Posted by Melissa Lande on Thu, Mar 03, 2011 @ 02:34 PM
By Alan Appel
In the annals of celebrity PR campaigns, there has never been anything quite as excessive (or deeply annoying) as that being waged by Charlie Sheen, who, during the past week or so, has spoken with . . . well, everyone. So when the phone at this outpost rang a few minutes ago, I imagined the voice at the other end to be unmistakably that of Charlie Sheen. The conversation I fantasized was brief, catching Charlie during another of his frantic days crammed with a typically inexhaustible series of bizarre chats with broadcast, print and web outlets, agreeing to spend a little time with TECHNORATI.
TECHNORATI: “Thanks for these few minutes, Charlie. I know your interview schedule is incredibly tight.”
SHEEN: “That it is, dude. I just got off the phone with Popular Mechanics, and following you, I’ve got Dental Health Today to deal with. So let me get this straight, you write for TECHNORATI, and your name is . . .?”
TECHNORATI: “Alan Appel.”
SHEEN: “Alan? Isn’t the Hebrew name for that, Shlomo?”
TECHNORATI: “I really have no idea, but asking does beg the question about allegations raised by some that calling the Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre by his Hebrew name, Chaim Levine, may be borderline anti-Semitic. How do you respond?”
SHEEN: “That’s of course ridiculous. My problems with Chuck have nothing whatsoever to do with his Hebrew name, only the measly millions per episode he pays me for the TV series. I LOVE all things Jewish, particularly the hot pastrami at Nate and Al’s deli in Beverly Hills, and by the way, dude, I have seen Exodus twice! What does that tell you?”
TECHNORATI: “I’m not really sure, but let’s go back to Two and a Half Men, which for the present has been shut down. You’ve said that you’re prepared to sue CBS for breach of contract and that, in any event, whatever happens with the show, you can always make a good living in movies.”
SHEEN: “Absolutemento! It’s a win-win for me. Possessed as I am of tiger blood, I’m a huge talent for all seasons and for all genres. And I’ll let you in on a little secret--since so much of the original material I see is crap, I’m thinking seriously of buying the rights—and believe me, I have the dough to do it—to some old classics and giving them a fresh coat of paint?”
TECHNORATI: “Like what?”
SHEEN: “Well that would be giving it away, wouldn’t it? But can you just imagine, for example, a remake of The Lion in Winter pitting me against Mel Gibson in 12th-century England?”
TECHNORATI: “But one of the two leads in that film was played by a woman, Katharine Hepburn?”
SHEEN: “WAS played, WAS played! You got to expand your mind, man.”
TECHNORATI: “I’m sorry, Charlie, I’m not quite getting this. Are you saying, you’d be King Henry II, and Mel would be his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine? Or vice versa?
SHEEN: “You’re missing the cosmic picture; it doesn’t matter. Roles in the universe are always dictated by the choices we make. Can you follow me?”
TECHNORATI: “Not even with GPS, but never mind. Can we turn instead to your possible substance-abuse issues?”
SHEEN: “Hello! What issues? That was a drug-free report I showed CNN’s Piers Morgan,”
TECHNORATI: “Yes, but afterward, Morgan said, you invited him to go out ‘and get hammered’. Do you worry that this full-bore media blitz of yours leaves you just too, uh, overexposed?”
SHEEN: “That supposed to be funny? Next, I’m guessing, you’ll want to ask me about porn stars, and all I’ll say on that score is that I am the equal at least of two and a half men, if you get my drift. You know what I hate about these interviews, dude? They invade my privacy. This conversation, therefore, is terminated.”
TECHNORATI: “OK, goodbye and good luck, Charlie.”
SHEEN: “Goodbye, Shlomo.”
Read more:
http://technorati.com/blogging/article/will-charlie-sheen-get-around-to/page-2/#ixzz1FZQu4yJJ
Posted by Melissa Lande on Mon, Feb 28, 2011 @ 02:44 PM
by Alan Appel
Few would argue that there was little suspense over who would be the major winners at last night’s 83rd Academy Awards.
Colin Firth and Natalie Portman were considered virtual shoo-ins for Best Actress (Black Swan) and Best Actor (The King’s Speech), and both Melissa Leo (dropping, and having ABC bleep out, an F*** bomb in her remarks, suggesting, who knows, she may have though she was still in character as the film’s potty-mouthed mother) and Christian Bale for their supporting turns in The Fighter, but here’s my question surrounding the Best Picture prize for The King’s Speech: since the producers of the telecast decided to play Firth’s climactic speech as King George VI in the film for several minutes (with the same music), it seemed to me in its entirety, over very brief clips of the nine other Best Picture nominees, was I the only one who got the feeling that someone must have been pretty well damn sure that it would indeed be The King’s Speech that Steven Spielberg would ultimately announce as the winner in the evening’s final category? Hmm.
