plus 3, "Hurt Locker" wins 6 Oscars, best film - Reuters

"Hurt Locker" wins 6 Oscars, best film - Reuters
Victorian home wanted for movie in Nashville - WAFF
Oscars: George Clooney vs. Jeff Bridges - AZCentral.com
WRAPUP 6-'Hurt Locker' brings Oscar glory to woman filmmaker - CNN Money

"Hurt Locker" wins 6 Oscars, best film - Reuters

Posted: 07 Mar 2010 09:12 PM PST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood finally entrusted a female director with an Oscar on Sunday.

Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman in the 82-year history of the Academy Awards to take the prize as her gritty Iraq War movie "The Hurt Locker" outshone "Avatar" after a nail-biting campaign season.

"The Hurt Locker" also took home the top prize, best picture, and four awards in other categories. "Avatar," the 3D smash directed by Bigelow's ex-husband, James Cameron, ended up with three awards, all in technical categories.

The acting races finished as expected and all four honorees took home the first statuettes of their careers.

Jeff Bridges won for his lead role as a drunken country singer who gets a shot at redemption in "Crazy Heart." Sandra Bullock got the gold for playing a suburban mom who guides a homeless black teen to football stardom in "The Blind Side."

In the supporting field, the prizes went to Austrian actor Christoph Waltz for the Nazi revenge fantasy "Inglourious Basterds," and stand-up comic Mo'Nique for the dark urban drama "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire."

The biggest shocks were in the adapted screenplay and foreign-language film categories. Geoffrey Fletcher became the first African-American to win the writing prize, for his work on "Precious." The prize had been expected to go to "Up in the Air," a six-time nominee that was snubbed.

The Argentine crime drama "The Secret in their Eyes" (El secreto de sus ojos) beat Germany's "The White Ribbon" (Das weisse Band) and France's "A Prophet" (Un prophete) to claim the country's second prize in the field.

BITTERSWEET VICTORY

In voting for "The Hurt Locker," Hollywood insiders clearly showed a preference for a relatively obscure movie that suffered a similar commercial fate as other films revolving around the Iraq War.

With North American ticket sales of about $15 million -- about half of what "Avatar" earned in its first day -- "The Hurt Locker" is one of the least-commercial best-picture Oscar winners ever.

The film, based on a story by journalist Mark Boal, follows an American bomb-disposal squad in Iraq. Boal won an Oscar for his original screenplay, and was also a producer, along with Bigelow, Greg Shapiro and French financier Nicolas Chartier.

The best-picture win was a bittersweet moment for Chartier, who was banned from the ceremony last week after breaking Oscar campaign rules by sending out an e-mail to voters.

Bigelow, 58, shot the film in the Jordanian desert in the middle of summer almost three years ago on a shoestring budget of $15 million. It marked her first movie since the costly 2002 submarine flop "K19: The Widowmaker."

Only three other women had ever been nominated for the directing Oscar, most recently Sofia Coppola for "Lost in Translation" in 2004.

As Bigelow left the stage clutching her statuette, the orchestra played Helen Reddy's feminist anthem "I Am Woman." But the shy horse-lover has bristled at the "female filmmaker" tag, and her works are often showcases for strong male roles.

Even Cameron had predicted he would lose the directing race to Bigelow, with whom he has remained on good terms after the couple split in the early 1990s. But he had hoped to repeat the best-picture success he had 12 years ago with "Titanic."

The race for the top Oscar thus pitted two ex-lovers against each other, with each claiming their film was the underdog: "The Hurt Locker" for obvious commercial reasons, and "Avatar" because sentiment largely seemed stacked against it.

Even though "Avatar" has made history with $2.6 billion in worldwide ticket sales and showcased Cameron's bold moviemaking skills, Oscar voters traditionally ignore science-fiction. "Avatar" also lost some major races to "The Hurt Locker."

Another new consideration this time saw organizers double the best picture field to 10 for the first time since 1943. The move was designed to bring more crowd-pleasing blockbusters and thereby arrest the event's steadily declining ratings.

The voting rules accordingly changed for best picture, with a preferential system that favored consensus choices over more-divisive contenders.

All the acting winners were first-time nominees, except for Bridges. The 60-year-old scion of a Hollywood acting family had been nominated four times previously, dating back to 1972. "Crazy Heart" also won the Oscar for best song.

Bullock, 45, ran a close race with Meryl Streep for "Julie & Julia." It's now been 27 years since 16-time nominee Streep won her second Oscar.

Waltz, 53, who played a Nazi with a twinkle in his eye, becomes the first actor to win an Oscar for a film directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Mo'Nique's role as a abusive mother was a departure for the 42-year-old comedienne. But she has said she got into character after recalling the sexual abuse she suffered as a youngster.

