movies – Page 25 – This Had Oscar Buzz

083 – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

For this week’s episode, we have another quintessential prestige picture that flubbed with Oscar: it’s-a Captain Corelli’s Mandolin! Coming off of a Best Picture win with Shakespeare in Love, director John Madden returned with a WWII romance set on a gorgeous Greek island between recent Oscar winner Nicolas Cage and next-big-thing Penélope Cruz. But this love story was instantly derided for its tepid sparks and cringe-worthy dialect work from Cage, making it more of a punchline come Oscar time than the viable contender it seemed to be before release.

This week, we look back at Madden’s very THOB-friendly filmography and the behind-the-scenes business maneuverings that crossed this film with Miramax. We also take an extended look at 2001′s acting categories and imagine what a Best Picture ten could have been in the year of A Beautiful Mind and the first Lord of the Rings installment.

Topics also include Cruz’s busy 2001 amid her relationship with Tom Cruise, how movie-going was impacted by 9/11, Christian Bale’s butt, and prostitute pasta.

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082 – Stranger Than Fiction (with Kevin Jacobsen)

This week we’re returning to a subject that never fails to summon Oscar buzz: comedic actors going dramatic. For this round, we welcome And The Runner Up Is host and writer for Gold Derby Kevin Jacobsen to discuss 2006′s Stranger Than Fiction. The high-concept seriocomedy starred Will Ferrell in his first major attempt at a dramatic role as Harold Crick, a man who hears a voice narrating his life and predicting his imminent demise. That voice belongs to an author played by Emma Thompson, with Harold being the subject of her next masterpiece.

But it wasn’t just Ferrell’s leap into drama that spelled Stranger Than Fiction’s Oscar potential. The film was directed by Marc Forster – already a rising Oscar commodity after directing Halle Berry to her win and following that up with Finding Neverland – with buzzed new screenwriter Zach Helm chasing the in-vogue absurdity of Charlie Kaufman. Despite good reviews, the film didn’t fully achieve the potential of its premise and was overshadowed by other counterprogramming options to Oscar’s brooding 2006.

This episode, we take a look back at the diminishing Oscar returns for Marc Forster and how Sacha Baron Cohen and Borat surprisingly stole this film’s thunder. Topics also include Amy Pascal at awards shows, films that made us look at film more critically, and canonical This Had Oscar Buzz superfan Don Gummer.

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081 – Finding Forrester

After the disasterous reception to his shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, Gus Van Sant returned to territory closer to his previous Oscar success with 2000′s Finding Forrester. Another tale of a prodigy in academia, the film follows newcomer Rob Brown as a young writer who stumbles into the guidance of a famed recluse writer William Forrester, played by a late career Sean Connery.

Told in tropes made very familiar by the likes of Dead Poets Society and Scent of a Woman, Finding Forrester is ultimately a very dull version of a mentor/pupil story. And while the film’s moderate box office success made for a small comeback for Van Sant, stiff competition and a late release kept Sean Connery out of the Best Actor race. Now the film is most remembered for its catchphrase, crowed into consciousness in Connery’s brogue: “You’re the man now, dog!”

This episode, we also discuss Connery’s string of post-Oscar hits throughout the 90s and Van Sant’s tough-to-pin-down filmography. Topics also include Oscar presenters who make the envelope reveal more about themselves than the winner, Busta Rhymes, and our favorite pottymouth Shohreh Aghdashloo.

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080 – Enough Said (with Mathew Rodriguez)

One one our favorite female filmmakers to hover just outside of Oscar’s graces is Nicole Holofcener, and this week The Body’s Mathew Rodriguez joins us to talk about one of her more recent films: 2013′s Enough Said. The romantic comedy stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a single mother preparing to send her daughter off to college while discovering the man she is dating is the ex-husband of one of her clients. One of Holofcener’s most celebrated humanist examinations of class and relationships, the film faced an uphill climb against Oscar’s bias against comedies and female stories.

But perhaps its closest shot was for Louis-Dreyfus’ love interest, the dearly departed James Gandolfini. Released after the beloved actor’s death, his against type (but true to his real-life persona) performance remains one of his best.

This week, we’re taking a look at our love for Holofcener’s work, including with her muse and Enough Said supporting star Catherine Keener. We also discuss this year’s exceptional Globes Actress in a Musical/Comedy lineup, what went down when Holofcener almost made Can You Ever Forgive Me? (which still led to her first writing nomination), and Bon Qui Qui from MadTV.

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079 – A Love Song for Bobby Long

The Golden Globes have a standing reputation for oddball nominations and this week we are discussing one of the peak examples: 2004′s A Love Song for Bobby Long. The film follows Scarlett Johansson as [ahem] Purslane Hominy Will, a young woman who inherits a home from her estranged mother only to find it occupied by two poet drunkards played by John Travolta and Gabriel Macht. Remembered far more as a trivia item for Johansson’s Best Actress in a Drama nomination at the Globes than the film itself, Bobby Long provides a fascinating time capsule to the exact moment when Johansson’s star was on the rise after her big 2003.

But this one was held by distributor Lionsgate for a post-Christmas qualifying release, with its fate doubly sealed when the then-tiny distributor’s other candidate Hotel Rwanda took off just a week before. This week, we take a look back at the history of Lionsgate from tiny indie label to the mini-major distributor they are today, and we argue that Johansson might not be the Globes darling that conventional wisdom claims she is.

