Oscar countdown.

A catch-all entry, to be updated throughout the week so as to avoid clogging the front page here with Oscar gunk. But first, the good stuff: A massive "Oscar Symposium" at the Film Experience and an ongoing exchange between Dennis Cozzalio and That Little Round-Headed Boy.

More predictions: Film Threat, Slant and IFC News.

Updated through 2/25.

"For many in the general public, the Oscar season is the first time they have even heard of Babel, Notes on a Scandal and Pan's Labyrinth, and for most it is the one time of the year movies become part of the everyday vernacular," writes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly. "In short, even the worst Oscars ever are better than no Oscars at all."

Jay A Fernandez hosts a screenwriters roundtable with Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine), Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth), Peter Morgan (The Queen) and Iris Yamashita (Letters From Iwo Jima).

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• Charles McNulty on what British actors have that American actors don't, "generally speaking."

• Mary McNamara on this year's round of actresses and on the campaigns.

• Richard Cromelin meets Mark Wahlberg.

• Rachel Abramowitz meets Stephen Frears.

• Sheigh Crabtree on the cinematography race.

• Karen Wada meets the subject of Nathaniel Kahn's nominated documentary short, Two Hands: The Leon Fleisher Story.

• Susan King tours From Amarcord to Z: Posters From Fifty Years of Foreign Language Film Award Winners, an exhibition open at the Academy through April 15.

"The nominees for best foreign-language film are even more politically charged, and every bit as artistically successful, emotionally touching and accessible as the English-language candidates," writes Caryn James. Accompanied by an audio slide show.

Also in the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz reviews the nominated live-action and animated shorts. More from Tim Grierson in the LA Weekly, Marjorie Baumgarten in the Austin Chronicle and Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat, where he also talks with Alan Arkin.

"The pre-Oscar drumbeat seems particularly intense this year as Web sites of the old media have jumped on the bandwagon and begun aggressively courting all those multitaskers who watch television and surf the Web at the same time," reports Katharine Q Seelye.

"Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of this new era is the increased presence of black nominees," writes Jason Solomons in an Observer package that includes Gaby Wood's profile of Ryan Gosling, Killian Fox's of Kevin O'Connell, with 19 nominations for sound-mixing but no wins yet, and a fashion piece from Bronwyn Cosgrave.

At PopMatters, Bill Gibron looks back at the Oscars Martin Scorsese should have won.

Movie City News lists the winners of the ASC Guild Award (that's the cinematographers, don't you know), the American Cinema Editors' faves (it's a tie), the Art Directors Guild Awards and the Costume Guild Awards - and points to the Cinema Audio Society Awards.

Updates, 2/20: Get this: The New Republic has launched an Oscar blog. Seriously. Oscar Wild! features contributions from Elspeth Reeve, David Thompson and Christopher Orr. Also: Orr on The Departed.

"Looking back over the span of the Oscars' history, it becomes quite apparent that the chances that the best picture will really be voted the Best Picture are slim," writes Kristin Thompson. "In Film Art, we talk about how saying that we like a film doesn't necessarily equate to its being a good film (pp. 63-65 in the 8th edition). There we suggest criteria that a viewer can apply in judging whether a film is good: coherence, unity, intensity of effect, complexity, and originality. On the whole, the Academy has opted for films that are pretty conventional." But here's the gist: She goes through "the entire run of Best-Picture winners up to 2000, giving my own choice (or choices) as to what should have won. Some of these are pretty outrageous, I'll admit, but I still think the should-have-wons that I list will be watched long after the films that beat them for the golden statuette."

"[T]he films in this year's Oscar race seem to suggest the world is more globally unified and polyglot than ever before," writes Anthony Kaufman in Variety. Anthony's also got a followup entry at his blog: "[W]hat I neglected to mention in the story is that most of the films have not exactly done 'boffo' business."

Nathaniel R rounds up linkage to more Oscar talk out there.

"[T]he Bagger has no idea what horse, or frog, to saddle up. His industry sources left him even more baffled than before, and while some of the comments he got from readers, whose predictions he solicited yesterday, where amazingly cogent and persuasive, they also tended to argue for different movies."

"Thoughts on Ennio Morricone, who receives his honorary Academy Award this coming Sunday..." Robert Cashill. Earlier: "Il Maestro in America." Update: More from the AV Club's Keith Phipps.

Time's Michiko Toyama chats with Rinko Kikuchi.

Online viewing tip. Steve Bryant's got a clip from a 1988 broadcast of the Tonight Show (with Johnny Carson hosting, no less) featuring two guys who first try to crash the Oscars, get nowhere, and then, in the second clip, actually back their way to the red carpet. Wild.

Updates, 2/21: Cheryl Eddy lays out her predictions for each category - except one. Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: Taro Gato surveys Japanese reactions to Letters From Iwo Jima: "[O]ne of the most often heard comments from Japanese viewers was the following: 'Tough to admit, but this is a more Japanese film than even a Japanese director might create.'"

Odienator proposes an "Oscar Exchange Program" at Edward Copeland on Film.

