Word: goldens
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...Butterfly, the French story of a man totally immobilized by a stroke, beat out the German spy drama The Lives of Others? (Three out of five critics groups say yes.) If you're getting restless, movie lovers, too bad. You'll be hearing the same obscure names at the Golden Globes and on Oscar night...
...damn well please. No problem with that; it's their gig, and obviously they should pick their favorites. (The choices are fine with me: No Country, Persepolis and No End in Sight are all on my 10 best.) But these laurels factor into publicity campaigns for the Oscars and Golden Globes; often they are the campaigns. It's the way we critics contribute to the art-industrial complex. Our prizes certainly help determine which films get nominated, setting in motion the next round of ballyhoo before the final prizes are handed out. So almost all the nominees will be from...
...Golden Globes and the Oscars, if they follow the critics' lead, will have V.D.D. - viewer deficit disorder. Large numbers of people won't watch shows paying tribute to movies they haven't seen. In the old Golden Age days, most contenders for the top Oscars were popular movies that had a little art. Now they're art films that have a little, very little, popularity. The serious movies Hollywood gives awards to in January and February are precisely the kind it avoids making for most of the year. The Oscars are largely an affirmative action program, where the industry scratches...
...this for Weitz: he got the movie made, even in its current gelded form. But there's something missing, beyond the iconoclastic theology, in this perfectly OK, blandly underwhelming superproduction. The movie lacks an elevating passion, a cohesive vision, a soul. It's as if The Golden Compass has misplaced its artistic compass. Somebody stole its daemon...
...Will the sequels get made, by Weitz or someone more gifted? Strictly on profit-and-loss terms, I'd guess no. The Golden Compass is unlikely to reach the LOTR stratosphere, and a company doesn't keep making money-draining pictures just to complete a trilogy. Remember, too, it's in the second and third books that Pullman revs up the blasphemy. Those film adaptations would have to be either offensive or unrecognizable...