Word: oscarization
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This may not have been the time to expand the Oscar category for Best Picture from five films to 10, but studio bosses will say it was a very good year. No matter what else Americans skimped on when they got slammed by the Great Recession, they didn't stop going to the movies. For the first time ever, the annual box-office total exceeded $10 billion ($10.5851, to get into pi calculations), outpacing the previous record, in 2008, by nearly 10%. The number of tickets sold, 1.474 billion, was the highest of the past five years - though lower than...
Note that, of the directors of these nine flops, four were either Academy Award winners (Robert Zemeckis, Ron Howard) or Oscar nominees (Michael Mann, Spike Jonze), whereas Cameron is the only Oscar winner among directors of the top 10 grossers. The lessons: prestige directors get to spend more money, and, in dollar terms, their "personal vision" can look astigmatic to the mass audience. (And great to critics, who put the Mann and Jonze films on their 10-best lists, and would rightly fret if big-budget assignments went only to hacks.) Consider, too, that none of the first seven...
...Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar...
...weekend box-office results were like the prizes a school gives to all sports competitors: everyone's a winner! The one exception was Nine, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a film director at a crisis in his life and career, and five Oscar-laden actresses dressing up this musical version of Federico Fellini's 8½. The picture earned $5.5 million in 1,412 theaters - a slow start for a film meant to give the ailing Weinstein Company a life-saving box-office boost. Movies about movies are rarely big hits (audiences want to eat the sausage...
Javier Bardem, the Spanish hunk who won an Oscar as the killer in No Country for Old Men, was originally to play Guido. When he dropped out, the role went to Day-Lewis, an actor nearly the opposite of Bardem. He's coiled, wary, and has a spirit that's not even slightly Mediterranean. In 8-1/2, Mastroianni was such a natural charmer - so, we have to say, Italian - that he made indolence attractive; in that film, a perpetual sexual adolescence was not a flaw but a goal (especially because women kept throwing themselves at him, and what woman...