Shared Darkness

The Casting Society of America and the Lady Filmmakers Film Festival announced Sharon Stone as the recipient of its 2013 Humanitarian and Career Achievement Spotlight Award today. The fifth annual festival takes place this weekend, September 28-29, at the Aidikoff Theater in Beverly Hills. Stone joins fellow honoree Bryce Dallas Howard, who was recently announced as the recipient of the Spotlight Award for acting and directing. For more information on the festival and its schedule, click here.

Nominations for the 84th annual Academy Awards are out today, and apart from being thrilled at the lack of recognition for the dreadful Hoodwinked Too!, I’m heartened by the deserved love for Moneyball. A few other quick thoughts — it’s nice recognition for A Better Life‘s Best Actor nominee Demián Bichir, Best Documentary nominee Hell and Back Again, and particularly Best Original Screenplay nominee A Separation. Massively bummed about the lack of kudos for Drive and Martha Marcy May Marlene, though. Interviews with A Separation‘s writer-director Asghar Farhadi and Pina director Wim Wenders, also a Best Documentary nominee, coming later today. Hosted by Billy Crystal, the Oscars will be broadcast on February 26, live from the Kodak Theatre, on ABC.

The International Press Academy handed out its 16th annual Satellite Awards Sunday night, in a ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and while its slate of TV and film nominees tips toward the too expansive, any showering of love for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is certainly not a bad thing.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today via press release that, following a two-month-long cordial exchange of correspondence with Academy president Tom Sherak, French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard has regretfully notified Sherak that he will not be able to attend the November 13 Governors Awards and receive his Honorary Oscar in person.

“He reiterated his thanks for the award,” reported Sherak, “and also sent his good wishes to the other individuals being honored the same night — Kevin Brownlow, Francis Ford Coppola and Eli Wallach — who he refers to as ‘the three other musketeers.'” The November 13 dinner ceremony, which is being produced by Sid Ganis and Don Mischer, will pay tribute to Godard through film clips and commentary by his admirers. The award will be accepted on Godard’s behalf by the Academy and, following the event, the Academy will arrange for the Oscar statuette to be delivered to him in Switzerland.

Over at The Wrap, Steve Pond ably sums up the shake-ups, movings, comings and goings of various awards season prognosticators and their outlets, including the thinking behind a kinder, gentler Deadline Daily, and that site’s play for seasonal print ad dollars.

Whether it was the general lack of suspense and sense of preordained coronation in the air — with really only Sandra Bullock’s Best Actress victory being the only category of the four main acting awards still a bit up in the air — or just my own bloated seasonal malaise, I couldn’t really get that amped leading up to the Academy Awards this year, and neither could I be counted on (obviously) to tap out exhaustive analysis after the fact. I’m not an awards blogger; it’s just not in my bones.

In addition to that crazy bitch producer going all Kanye West on the short film documentary winner (they have beef, don’t you know: history here), I thought the telecast was its usual mix of orchestrated, well-oiled tedium and enjoyable, sometimes emotionally piercing acceptance speeches (which are always the highlights of Oscar evenings). One thing I do love, though. It is a mortal lock, the morning after every single Academy Awards ceremony, that there will be competing qualitative-judgment narratives, with some camp proclaiming them the most boring/awful ceremony ever, and others calling them the best ceremony of all time.

Over at The Wrap, Steve Pond explains why those trying to cast Best Picture bullet-ballots for the Oscars are just wasting their time.

Straight from Fox Searchlight, the reactions from Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, T Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham to their Oscar nominations today:

Jeff Bridges, Best Performance by an Actor in a Lead Role: “I’m so grateful to have the honor of a fifth Oscar nomination, but to share this with my Crazy Heart colleagues T Bone and Ryan and my amazing co-star Maggie is truly special — this film is near and dear to my heart and theirs. I want to thank the Academy for being so kind to me for the past 40 years. And I want to thank my director Scott Cooper for helping bring Bad Blake to life, and to my wonderful wife Sue for being there for me the past 33 years. Today is filled with blessings.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role: “I am thrilled… beyond thrilled. I was completely surprised, overwhelmed and overjoyed this morning when I heard about the nomination. I am so proud of this movie. Working with Jeff was amazing. He opened me up and pushed me so far. I’d love to keep making movies with him over and over again. Scott Cooper wrote such a beautiful script, and was so full of love and strength as a director. I am honored and overjoyed!”

T Bone Burnett, Music/Original Song — “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)”: “All of us who worked on Crazy Heart are so proud of this film, and are incredibly thankful that audiences are embracing it, and that reaction from critics and the film industry has been so overwhelmingly positive. To receive an Academy Award nomination, along with Ryan Bingham, Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal, is a great honor and further validates our belief in this film. I am personally very grateful to the Academy for this recognition of our work.”

Ryan Bingham, Music/Original Song — “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)”: “Being a part of Crazy Heart has been the experience of a lifetime, and I never could have imagined when I first started writing ‘The Weary Kind’ that it would have led to such an honor from the Academy. I couldn’t have asked to work with a more amazing and talented group of people on my first film. I feel both privileged and excited to share this Oscar nomination today along with T Bone Burnett, Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal.”

More from a recent interview with director Scott Cooper later in the week.

Interesting thoughts on 61 years of Foreign Language Oscar winners from Variety‘s Peter Debruge, who made it his 2009 mission to comb through the full slate of honorees.

