Nine Films Vie for Best Picture NYT

January 24, 2012, 7:30 am

Nine Films Vie for Best Picture

By MICHAEL CIEPLY AND BROOKS BARNES

 

 

Phil Mccarten/ReutersTom Sherak, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, announces the Oscar nominations for the 84th annual Academy Awards.

9:47 a.m. | Updated LOS ANGELES – A chaotic Oscar season found some order on Tuesday as “The Artist,” a mostly silent tribute to old Hollywood, and “Hugo,” another bit of film nostalgia, joined “The Descendants,” about life and love in Hawaii, and “Midnight in Paris,” about literary Paris, in scoring an array of major nominations, including those for best picture and best director.

In a field of nine best-picture nominees — the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences pegged the number on a sliding scale after experimenting for two years with a list of 10 — “The Help,” about race relations; “War Horse,” about a fighting horse; “Moneyball,” about the business side of baseball; and two surprises, “The Tree of Life” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” all found a place. But none showed quite as strong as the leaders.

And a host of erstwhile contenders finally fell away, at least in the race for best picture at the 84th Academy Awards ceremony, set for Feb. 26. The full list is here. (To fill out your ballot and compete with friends on NYTimes.com, click here.)

The also-rans included Jason Reitman’s “Young Adult,” George Clooney’s “Ides of March” and  a half-dozen other films that were shaken out by a tough round of Hollywood guild awards and a revised Oscar balloting system.

By the numbers, this year’s most heavily nominated  contenders were “Hugo” with 11, followed closely by “The Artist” with 10. “Moneyball” and “War Horse” each had 6 nominations, while “The Descendants,” though strong in the acting, writing and directing categories, had only 5.

A large stack of nominations can sometimes be the Academy’s way of acknowledging a very good film that hasn’t really won its heart.

Last year “True Grit” had 10 nominations, including best picture, and ranked just below “The King’s Speech,” the eventual winner, but took home nothing on Oscar night. “The Aviator” and “Brokeback Mountain” were the most heavily nominated films in their years but weren’t winners.

The shockers this year included the fact that the best picture category stretched all the way to 9 of a possible 10 nominees. Oscar-watchers predicted widely that the new counting methods would yield a narrower field.
The biggest surprise in the group was almost surely “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” a drama revolving around the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The film had been snubbed in one after another of the pre-Oscar awards, though its backers, including the producer Scott Rudin, insisted that a devoted core of admirers might turn the film, directed by Stephen Daldry, into a best picture contender.

 

 

Alex Bailey/Weinstein CompanyMeryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady.”

In a seeming disconnect, only one best actress nominee, Viola Davis of “The Help,” appeared in a film nominated for best picture. Other nominees in the category were Glenn Close, for playing a woman who played a man in “Albert Nobbs”; Meryl Streep, as Margaret Thatcher, both in and past her prime, in “The Iron Lady”; Rooney Mara, as the damaged soul in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”; and Michelle Williams, as Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn.”

Ms. Streep’s nomination cemented her position as the most-nominated actor in Academy Awards history, with 17 nominations — far more than the next-most nominated, Jack Nicholson and Katharine Hepburn, with 12 each. Ms. Streep last won an Oscar in 1983, for best actress for “Sophie’s Choice,” and she was previously best supporting actress in 1980, for “Kramer vs. Kramer.”

Among the best actor nominees, Mr. Clooney (“The Descendants”), Jean Dujardin (“The Artist”) and Brad Pitt (“Moneyball”) appeared in films that have now edged within reach of a best picture Oscar. Demian Bichir, who played an illegal immigrant gardener in “A Better Life,” and Gary Oldman, a spy hunter in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” were also nominated.
Snubs on the actors list included Leonardo DiCaprio for “J. Edgar,” and Michael Fassbender for “Shame.”

Both films sizzled into the season amid supercharged publicity but wound up with no nominations in the major categories.

Similarly, “Bridesmaids,” a popular favorite whose cast of female comics was nominated for an ensemble award from the Screen Actors Guild, fell flat with just two major nominations, one for Melissa McCarthy, as best supporting actress, and another for an original screenplay written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.

 

Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe winner for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture Octavia Spencer poses with the trophy at the 69th annual Golden Globe Awards.

Other supporting actress nominations went to Bérénice Bejo for “The Artist”; both Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer for “The Help”; and Janet McTeer for “Albert Nobbs.”

Supporting actor nominees were Kenneth Branagh for “My Week With Marilyn”; Nick Nolte for “Warrior”; Jonah Hill for “Moneyball”; Christopher Plummer for “Beginners”; and Max von Sydow for “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.”

Conventional wisdom among Hollywood’s Oscar campaigners says the best director nominations help to identify the real contenders for best picture by culling out movies whose filmmakers did not quite make the cut. By that standard, “The Help,” a vastly popular movie with Oscar-friendly themes — about racial bias and conciliation — has a problem, as its director, the relative newcomer Tate Taylor, was snubbed. So was Steven Spielberg, as the director of “War Horse,” another best picture nominee.

