Abzee’s Oscar Predix for the year in film 2022 (Updated)

The nominations for the 95^th Academy Awards will be announced in exactly 2 weeks’ time. After the slapgate that was the Will Smith-Chris Rock embarrassment of last year, the Covid affected restricted ceremony of the year prior to it, the host-less events from the couple years before that, and the shadow of the #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite movements that loomed over the two ceremonies previous to these… the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would like the Oscars this year to be a return to normalcy and one that would be remembered only for the films rather than any scandal or drama. Having host Jimmy Kimmel back to anchor the evening is a step in that direction.

At a time when global film industries are in a state of flux, audiences’ viewing habits are shifting, and theatrical outings are becoming more and more about just tentpole releases… perhaps this will be the massiest Oscars in years. The Oscars have always battled low ratings owing to charges of snubbing popular films in favour of snobbish prestige fare. Think The Hurt Locker winning over Avatar, or Anthony Hopkins in The Father over Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther… there are several examples.

Summer blockbusters and superhero films, genres that have kept the film industries and theatres still relevant, have always received a reluctant appraisal from the Academy in technical categories like Visual Effects and Sound. The 95^th Academy Awards could be different.

A Brief History of South Indian Kuthu and Teenmaar Music in 10 Songs

From Deva to M.I.A. to A. R. Rahman, we trace the evolution of the dance-folk genre at the heart of RRR hit “Naatu Naatu”

Excerpt: “In truth, “Naatu Naatu” is just one example of what is called “dappankuthu” (literally “drum punch”) in Tamil or “teenmaar” (literally “three sounds”) in Telugu, a percussive, aggressive and raunchy form of pop music with roots in both Chennai and Hyderabad, the respective homes of the Tamil and Telugu-language film industries. The genre has its origins in street music, when Dalit musicians in both cities played the frame drum at a fast pace to accompany festivals, funerals, or weddings. While initially marginal in mainstream Indian film music, where a light classical, tabla-focused style of pop dominated, by the turn of the millennium the genre had established itself in the industry, setting the scene for every wannabe blockbuster’s most lavish musical number.”

Read the complete piece HERE

NewYork Magazine on “How a Nepo Baby Is Born”

How a Nepo Baby Is Born

How a Nepo Baby Is Born Hollywood has always loved the children of famous people. In 2022, the internet reduced them to two little words.

In 2022, the internet uncovered a vast conspiracy: Hollywood was run on an invisible network of family ties — and everybody was in on it! Everyone is someone’s kid, but it was as if everybody were somebody’s kid. Euphoria, the buzziest show on television, was created by the son of a major director and co-starred the daughter of another. Actress Maya Hawke was not only born to two famous parents but looked like them, too. Half of Brooklyn’s indie artists had dads with IMDb pages. Even Succession’s Cousin Greg turned out to be the son of one of the guys who designed the Rolling Stones’ lips logo. Aghast, content creators got to work. An unwieldy phrase — “the child of a celebrity” — was reduced to a catchy buzzword: nepo baby. TikTokers produced multipart series about nepo babies who resembled their famous parents, exposés on people you didn’t know were nepo babies (everyone knew), and PSAs urging celebrity parents to roast their nepo babies “to keep them humble.”

Read rest from here

No Time To Die Movie Review — Goodbye, Mr. Craig! You will be sorely missed…

It’s not a perfect film and has its flaws, mainly an under-developed villain and some moments full of bloat towards the end, but overall, it’s a solid Bond film made with a specific purpose in mind — to bid farewell to Daniel Craig. And it serves its purpose well enough, despite not being a timeless classic like Casino Royale or Skyfall.

An Jo on BLACK WIDOW

Watched BLACK WIDOW in the cinema hall in XD box version. What hell of a difference the viewing experience it makes! With each and every bullet ricocheting and creating goosebumps up your arse, it was a thrilling ride. The last time I watched a movie in theater was in December 2020 and that too only for Nolan, for TENET. The superbly shot Bombay sky-scraper sequence, the initial opera attack, and the reverse entropy scene, those were the highlights for me in terms of cinematic experience.

Oscar predix for the year in film 2019

With the 2020s all set to roll in a matter of only a few hours, honouring the films of 2019 will be our vestigial link to the decade gone by. A lot has happened over the last decade… this blog, and the wonderful world of movies that we all love and argue over, has offered us a safe space from all that is out there. Things must change, they always do… and a 2020 vision at least augurs well. But for a nostalgist, certain things, at least the good ones, must also be constant. My inconsistent annual Oscar predictions being something that I would like to keep doing. Here then, on the last day of 2019, are my Oscar predictions for the 92^nd Academy Awards. The actual nominations voting open on the 2^nd of January, 2020 and the nominees will be announced on the 13^th of the same month. The Oscars will be presented this time on the 9^th of February, 2020.

