Oscar Talk: Ep. 100 -- Looking back, from 'Hurt Locker' to 'Zero Dark Thirty'
Also: Best Animated Feature and is it worth it to report on 'whisper campaigns?'
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Welcome to Oscar Talk.
In case you're new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar's stage and we're here to address it all as it unfolds.
It's our 100th episode! With four years of coverage behind us, I went back and listened to our first podcast from August 28, 2009 and took notes on what we discussed. So we chew on that for old time's sake.
One of the things we talked about in that first podcast was "The Hurt Locker," and this year, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal are back in the fray and weathering criticism of "Zero Dark Thirty." We discuss that and coverage of same.
With that in mind, we also discuss the idea of "whisper campaigns" against films this time of year, whether they make an impact and whether it's of any value to cover such things in the media.
And finally, we dig in on the Best Animated Feature Film race and how we see it playing out.
Have a listen to the new podcast below. If the file cuts off for you at any time, try the back-up download link at the bottom of this post. You to subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here. And as always, if you have a question you'd like us to address on a future podcast, send it to OscarTalk@HitFix.com.
"Here I Come" courtesy of Stuart Park.
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2012-2013 OSCAR PREDICTIONS
Best Picture
Best Director
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Original Screenplay
Best Cinematography
Best Costume Design
Best Film Editing
Best Makeup And Hairstyling
Best Original Score
Best Original Song
Best Production Design
Best Sound Editing
Best Sound Mixing
Best Visual Effects
Best Animated Feature Film
Best Documentary Feature
Best Foreign Language Film
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Login or create a HitFix account Login SignupJJ1
December 21, 2012 at 2:29PM EST Reply to CommentI love a nice, spirited argument :)
3 things:
1) I thought Rise of the Guardians was a lovely, lovely animated film; if a little under-reaching narratively. But I really thought it was pleasant. Also, the movie is on track to make maybe $90-100 million in the U.S. and very well overseas.
2) Paranorman. I also thought it was great and I'm glad that it wound up being as close to Coraline with Rottentomatoes as it is. I also prefer Paranorman to Coraline.
3) Perks of Being a Wallflower - still in my top 3 for the year (haven't seen a few of the big hitters). To me, it goes beyond the 'kids in a kids movie' thing. I hope Anne gets to finally see it and hopefully have a different opinion.
Great podcast, as usual. Thank you and Happy Holidays to all!
Kristopher Tapley Problem is, she saw it. And still has that view. I can't help but think she went into it with a certain expectation and came out just the same.
December 21, 2012 at 2:48PM ESTJJ1 Ahhh. 'Tis a shame, then.
December 21, 2012 at 3:31PM ESTweed4504 Put me in the group of people that was completely shocked by how deeply I responded to The Perks of Being A Wallflower. I just watched it the other day with fairly low expectations but it kind of blew me away.
December 21, 2012 at 9:45PM ESTI think to call it just another coming of age movie, as Anne does, is extremely dismissive of what the film does accomplish. Most films about teenagers are awful. Either they're extremely dark and depressing (generally indie films and some are very good) or they are sex comedies. What TPOBAW accomplishes is telling a story that is full of heart, emotion, darkness, and ultimately redemption. It's about teenagers who are smart and creative and openly care about each other. I was rooting for all of them.
The film left me such an admiration for the sensitivity it showed. It is certainly taking place in familiar territory but the execution of the story is as good as those types of films ever have been. I think it's one of the best films about teenagers since Dazed & Confused (although that's obviously a very different film) and ranks easily along with anything John Hughes ever made.
If I have any issue with Anne, it's that I get the vibe so frequently from her that her own opinion is totally shaped by whatever hype is surrounding a film. I feel like she has a hard time separating the two. Or there are cases where she talks about Django Unchained feeling rushed and incomplete, which seems based more on the fact that the post-production had that reputation. Maybe I'm wrong but I frequently think that when she is speaking throughout the season.
JJ1 Wonderfully put, Weed. I agree, there's just something about Perks that struck me deeply, even though I did not have any of the exact situations that occur in the film happen to me.
December 21, 2012 at 9:54PM ESTI just think that the writing, the ease of the relationships (acting), and the evocation of that time and that "time of life" is what I responded to.
DylanS I agree with everything being said on the "Perks" front. There are so many small moments of honesty in the film, so much more sincere than anything you get in a typical coming of age story. Most of these sorts of films treat teenage issues in such a trivial way, this one had a genuine darkness to it, but also a warm center.
