In The Company Of Glenn

A bit more on the Independent Spirit Awards

...so, okay, on balance it's maybe not and better or worse than any other awards show, you know, you've got Todd Haynes giving a nice heartfelt eloquent tribute to Heath Ledger and then Rainn Wilson saying something lame about wanting to have sex with Bardem ("fuck" is the word he used—this awards show is different from other awards show not just for its spirit but because you can—no, I think you're actually encouraged to—cuss) and then Schnabel accepting an award in his pajamas, which kinda makes me wish he wins Best Director tomorrow night too...

Oh look. Angelina Jolie is so delightfully insufferable as she listens to applause and gives this little half-smile saying "am I not gracious to accept your praise"...say, not for anything, do you think the people who bought Juno's soundtrack were under the impression that the cutesy little songs on it were voiced by a waifish teenager rather than Kimbra Wilson, who is not a teenager or waifish and might be considered by even many bohemians as being somewhat forbidding in terms of appearance...did I ever tell you I met Tang Wei at a party and she was so nice and...Oh my blog Ellen Page just won best actress! Angelina Jolie's clapping with this little self-satisfied smile that says, "They don't know..."

Oh man I'm doing it. Liveblogging. Haven't even had that drink yet. Oh well only one more award...

I don't know what Jeff Wells is on about, Page looks pretty good to me...Ohmigod did I just write that...

Dustin Hoffman: "I did fuck Javier Bardem, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the product of our union." He immediately redeems it by saying "I hope you understand I mean that metaphorically" and then complaining that the mike's too low, which is a visual gag. Dustin Hoffman kind of rules.

Okay, so the best movie award goes to...Juno. One might recall it as the "only hit" cited by Rainn Wilson in his opening monologue. All the producers go up. "Labor of love," "treasure," and so on. They should make a rule that the director automatically gets a producing credit so when/if the movie gets an award someone interesting can go up with the other producers to get the award.

Okay. See you tomorrow night.

A brief look at The Independent Spirit Awards

"Oh, I get it, they're celebrating the spirit of independence in film by making fun of other artists," My Lovely Wife observed after peeking in on only a couple of minutes of the putative comedic content of the Independent Spirit Awards, which are ongoing even as I blog.

I've never watched these one of these before, and I have to admit it's kind of painful. Host Rainn Wilson's opening monologue was pretty much all about how they're going to give a bunch of awards to a bunch of movies no one in America has seen or cares about. I understand there's a longstanding showbiz award thing about not taking oneself too seriously, but this sort of thing strikes me as both a bit much, and pretty disingenuous.

Oh, and I see that Aaron Katz's Quiet City did not just win the John Cassavetes Award for best feature made for very little money...but it was a thrill just to see it nominated. August Evening, which I haven't seen, got it instead. It may well be worthy but how was I not gonna root for the home team?

Oh my. Now Steve Zahn, who is on occasion funny, is doing a Dylan parody lampooning I'm Not There. Had it not been so brief, this could have been the Snow White/Rob Lowe moment of the show.

Maggie Cheung just came out as a presenter, and they almost immediately cut to Tang Wei in the aud, as if to say, "look, there's more than one Asian here!"

Okay, I'm not gonna get sucked into live-blogging this. As loath as one ought to be to use the phrase, I need a drink. I'll update later.

Hey wait, Paranod Park didn't even open domestically this year...

Sundance Film Festival: 2008 awards.

Reportage and analysis by Howard Karren

It’s common at festivals for people to compare their overall quality from one year to another, but aside from jaded veterans, who really profits from that kind of evaluation? Far more important in the long run is the matter of how good each movie was individually, and this year at Sundance, there were plenty of standouts. There were certainly trends — fewer movies dealing with Iraq, stories pushing the envelope toward darker and darker material, such as self-cutting and mercy killing in Downloading Nancy, a Holocaust survivor turning her sons into sexual basket cases in Death in Love, and incest leading to murder in Savage Grace.

And then there are the awards. At Sundance there are essentially two types: audience awards, voted on by anyone who went to see the films, and jury awards, voted on by the juries selected anew each year by the festival‘s directors. Both types of awards apply to each of the categories in competition — Dramatic, Documentary, World Dramatic, and World Documentary. (The films screened under the rubrics Premieres, Spectrum, and Park City at Midnight, among others, are ineligible for awards.) The Shorts category, a launching pad for new filmmakers, is a world unto itself, though the winners and honorable mentions will not be names that are familiar to most Premiere.com readers. The ceremony itself is usually a poignant affair, filled with cheers and thanks and an occasionally humorous speech. This year it was hosted by the always-game William H. Macy at the Racquet Club in Park City, which was decorated like a Tex-Mex-themed senior prom, with giant green-lit saguaro cactus trees and a Wild West stage set. Most of the acceptances were short and sweet.

