Links (AKA Ways To Kill Even More Time on the Internet)
Thursday, January 2, 2014 at 8:09PM Vulture Battle of the Long Island Blondes in Wolf of Wall Street, Don Jon and American Hustle. My favorite among them is definitely ScarJo
The Playlist shares the new Electro teaser from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (aka Spider-Man 5) and is it just me or does Electro wielding his powers with a pointy all fingers twitch seem like a really bad cheap imitation of the Emperor in Return of the Jedi ?
Les InRocks [for French speaking readers] interviews director Alain Guiraudie on his critical breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Please let us know the most interesting lines because I love the portrait of Guiraudie in the bushes
Awards Daily Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio to be honored at Santa Barbara Film Festival. (But in what order are the 48 or so honorees being feted? No one speaks of this!)
Thompson on Hollywood icymi here's a long piece on the very complicated voting process for Oscar's Best Picture. I feel like you have to a higher education math degree or just have a very finely tuned stay-patient stay-focused button, to understand this. Since I have neither, I'm (partially) lost. I have too many questions once you hit step #7... But the theory presented is that we will have a smaller pool of nominees due to the large number of films with broad support, rather than the more common sense 'more beloved films means more nominated pictures' feeling.
Variety SPC picks up the Hungarian future Oscar nominee The Notebook
Cinema Blend a new Ralph Fiennes clip from Grand Budapest Hotel
Top Ten Mania
Towleroad my piece on the best queer characters of cinema this year from Kill Your Darlings through Blue is the Warmest Color
Towleroad best LGBT moments in television this year
Yahoo top grossing Broadway shows of 2013, The Lion King back on top despite Wicked continuing to rack in literally millions every week despite being several years old (Producers just burning money dawdilng about getting that movie mounted as we've bitched about a lot). I read so many articles about this and NONE list all ten even though they're referring to a mythical top ten... so you gotta check...
Broadway World ...for that
Pajiba the "brotastic" list of most pirated movies of 2013 from The Hangover Part 3 to Gangster Squad
Frontiers LA has an amazing top ten from the always hilarious and hip "Chloe Sevigny" (aka Drew Droege). Here are the actressy entries though the whole thing is worth a read...
6. The bowel-shaking rhythms of Jodie Foster’s Elysium timbre.
3. Actresses without teeth. Or anyone but Anne Hathaway.
LOL
Reader Comments (7)
For those who may be interested, A:OC just won 4 Capri Hollywood Film Festival Awards, including Best Pix, Best Lead Actress (Meryl Streep), and Best Ensemble cast.
I think my favorite entry on the Chloe list was this one.
"4. The remarkably understandable plot of Upstream Color. Talk about popcorn cinema!"
Quick overview of the voting. If you get to 1/11 of the total votes, you're an automatic nominee. If you hit 1/10 of the total number of ballots, all surplus votes get reallocated to your #2 as half-votes. I'd say 12 Year a Slave, Gravity, Nebraska and Her are the most likely to make it to surplus. Also if you vote for something that gets less than 1% of the total tally, like say The Past, your full vote gets reallocated for your #2.
No one else gets reallocated. This is the biggest difference as far as I can tell between Best Picture and all the other preferential categories, which keep reallocating from the bottom until they hit 5 nominees. Once reallocation is over, basically any film that hits 5% is a nominee, and everything under that is a lost vote.
That means that if you vote for something like All Is Lost, which only gets say 2% of the initial vote, you're putting all of your eggs into that film's basket, because if it doesn't get nominated, your vote doesn't get reallocated to your #2. So movies that are likely to be #4 on a lot of ballots like Saving Mr. Banks might have a harder time getting nominated than something with a small, passionate following like Fruitvale Station. #1s are the name of the game.
With basically 5500-6000 ballots in play this year, it means that anything that can make it to 550 votes is a for sure nominee, anything that can make it to 275-300 #1 votes is a very likely nominee. The issue is that it looks like there are going to be a lot of movies like Philomena or maybe Dallas Buyers Club that get maybe 225 votes. Not low enough to reallocate, but also not enough to make the list.
TB -- but people say this every year, that so and so movie just won't get number one votes... and then it does! i still dont think the reallocation is clear in that article. It sounds like only the surpluss votes (after you've hit the requistise amount) are reallocated... which means only some of the ballots are... but how do they decide whose ballots are reallocated?
@NathanielR--That's my question too. I'd assume that this is such an anal process that with surplus votes, every #2 is taken into account, and then they're allocated proportionally. So if Saving Mr. Banks gets 10% of the film's #2 votes, then it would get 10% of the surplus. But you're right that this isn't made clear in that article. It could just be random?
As for things getting enough #1 votes, it's hard to tell how things are trending because the 5% rule is so new. There are only two years to base all statistics off of, which totally throws everything off predictively. Last year seemed to indicate that passion would get you on the ballot, but who knows how this year will shake out.
They don't reallocate some ballots-- they reallocate a fraction of EACH ballot in that pile. So Nathaniel, if you vote for 12YaS and it reaches the surplus level by, say, 33%, then 33% of your 12YaS vote is reallocated to your #2 film. If that film isn't in the running or is already a nominee, than it goes to your #3, and so on.
The Long Island Blondes article is adorable except that at least two of the blondes are not from Long Island. Scar Jo's Barbara is a Jersey girl in Don Jon, and Bay Ridge (as in "the Duchess of Bay Ridge") is in Brooklyn, which is where Naomi is from. We're never told where Jennifer Lawrence's Rosalyn hails from in American Hustle.
Long Island, northern New Jersey, and Brooklyn have different, if similar, accents, although Aussie Robbie and Kentuckian Lawrence can't be expected to nail that nuance. ScarJo is a native New Yorker and does pretty good.