The Oscars are a bore this year, but luckily Mr. Skin has come through with a fur-tastic slate of Peeper’s Choice nominudes for our 13th Annual Anatomy Awards ! The Anatomy Awards celebrate the year’s finest achievements in celebrity skin, and this year we’ve got some exceptional nominudes in the areas of Best Nudecomer and Best Nude Debut , as well as some stiff compeTITion for Best Breasts and Best TV Show . We’ll be opening the envelope to announce our winners on February 22, so for the next month we’re asking YOU to open your envelope and VOTE for your Peeper’s Choice in all our top categories. Every vote enters you to win a MacBook Air and other great prizes, so go check out the nominated nudes for FREE on our Anatomy Awards page , and check out the full list of nominudes after the jump!
As we trudge into the fourth week of 2012 — one of those all-too-rare years that influenced a movie title — a question arises: What’s the best film named after a year? The worst? Because it went so well the last time we tried something like this , let’s give it another shot: 16. Year One 15. 10,000 BC 14. 1492: Conquest of Paradise 13. One Million Years B.C. 12. One Million B.C. 11. 1969 10. 2010: The Year We Make Contact 9. 1941 8. 1911 7. 1776 6. Nineteen Eighty-Four 5. 1900 4. 1991: The Year Punk Broke 3. 2012 2. 2046 1. 2001: A Space Odyssey Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
And nominations will be announced on Feb. 25, the day before the Oscars. I’ll let Dan Kois, the foremost Golden Raspberry Award expert in the business, explain the significance: “At long last, after 32 years, the Razzies will take place on the day they always should have: April 1, 35 days after the Oscars and 92 days after the last movie eligible for a Razzie was released. CHECK AND MATE, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences!” Orrr not. Anyway, this happened. [ Grantland ]
A day after collapsing at Sundance — prompting his swift hospitalization and his publicist’s even swifter refutation of alcohol and drug speculation — Tracy Morgan has just tweeted that he’s recovering nicely. It was just that, well… Here, he can explain. For the record, “kryptonite” is clearly a euphemism for Melissa Leo, with whom Morgan was photographed (above, with screenwriter Ron Nyswaner) at a Creative Coalition event shortly before his incident. Must… retrieve… inhaler… Superman ran into a little kryptonite. The high altitude in Utah shook up this kid from Brooklyn. Mon Jan 23 17:43:58 via TweetDeck Tracy Morgan RealTracyMorgan Thank U 2 the hospital staff. Back at work 2morrow shooting 30 Rock. Holla at me! Mon Jan 23 17:45:34 via TweetDeck Tracy Morgan RealTracyMorgan [Photo: Getty Images]
This is just terrible, terrible news: Former United Artists boss, October Films cofounder and recent appointee as S.F. Film Society executive director Bingham Ray has passed away following a series of strokes suffered while attending the Sundance Film Festival — an event from which his name and influence have been inseparable for more than two decades. He was 57. “It is with great sadness that the Sundance Institute acknowledges the passing of Bingham Ray, cherished independent film executive and most recently Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society,” read a release just received at Movieline HQ. “On behalf of the independent film community here in Park City for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and elsewhere, we offer our support and condolences to his family. Bingham’s many contributions to this community and business are indelible, and his legacy will not be soon forgotten.” No kidding. Ray commenced his film career in 1981 as a manager and programmer at New York’s defunct Bleecker Street Cinema, co-founding October Films a decade later with Jeff Lipsky. Initially set up shop for the purpose of distributing Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet , October eventually distributed such renowned ’90s indies as Secrets and Lies , Breaking the Waves , Lost Highway , The Apostle and Ruby in Paradise , the 1993 Sundance Grand Jury Winner that further reinforced the festival as one of the industry’s foremost movie markets. The company’s DNA survives today Focus Features, which evolved from a series of mergers between Universal, Vivendi, and other distributors in the late ’90s/early ’00s. Ray had since occupied top spots at United Artists (where he’d helped shepherd Bowling to Columbine No Man’s Land to Oscar wins) and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment before veering into consulting and teaching, ultimately taking over the SFFS last year after its executive director Graham Leggat succumbed to cancer. He had also worked recently as an advisor to digital distributor SnagFilms, the Film Society at Lincoln Center (which recently opened its first-run Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center) and as a professor at New York University. Late last week in Park City, word of Ray’s condition spread quickly. He was first hospitalized Thursday in Provo, Utah; on Friday, one of his daughters told TheWrap and Ray had suffered a second, “more serious” stroke. The festival announced his passing just after noon local time. Bingham Ray is survived by his wife, Nancy, son Nick, daughters Annabel and Becca, and sisters Susan Clair and Deb Pope. He was one of the true good guys — supportive, insightful, broad-minded, funny and utterly devoted to films and the artists who made them. He will be mourned, missed, cherished and remembered for a long time to come. R.I.P., Bing. [Photo: Getty Images]
