A tres meses de los Oscares. Las predicciones hoy.

(Como aparece en THR.com por Dave Karger)

It’s been a busy 24 hours in Awardsland, with the announcement of the New York Film Critics Circle and Gotham Award winners as well as the Spirit Award nominees. How does everything that’s happened so far shake up the overall Oscar race? Well, the dominating performance byThe Artist with the New York critics and the Spirits committee certainly cements its status as the frontrunner. But since the Spirit Award nominees are only voted on by a small number of people, we shouldn’t suddenly count out George Clooney for The Descendants or Glenn Close for Albert Nobbs just because they didn’t make the cut. Oftentimes the Spirit Awards favor darker, grittier performances and lesser-known performers, and Clooney isn’t exactly known as an indie-film mainstay. So he’s still at the top of my predictions list for Best Actor. Here’s how I see everything at this early date.

BEST PICTURE
1. The Artist
2. The Descendants
3. War Horse
4. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
5. Midnight in Paris
6. The Help
7. Moneyball
8. The Ides of March
9. Hugo
10. The Tree of Life
11. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
12. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
13. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2
14. Young Adult
15. J. Edgar

The unknown quantities at this point are Dragon Tattoo (which failed to win any New York critics awards) and Extremely Loud (which no one has yet seen). The Tree of Life and Dragon Tattoo are the two films that stand the best chance of climbing the ladder in the weeks to come. I’d say only the top 13 above really have any shot at a nomination.

BEST DIRECTOR
1. Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
2. Alexander Payne, The Descendants
3. Steven Spielberg, War Horse
4. Steven Daldry, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
5. Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
6. David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
7. Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
8. Bennett Miller, Moneyball
9. Martin Scorsese, Hugo
10. Tate Taylor, The Help
11. George Clooney, The Ides of March
12. Steve McQueen, Shame

OSCARS 2011: Get the latest news, photos, and more

This is a great mix of relative newcomers and living legends. Can a master like Spielberg, Scorsese, or Malick top the French whippersnapper Hazanavicius?

BEST ACTOR
1. George Clooney, The Descendants
2. Jean Dujardin, The Artist
3. Brad Pitt, Moneyball
4. Michael Fassbender, Shame
5. Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar
6. Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
7. Woody Harrelson, Rampart
8. Ryan Gosling, The Ides of March
9. Ryan Gosling, Drive
10. Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
11. Demián Bichir, A Better Life
12. Thomas Horn, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Gosling earned a Spirit nod for Drive, but I have a feeling Ides of March may be his better shot with the Academy. Although at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if neither one ends up panning out.

BEST ACTRESS
1. Viola Davis, The Help
2. Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
3. Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
4. Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
5. Charlize Theron, Young Adult
6. Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
7. Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin
8. Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene
9. Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method
10. Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia
11. Felicity Jones, Like Crazy
12. Ellen Barkin, Another Happy Day

The first four seem like locks, while Theron is a very shaky fifth place. Mara is the wild card at this point. It certainly feels like Davis vs. Streep for the win. Meanwhile, Jones topped Olsen for the Gotham breakout prize but I’m sensing Martha is the bigger overall contender.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
1. Christopher Plummer, Beginners
2. Max Von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
3. Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
4. Jonah Hill, Moneyball
5. Albert Brooks, Drive
6. George Clooney, The Ides of March
7. Christoph Waltz, Carnage
8. Armie Hammer, J. Edgar
9. Tom Hanks, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
10. Robert Forster, The Descendants
11. Nick Nolte, Warrior
12. Stellan Skarsgard, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

This is perhaps the toughest major category to predict. I wasn’t bullish on Brooks’ chances forDrive but the New York win and the Spirit nod prove that I may be wrong. And most of my Oscar-prognosticator colleagues think I’m too high on Branagh’s prospects for Marilyn but I wonder if Michelle Williams could lift him into contention as well.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
1. Octavia Spencer, The Help
2. Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
3. Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
4. Vanessa Redgrave, Coriolanus
5. Bérénice Bejo, The Artist
6. Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
7. Jessica Chastain, The Help
8. Sandra Bullock, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
9. Judy Greer, The Descendants
10. Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life
11. Kate Winslet, Carnage
12. Carey Mulligan, Shame

Chastain won the New York critics prize for The Help, The Tree of Life, and Take Shelter but is a prime candidate for vote-splitting, unfortunately. Wouldn’t it be wild to see Melissa McCarthy nominated alongside Vanessa Redgrave?

