SEASONAL HIGHS & LOWS
Look who’s bringing
sexy back
IF 61-year-old Helen Mirren wins best actress, it’s because “The Queen” star shrewdly conquered an age-old Oscar curse. Actresses over 50 don’t usually win. Only one has in the last 15 years: Judi Dench (best supporting actress, “Shakespeare in Love”). Otherwise, most recent champs look more like winners of a beauty pageant (Hilary Swank, Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry and Julia Roberts).
Last September, Miramax execs discussed the issue at the opening-night banquet of the New York Film Festival when “The Queen” made its U.S. debut. However, they deny that they’ve done anything strategically since then to address her sex appeal as part of her campaign.
But it seems someone is. The highlight reel for the actress’ Santa Barbara International Film Festival tribute included some of her finest cinematic nudie moments. And during the show, Mirren picked up a large hand mike, and eyeing it said, “God, this thing is so phallic.” She then pretended to lick it with her tongue. The audience, of course, went crazy. The actress also appeared on the cover of Los Angeles magazine’s February issue parting a white top to reveal a peekaboo black bra underneath.
Backstage at the Golden Globes, she got bawdy with journalists: “You know, when an Essex girl has an orgasm, she drops her fries.”
When asked about her prospects of winning the Oscar, she said, “I’ve never had an ‘O.’ They said the Earth moves. I can’t wait. I’ll definitely drop my fries for that.”
As the Santa Barbara highlight reel revealed, Mirren has been fearlessly frisky throughout her career, appearing nude in more than a dozen films, most recently in “Calendar Girls” at 58. But she’s made a special point of playing up her sauciness while chasing that naked golden boy Oscar.
-- Tom O’Neil
Please don’t make O’Toole do this
LAST month, Peter O’Toole made the round of talk shows in New York to promote “Venus,” for which he received his eighth best actor Oscar nomination. Nattily dressed and wearing what can be best described as a bemused expression, the 74-year-old thespian appeared on, among other things, “The View.”
“Can you believe that?” O’Toole quipped about his “View” tour. “It was extraordinary and a bit alarming.”
“When the world was young, actors didn’t do interviews,” O’Toole said. “We didn’t open our months except when we were doing some author’s words. We were required to turn up and put on a pretty frock and a dinner jacket [for the Oscars] and that was it. But now things have changed utterly. We are supposed to be the salesman and woman of the piece.”
So does he feel awkward becoming a pitchman?
“Let me put it this way,” said the veteran actor. “I confess I have done so much, I am running out of things to say.”
-- Susan King
If it’s Oscar night, then Sienna Miller is finally out of sight
IT was her off-screen performance that made Sienna Miller the hardest working actress in Hollywood this season. She schmoozed endlessly at cocktail parties, lunches and awards shows to promote her film “Factory Girl,” which gathered no awards, or even awards buzz, despite her best efforts and Harvey Weinstein’s considerable pull. In less than a month, Miller presented at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, hit the Screen Actors Guild Annual Tea the next day, was feted with a lunch at Mr. Chow, hit the “Bobby” Globe nomination party at Drago, unveiled Godiva’s One Million Dollar Hearts on Fire diamond shopping spree at Century City, and hosted a chic Chanel dinner (with Lauren Hutton, Lindsay Lohan, Cameron Diaz and Dustin Hoffman) at Chateau Marmont for a new couture fragrance line.
She was also a presenter at the Globes but got less-than-stellar fashion reviews for her Heidi-Ho braided do and Marchesa dress designed for her by Georgina Chapman, Weinstein’s squeeze.
Still, she gamely snapped photos of photographers at the Weinstein post party in Trader Vic’s and made an appearance at the WB/InStyle bash. Lastly, she opened the Santa Barbara International Film Festival with, oh yeah, her film about Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s doomed muse who was born -- and died of an overdose -- in Santa Barbara.
Asked about her non-stop awards season activities, Miller explained, “This is the first time I have really had to carry a film and I felt a responsibility to support it. Besides, Harvey can be very persuasive. But I’m looking forward to going home.”
No offense, Sienna, but we’re glad you’re going home too.
-- Elizabeth Snead
There’s always more gas in the van
IT screened for the first time more than a year ago, debuted in theaters last July and already is available at Blockbuster. By most objective measures, “Little Miss Sunshine’s” moment in the spotlight should have long since gone.
Yet as countless other Oscar contenders and pretenders went off the rails, the ensemble comedy grew only stronger, and will enter the Academy Awards with a strong chance to win the best picture trophy.
Rather than shout from the rooftops how fantastic its movie was (see DreamWorks’ handling of “Dreamgirls,” or Paramount’s efforts for “World Trade Center”), distributor Fox Searchlight let “Little Miss Sunshine” do its own talking.