If you’ve grown tired of the gimmickry and diminishing quality of “found footage” horror, Sundance’s Midnight program just delivered the cure: V/H/S , an anthology film comprised of shorts by six up-and-coming horror/indie filmmakers, each working within the parameter that their story be told via found media. The Devil Inside this ain’t; V/H/S is fresh and pulse-quickening to the end, one of the best discoveries of this year’s fest. Conceived by producer Brad Miska, V/H/S culls some of the most promising genre talent around for writing and directing duties: Ti West ( House of the Devil, Innkeepers ), Adam Wingard ( A Horrible Way to Die ), Joe Swanberg ( LOL ), David Bruckner ( The Signal ), Glenn McQuaid ( I Sell the Dead ), and filmmaking collective Radio Silence. Their six disparate segments are tied together thusly (though you won’t want to go in knowing much more about it than this): Four prankster punks are promised a big payday to break into a house and steal a VHS tape, but once they get there they find an empty house, a body, and a stack of bizarre tapes to sift through. As they pop in each cassette in search of The Tape, described in vague “you’ll know it when you see it” terms, we see what they see — a collection of found recordings documenting strange, grisly happenings. The segments unfold as follows (SPOILER ALERT: If you want to know nothing going in, close your eyes and skip to the next paragraph): Wingard’s Tape 56 , Bruckner’s Amateur Night , West’s Second Honeymoon , McQuaid’s Tuesday the 17th , Swanberg’s The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger , and Radio Silence’s 10/31/98 . While I won’t spoil the details (or even the premises) of these shorts, suffice to say V/H/S serves as a stellar showcase for its stable of writers and directors, some of whom also worked on each others’ selections. (Swanberg and Wingard, for example, each direct a short and act in another.) What’s interesting to note is that, as the directors explained late Sunday night following their raucous midnight premiere, none had any idea what the others were planning when they were all making their films. So when certain trends pop up — say, sex-hungry twenty-something young men undone by their own pervy impulses, a popular theme — it’s by coincidence. The film itself is an experiment in found-footage filmmaking, a trend much more profitable than it is respected, and yet these are the guys who aren’t cashing in on their neophyte horror cache by signing on to studio-backed horror sequels and remakes and trend-catchers. So while it’s a method commonly associated with the Paranormal Activity phenomenon, each director here manages to do something different with the form that defies convention while winking at the horror faithful. Some segments evoke classic slasher horror, others the supernatural thriller, and even the indie relationship drama, but they all exploit the medium as a storytelling aide, tweaking horror cliches with unexpected, and effective results. “On a large derivative scale, [found footage] is not appealing,” said West during the film’s Q&A, explaining what appealed to him about experimenting with an otherwise tired methodology like this. Thankfully — impressively, miraculously! — these folks have figured out a way to make the gimmick fresh again, and in wildly different but inventive ways. In a time when the found footage train shows no immediate sign of stopping, at least there’s proof that it can be done in new ways, and well. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
I don’t have a clue who this woman(?) is, but she must have been the most beautiful girl at the AVN Awards over the weekend. I should probably clarify that statement, she’s the most beautiful girl from her chin to her bellybutton. I think that clears it up. Anyhow, here she is with some of the other classy broads from the award show. Enjoy.
“Aziz [Ansari], barely audible over the jabbering crowd and telling jokes skewering everything from the gay hookup app Grindr to the sanctity of marriage, is bombing terribly. He’s visibly annoyed. All of a sudden, Cuba Gooding Jr. bum-rushes the stage out of nowhere, snatches Aziz’s microphone, and yells, ‘Everybody, shut the FUCK up! Have some respect for the black men onstage.’ Aziz —who is Indian— looks baffled, and when Cuba exits, remarks, ‘Y’all would be paying more attention if we were showing Boat Trip up here!’ Aziz: 1, Cuba: 0.” [ Sundance Channel / Daily Beast ]
Let’s not belabor this: The Artist claimed Best Picture at Saturday’s Producers Guild Awards, all but affirming its eventual Best Picture win at the Academy Awards. Other winners included The Adventures of Tintin in the animated category and Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest in docs. Congrats to all! Is it March yet? The winner of the PGA’s top award has gone on to repeat at the Oscars nearly 75 percent of the time over the last two decades, most recently doing so last year following The King’s Speech’s surprising victory over The Social Network . The Weinstein Company never looked back in 2011, and it won’t look back now. Next stop: Tuesday’s Oscar nominations, and at this point for Michel Hazanavicius’s silent film, it’s not a matter of “if” it will earn recognition, but “how much?” Check back tomorrow for my predictions — or just move on to fantasy baseball or something. It’s going to be a long month ahead. [ PGA ]
If Kim Novak sincerely thought that hearing music cues from Vertigo in The Artist was tantamount to artistic “rape,” then wait until she gets a look at the expropriation binge underway at Press Play . The site, known for its terrific video essays on all things film, is in the waning hours of a ” Vertigo ed” contest that has found Bernard Herrmann’s celebrated “Scene D’Amour” theme applied to everything from Star Wars to Freddy Got Fingered to — praise God — Jackass 2 . Check out the latter, priceless, obviously NSFW clip below, and find dozens more (and/or submit your own) videos over at Press Play. Happy Friday! You were done working for the most part anyway, right?
