Las nominaciones al Oscar - Live Online - 10 a.m. (hora argentina)

Watch live streaming video from academyawards at livestream.com

A las diez empieza el streaming de la transmisión. 10.30 arrancan las nominaciones.

One Conflict, Many Views, No Actors (The New York Times)

January 31, 2010

By ETHAN BRONNER

TEL AVIV

THE Israeli movie industry, once a sorry mix of ethnic melodrama and soldier slapstick, has come distinctly into its own in the past decade with a crop of admired writers, directors and actors. For two years now an Israeli film of subtlety and power has made the Oscars’ final five for best foreign picture: “Beaufort” in 2008 and “Waltz With Bashir” last year. So the fact that yet another Israeli film is among the shortlisted nine this year comes almost as no surprise.

But everything else about the film, a tribal crime drama called “Ajami,” is utterly unexpected: It is mostly in Arabic; it was co-written and directed by two novices, a Jew and an Arab; the actors were not professionals, they had no scripted dialogue, and the budget came in at under $1 million.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the movie, however, is what it does to viewers. In a conflict where each side lives and breathes its own victimhood, feeling the hurt of the other is a challenge. “Ajami” meets it. When a Palestinian youth turns to drug selling to help pay for his mother’s surgery, Jewish filmgoers here have wept. When the family of a kidnapped Israeli soldier breaks down over his murder by Palestinians, Palestinians in the theater have had tears in their eyes.

“I consider that our biggest achievement,” said Scandar Copti, the Arab member of the directing pair.

His Jewish colleague, Yaron Shani, elaborated: “People live in bubbles unaware of each other. Each side has its narrative, each side has its dreams and sees the other as threatening those dreams. But if you enter the other’s bubble, you see his dreams, his inner world and his values. Our idea was to make the audience experience what it meant to be the other.”

There are many competing narratives in “Ajami,” not just those of Jews and Arabs but also of West Bank Palestinians under occupation versus Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, Christians versus Muslims and urban Arabs versus Bedouins. The action takes place inside Ajami, a poor Arab but increasingly Jewish and gentrified part of Jaffa, the ancient port that abuts Tel Aviv to its south.

The story begins when a member of a prominent Bedouin family demands protection money from the owner of an Arab restaurant, leading to a shooting and vendetta against the men of the restaurant family. Along the way there is a doomed love affair between a Christian girl and a Muslim boy, a tough Jewish policeman whose soldier brother is kidnapped in the West Bank and an illegal West Bank Palestinian restaurant worker whose mother needs that expensive operation. Each tribe is seen in its deepest frailty by the viewer but feared as the powerful enemy by the others.

All the characters in the film are portrayed by nonactors. Many, like the cops playing cops or a Bedouin judge playing a Bedouin judge, act as versions of themselves. The directors trained them during a year of workshops where they were placed in dramatic situations and urged to react as they would in life. For the film itself, many scenes were shot without the actors knowing what was about to happen, only their general circumstances. A child is murdered, creating pandemonium. Dialogue in Hebrew-flecked Jaffa Arabic comes straight off the streets. The result is a film that feels at times like journalism.

Mr. Shani, 37, said that while in film school at Tel Aviv University 12 years ago he came upon the idea of steering away from professional actors.

“I had written a script and had gotten actors to act in it,” he recalled, sitting at an editing table in his Tel Aviv studios. “When the scene ended, and the camera stopped, I watched the interaction among the actors, and I realized that was what I wanted, the genuineness of the way they were talking at that moment rather than the acting that had gone on before.”

Mr. Shani began to explore documentaries as well as the work of directors like Ken Loach, the English social realist who has made films about homelessness and working-class struggles, and who largely prefers unknown talent to established actors.

Within a few years Mr. Shani became the director of a student film festival and wanted to get young people to make short films about their lives and surroundings. He was fascinated by Jaffa because of its history, crime and tensions. Thousands of years old, a once-glorious port known for its citrus industry, Jaffa is now well known for its underworld ways and rejection of Israeli law.

In recent years, due to its commanding location of the sea, Jaffa has attracted well-off Israelis, and its traditional cramped apartments are being replaced by the local equivalent of McMansions, producing keen tensions with the local Palestinians (also represented in the movie). “The place itself is unique and had never been portrayed in Israeli cinema before — an Arab ‘ghetto’ inside the main Jewish center of Israel,” Mr. Shani said.

In Jaffa he was introduced to Mr. Copti, an Ajami native, Christian and graduate of Israel’s top engineering college, the Technion in Haifa.

“I knew I didn’t want to be an engineer, but all the men in my family do it, so that is what I studied,” Mr. Copti, 34, said. The chance to make a short film about his neighborhood intrigued him, and along with a friend he made a 12-minute mockumentary about local myths called “The Truth.” He also co-starred in it.

Mr. Shani, the son of a high school teacher and jewelry maker, realized he had found a major talent as well as a creative soul mate, and he suggested that he and Mr. Copti write a script together and base the story in Ajami. He had a structure he wanted to employ: events told from several points of view and not in chronological order, so that the audience only fully discovers the truth at the end.

For four years, with Mr. Copti working as a waiter and Mr. Shani as an assistant to the respected Israeli film director Eran Riklis (“Lemon Tree,” “The Syrian Bride”), the two, both still unmarried (each has since married, and Mr. Shani has a child), would meet at each other’s places and develop story ideas and ultimately a script.

Then they solicited the actors. Mr. Copti, whose mother is a social worker and school founder in Jaffa, used his connections to find the people and settings. Posters were put up around the neighborhood, and clubs and social centers were canvassed. Mr. Shani did the same in search for those who would play a Jewish policeman and his family.

From hundreds of volunteers, the pair chose their cast and began the workshops.

“One of our tasks was to liberate them from the tendency to perform in front of a camera, so that they could become themselves,” Mr. Copti said, speaking at a favorite bookstore-cafe at the edge of Ajami.

Money was a nagging concern; the pair found little interest among investors for their experiment. In the end some money came from Germany, some from France and the rest from the Israeli Film Foundation.

They shot for just over three weeks, and all the locations were lent by locals, notably the restaurant where Mr. Copti had been working as a waiter. Hundreds of others in the neighborhood also lent a hand or a car or made meals for the cast and crew.

When the picture opened at the Jerusalem Film Festival last summer, after some seven years in preparation, it was widely hailed as a production of rare texture and truth. And last September, it took all the major awards (best picture, directing, screenplay, editing) in the Ophirs, Israel’s version of the Oscars.

In a way it was the ambition of two unknowns that was most impressive — a narrative with Faulknerian perspective shifts, a compelling cast of amateurs and a story whose loves are indistinguishable from its tragedies. It is a film that brings Middle East peace no closer but explains why it is so far away.

Kathryn Bigelow gana el premio DGA (Director's Guild Award)

Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary
Louie Psihoyos, The Cove

Oscars Try to Navigate Through Babel (The New York Times)

January 31, 2010

By DENNIS LIM

THERE was a time when the Academy Award for best foreign-language film reflected the state of world cinema: Fellini films won back-to-back Oscars in the mid 1950s, as did Bergman films in the early ’60s. But the category has come to suggest a peculiar gulf between Academy opinion and the tastes of critics and audiences alike.

Some Oscar-nominated foreign titles from the past decade will leave even committed art-house audiences drawing a blank: “Zelary” from the Czech Republic, “As It Is in Heaven” from Sweden, “Zus & Zo” from the Netherlands. Meanwhile critical favorites and festival hits have often gone unacknowledged; a list of conspicuous omissions might start — but certainly would not end — with “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Caché,” “Silent Light,” “Gomorrah,” “The Edge of Heaven,” “Secret Sunshine” and “Volver.”