The three-and-a-half-hour ceremony, hosted at the Kodak Theater by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, drew real-time brickbats from bloggers. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "I don't remember when I've seen a less exciting Oscarcast."

(Editing by Sandra Maler and Mary Milliken)

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Victorian home wanted for movie in Nashville - WAFF

Posted: 08 Mar 2010 01:09 AM PST

Associated Press - March 8, 2010 4:15 AM ET

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Wanted: A Victorian home around Nashville that can be destroyed.

The Tennessee Film, Entertainment and Music Commission is looking for such a home to be used in a movie.

But there's a catch: The movie's script calls for it to be bulldozed.

Bob Raines, a commission spokesman, said the movie probably will be filmed this spring, but other details have not been released.

The commission can be contacted at (615) 741-3456.

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Oscars: George Clooney vs. Jeff Bridges - AZCentral.com

Posted: 06 Mar 2010 12:02 PM PST

Being George Clooney in a George Clooney movie is a wise place to start if you are George Clooney.

A crushingly obvious truth, I suppose. But a rarely understood aspect of movie-star acting is range - and that an actor may appreciate his own range and use it to his advantage is even less understood, which (thus far) has saved us from Clooney as Hamlet or Willy Loman. Instead, we get that stoic brow, those bedroom eyes, the constant hint of a smirk and an effortless cool. He may veer an inch toward gravitas, or an inch toward silliness, but he's always within a narrow range.

Which, on Sunday, makes the Oscar race for best actor a competition laced with a few awkward truths.

One of which is that Academy Award voters prefer disguises, raw bluster and a certain naked emotional untidiness - and, generally, neither Clooney nor his competition, Jeff Bridges (whom conventional wisdom has pegged to win), offers much in the way of ostentatious. What they offer, again and again, is themselves, in minutely varying degrees. Bridges, 60, has more range than Clooney, 48, as well as more than a decade of experience on him. What they share, though, is that rather than disappear into characters, both use the illusion that the line between their roles and themselves is nonexistent.

So, we see a Clooney movie or a Bridges movie, and, once again, they're "playing themselves."

But does it really matter which movie a movie star like Bridges or Clooney receives an Oscar for? Clooney won a supporting actor Oscar for "Syriana," and Bridges may well win for "Crazy Heart" - clearly voters require at minimum a gut and an unkempt beard before they can be convinced that real acting is occurring. But neither role is that far afield for either actor. They give good performances and bad performances like any other actor, but when a star makes a career of playing himself, can we really separate those performances anyway?

"He just plays himself": There's often a wallop of contempt in that charge, lobbed by contemporary audiences at stars with the implication that an actor has grown lazy. But it conveniently ignores that big movie stars intend a degree of repetition, and that the savviest want audiences to believe they know them, not as actors but as people. It's also a charge that forgets what makes movies work, and that good actors who happen to be stars have an uncanny understanding of the pros and cons of playing themselves.

Clooney, nominated for "Up in the Air," plays no-bones businessman Ryan Bingham, so ideal a character for an actor who oozes confidence that Bingham even delivers motivational speeches. Clooney could coast, but he doesn't. Vulnerability enters his eyes, works its way into his voice, then his gait, which is rigid at the start of the film, but dawdling as the consistency in his own job (flying around the country and firing people) is thrown to the wind. The truth, however, is we're always watching George Clooney.

Just as, no matter how bad Bridges' Bad Blake in "Crazy Heart" gets - losing children in crowded places, getting sauced every night - the lonesome voice with a hint of mischief, the loose way he carries himself, always stays Bridges. We like him - just as we like him playing the villain in "Iron Man," throwing a jovial arm around Robert Downey Jr. with the same good ol' familiarity he has pulled out in movies with, you know, pick-up trucks and muscle shirts. His motivations may be less naive than in "The Last Picture Show," and his head less clouded than in "The Big Lebowski," but the amiable exhaustion, our sense that he always understands more than he lets on, leaves a smile on our faces. Each performance is a smidgen different from the last.

This is not a bad thing.

The Golden Age of Hollywood's studio system treated contract players as specific brands and assigned them a narrow range, thereby giving audiences what was expected. What it allowed a strong personality to do was create his own reality, which is what Clooney and Bridges do. It's what Cary Grant did, and Tom Cruise does, and James Cagney did, and Julia Roberts does.

The con to a ready-to-go movie persona is the same as the pro: Actors can fall back on it. When they stop offering anything fresh, it's a liability. The uncomfortable truth is that some of the best never give a strenuous performance.

