As the big night fast approaches, it’s time for another of Movieline’s virtual awards roundtables. Our Oscar nominees this time are up for Best Costume Design. They are (in alphabetical order):
A new batch of Battleship stills show singer-turned-actress Rihanna in Navy gear manning all manner of combat machinery as the resident weapons specialist in Taylor Kitsch ‘s crew. But can her feature debut in Peter Berg’s summer blockbuster counteract the criticism she’s getting from reuniting, at least professionally, with Chris Brown? The stills (below, via Universal and Digital Spy ) hit the web at a conspicuous time for Rihanna, who was assaulted in 2009 by then-boyfriend Brown. After a three-year split, during which time Brown was sentenced to domestic violence counseling and community service and ordered to stay away from Rihanna by restraining order, the two collaborated on a pair of songs released this week. According to producer The-Dream, who oversaw the “Birthday Cake” remix featuring Brown, the move was Rihanna’s idea. “The true thing really is to forgive,” he explained to Billboard Magazine . “And … you want to believe in people.” Some celeb-watchers take the reunion as more than just a professional expression of forgiveness. “The message couldn’t have been clearer to the world,” writes Hollywood Life’s Bonnie Fuller. “We’re a couple again and we’re saying it in the strongest way that we know how — through our music.” That seems like a bit of a stretch, but whatever the relationship, many fans who supported Rihanna as she bounced back from the public fallout of the 2009 incident are understandably upset that the 24-year-old would unite on any front with her former attacker. Enter Battleship . Over a year after the assault, Rihanna was cast as Petty Officer Raikes in Universal’s naval actioner. She’d been looking to break into film already, telling MTV in 2008 that she was looking “seriously” into making her acting debut. Battleship , then, provided a prime opportunity; as Raikes, Rihanna gets to play a strong, serious-minded character involved directly in action sequences whom she’s described as “one of the guys” — as opposed to the film’s eye candy, as embodied in Brooklyn Decker as Kitsch’s love interest. That character quality alone may have been reason enough to break into a side career in acting with Battleship , but it also allows Rihanna to project an image of strength and resilience to her fans. At the helm of a gunboat or wielding assault rifles, she is seen in a position of control and dominance, the would-be executor of violence (against aliens, in this case) instead of a victim. Of course, that’s not to say Battleship will erase the image of Rihanna, battered and bruised, from our collective memories. It certainly shouldn’t, in the least. And it’s not quite a pointed personal statement that, say, a G.I. Jane or a Brave One -styled vigilante pic might be; it’s a subtle move that simultaneously eases first-time actor Rihanna into the movies in a supporting role with more seasoned actors around to do the heavy lifting. Conspicuous as it is that new Rihanna-holding-guns images were released into the world around the same time as her Chris Brown collaborations (joining a few more that were previously released by Universal), it hints at an effort to protect her image from the backlash that any Brown-related association invites. But Battleship has yet to be seen, and Rihanna, who hasn’t yet directly addressed the Brown collaborations, may yet still win back or further alienate her following in the weeks to come.
As the Academy and its guests gather Sunday to enthusiastically slap congratulatory-calloused backs at the Oscars, an altogether different condition will overtake multiplexes nationwide. There, audiences will be confronted by a one-joke hippie comedy with Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston ( Wanderlust ), an Amanda Seyfried thriller withheld from critics before opening day ( Gone ), the Navy SEAL recruitment effort ( Act of Valor ), and frequent Oscar week performer Tyler Perry, departing from his matriarch Madea for a change ( Good Deeds ). Such a weak field is hardly an anomaly; the first months on the calendar historically are the wasteland of the release schedule, sitting in sharp contrast to the Academy’s annual celebration of cinematic “greatness.” A curious paradox is normally in play — at the time Hollywood crows about its best, it often serves up some of its worst. To gauge this phenomenon — and display the movie industry’s staggering self-unawareness — here is a look back at what has been foisted on the public during the last 20 years of Academy Awards weekends:
The Oscars are Sunday, and while we hope and pray for an on-air nip slip, we are secure in the knowledge that several of the babes who will be taking the stage have a history of nudity. Michelle Williams , Glenn Close , and Rooney Mara are battling it out for Best Actress, while skinstresses like Jessica Chastain and Janet McTeer aim to take home Best Supporting actress Oscar gold. So dig into our Top 10 2012 Oscar Babes Who’ve Been Naked… where everyone’s a winner! Especially your wiener.
