There are several major announcements this week to cover, from Honorary Oscars to new Oscar contenders.

Oscar News

• Two awaited films are getting December releases from Roadside that could push them into Oscar consideration. I Love You Phillip Morris, starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as a gay couple, got good buzz at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and will be released on December 3. Bitiful, which got great reviews at Cannes for leading man Javier Bardem, will be released sometime in December also.
• The Academy announced the four recipients of the 2010 Honorary Oscars. The Irving Thalberg Award will go to five-time Oscar Winner Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II). Honorary Oscars will go to historian and film restorer Kevin Brownlow, French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and actor Eli Wallach. Interestingly enough, none of those three recipients have ever been nominated for an Oscar. If you are interested in discovering how the decision was made, read this article from The Wrap.
• Predicting the animated film category may get a little tougher this year, after Disney announced they are removing themselves from participation in the Annie Awards. Apparently, they are unhappy with the membership process for the awarding body. The Variety article can be found here.

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This morning, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced the recipients of the 2010 Honorary Oscars. Five-time Oscar winner Francis Ford Coppola will receive the Irving G. Thalberg Award, while honorary Oscars will go to preservationist Kevin Brownlow, director Jean-Luc Godard and actor Eli Wallach. The press release follows.

Beverly Hills, CA (August 25, 2010) — The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted last night to present the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to producer-director Francis Ford Coppola and Honorary Awards to historian and preservationist Kevin Brownlow, director Jean-Luc Godard and actor Eli Wallach. All four awards will be presented at the Academy’s 2nd Annual Governors Awards dinner on Saturday, November 13, at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center®.

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This is a new feature here at CinemaSight, where every Saturday I will have a round-up of all the latest Academy Award related news of the week. For the next few weeks, we will probably be playing around with different titles and features, so please be patient.

Oscar News

• Perhaps the biggest Oscar-related news of the week was the new release date for sudden Oscar contender The Tourist. GK Films and Sony Pictures Classic announced they are moving the spy film from 2011 to a December 10 release. The film is written by Oscar winner Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) and Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects), and is directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmark, whose film The Lives of Others won the Best Foreign Film Oscar a few years back. It stars Oscar winner Angelina Jolie (Girl, Interrupted) and three-time Oscar nominee Johnny Depp (Finding Neverland, Sweeney Todd). If the buzz for this comes through as good, we could be looking at a strong contender View the rest of this article...

Well, with 3 major critics groups finished and the Globe nominations finished this morning, frontrunners and losers are already starting to creep out of the woodwork or fall out of sight. Anyways, here are my Post-Globe Nod predictions, with brief (and probably incorrect) insight following the categories. Please do not hold any of these against me!

BEST PICTURE

Avatar
The Hurt Locker
Inglorious Basterds
Invictus
The Messenger
Nine
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
A Single Man
Up
Up in the Air

We seem to have four locks in this new, broader category already: The Hurt Locker, Precious, Up and Up in the Air don’t seem to be going anywhere. Inglorious Basterds picked up major steam this morning, and the reviews of Avatar are pushing it into strong contention. I think Invictus and Nine are getting enough traction to hold on to a spot in this new larger category, but if this were a year ago I think they would be losing a lot of steam. I have A Single Man and The Messenger in the last two slots, but both are fighting for their lives. The Lovely Bones, A Simple Man and (500) Days of Summer could be holding on enough to take their place still.
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So, we are at the point of the year where all the major film festivals are over, and so most of the major Oscar contenders have been seen, at least by some film critics and insiders. In fact, there only seem to be three films that no one has yet seen: James Cameron’s Avatar, Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones and Rob Marshall’s Nine. All three are films by men who have brought us Best Picture winners, and all three seem to be on track to a Best Picture nomination. Why?

Much has already been bandied around by those on this blog (and everywhere else) about the change to 10 Best Picture nominees. Still, no one seems to know exactly how that change will play out in January. But with these three films, the expansion to 10 films should push them over the limit, barring catastrophic reviews or disastrous box office. Here is why: With 10 films going up for the big prize, it only takes half of the votes (or less) to push a film over. I have already talked earlier in this blog about how that works, and how that may affect the race.

What happens with these three films is they will spend the next month being proclaimed as strong contenders (and probably the three frontrunners) without anyone really seeing them. Some critics may start to see them by the end of this month (in order to factor into award voting), but I will guess that most Academy voters won’t get to see the films until mid-December. This will happen after the Golden Globes and the Golden Satellites announce their nominees. These awards tend to see themselves as prognosticators of the Oscars (especially the Satellites), and will want to push what they see as the frontrunners, so I bet all three of these films lead the nominations. By the time people get around to seeing them, they have in their heads that these are the films that people will love this year, and unless they are completely put off by them, will follow suit.
This plan has backfired in the past (Cold Mountain one example), but I guarantee that had 2003 had 10 nominees that film would have been sixth or seventh in voting. There is too much room in the lists, and these films should sneak in. They all feel like Oscar nominees: a space epic by the director of the most awarded film in Oscar history (Avatar), an adaption of a beloved, best-selling book by the director of the most awarded film in Oscar history (The Lovely Bones) and an adaptation of an award-winning Broadway musical in the vein of the director’s last Best Picture winning film (Nine). They feel like Best Picture nominees, they look like Best Picture nominees, people say they will be Best Picture nominees and there are more Best Picture nominee slots in 60 years, so why won’t they be Best Picture nominees? You tell me.

The academy this summer, along with everything else it announced, stated that the Honorary Awards will no longer be a part of the Oscar ceremony come February. Then, this week, they announced the FOUR Honorary Award winners. They will receive their awards at an untelevised ceremony in November. This is of course a double-edged sword.

I for one am happy that the Honorary Awards are no longer part of the Oscar ceremony. First off, for a ceremony that is always chastised for being too long, this is an unneeded 10 minutes per Honorary Award that need to be spent. This can save us close to 30 minutes probably, time that can be spent in better ways (like not cutting off acceptance speeches) or just forgotten. It will defiantly make the ceremony move faster, and will focus it on the past year in film.

Second, it opens up the possibilities of the award itself. I highly doubt that four people (see Wesley’s post below for the info on this year’s winners) would be getting Honorary Oscars this year if they were being given in February. That is too much time for them to spend on it. All of this year’s recipients are overdue and more than deserving, so the ability for them to get their moment and their statue is important and key.

They will also be getting their due in a much more in-depth way, also. Traditionally, a presenter gives a short speech, we see a montage of clips from their career and the recipient gives a short acceptance speech. It is one more award in an evening with 24 other awards. Moving this to its own ceremony, though (such as the American Film Institute does), these recipients will be given a much more thorough tribute and their career given a true reflection. Lauren Bacall, Roger Corman, Gordon Willis and John Calley will be given more than a 5 minute montage now. They will be given an evening-long reception where each of their careers can be examined over a 20-30 minute presentation.

Of course, this brings us to the one flaw in the new Academy system: this November ceremony will not be televised. While I fully support, and applaud, the new ceremony, it is criminal that we will not be able to view it, nor that the Academy is not honoring these lifelong cinematic figures with a national program. They are pretty much saying you get an Oscar, but it isn’t important enough that we want people to see it. Wesley has already said he hopes TCM or Bravo will pick it up. If ESPN can air Baseball Hall of Fame inductions, and with the appearance now of an awards show for every niche of entertainment imaginable, surely one of these stations (or PBS, or AMC, or Ovation, or HBO) can spend a few hours honoring these newest Oscar winners.