So much for the stalled band wagon for The Social Network, which, though it picked up a few prizes—including one for Aaron Sorkin’s adapted screenplay—had a disappointing evening. His acceptance speech included a thank-you to his agents “who never blow my cover,” and I’m still trying to figure out what exactly that means. Of the major races, the closest was perceived to be between Social Network’s David Fincher and The King’s Speech Tom Hooper, but once Hooper won the Director Guild of America prize some weeks earlier, the dye was likely cast.
As for the show itself, give its two young hosts, Anne Hathaway and James Franco, props for trying to inject some energy into the proceedings. The Oscars are trying to go young and hip, I get that. But when did sharp, self-deflating comedy become too old school (and, believe me, in an Oscar-night audience, there’s much to deflate)? You know you’re in trouble when the funniest lines are delivered in archival clips of Bob Hope, and in a brief bit of stand-up by Billy Crystal. (Hathaway and Franco opened the show much as Crystal used to do as host, by injecting themselves into a montage of nominated films and that may have been the entertainment high point.)
It was good to see Crystal, and also the wonderful Kirk Douglas, whose endlessly stretching out an introduction of the Supporting Actress winner bothered me not a bit (but did give me pause to wonder how his son Michael, who apparently was not there, was doing in his recovery from throat cancer). But where were all the other Hollywood heavyweights? The evening is ostensibly about movie-making royalty, so it would have been nice to see, for example, Robert DeNiro (who showed up at the Golden Globes to collect the DeMille prize) or Al Pacino or George Clooney or Harrison Ford or Meryl Streep or Barbra Streisand (who sang at the Grammys) or Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise, or even comics like Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart or Whoopi Goldberg and—dare I say it, Ricky Gervais--who might have goosed up the proceedings as presenters and lent the show some spontaneity.
And, for heaven’s sake, could they not have found a few minutes to present Francis Coppola with the Thalberg Award and Eli Wallach with his honorary Oscar during the broadcast. They are Hollywood royalty, and film packages of their careers would remind us what great film-making is all about. We have time for an In Memoriam segment (sung to by Celine Dion), but no time to celebrate in person a couple of living legends? Explain that to me.
That said, the show was mercilessly brief (clocking in at less than 3 and one-half hours, fairly astonishing for the Oscars) and handsomely mounted. It did have the patina of class, but every party needs a jester, and they were in short supply last night. Evenings such as this, however, are to be savored for any touch of irony, and last night’s was delivered to us by the estimable Oprah Winfrey, who reminded us that part of why we go to we go to the movies is for escape and relief—and then proceeded to present the Best Documentary Oscar to Inside Job, Charles Ferguson’s lacerating study of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown that put millions of Americans in the crapper. Ferguson collected his prize and said, three years after the debacle, “not a single financial executive has gone to jail.”
Unlike we among the unwashed masses, rest assured those guys don’t need relief.
Posted by Melissa Lande on Tue, Feb 01, 2011 @ 03:34 PM
Come home, Ricky Gervais, all is forgiven.
Honestly now, as movie-awards shows go, and of course we can never have enough of THEM, has there ever been a duller one than the 17th Screen Actors Guild ceremony? Telecast simultaneously on TWO basic-cable outlets, no less. This show didn’t sag, it sank.
Apart from the fact that there was no time wasted on lesser Hollywood craftspeople, you know, minor contributors like, say, writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, costumers and art designers; and apart from the fact that the broadcast had the feel of a union rally—albeit one with a spiffily dressed audience membership, one considerably more well-heeled, you can be sure, than the nearly 100,000 active members of SAG nation-wide who voted; and apart from the fact that there were neither hosts nor any traditional entertainment segments to inject the proceedings with actual fun, I am now formally and unapologetically rethinking my position on having even an incendiary host such as Gervais to ignite any kind of spark to leaden affairs such as this.
There’s not much that can be said of the show-biz value of the 17th SAG Awards telecast, but you can give it this: how many telecasts would give several shout-outs to the Teamsters? Jimmy Hoffa would have been proud.
The awards themselves only confirm what Oscar prognosticators already know—that the winners of the four major individual SAG awards provide an air of inevitability to their collecting the gold at the Feb. 27 Oscars. Those four are lead actors Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) and Natalie Portman (Black Swan); and supporting actors Melissa Leo and Christian Bale ( both for The Fighter). Further, the ensemble award for The King’s Speech, the night after its director Tom Hooper won the DGA Award (The Social Network’s David Fincher had been considered the strong favorite), lends added proof that this superb historical drama (with 12 Oscar nominations), and not The Social Network (with eight), is the consensus front-runner for Best Picture and numerous other Oscars, though Aaron Sorkin still appears to be a lock for adapted screenplay.
