Screenwriter »

• Moments at the Oscars

  February 27, 2012 @ 4:07 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  By now you will know that The Artist has triumphed at the Oscars. Scratch that. You knew that was going to happen about six months ago. As I suggested in The Ticket last Friday, the Oscar watcher really has to talk himself or herself into believing that the ceremony is worth staying up for. You know what? For all the bitching that I have indulged in here, I still wouldn’t miss them for the world. I suppose I feel about them the way certain people feel about the Oxford vs Cambridge boat race. It doesn’t establish the world’s best rowers. It follows the same stretch of river every year. It all ends with a small man or lady being thrown into the river. (Okay, the last sentence has no power as a metaphor, but you can make sense of the rest.) For all that, the event feels like something worth enduring.

  What were the moments to savour this year?

  1. Nick Nolte’s interview on the red carpet.

  He seemed awfully, well, confused. The nicely spoken girl from Sky might as well have been speaking Swahili for all the sense Nick made of her questions.

  2. Terry George and Oonagh George winning for The Shore.

  Yeah, okay, I am playing home advantage here. But the Belfast man gave, I think, the most touching speech of the evening.

  3. A Separation winning best foreign language picture.

  For once, this notoriously badly organised award went to the best film on the list. After several decades of breaking new ground, Iranian film has finally grabbed its first golden statue.

  4. Sacha Baron Cohen on the red carpet.

  Okay, by turning up dressed as The Dictator, he was promoting his own film. But we were grateful for some disruptive irony.

  5. Meryl Streep makes with the humility.

  “I could hear half of America saying: ‘Not her again,’” she said. Yeah, right. We all know that it’s been 30 years since you last won. The Iron Lady stank. But we don’t begrudge you a third Oscar.

  6. Nick Moran going bananas about John Williams.

  Oh Lord. I’m already getting desperate. The Sky broadcast was enlivened by a festive Nick Moran, actor and director, going on a rant about the hopelessness of the world’s most honoured film composer.

  7. Billy Crystal’s strange inflated face.

  Nothing in his monologue was as funny as his peculiar man-boy cheeks. There was something of Mad magazine’s Alfred E Neuman about those rosy chops.

  8. Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog in Statler and Waldorf’s seat.

  What was going on there? We know which Muppets belong in the box at the side of the stage.

  9. A nice, vintage performance by Christopher Plummer.

  “You’re only two years older than me,” Plummer said to his award.  ”Where have you been all my life?” By some calculations, they are actually the same age. But we’ll let him off on a technicality.

  10. The best film won.

  Of the nominees, I mean. The Tree of Life was a little too philosophically banal. Hugo was a bit short on narrative drive. Yes, that’ll do nicely.

• Screenwriter’s shamefully poor Oscar nap.

  January 24, 2012 @ 10:26 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Well, it wasn’t a complete disgrace. Screenwriter, at least, managed to have all the front runners in place. But, in two areas at least, I received a fairly serious drubbing. Your correspondent felt that both Tomas Aflredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would (and not just because their titles were too long) figure absolutely nowhere. As it happened, both secured significant nods. Gary Oldman finally gets his best actor nomination for TTSS. Max Von Sydow is in the best supporting frame for ELAIC and that Daldry film is up for best picture.

  

  There are four of them, and Smiley.

  Come to think of it, as Dan Ashcroft noted beneath the last post, these Oscars have kicked up more surprises than any recent edition — which just goes to show how predictable they usually are. Virtually nobody felt that Extremely Loud had a serious chance of a best picture nomination. Earlier tonight, on BBC Radio Four, Mark Lawson suggested to Daldry that this was the worst-reviewed film ever to secure a best picture mention. (Daldry took it quite well.) Yet there it sits. Demian Bichir did receive a nod at the Screen Actors Guild for his fine turn in the (to my mind) useless A Better Life. So we can’t say his nomination was the greatest upset of all time. But I would never have felt he’d take the place marked for Michael Fassbender. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this result shows the Academy at its most wishy-washy. The bloke in the film about the hard-working Mexican immigrant (a travesty of Bicycle Thieves, incidentally) beats out the guy in the sordid (if moral) film about an unstoppable shagging machine. I haven’t seen Extremely Loud yet. I will, nonetheless, point out that the 9/11 story beat the racy Drive and the lubricious Bridesmaids to the presumed last spot on the grid. Draw your own conclusion.