The company organized more than 100 word-of-mouth screenings. It sent its cast and producers to host showings at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival and pretty much everything in between. Searchlight was the first outfit to ship “Little Miss Sunshine” screener DVDs to awards voters. If a Hollywood guild or some awards organization wanted a “Little Miss Sunshine” question-and-answer screening, the filmmakers, actors or producers would show up -- even for an audience of just 10 people.
Wrapping the whole operation in a catchy, ubiquitous yellow, Searchlight even dispensed “Little Miss Sunshine” cupcakes and hired VW vans to tool around town with the logo “Little Best Picture” emblazoned on their sides.
It may not ultimately propel the movie past “Babel” or “The Departed,” but the effort nonetheless pushed “Little Miss Sunshine” a lot further than even its makers ever thought it would go.
-- John Horn
There is no cultural divide
FROM the first moments after the announcement of this year’s Academy Award nominations, there has been a perception that this is the year Oscar goes global. The 16 combined nominations for “Babel,” “Children of Men” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” all of them a cosmopolitan jumble of cultures, languages and locales, would be notable even without the media-ready friendship among their three Mexican-born directors, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo Del Toro.
As well, the academy has long had a soft spot for the tradition of the British actor’s actor -- note the perennial nominations for Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, or even Peter O’Toole -- but this year nominations fell more widely on British writers and directors as well, the talent behind such films as “United 93,” “The Queen,” “Notes on a Scandal” and “Borat.” Nods also went in main categories to foreign-language pictures “Volver” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.”
“We are breaking our old stiff politics of nationalism, those very primitive and very provincial barriers,” says best director nominee Gonzalez Inarritu. “Every nation has to embrace art as a universal expression, beyond religion, beyond language. And that’s what I’m feeling now, the first step.”
Patrick Marber, nominated in the best adapted screenplay category for “Notes on a Scandal,” adds that he believes these changes are coming not just as effects of a globalizing economy, but from the increased connectedness of cultures as well.
“The entertainment country is the world,” he says.
Marber also notes that the human concerns of class and identity at the core of his work cross boundaries of nation and language.
“I don’t know where ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is set, for example. I don’t know those roads. But it feels to me a universal story because it’s about a family trying to function. And we all know that.
“I think story is story.”
-- Mark Olsen
Girls’ night out
IT’S fitting that “Dreamgirls” contains the catchy tune “One Night Only,” because for one night in November it was the year’s best picture, or so we thought. On the night in question, “Dreamgirls” was of one of the season’s last films to be seen and the crowd inside the overheated Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences Theater was primed. It seemed to know the movie from the Broadway show, cheering before musical cues and offering standing ovation after standing ovation. Meanwhile, DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press sat in the lobby monitoring good news from other simultaneous showings via her BlackBerry. Alas, it wouldn’t last. While the film did get eight Oscar noms, including supporting actor and supporting actress, it failed to achieve noms for best picture, director, actor or actress. Maybe “One Night Only” was a little too prophetic.
-- Tom Tapp
They know how to spin and win
ALTHOUGH Harvey Weinstein has kept a relatively low Oscar profile since leaving Miramax, his former campaign chiefs haven’t.
Now out on their own as independent consultants, Cynthia Swartz and Amanda Lundberg teamed up with celebrity publicist Leslee Dart to form 42 West, which has become the most dynamic new player in the Oscar campaign game.
A little indie movie, “Half Nelson,” benefited from their push this year (best actor Ryan Gosling). 42 West’s other, higher-profile films include “Little Children,” “Notes on a Scandal,” “Dreamgirls” and Miramax’s “The Queen” and “Venus.”
Last year they helped to engineer George Clooney’s victory in “Syriana,” plus nabbed nominations for little films like “The Squid and the Whale” (best original screenplay) and “Hustle and Flow” (best actor Terrence Howard and best song). The latter’s victory in the music race was a big deal since rap song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” wasn’t considered academy friendly.
But their biggest coup was one of the greatest upsets in Oscar history.
Referring to “Crash’s” win as best picture, Lionsgate President Tom Ortenberg concedes, “Cynthia Swartz and Amanda Lundberg played key roles in a large team effort that helped to pull off an incredible victory.”
“Our job is simple,” Swartz says. “We just need to make sure that our clients’ movies get seen -- and talked about.”