Disney has shut down production of "The Lone Ranger,"

(From THR.com by MattewBelloni)

Disney has shut down production of The Lone Ranger, its ambitious retelling of the classic western that was to starJohnny Depp.

Lone Ranger was heralded by Disney as a potential franchise starring the bankable Depp as Tonto and Armie Hammer as the Lone Ranger. Gore Verbinski, director of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, was set to helm.Sources tell The Hollywood Reporterthat the abrupt move to kill a project that was set to begin shooting in the fall comes amid clashes with producer Jerry Bruckheimer over the budget for the tentpole, which was scheduled to be released in December 2012. A Disney spokesman did not return calls.

The move is a direct blow to Bruckheimer, who has produced the four mega-hit Pirates films for Disney. It also raises questions about whether Depp will agree to reprise his starring role in another Pirates film, which is a priority for the studio.

The halt is all due to budgetary concerns, not creative differences, sources tell THR. The studio is said to have given Verbinski a firm budget number but the director balked.

“Gore doesn’t want to budge for what he thinks a movie like this needs,” says one insider.

One concern for the studio, according to an insider, is that even though Depp is the biggest star in the world, the project is a western, and the genre is having some dark days, particularly in light of the recent poor showing of Cowboys & Aliens.

“The fact that it’s a Western is a definite concern,” says one source.

While budget numbers for Ranger are hazy, Disney already has a number of expensive projects in the can, or in the works, including John Carter ($250 million-plus) and Oz The Great and Powerful, currently in production.

The move, of course, raises a slew of questions: What does this mean to the relationship between Disney and Bruckheimer, which is already under strain due to its expensive nature and Bruckheimer’s cold streak (Pirates 4 notwithstanding)? And how does this affect the studio’s relationship with Depp, the star of several billion-dollar hits for the studio, and who may now be less inclined to make a fifth installment of Pirates?

Depp has been involved with the Ranger movie since September 2008, when at a studio preview then-chairman Dick Cook brought out the actor for a surprise announcement. The double surprise was that Depp would portray Tonto, the Ranger’s Indian partner and not the Ranger himself.

The project heated up later last year when Verbinski came on board as director, and soon Hammer, riding high from his turn as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, signed on to play the Ranger.

8 Billion Dollar Babies: Movies That Have Crossed The 10 Figure Mark.

(De TheHollywoodReporter por Pamela McClintock)
Only eight movies have ever crossed the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office. The newbie to the club is Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which reached the milestone over the July 4th weekend, fueled by a massive showing overseas. If there’s a studio that owns the club, it’s Disney, which has four films on the list. When it comes to directors, James Cameron is the champ, between Avatar and Titanic, which are No. 1 and No. 2. And there’s no doubt that Johnny Depp remains the world’s biggest box office star, with three films in the club.
1. Avatar $2.8 billones
2. Titanic $1.8 billones
3. The lord of the rings:The return of the king ($1.12 billones)
4. Pirates of the caribbean:dead man's chest (1.07 billones)
5. Toy Story3 ($1.06 billones)
6. Alice in wonderland ($1.02 billones)
7.  Pirates of the caribbean:on stranger tides ($1.009 billones)
8. the dark night ($1.002 billones)

'Citizen Kane' Coming to Blu-ray

(From THR, by BorisKit)

Citizen Kane, one of the most acclaimed movies of all time, will premiere on Blu-ray on Sept. 13 with a 70th anniversary collector's edition.

