VARIETY
Dave McNary
Film Reporter
@Variety_DMcNary
May 16, 2014
Sean Bean is in talks to star opposite Sally Hawkins in the romance “Maudie,” which set to start shooting in Newfoundland in July.
Bean will play a reclusive local fish peddler who hires Maud Dowley — a tiny disabled woman – to be his housekeeper for his small home. The story, set in the 1950s and 1960s, follows their romance as she becomes a well-known folk artist whose paintings hang in The White House.
Mongrel Intl., the new acquisition division of Canadian shingle Mongrel Media, is handling worldwide sales rights to the period romancer at this year’s Cannes Film Market. “Maudie,” a Canadian-Irish co-production, marks the first pickup for Mongrel Intl.
The Cannes Film Festival is angling for a Great kickoff this year.
Festival organizers announced Tuesday that the glitzy Leonardo DiCaprio starrer The Great Gatsby will open the 2013 festival with a splashy premiere on May 15.
The slick reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic literary tale, directed with signature manic flair by Baz Luhrmann and costarring Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan, will bring the Art Deco–inflected roaring '20s to Cannes' famed Croisette.
"We are thrilled to return to a country, place and festival that has always been so close to our hearts, not only because my first film Strictly Ballroom was screened there 21 years ago, but also because F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of the most poignant and beautiful passages of his extraordinary novel just a short distance away at a villa outside Saint-Raphaël."
The Great Gatsby will be screened at Cannes in 3-D—only the second such film in the festival's history, following Pixar's Up in 2009.
Of course, we're still quite a few months away before this year's Cannes Film Festival announces its selection of films that will screen, both in and out of competition. But both Tambay and I agree that this is a no-brainer.
Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave for certain, will make its premiere at this year's festival. So how can we be so confident? Well there are several factors in its favor.
First of all, it's an independently made, much talked about and anticipated, high profile film with major stars, about a controversial subject matter made by an equally controversial major director. That's the kind of movie they live for at Cannes.
Second, as I just alluded to, it's got star power: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alfre Woodward, Ruth Negga, Quvenzhane Wallis and Dwight Henry among others. And there's nothing they love more at Cannes than to have movie stars walking up those famous red carpeted steps to the Grande Auditorium on The Palais, for the movie's premiere, with the world's paparazzi out in full force.
And it will be the second trip in a row for both Wallis and Henry, who were at Cannes last year for Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Canada and Norway pre buy Ripper Street ahead of MIPCOM 2012
Click to tweet: @BBCWpress announce Ripper Street launch with the 3 lead actors @mipcom 8 Oct plus 2 new pre sales to Canada & Norway http://bbc.in/Qll8tU
BBC Worldwide will be hosting the stars of the brilliant new crime drama Ripper Street at MIPCOM 2012 as Matthew Macfadyen (Pride and Prejudice, Spooks), Jerome Flynn (Game of Thrones) and Adam Rothenberg (Alcatraz) fly down to Cannes to launch the series at a special event on 8th October. Ahead of MIPCOM, BBC Worldwide is pleased to announce two more pre-sales of the title with Canada’s SPACE and NRK in Norway picking up the 8-part series.
IMAGES FROM RIPPER STREET TUMBLER
http://ripperstreet.tumblr.com/
Steve Macallister, President & Managing Director for BBC Worldwide Sales & Distribution, says: “Acclaimed writers, superb acting talent and the highest of production values are all evident in our rich and varied MIPCOM drama slate. With such shows as Ripper Street and The Paradise, set in the Victorian era; WW2 drama Spies of Warsaw; Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake set in modern day New Zealand and the futuristic Doctor Who (S7) we can offer truly unrivalled storytelling spanning three centuries and beyond.”
Ripper Street, written by Richard Warlow (Waking the Dead, Mistresses) and produced by Tiger Aspect Productions and Lookout Point for the BBC, has already pre-sold to Network Ten in Australia and is a co production with BBC AMERICA. The drama is set in and around Whitechapel in London’s East End in 1889, during the aftermath of the Jack the Ripper murders. The action centres on the notorious H Division, which is charged with keeping order in the chaotic dark streets of London.
Actor Ewan McGregor, filmmaker Alexander Payne and fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier will help pick the winner of the Cannes Film Festival's top prize.
The trio will join Italian filmmaker and jury chair Nanni Moretti on the feature film jury that will choose the winner of the festival's Palme d'Or from this year's 22 competing entries.
