The $11 Billion Year

by Anne Thompson

  While some are shocked by the win for Ang Lee, the biggest surprise of the evening is the two wins for the Weinstein Company’s Django Unchained, which repeats its wins from the Golden Globes. At the start of the night, Christoph Waltz wins Best Supporting Actor—in this case, demonstrating that a BAFTA win can be more predictive than the SAG, which was won by wily Lincoln scene-stealer Tommy Lee Jones. (Later, Waltz tells me that while he’s lost awards in Austria, he wins when he works with Quentin Tarantino. Let them both continue!)

  And Tarantino accepts the win for Best Original Screenplay, beating Michael Haneke, who takes home just one Oscar for Amour, for Best Foreign Language Film. Tarantino is well liked by the Academy. He dedicated his win to his fellow writers and to the actors who brought his words to life. “It’s the writers’ year at the Oscars,” he declares.

  Zero Dark Thirty has to settle for a tie with Skyfall in the Sound Editing race. Ties are a rare occurrence, happening only five other times in Academy history, and that accounts for the show going five minutes over its planned three-and-a-half-hour running time.

  Even though Riva, the oldest Best Actress nominee ever, makes the trek to Los Angeles to celebrate her eighty-sixth birthday after her back-to-back BAFTA and César wins for Amour, she loses to twenty-two-year-old ingenue Lawrence, who represents the one win for Silver Linings Playbook. Lawrence is now a major movie star who has banked both a franchise (Hunger Games) and an Oscar win. Beasts of the Southern Wild’s youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Wallis also emerges from the Oscar season a star, set to topline musical Annie.

  Silver Linings Playbook has to settle for its wins the Saturday before the Sunday Oscars at the sunny 28th Independent Spirit Awards, the younger and hipper indie awards show mounted by Film Independent inside a white beach tent in a breezy parking lot in Santa Monica. Going in, it was Fox Searchlight’s scrappy Beasts of the Southern Wild vs. the Weinstein Company’s Silver Linings Playbook, which in the end prevails with four awards: Best Feature, Actress (Lawrence), Director, and Screenplay (Russell). Beasts has to settle for the same prize it won back at Sundance, Cinematography (Ben Richardson).

  And The Sessions takes home two Spirit awards, for Supporting Actress Helen Hunt, and for Best Actor John Hawkes—not nominated for an Oscar—in a surprise win over Silver Linings star and Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper. At the Spirits, the Oscar nominee often wins; in this case, a dramatic performance beat out the comedic one. Hunt, who was not expected to win at the Oscars, says she is thrilled that writer-director Ben Lewin “made a movie about healthy sexuality . . . A miracle.”

  Finally, the constant spinning about the movie being about mental illness cannot change the fact that Silver Linings is a delightful talking heads romantic comedy. Serious drama also trumps comedy at the Oscars, almost every time. Silver Linings lucks out by riding Harvey Weinstein’s conservative long-slow distribution plan all the way to bank. What starts as risky and indecisive pockets winds up looking like genius. With Silver Linings and Django Unchained, the Weinsteins finally climbed out of the red and are collecting cash profits again. But this is not to be a repeat of the Weinsteins’ upset Best Picture win against Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan with Shakespeare in Love, which had more period scale and scope. This is an actors’ film, and so Lawrence marks its big win.

  The Weinstein Company’s critics’ favorite The Master, on the other hand, which scored three acting nominations for Oscar perennials Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, but no writing or directing nods for Paul Thomas Anderson, proves to be too opaque and complex a movie for the Academy at large. All the money that goes into obtaining those nominations, while it boosts the reps of the actors, doesn’t necessarily improve the movie’s bottom line. Annapurna’s Megan Ellison and Harvey Weinstein clash over releasing the film; he reportedly brings her to tears more than once. Weinstein later blames himself for not finding the right way to bring it to audiences. The picture tops out at $16 million domestic.

  THE DAY AFTER THE SPIRIT Awards, Harvey Weinstein’s contribution to the Oscar telecast is known: he made the connection between the Oscar producers and First Lady Michelle Obama, who agrees to present the Best Picture award live from the White House. Like Bill Clinton’s introduction of Lincoln at the Golden Globes, some people look askance at this intrusion of Washington into show business. But Obama is a warm, beaming presence on Oscar night. She pulls it off.