"[T]he Oscar race has a lot in common with ice skating and gymnastics: You often get graded on poise and good form, not just on performance." In the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Goldstein takes "a look at some of the victors and vanquished from this year's Oscar season."

A New York Observer mash-up. Plus, Sara Vilkomerson with Ryan Gosling. David Poland talks with him, too.

Willa Paskin interviews Jackie Earle Haley for Salon.

The Bagger's thoughts, as he heads out to LA.

Online listening tip #1. Deliver Us From Evil director Amy Berg is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online listening tip #2. An "Oscar Spectacular" at Radio Allegro.

Online listening tip #3. "WNYC Loves Oscar." The New York Public Radio goes all out through Sunday, and of course, you don't have to be in New York to listen in.

Peter Keough spells out his predictions in the Boston Phoenix. Not that he's happy about them. "I really despise Babel, for example, but that's not the only reason I think it's going to win."

Joe Leydon sees two possible upsets on Sunday night.

Glenn Kenny on the latest from Maureen Dowd: "In between taunting Obama with his old handle 'Barry' and calling him 'Obambi' (no, I'm not kidding), she assesses the current buzz in Hollywood with wordplay based around - you'll never guess - the titles of current Oscar contenders!" The results are every bit as dire as you might guess. Click Glenn's name for samplers. Update: David Poland posts the whole column and Nikki Finke comments on Dowd's David Geffen quotes. See, this is how boring the Oscar races themselves are this year.

SF360's Susan Gerhard has news of an award that'll be presented in May to probably the most celebrated screenwriter of 2006, Peter Morgan.

Updates, 2/22: "[I]t's time to quit bitching," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir in a piece on the nominated films in the foreign-language and documentary categories. "Let's honor the wondrous spectacle of Hollywood getting it right." All ten films are revisited and a few of the write-ups are laced with fresh quotes from the directors.

The Guardian's special Oscars section gets lively.

"Surveying the nominees in the five big categories, we, Vue film critics Josef Braun and Paul Matwychuk, weigh in on who we'd like to see take home the shiny bald guy. More importantly, we imagine an Oscars where the work that really matters, the neglected or under-seen movies of 2006, get nominated."

Dana Stevens opens a pre-show chat with Kim Masters and Troy Patterson. Also at Slate: Matt Feeney on Little Miss Sunshine: "[W]hy should anyone be so annoyed by a genial comedy that clearly satisfies the genre-requirement that it be funny?"

Ed Champion and friends are ready, set to go. Just take a look at that list of participants. The man knows how to throw a party.

Peter Nellhaus considers "eight directors, in chronological order, who prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that winning isn't everything, and sometimes it's enough to be a contender."

More predictions from Time Out's Chris Tilly.

Updates, 2/23: David Carr, NYT media 'xpert and Oscar blogger, places his bets. Also, AO Scott on the nominated docs: "[T]he Academy seems at the moment especially focused on larger problems, on public issues that won’t go away no matter how fervently we might wish they would."

Amos Posner nominates five passed over contenders for each major category. Also at PopMatters, Zeth Lundy on the two Randy Newmans.

The Telegraph's special section.

More predictions: Edward Copeland and Josh R.

Also live blogging Sunday night: Facets Features.

And Nikki Finke.

Via Joe Leydon: "Esquire's Eighth Annual Alternative Oscars."

For Der Spiegel, Lars-Olav Beier follows Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on his Lives of Others Oscar campaign trail.

Online viewing tip. A video montage of Magnum movie photos at Slate.

Updates, 2/24: Neil Amdur in the NYT: "Win or lose tomorrow night at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, one contender - Deepa Mehta's Water a nominee for best foreign-language film - will already have scored its greatest triumph simply by existing."

The Observer's Philip French talks with Clint Eastwood.

Ed Caesar in the Independent: "The Golden Groans: The best of the worst of the Oscars."

Online viewing tip. David Poland lunches with Jesus Camp filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.

"Was there ever a more slippery sub-genre than the docu-drama?" asks the Guardian's Xan Brooks, who thinks this may be a factor in the non-nominations of Borat and United 93 for Best picture.

Harvey Weinstein - yes, that Harvey Weinstein - chimes in on the Little Miss Sunshine flap in the Los Angeles Times: "I couldn't agree more with the position of the Producers Guild that simply having the clout or leverage to demand a particular title does not make you a producer. By the same token, however, there shouldn't be some arbitrary limit to the number of producers a film can have. At the awards podium, there should be room for everyone who did the job."

"[E]very year there's at least one performer who did astonishing work and yet failed to show up on anyone's radar, slipping by unnoticed even by most critics," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "For me this year, that someone is Alec Baldwin, who appeared in three pictures, The Good Shepherd, The Departed and Running With Scissors. He's terrific in the first two, and off the charts in the third."

For SF360, Michael Guillén asks Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt just two questions - but the answers run long.

Glenn Kenny will not be getting "jiggy with it" when he and a few friends do a bit of live blogging tomorrow night.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle will be hosting a post-show chat at his blog.

Dan Eisenberg's predictions.

