Oscar Week in Review: November 28 – December 4, 2010

Oscar News

This year’s Oscar hosts were announced this week, and the Academy is returning to the days where film personalities hosted rather than comedians. Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway and James Franco will host this years ceremony.
The National Board of Review continued its precedent of being the first major precursor to announce its awards by presenting 4 awards, including Best Picture, to The Social Network. Jesse Eisenberg, Leslie Manville, Christian Bale and Jacki Weaver took the acting awards. The full list of winners can be found here.
The Satellite Awards announced their nominees earlier this week, with Inception leading the pack with 11 nods.
Winter’s Bone led the pack of nominees for the Independent Spirit Awards this week, picking up 7 nominations. The Kids Are All Right followed with 5.
Winter’s Bone also took the Best Picture prize at the 20th Annual Gotham Awards, a New York-based awards show honoring independent film.
The Academy released the short lists for Animated and Live Action Short Films this week. 10 films will compete to be nominated in each category.
The PGA announced their nominees for Best Documentary. Among the 6 nominees are Oscar-shortlisted films Client 9, Inside Job, The Tillman Story and Waiting for “Superman”.

Black Swan is the major Oscar contender being released this weekend, and the divisive nature of the film is shown in the strong, but not great, 76 from Metacritic. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 86%, but looking at the reviews show that for every critic who loves the film’s vision, another finds it hollow or unengaging.
I Love You, Phillip Morris is getting stronger reviews than some of the buzz anticipated, with a 69 on Metacritic and a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes. Still, all the reviews seem to agree that while they like the film, it is nothing great or special and will probably be forgotten by the awards groups.

The King’s Speech set the bar for the year 2010, garnering the highest debut per screen average of the year, well over $88,000 a screen in New York and Los Angeles. It continues to spread out to other cities this weekend.
Disney’s Tangled premiered with the second highest Thanksgiving opening ever, behind Toy Story 2 in 1999.

No Oscar contenders released new trailers this week.

Italian film legend Mario Monicelli died this week at the age of 95. He was nominated for an Oscar twice as a screenwriter (for Casanova ’70 and The Organizer), and four of his films were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film (including the classic Big Deal on Madonna Street).
Leslie Nielsen, whose career moved from B-movie straight man to older, comedic leading man passed away at the age of 84. Among his memorable comedic moments is a trip to the Academy Awards in The Naked Gun 33 1/3.
Irvin Kirshner, the director of The Empire Strikes Back, passed away at the age of 87. Among his other films were the James Bond film Never Say Never Again.