-- Tom O’Neil
Borat meets Spielberg
AFTER his acceptance speech provided the Golden Globes with its YouTube moment, “Borat” star Sacha Baron Cohen and Steven Spielberg touched off a camera phone frenzy at the Paramount/DreamWorks party. The two first met a few days earlier at the AFI Awards luncheon, where they chatted for about 20 minutes. But it was the very public summit after the Globes that cemented both Baron Cohen’s status as the night’s “it” boy -- and his friendship with Spielberg.
“Steven is a great admirer of Sacha,” a spokesman for Spielberg later said.
He must be, since Baron Cohen is currently making “Sweeney Todd,” a co-production of Warner Bros. and Spielberg’s DreamWorks.
-- Robert W. Welkos
Good for your career, bad for your teeth
GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S favorite character actor, the preternaturally double-jointed Doug Jones (a.k.a. Abe Sapien, Pale Man and Pan), was spotted stuffing his suit pockets with homemade caramel corn while Aaron Eckhart eyed Hostess-inspired mini cupcakes in a junk food sampler antechamber at Sofitel’s Simon L.A. on Feb. 8.
Picking up the bill for Iron Chef Kerry Simon’s inspired eats were Picturehouse, which threw in for Del Toro, Paramount Vantage, on behalf of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and Universal Pictures for an absent Alfonso Cuaron.
The tony fiesta attracted nearly every notable director in town, including Oscar nominee George Miller, Curtis Hanson, John Singleton, Brad Silberling and Wes Craven.
Cuaron, who was reportedly waylaid in London with flu, not only missed “sticking his fork in his friends’ salads,” he missed the impromptu performance of the year.
Inspired perhaps by the mariachi band in the courtyard or maybe Penelope Cruz’s riveting solo in “Volver,” Del Toro grabbed a microphone to introduce Gonzalez Inarritu, who broke unaccompanied into a baritone serenade before a surprised audience of e-mail-exchanging industryites.
-- Sheigh Crabtree
Don’t forget the non-campaigners
MERYL STREEP skipped the annual Oscar nominees lunch and ditched the SAG awards for a political event. She also did very little press. Martin Scorsese did no press at all, though he did attend a few events. They are among the few this year who, though they largely shunned the awards machinery, still managed Oscar nominations (and Scorsese’s favored to win).
Another of the non-campaigners is Ryan Gosling. After getting a first Oscar nomination under his cummerbund for “Half Nelson,” Gosling was AWOL from the awards circuit. Ignoring the season’s campaign demands, Gosling scheduled his out-of-the-country itinerary almost exactly from the day Oscar nominations were announced to the day ballots are due. Why? Gosling has been scouting locations in Uganda for “The Lord’s Resistance Army,” a drama about child soldiers that he wrote and plans to direct. It seems campaigning for a longshot best actor Oscar has nothing on writing and directing a movie about kids in need.
-- Sheigh Crabtree
High fashion
in high gear
JUST call it the Season of the Stitch. Haute couture has long been seen on Oscar red carpets. But several powerful high fashion forces are converging on Oscar this year.
Following Meryl Streep’s nomination for her wicked portrayal in “The Devil Wears Prada” of an editor resembling “Vogue’s” Anna Wintour, Oscar producer Laura Ziskin deviled up her act. She enlisted a flamboyant “Vogue” fashion editor -- Andre Leon Talley -- to boost the show’s style presence.
Talley began by curating a “Celebration of Oscar Fashion” runway show of 30 historic Oscar gowns worn by Barbra Streisand, Liz Taylor, Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Faye Dunaway and Marlene Dietrich.
Of Cher’s then-scandalously sheer gown, Talley gushed, “This is Cher Chic!”
Talley was also anointed official fashion commentator for Ziskin’s “Road to the Oscars” pre-show on Feb 25. “Never again will you hear, ‘Who are you wearing?’ ” said Ziskin. “Andre will already know.” Indeed. In Jennifer Hudson’s case, he selected her Globes gown and will dress her for the Oscars.
“How can he critique his own work?” fashion insiders sniffed. “Now Vogue controls Paris, New York and Hollywood,” moaned PR maven Kelly Cutrone of People’s Revolution.
Haute on Talley’s heels was fashion diva Donatella Versace, who was honored -- and “roasted” with Maya Rudolph’s and Sharon Stone’s raunchy impressions -- at the Rodeo Drive Walk of Style.
But watch your back seams, Donatella. Giorgio Armani, MIA from Hollywood since ‘92, arrives this week. He flew Cate Blanchett to Paris (on his private jet) to fit her in an Armani Prive ronze gown for SAG and it’s rumored he’ll dress her for the Oscars. Plus, he’s throwing a star-studded fashion bash -- complete with a runway show of his spring couture -- at Ron Burkle’s Green Acres estate, the night before the Oscars.
-- Elizabeth Snead