Both McGregor and Payne are coming off recent film successes: the Scottish actor for his touching performance in the romantic comedy and father-son drama Beginners and the American director for his Oscar-winning family drama The Descendants.
Welcome to the last slow stretch of the Oscar season. Over the next few weeks, a couple of movies will open with the hope of landing acting or writing nominations, but mostly they just want your money (For Your Consideration: The Thing?). The year’s remaining big guns won’t start to arrive until mid-November, and here’s a hunch, based partly on what I’ve seen, partly on instinct, and partly on hope: We’re looking at a year without an early frontrunner.
By which I mean that the more than two dozen critics’ groups that announce their year-end prizes in a furiously compressed frenzy of semi-futile self-assertion may not become one big hive mind the way they did in 2009 with The Hurt Locker or last year with The Social Network. It’s possible that The Descendants, the black-and-white silent sensation The Artist, or one of the still-unscreened contenders — War Horse? The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? — could turn into The Monolith, but otherwise, December could bring a scattered and chaotic field. Here’s hoping.
So while we wait, perhaps it’s time to turn to the Academy itself. As Oscar-watchers, we all root for excellence to be rewarded. Sometimes that doesn’t happen because of collective bad taste, or sentimentality, or blind spots, or irrational exuberance, but it’s particularly galling when it doesn’t happen because the Academy’s own rules prevent it.
Three examples: The best foreign film quagmire.
I hate to beat up on the Academy’s foreign-film selection system because in recent years, some intelligent and helpful reforms have actually been instituted. Nobody can say they’re not trying. Unfortunately, the Oscars still obstruct, rather than encourage, the honoring of the best of world cinema. Briefly (at least, as briefly as possible given the sewn-together-Frankenstein-monster nature of the process), here’s how it works. Every country can submit one film for consideration. (This year, 63 countries did.) Those movies are then screened and sifted by volunteer Academy members, who — until a few years ago — would then vote to select five nominees.
The problem was that members who can attend enough screenings to vote tend to be L.A.-based retirees with epic amounts of free time. And their creaky taste tilts heavily toward dramas about the importance of the Holocaust and fables about little orphan boys whose only friend is the village mule. Formally challenging or artistically adventurous movies either anger them or knock them cold faster than a hit of Propofol.
Listen, I’m sure it’s hard work. I took a look at some of this year’s titles — not the movies, just the titles — and honestly, I’d have an easier time sitting through Dolphin Tale 2: Corpse in the Tuna Net. Imagine an art-house marquee that looks like this:
The Rumbling of the Stones Breathing The Woman in the Septic Tank The Colors of the Mountain The Prince and the Pagoda Boy Montevideo, God Bless You!
Those are real 2011 submissions. Oscar voters, God bless you for your brave efforts.
Anyway. A few years ago, the system was overhauled. The volunteers would now pick nine movies, a list that would be narrowed to five by a smaller group of voters with pulses more diverse and contemporary taste.
This helped, but not enough: In 2008, for instance, the grumpy-old-men demographic of the Academy was still able to prevent the year’s two most acclaimed foreign films, Persepolis and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, from even reaching the final nine. So in a further tweak, volunteers now select six movies, a separate committee can add three really good titles that were inexplicably omitted, and still another set of voters then selects the five nominees from those nine.
But what lingers is the original sin: Unlike any other Academy Award, the foreign-film system outsources Oscar judgment to other countries — and the one-submission-per-nation rule makes for a Petri dish of infighting, political resentments, and under-the-table deals. Who are each country’s selectors, how are they chosen, and what guards against favoritism? Who the hell knows? Why is it that Pedro Almodóvar, possibly the most beloved living European director among U.S. moviegoers, can’t compete for best foreign-language film with his elegantly nightmarish new movie The Skin I Live In — just as his last film, Broken Embraces, was ineligible? Because Spain didn’t pick him, that’s why.
There’s some merit to the submission rules, which at least insure that an extraordinary range of countries gets to run one movie past the votership each year. The Academy doesn’t need to overrule those selections. But why not amplify them with, say, half a dozen well-received foreign films that opened here during the year or won major film festival prizes but weren’t submitted by their country of origin? (Perhaps they didn’t even have a country of origin — among other benefits, this reform would open the door to international co-productions.) Just add them to the 63 submissions and let them take their chances.