This incongruity has much to do with the category’s submission and nominating process, which is more byzantine than for any other, involving nominating bodies in various countries and several Academy committees. This year’s nine-film shortlist, announced this month, was whittled down by two committees from 65 submissions; the final five, to be determined by a third committee, will be revealed along with the other Oscar nominations on Tuesday. Mark Johnson, a veteran producer (“The Notebook,” “Ballast,” the “Narnia” films) and chairman of the Academy’s foreign-language committee since 1999, said that he has been striving in recent years to improve a process that, he acknowledged, often left the impression of an out-of-touch voting body. “We’ve attacked some of what I think have been real legitimate problems and criticisms,” he said.

While Mr. Johnson’s efforts have been largely focused on arriving at a more credible group of nominees, they have not streamlined the complex, multistage procedure. At each phase “there are always surprises and disappointments,” said Michael Barker, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which is distributing three of this year’s nine shortlisted films: Michael Haneke’s “White Ribbon” (Germany), Jacques Audiard’s “Prophet” (France) and Juan José Campanella’s “Secret in Their Eyes” (Argentina).

The rule changes have not eliminated controversy. This year some critics pointed to omissions like “Police, Adjective” (from Romania), “Mother” (South Korea) and “I Killed My Mother” (Canada), all of which were the submissions of their respective countries, and films like “The Maid” (Chile) and “Vincere” (Italy), which were not selected in the first place.

Jonathan Sehring, the president of IFC Entertainment, an active distributor of foreign films, called the nominating process “terribly flawed” and singled out for criticism the one-film-per-country rule.

Some countries arrive at their choice by polling an Academy-like professional organization with hundreds or thousands of members; countries with less robust film industries might have more ad-hoc groups, sometimes with as few as a dozen voters. While the system is designed to allow even the smallest of film-producing nations a shot, it also ends up punishing relative powerhouses like France and Italy, which have many more acclaimed releases in a given year than, say, Iceland or the Ivory Coast, but must pick only one.

The emphasis on national origin means that international co-productions (like “The Motorcycle Diaries”) tend to fall by the wayside. Until recently the Academy also insisted that the foreign language match the foreign country; for instance, Mr. Haneke’s “Caché,” a French-language film by an Austrian director, was deemed ineligible. And two years ago “The Band’s Visit” was disqualified from being Israel’s official candidate because too much of the movie was in English.

At the national level the decisions are often tangled in internal politics. “Some countries approach the process in terms of ‘Whose turn is it?’ ” Mr. Sehring said, adding that personal agendas can come into play. Some questioned Italy’s decision this year to submit Giuseppe Tornatore’s big-budget period epic “Baaria” over Marco Bellochio’s “Vincere,” a film about Mussolini’s secret lover that has been received with greater enthusiasm at festivals (and is being released in the United States by IFC this year); it has not gone unnoticed that one financial backer of “Baaria” is Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

Voting bodies are apt to consider, sometimes above all other factors, how well a film might travel. Mr. Barker of Sony recalled being at an Academy-related panel at a film festival in Norway and hearing the question come up in the bluntest terms: “Do we pick what we think is the best film, or do we pick what we think the Americans will vote for?” France has fielded suspiciously treacly fare like “Merry Christmas” and “The Chorus,” ignoring work by better-known auteurs like Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas.

The record in the foreign-language category suggests a weakness for stodgy, conservative films, and the Academy members who vote in the category are usually older.

Gary Palmucci, general manager of Kino International, attended a few Academy screenings two years ago, when one of his films, “Beaufort” (Israel), was up for an Oscar. With a few exceptions, he said, “it looked like everybody was over 65.” (Kino has another Israeli film on this year’s shortlist: “Ajami,” which opens in New York this week.)

This demographic quirk can be partly chalked up to the rigors of the nomination process. Every year the submitted movies are divided into four groups; an Academy member who wishes to participate in the nominations must see at least 80 percent of the films in one group (which usually works out to more than a dozen films). All films must be seen in theaters; since most of the titles are not in commercial release, that usually means attending special Academy screenings.

“The people who have that kind of time are often the older members who are retired,” Mr. Johnson said. And they tend to favor what Mr. Palmucci described as “a more meat-and-potatoes kind of film.” Mr. Sehring noted that movies with relatively challenging subject matter (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” about abortion in Ceausescu-era Romania) or form (the hand-drawn animation of “Persepolis”) have often been overlooked.

Such criticisms are hardly new, but they intensified two years ago when the Academy snubbed “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a Palme d’Or winner at Cannes. Mr. Johnson responded by introducing an intermediate step in the nominating process to try to create a safeguard measure against glaring oversights.

“I don’t mean to be critical of the general committee because it’s older,” Mr. Johnson said, “but I wanted to make the selection process reflect more the Academy at large.”

Instead of entrusting the general membership with arriving at the nine-film shortlist, the Academy now takes the top six choices of the voting members (an average of 300 every year, Mr. Johnson said); the remaining three are wild-card selections by an executive committee appointed by Mr. Johnson, including the director Curtis Hanson, the cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, whose film “The Lives of Others” was a foreign-language winner. (The shortlist is narrowed to the final five by yet another committee’s members, who watch all nine films in a three-day period.)

Last year — the first time the shortlist was determined by two separate committees — the eventual nominees included well-reviewed art-house hits like “The Class” and “Waltz With Bashir” as well as an under-the-radar critical favorite, “Revanche.” This year’s list includes the Berlin festival’s top prizewinner, “The Milk of Sorrow” (Peru), and two Cannes hits, “The White Ribbon” (Germany) and “A Prophet” (France), films that might be too dark or difficult to have made it this far under the old system.

But there is nothing Mr. Johnson can do once the nominees are set and the vote is opened to the entire membership. Last year his rule changes produced the category’s most respectable lineup in some time. But it was the Japanese film “Departures,” which many considered the most conventional and sentimental of the five, that won.

That decision may not stand the test of time, but in a sense it is in keeping with tradition. In 1981, when Mr. Barker and his partner Tom Bernard were at United Artists, they had a foreign-language Oscar frontrunner in François Truffaut’s “Last Metro.” The other prime contender was thought to be Akira Kurosawa’s “Kagemusha.” But the eventual winner was a Russian film, long since forgotten, called “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.”

“It was a surprise to us that this could happen,” Mr. Barker said. “But then we realized this kind of thing has been happening for generations.”

And then there were nine... (Screendaily)

Nine films are on the foreign-language film Oscar shortlist this year. Mike Goodridge assesses what was left off the list and which might go forward to the final five

The Oscar shortlist of nine films for the best foreign-language category, whittled down from 65 official submissions, saw some surprise inclusions and some shutouts but was generally without the embarrassing omissions of previous years, such as 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days in 2008.

Cannes heavyweights The White Ribbon (picutred) (Germany) and A Prophet (pictured) (France) – both widely acknowledged as the year’s masterpieces - both secured slots in the final nine, while Claudia Llosa’s The Milk Of Sorrow from Peru, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin last year, and two other Cannes critical darlings, Samson & Delilah from Australia and Ajami from Israel, also made the shortlist.

The Academy foreign-language committee’s mainstream sensibility also embraced popular hits Winter In Wartime from Netherlands and The Secret In Their Eyes (pictured) from Argentina, while perhaps the two eye-openers in the selection were Ermek Tursunov’s Kelin (aka The Daughter-In-Law) from Kazakhstan, a harsh but beautiful tale of nomadic life in the fourth century, and Stephan Komandarev’s The World Is Big And Salvation Lurks Around The Corner from Bulgaria, a dramatic story of a German man with amnesia on a journey to his Bulgarian past.