  Being set in the past is a boon for Argo, which wins its three awards (Picture, Adapted Screenplay, and Editing) without courting commentary from Washington, although the filmmakers do quickly change a title card to placate the Canadians and give them more credit. Ripped from the headlines, contemporary Middle East CIA drama Zero Dark Thirty, on the other hand, is hit hard by Washington’s politically motivated campaign against it. But crucially, Zero Dark Thirty is too smart and unconventional for the Oscar arena. Director Bigelow, writer-producer Boal, and gifted lead Chastain deliver a memorably tough real-world feminist hero. But the steak-eaters in the Academy aren’t quite ready to go there.

  In the Animated Feature category, the fierce battle between two Disney releases, Pixar’s Brave (which won the Visual Effects Society, Editing, Sound Mixing, and BAFTA awards) and box-office juggernaut Wreck-It Ralph (which won the PGA, Critics’ Choice, and five Annie awards) yields a win for Brave directors Chapman and Andrews. In the end, the Academy goes for Brave as the classier, more beautiful film over the scruffy video-game-themed Wreck-It Ralph.

  Sony Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker and Tom Bernard do well that weekend. Amour wins Best International Film at Saturday’s Spirit Awards, where white-haired Michael Haneke thanks them and his actors Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, who had both won at the French Césars the night before, and says, “I’m the oldest man in the whole room!”

  Barker and Bernard’s Amour wins the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and their Searching for Sugar Man wins for Best Documentary, which gains an advantage from the category having, for the first time, the entire Academy membership voting in it. Whether everyone eligible to vote saw all five of the nominated documentaries as they are honor-bound to do before casting their vote is another question.

  (In 2013, for the first time, members will get all five foreign DVDs, too. But the unwieldy and hidebound foreign nominations process remains tangled in arcane committees. Many Academy members clamor to reform it.)

  February 24:

  THE NIGHT OF THE OSCARS

  To host an entertaining musical Oscar night, producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron pick as their host song and dance man and TV writer Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy), who has recently earned his stripes as a movie biz insider by writing, directing, and voicing the stuffed bear in the sleeper comedy summer hit Ted. MacFarlane has proved himself as a witty host of the Writers Guild Awards. In the run-up to the Oscars, the Oscar show producers collaborate closely with him and his handpicked writing team every day in an attempt to liven up the show, always fighting against going into overtime.

  Predictably, the spanking-new host, who is crudely flat as an entertainer—not nearly as spot-on with his inside industry jokes as the Golden Globes’ team of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler—boosts the show with young viewers, although its mainstream popularity is as usual mainly due to the films in contention, six of which have passed the $100 million domestic mark.

  I have a blast attending the Oscars as a guest, as opposed to standing for four hours in high heels doing red carpet interviews, or backstage in the pressroom trying to simultaneously track the live show and winners’ interviews, as I’ve done for too many years to count. It has been a few years since I’ve covered the Oscar show for Premiere and Entertainment Weekly—back at the Shrine and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

  My Indiewire colleague and Oscar virgin Peter Knegt, wearing a new tuxedo, and I opt to walk from his Sunset Strip hotel instead of driving. This requires, it turns out, that we be accompanied by a police escort as we walk up Highland from Sun
set to the red-carpet entrance on Hollywood Boulevard. Sparkling big-haired Adele, whom the producers have lined up far in advance, figuring her Skyfall theme would be an easy nomination, is in the queue behind us, while wraithlike Anne Hathaway is just ahead filing through security.

  The Oscar red carpet at Hollywood and Highland is like a river with strong currents—and pesky security guards—pushing you forward on the outside past the inside red carpet, where celebrities such as Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis, presenter Octavia Spencer, Michael Haneke, and MPAA chief Christopher Dodd are walking the press gauntlet.

