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Oscars Preview

After an arduous campaign that makes the US Presidential primaries seem like the election of a class milk monitor, the awards season finally climaxes at the Oscars on Sunday. Arguably beginning with the unveiling of No Country For Old Men and The Diving Bell And The Butterfly at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, the awards race kicked into high gear last autumn with the arrival of Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton and There Will Be Blood. Following the Golden Globes, awards from the various US guilds (Screen Actors, Writers, Directors, Producers) and critics groups, and the BAFTAs, the big one has finally arrived. Here are my predictions.

Best Actor
Nothing is ever certain when it comes to American Academy voters, but if they fail to award the prize to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood, it will be a major shock. Some will inevitably find his egomaniac oilman a little rich, but few can argue that this is the performance of the year. George Clooney in Michael Clayton is emerging as a possible rival.

BAFTAs preview

It’s the BAFTA Film Awards this Sunday, the last major ceremony before the Oscars, and the London film industry is inevitably buzzing about who will and should win. Atonement leads the pack with 14 nominations, and might be expected to scoop both Best Film and Outstanding British Film. But the latter is decided by a small jury, who in past years gave it to My Summer Of Love over Vera Drake and to Touching The Void over both Cold Mountain and Girl With A Pearl Earring, so that result is unguessable. As for Best Film, don’t necessarily count on patriotic voter impulses to push Atonement past leading US contenders No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. On the other hand, votes for these two muscular, masculine features from American auteurs (the Coens and Paul Thomas Anderson), both set in the past and both filmed in Texas, may split evenly, allowing Atonement to sneak through the middle. (If either of the other two nominees – The Lives Of Others and American Gangster – win, that will be a shock.)

In Outstanding British Film, Atonement’s rivals are The Bourne Ultimatum, Control, Eastern Promises and This Is England. Control and This Is England might be considered more “awards”-type movies, but the jury gave the prize to Wallace & Gromit a couple of years ago, so there is no pattern to it.

British Independent Film Awards

As with all film awards ceremonies, it can go one of two ways at the BIFAs. There are years when the jury spreads the love around a number of films, and years where one candidate is so strong it wins a virtual clean sweep. This time, it was the latter. “See you at the BIFAs?” I’d signed off in an email to a friend earlier that day. “Yes, I’m going to go and watch Control win everything,” he replied.

That prediction turned out to be almost but not quite true. Anton Corbijn’s masterful film about tragic Joy Division singer Ian Curtis only won five of its nine nominated categories: Best Director and Debut Director for Corbijn; Best Newcomer for actor Sam Riley; Best Supporting Actor/Actress for Toby Kebbell; and Best Film. It was a popular result. The British Independent Film Awards have travelled a long way from their modest beginnings nine years ago, and a few had grumbled at the not-terribly “independent”-seeming Walt Disney Motion Pictures garnering 14 nominations this time, but Control is incontestably a British independent film, and embodies the whole spirit of that oft-beleaguered category.

Water

Of the five Foreign Language Oscar nominees, Pan’s Labyrinth and After The Wedding have already been released. The French-Algerian Days Of Glory follows next, at the end of this month, and then Germany’s The Lives Of Others (which won the Academy Award) in April. The fifth nominee, Water, will be the last to get a cinema release in the UK; it opens here June 1.

Water is Indian-born film-maker Deepa Mehta’s third instalment in her trilogy of the elements, following the award-winning Fire and Earth. Set in 1938, nine years before India won independence from British colonial rule, the film focuses on the treatment of widows in traditional Indian society: according to a strict interpretation of religious scripture, at that time they were not permitted to remarry, but were instead consigned to a life of redundant exile in special widows’ homes. And since some girls were married off at absurdly young ages – the chief widow protagonist of Water is just seven – the unlucky ones could have their whole lives thrown away by the untimely death of a husband.

In Mehta’s film, Gandhi is glimpsed as a then-rising harbinger of political and social change that would put human rights ahead of narrow religious teachings – and this portent of progress gives the film an inspirational ingredient that helps soften the bleaker, disturbing narrative elements. So too do Mehta’s pretty compositions and musical montages. Whether these factors will be enough to help Water reach a crossover UK audience – Monsoon Wedding it ain’t – remains to be seen.

What others are saying:
http://www.flickfilosopher.com/blog/2006/05/water_review.html
http://www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/ddb5490109a79f598625623d0015f1e4/c25c7b82458bd64b8825715e0011e59d?OpenDocument

Days of Glory

The Cannes wags dubbed it "Saving Private Said", and indeed this World War Two film, which views the conflict from the perspective of the Algerian soldiers who fought to liberate the French motherland from Nazi occupation, bears some similarities to Steven Spielberg's Oscar® winner.  The film won Best Actor in Cannes last May, an honour that was shared by principal performers Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila and Bernard Blancan. (The Cannes jury in 2006 had a bit of a thing for rewarding ensemble casts, since Best Actress went to the ladies of Volver.)  When the film premiered at the Palais Des Festivals, the actors were pretty well-known to the crowds there, who went crazy over them.  Debbouze is best known to western audiences for Amélie, and he was recently the lead actor of Luc Besson's Angel-A. He lost most of his right arm playing on train tracks when he was a boy, so that always stays in his pocket, but he doesn't make a big deal out of it. Its absence is more noticeable in Days of Glory, since he's playing a soldier, and there's plenty of action.  Rachid Bouchareb's film, which is called Indgènes in French-speaking countries, is one of the five nominees for the Foreign Language Film Oscar®, where it faces off against Pan's Labyrinth, After the Wedding, The Lives of Others and Water.