December 22, 2012 at 11:49PM ESTHoustonRufus Count me in the Perks of Being a Wallflower fanclub. It's in my top 10 for the year or just outside it. I especially appreciated the sensitive performances of Lerman and Miller.
December 22, 2012 at 11:57PM ESTMarcus
December 21, 2012 at 3:02PM EST Reply to CommentKris,
Have you been asleep the last 10 years? The topic of whether or not the CIA learned anything from torture has been controversial with passionate people on both sides in Congress. People get angry over this issue. It's an important issue policy wise that is why those three Senators are involved. They don't want a false narrative of "torture worked" to form in the public mindset. Kathryn Bigelow is claiming her film is factual, most people will walk away believing what they saw in her film is thus factual. That is VERY dangerous for public policy if it's not true. I don't understand why you don't get that.
This isn't an Oscar smear campaign, to people like John McCain who was tortured for years it's a million times more important than some trophy. It's influencing the public to buy into torture. Argo went about it the right away by saying parts of the film are fiction, Bigelow refuses to do the same so she has to deal with the outrage from congress.
Kristopher Tapley I never once called it an Oscar smear. There's so much going on underneath all this Senator stuff it's kind of amazing.
December 21, 2012 at 3:16PM ESTIt's very telling that Boal chose a clip of Obama saying "AMERICANS don't torture" in the film, by the way. The whole thing is a dense, multi-tiered issue, and the simple-minded settling on the (false) assumption that the film states flat out that "torture worked" is such a shame.
Kristopher Tapley And none of that, by the way, changes the fact that Senators borderline instructing a filmmaker to alter his or her film is beyond the pale.
December 21, 2012 at 3:18PM ESTweed4504 It seems naive to me to just assume that torture didn't lead to any important information. I obviously have no way of knowing for sure, but the film covers ten years of the investigation. Especially during the Bush administration, they were open about using "enhanced interrogation techniques."To say that we never got any information from any of these instances seems like misguided.
December 21, 2012 at 9:51PM ESTI'm not in any way condoning torture, but I also don't think the film is either. Just presenting something and saying it happened isn't the same as condoning it. If torture is a part of the story, which we have every right to suspect it was, then we shouldn't be afraid to be honest about what we've done.
Kristopher Tapley The fear is that there isn't enough balance of that with the fact that we got a LOT of misleading information from torture, and a lot of people died based off that bad intel. But I think the film addresses that. There's an entire scene with Mark Strong that addresses it specifically, in fact.
December 21, 2012 at 10:16PM ESTMarcus Kris,
December 22, 2012 at 10:19AM ESTThe senators aren't asking for the film to be altered just a disclaimer card saying it is a work of fiction either at the beginning or the end of the film, in place of the "based on true accounts" card. Ben Affleck handled this best for Argo than Bigelow/Boal. They want to claim their movie is journalist fact which it's not.
Weed,
These are senators that are on the Senate intelligence committee and read the over 6 Million page reports. What is naive about them exactly? They know more about what happened than you, me or Kathryn Bigelow. And John McCain knows a thing or two about the efficacy of torture haven been tortured for YEARS.
If someone tortures me I'm going to tell them whatever they want to hear which means a lot of bull that isn't true. You get a lot of junk that leads nowhere. If torture worked Osama Bin Laden would have been found during the years it was being used. They learned his location from hard core intelligence work that takes years to get a result but it's more accurate.
weed4504 Marcus,
December 22, 2012 at 12:47PM ESTHave you actually seen the film or is all of this based on just speculation on your part?
Torture is only a fraction of what goes on in the film. As Kris posted, there is a scene where Mark Strong addresses the bad intel they've received. There are people who are deeply frustrated by all the false leads they've gotten. There is also a scene where a character says something along the lines of "Just don't torture me again. If you have a question, I'll answer."
The film shows multiple ways of intelligence gathering on multiple levels of the intelligence food chain. There is torture in the film, but there are multiple times that they address that it wasn't very helpful.
And when I said it was naive to believe torture wasn't effective, I meant it more in a broad way. Obviously I (and you) have no way of knowing if the scene in the film is exactly how it happened or how based in fact it is, but I have little doubt in my mind that there was some torture used at certain points in the investigation. That's really all that the film is saying. They express multiple times that it wasn't much help. There are even moments in the film where it deals with how during the transition from the Bush to the Obama administration there was a new status quo.