Another Oscars promo video, another vain attempt to show some personality and pep by the Academy; this time around the Oscars have tapped Mike Myers to do an uppity butler type straight out of the discards of the Austin Powers supporting character brainstorming boards, who teaches Oscar winner Kevin Kline the proper way to hold his statuette. If this kind of humor tickles you silly and makes you set your TV calendar for Sunday, then hold on to your pants and chill a few cans of Ensure! We are in for a riot , people. I mean, what says hilarious and relevant more than KEVIN KLINE and MIKE MYERS?? Sigh. It’s not even funny to joke about how unfunny these bits are. I refuse to believe this is really the best that Funny or Die could do with the Oscars. Given the choice, I vote “Die.” Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The latest in a series : “The Oscars have become the golden fig leaves that the industry wears to pretend it’s as committed to being in the quality business as it was in the past.” [ NYT ]
Everybody knows that George Clooney broke out on The Facts of Life in the mid-’80s. But in the quarter-century before the once and possibly future Oscar-winner and all-around Hollywood royal’s media profile encompassed morning-show house tours and magazine covers from Esquire to Vanity Fair , where was the 25-year-old Clooney developing his public persona? Where else? Tiger Beat ! Just in time for this week’s Oscar build-up, the indispensable film-culture resource Looker points us to the heartthrob repository and its revelatory Clooney feature from February 1986. Parts of it sound uncannily familiar — the Descendants star’s self-effacing charm (“I ran outside in my rabbit suit shouting, ‘What’s happening?’ and I was known as Chicken Little for a long time!”), bachelor swagger (“I’m really bad at a lasting relationship — you can tell because I’ve never had one!”) and bracing humility (“I don’t think I dislike anything about this business except for the fact tat there are so many actors out of work!”) all come through loud and clear. But other parts of it of it are like, “Say whaaaa?” To wit: George Clooney has (or had, anyway) a temper! And a very large car: “The problem is that, especially in this business, you’re always on the edge, everything is so temporary. Sometimes, if I’m driving my car and the guy in front of me wants to turn left when he wasn’t signaling for a turn, I just want to ram into him! I go nuts, crazy! I have this big Oldsmobile that could drive over everything and that’s what I feel like doing. I have this bumper sticker on my car because I broke the dashboard with my fist: ‘Don’t worry about things you don’t have control over.'” Priceless . And this bit about “time for myself”: “I love my new apartment and being there just listening to music or studying my script.” Your move, Brad Pitt . [ Looker ]
Mmmm mmm mmm Dania is looking gooder than a muhfugga! But where did she get this dude from? He’s dressed like a bum, did they go to the same event??? Something tells us that this guy is also Latino. What do you guys think? We’re ready to play her some “Marvin’s Room.” SplashNews More On Bossip! Breezy And His Boo Thang Hit The Beach… Do You Believe She’s Not Threatened By His RihRih Reunion? Happy Birthday, MJ! A Gallery Of Iconic Michael Jordan Images Through The Years From Baller To Hole-y Jeans Lover You’re Fired!: Check Out The Wild Card Stars On This Season’s “Celebrity Apprentice” We Saw The Signs: Couples We Knew Were Doomed To Fail Before Even They Did
New to the distribution arena, Alamo Drafthouse co-founder Tim League became enamored of a small Belgian crime drama called Bullhead at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Less than a year later, he and his Drafthouse Films operation have an Oscar contender on their hands. Not too shabby for a company younger than the Obama administration. Bullhead , from first-time feature director Michaël R. Roskam, centers on a contemptuous, troubled cattle farmer who is dragged into Belgium’s bovine hormone mafia underworld. Lead actor Matthias Schoenaerts (pictured above) packed on 60 pounds of muscle for the complex, acclaimed role. The film made such an impression at Cannes that League lobbied “fiercely” to include it in the lineup for his venue’s annual Fantastic Fest, despite its wide perception among viewers and industry alike as a sci-fi/horror/Asian genre showcase. “We had to really convince them to show it at the festival,” League told Movieline in a recent interview. “And it was after the festival and the great response that it had from our audience that we decided we wanted to make an offer on it for the label.” “The label,” of course, is Drafthouse Films, a venture that grew out of the festival, which itself had been an evolution from programming the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema — the Austin-based theater chain that League co-founded with his wife, Karrie, in 1997. The impresario saw distribution as a natural next step, commencing in 2010 with director Chris Morris’s suicide-bomber satire Four Lions . “We realized that a lot of these films really didn’t have an opportunity to find a great home for U.S. distribution,” League said. “So we thought we were building an audience with the festival and we might as well build a label to walk alongside it with the same sensibilities.” (Incidentally, Four Lions had closed Austin’s flagship film fest, South by Southwest, six months earlier.) For its second release, the distributor gave Bullhead a U.S. home and entered the Foreign-Language Oscar race in one fell swoop. “We really loved Bullhead , and there was just a strange set of circumstances that fell into place where we expressed our interest, and before we had the contract done it was Belgium’s official entry to the Academy Awards, which kick-started the process,” League said. “But even still, we knew we were a long shot. It’s been wild to see it fall into place.” The Drafthouse team was at Sundance last month when the good news came through. “We were watching the announcement live on television,” League said. “And we got the nomination, and we celebrated and had a glass of champagne, then everybody just hunkered down at their computers for about five hours and set a lot of wheels in motion. We had to put the trailer together, the poster together, the ad campaign. We had to hire a bunch of folks to help us out with the process.” Those hires were made from preparations the team had already done for the film’s distribution, but the nomination sped up the process. Drafthouse Films plans to release six films a year theatrically and on VOD, but it isn’t following a set model each time. It has three films planned for this year so far: Bullhead , the subversive comedy Clown and SXSW favorite The FP . Meanwhile, League admits Bullhead is an underdog at the Oscars — particularly against A Separation , the Golden Globe-winning Iranian film that’s also up for best screenplay. Nevertheless, he says, it’s a category that has seen upsets and surprises. The Drafthouse team will be in Los Angeles to support the film on Feb. 26, throwing a Bullhead party on Oscar night. “Win or lose, we’re super happy to be a part of it,” League said. Bullhead will be released in New York, Los Angeles and Austin on Feb. 17, with further expansion to come ahead of the Oscars.
Breaking Sports Video