Release date for Days of Glory: 30th March 2007

Trailer:

Read more: http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0444182/

What others are saying:

http://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/reviews.php?id=5670

http://daily.greencine.com/archives/001998.html

This is England

This Is England premiered at the Toronto Film Festival back in September 2006, and was in the London Film Festival last October.  It also won two prizes at the British Independent Film Awards in November 2006: Most Promising Newcomer (Onscreen) for 14-year-old Thomas Turgoose; and the big one, Best Independent British Feature.  But it doesn't open in the UK until April 27, again, like The Lives of Others and Half Nelson, presumably because it doesn't want to compete for its audience with all of the Oscar®-type films clogging screens in January, February and March.  But Shane Meadows' fifth feature film will be worth the wait.

Set in a small town suggestive of both the north Midlands and Yorkshire, the film takes place in the summer of 1983, a year after the end of the Falklands War.  Turgoose plays young Shaun, whose soldier dad died in the conflict, and whose mum dresses him in unfashionable clothes that get him bullied at school.  But when he's accepted into the local gang of skinheads, thanks to the friendly overtures of nice-guy Woody (Joe Gilgun), his horizons open.  Then the return to the gang, from prison, of the scary Combo (Stephen Graham, from Snatch) creates divisions and introduces Shaun to the racist, violent aspect of skinhead culture.  Opinions are divided over Meadows' oeuvre: his second feature A Room For Romeo Brass (1999) has a lot of champions; most people agree the follow-up Once Upon A Time In The Midlands was an unsuccessful attempt to impose a mainstream sensibility on the director; and most would also concur that his lowest-budget feature to date, revenge thriller Dead Man's Shoes, represented a creative regeneration. For me, This Is England is his best film yet, and one that somehow connects to all his previous features and makes sense of them as a coherent body of work. 

This Is England represents the first time Shane Meadows has worked with the same producer twice, Sheffield-based Warp Films Mark Herbert, who also produced Dead Man's Shoes. Reports suggest that Shane is a passionate filmmaker who doesn't always give producers a smooth ride, so it's great that he's clearly found in Herbert a soul mate who is capable of bringing the best out of him.  Herbert won the 2006 Alfred Dunhill-sponsored UK Film Talent Award, given to a first-time writer, director or producer each year at the London Film Festival.  It was a well-deserved honour.

BAFTA night

Not a huge number of surprises at the BAFTAs last night, although both screenplay wins probably fall into that category. Who would have guessed Peter Morgan would win his BAFTA for The Last King of Scotland, instead of for The Queen? The latter film was favourite in the Original Screenplay category, but lost to Little Miss Sunshine.  As for Adapted Screenplay, which Morgan and Jeremy Brock won for The Last King Of Scotland (adapting from Giles Foden's novel), my own guess would have placed Patrick Marber's adaptation of Zoe Heller's Notes On A Scandal as the likely winner.

Big relief at the joint party for Pathé and Miramax, which followed the BAFTA dinner, held at the Park Lane Hilton's top-floor Windows bar. Executives for both companies, who distribute The Queen respectively in the UK and the US, confessed they had a bumpy ride on the night as The Queen lost the categories, one after another of British Film, Make-Up, Costumes, Editing, Supporting Actor, Music, Original Screenplay and Director. But having scored 0 for 8, raising fears that the film just wasn't getting the love from BAFTA this year, it won its ninth and tenth nominations: the biggies, Best Actress for Helen Mirren and Best Film.  The nominees in the Best Film category are its producers, Andy Harries, Christine Langan and Tracey Seaward, not its director Stephen Frears, but Frears joined his colleagues on-stage anyway, rocking his trademark suit-and-sneakers look. Frears had been given a green pin-badge at the London Critics Circle Film Awards on Thursday by charity the NSPCC, and he was still wearing it on Sunday.  This may have been a deliberate choice by Frears, although it's more likely he didn't notice, and it's gratifying to see he is clearly not a man who wastes money on dry cleaning his tux between award ceremonies.  His opening gambit, "Queen of the world!", he said for a dare.

London to Brighton

If you haven't yet caught London to Brighton, Paul Andrew Williams' excellent feature debut which opened back in December, you may have to be extra eagle-eyed to do so.  It's down to just six screens nationally at the moment and frankly deserved to do significantly better at the box-office than it did (about £160,000 so far).  Reviews were very supportive, so you can't blame the critics.  Maybe the date, in the run-up to Christmas, wasn't the best, and it opened directly against Shortbus, with both films slightly harming each other at the box-office.  Probably the real damage was done by Pan's Labyrinth, which opened one week before London to Brighton and Shortbus, and has proved overwhelmingly the popular choice for audiences looking for an alternative to mainstream fare -- with £2.2 million UK box-office and counting (and still playing on 60 screens nationwide).

The Last King of Scotland

Well, you've got to give respect to the BAFTA voters.  They're not known for showing much patriotic fervour, and in fact they've been accused of being in thrall to Hollywood Oscar campaigners in their nominations.  But they came through in fine style for The Last King of Scotland, giving it five nominations, for Best Film, Best British Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (James McAvoy) and of course Best Actor (Forest Whitaker).  Most of the other BAFTA nominations were in step with the Oscars® (four of the same Best Picture nominees, a total match-up in the five Best Actress contenders), but with The Last King of Scotland, the BAFTA voters have shown commendable independence of thought.  The American Academy gave the film one nomination: to Forest Whitaker.