Even though Academy foreign-language chief Mark Johnson has worked tirelessly to ensure outstanding submissions were not snubbed by the committees, there were some notable omissions. One has to assume the committees, largely composed of aged AMPAS members who have the time to see the alloted films, scowled with disapproval at daring, artful or quirky pictures such as Police, Adjective (Romania), The Misfortunates (pictured) (Belgium), I Killed My Mother (Canada) or Terribly Happy (Denmark).

China’s safe ploy of submitting Chen Kaige’s Forever Enthralled over the brilliant City Of Life And Death did not work. Nor did Chile’s decision to submit DawsonIsla 10 by Miguel Littin over Sebastian Silva’s popular The Maid, which previously won a Golden Globe nomination. Likewise the perennial Spanish snub of Pedro Almodovar, this time for Broken Embraces, failed to yield a place on the shortlist in favour of The Dancer And The Thief from former Oscar-winner Fernando Trueba.

Other fine films which failed to strike a chord included Bong Joon-ho’s delirious mystery Mother, Asghar Farhadi’s powerful About Elly from Iran and Ursula Meier’s Home from Switzerland, all three 2009 festival favourites. And Espen Sandberg and Joachim Roenning’s rousing Second World War drama Max Manus from Norway had all the ingredients of an Oscar contender.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the failure of Oscar stalwart Giuseppe Tornatore to make the final nine with his Sicilian epic, Baaria. The lavish production, probably the biggest in Italy’s film history, may not have received unanimous critical affection but it features all the warmth, humanity, colour and cinematic sweep for which Tornatore, a former winner in this category, is famous. Still without a US distribution deal, the film would have surely benefited from an Oscar nod.

Too good to overlook

As to whether The White Ribbon or A Prophet will go forward to the final five, that is a question that can only be answered on February 2, since this particular Oscar category is never short of shocks and can never be second-guessed.

That said, those two epic films have been playing face-off since they emerged as clear favourites in competition at Cannes where The White Ribbon won the Palme d’Or and A Prophet the Special Jury Prize. Subsequently the Michael Haneke film has also beaten Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet to the European Film Award and the Golden Globe, although neither film is particularly Oscar-friendly. The White Ribbon is an enthralling mystery but, being a Haneke film, it refuses to give any conclusive answers as to who-done-it, and A Prophet is a hard-hitting and violent 150 minute drama about a North African in a French prison which is about as far removed from the ageing Oscar voters’ experience as could be imagined.

Perhaps 2009 is one year in which AMPAS voters will fall in line with every other jury that has had these two films in its selection. Perhaps these particular pictures are just too good to overlook.

Sony Pictures Classics (SPC) has domestic rights to both films, but the Oscar-savvy SPC also has rights to Juan Jose Campanella’s The Secret In Their Eyes, a leisurely thriller about pensioners falling in love while revisiting an old murder case. Now there is a film which has Oscar written all over it.

With 'Avatar,' 'District 9' and 'Trek,' Hollywood 2010 is a space odyssey (Los Angeles Times)

"Avatar" has become the highest grossing movie of all time, surpassing the Oscar-winning film "Titanic." Will "Avatar" make a big mark on Oscar night too? We talked earlier to Rebecca Keegan, the author of "The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron," and here she weighs in on why this could be the year a science-fiction film wins the Oscar for best picture. -- Jevon Phillips

Slasher films, pot comedies, anything starring The Rock -- there are some movies that no one expects to win Academy Awards. And traditionally, Oscar's no-fly list has included science fiction. Academy Award-winning films are supposed to be serious, weighty, historical -- if your movie takes place in a galaxy far, far away, well, you can leave your tuxedo in the closet until it's time to accept a somewhat less prestigious prize shaped like a rocket ship.

This year, however, is looking like a breakthrough year for sci-fi, as the alien vehicles "Avatar," "District 9" and "Star Trek" have earned critical praise and accolades from the industry groups that tend to foreshadow Oscar nominations. Thanks to a convergence of factors, including the expansion of the best picture category from five movies to 10, the ascendance of the post-"Star Wars" generation in Hollywood and the imposing box office success of James Cameron's "Avatar," this Rodney Dangerfield of movie genres looks like it may finally win some respect come Oscar time.

"The academy has always thought of sci-fi as a secondary type of exploitation film," says Roger Corman, who was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in November, in large part for his role in producing the low-budget sci-fi films that gave directors like Cameron their start. "They're only beginning to realize that there is seriousness and depth within the genre."

A sci-fi film has never won best picture, and to a certain generation of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members the genre is still the ignoble territory of the drive-in, the rubber suit, the B actor. In 1968, influential film critic Pauline Kael called Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" "a monumentally unimaginative movie. . . . If big film directors are to get credit for doing badly what others have been doing brilliantly for years with no money, just because they've put it on the big screen, then businessmen are greater than poets and theft is art." It seems many in the academy agreed with Kael's dismissal of "2001," because Kubrick's now iconic film earned only one Oscar, for its special effects, and was not nominated for best picture.

The academy primarily rewards sci-fi in its technical categories, as it must, since so much of cinema's innovation comes from artists depicting alien worlds and futuristic wars. But after years of largely ignoring the genre in its other categories, Hollywood was virtually forced to acknowledge sci-fi in 1977. "The academy had to admit that there was this 800-pound gorilla in the room and that was 'Star Wars,' " says John Scalzi, author of "The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies." An undeniable cultural phenomenon, "Star Wars" was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture, but lost to the cerebral comedy "Annie Hall." At the 1982 Oscars, another sci-fi gorilla, Steven Spielberg's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," lost to "Gandhi," a three-hour Richard Attenborough-directed biopic of a beloved historical figure -- in other words, a made-for-Oscar film. In his acceptance speech, Attenborough demurred the honor, saying, "I was certain that not only would 'E.T.' win, but that it should win. It was inventive, powerful [and] wonderful."

Perhaps the biggest impediment to sci-fi's acceptance at Oscar time has been actors. With actors accounting for the largest branch of the academy (1,300 out of the body's 5,800 members), a genre that showcases ideas rather than performances is at a disadvantage. Only a handful of actors have ever been nominated for a sci-fi performance -- Alec Guinness for playing the sage Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars," Sigourney Weaver for the role of intrepid space heroine Ellen Ripley in "Aliens," her last pairing with director Cameron before this season's "Avatar."

"If you're just shooting ray zappers and ducking at other people shooting at you, then you're not going to get a nomination any more than the actors doing the same thing in a western did," says academy Executive Director Bruce Davis.

Even films with sci-fi premises, like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," with its erased memory story line (and for which Kate Winslet was nominated), are often categorized more simply as dramas. "There's a cognitive bias against sci-fi," Scalzi says. "In that, if it's good, it can't possibly be sci-fi."

But the demographics of the academy, like the demographics of Hollywood, are changing. New academy members in 2009 included young actors like Michael Cera, who wasn't even born when "E.T." hit theaters. For young Hollywood, sci-fi has been big-budget entertainment their whole lives. "New generations maintain their early interests and passions," Davis says. "They may think of 'Star Wars' as an old classic."

There have been recent signs the academy is inching toward an embrace of sci-fi. The awarding of best picture and a record-tying 10 other Oscars to Peter Jackson's 2003 adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" signaled a softening toward fantastical movies -- albeit ones with a literary pedigree. Last year, Warner Bros. mounted a best picture campaign for Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," a comic book movie that shares some of sci-fi's DNA. For the academy, which has been concerned in recent years with the shrinking audience for its award show's telecast, having a box office hit like "Dark Knight" in the mix was attractive.