As for SAG’s TV awards, Julianna Margulies (The Good Wife) and Steve Buscemi (Boardwalk Empire) were entirely deserving, individual comedy wins by Alec Baldwin(30 Rock) and 89-year-old Betty White (Hot in Cleveland) were minor surprises, and Boardwalk Empire’s ensemble-drama triumph broke the two-year streak of Mad Men. Modern Family won the TV ensemble comedy award (undoubtedly ticking off fans of Glee who probably considered it, along with Jane Lynch, shoo-ins for prizes).
If the SAG telecast did have one highlight, it was the 47th annual Life Achievement Award to 94-year-old Ernest Borgnine, presented to him by Morgan Freeman (who appeared with him in Red) following a somewhat rambling, and definitely unfunny, introduction by his old McHale’s Navy costar Tim Conway. “There are millions of those in the world who would love to be in our shoes,” said Borgnine, who was visibly moved by the honor. “We are a privileged few who have been chosen to work in this field of entertainment.” A 1955 Best Actor Oscar winner for Marty who’s made more than 160 films, Borgnine has been one of our great unsung character actors for more than half a century. The SAG Awards was nothing to cheer about, but the heartfelt, long-overdue standing ovation for Borgnine was something any movie fan could applaud.
Posted by Melissa Lande on Wed, Jan 26, 2011 @ 12:02 AM
The first gasp from the over-caffeinated audience at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills came shortly after 5:40 AM (Pacific Time) with the very first announcement in the
2011 Oscar nominations. Javier Bardem, a supporting-actor winner a few years back for
No Country for Old Men, received a Best Actor nod for
Biutiful. Be honest now, who saw that coming? How many of you, in fact, have even SEEN this art-house film? A surprise like this meant two things: good news for the Bardem entourage, but disappointment for two other nomination-worthy actors who were pushed aside—in this case Ryan Gosling for
Blue Valentine and Mark Wahlberg for
The Fighter.
The Wahlberg omission is interesting. Let me see if I understand this:
The Fighter gets nominations for Best Picture, Director (David O. Russell), Supporting Actor (Christian Bale), Supporting Actress (Amy Adams and Melissa Leo), Film Editing and Original Screenplay, but Wahlberg, giving the performance of his career in this gritty boxing drama, is shunted aside (though he is a producer of the film)?
His wasn’t the only snub. The box-office hit
Inception gets a Best Picture nomination, but it is primarily the vision of one of Hollywood’s most boldly imaginative directors, Christopher Nolan, yet he is overlooked. Crazy. And what of
The Social Network, which received eight nominations? Jesse Eisenberg did score a Best Actor nomination, but some (including myself) feel two things about this film. 1) It is wildly overrated and 2) The best performance of the film was given by Andrew Garfield, who was considered a shoo-in for a supporting nod—and didn’t get one.
Here’s the good news in the Supporting Actor category: the great Mark Ruffalo did indeed score his first nomination for
The Kids Are All Right, though probably hasn’t a shot in hell of winning. Bale and Geoffrey Rush (
The King’s Speech) are the favorites. Another highly touted contender was Mila Kunis for
Black Swan in the Supporting Actress category. She didn’t get a nomination, and that now calls into question whether her costar in the film, Natalie Portman, is really such a lock-solid sure thing for winning the Best Actress prize. Momentum does seem to be building for two of her rivals, Annette Bening (
The Kids Are All Right) and Michelle Williams (
Blue Valentine). The good news in the Supporting Actress grouping is that young Hailee Steinfeld (
True Grit) received a nomination; the bad news is that Julianne Moore (
The Kids Are All Right) didn’t.
Steinfeld’s nomination was one of 10 for
True Grit, proving once again that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which shut it out completely at the Golden Globes, is something of a joke.
Jeff Bridges, who won last year for
Crazy Heart, is nominated again for the Rooster Cogburn role that won
John Wayne the Best Actor Oscar in 1969, and also well deserved are the directing and writing nominations for Joel and Ethan Coen. James Franco, a co-host of the Oscar ceremony this year with Anne Hathaway) also received a Best Actor nomination, for 127 Hours.
The nominations champ, however, and what I’ve long contended is the film of the year, is
The King’s Speech, with 12 nods. Nothing is ever certain in these Oscar derbies, but if Colin Firth doesn’t win Best Actor on Feb. 27, there will be even louder gasps (and, I would suggest, calls for a vote recount). Director Tom Hooper probably hasn’t much of a chance against
The Social Network’s David Fincher, but
The King’s Speech, now with a dozen nominations in the bank, has a legitimate shot at Best Picture.
Finally, might this at long last be the year when an animated film—in this case,
Toy Story 3--wins Best Picture? Probably not, and not so long as the Academy continues to have an animated film competing against itself. Can someone please explain to me the point of having an Animated Feature Film Oscar (where
Toy Story 3 is competing against
How to Train Your Dragon and
The Illusionist), with the same film showing up in two best-picture categories?