  What else has gone unnoticed? Well, the most notoriously stupid category — that for best foreign language picture — did manage to hang on to Asghar Farhadi’s fine A Separation. There is still every chance it could lose. If it does so to the excellent Footnotes then I will just about live with it. A victory by any other film will cause my eyebrows to raise.

  Having already won quite a few awards for his supporting turn in Drive, Albert Brooks looked even more of a shoo-in than did Michael Fassbender. It is, however, hard to get too upset about Max Von Sydow sneaking in ahead of him. What a pleasure to have two great octogenarians — Christopher Plummer remains strong favourite — in the best supporting actor competition. Hats off to movie royalty. You have both helped movie-goers’ lives seem worthwhile over the last 50 years or so.

  

  Great, an excuse to post a photo of my heroes.

  Mark, also, an interesting exclusion in the best feature animation race. For the first time since its inception, the relevent year’s Pixar film has failed to make it into the enclosure. When you consider that this was a particularly weak year for that genre this result seems all the more notable. What in the name of Tex Avery was John Lassetter thinking of with Cars 2? The first film wasn’t great. But the second was a roaring disgrace. For the last decade and a half we have been praising Pixar for working hard on their scripts and not slipping into lazy talking-animal (or, in this case, automobile) cliches. The relatively poor box office for that film and its shameful performance at the Oscars will, we hope, give the people at that great animation studio pause for thought. Advance word is good for their upcoming Brave. Don’t let us down, boys and girls.

  It’s also worth pondering the decline of the “original song” category. Just two tunes turned up in that race: Man or Muppet from, erm The Muppets and Real in Rio from, erm, Rio. I like the Muppet tune. But nobody is likely to mistake it for Somewhere Over the Rainbow or As Time Goes By. Where have you gone, fair songwriters? Come back to the fold.

  In so far as we give a damn, the list did offer quite a bit of food for thought. And we haven’t even mentioned that 40 percent of the nominees for best live-action short were Irish. We’re almost as good at that discipline as  we used to be at the Eurovision Song Contest.

• Bumper final Oscar prediction post.

  January 21, 2012 @ 9:33 pm | by Donald Clarke

  I have been relatively quiet about the Oscars this year. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, I am sick of being shouted at every time I make such a post. I know they don’t mean anything. But I still enjoy playing the game. The second reason for the relative silence stems from performance anxiety. As I have mentioned many times since, I made 25 predictions last year and got 25 right. With the new rules for best picture, that seems close to impossible this year. As you will recall, the Academy is set to nominate between five and 10 films. All pictures that receive at least 5 percent of first preferences — unless, of course, that number exceeds 10 — will be included in the final shortlist. So, we have to work out not just whether a film is among the 10 most liked, but whether it has a significant weight of support behind it.

  

  Not this year, Uggie.

  First things first. If there were still just five nominations — the case until 2009 — then I reckon we could have a very good stab at getting them right. I see four films as being absolutely secure in their seats and one more as being almost nailed to its perch.  The dead certs are The Artist, The Descendants, The Help and Midnight in Paris. The slightly less certain nominee is Hugo. The Artist is odds-on favourite for the big prize. The Descendants, Alexander Payne’s latest mid-life crisis drama, hasn’t won all that much in awards season, but the director makes the kind of well-structured, middle-brow flicks the voters favour and they all love George Clooney (though not enough to nominate the flaccid Ides of March).  The Help is a good, old-school, socially conscious soap. Midnight in Paris has, somewhat bafflingly, become Woody Allen’s biggest film ever. The delightful Hugo — which originally sounded awful — ended up getting great reviews and Hollywood adores films about its own medium. Martin need not fret.