The movie, frequently cited as the best American movie ever made and the movie chosen by the American Film Institute as the No. 1 film of all time, was co-written, directed and produced by then 25-year-old Orson Welles, who also starred in the pic, which told the life of a controversial publishing tycoon. It was nominated for nine Oscars and won for best original screenplay.

Warner Home Video is going back to the original nitrate for a hi-definition restoration in 4K resolution.

"The work to re-create the original look of the film and to clean up the effects of aging was a painstaking, frame-by-frame process," said Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging colorist Janet Wilson in a statement. "The source for most of the picture was a 4K scan from a 1941 composite fine grain positive master."

WHV is saying this edition will present Kane in the highest quality of any editions yet.

And there will plenty of new extras, too.

The collector's edition will come with a 48-page book part of which will be a 20-page reproduction of the original 1941 souvenir program, lobby cards plus facsimiles of memos and correspondence made during the movie's production.

The new edition will all the extras from the DVD two-disc special edition, including the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane, and it will contain RKO 281, the Golden Globe- and Emmy-winning HBO docudrama movie that chronicled the clash between William Randolph Hearst and Hollywood and starred Liev Schrieber as Welles and James Cromwell as Hearst, whose life was the inspiration behind Kane and who tried to stop the movie from being made.

The 70th anniversary edition will also be released via iTunes, On Demand, VUDU and Amazon Instant Video.

"Tree of Life" and "Melancholia" could be de-facto Oscars contenders?

(From Hollywood Reporter by GreggKilday)

Basking in the glow of the just-concluded Cannes Film Festival, this year's winners have every reason to celebrate. Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life was rewarded with the top prize, the Palme d'Or. Best actress honors went to Kirsten Dunst, whose performance as a depressed bride in Melancholia wasn't overshadowed by director Lars von Trier's Hitler antics. And the best actor laurels went to French star Jean Dujardin, who offered up a wordless turn in the silent movie The Artist.

STORY: 'The Tree of Life' Wins Cannes' Palme d'Or But only one Palme d'Or winner -- 1955's Marty -- has ever gone on to win the best picture Oscar, and Cannes history is littered with favorites that lost their buzz by the time Hollywood's awards season kicked into gear in late fall.

This year, though, Cannes might prove more prophetic. Take Malick's case. The Academy has never known quite what to make of the elusive director: He's received only two Oscar noms -- as writer and director of 1998's The Thin Red Line -- for his previous four films combined. And he's not likely to sit through a series of guild Q&As to explain his new movie. At Cannes, he slipped into the Palais for the movie's unveiling but skipped the red carpet and traditional press conference entirely.

But Tree's Palme d'Or means attention must be paid, and there's a growing critical consensus to match. Even if the film, which Fox Searchlight begins rolling out May 27, befuddles the average moviegoer, Academy voters might bite. An acting nomination for Brad Pitt, who plays the stern paterfamilias, is more problematic. He convincingly inhabits the role, but Malick doesn't ask his performers for the kind of showy scenes that pay off at awards time.

On the other hand, for the film's pristine imagery, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki -- who was nominated in 2006 for Malick's The New World -- has to be considered a front-runner in his category.

While the unconventional Tree poses a challenge, two other Cannes movies -- Woody Allen'sMidnight in Paris and Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist -- emerged as genuine crowd-pleasers. And that could boost one or both into best picture contention depending how many slots are available once the more serious movies arrive toward year's end.

At very least, Allen should be in line for another original screenplay nomination for his Gallic valentine: Not only does Owen Wilson play a successful Hollywood screenwriter who yearns to write a serious novel -- what member of the Academy's writing branch can't relate to that? -- but the movie also flatters smart-house audiences with lots of Paris-in-the-'20s name-dropping. The Sony Pictures Classics release already received an official Academy screening, which was packed and enthusiastic.