It seems to me that most of the people seriously attacking the film seem to be coming at it with their own personal feelings on torture. I am extremely against torture and agree that it's not an effective tool of interrogation. Obviously John McCain is coming at it from a very unique perspective. But that doesn't mean if I hear that torture was one of many tools used at various stages during the hunt for Bin Laden, I'm going to react the way McCain has. After 9/11, America went through some dark patches where the people were willing to allow certain things to happen if it meant possibly preventing another attack. That's where torture and the Patriot Act came from.
It's not something anyone should be proud of, but we're never going to deal with it if we don't talk about it. But the attacks on this film seem strange to me largely because most of them seem to take the torture completely out of context with the rest of the film.
Kristopher Tapley Worth your time: http://moviecitynews.com/2012/12/zero-dark-torture-timeline/
December 22, 2012 at 4:53PM ESTAndrej
December 21, 2012 at 4:00PM EST Reply to CommentPersonally I think that the way Anne talked about Paranorman and how slight and already-seen it is is more appliable to Frankenweenie. I liked the movie alright (though I liked Paranorman way more), but I felt there was nothing narratively or aesthetically new for Tim Burton there. Yes, it's based on one of his previous works, but it's still a story about a shy kid who's befriended/is attached to someone from the underworld. He's been there, done that already a handful of times already. The Corpse Beetleweenie Before Christmas, etc.
I'm not opposing to the idea of him someday winning an Oscar, though, but I'd rather see him win for something that really stands out in his filmography on its own, out of the comfort zone of his usual tropes. Something like Batman, Ed Wood, Big Fish, or even to some extent, Sweeney Todd.
Kristopher Tapley It's not more or less applicable to "Frankenweenie," which has a lot going on in regards to pro-science, a personal touch about genre affinity and, of course, a third act that comes out of nowhere and is bursting with cinematic odes. I don't get the need to pick one over the other so extremely.
December 21, 2012 at 4:04PM ESTAnd picking on Burton's thematic aesthetic is just a tired argument to me. Yes, he's interested in similar themes from film to film. That's called personal canon and it's visible in any number of artists' work. The films you mention at the end there are awash in his "usual tropes."
Andrej I'm aware of personal canon, but given the profile the guy has, it's become a love-or-hate thing for most moviegoers by now. The movies I mentioned share his tropes and all, they're more carefully selected and employed. The dude isn't really a bad storyteller, but he needs some restraint, and to lay off the Burtonsploitation for a while.
December 21, 2012 at 5:09PM ESTDylanS "Yes, he's interested in similar themes from film to film. That's called personal canon and it's visible in any number of artists' work."
December 22, 2012 at 11:53PM EST*Cough* Wes Anderson *Cough*
But yes, with any director, there is going to be thematic overlap.
Matt
December 21, 2012 at 4:17PM EST Reply to CommentGreat show as always!
Mia
December 21, 2012 at 8:02PM EST Reply to CommentThe Senate Intelligence committee is not forcing anyone to change their film but to publicly say that the film's portrayal of torture is INACCURATE and they want the public to know that this film's claims of being truthful are WRONG. This movie is touting itself as journalism, which means it has an obligation to be truthful. If Boal wanted to take liberties then he shouldn't have touted his script as journalism.
It's such a shame that you people value 2 hours of entertainment over the lives of actual people.
Kristopher Tapley Your last sentence nullifies any cogent argument you might have had. It's so aggressively wrong-headed, insulting and irrational that I can't even be bothered. Shame on you, Mia.
December 21, 2012 at 10:18PM ESTMeanwhile, do give us your clearly-more-educated-than-Boal's understanding of these matters.
ann
December 21, 2012 at 8:08PM EST Reply to CommentJournalist Peter Maass in The Atlantic on Zero Dark Thirty:
"I agree that the movie’s depiction of the CIA is regrettably uncritical; let’s remember, the CIA provided false evidence for going to war against Iraq, it tortured prisoners in secret jails and sent others to third countries where they would be tortured (and covered up as much of this as possible), and it is now engaged in a covert program using aerial drones to kill people who have not been convicted of any crime—and in these attacks women and children are often killed. The film fails to consider the notion that the CIA and the intelligence industry as a whole, rather than being solutions to what threatens us, might be part of the problem."
Jane Mayer writing about the film for The New Yorker:
“Zero Dark Thirty,” which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration’s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.’s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces.