COMMENT MELISSA LANDE: Big Media Day in the USA- First Oscars. Then State of the Union. Are we not the greatest nation? It's not just how you play it's if you win. Just keep trying, guys. We're all on the same team. Aren't we? I'm having some personal issues about awards though. And Robert De Niro burst a few bubbles in his quite frank speech at the Golden Globes. All that glitters is not gold. How does this relate to media relations? It's about awards, awards, awards. Let the work begin. Personal congratluations to the enterntainment busoness who did a lot of meaningful material this year.
Posted by Melissa Lande on Mon, Jan 17, 2011 @ 02:20 PM
Alan Appel writes OSCAR AND EMMY WATCH: MUSINGS & MISGIVINGS for Technorati; his own blog (http://namedropblog.blogspot.com/) and he referred to the absolute mean spiritedness of the TV awards show, which is getting buzz everywhere.
His column:
Well, we know this much at least—if last night’s Golden Globes telecast was a train wreck, Ricky Gervais was the engineer.
There’s bawdy and then there’s bad. Not that overlong, self-inflated telecasts like the Golden Globe Awards can’t occasionally use a dash or two of bad taste, nastiness and even outright offensiveness (as opposed to the sometimes blinding garishness of, say, the Oscar ceremonies). But, c’mon now, stale, almost uniformly unfunny, way-past-their-expiration-date and at times cringingly unkind jokes about Charlie Sheen, “gay Scientologists,” the “airbrushed” cast of Sex and the City (“girls, we know how old you are. I saw one of you in an episode of Bonanza), Hugh Hefner as “the walking dead,” and even Robert Downey Jr.’s past legal and drug troubles are supposed to pass for entertainment? “Hugely mean-spirited” is how Downey described the proceedings at one point, and he had a point.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association deserves what it gets, and if Gervais wants to kid about corruption and bribes being the only explanation for the nominations for The Tourist, who’s to say he’s wrong. That’s called an easy target, and Gervais clearly had no intention of playing it safe, which is entirely fine. Shows like this need unscripted, on-the-edge spontaneity and unpredictability. The problem wasn’t the talented Gervais; it was his tone-deaf material. And why exactly he seemed to disappear for about an hour midway during the show (prompting Twitter jibes that he may have been either a) drunk or b) fired mid-broadcast) is a question that no one seems able to answer. “I want to do either such a bad job I’m not invited back,” Gervais earlier told the Chicago Sun-Times, “or such a good job that I don’t want to do it again.” Choose choice one.
If Gervais’s stand-up left much to be desired, what then to make of
Robert De Niro’s odd speech accepting (from Matt Damon; what, Martin Scorcese couldn’t fly in from London for the event?) the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. Apparently channeling his inner Rupert Pupkin from The King of Comedy, De Niro, struggling with the cue cards, had his own ideas about being funny. “I’m sorry more members of the foreign press aren’t with us tonight, but many were deported right before the show along with most of the waiters. And Javier Bardem.” Leave it to the Golden Globes—suddenly Robert De Niro is Jim Carrey.
As to the other awards, there were hardly any major surprises, though the prizes for Al Pacino (You Don’t Know Jack) and Claire Danes (Temple Grandin) for best performances in a TV movie or miniseries were almost afterthoughts inasmuch as both won Emmys for their roles six months ago. What the Golden Globe movie winners foreshadow in terms of Oscar-nomination projections seem clear: The Social Network is the Best Picture to beat (along with its director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin); Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) and Natalie Portman (Black Swan) are heavy favorites in the lead actor categories; and The Fighter, gaining momentum by the week, has a strong pair of supporting-actor contenders in Melissa Leo and Christian Bale. Best Oscar dark horse: The Kids Are All Right and Annette Bening, both Golden Globe winners.
Finally, if the telecast had a single grace note and emotional high point, it was the appearance of
Michael Douglas to announce the final award. “There’s just got be an easier way to get a standing ovation,” said Douglas, and for once, the applause and cheers from the audience seemed heartfelt and genuine.
PR/Image & Branding Commentary from Melissa Lande, Lande Communications aka LeaderHuntress: With all of the good vibes, consciousness raising and charity works the entertainment business bequeaths to this country and others, Ricky Gervais was far off the mark in styling communications. FAR. If he did his homework (or lost his ego for a nano-second) he would know he was among some of Hollywood's biggest humantiarians last night. And he blew it. Not just embarrassing himself AND the industry. But casting a pall in these political days of fight-fight-- when many Americans, especially those in Hollywood with money and high profiles, are trying to move closer to an age of uniting, helping, compassion and tolerance. How rude to refer to Robert Downey Jr. in such a condescending fashion. How absolutely counter productive when the numbers of alcoholics and drug addicts fight a lifelong battle. I can only guess that high porfile personalities like Spielberg, Hanks (he told us publicly what he thought), Damon, Pitt and hundreds of others were appalled. This is BAD IMAGE PR for both the Golden Globes, TV, and one lousy comic. Let's get back to a civilized era, yes?