The Screen Actors Guild announced its award nominations this morning, ass-crack early, and while there was some spread in the nods, there was also no doubt as to the biggest winner. The headlining nominations, for Outstanding Performance by an Entire Cast, are The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, Milk and Slumdog Millionaire. In the Male Actor in a Leading Role category, the nominees are Richard Jenkins for The Visitor; Frank Langella for Frost/Nixon; Sean Penn for Milk; Brad Pitt for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; and Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler. In the Female Actor in a Leading Role category, the nominees are Anne Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married; Angelina Jolie for Changeling; Melissa Leo for Frozen River; Meryl Streep for Doubt; and Kate Winslet for Revolutionary Road.

For the Male Actor in a Supporting Role category, the nominees are Josh Brolin for Milk; Robert Downey, Jr. for Tropic Thunder; Philip Seymour Hoffman for Doubt; Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy… err, sorry, Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight; and Dev Patel for Slumdog Millionaire. For the Female Actor in a Supporting Role category, the nominees are Amy Adams for Doubt; Penelope Cruz for Woody Allen’s otherwise long ago disregarded Vicky Cristina Barcelona; Viola Davis for Doubt; Taraji P. Henson for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; and Kate Winslet for The Reader.

To my mind, the only real surprise is Patel, who’s been lambasted in some reviews of Slumdog; a nominal surprise is Brolin, whose been getting plenty of critical love, but hadn’t really broken through with a top-shelf prize yet to more firmly establish himself as an Oscar contender. There was as much love for Che as for The Love Guru, it turns out — which is to say none. Which doesn’t bother me, I confess. The SAG Awards will be simulcast live on Sunday, January 25, on TBS and TNT, at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times.

Today, the American Film Institute announced their official selections for the year’s most outstanding achievements in film, which will be honored at an invitation-only luncheon on Friday, January 9, 2009 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. “AFI Awards honors the community of artists who come together each year to create films and television programs of excellence,” said Bob Gazzale, AFI’s President and CEO in a press release. “They are not competitors at an event, but colleagues, in a world that needs art and entertainment more than ever.” In alphabetical order, AFI’s honorees are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Frozen River, Gran Torino, Iron Man, Milk, Wall▪E, Wendy and Lucy and The Wrestler. Needless to say, as someone who has seen all 10 films listed above, this slate has both sins of omission and sins of commission, in my opinion, but we’ll be getting into that more in the coming weeks.

The video footage hasn’t worked for me — all I get is emcee Leonard Maltin, frozen in time and space — but maybe others will have more luck. At any rate, here’s Fox LA’s coverage of Saturday night’s 33rd annual Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards, apparently anchored by reporter Suzanne Marques.

A corrective note, though: while Daniel Day-Lewis was indeed feted as Best Actor for his work in There Will Be Blood, Sissy Spacek was simply in attendance with husband Jack Fisk, honored for his production design work on the same film. Other attendees included Patton Oswalt, Maya Rudolph and Tate Donovan, as well as winners Paul Thomas Anderson, Marion Cotillard and more.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood was the big winner at the Los Angeles Film Critics Awards voting today, taking Best Picture, Best Director and Best Production Design honors, in addition to star Daniel Day-Lewis picking up the prize for Best Actor.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was runner-up in the Best Picture, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director categories, but Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography for the movie was honored. Other winners include Marion Cotillard for Best Actress for her work in La Vie En Rose; Amy Ryan for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Gone Baby Gone and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; Vlad Ivanov for Best Supporting Actor for his work in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Tamara Jenkins for Best Screenplay for The Savages; Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days for Best Foreign Language Film; and No End in Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson, for Best Documentary/Non-Fiction Film. Sicko, directed by Michael Moore, was the runner-up in the latter category.

For Best Animated Film, Ratatouille and Persepolis tied, while Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova’s work in Once was honored with Best Music. Actress Sarah Polley will be presented with the New Generation Award, for her directorial debut, Away From Her; meanwhile, Colossal Youth, directed by Pedro Costa, will be awarded the Independent/Experimental Film Award.

This year’s awards ceremony, to be held January 12, 2008, will be dedicated to the memory of the late Robert Altman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Ousmane Sembene and Edward Yang. It was previously announced that Sidney Lumet was the organization’s Career Achievement Award winner. More on all these films — and what if anything this and other critics groups’ votes mean for Oscar chances — in the coming days.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced yesterday that director Sidney Lumet will be honored with the group’s 2007 Career Achievement Award at their annual awards dinner, to be held January 12, 2008. Previous winners include Jerry Lewis, Andre de Toth, Arthur Penn, Billy Wilder and Conrad Hall, among others; in 2005, Richard Widmark was spotlighted for his work, while Robert Mulligan was honored last year. Lumet’s long and distinguished career spans more than five decades, and includes Fail-Safe, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City and The Verdict, as well as this fall’s buzz-heavy Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, starring Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei.

On the heels of his recent Best Cinematography feting from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association for his work in Children of Men, Emmanuel Lubezki took top honors in the feature film competition last night at the 21st annual American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Outstanding Achievement Awards at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel.

This is the first ASC Award for Lubezki, who was nominated along with Dick Pope, for The Illusionist; Dean Semler, for Apocalypto; Robert Richardson, for The Good Shepherd; and Vilmos Zsigmond, for The Black Dahlia. The award was presented by Tim Allen, who noted, “All of these artists contributed their talent for writing with light and motion to each story.”

Charlize Theron, meanwhile, presented Allen Daviau — an Oscar nominee for films like E.T., The Color Purple, The Empire of the Sun and Bugsy — with the Lifetime Achievement Award, while the ASC John Alonzo Heritage Award — named in honor of the cinematographer of such classics as Harold and Maude, Norma Rae and Scarface — was presented to a pair of student filmmakers, Brian Melton from the North Carolina School of the Arts and Lyle Vincent from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. For more information, visit American Society of Cinematographers’ Web site.