We also discuss other qualifying releases that had varying degrees of success, Oscar’s history of actors getting double nominations, and galaxy brain what The Cell: The Musical would look like.

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078 – One Hour Photo (with Matt Jacobs)

After Robin Williams finally won his Academy Award for Good Will Hunting, unfortunately the next few years were a series of less-than-well-received projects after another. But after a quick break, Williams transitioned from more sentimental films into a run of dark and creepy material – including this week’s film, the stalking psychodrama One Hour Photo.

This week, HuffPost movie reporter Matt Jacobs joins us to talk about Robin Williams’ pivoted into creepiness, including Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia and the completely reviled Death to Smoochy. Despite the independent thriller was a small scale success at the box office, One Hour Photo was ultimately buried in a year of December heavyweights. Though Williams received raves at the Sundance Film Festival and a Critics’ Choice award nomination (not to mention an AARP Movies for Grown-ups nomination for… Best Breakaway Performance?), the Academy did not embrace this new territory for the screen legend.

We also talk about director Mark Romanek and the generation of directors that started in music videos, movies we first watched in high school classrooms, and undiscovered Celine Dion classics.

(Apologies and thank you for your patience on this week’s audio! We had unfortunate technical difficulties that arose after the recording.)

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Class of 2019

With last week’s announcement of this year’s Academy Award nominees, we can now discuss the episode a year in the making (or, in the case of The Current War, several years): the This Had Oscar Buzz Class of 2019.

In keeping with last year’s tradition, we’ve broken the films up into several categories: The Cake Memorial Prize for happiest miss, The Justice for “Slaughter Race” Prize for saddest miss, The Dr. Louise Banks Award for most surprising shutout, the Unfinished Life Prize for most forgettable, the Angela’s Ashes technicality prize, and the Welcome to Marwen Prize for most anticipated episode.

We naturally rage against the snub of Jennifer Lopez for Hustlers, make promises of an eventual Cats episode, and highlight what makes this year’s Independent Spirit Awards so special. Apologies for the delay in the arrival of the episode!!

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077 – Seven Years in Tibet

As Brad Pitt cements his status as a frontrunner in this year’s Oscar race for his performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, we decided to take another look back at his reign as prestige hottie in the 90s. After nearly missing a win on his first nomination for 12 Monkeys, Brad Pitt’s red hot persona yielded an Oscar expectation that was met with disappointing projects before Fight Club reignited. But one of his most prominent misfires of that era was the misguided and milquetoast Seven Years in Tibet.

The film follows Pitt as mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, who becomes tutor to the young Dalai Lama before and during the invasion of Tibet. While the film fumbles in trying to generate the kind of epic period sweep that Oscar often rewards, its biggest issues lie in a narrative that indulges in cultural tourism, pacifies its true-life protagonist’s Nazi associations, and offers one of the most underwhelming uses of Pitt’s star persona. This week, we’re looking at Pitt’s ascension as 90s peak sexpot, and the Oscar year that favored another epic (you know, the boat one) and a different handsome blond actor.

Topics also include the 90s pop culture obsession with the Dalai Lama (including Scorsese’s Kundun in the same year), the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival, and Pitt’s shaky abilities with dialects.

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075 – Cloud Atlas

We’re bringing 2019 to a close with another Listeners’ Choice, and our listeners have chosen perhaps what will be our most daunting title yet: 2012′s interconnected science fiction opus from Lana & Lilly Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, Cloud Atlas! This tale of several stories spanning generations, genres, and continents launched its Oscar hopes with a jaw-dropping, mega-sized trailer, and lost them just as quickly with an extremely divisive critical reception at TIFF. Led by Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, the film takes massive narrative and emotional leaps that were ultimately too much for Oscar and general audiences.

But you can consider both Chris and Joe as firmly in the positive for this film, while also accepting of its ambitious flaws. This week, we spend the majority of this episode unraveling the many threads and issues within the film (Yellow face makeup, its near three hour length, its dizzying construction), and just what stirs our affection for it (its spiritual convictions, general audacity, and of course “The Cloud Atlas Sextet”).

Topics also include Ben Whishaw’s whittle butt, Hurricane Sandy, and who would play our own personal Old Georgies. You true-true-ly chose a great movie for us, and we love you all the more for it!

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074 – Welcome to Marwen

We’re cracking open the lid on the coffin of the This Had Oscar Buzz Class of 2018 for the first time this week! And as promised, the first title that we’re diving into is Robert Zemeckis’s uncanny valley disasterpeace Welcome to Marwen. Based on the documentary Marwencol and the life of artist Mark Hogancamp, the film follows Hogancamp (played by Steve Carell) in the fallout of a brutal attach as he creates a fictional village of dolls inspired by the women in his life.

But the film half takes place in Marwen, bizarrely trapping the film in Mark’s imagination while only loosely relating to his real-world troubles and subjecting us to Zemeckis’ unintentionally horrifying dolls-come-to-life CGI. Naturally, we spend most of the film wishing it developed the female characters beyond their role as caregivers instead of wasting the talents of Leslie Mann, Merritt Weaver, Janelle Monáe, and Gwendoline Christie.

This episode, we look back at Zemeckis’ increasingly diminishing returns beginning with The Polar Express, Carell’s less successful performances, and the perils of Forrest Gump.

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