Bet it's the Oscars
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Despite originally starting as the dark horse, The King's Speech is racing towards Oscars glory at the 83rd Academy Awards on Monday. The Social Network was the early favourite to take the best picture Oscar, but British Australian co-production The King's Speech has since stuttered to a comfortable lead with 1/4 odds for best picture ahead of the Facebook movie at 11/4. The King's Speech director Tom Hooper says while the prospect of taking out the major categories is ``fantastic'', he's trying not to get ahead of himself.``I like to keep focus on what has already happened and I'm delighted just to have 12 nominations,'' he says.
``There's a lot to celebrate in that.''
The film's star, Colin Firth, looks set to have plenty to celebrate at the Oscars after party. Bookies have him as the shortest-priced favourite in Oscars history. Best actress honours are also likely to be a sure thing, with Natalie Portman (Black Swan) at 1/10 and Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right) at 5/1. Unfortunately, Australian nominees Nicole Kidman (best actress, 66/1) and Jacki Weaver (best supporting actress, 66/1) are outsiders, while Geoffrey Rush (best supporting actor, 3/1) trails hot favourite Christian Bale (1/5).
The Australian with the best chance of climbing the podium to make an acceptance speech is film editor Kirk Baxter, whose editing work on The Social Network has him at 1/5, with his main rivals 127 Hours and The King's Speech at 6/1. Other Australians nominated for Oscars include producer Emile Sherman (The King's Speech), animated short film director Shaun Tan (The Lost Thing) and visual effects gurus Ben Snow (Iron Man 2) and Joe Farrell (Hereafter).
In a year in which the favourites are tipped to triumph, the best director category is shaping up as the closest thing to a nail-biter. Christopher Nolan's (Inception) controversial absence in the best director category has left Hooper (The King's Speech) and David Fincher (The Social Network) in the Oscar's closest race at 7/4 and 21/50 respectively. Who would have thought a film that looks exactly like Oscar bait a bullied Brit overcomes adversity while his knowing and unconventional mentor looks on would turn out to be just that? Well, besides everyone.
The 83rd Annual Academy Awards screen Monday from 9am on Pay TV's Starpicsth1 and from 9.40pm on Nine and NBN.
With the hysteria of the Golden Globes starting to die down, the attention now turns to the Ben Hur of Hollywood awards ceremonies - the Oscars. On Wednesday, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce this year's nominees and, if the combined results of the Globes and Critics Choice Awards are anything to go by, The Social Network will lead the charge. It will most definitely get nominations across the board in the best film, best director, best original screenplay, and best actor/supporting actor categories. But history has shown us several best picture favourites have fallen on their own sword in past Oscars upsets.
Boxing films have proved to be big winners at the Oscars, which could both work for and against The Fighter. Academy voters are less likely to be confronted by the conceptually challenging themes, like they will with Inception, and The Fighter is a superbly acted underdog tale that is benefited by the indie leanings of director David O.Russell. But where Rocky and Million Dollar Baby have concurred, boxing flicks like Raging Bull and The Hurricane have been knocked out, so it could go either way for Mark Wahlberg's passion project.
Firth is certainly the favourite for the career Oscar and his superb turn in The King's Speech is likely to be unshakable. But two-time Oscar nominee M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs) thinks The Social Network's Jesse Eisenberg is in with a shot.
Briggs met Ward just after the first of three fights with Arturo Gatti, which went on to become one the great boxing trilogies (Ward and Gatti are pictured above). Briggs said chatting with Ward "between fights and rounds'' he was struck by how ``down to Earth'' he was. Sitting next to Ward at the fight was his older brother Dicky who Briggs said was ``a bit of a lunatic''. Christian Bale's erratic portrayal of Dicky in The Fighter is tipped to win him an Oscar and Briggs said it seems authentic.
Wahlberg was a driving force behind the film, taking it from early development stages as an executive producer and hand-picking everyone from directors and trainers, to actors and producers. Bale had this to say about Wahlberg in his acceptance speech “Mark, really got to give a shout out to Mark as he really drove this whole movie. You can only give a loud performance like the one I gave when you have a quiet anchor and a stoic character. I’ve played that character many times and it never gets any notice. But the HPFA have nominated Mark for tonight so that’s fantastic, but thank you buddy. Kudos to you for that, otherwise I wouldn’t have got away with it.”
It took four years, three directors and numerous stop-starts before Mark Wahlberg's biopic on boxer `Irish' Mickey Ward was able to get out of the gym and into the ring. Thankfully, it's worth the weight.
As a boxer, Micky Ward is best known for fighting one of the great trilogies in boxing history with Arturo Gatti. However, The Fighter is set before Ward goes pro and is less of a sporting drama, than it is a family one. It would be easy to write it off as your typical underdog sporting story, but few people who enter the film will leave with that attitude. The most obvious element in its filmic arsenal are the performances - with Bale spine tingling as the erratic and crack cocaine addicted brother. In fact, he's so convincing as a crackhead it makes you wonder just what it is he does during his down time between films. Although Bale's acting talent outside of action blockbusters is no secret to fans of The Machinist, The Prestige, American Psycho and The New World, his portrayal is beyond worthy of the best supporting actor Oscar. Despite Bale's physical transformation to embody the unhealthy physicality of Dicky, his flamboyant and unbridled performance is quite simply a career best.
Perhaps the real star of The Fighter is director David O'Russell, who delivers an absolute haymaker of a film. His third collaboration with Wahlberg, after Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, O'Russell's product is a collage of greatness mixing documentary elements and confronting close-ups with stills and balls-out creative shots. From the unexpected tracking shots and angles to genius continuous shots, as a director he has mixed his indie filmmaking sensibilities with the conventions of the genre to make a sporting film that extends beyond its reach. Even the fight scenes in the ring, although beautifully constructed and toe-to-toe with anything from the greatest boxing films like Rocky or Raging Bull, act more as a Bolo Punch while the out-of-ring drama delivers the knockout. When other directors could have taken Dicky's addiction and imprisonment to a dark place, O'Russell brings in comedic elements without losing the significance of the situation.
The Fighter is out in Australia on Jan 27 and the rest of the lucky world already have their mitts on it.
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