Welcome to week six of Oscar Index , your regular reading of buzz, hype, speculation and crippling myopia in and around the 2011-12 awards beat. This installment brings some rather momentous determinations from the wonks at Movieline’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics — let’s get right to them!
This just in: Lindsay Lohan was handcuffed in court this morning and escorted back to jail after a judge revoked the actress’s probation for failing to meet her community service requirements.
When Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson presented some of the first footage from their epic mo-cap collaboration The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn to this summer’s Comic-Con audience, they also shared the film’s “first motion-capture test” — a cute video in which Jackson nervously auditions for the role of Captain Haddock with a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand. Now, the audition video is available for everyone to see via a new Tintin featurette.
Kevin Smith was tickled when his Red State star Melissa Leo won the Oscar last year, as he tells it in Movieline’s exclusive behind the scenes featurette from this week’s DVD and Blu-ray release of the provocative horror film. In the clip, meet Leo’s Sarah Cooper, the steely and devoted daughter of Red State ‘s fire and brimstone villain Pastor Abin Cooper, as described in Leo’s own words.
My complicated muddle of feelings toward the Paranormal Activity franchise are directly related to my acute personal susceptibility to jump scares. They work on me embarrassingly well. A film that’s as reliant on them on Paranormal Activity 3 , the series’ latest episode, can have me as twitchy as an meth addict out of agonized anticipation of the inevitable “boo.”
Welcome back to week five of Movieline’s 2011-12 Oscar Index — week five! Already! We’re entering the second month of this sucker, and our scientists and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics remain hard at work uncovering new hints and implications every passing day. Well, not every passing day. OK, like, maybe a couple times a week. What can I tell you? It’s still early! Let’s have a glimpse at the latest — if light — movement this week.
It’s apparent that there are certain Saturday Night Live hosts whom the show really has no idea how to use — Elton John is a good example from earlier this season. Then there’s the strange case of Ed Helms: For whatever reason, the show decided to pretty much ignore the fact that Helms was host altogether.
In a curious but pleasant development, a latecomer to the Cannes competition lineup, announced just a week before the festival began, has suddenly become a possible front-runner for the Palme d’Or. Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, a silent film shot in Hollywood in black-and-white, screened this morning, and its sly charms seemed to win over a sizable portion of the audience — including me.