  Now things get tricky. Dave Karger of Entertainment Weekly reckons the field is so evenly spread that we really will see just five nominess. I don’t buy that. Surely there is at least one more film that one in 20 of Academy voters rate as their favourite. But what? I think two establishment picks will sneak in. War Horse should sweep by on the Spielberg trade wind. Then there’s the peculiar case of Moneyball. Two months after its release, I have yet to meet anybody who thought the film was anything more than passable. Yet the American critics love the blasted thing. It’s not just that we don’t get baseball — actually, I enjoy the sport — it’s that we don’t see that activity as a class of religion. Most of us on this side of the Atlantic refuse to buy man-hitting-ball (or, with apologies to hurling and cricket fans, man hitting that particular ball) as an irresistible metaphor for life’s great existential challenge or whatever. Anyway, I think it will saunter in.

  So, I’m going with seven. If there are more, then they should be drawn from The Tree of Life (annoyed as many as it impressed), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (beats me), Bridesmaids (they’d fancy a populist choice) and Drive (will require younger, hipper members to vote en masse).

  What’s missing? Well, before anybody saw it, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close looked like it had a good chance. It seems as if Mr Stephen Daldry will, however, see his so-far unbroken record of Oscar nominations come to an end. The film has opened in the US to very iffy reviews. The Americans were less keen on J Edgar than I was. The Iron Lady stinks.

  But the really intriguing dog that hasn’t barked (unlike Uggie above) is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It really is an odd one this. The film got superb reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. It has made very decent money. Indeed, playing in the same class of cinema as The Artist, it has made about 20 percent more in the US than the French film. It received 11 nominations at the Baftas and  – given that about 10 percent of Academy voters are also Bafta members — those awards generally offer the best guide as to the eventual Oscar nominations. Yet the picture has been completely invisible at US awards ceremony so far. It would be astonishing if, after travelling beneath the water for so long, it broke the waves to secure a best picture nomination. I hereby predict that it gets nothing at all.

  So here we go. As was the case last year, I have listed suggestions for best picture, best director and the two main acting prizes. The nominations emerge at lunchtime on Tuesday. In order of likelihood…

  BEST PICTURE

  1. THE ARTIST

  Still there. Still favourite.

  2. THE DESCENDANTS

  Payne is Oscar catnip.

  3. THE HELP

  Old-school Oscar fare.

  4. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

  One more for Woody

  5. HUGO

  Films about films…

  6. WAR HORSE

  Who directed this again?

  7. MONEYBALL

  I dunno. Ask an American

  If there are three more: THE TREE OF LIFE, BRIDESMAIDS, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

  BEST DIRECTOR

  1. ALEXANDER PAYNE (The Descendants)

  Could be one of those years where best film and director split.

  2.MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS (the Artist)

  Well, d’uh!

  3. MARTIN SCORSESE (Hugo)

  Even if the film doesn’t get in, he should manage a nod.

  4. WOODY ALLEN (Midnight in Paris)

  Of course he won’t turn up.

  5. STEVEN SPIELBERG (War Horse)

  Could nudge out Tate Taylor from The Help.

  BEST ACTOR

  1. JEAN DUJARDIN (The Artist)

  Neck-and-neck in the big race with…

  2. GEORGE CLOONEY (The Descendants)

  They love the grey-haired man. He was so kind to those sick kids in ER

  3. BRAD PITT (Moneyball)

  I could have done this standing on my head, but then again I’m not Brad bleeding Pitt.

  4. MICHAEL FASSBENDER (Shame)

  Relax, Kerry. He has no chance of winning

  5. LEONARDO DICAPRIO (J Edgar)

  The fifth place is really tricky this year. If it’s Michael Shannon or Gary Oldman (and it could be) I will — for the first time in my life — happily be proved wrong.