The Weinstein Co. is hoping something similar happens with Artist, which was greeted with an extended standing ovation at the Palais. As if providing an antidote to today's effects-heavy 3D movies, Hazanavicius has constructed a retro entertainment, set when the talkies were edging out silent movies. Dujardin's Cannes win won't automatically translate into recognition in the U.S. (His OSS 117 spy spoofs have been big hits in France.) But if he's brought to the states for extended meet-and-greets, he could court a nomination with the same kind of charm offensive that Harvey Weinstein orchestrated some years back for Roberto Benigni.

The controversy surrounding von Trier aside, his films -- with the exception of 1996's Breaking the Waves, which brought Emily Watson a nom -- haven't been warm and fuzzy enough for Academy tastes. So Dunst will need a lot of critical support if she's going to prevail for the Magnolia release.

Tilda Swinton has a lot of critics in her corner for her role as a mother at war with her difficult son in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Oscilloscope, which two years ago helped Woody Harrelson get a nom for The Messenger, is promising an awards push.

Although only buyers saw Pathe's promo reel for The Iron Lady, in which Meryl Streep plays Margaret Thatcher, a drumbeat that could lead up to the actress' 17th nomination has already begun. Partnering with Ron Burkle's Yucaipa, the Weinstein Co. ponied up about $7 million for the biopic, which is aiming to be finished in time for a fall release. The conservative Thatcher might not seem like someone Hollywood will rush to embrace, except that Streep plays the former prime minister as an aging woman struggling to hold it together as she flashes backs to memories of her triumphs. That sounds like the kind of acting exercise the Academy won't be able to resist. 

FRENCH BOX OFFICE: In keeping with tradition, films debuting at the Cannes Film Festival open simultaneously in French theaters. Here's how some of those titles fared May 18 to 22:

-- Midnight in Paris came in No. 2 for the weekend behind Pirates: On Stranger Tides, grossing $1.8 million from 406 playdates for a stellar total of $6.1 million in less than two weeks.

--Xavier Durringer's Nicolas Sarkozy biopic La Conquete (The Conquest) grossed $1.7 million from 500 locations in its debut. The film came in No. 4.

-- Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or winner The Tree of Life opened at No. 5, grossing $1.1 million from 405 playdates.

MiSS BALA STORMING CANNES (From Mubi.com)

(Excerpt from MUBI.com. Article by David Hudson)

"Inspired by the true story of a Tijuana beauty queen who got mixed up with the local narco gangsters, Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Balais a ferociously paced crime thriller, filled with atmospheric detail and exceedingly bleak humor," blogs the Voice's J Hoberman. "Here, even more than with his Godard homage youth film I'm Gonna Explode (the great discovery of the 2008 New York Film Festival), Naranjo demonstrates an impressively fluid camera, a feel for location, and a terrific rapport with actors. Stephanie Sigman, the natural beauty who innocently stumbles through the looking glass to find herself catapulted into a series of increasingly violent gangster transactions, as well as the televised Miss Bala pageant, exhibits tremendous poise in her first major role — one that requires her to be present in virtually every scene."

"Much like the Bolsheviks and Czarists battling in Miklós Jancsó's harrowing The Red and the White, Gerardo Naranjo makes the often-faceless Tijuana police and brutal criminal syndicate sound ideologically identical in his harrowing formalist assault Miss Bala."Glenn Heath Jr at the House Next Door: "The long take plays a crucial role in establishing the infinite possibilities of violence and death in any one given moment, and Naranjo sees the overlapping patterns of off-screen sound as audible meat grinders crushing any potential hope for innocent characters in distress…. As a political and social document, Miss Bala is shock, awe, and pure cinema at its finest."

