OSCAR - Academy Awards
Oscar Buzz – Gran Torino And Two TV Spots
Warner Brothers recently debuted two short TV spots for “Gran Torino” and here they are. You can also see some images from the movie.
Movie critics were not so thrilled by Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling,” but numerous early reviews of “Gran Torino” put Eastwood’s second movie in 2008 into Oscar consideration.
In “Gran Torino” Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, an iron-willed veteran living in a changing world, who is forced by his immigrant neighbors to confront his own long-held prejudices.
The Dark Knight – For Your Consideration
As we know Oscar season is approaching and Warner Bros. has been putting out their “For Your Consideration” ads featuring a shot of Heth Ledger as The Joker to remind the Academy for best picture category and best supporting actor. Check them out below.
In addition to running their ad on the cover of Variety, the studio also bought two full page ads in the magazine, one for Ledger and one for “The Dark Knight” to win Best Picture.
“$9.99″
Fourteen features have been submitted for consideration in the Animated Feature Film category for the 81st Academy Awards. One of them is “$9.99” a stop motion animated movie for grown-ups based on the Short Stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret. Tatia Rosenthal is director and co-writer.
Despite the low budget constraints of the production, the filmmakers and casting agent Nikki Barrett decided to aim high with the casting of the puppet’s voices. Sending the script out to a number of internationally acclaimed Australian actors, the filmmakers were gratified by the response.
“Actors just wanted to be part of this project. We ended up with a fantastic cast…our dream list of actors to play the roles,” said the producer Emile Sherman.
Departing from the more usual practice in the animation industry of recording voice performances in isolation from each other, director Rosenthal preferred to record the actors in the configurations they appeared in the script.
“I insisted on getting everybody together in the booth. This became possible because we required them for such a short time. As a first-time director I needed to have that immediate sense of whether a scene was going to work. I didn’t want to imagine it. I wanted to hear it.”
14 Animated Features For Oscar 2008
Fourteen features have been submitted for consideration in the Animated Feature Film category for the 81st Academy Awards.
Under the rules for this category, a maximum of 3 films can be nominated in a year in which the field of eligible entries numbers at least 8 but fewer than 16. Films submitted in the Animated Feature Film category also may qualify for Academy Awards in other categories, including Best Picture, provided they meet the requirements for those categories.
The 14 submitted features are:
- Bolt
- Delgo
- Horton Hears a Who!
- Dragon Hunters
- Fly Me to the Moon
- Igor
- Kung Fu Panda
- Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
- $9.99
- The Sky Crawlers
- Sword of the Stranger
- The Tale of Despereaux
- WALL-E
- Waltz with Bashir
The 81st Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 22nd 2009.
Source: The official site for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Oscar 2009 – The Earliest Oscars Ever
What’s more significant: the inauguration of a new U.S. president or the announcement of the year’s Oscar nominees?
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided politics takes precedence, announcing Monday that it has delayed the nominations announcement by two days.
Oscar nominees are usually revealed on a Tuesday about four weeks before the big show, which is typically held the last Sunday in February. For 2009, though, the targeted Tuesday, Jan. 20, is Inauguration Day.
“It didn’t make any sense for us to try to compete with (the inauguration) from a news point of view,” academy Executive Administrator Ric Robertson told The Associated Press.
“Ballots are due Jan. 12, and nominations are announced 10 days later, so that’s getting pretty close to the minimum,” he said. “The most critical path is the balloting-voting process. Since we remain committed, for security reasons, to paper balloting, and all Pricewaterhouse Coopers tabulating is done by hand, it’s not done by computers. … They can turn things around quickly but they still need time.”
The 2009 presidential inauguration isn’t the first event that prompted the academy to alter its calendar. The Oscar show was moved from the last Sunday in February in 2006 so it wouldn’t conflict with the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, Robertson said.
So the 81st annual Oscar nominees will be revealed Thursday, Jan. 22, and the Academy Awards will be presented Sunday, Feb. 22, the earliest Oscars ever.
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