  BEST FEMALE ACTOR

  1. MERYL STREEP (The Iron Lady)

  She hasn’t won for nearly 30 years, you know.

  2. MICHELLE WILLIAMS (My Week with Marilyn)

  Running Meryl close. They love impersonations.

  3. VIOLA DAVIS (The Help)

  An amazingly good actress. But the role is barely a lead.

  4. TILDA SWINTON (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

  Showy. Hard to ignore.

  5. GLENN CLOSE (Albert Nobbs)

  She dresses as a man. Almost a safer bet than playing a disabled person.

• Can anything stop The Artist?

  December 12, 2011 @ 9:35 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Probably not. When Michel Hazanavicius’s hitherto unbuzzed about film was inserted as a late entry into the Cannes competition nobody paid much attention. To that point, the director was best known for a series of spy movie parodies that had struggled to receive screenings outside France. The new film was — get this — a silent, black-and-white comedy concerning the coming of sound to Hollywood. It might pass the time. But nobody was likely to take it seriously.

  The Artist went down a bomb at that Cannes screening and word began to build that we might be looking at a crossover hit. Mind you, the film would have to “crossover” so many barriers it would end up in a state of confused dizziness. Did you read the above? It’s silent. It’s foreign. It’s in black and white. It might as well be carrying some fatal disease. The Weinsteins thought differently and got out their cheque book.

  It remains to be seen if the film can draw in serious coin in Anglophone territories. But it certainly deserves to do well. Nicking bits of A Star is Born and Singin’ in the Rain, The Artist follows the gentle decline of a silent movie actor and the sudden rise of a younger actress. Jean Dujardin buzzes with sad energy as the protagonist. Bérénice Bejo is similarly spiffing as the coming icon. The film manages to celebrate every corner of its cinematic era without for a second seeming arch or pointy-headed. There is no doubt that it will receive raves from every sane critic. Have I got the point across: The Artist is an absolute delight. But can it win over the multiplexes? I think it can. Just about.

  Returning to more rubbishy matters, we are forced to wonder whether it can fail to win the best picture Oscar. On balance, I’d feel confident placing a reasonably sized bet on its nose. The Help might still emerge as a consensus choice. War Horse is picking up good word from advance screenings. But here’s the thing. Despite being French, The Artist is a film deeply, hopelessly in love with Hollywood. Those voters like to be told they are important. Also remember that the Weinsteins are masters at Oscar promotion. They even managed to garner nominations for crap such as Chocolat. The momentum is all in Hazanavicius’s direction. The film opens round New Year and an interview with Dujardin will appear in The Ticket shortly.

  Anyway, here’s my current bet on the likely Oscar nominees for best picture. I am now increasing the list from seven to eight, as I think support is building for quite a few releases.

  1. THE ARTIST

  See above.

  2. THE HELP

  Classic, old-school Oscar fare.

  3. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

  There’s a swelling feeling that the Academy wants to honour Woody one more time.

  4. THE DESCENDENTS

  Hasn’t done as well as expected in early awards, but still very safe.

  5. WAR HORSE

  Sources close to Screenwriter tell us that, at a recent screening, hardened journos were weeping into their notebooks.

  6. MONEYBALL

  Greeted with puzzled shrugs in Rest of the World, but American critics love the thing.

  7. THE TREE OF LIFE

  Could slip out. But the patina of pseudo-highbrow quality continues to divert voters.

  8. TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

  Yeah, you’re all groaning. But it has just opened in the US to the best reviews of the year.

  IN: Midnight in Paris

  OUT: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

• Look away, it’s the first Oscar post.

  November 10, 2011 @ 10:39 pm | by Donald Clarke

  Apologies for the silence of a late. The Corona Cork Film Festival intervened and I found it difficult to get to this corner of the computer. If you are anywhere near that great city, be aware that this venerable event continues until Sunday. They’re very nice people and they have plenty of good films to show you.