It's understandable - as high profile personalities have let go of some of the standard PR restrictions from days of yore (or ten years ago) -- Bad manners is still not in. Public relations means relating to the public and Gervais did not even relate to the room he was in.
Read more: http://technorati.com/blogging/article/oscar-and-emmy-watch-musings-misgivings1/#ixzz1BK8RefZ9
Posted by Melissa Lande on Sat, Dec 25, 2010 @ 04:40 PM
It’s a time for holiday cheer, so I figured I would get in the mood by canoodling around the house humming two of the Golden Globe-nominated songs from that magnum opus Burlesque, “Bound to You” and “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me,” until I remembered, who the hell has ever HEARD of these songs much less knows how to sing them?
No, let’s try another tack—all the laugh-out-loud comedies of 2010 that have given us such a rollicking time and provided much needed belly laughs, Maybe if I recall the good times we all had at the screen hilarity that lightened our heavy loads, that would definitely put me in a more convivial frame of mind. Until, I thought, has there really BEEN a single comedy this past year that has been any good? Not really, even when a Hollywood heavyweight like James L. Brooks—the guy, after all, who gave us Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets-- produces such a tepid Reese Witherspoon -Paul Rudd-Owen Wilson-Jack Nicholson vehicle like How Do You Know, we know it’s been a tough year.
Funny, but James L. Brooks will likely get another pass, but when an enduring master like Woody Allen produces genuinely funny, if inconsequential, films like, say, Hollywood Endings or Whatever Works, he’s harpooned again for producing “just” another mainstream comedy, and not another masterpiece like Annie Hall, Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters. The double standard is alive and well in Hollywood and simply making audiences laugh is apparently no longer enough.
But it was certainly enough for two wonderful comic artists who recently died—actor Leslie Nielsen and writer-director Blake Edwards . Nielsen, a sturdy, nondescript movies and television leading man of the 1950s and ‘60s, reinvented himself as a brilliant, deadpan farceur with 1980s’s Airplane! a relentless exercise in sight gags, puns, non sequiturs and manifest foolishness. As many of us do, Allen was among those who copped to having a soft spot for Airplane! And Nielsen surely--whether or not you call him “Shirley”—helped showcase this new genre spoofing disaster, cop and other films.
And Edwards (a recipient of an honorary Oscar in 2004), who helped make his name with such classics as Breakfast at Tiffanys, Days of Wine and Roses, 10 and Victor/Victoria, left behind perhaps a more indelible—or at least funnier—mark as the creative force behind the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films.
One of the better Mel Brooks comedies, 1981’s History of the World: Part I, has a delicious vignette on the French Revolution, complete with memorable lines (“don’t get saucy with me, Bearnaise!” and, of course, “it’s good to be the King”). You’ve got to hand it to those down trodden late-18th-century French; they knew how to settle a score with the aristocracy. Now, during these profoundly hard economic times, when avaricious corporate/financial interests and dunderhead politicians are turning millions of hurting middle-class families into the new peasant class, I suppose we should be grateful that no one today is storming the Capitol.
But I do wonder: do they still have guillotines?
Posted by Melissa Lande on Thu, Dec 16, 2010 @ 05:13 PM
By Alan Appel
Post-mortems on this week's announcement of the Golden Globe nominations for movies and television were predictably less about the heavy favorites that predictably got much of the love (The King's Speech, the nominee leader with 7, followed by The Social Network and The Fighter with 6 each), then several critical darlings that got royally screwed. Foremost among them are the Coen Brothers’ expansive remake of True Grit, which was shut out; and Ben Affleck’s gritty bank-robbery drama The Town, which scored but a single nomination (Jeremy Renner’s supporting turn).
And then, of course, came the howlers—out-of-left-field nominations for performances and films that seem to make no sense whatsoever, until you remember that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an assemblage of less than 100 entertainment journalists and freelancers, is not taken all that seriously. And it never will be when it produces multiple nominations for the likes of pedestrian works such as The Tourist and Burlesque. As predictors for eventual Oscar nominees and winners, the Golden Globes has a mixed record—its Best Picture last year, for example, was Avatar, while the Oscars chose The Hurt Locker), but what Globes recognition does yield is enormous promotional value for print and broadcast Oscar campaigns. As for the television selections—for shame HFPA for overlooking Blue Bloods—in terms of influencing the Emmys, less so.
If there is one odds-on, overwhelming Oscar favorite this year, it is Colin Firth as Best Actor for The King’s Speech. It is a stunning, richly textured and emotionally charged performance (as England’s future King George VI, suffering from a severe stammering problem) in a handsomely mounted, crowd-pleasing film that doesn’t leave many dry eyes in the house. No less effective is Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, the unorthodox Australian therapist who helps the monarch.
