ahead of the pack, is Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. [IndieWire.com]
· The Onion A.V. Club gives their top honor to Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, with special mentions to the underrated Brick (#4), and Half Nelson (#6), which succeeds in its inner-city high school inspirational teacher story despite a lack of a Coolio song on the soundtrack. [AV Club]
To promote Fox Searchlight's small scale comedy Little Miss Sunshine, the Fox marketing department had someone drive the movie's iconic VW bus around town. An eyewitness managed to snap a cameraphone photo of the saffron-hued promobile, which, through either faulty mechanics or bad driving, managed to make afternoon traffic on Pico Blvd. even worse:
