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Friday, February 22, 2008

Hollywood's big night



At some unnoticed tipping point during the past decade, Americans evidently decided that talking about the Oscars was far more interesting than actually going to the movies that are nominated, or even watching the awards show created to celebrate them.


That great, bloated dirigible of self-love and gas will rise from its hangar tonight (5 p.m., Ch. 7) for its annual close-up. If you turn the ceremony off - or never bother to turn it on - because you haven't bothered to see any of the best picture nominees, you are not alone. Four of the five contenders for the top prize were released by the studios' specialty divisions, a sort of white flag acknowledging their limited commercial appeal.


If it weren't for the surprising success of "Juno," which surpassed $125 million at the domestic box office last weekend, the combined take of all the films nominated for best picture this year would be far less than that singular artistic achievement, "Alvin and the Chipmunks."


When studio moguls created the Academy Awards 80 years ago, the idea was to validate their own fine judgments, while promoting the product they were selling. But the increasing timidity of Hollywood bosses - who now occupy small but colorful "profit centers" in such corporate behemoths as News Corp., Viacom and General Electric - about making anything they can't turn into a franchise, coupled with a creeping case of film snobbery among academy voters, has left the studios that


created the show without an entry in this year's race.
Only one best picture contender - "Michael Clayton" - was released by a studio, and despite its Warner Bros. label, the George Clooney thriller was actually financed by a Boston real estate developer.


In fact, if you count the 2005 best picture win for "Crash," produced by former real estate developer Bob Yari, and the six nominations that same year for "Ray," produced by former real estate tycoon Phil Anschutz, selling luxury condos appears to be a surer route to Oscar glory than running a studio.


When "There Will Be Blood," "No Country For Old Men," "Michael Clayton" and "Atonement" collected 30 nominations in January, Los Angeles Times Hollywood columnist Patrick Goldstein was moved to inquire, "Is this the Oscars or the Independent Spirit Awards?"


Good question. There were movies that not so long ago probably would have made it: "The Bourne Ultimatum" was a dazzling piece of craft by a director (Paul Greengrass) working at the top of his game; "Ratatouille" had a compelling story and broad appeal; and "Knocked Up" had as many people talking about its story as laughing at its crude humor. But academy voters, driven by a cadre of sniffy Oscar bloggers whose swoony paroxysms over this actress or that film are a 24/7 reminder of how much Hollywood can be like a restricted country club, now shudder at such riffraff.


Only a decade ago, Fox's populist romance "Titanic" won 11 Oscars in 14 nominations, including best picture. And in the 1970s - the decade considered the golden age of the modern era by even the snootiest film snobs - "Airport" (starring Dean Martin!) and "The Towering Inferno" were both best picture contenders. After "Titanic," small independent films began to dominate the Oscars, and the show's television ratings began to sink as if struck by an iceberg.


The ratings for the past five years have averaged 23.7 - a good night for "American Idol," but only half the massive audience that tuned in when "Ben-Hur" won in 1960. The only Oscar telecast from the 1980s to crack the 10 top-rated shows was in 1983, and it is telling that that was also the year "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Tootsie" were the crowd-pleasing favorites.


"Tootsie," which was later named the second most popular comedy of all time by the American Film Institute, had 10 nominations, and "E.T." nine. But "Gandhi," an arty biopic more esteemed than loved, won big that year. "Tootsie" left with only one award, and the public was subjected to a lot of boring speeches about how movies could further the cause of world peace. The audience apparently never forgave them for it.


Another seminal moment arrived in 1995 when Quentin Tarantino, a former video store clerk turned auteur, was canonized by Hollywood with one Oscar for his "Pulp Fiction" screenplay, and another nomination as best director.


In "The Film Snob's Dictionary," authors David Kamp and Lawrence Levi provide a withering insight into the sort of geek snobbery that Tarantino's ascension has brought about in Hollywood.


Even the most driven fan of rock music, they point out, "seldom becomes a rock star - he may be thoroughly versed in the ins and outs of what's cool about Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls, but he lacks the idiot-savant charisma and communicativeness of the lithe halfwits who actually perform rock music. Film, by contrast, is a director's medium, naturally hospitable to behind-the-scenes brainiacs with poor dress sense; it's not a huge step from being a maladjusted Douglas Sirk obsessive to being an Academy Award nominee."


The Oscars have become all talk, and not much action. Sunday night's ceremony should provide a fitting tribute to that.


more.......


'Michael Clayton' represents a grown-up Oscar vote


If it wins best picture, it would be a boon for classic Hollywood filmmaking.
WHEN 72-year-old actress Ruth Gordon, with half a century of show business behind her, collected her Oscar for "Rosemary's Baby" in 1969, her wry acceptance speech -- "I can't tell you how encouraging a thing like this is" -- did more than bring down the house.