Rush (a previous Best Actor winner for Shine!) will almost certainly get a Supporting Actor nomination, and that will beg the question for many as to why exactly Rush, who shares above-the-title screen credit with Firth and seems to have as much screen time as him, shouldn’t be nominated in a lead rather than supporting category. But then we know the answer, don’t we? The producers won’t want to split the vote.
And that, in turn, may likely hurt the nomination chances of a true supporting male performance in The King’s Speech that has not gotten nearly enough attention. Guy Pearce, an always interesting and occasionally eccentric actor with those wonderful John Malkovich-like dramatic tics, gives one of his most complex and understated performances as King Edward VIII, whose affair with Baltimore divorcee Wallis Simpson scandalizes the royal family and leads him ultimately to abdicate the throne for “The woman I love.”
When you get right down to it, actual performance time in a film hardly seems to matter one way or another. Several supporting Oscar winners triumphed despite being on screen in their films less than 10 minutes (Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life, Beatrice Straight in Network and Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love), so if Rush doesn’t mind having his meaty role—one that could well carry its own film, say, The King’s Speech Therapist—relegated to a supporting category, it probably makes strategic sense. Because there’s no way he—or anyone else—is beating Firth.
Read more: Technorati.
Comment from Melissa Lande: Our favorite critic called most of this in earlier columns- he's not that far off, except for The Town being treated shabily. We like when journalists call it like they se it- as he says "The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an assemblage of less than 100 entertainment journalists and freelancers, is not taken all that seriously."
Posted by Melissa Lande on Mon, Dec 13, 2010 @ 09:49 PM
In today’s lesson, biding our time while the year-end movie-critic awards begin to roll in — expect ample recognition for The Social Network and not enough for The Town -- we’ll try and dispel some myths about myths surrounding the Emmys and the Oscars.
First we’ll concentrate on the Emmys, some of whose officials, during my years at TV Guide Magazine, were relentlessly pushing the idea that their prizes reflected what industry professionals and audience members already knew, that today’s television fare — in its sheer diversity (a fractionalized programming universe with hundreds of channels will do that), graphic treatment of even the rawest subject matter (thanks to premium cable, anything goes, and who says that’s such a good thing) and pure entertainment value — constitutes the medium’s real golden age. “What is it with this nostalgic haze,” a CBS executive asked me at one Emmy ceremony in the ‘90s, “lamenting the shows of the ‘50s and ‘60s as if they were truly superior to today’s programs?” The so-called 1950s-‘60s golden age of television, went the argument, is a myth.
But I wonder if that itself is a myth, and whenever I took up the golden-age-then-or-now question (a generational one, I grant you, relevant only to viewers of a certain age) with a veteran actor whose work spanned many decades, as I once did with Jackie Gleason and Jack Klugman , the conversation generally pivoted on two words: live television. There were giants indeed among the writers and directors working in live TV during the ‘50s — Chayefsky, Mosel, Foote, Serling, Mandel, Rose, Cook, Mann, Hill, Frankenheimer, Lumet, Pollack, Schaffner and Nelson among them. “There will never be another time like that,” said a wistful Klugman at a press tour event in Los Angeles. Like many of his contemporaries such as Jack Lemmon and Charlton Heston, Klugman got his start and honed his craft doing countless live TV anthologies, including Playhouse 90, in the ‘50s. Live television was America’s national theater.
So where are the new, trend-setting writers and directors who might energize the medium today? There are a handful of true innovators (J.J. Abrams and Matthew Weiner among them), but so many more toil invisibly in a steady churn of dramas and comedies that come, go and register with few.
That is, if they can find a scripted show, at least on network television. Scripted shows once dominated the medium and there was also a time in the ‘70s and ‘80s when the long-form miniseries and a full slate of made-for-TV movies flourished and gave next-generation artists like Steven Spielberg a chance to grow. Now TV thrives as a niche-driven, specialized-content-for-every-conceivable-taste landscape populated with an ungodly number of reality series (filling one-quarter of network line ups according to one estimate), a few of them — such as the reigning Emmy reality winner Top Chef, Amazing Race (which won the prize the preceding seven years in a row) American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and Project Runway -- earning loyal followings.
Once viewers watched TV stars and now they want to be them. Reality shows are hardly new (Candid Camera, Divorce Court, Queen for a Day and You Asked For It were early favorites); the problem today is their unchecked proliferation — seriously, how many of us ever thought that any reality show could call itself The Biggest Loser? And be a hit. Now we have Skating with the Stars. What next -- Sleeping with the Stars? After The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, how about something with a Yiddish flavor, The Balabusta. Network honchos say they want to celebrate the diverse passions of real, everyday people, young and old; their pluck, perseverance, resilience, ambitions and talents. Of course, what they actually celebrate is the bottom line — cheap programming. Viewers are the biggest loser.