Best Picture

1917 Universal Pictures
THE IRISHMAN Netflix
MARRIAGE STORY Netflix
ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD Sony Pictures Releasing
PARASITE CJ Entertainment and Neon

If the Academy nominates six films, then
JOJO RABBIT Fox Searchlight Pictures

If they nominate seven, then
JOKER Warner Bros. Pictures

With eight nominations,
FORD V FERRARI 20^th Century Fox

With nine,
LITTLE WOMEN Sony Pictures Releasing

And when ten,
THE FAREWELL A24

Potential Spoiler– THE TWO POPES Netflix
Dark Horse– BOMBSHELL Lionsgate
Long Shot– A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD Sony Pictures Releasing
Unanticipated Sneak-ins– KNIVES OUT Lionsgate, RICHARD JEWELL Warner Bros. Pictures

What the Movies Taught Me About Being a Woman (Manohla Dargis in the NYT)

“I was a movie-struck kid, and I learned much from watching the screen, including things about men and women that I later had to unlearn or learn to ignore. I learned that women needed to be protected, controlled and left at home. I learned that men led, women followed. And so, although I loved Fred Astaire, I merely liked his greatest dance partner, Ginger Rogers. I was charmed by her sly smile and dazzled by the curve of her waist as she bent in his embrace. But I saw her as a woman in the great man’s arms, a message I didn’t learn just from films. … In the wake of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo, I have been thinking a lot about what movies have asked me to dream, including the image of the forced kiss and all that it signifies about women and film. I’ve been thinking about what else I learned from them.”

 

Read the complete piece (embedded clips et al) HERE

Nicole Kidman Married Tom Cruise for Love — and Got Protection

Excerpt: “…That said, I got married very young, but it definitely wasn’t power for me — it was protection. I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed. I would work, but I was still very much cocooned. So when I came out of it at 32, 33, it’s almost like I had to grow up.

Of course I’ve had #MeToo moments — since I was little! But do I want to expose them in an article? No. Do they come out in my work? Absolutely. I’m open and raw. I want to have my well of experience and emotion tapped into, used — and I’m not just talking about sexual harassment. I’m talking about loss, death, the full array of life. But it has to be by the right people so it’s not abused again. I’m making a movie with Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie about Roger Ailes. [Kidman is playing Gretchen Carlson.]”

Showman: New Yorker Profile of Sam Mendes

Excerpts: ““The director as a concept, as a cultural phenomenon, is dying,” he said. “Coppola of ‘The Godfather,’ Scorsese of ‘Taxi Driver,’ Tarantino of ‘Pulp Fiction’—these figures are not going to emerge in the way they did in the twentieth century. The figures who are going to emerge will come out of long-form television.” He continued,

NewYorker.Com Review: Richard Brody on The First Man

“The one scene that embodies the sixties onscreen is, to my mind, among the most contemptible scenes in recent movies. It takes place midway through the action, when Congress begins to question the value of the space program. Neil is dispatched to represent nasa in a meeting at the White House, where senators fret about “taxpayer dollars,” and while there he is summoned to the phone and informed of the deaths of three astronauts in an Apollo test. The point is clear: that the astronauts are risking their lives while Congress is counting beans and playing politics. 

Ethan Hawke Profile (New York Times)

Now he’s 47, but when he was much younger, Ethan Hawke read “Cassavetes on Cassavetes,” the indie filmmaker bible, and then went to hear the author’s widow, Gena Rowlands, speak. She looked out at the crowd and laughed. She said John Cassavetes was always disappointed because nobody would finance his movies; he’d always felt dismissed and disregarded. “‘And now here you guys are making a big deal out of him,’” he remembered her saying. She said that was nice, but that they shouldn’t miss the point. “‘Make a big deal of yourself.’ You know? Whatever indifference the world gives you, he felt it, too. So you’re just as good as he is. Like, go out and do it.”

Mr. Hawke found that so moving, the idea of ignoring what the world was telling you about yourself and instead living only by standards that you had, yourself, carefully defined for your life and work. He vowed right then that he would do whatever it took to make good art on his own terms, no matter what anyone said. He would take himself seriously, even if no one else did.

Read the complete piece HERE.