  What do you know? I return with everybody’s least favourite subject: the premature Oscar cheat sheet. This time last year, I managed — more or less — to predict all 10 best-picture nominees from a distance of two whole months. With the bizarre rule change, it looks close to impossible to repeat that feat. Listen carefully. There will be between five and 10 nominations. All films that receive a minimum of 5 percent of first preferences will, within those limits, be included on the shortlist. Jeez! The greatest psephologist on the planet will have trouble getting anywhere close to the final seven. Or five. Or eight. You get my drift.

  A few opening comments. As ever at this stage, a few films that have yet to open look like front runners. Then again, two years ago, everyone reckoned that Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones was high in the pecking order. The film stank and tanked. It was nowhere to be seen on nomination day. Still, it is hard to ignore behemoths such as Steven Spielberg’s War Horse or Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. They are both big middle-brow films from awards-friendly directors. Hmm?

  The other point that I must stress (you’d be surprised how many people miss this) is that these are not my favourite films. There are a few that I think quite ordinary among the bunch. I am merely trying to guess which way the old buggers will lean. So, in order of likelihood..

  THE DESCENDANTS (Alexander Payne)

  

  A classic in the Payne genre. His last two films — About Schmidt and Sideways — picked up multiple nominations. The new film revisits similar themes. The Academy loves George Clooney. A dead cert for a nomination, but unlikely to win.

  THE HELP (Tate Taylor)

  

  It’s a bit soppy. It’s a film about black people for white people. But it’s stuffed full of stonkingly good actors and it’s about “an issue”. Could very well win the big one.

  THE ARTIST (Michel Hazanavicius)

  

  A total surprise at Cannes. This black-and-white silent film — dealing with similar story matter to Singin’ in the Rain – has won fans wherever it has played. Another potential victor.

  WAR HORSE (Steven Spielberg)

  

  Almost nobody has seen it yet. But it’s about the first World War, it’s directed by li’l Stevie and it’s based on a play and book that everyone loved. Only has to be decent to get in.

  EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE (Stephen Daldry)

  

  Okay, this is a bit of a punt. The trailer is awful (see above) and the book was not everyone’s favourite. But it’s about 9/11 and Daldry (trivia fans, alert) was nominated as best director for each of his first three films.

  MONEYBALL (Bennett Miller)

  

  Despite starring Brad Pitt, nobody, but nobody, will go and see it outside the United States. It’s about the revival of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, for Pete’s sake. Nearly certain to be nominated. Sure to lose.

  THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick)

  

  A film that really, really divides people. Still, the patina of quality and its Palme d’Or triumph could push it over the wire.

  TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY (Tomas Alfredson)

  

  Very iffy this. Its twisty plot and grim ambience will alienate many American viewers. But if it is half as well received on the other side of the Atlantic as it was on this seaboard then it might just shamble into the pack.

  Okay. That’s eight. That sounds about the right number. If two more get in, I would guess the lucky films will be Midnight in Paris and J Edgar. That last movie is, perhaps, the most glaring exclusion from my main list. The film opens tomorrow in the US and the reviews have been only modestly positive. I feel it’s slipping away into the also rans.

• An Oscar for Oprah? Pardon?

  August 4, 2011 @ 9:22 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  In recent years, the Oscar mob have done a decent job when it came to handing out honorary gongs. Two years ago, Lauren Bacall, Gordon Willis and Roger Corman were the lucky recipients. Now that’s some line-up. This year’s announcement has, however, stirred up some controversy. James Earl Jones? No problem. The great man has been lending his honeyed voice to films for half a century. Dick Smith? His name is not exactly a household one, but his skills in the make-up department have enhanced such films as The Godfather, The Exorcist and Taxi Driver. The only objection one might have to Dick’s award is that he won a real one for Amadeus in 1984.