But despite earning widespread critical praise and eight nominations in other categories, Nolan's film couldn't crack the top 5 for best picture. "Dark Knight's" omission prompted a hue and cry in some corners of Hollywood and helped motivate the academy's expansion of the category last June. "We wanted to give certain kinds of films more of a chance," Davis says. "Not just sci-fi, but we would love it if we found room for an animated film or two or a documentary."

Sci-fi may be just what the Oscars need. In Hollywood's current, risk-averse environment, it's hard to imagine a studio green-lighting a film as lavish and elaborate as "Gone With the Wind" or "Ben-Hur" -- the kind of grand, epic movies that have historically lent the ceremony glamour and mass appeal. Science fiction has become the last refuge of epic filmmaking and "Avatar," with its heroic, blue-skinned characters, sprawling story set on the alien moon Pandora and extravagant, 3-D spectacle, is closer to Scarlett's Tara or Ben-Hur's chariot race than any of its competition. The blockbuster is also, as everyone from the Vatican's film critic to the U.S. Marine Corps' newspaper has pointed out, stuffed with allegories about war, the environment and spirituality. For academy members who have long considered sci-fi kids' stuff, it's hard to deny that Cameron's film has given adults plenty to think about. And as it closes in on the box office record, and having taken best dramatic motion picture and best director at the Golden Globes this month, "Avatar" is emerging as a best picture front-runner.

Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" too is rich with political metaphor. A faux documentary about crustacean-like aliens who make their home in a hostile South Africa, "District 9" earned a best picture nomination from the Producers Guild of America and screenplay nods from the Golden Globes and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. As a sleeper hit with a pointed message about xenophobia, "District 9" gives academy voters a chance to acknowledge the art and the business of moviemaking. Even "Star Trek," J.J. Abrams' slick rebooting of the ultimate geek franchise, has earned love from both the producers and writers guilds. There is, apparently, room this awards season for a popcorn film that simply does what it's supposed to do -- entertain.

It's safe to say that none of these directors set out to make Oscar-bait movies or they surely would have chosen more earthly stories to tell. But if multiple sci-fi films are nominated for best picture this year, or if one wins, it will be a landmark for the genre.

"I felt I was being accepted to a club I never thought would accept me," Corman says of receiving his Oscar last fall at age 83. "I just never thought it would happen." Not in this galaxy anyway.

-- Rebecca Keegan

Las nominaciones a los premios BAFTA

By Stuart Kemp

LONDON -- James Cameron's " Avatar," Kathryn Bigelow's " The Hurt Locker" and Lone Scherfig's " An Education" emerged blinking with eight nominations apiece for this year's Orange British Film Awards including noms for best film and best director.

The big surprise on this year's list is the Peter Jackson produced South African set sci-fi " District 9" which secured seven nominations, one ahead of this year's six times nominees " Inglourious Basterds" and " Up in the Air."To win this year's best film award, recent Golden Globe king Cameron and his other worldly blue people drama will have to see off competition from " Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire" and "Up In The Air" as well as "The Hurt Locker" and "An Education."

Presented by the British Academy Of Film and Television Arts, the Orange BAFA for best director is a face-off for votes with "District 9" director Neill Blomkamp joining a list sporting Quentin Tarantino for his World War II actioner "Inglourious Basterds," Cameron, Scherfig and Bigelow.

Other Globe winners making the list include Jeff Bridges for his turn in " Crazy Heart" in the leading actor category where he finds himself up against George Clooney for "Up In The Air," Colin Firth for " A Single Man," Jeremy Renner in "The Hurt Locker" and Andy Serkis for " Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll."The evening's leading actress nod will come from Carey Mulligan in "An Education," Saoirse Ronan in " The Lovely Bones," Gabourey Sidibe for "Precious," Meryl Streep in " Julie & Julia" and Audrey Tautou for " Coco Before Chanel."

Alfred Molina is in the running for best supporting actor for his turn in "An Education" alongside Alec Baldwin for " It's Complicated," Christian McKay for " Me And Orson Welles," Stanley Tucci's turn in "The Lovely Bones" and Christoph Waltz in "Inglourious Basterds."Meanwhile "Up In The Air" duo Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick and " Nowhere Boy" pair Anne-Marie Duff and Kristin Scott Thomas are nominated alongside Mo'nique" for "Precious" in the best supporting actress category.

Best British film, one of two of the evening's U.K. awards, will come from "An Education," " Fish Tank," " In the Loop," " Moon" and "Nowhere Boy."The awards will be dished out Feb. 21 at London's Royal Opera House.A full list of nominations can be found at www.bafta.org

BEST FILM"Avatar," James Cameron, Jon Landau"An Education," Amanda Posey, Finola Dwyer"The Hurt Locker," Nominees TBC"Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness"Up In The Air," Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman, Daniel Dubiecki

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM"An Education," Amanda Posey, Finola Dwyer, Lone Scherfig, Nick Hornby"Fish Tank," Kees Kasander, Nick Laws, Andrea Arnold"In The Loop," Kevin Loader, Adam Tandy, Armando Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche"Moon," Stuart Fenegan, Trudie Styler, Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker"Nowhere Boy," Kevin Loader, Douglas Rae, Robert Bernstein, Sam Taylor-Wood, Matt Greenhalgh

DIRECTOR"Avatar," James Cameron"District 9," Neill Blomkamp"An Education," Lone Scherfig"The Hurt Locker," Kathryn Bigelow"Inglourious Basterds," Quentin Tarantino

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY"The Hangover," Jon Lucas, Scott Moore"The Hurt Locker," Mark Boal"Inglourious Basterds," Quentin Tarantino"A Serious Man," Joel Coen, Ethan Coen"Up," Bob Peterson, Pete Docter

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY"District 9," Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell"An Education," Nick Hornby"In The Loop," Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche"Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," Geoffrey Fletcher"Up In The Air," Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner

FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE "Broken Embraces," Agustin Almodovar, Pedro Almodovar"Coco Before Chanel," Carole Scotta, Caroline Benjo, Philippe Carcassonne, Anne Fontaine"Let The Right One In," Carl Molinder, John Nordling, Tomas Alfredson"A Prophet," Pascale Caucheteux, Marco Chergui, Alix Raynaud, Jacques Audiard"The White Ribbon," Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, Margaret Menegoz, Michael Haneke

ANIMATED FILM"Coraline," Henry Selick"Fantastic Mr. Fox," Wes Anderson"Up," Pete Docter

LEADING ACTORJeff Bridges, "Crazy Heart"George Clooney, "Up in the Air"Colin Firth, "A Single Man"Jeremy Renner, "The Hurt Locker"Andy Serkis, "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll"

LEADING ACTRESSCarey Mulligan, "An Education"Saoirse Ronan, "The Lovely Bones"Gabourey Sidibe, "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire"Meryl Streep, "Julie & Julia"Audrey Tautou, "Coco Before Chanel"

SUPPORTING ACTORAlec Baldwin, "It's Complicated"Christian McKay, "Me and Orson Welles"Alfred Molina, "An Education"Stanley Tucci, "The Lovely Bones"Christoph Waltz, "Inglourious Basterds"

SUPPORTING ACTRESSAnne-Marie Duff, "Nowhere Boy"Vera Farmiga, "Up in the Air"Anna Kendrick, "Up in the Air"Mo'Nique, "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire"Kristin Scott Thomas, "Nowhere Boy"

"El secreto de sus ojos", entre las nueve prenominadas al Oscar extranjero

20 January, 2010 By Jeremy Kay (Screen Daily)

As expected Michael Haneke’s German entry The White Ribbon (pictured) and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet from France have made it on to the Academy’s foregn language shortlist, although Bong Joon-ho’s widely admired South Korean film Mother is the notable omission.