Kristopher Tapley Well aware of both. Mayer's piece in particular was ill-considered and full of projections.
December 21, 2012 at 8:13PM ESTKristopher Tapley And the point Maass makes is completely fair. The film is, of course, the result of CIA interviews, which aren't likely to be as introspective as to wonder whether "the CIA might be part of the problem." It shows you what happened and you decide. Period.
December 21, 2012 at 8:15PM ESTKristopher Tapley Worth your time: http://moviecitynews.com/2012/12/zero-dark-torture-timeline/
December 22, 2012 at 4:52PM ESTStefan
December 21, 2012 at 10:26PM EST Reply to CommentYeah, I'm not quite sure why Anne is being so down on ParaNorman. If the Annie Award nominations are any indication, the animators really DO like the film (Norman and Wreck-It Ralph were the only Annie nominees to be nominated for Animated Feature, Directing and Writing). I actually watched the film's bonus features last week and the whole film really did use traditional stop-motion animation techniques with only a couple of CG effects thrown in. The only character effect that was a combination of stop-motion and CG was the "glowing girl" effect and that one even used some hand-drawn animation, too. The 40-minute documentary on the DVD/Blu-Ray is really quite fascinating.
Also, I wouldn't call The Pirates! Band of Misfits a flop. Critics gave it very good reviews when it was first released (I'm surprised they've completely forgotten about it. I only recall one critic's group throwing a bone to it so far) and while it did poorly in North America, it made enough money overseas to turn a solid, if unspectacular profit.
JJ1 In actuality, ParaNorman did not even make back it's budget, while Pirates! exceeded theirs.
December 22, 2012 at 9:09AM ESTAND, Pirates! has a better Metacritic score from Top Critics than ParaNorman. So on paper, you can call Pirates! more successful than paraNorman on both fronts.
Me? I preferred ParaNorman by quite a bit. But I also thought Pirates! had it's quirky charms.
Levi
December 22, 2012 at 2:52AM EST Reply to CommentKris is absolutely correct in regard to Ellison, who has become the Lindsey Lohan of novelists. He's also a total scum-bag. I suspect his outrageous half-wittedness coincides with his inability to afford coke during any/and/or/every given month. Drug addicts should be helped through accessible drug-addiction treatment; Ellison should just be institutionalized because clearly he is a sociopath, much like the characters he idolizes in his books. Who knows what this Travis Bickle of non sequitur rot is capable of conjuring when funds run low. At any rate, he certainly lives up to the title of his first--absurdly!!!--lauded novel.
Levi And before anyone feels the urge to correct me in regard to his name, believe me, I know.
December 22, 2012 at 2:58AM ESTLevi Nevermind, the Megan Ellison name is confusing enough! Okay, Brett Elliot whatever. The guy needs a crack enema, and hopefully Schrader will assist (he should know how by now).
December 22, 2012 at 5:30AM ESTBy the way, the Rickets Ralph faux was so unintentionally funny I almost tossed my chicken wings(though I loved the film).
THE Diego Ortiz
December 22, 2012 at 3:28PM EST Reply to CommentIf Disney can get the Tinkerbell movies qualified and eligible for Oscar nominations then Warner Brothers should do the same for their DC Universe movies.
Joe
December 22, 2012 at 4:50PM EST Reply to CommentThanks for defending ParaNorman Kris!
Steve G
December 23, 2012 at 11:35PM EST Reply to CommentCongrats guys on 100 podcasts! That's a mighty achievement. I've been a keen listener from the start (I read both your blogs, so I figured why not?) and there's probably been only a handful or so that I've missed. Being in Australia, where so many award movies don't open till late, it's a great way to keep up with the unfolding season.
For me, what makes the podcast work so well is your chemistry. Not just your obvious friendship and respect for each other, which shines through even when you argue (!), but the coming together of two people of different gender, generation and background, who have interesting perspectives to share and who can listen to each other.
In August 2009 I wasn't aware of any other regular Oscar-related podcasts, and now there are so many! I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery :) But then I've never found any reason to listen to any others (besides, life's too short).
So enjoy a well-deserved rest over the holidays. Kris, the work you put into these every week, editing and fixing sound glitches and the like, does not go unnoticed or unappreciated. I look forward to hearing more in 2013.
jtagliere
December 25, 2012 at 5:31PM EST Reply to CommentThank God you guys mention the tawdry article written by Kim Masters. I was disturbed reading that article.