  On the outside, rubber-necking, nonpress carpet, we run into writer-director Alexander Payne (The Descendants), who likes to go every few years just for fun (he may be back in the game with his 2013 Nebraska, starring Cannes Best Actor winner Bruce Dern) and Fox Searchlight chief Nancy Utley, who is rooting for Beasts of the Southern Wild and The Sessions’ Indie Spirit winner Helen Hunt.

  While many security people warn me not to take pictures, I keep moving and ignore them, even trying to shoot with my iPhone Academy CEO Dawn Hudson, who shies away. I do get affable Universal chairman Ron Meyer and his wife, Kelly, to pose. Moving through the giddy throng is grinning Chastain, all curves in her formfitting nude-gold Armani Privé couture gown. “It’s a very ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’ kind of dress,” she says on the red carpet, in the company of her grandmother. After the Oscars she plans to attend Fashion Week with her handsome boyfriend, Italian fashion executive Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, as well as visit fashion capital Milan, before starting the title role in Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie. Also passing by are Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jennifer Aniston, Amanda Seyfried, and Olivia Munn, who takes my stepping on her train with good grace: it held firm, thankfully.

  Inside the Dolby Theatre, Peter and I arrive too late for the champagne; the mezzanine is cordoned off due to a women’s room flood soaking the carpet. Hungry, A Royal Affair star Mads Mikkelsen asks a waiter for a mini-burger. When Eddie Redmayne brushes past me heading for the men’s room, I spill some caviar on my iPhone. Nice problem to have.

  The Academy Awards brings out the top moguls: I spot not only usual suspects Tom Bernard of Sony Pictures Classics and Working Title’s Tim Bevan, who produced Les Misérables and Anna Karenina, but also Tim Burton, Lionsgate’s Friedman, Paramount chairman Brad Grey, Disney CEO Robert Iger, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, and recent Fox chairman Tom Rothman and his ex-boss, News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch, who are both rooting for Life of Pi.

  The Dolby Theatre boasts a vertiginous balcony, which also houses fellow journalists Manohla Dargis of the New York Times and The Wrap editor Sharon Waxman. I inch in high heels across a pitch-dark narrow ledge to my seat, afraid of slipping. This means that I’m trapped in the middle of a long row for the entire evening—Peter does skip down to the lobby bar for a bit to check out the losers getting drunk.

  Producers Zadan and Meron come onstage before the show to humbly request that the winners keep their speeches “lively but succinct,” knowing that they are courting length records with all their musical numbers. Clearly, the producers have an enormous show to mount with many moving parts: the sets moved in and out during the commercial breaks.

  The Bond fiftieth anniversary celebration brings the magnificent seventy-six-year-old Dame Shirley Bassey, who earns a standing ovation when she hits that high note at the end of “Goldfinger.” It’s too bad Adele can’t follow with her Oscar-winning “Skyfall,” but they go straight to a commercial. The planned reunion of the Bonds doesn’t happen because both Roger Moore and Sean Connery weren’t up for the trip, Bond George Lazenby told me as we sipped champagne at the BAFTA nominee celebration two days before in the British Consul’s garden in Hancock Park.

  The 2012 Oscars sees plenty of song-belting, from Bassey to Streisand; some charmingly old-school dance numbers; and moving speeches from award recipients. Sure enough, we enjoy Oscars: The Musical, even though the sound is a little strange—is it because the orchestra is piped in for the first time from the Capitol Records building? The music plays better than host MacFarlane, who earns many audible groans and fails to engage with this audience, at least. The Academy insists on continuing to chase the young male demographic while alienating the core older audience that goes to see the actual nominees in theaters. The Academy will consider MacFarlane a success by virtue of a slight uptick in ratings. But while he has presumably improved his audience familiarity TV Q rating, MacFarlane later states that he has no intention of repeating the gig, and his foul press seals his fate.

  In terms of ratings, ABC reports a 2 percent gain in show viewership, which makes the 2013 telecast the best since 2010. The show averages a 26.6 rating, or an average of 40.3 million viewers. It also scores on social media, with 13.3 million interactions on February 24. Love or hate host MacFarlane, he does help to pull in that cherished eighteen-to-forty-nine demographic, with an 11 percent ratings boost in that group.