Nine films have advanced from the initial pool of 65 submissions and will be in the mix when the five nominations are announced on February 2.

The shortlisted films in alphabetical order by country are:

El Secreto De Sus Ojos (Argentina). Dir: Juan Jose Campanella

Samson & Delilah (Australia). Dir: Warwick Thornton

The World Is Big And Salvation Lurks Around The Corner (Bulgaria). Dir: Stephan Komandarev

Un Prophete (France). Dir: Jacques Audiard

The White Ribbon (Germany). Dir: Michael Haneke

Ajami (Israel). Dir: Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani

Kelin (Kazakhstan). Dir: Ermek Tursunov

Winter In Wartime (The Netherlands). Dir: Martin Koolhoven

The Milk Of Sorrow (Peru). Dir: Claudia Llosa

Foreign language nominations are again being determined in two phases. The Phase I committee, comprising several hundred Los Angeles-based members, screened the 65 eligible films between mid-October and January 16. The group’s top six choices, augmented by three additional selections voted by the Academy’s foreign language film award executive committee, constitute the shortlist.

The shortlist will be reduced to five nominees by specially invited committees in New York and Los Angeles. They will spend January 29-31 viewing three films each day before casting their ballots. The nominations will be announced on February 2.

'Welcome' upsets 'A Prophet' at Lumiere Awards (Variety)

PARIS -- The 2010 Gallic awards season kicked off with underdog "Welcome" upsetting favorite "A Prophet" for best picture prize at France's Lumiere Awards.

Starring Vincent Lindon as a swimming coach who aids a young Iraqi Kurd in his quest to cross the English Channel, "Welcome" scored more than 1 million admissions during a French release sparked by controversy over a minister's comments about the film's take on illegal immigrants. U.S. rights to the pic were recently nabbed by Film Movement.

"I was afraid to tell my producer that 25 minutes of the film would be in Kurdish. 'It's normal,' he said. 'The character's Kurd.' " quipped scribe-helmer Philippe Lioret to a packed house at Paris' Hotel de Ville.

Jacques Audiard's much heralded prison thriller, "A Prophet," nabbed two major prizes: director and actor for newcomer Tahar Rahim. Pic is nominated for foreign language film at the Golden Globes, and is France's contender for foreign language film at this year's Oscars.

Actress went to vet Isabelle Adjani for her portrayal of a high school teacher under siege in Jean-Paul Lillienfeld's drama "Skirt Day." "It's touching to receive a prize for a film about such a taboo subject," Adjani remarked.

Screenplay kudos went to Mia Hansen-Love for her family drama "The Father of My Children." Scribe-helmer's sophomore pic nabbed Un Certain Regard's Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and is slated for U.S. release by IFC this year. She's also one of Varietys 10 Directors to Watch.

Twenty-year old Canuck actor-director Xavier Dolan received best Francophone film award for his debut, "I Killed My Mother."

Created in 1995 by legendary Gallic producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier and Newsweek foreign correspondent Edward Behr, this 15th edition of the Lumieres paid homage to late French auteur Eric Rohmer and to thesp Jocelyn Quivrin, who died in a car crash last November.

Wes Anderson’s NBR acceptance speech

Nominaciones de los guionistas y los directores de fotografía

“Avatar” has been lauded for its technological wizardry and the all-encompassing movie experience it offers. As for the writing: not so much. But that hasn’t prevented the Writers Guild of America from nominating James Cameron, the movie’s writer and director, for best original screenplay. He’ll face off against Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber for “(500) Days of Summer”; John Lucas and Scott More for the “The Hangover”; Mark Boal for “The Hurt Locker”; and Joel and Ethan Coen for “A Serious Man.”

The Writers Guild’s winner for best original screenplay often translates into Oscar gold; last year, Dustin Lance Black won both awards for “Milk.”

In the field of adapted screenplay, the nominees are “Crazy Heart,” by Scott Cooper, based on the novel by Thomas Cobb; “Julie and Julia,” screenplay by Nora Ephron, based on the books “Julie & Julia” by Julie Powell and “My Life in France” by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme; “Precious: Based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher, based on the novel “Push by Sapphire”; “Star Trek,” written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, based on the TV series “Star Trek”; and “Up in the Air,” screenplay by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn.

For documentary screenplay, the Writers Guild gave some love to the largely ignored Michael Moore documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” Other nominees include Richard Trank for “Against the Tide”; Mark Monroe for “The Cove”; Robert Stone for “Earth Days”; Chris Rock and Jeff Stilson and Lance Crouther and Chuck Sklar for “Good Hair”; and Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman for “Soundtrack for a Revolution.”

The Writers Guild will bestow its honors Feb. 20 in untelevised and very long awards ceremonies in both New York and Los Angeles. The comedian Susie Essman, known to work blue, is the host.

The American Society of Cinematographers also announced its nominees for best cinematography on Monday. The nominees are: Barry Ackroyd for “The Hurt Locker”; Dion Beebe for “Nine”; Christian Berger, who will pick up an award on Monday night at the New York Critics Circle Awards for the black-and-white film “The White Ribbon”; Mauro Fiorefor for “Avatar”; and Robert Richardson for “Inglourious Basterds.” The winner will be announced on Feb. 27 at a gala at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel.

The New York Times Oscars Special: The Work of War, at a Fever Pitch

By MANOHLA DARGIS

LOVE is a drug, and so too is war in Kathryn Bigelow’s visceral and morally urgent “Hurt Locker.” A story about men and battle and the murderous highs of violence, the film is set in the Iraq of 2004, the year that the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib were revealed to the world, the year that four American contractors were murdered in Falluja, the year that the American military death toll reached 1,000. Written by a journalist, Mark Boal, who based the story on his experiences covering Iraq, it centers on a crew of technicians who spend their dusty days and eerie nights in and around Baghdad disarming bombs.

Ms. Bigelow has spent her career bending genre to her intelligent ways. “The Hurt Locker” is a war movie that successfully goes where few do or can: inside the kill zone of a man’s head, namely that of Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), a young bomb tech who lives for his near-death experiences. Like most of Ms. Bigelow’s most memorable characters, James has pushed against his own limits and then pushed some more. He’s a danger addict who walks directly into the abyss so he can hear the thump thump thump of his own ticking heart, itself an incendiary device. But war isn’t a solitary act and James can only feed his habit by imperiling others: this is his tragedy and, by extension, ours.

The film can be divided into nine violent incidents that are connected, with a few exceptions (an impromptu wrestling match included), by somewhat quieter interludes of conversation and contemplation. James enters the story shortly after its jolt of an opener in which his predecessor (Guy Pearce) is killed during an explosion. James soon manages to disarm another device, but in the process he alienates his support team, Sgt. J. T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). Sanborn subsequently confronts James in a bathroom, telling his new superior officer, “I’m pretty sure I can figure out a redneck piece of trailer trash like you.” James, a smile edging his mouth, replies, “Well, it looks like you’re on the right track.”

The scene that follows, which takes off about 30 minutes into the film, opens with a long, hand-held shot of men and women, including soldiers, streaming out the door of a squat building adorned with a few United Nations signs. This long shot then zooms in, with purposeful wobbliness, to give you a closer look at the fast-moving evacuees. Widely used during the 1960s and ’70s in American and European cinema (and probably borrowed, in turn, from documentary film), the zoom shot has made something of a comeback, reintroduced by directors like Steven Soderbergh to suggest an earlier era (and filmmaking ethos) or to mock the same (as in the “Austin Powers” comedies).

