- Variety: Dave McNary reports that Lucy Walker’s “Waste Land” won the top feature award at last night’s International Documentary Association (IDA) Awards. The doc, which is also on the short-list of 15 films from which the Academy will select its five nominees for the best documentary feature Oscar, beat out “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” “The Oath,” “Steam of Life,” and “Sweetgrass” for the honor. (Last year’s IDA winner, “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” failed to even make the Oscar short-list.”)
- The Hollywood Reporter: Tim Appelo questions if Paramount’s “striptease Oscar release” for Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s Western “True Grit” was a “smart move,” noting that the studio “coyly withheld its screenings until the last minute from all but a chosen few,” whom he refers to as “the cool kids.” Jon Landau, the producer of last year’s big late-season release “Avatar,” says, “We live in a day and age where information is so rapidly disseminated you don’t need long campaigns for movies these days.” An ex-studio employee, however, disagrees, noting “Look what’s happening — we’re talking about it.”
- Gold Derby: Thelma Adams speculates that “the first big casualty of the Oscar season” may be Ryan Gosling (“Blue Valentine”), who “certainly deserves a shot for his raw, ingratiating, multi-faceted performance,” but “is clearly the stepchild in The Weinstein Company’s stable” this year behind Colin Firth (“The King’s Speech”), and may therefore get a somewhat lesser push as a result. (Adams notes, however, that Gosling’s co-star Michelle Williams, a best actress hopeful, will probably avoid a similar predicament “since Harvey [Weinstein] doesn’t have an actress competing in that category.”)
- IFC: Matt Singer argues the case for why best supporting actor longshot John Hawkes “deserves a nomination” for his performance as Teardrop, the complex uncle of Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree in “Winter’s Bone.” (He just received one from the Indie Spirit Awards last week.) Singer explains, “It isn’t simply that Hawkes is a convincing heavy… What makes his performance as Teardrop special is the way he provides near-subliminal hints of depths beneath the terrifying facade… A man like Teardrop would never tell his niece how he was feeling. So Hawkes has to say it all with gestures: the slouch behind the wheel of his truck, the desperate way he drags on his cigarette. In [the] final scene, he tells us exactly what is going to happen to Teardrop after the film is over without uttering a single word.”
- The Daily Beast: Nicole LaPorte believes that the best actress race “has already boiled down to “a smackdown between just two of the divas,” 29-year-old Natalie Portman (“Black Swan”) and 52-year-old Annette Bening (“The Kids Are All Right”). LaPorte notes that youth has trumped experience over the past decade — “all of the winners have been in their late 20s or 30s,” with the exception of 2006 winner Helen Mirren and Sandra Bullock — and sexiness has been a recurring trait, as well, both of which would seem to give Portman the edge. But Bening has, over the course of her campaign, “made a point to remind fellow thespians that she is an actor’s actor… with a long body of work both on the stage and screen,” not to mention that she did not wear makeup in her film (“going ugly” often works with voters, too).
- Little Gold Men: John Lopez notes that while the 2010 Sundance Film Festival “was brightly burnished such household names as Ryan Gosling, Natalie Portman, James Franco, and Kristen Stewart,” the just-announced 2011 lineup features primarily “indie-catnip candidates” like Keisha Castle-Hughes, Thomas Haden Church, Terrence Howard, John C. Reilly, and Michael Shannon. Why? Lopez cracks, “This could be a byproduct of the fact that it’s easier to find bailout money for Goldman Sachs right now than it is to fund an independent film big enough to support mainstream celebrities.”
- E! Online: Marc Malkin suggests three “of the scenarios being repeated among colleagues, and yes, friends” of slain Oscar publicist Ronni Chasen about what may have led to her brutal murder two weeks ago in Beverly Hills — one relates to the possibility that she was paying off a friend’s gambling debt; another is that she was part of an industry deal gone awry; and the third suggests that she may have been quietly dating a man with whom problems could have developed.
Photo: “Waste Land.” Credit: Arthouse.
