Word: oscars
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...Toronto Film Festival ends its 34th annual session tonight, but most of the international press corps has gone home, their heads crammed with images and performances. Toronto, famous for years now as the kickoff to Oscar season, is the place Hollywood visits in search of Academy Award contenders. There were a few - though in a straitened economic environment, with fewer zillionaires eager to bankroll indie movies, some excellent films (Life During Wartime, The Joneses) had a tough time finding buyers. Crystal-balling the Oscars is fun, but it can't compare with seeing and savoring good films that might...
...portrait of a character not far from his own: a traveling man with scores of women in his past, riding high on the confidence that people will buy anything he pitches - even a savory comedy-drama with a tart aftertaste. He, and Reitman, could close the sale on Oscar night...
...that the Coen brothers - who were raised in an academic Jewish family in Minneapolis, and were 13 and 10 respectively when the movie takes place - are self or other-hating Jews. But as filmmakers (and Oscar-winners, last year, for No Country for Old Men), they've always enjoyed anatomizing humanity's weak points and turning them into a kind of comedy. The lynch party, composed of Jews and gentiles, that assembles around Larry is full of these caricatures. And Larry was made to be intimidated, ignored, abused. He is a passive protagonist whose plight earns him as much pity...
...Yazpik is intriguing in a small role performed entirely in Spanish. To attempt to elaborate any more of the characters, plot, themes, or images would be both futile and unfair, as any intelligible explanation would also spoil the ending. Only one thing is apparent from almost beginning to end: Oscar season has arrived. —Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu...
...Great Oscar Giveway, as it is known, is the brainchild of Brian Mullaney, the president of Smile Train, who spent 20 years in advertising before starting the not-for-profit organization. It was his idea to make the documentary and aim for an Academy Award. (Probably not coincidentally, one of Smile Train's publicists used to work for Harvey Weinstein.) Having achieved that, he wants the movie to have a long tail. "Our biggest challenge is awareness. Nobody cares about clefts," he says. "Winning the Oscar was luck, but now that we've won it, it's like a Trojan...