One of the masters of the zoom was Sam Peckinpah, perhaps best known for his 1969 masterpiece, “The Wild Bunch.” As the critic Amy Taubin has observed, Ms. Bigelow is a “daughter” of Peckinpah, specifically because her “double-faced critique of — and infatuation with — the codes of masculinity reveals the hysteria beneath their seeming rationality.” Put another way, like Peckinpah, Ms. Bigelow is brilliant at both delivering and dissecting male violence, which is why “The Hurt Locker” is at once so pleasurable and disturbing. You thrill to the violence even as you understand its horror, and your horror is doubled because you are thrilled: this is true in “The Wild Bunch” and in “The Hurt Locker.”

A zoom simply reframes an image (instead of cutting in closer, which Ms. Bigelow also does), but, when deployed fast and with a tremble, as it is here, it can also serve as a kind of visual punctuation, like an exclamation point. Ms. Bigelow creates a somewhat similar zoomy effect in the editing with her propulsive use of close-ups and very long shots: she consistently brings you within panting distance of the characters only to switch to a bird’s-eye (or insurgent’s) view and back. This accordionlike editing, along with the zooms and hand-held camera work — which at times feels almost frantic even as it remains utterly controlled — all help to destabilize the visuals, which adds more edge to the already tense setups.

The bomb that James and his crew need to disarm in front of the United Nations building turns out to be inside a car, which an enemy sniper shoots at and almost detonates. Much of the scene involves James’s search for the timer, a task he undertakes with ferocious concentration as the increasingly unnerved Sanborn and Eldridge (proxies for the viewers) stand watch. As he searches the car, and particularly after he sheds the bulky protective bomb suit that makes him look like an astronaut or a snow-suited toddler, James begins to resemble the car mechanic he might have been back home. “It looks like he’s checking the oil,” Eldridge says, reminding you that war is both dirty business (and often fought by the poor) and also work.

Before James does get down to his work, though, there is a shift, about a minute into the scene, from the film’s customary (and classic) detached narrative position — where the camera hovers next to characters and often shows you what they see — to a shot from inside James’s helmet looking out, as if you were seeing the world through his eyes. You see him. Then you see with him. Although this shift to the first person lasts for about six seconds, a standard shot length in contemporary movies, it feels longer because you’re abruptly removed from the visual and aural chaos. For those six seconds you see what James sees through the helmet that frames the world like a camera, and you mainly hear what he hears: his heavy breathing.

Ms. Bigelow uses the first person several times in the film, usually to put us inside James’s helmet and possibly his thinking. But her most canny deployment of this subject position actually takes place during the first scene, when James’s predecessor dies. The opener has several first-person shots from inside this tech’s helmet, but it’s early yet in the story, and you don’t understand the stakes, and anyway the crew is laughing and joking. The men have let down their guard, and so yours is down too, the folly of which is made brutally clear when the bomb explodes, killing the tech and filling his helmet with blood. It’s no wonder that James later wears his helmet in bed: he’s holding fast to his head before it and he explode.

"Avatar", de James Cameron (Screenplay/Guión)

THE SOUND OF DRUMS, from a great distance, growing louder.

FADE IN:
WE ARE FLYING through mist, a dimly glimpsed forest below.

VOICE (V.O.)
When I was lying there in the VA
hospital, with a big hole blown through
the middle of my life, I started having
these dreams of flying.

We are very low over the forest now, gliding fast, the drums
BUILDING to a PEAK --

VOICE (V.O.)
Sooner or later though, you always have
to wake up...

CUT TO:

EXT. CITY - NIGHT

A SCREECH OF BRAKES as a vehicle WIPES FRAME, revealing --
JAKE SULLY, a scarred and scruffy combat vet, sitting in a beat up carbon-fiber wheelchair. At 22, his eyes are hardened by the wisdom and wariness of one who has endured pain beyond his years.

Jake stares upward at the levels of the city. MAGLEV TRAINS WHOOSH overhead on elevated tracks, against a sky of garish advertizing.

JAKE (V.O.)
They can fix a spinal, if you’ve got the
money. But not on vet benefits, not in
this economy.

The traffic light changes and Jake pushes forward with the crowd, pumping the wheels of his chair. Most of the people wear FILTER MASKS to protect them from the toxic air. In a LONG LENS STACK it is a marching torrent of anonymous, isolated souls.

INT. JAKE’S APARTMENT - NIGHT

The room is a tiny CUBICLE, prison cell meets 747 bathroom.
Narrow cot, wall-screen droning away in the B.G. --

PERKY NEWSCASTER
The Bengal tiger, extinct for over a
century, is making a comeback. These
cloned tiger cubs at the Beijing Zoo
are...

Download/Descarga

The New York Times Oscars Special: Boy and Beasts, Human and Not

By A. O. SCOTT

MOST of the action in “Where the Wild Things Are” takes place on an island of monsters, who roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and, above all, try to work out their terrible emotional issues in the presence of a young boy named Max.

The creatures are brilliantly realized, with giant costumes, digitized faces and the voices of some very gifted actors (including James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper and Catherine O’Hara). The rough, strange naturalism of their world is the great achievement of the director Spike Jonze, who has a way, in all his films, of making impossible feats of visual invention look like child’s play.

Vivid and enchanting though the land of the wild things may be, it also distills and reflects the impulses and anxieties that Max (played by Max Records) has tried to leave behind. The prickly friendships and unstated tensions that arise among Carol, K W and the other big, furry monsters are recognizable to anyone who has lived among humans and are implicit in the scenes of everyday life that precede Max’s voyage. Nearly everything that happens on that island is foreshadowed in the first few minutes of the movie, in which nothing very extraordinary happens at all.

It is a winter day on a North American street, where the wood-frame houses sit close together and the kids amuse themselves without much adult supervision. Maurice Sendak’s wild rumpus is reached by way of Longfellow, who observed that “a boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

Like most children traversing the territory between toddlerhood and adolescence, Max makes his own world, but he does not make it as he pleases, in circumstances of his own choosing. The globe his absent father gave him has a small plaque at the base identifying Max as “the owner of this world.” That’s only a plaything, though. The boy’s imagination may be unconstrained, but like any child he is tethered to the will of others and a set of painfully familiar limiting facts. He is small, dependent and alone.

“Where the Wild Things Are” is partly the story of how Max finds companionship among the monsters, a situation that turns out to present its own challenges and difficulties. His solitude, however, is the film’s starting point; after the boisterous opening credits, in which homage is paid to Mr. Sendak’s picture book — here is our hero in his wolf suit, noisily harassing the family dog — we jump to a shot of Max’s legs sticking out of the igloo he has made from a plowed-up pile of snow across the street from his house.

Sweet, warbly music (by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) cushions him like an extra layer of winter clothing, signaling the unhurried pleasure of play taken as seriously as work. The editing, its jump cuts mirroring the fluctuations of Max’s attention, subtly disorients our sense of time, compressing a whole afternoon into a few minutes and expanding seconds of perception into languorous stretches of concentrated activity.

Max is absorbed, almost literally, in his project, and the only thing left is to show it off to someone. His older sister, in the house talking on the phone, shoos her brother away when he invites her outside to see what he has made in the snow. “Go play with your friends,” she says, but his only playmate is the fence bordering the lot where his fortress stands.

Undeterred, he assembles a stockpile of snowballs and plants his battle standard (a blue plastic bag fastened to a stick) atop the icy roof. Some canny reconnaissance locates a suitable foe, and Max crosses back to his own house to lay siege to his treacherous sister and her gigantic, wild, teenage, boy friends. The battle begins with whoops of laughter — he has captured some attention and drawn enemy fire that can be regarded as friendly — and ends in tears. Max’s tears, of course. His igloo is smashed by one of the giants, and the world he has built lies in ruins, along with the day and his mood.

