The Oscar race turned into a wild scramble on Tuesday morning, as “The King’s Speech” moved out front when nominations for the 83rd Academy Awards were announced.
“True Grit” surged into second position, and “The Social Network,” which had seemed a frontrunner, was matched by “Inception,” followed closely by “The Fighter.”
“The King’s Speech,” about friendship and speech therapy, got 12 nods, including ones for best picture, best director (Tom Hooper) and best actor (Colin Firth as a stammering King George VI). It won top honors from the Producers Guild of America over the weekend and emerged as the leader in an unusually competitive pack of contenders for the best picture Oscar.
In the morning’s biggest surprise, “True Grit,” a western remake from the filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, was second, with 10 nominations, including ones for best picture, best director (the Coens) and a best actor nod for Jeff Bridges, who won the award last year for “Crazy Heart.”
“Ten seems like an awful lot,” the Coens said in a statement. “We don’t want to take anyone else’s.”
“True Grit” has been an audience favorite since its release in late December but had barely registered in the panoply of pre-Oscar awards and received no nominations for the Golden Globes.
By contrast, “The Social Network,” an unauthorized look at Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, dominated the early awards, but received fewer Oscar nominations than its rivals, partly because it was not a contender in categories like costume and supporting actress. (T-shirts are featured but not women.) In total, “The Social Network” got eight nominations, including one for best picture; David Fincher was nominated for his directing, Aaron Sorkin for the script and Jesse Eisenberg (best actor) for his role as Mr. Zuckerberg.
“Inception,” a twisted tale of layered dreams, also received eight nominations, including one for best picture, but did not win a best director nomination for Christopher Nolan.
The seven nominations for “The Fighter,” a boxing drama, included best picture, best director for David O. Russell and a best supporting actor nod for Christian Bale, but did not include a best actor nomination for Mark Wahlberg. Mr. Russell, who was a ticket taker at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, said his first call when he learned of the nominations was to Mr. Wahlberg, who was also a producer of the film.“Mark was the first person who I wanted to connect with because I owe an incredible debt of gratitude to him,” Mr. Russell said. Mr. Wahlberg brought Mr. Russell in to direct after the movie, about the boxing brothers Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund, had several false starts.
In a twist that will require some tap-dancing on Oscar night, Feb. 27, one of the ceremony’s hosts, James Franco, was nominated as best actor for “127 Hours.” Based on the true story of a trapped outdoorsman who must sever his own arm to escape, “127 Hours” was also nominated for best picture. Mr. Franco’s co-host for the evening is to be Anne Hathaway, another young star, who was featured in “Love and Other Drugs,” a contender that was shut out on Tuesday.
“One of the reasons I agreed to host was to take my mind off the nominations — I have a reason to show up and not think about winning anything,” Mr. Franco said by telephone from Yale, where he recently began a doctoral program in English. “At the moment,” he added with a laugh, “I’m really just worried about making sure I’m on time for class.”
Natalie Portman, fresh off winning a Golden Globe for her performance in “Black Swan,” received a best actress nomination, which was widely expected. Other nominees included Annette Bening for playing a controlling lesbian in “The Kids Are All Right”; Michelle Williams for her emotional portrait of a young wife in “Blue Valentine”; Nicole Kidman as a mother dealing with the loss of a child in “Rabbit Hole”; and Jennifer Lawrence for her role as an Ozarks girl on a hunt for her crystal-meth-cooking father in “Winter’s Bone.”
“The Fighter” dominated the supporting actor categories. In addition to Mr. Bale, who plays a crack-addled former boxer, Melissa Leo, portraying his hard-bitten mother, and Amy Adams, equally tough as Mr. Wahlberg’s love interest, each grabbed nominations. Other supporting nominees included Hailee Steinfeld, the 14-year-old actress at the center of “True Grit,” and John Hawkes, who portrays a terrifying Ozarks man named Teardrop in “Winter’s Bone.”
Jacki Weaver, the bleached-blond matriarch of an Australian crime family in “Animal Kingdom,” said she learned of her supporting actress nomination in a text message from her ex-husband in Australia. “I had the television on in the hotel room at the Beverly Wilshire, but it was on mute,” she said in an early, early morning interview. “I slept through my own nomination after being awake all night with excitement.”
Javier Bardem received a best actor nomination for his role in the Mexican movie “Biutiful, ” which was nominated for best foreign language film. “Dogtooth” (Greece), “Outside the Law” (Algeria), “Incendies,” (Canada) and “In a Better World” (Denmark) were also nominated in that category.