Scripted dramas and sitcoms may be doing a slow vanishing act, but here’s the good news: we still have Turner Classic Movies (the best damned channel in the universe) and lots and lots of sports. And recent times have given us the likes of The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Nurse Jackie, Boardwalk Empire, Dexter and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Cable, premium and basis, has become what network television once was. Only now we’re paying for it.
If network television, following the era of live television, was “a vast wasteland,” then what is it now? Not more dynamic or original, for sure, not in these crushing, impossible-to-fill 24/7 programming days. But maybe the long-ago “golden age” of fewer channels and more iconic talent has just burnished our memories. Holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Gleason, in Manhattan in the early ‘80s to promote a TV movie with Art Carney titled “Izzy & Moe,” laughed that familiar raspy laugh at the notion that he, The Honeymooners or any other beloved show or performer in television’s formative years were part of a golden age. “The truth, pal,” he said, is that “they were part of OUR, not a, golden age.”
Comment from Melissa Lande: I have a feeling that Jackie G. was right-- it was a Golden Age for someone else; this is a Golden Age for beancounters at the networks and a different kind of publicity seeker who wants to play center stage. I've already commented endlessly on the PR value of reality shows in proportion to their humiliation value; many people will do anything (eat a worm; have a relationship in the dark only to be rejected when the lights go on; it's used to be just a simple pie in the face) to have their 15 minutes of media fame and people love to watch a horror (Diane Arbus got this as did many novelists.)
We're lucky that the great shows that Alan has mentioned above are so superior to so much that has been done in the past- and it's interesting to see how TV was a venue for very powerful writers, directors, etc (Spielberg? Serling? Hitchcock? )Do you think of TV as a powerful venue for the greatest artists today?
Today it was announced that BFF is used in the newest version of the Oxford Dictionary. BFF is now a word. Soon it will be a reality show. Refudiate is a word. It's a word that Sarah Palin made up. Soon it will be a reality show or a politician. Can you make up a word for the dictionary? I'm not as concerned about TV's niche audiences as with their mass audience that likes words that aren't words or doesn't even know that they are not words. Shame on Oxford. The Golden Age of words is, indeed, over.
Posted by Melissa Lande on Sun, Dec 05, 2010 @ 08:12 PM
by Alan Appel
“I see a lot of new faces, especially on the old faces”—host Johnny Carson scanning the audience at the Oscars
So now that they’re named two new faces to host the 83nd Academy Awards telecast—Anne Hathaway and James Franco —the pairing has been announced as one that, say the producers, “personifies the next generation of Hollywood icons.” Their selection is clearly designed to serve and attract a younger viewing audience, and that’s all well and good, but can we please not liken these talented and pleasant young actors to icons. Icons are always stars, but not all stars are—or ever will be--icons. It’s about indelible personality as much as artistry, awards or longevity.
True icons, the for-all-time legendary faces that would be carved on Hollywood’s Rushmore, are—from the sound era--the likes of Grant and Gable and Davis and Garbo and Stanwyck and Crawford and Fonda (the elder) and Cooper and Garland and Rooney and Stewart and Astaire and Bogart and Cagney and Welles and both Hepburns and Peck and Wayne and Douglas (the elder) and Lancaster and Tracy and Monroe and Holden and Brando and Taylor and Dean and Newman and Redford and O’Toole and Eastwood and Streep and Pacino and Poitier and Streisand and Nicholson and De Niro and Freeman.
And then there’s the class of cross-generation possible-icons-in-waiting (depending on your own particular grading curve), which might include a select few from among Roberts and Hanks and Keaton and Beatty and Duvall and Bridges and De Caprio and Damon and Washington and Clooney and Cruise and Pitt and Depp. Our young hosts are a long way from either group, but it does invite the question as to whether the right host, any host, solo or in partnership, can elevate the Oscar from a tedious, self-congratulatory affair with way too much industry business to conduct (and awkward acceptance speeches to endure) into a bona fide entertainment showcase that does the movie business proud.
I have my doubts, but every circus does need an affable ringmaster and even if you can’t get the likes of a modern-day Will Rogers (the host in 1934), we would benefit from one with a comedic bent who can deliver a sharp monologue and has the ability to toss out an ad-lib or two—18-time host Bob Hope (“How about the pictures this year? Sex, persecution, adultery, cannibalism—we’ll get those kids away from TV sets yet”) and eight-time MC Billy Crystal (“a billion people are watching tonight, except for Linda Tripp—who’s taping it”) having set the standard.
If we fess up to the fact that the primary reason we once liked watching the Oscar telecast—to see old-style Hollywood glamor and real icons (such as those listed above) is now as relevant as black and white movies, then we can admit to ourselves that the present-day ceremonies, say beginning with those in the 1980s, are basically about six things: 1. The office Oscar pool. 2. The red-carpet pre-show in which nominees would have us believe (we don’t) that “it’s honor enough just to be nominated.” 3. The gowns. 4. The hair styles. 5. Wondering who's had plastic surgery. 6. The shots of the major-category nominees in the audience, their faces impassive and seemingly frozen, and our wondering whether any of them might visibly express what they really feel—abject mortification?--when their names are not announced as a winner.
Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were a tandem with good chemistry last year (Martin: “There’s that damn Helen Mirren.” Baldwin: “That’s Dame Helen Mirren”), but you can’t fault the producers for going young this time. So let’s give the kids a chance—maybe Hathaway and Franco, with good material and stage presence, are the freshness the show needs, plus if both score Oscar nominations—Franco is the better bet for a Best Actor nod for 127 Hours and Hathaway less of a sure thing for Love and Other Drugs--well, it would give the show a little more juice. And even if they don’t work out, remember, even disappointing one-time hosts can leave us with something memorable. In David Letterman’s case, in 1995, four words that live in Oscar infamy: “Oprah, Uma. Uma, Oprah.”
Read more: http://technorati.com/entertainment/tv/article/oscar-emmy-watch-musings-misgivings-rookie/page-2/#ixzz17ICXSxx
Comment from Melissa Lande: Since celebrities are the ones we like to watch, what becomes of the pundits, or is no one "good enough"? Everyone is so critical of the messenger-- the glue in between the ceremony, so that now the producers think the draw will come from young stars themselves. And will this really play to a younger TV audience? Like the MTV awards?
Posted by Melissa Lande on Mon, Nov 29, 2010 @ 07:11 PM
By Alan Appel
“What art? What science?”—
D.W. Griffith In the annals of prizedom, there have been, of course, momentous screw-ups. After all, the Oscars and Emmys wouldn’t be much fun without them. I’m not talking your traditionally nutty, are they-KIDDING? brand of head-scratchers—say the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ unfortunate and occasional habit of bestowing Best Director statuettes on favored actors in their membership, two particularly egregious examples being
Robert Redford’s 1980 win for
Ordinary People (beating out
Martin Scorsese or
Raging Bull) and
Kevin Costner’s a decade later for
Dances with Wolves (burning Scorsese again, this time for
GoodFellas)—but rather those of the apocalyptically mindless variety that forever stains the Oscars’ credibility, rooted perhaps in a bias against East Coast filmmakers and so-called “popcorn entertainments,” or, as was the case for example in the 1980s, in a bias FOR politically correct epics.
Looking back, it’s hard to discern exactly how voters justified the director’s 1982 win for
Richard Attenborough (another actor) for the fairly unwatchable
Gandhi over
Steven Spielberg —who had previously been denied winning for
Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and
Raiders of the Lost Ark—for the much loved (by critics and audiences alike)
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Spielberg would, in 1985, become the focal point of Oscars’ most celebrated snub ever when
The Color Purple received 11 nominations and he, its director, was shut out. OMISSION IMPOSSIBLE ran one headline, and the Academy, in a clear demonstration of brazen envy from those in its ranks, seemed to again be punishing him for possessing, at so young an age, prodigious talent and from having honed it in--horrors!--television.
The Color Purple did not receive a single win.
Being a wunderkind in Hollywood, therefore, isn’t necessarily wonderful; it can inspire craven pettiness (see also: Orson Welles). In 1986, the Academy gave Spielberg the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award (which is a producer's award, the Academy thinking perhaps that, well, an award is an award is an award). His competitive Oscars as director would come in the 1990s, when Spielberg was segueing from Young Turk into Old Guard, for
Schindler’s List and
Saving Private Ryan. Back to Scorsese. The classics for which HE should have won Best Director come to mind because both starred his favorite actor,
Robert De Niro, who, as it happens, will at long last be receiving the Cecil B. De Mille Award for lifetime contributions at the 68th Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, Jan. 16 (Scorsese was so honored at last year’s ceremony). Presumably the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will get around to Woody Allen--if he'd bother to actually show up and accept the award--or Michael Caine or Meryl Streep before they're 90, and what's with the fact that only one minority, Sidney Poitier in 1982, has gotten the DeMille; Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones are long overdue. For De Niro, I suppose, it's better late than never and at this stage of his distinguished career, he does seem today to be coasting in a series of harmless “Focker” and “Analyze” comedies (with sequels), threatening to become the next
Fred MacMurray (himself a great star with a long, ever-evolving career who, you should know, never received a single competitive nomination. But then again, neither did
Edward G. Robinson. Nor
Donald Sutherland. Nor Spike Lee (at least, not as director). Nor
Mia Farrow. Nor
Jerry Lewis. (The Emmys has its own share of shameful oversights—like the Great One himself,
Jackie Gleason, being a non-winner—and we’ll get around to them in a later column.)
The various newspaper critics awards will start rolling in soon, and the Golden Globe nominations will be announced on Tuesday, Dec. 14. Sometimes they’re a good predictor of Oscars, sometimes not. But for sure, it’s then that Oscar campaigning seriously begins and we draw closer to wondering about the next great snubs.