That mood will swing a few more times, from rage to regret and then from tenderness back to rage. Although we have not yet met Max’s mother, a well-worn maternal admonition hovers over those first moments, especially as the giddiness of the snowball fight veers toward catastrophe. It’s always fun until someone gets hurt.

And it might not be fun unless someone did. Children’s entertainment these days tends to swerve between treacly sentiment and sugar-rush rambunctiousness, but few movies embrace the aggression and passion of childhood as ardently or accurately as “Wild Things.” Nor are the subtle continuities between adult and juvenile behavior often handled with the care and insight shown by Mr. Jonze and his co-writer, Dave Eggers. Precocious kids and grown-ups (men in particular) who take refuge in immaturity are ubiquitous, of course, but we don’t often see the likes of Max on screen, even though our neighborhoods and our houses might be overrun with Maxes.

He’s a regular kid, in other words, and our first encounter with him does not seem to suggest anything more. Max himself could sum up the first minutes of his movie more succinctly than any critic or pair of screenwriters. “I built this awesome igloo, and then some bigger kids came along and wrecked it.” We’ve all been there. But we may have forgotten what it felt like — how we were immune to the cold until suddenly we were freezing; how we were happy and angry, bored and entranced, all in the space of a few minutes; how we felt like kings and then our kingdoms were destroyed.

All of this will happen again, on the other side of the water. Just as Max’s sister has moved onto new friendships, leaving behind the brother who loves her best (and just as his mother seems to him to prefer the company of her boyfriend), so will K W abandon Carol for a couple of owls named Bob and Terry. The smashing of the igloo foretells both Max and Carol’s joyful demolition of the wild things’ houses and Carol’s climactic, out-of-control smashing of the grand edifice he and Max have planned and built. The snowballs come back as clods of dirt, which hurt when they hit their targets even though they are so much fun to hurl.

As for the wild things, though they are large in size and grown-up in voice and manner, they seem not to have outgrown the emotional drama Max thought he was fleeing. On the contrary, their moody, manipulative, anxious ways mark them as creatures of civilization, not instinct. They are less emanations of his unconscious, as a Freudian or orthodox Sendakian interpretation might suggest, than specters of his future. Alone with our thoughts and our toys, close to home and its comforts, we are tame even when we feel otherwise. It’s only later, when we’re set free among the other monsters, that things really start to get wild.

The New York Times Oscars Special: A Ceremony For Everyone (In Hollywood)

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES

AT the Kodak Theater in Hollywood a carpet of incandescent blue replaced the usual red for the mid-December premiere of James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

Those who are staging the Academy Awards ceremony at the same site on March 7 should be thinking about beige, given that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been trying to avoid some difficult choices.

And yet, as the 82nd Oscar night approaches, the annual race has had its share of excitement. Movies like “Bright Star” and “Capitalism: A Love Story,” after hot starts at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, fell back in the pack.

Jeff Bridges, meanwhile, came out of nowhere to become one of the acting favorites, with “Crazy Heart.” And Mr. Cameron’s 3-D “Avatar” finally opened, to rave reviews, making a contender of what might have been a novelty act.

But in a year that has felt a little confrontational — “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” which could be the first best-picture nominee from a black director, Lee Daniels, has been strongly criticized as “poverty porn” by some African-Americans — the academy has been dwelling in a comfort zone of its own making.

For the first time since 1943 governors of the 6,000-member academy have decided to list 10 best-picture nominees rather than the usual 5, in search of a wider audience for its national show. So, in a year of tough choices, Hollywood’s leading tastemakers have chosen to be less choosy.

Privately, some academy governors — who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid tarnishing their big night — have called the doubling of best-picture nominees an experiment. It will be put back on the shelf, one governor said recently, if ultimately the new plethora of contenders does not boost the energy level, and ratings, of ABC’s annual Oscar broadcast.

Generally the show’s audience has spiked when blockbuster movies have ruled the night, as “Titanic” did in 1998 (when there were 55 million viewers, according to Nielsen), or “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” in 2004 (43.5 million). The audience also has been large when a rich mix of popular movies converges with a popular host.

Something like that happened in 2005, when the slightly cerebral “Sideways” shared best-picture nominations with the sentimental hit “Million Dollar Baby” and the musical biopic “Ray,” on a night overseen by the sharp-tongued comedian Chris Rock. A robust audience of 42 million viewers tuned in, and 12.5 percent were African-Americans, double the number from the previous year.

With likely nominees as diverse as “Avatar” and “Precious” this year, the show’s appeal could be similarly wider. By contrast, in 2008, when Jon Stewart was the host and independent-style films like “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” dominated, as few as 32 million viewers watched.

The prelude to the big night, when Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will share host duties, has been noticeably lacking in tension.

Not so many years ago, phone lines here crackled with complaints about nasty campaigns that raised charges of anti-Semitism against the real-life protagonist of “A Beautiful Mind” or accused the marketers behind “Brokeback Mountain” of soft-pedaling their gay love story. By contrast, this year’s race has been bloodless, presumably because the broad field of nominees for best picture makes it easier for the academy (the entire membership votes in the best-picture category) to do the kinds of things it has always done.

Does the group, as often noted, have a soft spot for Holocaust stories?

If so, no problem. With 10 nominees, there is plenty of room for “Inglourious Basterds,” even if Quentin Tarantino’s take on Nazis and Jews, arch and hyper-violent, might be scratching for the fifth nomination in a conventional year.

Is there almost always a nominee from the British contingent, say, “The Queen,” or “Atonement,” or “Finding Neverland”?

This year looks no different: “An Education,” the coming-of-age story of a London teenager, should find a place in the field of 10.

Must the brilliant independents be honored, ticket sales be damned?

Easily done. With the number of nominees doubled, few fear that critical darlings like “The Hurt Locker” or “A Serious Man” will somehow fall out.

Speaking by phone last month, Tom Sherak, the academy’s president, said he could see nothing but good in honoring the many people who contributed their labor to the 10 pictures, out of 274 eligible films, that will be nominated for best picture. “I’m not just talking about the producers,” Mr. Sherak said. “I mean everyone, from grips to gaffers to everyone else. They’re all going to be able to say, ‘I worked on a film that was nominated.’ ”

Still, the expansion of the best picture field is unlikely to solve problems in the Oscar process. Few are predicting, for instance, that any foreign-language film will make the cut: for Hollywood, the highest form of excellence is mostly achieved in English. (Like animated films and feature-length documentaries, foreign-language films can be nominated for best picture, though they have their own category.)

Neither will the best-picture nominees, in all likelihood, correct perceived inequities in the documentary slot, where the shortlist of 15 contenders (for five slots), chosen by the academy’s documentary branch, bypassed high-profile movies like “Tyson” and “Capitalism: A Love Story,” or the do-it-yourself sensation “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” while recognizing a number of candidates that have been virtually unseen.

Despite some wishful thinking among the makers of those popular documentaries, they are not on the generally accepted lists of best-picture candidates.

(Though a dearth of animated nominees in the best-picture ranks may be corrected by a nomination for “Up.”)

In a running compilation of best-picture contenders maintained by the Web site Movie City News (moviecitynews.com/awards/index_gurus.html), 15 Oscar watchers by mid-December were offering nearly identical renderings of the 10 probable nominees; only the order was different.

“Invictus” made every list; Clint Eastwood directing Morgan Freeman in an inspirational story is classic Oscar fodder. “Nine,” meanwhile, was on 13 of 15, though over Christmas it missed its mark with the audience. Nevertheless a musical from Harvey Weinstein presses all the old buttons. Nobody was including “(500) Days of Summer,” despite its two Golden Globe nominations; when it comes to the Oscars, apparently, romantic comedies still do not play.