"A brooding sense of despair and helplessness pervades the script by Naranjo and Mauricio Katz, more in the mood of a horror film than a shoot-em-up," writes Deborah Young in the Hollywood Reporter. "Like the Italian film Gomorrah, which described the way the organized crime operates in Naples, Miss Bala derives much of its interest from its insider's view of drug traffickers who live in conniving symbiosis with the police."

For Variety's Peter Debruge, Naranjo's Un Certain Regard entry "delivers on the promise of such well-respected early pics asDrama/Mex and I'm Gonna Explode, revealing them as dry runs for this Scarface-scary depiction of south-of-the-border crime run amok…. Though light on music, the pic achieves just the right uneasy effect through Pablo Lach's careful sound design, which makes even silences sound ominious. Fellow AFI alum Tobias Datum (who supplied Naranjo's last two features with much of their vivacity) isn't with him here, but award-winning Hungarian lenser Mátyás Erdély helps the director bring a measure of blood-chilling control to the whole horrific affair, elevating the entire aesthetic in the process."

"The film leaves a number of lingering questions in the mind including why Lino [Noé Hernández] and the gang decide to make continued use of Laura rather than killing off what would seem a minor inconvenience to them," writes Allan Hunter in Screen. "The idea presumably is to show that anyone, especially a pretty young woman, is a commodity to be used at the whim of anyone who chooses to exercise power in what appears to be a vacuum."

"Bodies drop, people are left to die, blood runs freely. But most haunting of all, the dead are forgotten, just collateral of a larger fight that has no end in sight." An A- from the Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth.

"I heard one prominent critic in the hallway after the screening complaining that some of Naranjo's plot twists were implausible, but give me a break," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "First of all, much of Naranjo's point is that almost nothing is implausible in the upside-down world of Tijuana, where it's nearly impossible to identify a clear line between cops and criminals. Secondly, while Miss Bala strives for a naturalistic feeling and draws on some recent criminal history, it's a bullet-riddled downhill thrill ride about a would-be beauty queen and a drug lord, not The Bicycle Thief."

And here are two more clips: 1, 2. At Ioncinema, Eric Lavallee has video from the night of the premiere; Micropsia is collecting grades.

Update: "I suspect people will look back at the lineup in years to come and marvel that this powerhouse wasn't in Competition," writes Mike D'Angelo at the AV Club. "He wasn't kidding: He was gonna explode…. I'm tempted to utter the ultra-hype phrase 'not since Heat' — as well as, I believe, a corrosive metaphor for the brutal demands society makes of women in exchange for success. That the film concludes with a banal scrawl detailing the human cost of Mexico's drug war potentially undermines that reading, admittedly, and it may take a second viewing for me to work out whether Miss Bala is as powerfully subversive as I'd like it to be or just an unbelievably exciting just-say-no tract. But since I can't wait to see it again, that's hardly a problem."

Updates, 5/15: Daniel Kasman: "In Miss Bala each shot contains a discovery of space, light and movement, and then before Naranjo cuts away he lets that camera do something else too — there is always something more, an extra detail, a new reveal, a subtle movement. Often it's a slight shift in perspective — the image will start as an objective shot of a space, and when our heroine moves into the frame she re-defines the camera angle as her own, it's movement as her movement. It makes each shot a pleasure, a richness, and, sometimes, an event."

"As controlled as the filmmaking is, there's still a sense of barely contained chaos pushing in at the edge of things that made Miss Bala one of the most tense film experiences I've had in a while," writes Drew McWeeney at HitFix.

Update, 5/16: "Stephanie Sigman's would-be beauty queen character is barely developed, making it difficult to invest in her escalating punishment," finds Karina Longworth, blogging for the Voice. "As she's shuttled between increasingly bizarre stages of exploitation, her receding personality seems increasingly like a deliberate strategy to set up one woman's suffering as a stand-in for the rape of a nation — a suspicion bolstered by Bala's gratuitous film-closing on-screen titles, reminding us that The War On Drugs is, like, bad, especially for women."