  No. The furore has been stirred by the awarding of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Ms Oprah Winfrey. However much one might abhor all that blubbing and confronting ones inner this-or-that on her show, it is worth thinking twice before criticising Oprah Winfrey. If you had an upbringing anywhere near as appalling as hers then you were a very, very unlucky person. And she has certainly raised significant amounts for charity. That’s not the issue. The Oscar is awarded to film professional. Ms Winfrey did, of course, appear in The Color Purple (indeed, that performance won her an Oscar nomination). And she has produced the odd picture. But she is clearly a telly professional. Let the Emmy committee deal with Mr Winfrey.

  Despite Winfrey’s terrifying power, more than a few commentators have stepped forward to question the decision. John Anderson, chair of the New York Film Critics Circle, was particularly vociferous. “It seems like a shameless bid for a ratings boost,” he said “Although once they start showing clips from Beloved and The Color Purple the numbers will plummet.”

  Even Armond White, the Afrocentric contrarian critic for the New York Press, spoke up. He said: “Does this newly announced Academy prize prove that Oprah means the same thing to Hollywood as past Jean Hersholt Award winners Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Lew Wasserman, Charlton Heston? Is this just another way for the academy to continue to grovel for TV ratings?”

  Armond’s question is rhetorical.

• Early Oscar Shocker!

  June 17, 2011 @ 2:20 pm | by Donald Clarke

  

  Look away now if you find the whole Oscar business unimaginably tedious. Two years after the Academy stunned analysts by increasing the number of best picture nominations from five to 10, that body has made another, even odder change to the rules. Next year, there could be as few as five nominees or as many as 10. The notion seems to be that all films that receive more than five percent of first preferences will — up to a maximum of 10 — be shortlisted for the big prize. (Unless, of course, fewer than five manage that feat. In which case, I assume, they just include the top five.) Have you got that?

  Initially suspicious, I think that increasing the nominees to 10 has actually worked out quite nicely. It was good to see movies such as Winter’s Bone and A Serious Man make it into the (longer) short-list. Even if those films had little chance of winning, they added class to the big party.

  The Academy appears to think differently. Most boffins believe that the plan is to weed out the also rans. According to The Envelope, The LA Times’s awards blog: “Some skeptics said that the number 10 was misleading since some films had little to no chance of actually winning. Tuesday’s news, then, seems designed to eliminate films that are nominated just to fill out the field of 10.”

  Huh? Surely, it has always been the case that films with no chance made it into the nominees enclosure. Could Nicholas and Alexandra have won in 1971. Ghost in 1990? What about Sounder in 1972? You can play this game yourself.

  It all reminds me of taking exams in the Trinity College maths department during the 1980s. In those days — maybe it hasn’t changed — you weren’t told how many questions you had to answer. The unfortunate mathematician attempted as many as possible and then, after seeing how well the student body had done, the examiners would decide how many to grade out of. Oscar-watchers will encounter similar problems when trying to guess the nominees for next year’s big prize. This year, we got all 10 right. In 2012, we may need to read the entrails of chickens to repeat that result.

• Do Oscar nominations (or wins) translate into bucks?

  March 3, 2011 @ 4:58 pm | by Donald Clarke

  It’s a hard one to answer. Last year, we would have replied with a definitive “no”. Sure, Avatar was the biggest film of all time, but nobody would seriously argue that the success of Cameron’s epic was down to its popularity with awards juries. Elsewhere, in Mexaplex 9, a yawning void greeted the eventual best-picture winner, The Hurt Locker. That film was, by many estimates, the least successful film ever to triumph in the big race. It took, would you believe, just $17 million in the US. Films about Mongolian peasants draw in more bucks.

  

  Calm down, dear. They like you.

  This year, the real best picture nominees — those that also got best director nods — have all done very decently at the US box-office. True Grit, Black Swan and The King’s Speech all passed the $100 million mark. The Social Network and The Fighter (on the surface, the most commercial of the five) are just a few million off that watershed. Having racked up $167 million, True Grit is a genuine hit. This week, Black Swan managed a quite remarkable feat. By passing out Narnia, it became 20th Century Fox’s most successful release of 2010. It should be noted that Fox — whose figures were of course boosted by a certain 2009 release featuring blue aliens — did not have a particularly stellar year. But this is still a very odd situation: a major studio’s biggest hit is a scary, vaguely avant-garde film about ballet.