Gordon expressed, likely without even meaning to, a fundamental truth about the Oscars. Often derided for the endemic silliness that inevitably surrounds them, the Academy Awards validate, they authenticate, they put an authoritative stamp of approval on people and films. More than anything, they powerfully encourage the work of the winners.
Paradoxically, it's often the people outside the Hollywood system who understand this best. People like the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda. As the maker of elegantly serious films such as "Kanal," "Ashes and Diamonds" and "Man of Marble," Wajda should be immune to Oscar's charms. Yet it was crystal clear, when I interviewed him in 2000 on the occasion of his honorary Oscar, that this award meant an enormous amount to him because of the recognition it conveyed, not only for his work, but also for an entire nation's cinema.


So when I look over this year's best picture nominees and think about which film I want to win tonight and why, I am doing more than indulging my personal taste. As Wajda understood, each film represents more than itself, it represents a way of working in the movie world. When studios or their specialty divisions decide which serious films to splurge on, when they greenlight ventures that have little chance of having a "Meet the Spartans" kind of opening weekend, they want to feel that at the very least they have the zeitgeist of the community and the respect of their peers behind them.


In a trend that has grown more marked over time in prestige categories like best picture, the present and former Hollywood employees who decide on the nominees display a genial disregard for the bread and butter pictures like "Pirates of the Caribbean" that pay the bills and keep the studios afloat. Especially noteworthy this time is that many of the best picture nominees are actually among the best films of the year. So making a choice among this year's candidates is especially difficult because it means deciding among different kinds of good things.


What they represent


THERE are even good things to be said about "Juno," though they don't involve the film's smug and fatally self-satisfied original screenplay. Although it is the weakest of the five candidates, a victory for this film would validate the notion that small, unheralded pictures can still make themselves heard in both the marketplace and the battle for cinema's biggest prize. Going as far back as "Marty's" victory for 1955 and the original "Rocky" for 1976, a triumph for the little film that could is a powerfully encouraging thing. Look what it did for Sylvester Stallone.


No one who's seen "There Will Be Blood" can have the slightest doubt as to what a best picture Oscar for it would be supporting. Though star and likely best actor winner Daniel Day-Lewis is the film's irreplaceable public face, this film stands in plain sight as a tribute to the cinematic virtuosity of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson.


Anderson, a modern cinematic visionary, is happiest when he is out on the aesthetic edge, using a ferocity of approach to involve audiences in disturbing, difficult narratives. If "There Will Be Blood" were to win, it would validate the "one genius, one film" approach to moviemaking that goes at least as far back as Orson Welles and "Citizen Kane."


Similarly, a victory for "Atonement" would strike a blow for a very specific and easily recognizable kind of filmmaking: the full-bore, British-accented romantic epic. A rich, old-fashioned love story spun out of modern psychology and post-modern storytelling, "Atonement's" decades-long, war-torn examination of love, pain, betrayal and, yes, atonement, has the kind of expansive sweep that brings antecedents such as "Doctor Zhivago" and "The English Patient" to mind.


Though audiences claim to long for this kind of film, they don't always patronize it, and "Atonement's" disappointing under-$50-million domestic gross is a case in point. A best picture victory would legitimize serious romantic cinema at a time when its existence is in jeopardy as well as encourage slackers in the audience pool to get on the case.


Perhaps the most interesting point to be made about "No Country for Old Men," generally considered the favorite to take home the best picture prize, is that it is hard to say exactly what voters would be supporting if they picked it. It's a career achievement vote for the gifted and hard-working Coen brothers as well as a vote for old-fashioned filmmaking craft, for a picture that is such a model of faultlessly constructed, implacable storytelling that you can't stop watching it even though you very much wish you could.


Most of all, a vote for "No Country" feels like a vote for the Hollywood art film, for an archetypal specialty division product that marries a violent and decidedly offbeat genre sensibility, courtesy of Cormac McCarthy's novel, with top-flight acting and production values. In most years, this would be my Oscar choice, but this year is different. This year has "Michael Clayton" in it.


A victory for this smart and suspenseful legal thriller would be more than a vote for the only one of the five to be distributed by an actual studio. It would be a vote for a beautifully remodeled classic studio picture, an impressively updated version of the kind of movie "they just don't make anymore."


All the elements of vintage Hollywood filmmaking are present and accounted for in "Michael Clayton," starting with writer-director Tony Gilroy's heightened and dramatic dialogue. Add to that the ability of a peerless cast, including George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton, to animate characters who are at once familiar archetypes and completely individual. Finally, there's Gilroy's instinct for the emotional jugular, a storytelling panache that is almost a lost art all by itself.