Sure, 10 nominees will create some new dilemmas. One can imagine Steven Spielberg trying to choose 10 best-picture nominees, while naming only five candidates for best director. Inevitably, he and the other nominators will be sending five films to the show without their directors, creating just the sort of snub he suffered in 1986, when “The Color Purple” picked up 11 nominations, including best picture, but he was overlooked as its director.

And in a really interesting year, one could argue, the academy has been defined by its snubs. What could be more telling than the decision, in 1970, to honor the old hand John Wayne as best actor for “True Grit,” while bypassing Dustin Hoffman, a countercultural hero for his work in the year’s best picture, “Midnight Cowboy”?

But this year the academy, like George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham, the corporate consultant in “Up in the Air” — a star vehicle that will surely find a place in the field of 10 — has chosen to fly above the turmoil, in a comfortable, if not wholly interesting, place.

Awards Watch: Foreign Language Films (The Hollywood Reporter)

By Scott Roxborough

Who will win this year's foreign-language Oscar race?

That's almost impossible to answer. Partly, it's because other awards groups, like the Golden Globes, provide a poor litmus test given that they use a different voting process from the Oscars and therefore come up with very divergent results -- as, for instance, with "Letters From Iwo Jima," named best foreign-language picture by the Globes when it wasn't even eligible for the Oscars.

Another reason is that the Academy's voting procedure (where voters have to agree to see a quota of entries if they wish to select the nominees) means that a relatively older group chooses the candidates, voting on a pool that is limited to one film per country. The Academy has tried to avoid this group's preference for more mainstream, safer films by having its foreign-language steering committee choose up to three films that combine with the broader group's six choices to create a shortlist of nine, from which the five nominees will be selected -- but that still leaves a process considerably at odds with the major festivals and critics' groups.

Nowhere was this clearer than last year, when Japanese entry "Departures," largely ignored by critics and the festival circuit, beat critical favorites from France ("The Class") and Israel ("Waltz With Bashir").

"Everyone was surprised by the Japanese film winning," says Claudia Landsberger, managing director of Dutch promotion body Holland Film. "It maybe shows that things are shifting, making it even harder to predict."

This year, the race is complicated by the fact that several front-runners were eliminated when they were not selected by the countries where they were made.

Sebastian Silva's domestic servant drama "The Maid," for example, a Grand Jury Prize winner in Sundance and a Golden Globes and Independent Spirit nominee, is nowhere to be found on the list of 65 eligible pictures. Instead, Chile has gone with Miguel Littin's "Dawson Isla 10," a political period piece set in the aftermath of the 1973 coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power.

Oliver Assayas' "Summer Hours" has racked up several honors, including nods from critics' associations in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, but France bumped it in favor of Jacques Audiard's prison drama "A Prophet."

And Spain has again snubbed Pedro Almodovar, whose "Broken Embraces" is a front-runner for the Golden Globes but won't make the Oscar short list -- at least not in the foreign-language category. (It is eligible for the other categories, including best picture, because it was given a U.S. release in 2009.) Spain is pinning its hopes on "The Dancer and the Thief," a heist drama from Fernando Trueba, the Oscar-winning director of "Belle Epoque."

Other award-winning foreign features whose visa won't be stamped Oscar this year include John Woo's action epic "Red Cliff" (China); the bloody vampire romance "Thirst" from director Chan-wook Park (South Korea); Cary Fukunaga's immigrant drama "Sin Nombre" (Honduras) and Anne Fontaine's fashion biopic "Coco Before Chanel."

Of the candidates actually in the running, Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" (Germany's entry despite the director's Austrian passport) and France's "A Prophet" lead the kudos stakes. Both were winners in Cannes, with "Ribbon" taking the Palme d'Or and "Prophet" the Grand Jury prize, and also at the European Film Awards. New York's online reviewers, along with critics in Toronto and Chicago, voted Haneke's black-and-white period piece the best foreign-language title of the year, while Audiard's tough crime story got the nod from the National Board of Review.

Both, of course, are Golden Globes nominees where, according to Bookies.com, "The White Ribbon" is the favorite to win with 2-to-1 odds compared with 6-to-1 for "A Prophet."

But Academy voters are a separate breed. And both pictures are a difficult sell there.

"The Academy has its own tastes, and they're not the same as other festival juries or critics," says Christian Dorsch, head of German Films, which brings together the jury every year to pick Germany's Oscar candidate. " 'Run Lola Run' was a unanimous choice by the (German) jury, but it didn't get nominated, even though it went on to be a boxoffice success in the U.S. It was the same with 'Goodbye Lenin!' which was a Golden Globe nominee but missed out on the Oscars."

To increase their chances, national juries often go with what has worked in the past. For Europe, that means World War II. No period has a better Oscar track record. This year's race has several WWII-set epics, from Norway's "Max Manus" to the Netherlands' entry "Winter in Wartime"; from the Slovakian "Broken Promise" to "Refractaire" (aka "Draft Dodgers") from tiny Luxembourg; and the Czech thriller "Protector."

"Protector" "is tailor-made for Hollywood sensibilities: War, Germans and Jews," is how Czech film academy president Petr Vachler puts it.

"The more epic films show what a country is capable of: the costumes, the sets, an so on," adds Landsberger. "Academy members aren't just interested in the quality of the script or the acting; they judge the entire production."

Many critics have turned up their noses at Italy's entry, Giuseppe Tornatore's "Baaria." But the Sicilian epic, with its grand, romantic view of Italian history, not to mention strong production values, is the kind of European cinema the Academy loves. Torantore also has the advantage of name recognition, thanks to his Oscar win for "Cinema Paradiso" in 1990.

Similar factors could help director Chen Kaige, whose "Forever Enthralled," a biographical drama set in the opulent world of Chinese opera, will evoke a sense of deja vu from fans of his Oscar-nominated "Farewell, My Concubine."

It's hard to say whether fame will be a factor in judging "Mother," Korea's entry. Director Joon-ho Bong is best known stateside for his hit monster movie "The Host." But that film is worlds away from the murder-mystery plot and domestic melodrama of "Mother." Working in "Mother's" favor is a breakout performance by lead Kim Hye-ja.

Reputation isn't the only factor at work. In the past, Academy voters have often overlooked higher-profile titles in favor of films that address important political issues or redress historic wrongs. Claudia Llosa's Berlin Golden Bear winner "The Milk of Sorrow" does both with its allegorical look at the damage wrought by political violence in Peru. Similarly, the plots of Austria's "For a Moment, Freedom" (Iranian political refugees fleeing to Europe), Japan's "Nobody to Watch Over Me" (media sensationalism in the Internet age) and Australia's "Samson and Delilah" (Aborigines fighting poverty and racism) have a ripped-from-the-headlines appeal that might make the difference.

Of course, no foreign-language forecast would be complete without a few dark horses. At first glance, "Police, Adjective" Romania's hope, is an unlikely Oscar candidate. Director Corneliu Porumbiou has made an anti-thriller where semantic discussion takes the place of shoot-outs and car chases. But this intelligent drama has a core of devoted and vocal fans -- not least Roger Ebert, who picked it as one of the best foreign films of 2009.

Xavier Dolan's "I Killed My Mother" is another out-of-left-field candidate that could go the distance. The Canadian drama, tracing the love/hate relationship between a mother and her homosexual son, has been gathering critical momentum since it swept the Directors' Fortnight honors in Cannes last year.

But don't bet on either. Which would be hard, in any case: No matter what odds the bookies give on foreign-language wins elsewhere, they are by and large avoiding the Oscar race.