Last year, when the Academy doubled the number of best picture nominees to 10 in a bid to shore up television ratings for its ceremony, Oscar watchers began looking to the directing category for clues as to which five were really the top contenders. By that measure, “Black Swan” would make the cut, as its director, Darren Aronofsky, received a nomination, one of five for that film, including best picture.
Paramount Pictures finds itself juggling a pair of best picture contenders, “The Fighter” and “True Grit,” as does Fox Searchlight, which has both “Black Swan” and “127 Hours.” Walt Disney Studios and its Pixar unit, meanwhile, can feel vindicated by the nomination of “Toy Story 3,” which became Disney’s third animated film — after “Beauty and the Beast” and “Up” — to be nominated for best picture.
“Toy Story 3” was also nominated as best animated feature, along with “How to Train Your Dragon” and “The Illusionist.”
The other best picture nominees are “The Kids Are All Right” and “Winter’s Bone,” which was lauded on the indie film circuit and slipped in among some of the more heavily promoted films that dominated the top of the nominees list.
The nominations were announced with the usual predawn hoopla. Mo’Nique, wearing a silvery party dress, joined the academy’s president, Tom Sherak, in a dapper sport coat, to read the top categories on a live broadcast from the Academy’s headquarters that began more than an hour before sunrise.
As always, Hollywood will pay attention to what was left out. Perhaps the most striking omission this year was that of Michael Douglas, a Hollywood favorite who received a diagnosis of throat cancer as the awards season got under way. He had two films — “Solitary Man” and “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” — in contention.
Neither film received a nomination, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, when the Academy was more inclined to leaven its judgments with a dollop of sentiment. (Witness the “True Grit” best actor award, in 1970, for the overdue John Wayne.) Over the last five years the voting membership has become slightly younger, more foreign and far more inclined to honor independent films than crowd pleasers and old-school stars.
This year has brought a face-off between Harvey Weinstein, the old Oscar hand whose Weinstein Company released “The King’s Speech,” and Scott Rudin, a similarly credentialed player who is among the producers of “The Social Network” and “True Grit.” Two years ago Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Rudin tangled publicly over their involvement with “The Reader,” but eventually made up and moved on.
For Sony Pictures, a win by “The Social Network,” now facing stiff competitors, would be a long-awaited triumph. The studio has not had a best picture since “The Last Emperor” in 1988. A win for “The King’s Speech” would be the first for its distributor, the Weinstein Company, formed by Harvey and Bob Weinstein after they left Miramax Films, a studio they founded and turned into a perennial Oscar presence.
The nominations have brought a cultural divide, as well. “The Social Network,” with its scrutiny of a still aborning tech phenomenon, points forward, while “The King’s Speech,” which has an international following, looks back toward World War II. It received 14 nominations for awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, whose membership overlaps with the 5,755 voting members of Hollywood’s film academy.
In a show of strength on the independent film side, Sony Pictures Classics, a small specialty films unit of Sony Pictures, had seven nominations, including two for best foreign film (“In a Better World” and “Incendies”), one for best animated feature (“The Illusionist”) and one for best documentary feature (“Inside Job”).
The Academy’s governors had said that they hoped a documentary would slip into the expanded ranks of best picture nominees, but that did not happen. In the best documentary category, other nominees were “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” “Gasland,” “Restrepo” and “Waste Land.” A significant snub was the omission of “Waiting for Superman,” a film about education reform that was directed by Davis Guggenheim, the director of “An Inconvenient Truth.” “Superman” had enjoyed strong backing from both Paramount and Bill Gates. Mr. Gates, an advocate of education reform, even appeared onstage with Mr. Guggenheim at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. But less heavily promoted nominees carried the day.
Among the strongest contenders for best picture, “The King’s Speech,” “The Fighter” and “The Social Network” are all rooted in true stories, a difference from last year, when Hollywood reveled in fictions and fantasies like “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar.”
“Sometimes true stories are the ones that have the most reliability — the narrative lands harder,” said Todd Lieberman, a producer of “The Fighter.” “It’s hard to believe what you’re watching actually happened.”
The last time films drawn so directly from life played as strong a role in the nominations was 2006, when “Capote,” “Munich” and “Good Night, and Good Luck” were nominated.
No comments:
Post a Comment