  We follow the stream over to the sumptuously decorated Governor’s Ball, where the winners have to make an appearance if only to get their Oscars engraved before heading out into the night to Vanity Fair and private parties dotting the hills. As Michael Feinstein croons standards on the bandstand, I sip champagne and line up behind William Shatner, with cane, for lobster and shrimp on ice. Steering away from the river of molten chocolate, strawberries, and desserts, I check out the Weinstein Company tables as Jennifer Lawrence leans over the balustrade to thank Harvey, hanging onto her Oscar. When I ask her why she fell on her way up the stairs to the stage, she gestures at her voluminous gown: “Look at this dress!” Quentin Tarantino forgives me for not picking him to win by planting a big wet one on the lips.

  Engraved Oscar in hand, happy producer Clooney, sporting one of many beards on display that night (for a role in his next directing gig, The Monuments Men, which is to start shooting in a few days in Europe), with leggy then girlfriend Stacy Keibler, slips out a back door exit toward their waiting limo. He goes to meet up with Affleck and their buds at Craig’s, a grill on Robertson Boulevard that they’ve reserved for the evening. Affleck goes into the men’s room and shaves off the beard he wore, superstitiously, throughout the season. He doesn’t need it anymore.

  At night’s end Peter and I wind up at Fox’s celebration at Lure, where the Beasts contingent is dancing up a storm alongside all the Life of Pi winners. I hoist an Oscar and remember how heavy they are. Fox 2000’s Elizabeth Gabler is bone-weary after her decade-long fight to get Life of Pi made and turn it into a worldwide hit heading for a total $609 million. On our way out, Ang Lee finally arrives. He’s smiling.

  Thing is, none of the nine movies that wound up vying for Best Picture—among the best selection ever, many observers agreed—would have gotten made if they hadn’t been passion projects that their makers were compelled to push through. None were easy, all were tough. And the indies aside, the studio projects were also hugely commercial year-end broad entertainments—six grossed over $100 million, which is not the usual—and Zero Dark Thirty topped out at $95 million domestically.

  In each case the studios agreed to support—with outside investors taking some of the risk—movies that with an experienced Oscar-winning director behind them could play commercially. Oscars were the icing on an already sweet cake.

  PICTURE SECTION

  Bingham Ray and me on Main Street, Park City, Utah, in the early 1990s.

  Benh Zeitlin, the director of Beasts of the Southern Wild, with his star Dwight Henry at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

  Mark Duplass and John Hawkes at an Indie Spirits brunch.

  Helen Hunt and John Hawkes get intimate as sexual surrogate and patient in Ben Lewin’s The Sessions.

  Fox Searchlight Pictures/Photofest © Fox Searchlight Pictures

  Beasts of the Southern Wild’s Quvenzhané Wallis was six years old when she played Hushpuppy, who learns how to survive below the levees in New Orleans, and nine when she became the youngest-ever Best Actres
s nominee.

  IFC Films

  Singer-songwriter Rodriguez and Searching for Sugar Man director Malik Bendjelloul.

  Henny Garfunkel

  Documentary filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady opted to self-distribute Detropia, their portrait of the deteriorating Motor City.

  Henny Garfunkel

  Filmmaker Kirby Dick’s documentary The Invisible War brought to life shocking cases of sexual assault in the U.S. military.

  Henny Garfunkel

  Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket, Woody Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy, and Jennifer Lawrence as District 12 fighter Katniss Everdeen in Gary Ross’s successful launch of the Hunger Games franchise.

  Lionsgate/Photofest © Lionsgate Photographer Murray Close

  Disney’s generic early teaser poster for John Carter.

  Photofest © Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

  In John Carter, Taylor Kitsch plays the title role, a Civil War soldier who gains superhuman strength when he is magically transported to Mars. Here he is pitted against two hulking Barsoom beasts.

  Photofest © Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

  At CinemaCon, eye-popping preview footage from Ang Lee’s Life of Pi wowed the convention audience. Here, after a shipwreck drowns his family, Pi (Suraj Sharma) is stranded in a life raft on the Indian Ocean with a Bengal tiger (created by combining computer graphics with footage of live tigers).

  Photofest © 20th Century Fox