A rewrite of the rules could also help filmmakers like Joshua Marston, the American journalist-turned-director whose first feature, Maria Full of Grace, won a 2004 best actress nomination. Maria was submitted by Columbia that year, but the foreign-language committee rejected it as insufficiently Columbian. This year, Marston made his second movie, The Forgiveness of Blood, a Berlin Film Festival prizewinner that was cowritten with an Albanian screenwriter and shot in Albania with a primarily Albanian cast and crew. Albania submitted the film, and the Academy disqualified it.
In a world in which the likes of the Nobel Prize committee has taken to scolding American artists for being too insular, a filmmaker like Marston whose passions routinely take him beyond the boundaries of his own country and language should be encouraged by the Academy, not excluded. And, although I haven’t seen his movie, “insufficiently Albanian” strikes me as maybe the worst reason in history for a film not to be eligible for an Oscar.
The impending video-on-demand crisis.
Lars Von Trier’s idiosyncratic end-of-the-world drama Melancholia doesn’t open in theaters until November 11, but if you have a good cable-TV system, you can see it right now, since it debuted on IFC's on-demand channel a couple of weeks ago. The Academy has strict rules that no movie shown on television before its theatrical release will be eligible for Oscars, so I was startled when it showed up on Time Warner Cable, since I assumed its distributor Magnolia would be mounting a campaign for the extraordinary performance of Kirsten Dunst, which won the best actress prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. When I asked the film’s publicist, I learned that Dunst will indeed get her campaign, because the movie secured its eligibility by booking an unannounced and unadvertised run on a single screen in Los Angeles earlier this year.
Which is great. Melancholia should be eligible, because it isn’t in any sense a made-for-TV movie (for one thing, unlike, say, HBO or Sundance Channel movies, VOD films can’t compete for Emmys). Nevertheless, it is undeniably on TV. Video-on-demand is an increasingly important revenue stream for foreign, independent and art-house movies, and films shouldn’t have to sacrifice their Oscar chances because moviegoing habits are evolving. I know some Academy members who feel strongly that their mission is to preserve the primacy of theatrical distribution. They’re wrong. Their mission is to reward the year’s best movies, and to respond with a flexibility that keeps pace with the way those movies are seen. With its one-week booking, Melancholia followed the letter, if not the spirit, of the law. But maybe both the spirit and the letter need reexamining.
The Academy should reconsider the necessity of forcing distributors into virtually invisible bookings in order to satisfy a requirement that was created before VOD even existed. Of course, the Academy could also respond by cracking down and saying that VOD films will all be ineligible for awards. But that kind of unwelcome tantrum would ultimately hurt the Oscars more than the movies.
An indefensible restriction for acting nominees.
If your four favorite lead performances of 2011 are Michael Fassbender as Rochester in Jane Eyre, Michael Fassbender as Magneto in X-Men: First Class, Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method, and Michael Fassbender as a very unhappy, very naked man in Shame, too bad. Although the same actor can be nominated in both lead and supporting categories (it’s happened about a dozen times, most recently for Cate Blanchett in 2007), the Academy will not allow an actor to be nominated for more than one performance within the same category.
There’s not much to say about this rule other than that it’s so dumb that no other branch of the Academy shares the policy. Steven Soderbergh famously competed against himself for best director in 2000; he lost for Erin Brockovich and won for Traffic. John Williams and Thomas Newman are among the many composers who have gone up against themselves, and so have cinematographer Roger Deakins and costume designers Sandy Powell and Ngila Dickson. And this year, screenwriter Steven Zaillian could find himself twice nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay (for Moneyball and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), as could John Logan (for Hugo and Coriolanus).
A majority of the Academy clearly understands that there’s nothing wrong with a great year being reflected in a double nomination — so why not for actors? Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Carey Mulligan, Christopher Plummer, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Judi Dench are among the performers who’d conceivably be eligible to double- or even triple-dip this year; it’s unlikely that it would happen for any of them, which is exactly the reason to change the rule now rather than wait until it causes a real injustice. Actually, that’s already happened. In 1986, Dennis Hopper received his only acting Oscar nomination, for the basketball film Hoosiers. That achievement instantly disqualified all the votes he got for his other, rather more notable supporting performance that year — in Blue Velvet.
And now, fellow obsessives, I’d like to hear from you. You can follow me on Twitter and publicly or privately message me there with any questions or topics you’d like addressed in a future Oscarmetrics column. Don’t be shy!