Oscar nominations.

"Not only will Michael Clayton get a Best Picture nomination, it could take the award," a very savvy industry insider insisted in conversation the other night. Well, Clayton's halfway there, as the announcements for the 80th Academy Awards attest. We also discussed Juno's chances, and here's where we were wrong, speculating that Juno would edge out Atonement or vice versa, while what actually happened was that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly got the snub there. This extended to the film's fine cast, alas, but not to director Julian Schnabel or screenwriter Ronald Harwood.

The noms yielded a bunch of surprises, some pleasant (Viggo Mortenson for Eastern Promises—awesome; Tamara Jenkins for The Savages in original screenplay, well done) others not so much (Lars and the Real Girl for original screenplay wins, hands down, my "Are You F**kin' Kidding Me" award, especially given that I was hoping for a Darjeeling Limited nod in screenplay). The most complete list I've been able to find so far is over at the San Jose Mercury News, but more will be popping up at various media venues in the next hours. Check it out, and leave your thoughts! There'll be more here later, after I work through a minor health issue (see above), and I hope to reprise a Premiere tradition—an Oscar dialogue with Variety's Anne Thompson—here in the near future.

Global Domination

8:59 p.m., EST If a Golden Globe is awarded and a performer isn't there to be summoned out of the bathroom to give a drunken, substance-free acceptance speech, does it signify?

I suppose we're about to find out.

9:02 p.m., EST Or not. I just turned on NBC, and they're trying to make "a show" out of the whole sorry non-event. Sorry, my wife and I are hosting a dinner party and this is a major buzzkill that it wasn't worth pausing the Hampton Hawes CDs I had on the box for. I'll put up a post after the announcements have been made to put in my two cents. Assuming I still give a shit. Assuming I ever gave a shit.

9:06 p.m., EST From the dining room I just heard my friend Kip say, apropos the NBC broadcast, "This is so sad."

Indeed. But at least now we know what a Ben Silverman self-generated prom looks like.

We've all got better things to do right now, don't we? Later.

9:34 p.m., EST I give up. I live blog. Here's my living room now. I'm explaining Billy Bush to my guests; for most of them, he's an unknown quanitity.

Live from my living room...damn I need a new digital still camera...

As I keep telling My Lovely Wife, I don't do TV, so I don't feel the need to, well, do TV, that is, weigh in on TV winners...but so far the movie awards have gone to Bardem for No Country, supporting actor drama, and, for lead actress in comedy or musical, in an upset over Juno's Ellen Page, the pre-Juno fave, Marion Cotillard for La Vie En Rose. Good for her. I'm still not caring, although, OK, I'm glad for Bardem.

What I'm most feeling watching all this nonsense is a hope that the Oscars get a normal ceremony and such, because looking at stuff this way feels really disconnected. All you've got to make fun of are Billy Bush and his female counterpart, whose name I can't remember no matter how many times it's repeated to me. Poor Dave Karger from Entertainment Weekly. A nice, smart, guy. Forced to do "analysis" here. And yet in a way this was the sort of thing I was/am supposed to aspire to. Oh good, a commercial break before I lapse into an existential crisis.

Q: Will the Golden Globes be ruined by the WGA strike? A: Define 'ruined'

So went a part of my email exchange with Movie City News/Gurus of Gold poohbah David Poland—although I'm wondering if he ever gets my emails lately, as my choices aren't up at the site yet(UPDATE: They are now, for what it's worth!)—this morning. As many of you are aware, I've never quite gotten around to taking the Globes seriously, kind of have a hard timing getting overly excited about Oscars even, as I'm one of those uptight guys who think that art and awards have zero to do with each other, unless the art is mine and the award is a MacArthur Genius Grant. (So not going to happen.)

Anyway, my non-snark answer to Poland's question was a resounding "Yes," but I'm a bit surprised at being proven right so quickly. The announcement just came down from Variety that, as per SAG, no actors—that's zero—will attend the Golden Globes ceremony.

Which means, effectively, no Golden Globes ceremony. No fun, not even of the making-fun sort. Nothing.

The shock of recognition that might follow this announcement—the reality that while there may be no business like show business, right now there's no business—could it be enough to shake the opposing parties in the writers' strike back to the negotiating table? My guess—and it's a mere guess; as regular readers of this blog may have inferred, I'm not much of a "biz" journalist—is that it might.