  On balance, the awards chatter probably does matter. Black Swan, already doing nicely at nomination time, hung around throughout the Globes, Guilds, Baftas and — centuries later — the Oscars themselves. That added publicity must have helped. True Grit, however — ignored at the Globes, the first big jamboree — was well on the way to being a smash before, to many people’s surprise, it clocked up 10 Oscar nominations. The lesson probably is that, though cynics such as I will continue to wail, if you put quality product before the public, they may still turn out in sizable numbers. People are not as dumb as we often pretend. Older viewers will go to the cinema if they believe there’s something worth seeing. There is slim possibility that, when the 2011 sequel-fest is over, we might actually see more serious product from the major studios.

  Mind you, a glance at the weekend figures suggests that the biggest film of this week could (still) be Yogi Bear. Make of that what you will.

• The f***ing Oscars

  February 28, 2011 @ 3:08 pm | by Donald Clarke

  I’m sure few of you bothered to stay up to watch the Oscars last night. That was a wise choice. Move along. Move along. There’s nothing to see here. I’ll be mouthing off in the paper tomorrow about the awards’ increasing predictability and about their unstoppable cheesiness. It says something that the highlight of the event was Melissa Leo’s careless bellowing of a certain expletive that, though common on trawlers and in rugby changing rooms, still causes attacks of the vapours in American media-watchers.

  

  What are you f***ing looking at!

  The King’s Speech’s win saw The Oscars returning to their middle-brow roots. The banter was cheesy. The set was puzzlingly ugly. At least, at a mere three hours, the show is now a bit shorter than it used to be.

  One question should be asked here: why is Sky’s coverage so abysmal? For the second year running, the panel included at least two guests — Edith Bowman and the befuddled Brix Smith-Start, former wife of Mark E Smith — who appeared to have little interest in film. Who would have thought that Robbie  Collin of The News of The World would end up being the voice of wisdom and reason?This is one of the jewels in Sky’s crown. Yet they seem to treat it with the same respect they would bring to a gymkhana on Sky Sports 3. The set was thrown together. The guests were uninformed. Would it kill them to get the odd half-decent boffin on board?Oh, what’s the point.

• Screenwriter gets the Oscars 100 percent correct.

  January 25, 2011 @ 6:19 pm | by Donald Clarke

  I would not be human if I did not crow a little. Yesterday, this “blog” offered predictions for Oscar nominations in the best picture, best director, best actor and best actress races. How did we do? 25 out of 25. That’s how. Last year’s 23 out of 25 wasn’t bad, but, at this rate, Screenwriter will soon be elevated to the status of mystic sage.

  

  Get it?

  Okay, by my own admission, many of the races seemed comfortably sewn up ages ago. But we did stick out necks out in a few places. Most pundits thought that Christopher Nolan would sneak in ahead of the Coens in the director category. Javier Bardem was a mild outsider in the best actor competition. At any rate, you will look far and wide before finding any internet pundit who has done quite so well. Crow, crow, crow.

  Okay, I must reluctantly admit that, in a previous post, I got things totally wrong as regards the best foreign language picture. Live Above All, my sure-fire pick for winner, didn’t even make the final five. Equally surprisingly, the excellent Dogtooth, which I thought too worrying for that electorate, did appear on the short list. For the first time in living memory, we tip our hats to the voters in that category.

  To be fair, if you look down the list, you will find that the Academy did make some admirable choices. Everyone knew that Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon would (deservedly) make it into the best animated feature shortlist, but few of us dared to hope that The Illusionist would take the third place. Yet there it is. Bravo!

  Banksy’s brilliant Exit Through the Gift Shop looked a bit off-beam — not to mention English — to secure a position in the best documentary showdown. They surprised us there as well. There’s hope for the creaky old Oscars yet.