And we want to see strain, as do award voters, but it's not fair. That lack of sweat is what has hindered Bridges and Clooney; it's why we don't consider them the equal of Meryl Streep or Philip Seymour Hoffman. They don't work to win our affection. But because they have less room to play in, and because they rarely coast in the narrow range allowed, they do cut deeper and get closer, and, illusion or not, we know them.

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WRAPUP 6-'Hurt Locker' brings Oscar glory to woman filmmaker - CNN Money

Posted: 07 Mar 2010 11:57 PM PST

* "Hurt Locker" wins 6 Oscars including best film

* Sandra Bullock wins best actress in "The Blind Side"

* Jeff Bridges gets best actor for "Crazy Heart"

(Adds quotes)

By Bob Tourtellotte

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "The Hurt Locker" director Kathryn Bigelow battled her way into Oscar history books Sunday, topping her movie's best film honor with her own Academy Award for directing to become the first woman ever to earn that distinction.

The low-budget film, which has earned $20 million at box offices, picked up six awards in all and bested "Avatar," directed by Bigelow's ex-husband James Cameron. "Avatar" is the top-grossing movie of all time with $2.5 billion.

In a ceremony that harkened back to old Hollywood with glamour, music and comedy, the gritty drama about a squad of bomb-defusing specialists also secured writer Mark Boal the Academy Award for original screenplay and claimed honors for film editing, sound editing and mixing.

"This really is, there's no other way to describe it, it's the moment of a lifetime," said Bigelow, the first female best director in the Academy Awards' 82-year history.

She said she hoped to be the "first of many" women filmmakers to win the honor and that the female modifier "would be a moot point" in the future.

Boal highlighted the struggle to make the movie when only a few years ago in Hollywood money for such true-life drama was hard to find after audiences turned their backs on war films.

"This has been a dream, beyond a dream," said Boal, a journalist who was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq.

At best, he said, the film's makers hoped "we would find a distributor and someone would like the movie."

For its part, "Avatar" walked away with three Oscars, but in technical categories -- visual effects, cinematography and art direction.

FAMILY NIGHT AT OSCAR

Veteran Jeff Bridges claimed best actor for playing a drunken country singer in drama "Crazy Heart." The son of Hollywood star Lloyd Bridges held his trophy high over his head, looking to the heavens and thanking his deceased parents.

"Mom and Dad, yeah," he shouted. "Thank you Mom and Dad for turning me on to such a groovy profession."

Sandra Bullock was named best actress for "The Blind Side" in a first for the actress once dubbed "America's Sweetheart" because she won so many early fans in her romantic comedies.

For "The Blind Side," however, she took the part of a real-life, strong-willed mother who helps take a homeless youth off the street and makes him into a football success.

"Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?" she joked on the Oscars stage.

She held back tears when thanking her own mother, whom she called "a trailblazer" and major influence in her own life.

"To the moms who take care of the babies, no matter where they come from. Those moms never get thanked," Bullock said.

Family film "Up," one of the best-reviewed movies of 2009, won two Oscars for best animated movie and original score with its tale of an elderly man who ties balloons to his home and flies off on an adventure with a young boy.

Dark drama "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" also earned two Oscars including best supporting actress for Mo'Nique and, in another piece of Academy Award history, adapted screenplay for writer Geoffrey Fletcher, who became the first African American to claim that honor.

RECALLING HOLLYWOOD HISTORY

Mo'Nique told reporters backstage that in her hair she wore the same gardenia Hattie McDaniel had when she won supporting actress in "Gone With the Wind" -- a trailblazing win because it was the first ever Oscar for an African American.

"I want to thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all she had to so that I would not have to," Mo'Nique said on stage.

Austrian actor Christoph Waltz won best supporting actor for his turn as a menacing Nazi officer in revenge fantasy "Inglourious Basterds," which follows a band of American Jews killing their enemies behind lines during World War Two.

But it was the only trophy Quentin Tarantino's "Basterds" could claim from eight nods, behind nine apiece for "Hurt Locker" and "Avatar."

Oscar organizers promised a fast-paced show with lots of laughs from co-hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. And after an old-style musical from by Neil Patrick Harris with showgirls and men in tuxedos and tails, Baldwin and Martin put on a stand-up routine picking out stars in the audience.

"There's that damn Helen Mirren," Martin said.

"No Steve, that's Dame Helen Mirren," Baldwin came back.

On the red carpet fashion parade before the awards, Hollywood's leading ladies like Bullock, Cameron Diaz and Zoe Saldana dazzled fans with gowns in many colors and shimmering metallics.

Choices were bold and less restrained than in previous awards shows this season.

(Editing by Mary Milliken and Sandra Maler)

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