Archive for the ‘Oscars’ Category

A $6 million opening weekend for Mars Needs Moms against a $160 mil budget – Pluto Nash territory bombwise. How much money does Robert (The Polar Express) Zemeckis have to waste before he realizes his dream – of completely “human” CG – is delusional? People are creeped out by it, and that’s not about to change.

When cameras were invented, artists realized they had to become more stylized, portray what a camera image couldn’t. That’s the future of CG, not spending hundreds of millions to create realistic humans when you could hire a real human for scale. Even in the Toy Story movies, the scenes with human characters are the ones that tend to pull you out of the story.

If you are wondering what the Canadian-born Oscar nominees look like, here are most of them from the Academy Awards luncheon this week at the Consul General of Canada’s official residence in Hancock Park. Let’s hope we see some of them stride up on stage tonight.

Left to right: Luc Dery (co-producer of Incendies, up for the best foreign language Oscar), Adrien Morot (makeup artist nominated for Barney’s Version), Kim McCraw (co-producer of Incendies), Denis Villeneuve (director of Incendies) and Dean DeBlois (co-director of How to Train Your Dragon, up for best animated feature).

Missing from the luncheon, and therefore the photo, was Craig Berkey. He was nominated twice in the sound editing and sound mixing categories for the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit.

Best bet among all of them is Incendies, which would be another triumph for Quebec cinema. Last and only time Canada won in this competition was Denis Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions.

As for Morot, he expects Rick Baker and Dave Elsey will win for their flashy work in The Wolfman — and Baker is the god of Hollywood makeup now. Morot calls him “The Chosen One”.

DeBlois hinted he does not expect to win, either. Toy Story 3 is the odds-on leader for best animated feature, another win for Disney/Pixar, which seems to do no wrong. But the nomination itself has been great for Dragon, which is planning two sequels to create a trilogy.