Updates, 2/25: David Carr looks back on awards season: "I've been a serious journalist most of my life, and the red carpet reminded me of a national political campaign without the stakes. Juggling an endless array of badges, people wearing headsets and the overall star apparatus, I had a great deal of access, but very little insight." Here's a rather startling factoid, though: The "Oscar economy" is estimated to be worth over $640 million.

More NYT Oscar stories this morning: Lola Ogunaike on what Jennifer Hudson wears, Jamie Diamond meets Jackie Earle Haley and Stephanie Rosenbloom: "While the majority of heartbroken Americans must devise their own sophomoric strategies for dodging former sweethearts, celebrities have publicists to deftly manage their Ex Capades."

Craig McLean profiles Graham King, the producer behind The Departed and Blood Diamond.

Also in the Observer, Zoe Ludlow Green: "This may just turn out to be the year in which more British fiction than ever before has been successfully translated to the widescreen: PD James's dystopian The Children of Men, Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal and Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland. British writers as diverse as Patrick Marber, Hanif Kureishi and Peter Morgan are also strongly in contention. So is the Oscar-worthy American screenplay under threat? Controversy rages. One A-list screenwriter rants that Little Miss Sunshine is 'one of the worst pieces of shit I've seen all year.'"

Online viewing tips. A fun and wide-ranging collection of Oscar-related clips at Movie City News.

"[T]he industry is in a state of ongoing disquiet." Neal Gabler rolls out a series of numbers, most of them from surveys showing all the various ways movies are playing a smaller and smaller role in people's lives:

What is happening may be a matter of metaphysics. Virtually from their inception, the movies have been America's primary popular art, the "Democratic Art," as they were once called, managing to strike the American nerve continuously for decades. During the 1920s, nearly the entire population of the country attended the movies weekly, but even when attendance sank in the 1950s under the assault of television and the industry was virtually on life support, the movies still managed to occupy the center of American life.

[...] To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content. Television never questioned the very nature of conventional entertainment. The Internet, on the other hand, not only creates niche communities — of young people, beer aficionados, news junkies, Britney Spears fanatics — that seem to obviate the need for the larger community, it plays to another powerful force in modern America and one that also undermines the movies: narcissism.

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• John Horn and Sheigh Crabtree: "The disparity between movies the public embraces and those Oscar voters revere has grown dramatically, leaving the award ritual open to charges it has become elitist and potentially superfluous."

• Similarly, Joe Queenan: "Year in, year out, this largely unidentified group of voters — many of them quite advanced in years, some presumably dead — persist in honoring actors, actresses, directors and screenwriters for their superb work in films that are widely ignored and have almost nothing to do with the industry's raison d'etre." And to think that the LAT is the industry's hometown paper. Hats off; oh, and happy Oscar Day, folks.

• "[T]he triumph of Iñarritu, Cuarón and Del Toro in Hollywood creates a lingering, bittersweet reaction," writes Sergio Muñoz, who traces past US infatuations with Mexico, from the left's fascination with the Revolution (1910 - 1921) through the Diego Rivera solo exhibition at MoMA and more.

• The Three Amigos are not alone. Reed Johnson reports on "the dynamic new Latino film colony that's blossoming on once-inhospitable Hollywood back lots."

• Bob Berney's early support for Pan's Labyrinth earns him a profile by Lorenza Muñoz.

• Sheigh Crabtree profiles Rinko Kikuchi.

• "What do we expect of Eddie Murphy?" asks Peter Rainer. "To put the question more directly, what does he expect of himself? He is one of the most commercially successful actors in history and also one of the most confounding."

• Mark Swed: "Just as you cannot give Morricone too much credit, you cannot dumb him down too low."

• Mark Olsen meets Ari Sandel, director of the nominated short, West Bank Story.

• Robin Abcarian talks fashion with Vogue editor at large André Leon Talley and reminds us that there's so much more to Ken Davitian than the naked wrestler in Borat, and: Sammy Davis Jr, photographer.

• Mary McNamara on how PricewaterhouseCoopers counts: by hand.

Salon's Heather Havrilesky settles in: "We must stay focused, chickens, and remember that this night is merely an elaborate excuse to point and jeer at wealthy humans in shiny dresses while eating an entire bag of potato chips in one sitting. Ultimately, the Oscars are a wide-scale group experiment, where we all pretend that the opinions of people who've proven themselves incompetent in the past somehow matter once again - you know, sort of like our presidential elections."

Nick Davis's last-minute predictions and: "13 Ways of Feeling Better about Oscar."

Final predictions from Nathaniel R.

Robert Cashill's ballot.

Shawn Levy will be hosting the Oregonian's live blogging gathering.

William Booth in the Washington Post: "Al Gore, Rock Star." Via Chuck Tryon.

Final predictions (and preferences) from Eugene Hernandez.

Online listening tip. NPR's Andy Trudeau wraps his consideration of the five nominated scores. Scroll down for links to the full series.

More live blogging: Harry Knowles, Jeffrey Wells and the AV Club.

Posted by dwhudson at February 19, 2007 8:09 AM