In voting for "Michael Clayton," Hollywood would in essence be voting for itself, voting for thoughtful, adult studio films crafted in the heart of the system. I can't think of any other movie-making constituency that needs more help right now.

EXTRA......



About Michael Clayton


Michael Clayton is an Academy Award nominated dramatic law thriller film written and directed by Tony Gilroy, co-produced by George Clooney, and starring Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton. It chronicles the attempts of attorney Michael Clayton to cope with a colleague's apparent mental breakdown and corruption within a major client of his law firm.


Plot summary
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is an attorney and former gambling addict employed by a prestigious law firm in New York City as a "fixer", someone who rectifies difficult situations, often through unconventional or expedient methods. After meeting with a colleague's key client who had accidentally struck a pedestrian with his car, Clayton sees some horses near the side of the road. He stops driving, leaves his car, and climbs a hill to go admire the animals. While he is watching the horses, his car explodes in a fireball.


The story then flashes back to four days earlier. Clayton has just received the news that he owes $75,000 to organized crime figures due to a failed attempt to open a bar with one of his brothers (David Lansbury) when he learns that one of the firm's leading attorneys, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), has suffered a mental breakdown. In the middle of a crucial deposition involving a class action lawsuit against the firm's largest client, U-North, an agricultural products conglomerate, Edens began rambling incoherently and stripped naked. Dispatched to fix the situation, Clayton gets Edens out of jail in Milwaukee and learns that his friend, who had a mental breakdown in the past, is not taking his medication. Before Clayton can escort Edens back to New York City to receive medical care, Edens sneaks away and returns to New York on his own. Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), U-North's chief counsel, takes Edens' briefcase from the deposition room and discovers that Edens had an internal U-North memorandum that documents the company's responsibility for releasing cancer-causing chemicals. When Crowder learns that Edens refuses to cooperate and cannot easily be committed to a mental health institution, she decides to hire two men (Robert Prescott, Terry Serpico) to surveil Edens, including tapping his phone and installing bugs in his apartment. This surveillance and the firm's review of documents in Edens' office reveals that Edens was actually building a case against U-North, his own client. Crowder instructs the two spies to murder Edens, and their methods fool the police into believing it was a suicide.


Clayton is distraught at the death of his co-worker and friend, but becomes suspicious when he learns both that U-North was planning to settle and that Edens had purchased a plane ticket to New York for one of the class-action plaintiffs (Merritt Wever). With the passive assistance of his other brother (Sean Cullen), a NYPD police detective, he breaks into Edens' apartment and discovers a receipt for a large order at a copy store. At the store he finds that Edens has assembled documents that present a damning case against U-North, and has made thousands of copies. Clayton takes a copy and leaves, but the two hit men are now tailing him and they inform Crowder. While Clayton plays poker, one of the hit men rigs his car with a bomb. Clayton leaves the game earlier than expected, interrupting the hit man's re-installation of the GPS tracking device, causing it to give off an inconsistent signal. Clayton drives to Westchester County to meet with the client who committed the hit-and-run. Clayton is followed by the two hit men, but they have trouble tracking him. Knowing that he is nearby, but not his exact location, the hit men detonate the bomb. At this point the plot catches up to the events shown at the beginning of the film.


Clayton is unharmed, because he is not in the car. He runs to the side of the car and throws his phone, wallet, and watch into the fire, causing initial reports to indicate he was killed in the explosion. At a U-North board of directors meeting, Crowder proposes that the settlement agreement be extended. When she steps out of the conference room to allow the directors to confer, Clayton is waiting for her. He tells her he has access to copies of the U-North memo and that he knows she was responsible for Edens's death and the attempt on his own life. He demands to be paid off for his silence, asking for $10 million, to which Crowder agrees. Clayton responds, "You're so fucked," and walks away as police officers approach. Clayton reveals he had a phone in his pocket the entire time, and his brother, the NYPD detective, was secretly listening to the conversation. As Crowder and the U-North Chair (Ken Howard) are arrested, Clayton leaves the building and gets into a taxi. He gives the driver $50 and tells him to just drive. The film's credits appear over footage of him sitting in the back of taxi; when the last credit line appears over this shot, he smiles just before the picture fades to black and the credits continue.



Production
The film premiered August 31, 2007, at the Venice Film Festival and was shown at the American Films Festival of Deauville on September 2, 2007, and at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2007. It opened in the United Kingdom on September 28, 2007, and at Dubaï Films Festival on December 2007. The film opened in limited release in the United States on October 5, 2007, and opened in wide release in the U.S. on October 12, 2007




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