UPDATE: Nikki Finke's been on this case longer than I have, and knows the territory better. Go here and then follow the links for more to ponder, if you're inclined to ponder.

The Globes

1981 New Star of the Year, Pia Zadora.

The nominees for the 65th Annual Golden Globe Awards are out. Variety has the whole sordid story here.

Nice to see Eastern Promises getting some love. But my question is, now that the famously non-hifalutin Foreign Press Association has seen fit to nominate the likes of There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, and Persepolis for awards, can everyone just shut-the-you-know-what-up about what obscurantist snobs all the major metropolitan film critics are? (Not you guys. Just, you know.) Thanks.

Richard Corliss, I'll put my anecdotal evidence against your anecdotal evidence any day!

I'm a big fan of Richard Corliss—as a writer, as a person, as a fellow Guy With A Beard—but I'm not sure I follow the thrust of his Time online column entitled "Do Film Critics Know Anything?" in which he observes that critics often give awards to movies a lot of people haven't seen, and that that's perfectly all right, except when it's not. Not only am I not quite sure what his argument is, I'm also not quite sure what he thinks critics ought to do about it. His argument, that is. Oh, forget it.

It's not what I wanted to address in the first place. No, what I wanted to address was the anecdote he kicks off the piece with.

An Army of Criswells (updated)

Update: Clearly, my sense of humor is a little too dry—or, let's face it, lame—today, although I'd hoped the Criswell shot would have set the mood. I have highlighted my "punch line," for what it's worth, below.

A bunch of awards are going out via various critics orgs, including one I'm in, the New York Film Critics Online. Here's our winner's list:

PICTURE
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (tie)
"There Will Be Blood" (tie)

DIRECTOR
Paul Thomas Anderson, "There Will Be Blood"

ACTOR
Daniel Day-Lewis, "There Will Be Blood"

ACTRESS
Julie Christie, "Away From Her"

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Javier Bardem, "No Country for Old Men"

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, "I'm Not There"

CINEMATOGRAPHY
"There Will Be Blood," Robert Elswit

SCREENPLAY
"The Darjeeling Limited, "Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, Roman Coppola

FOREIGN PICTURE
"The Lives of Others" (tie)
"Persepolis" (tie)

DOCUMENTARY
"Sicko"

ANIMATED FEATURE
"Persepolis"

MUSIC/SCORE
"There Will Be Blood," Jonny Greenwood

BREAKOUT PERFORMANCE
Ellen Page, "Juno"

DEBUT AS DIRECTOR
Sarah Polley, "Away From Her"

ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE
"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"

PICTURES (alphabetical)
"Atonement" (Focus Features)
"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" (THINKFilm)
"The Darjeeling Limited" (Fox Searchlight)
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (Miramax)
"I'm Not There" (The Weinstein Company)
"Juno" (Fox Searchlight)
"Michael Clayton" (Warner Bros.)
"No Country for Old Men" (Miramax)
"Persepolis" (Sony Pictures Classics)
"Sweeney Todd" (DreamWorks)
"There Will Be Blood" (Paramount Vantage)

I'm not one of those vote-and-tell types, but I can report that the NYCFO is a pretty well-behaved bunch, that we got through our voting in almost exactly the three hours we had allotted us in our venue, and that Ellen Page's actual breakout performance was in Hard Candy. Anyway.

Awards Daily is providing up-to-the-minute coverage of the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics' Circle, Boston Film Critics, Stephen King's frickin' top ten, and so on, and still we wait for The Daughters-In-Laws of Second-Generation Estonian Esthetes to weigh in. Readers of the tea leaves are now trying to discern what it all means for The Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Cate Blanchett, Marion Cotillard, and sundry others, w/r/t/ Golden Globes and Oscars. We are all interested in the future, because that is when the Oscars will be happening.

Perhaps the visual cue that would have worked better for the following paragraph would have been this instead of Criswell...

I myself wonder if there isn't at least one snubbed moviemaker or actor out there who's not sighing with relief. But that's just me. And to answer Jeffrey Wells' question: I don't think anybody's been offended by Cate Blanchett, aside from people who don't like her at all. I think I'm Not There is a more divisive film than it might seem, and that the critics who are giving Best Supporting Actress nods to Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone over Blanchett are thinking as much about Ryan in Enchanted as in Gone as they do so.

PUNCH LINE: Okay, I think that's about right.

If anyone has any other specific questions, I'll address them in comments. Or, prognosticate amongst yourselves there!

Just remember, I actually do know the difference between Amy Ryan and Amy Adams. It was a joke.