Instead, the directing nominations went to Michel Hazanavicius for “The Artist”; Alexander Payne for “The Descendants”; Woody Allen for “Midnight in Paris”; and Martin Scorsese for “Hugo,” along with Terrence Malick for “The Tree of Life.” Only Mr. Hazanavicius has not been previously nominated in the category.

 

Paul Buck/European Pressphoto AgencyMartin Scorsese with his Golden Globe award for best director for his film, “Hugo,” which received nominations for a number of awards including best director and best picture.

Mr. Scorsese, named best director in 2007 for “The Departed,” had perhaps the warmest reception of anyone at the Golden Globes this month when he received an award for directing “Hugo” to an outpouring of admiring applause.

Mr. Allen, by contrast, did not appear to pick up his Globe for writing “Midnight in Paris,” so no one can say whether he too would have set off the kind of Globes-night enthusiasm that foretold an Oscar win for Jeff Bridges, another Hollywood favorite, in 2010.

In Tuesday’s nominations the surprises included a rare rebuff of Pixar and its chief creative officer, John Lasseter. “Cars 2,” which Mr. Lasseter directed, was not among the animation nominees, which in the past have been dominated by Pixar films like “Ratatouille,” “Wall-E” and “The Incredibles.

Rival DreamWorks Animation had two animated nominees, “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Puss in Boots.” Also nominated were “Rango,” from Paramount Pictures, and “A Cat in Paris” and “Chico & Rita,” both from abroad.

The snubs included “The Adventures of Tintin,” an ambitious, performance-capture film directed by Mr. Spielberg and produced in partnership with Peter Jackson. It had qualified for consideration in the animation category but was overlooked — perhaps an indication that the Academy’s animators are not eager to embrace a hybrid form that combines live action with computer techniques.

As has usually been the case in recent years, no foreign-language nominee has found a wide audience in the United States. The nominees in that category are “Bullhead,” from Belgium; “Footnote,” from Israel; “In Darkness,” from Poland; Monsieur Lazhar,” from Canada; and “A Separation,” from Iran. “Footnote,” “In Darkness” and “A Separation” are all backed in the United States by Sony Pictures Classics, one of the few domestic distributors that still focuses on subtitled films.

The year’s documentary selections — “Hell and Back Again,” “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” “Pina” and “Undefeated” — are the last under an old set of rules that allowed very small groups within the Academy’s 157-member documentary branch to filter their choices through a selection process that will now be open to wider input and may lean toward choices that have been more widely seen.

Among companies, a big winner was Sony Pictures, which had at least 21 nominations for films from both its major studio and its Sony Pictures Classics art-house division. Those nominees included “Midnight in Paris” and “Moneyball” in the best picture category, and a number of nominations for “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and “A Separation.” Both Paramount and the Weinstein Company had more than a dozen nominations each, and Disney — though it hasn’t been an Oscar powerhouse of late — had at least 11 nominations, including those for “War Horse” and “The Help,” which were made by its affiliate, DreamWorks.

Among the year’s screenplay nominations were at least two surprises, “A Separation,” the Iranian foreign-language nominee, by Asghar Farhadi about family tensions, and “Margin Call,” an indie drama, written by J. C. Chandor, about the financial meltdown.

While 9 of the top 10 films at the domestic box office last year were sequels — an unprecedented alignment — only a handful of such follow-up films made an impression on the Academy. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the year’s best-selling film, with more than $1.3 billion in worldwide ticket sales, was nominated only for its art direction, makeup and visual effects, despite an aggressive billboard and radio campaign here that highlighted its awards potential.

The Academy’s challenge this year is to win over viewers who have not yet warmed to the movies that will be on display when the ceremony is broadcast on ABC. Among the best picture nominees, only “The Help” has crossed the $100 million mark at the domestic box office (where it amassed almost $170 million in North American ticket sales and just $36 million elsewhere).

If the movies lack drawing power, the Oscar host, Billy Crystal, is at least known for having presided over some of the Academy’s most heavily viewed ceremonies, including a 1998 show. That one ran an epic three hours and 47 minutes but drew a record 57.3 million viewers, as “Titanic” was named best picture. Last year’s ceremony, with hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway, and more than 30 minutes shorter, drew only about 37.6 million viewers.

Mr. Crystal, whose screen appearances have been few of late, stepped in after Eddie Murphy dropped out last November, following the sudden resignation of the Hollywood bad-boy Brett Ratner as one of the show’s producers.

Mr. Ratner had caused a stir for some sex talk on the radio and for using an anti-gay slur at a public appearance in Los Angeles. He was quickly replaced by Brian Grazer, a veteran film producer who has largely refrained from public discussion of his plans for the show, in an effort to preserve some surprise in the proceedings.