How Superheroes Made Movie Stars Expendable (New Yorker, May 28, 2018)

[A thought-provoking and informative piece (with far broader implications than its title might suggest), that ties into several themes that have been the subject of discussion on this site over the years — Qalandar]

LINK

Excerpts: “…When movies were mostly one-offs—and not spinoffs, sequels, reboots, or remakes—they had to be good. A little blunt, too, maybe. Conjuring a universe out of nothing, bringing it to crisis and back again, all in under two hours, required, if nothing else, craftsmanship on a level admired even by European snobs.

Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories (New Yorker)

It’s hard to believe that this sort of conduct could remain out of the public eye for this long if it weren’t part of a wider problem in the industry, and the forms of exploitation that we all know have formed part and parcel of the film industries all over the world.  Even as we digest the allegations against Weinstein, we would do well to remember that this offers a glimpse into the system, and should not interpret this simply as an aberration — Qalandar

Excerpt: “…For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, told me that she did not speak out until now––Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would “crush” her. “I know he has crushed a lot of people before,” Argento said. “That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old, some of them are older—has never come out.””

Read the complete article HERE

the BOmbay report (2016): 15th Jan–21st Jan

It is week 3 of a Box-Office experiment that attempts to understand Box-Office beyond the numbers, and hopes to arrive at the less tangible, but perhaps more genuine, indicator of how well-liked and well-received any film is/was.

We will be taking into account all the screens in the Mumbai region, inclusive of Navi Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan-Dombivali as well. The films will be assigned points based on an algorithm that takes into account parameters such as- a) how many screens did the film open on; b) the capacities of these screens; c) the occupancy in comparison to the capacity; d) daily sustenance/growth/drop in the occupancy; e) change in the number of screens in successive weeks; f) change in capacities; g) occupancy in relation to changed number of days and screens; h) occupancy in relation to newer and existing releases; and so on.

These points, the Audience Interest Index (AII), encapsulate buzz, desire to watch translating to actual occupancy and finally acceptability… and that most prestigious of all goals- trending.

 

Top Ten Films In Mumbai (15^th January 2016 – 21^st January 2016) 

A staggering 28 films released in Mumbai this week, of which those in the Marathi language numbered the most with 5 releases, while there were 4 releases each in English, Hindi and Tamil. Of the English releases, The Hateful Eight also released on IMAX screens. Wazir, which had released last week, also expanded to IMAX in its second week. Bhojpuri and Telugu had 3 releases a piece.

With 13 films ending their run, the total number of films playing at the cinemas this week was 44! If you count Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge which resumed screening at Maratha Mandir this week, that number is 45.

More films did not mean more viewers however. The overall AII for this week is 89.69 compared to last week’s 133.62, a drop of 32.87%. With lesser viewers and an incredible amount of new releases, Wazir still remained the number one choice, even if the number was low. In fact many films operated in the middle range this week, so much so that this week’s 15^th ranked film has earned twice as many AII points than last week’s number 10 film.

Honourable mentions then to the Tamil film Rajini Murugan and the Telugu release Nannaku Prematho as both put up impressive AII numbers despite not making it to the top ten.

Rajini Murugan performed the best of all the Tamil releases with 105 AII points, while the Telugu language Nannaku Prematho did even better with 119 AII points.

the BOmbay report (2016): 08th Jan-14th Jan

Week 2 then, of a Box-Office experiment that attempts to understand Box-Office beyond just the numbers; and hopes to arrive at the less tangible, but perhaps more genuine, indicator of how well-liked and well-received any film is/was.

We are starting only with Mumbai for now. We will be taking into account all the screens in the Mumbai region; that is inclusive of Navi Mumbai, Thane and Kalyan-Dombivali even.

The films will be assigned points based on an algorithm that takes into account parameters such as- a) how many screens did the film open on; b) the capacities of these screens; c) the occupancy in comparison to the capacity; d) daily sustenance/growth/drop in the occupancy; e) change in the number of screens in successive weeks; f) change in capacities; g) occupancy in relation to changed number of days and screens; h) occupancy in relation to newer and existing releases; and so on.

These points, the Audience Interest Index (AII), hope to be an all-encompassing indicator  of buzz, desire to watch translating to actual occupancy and finally acceptability… and that most prestigious of all goals- trending. As this is a new experiment, we may get a true picture only as we go along.

 

Top Ten Films In Mumbai (08^th January 2016 – 14^th January 2016)

10) CHAURANGA (Hindi)

• New Release
• AII Points- 45