C4
Sunday, March 7, 2010
The Vicksburg Post
82Nd ANNuAL AcAdEmy AwArdS
In Memoriam touching to watch, hard to make LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Kodak Theatre goes quiet as the big screen at center stage begins flashing images of actors and filmmakers who have died. A photo of Heath Ledger or Paul Newman might move the audience to spontaneous applause. Other images inspire deep sighs, as viewers reflect on the entertainers who have touched our lives. The In Memoriam segment can be the most moving part of the Oscar telecast. It’s also the toughest to produce. “It is the single most troubling element of the Oscar show every year,” says Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “Because more people die each year than can possibly be included in Paul that segment.” Newman Davis’ office keeps a running list of academy members and others in the movie business who have passed since the previous year’s segment was compiled. Then, a few weeks before the awards, he and a small committee of academy officials whittle the list of more than 100 names down to the 30 or so folks who will be included in the show’s memorial — from the famous faces viewers at home are sure to recognize to the behind-thescenes workers familiar only to academy members. “It gets close to agonizing by the end,” Davis says of the annual meeting. “You are dropping people who the public knows. It’s just not comfortable.” Oscar’s In Memoriam montage began in the early 1990s and other awards shows followed suit, including the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Grammys and Emmys — all of which go through the same painful process every year. “It’s a killer because we have hundreds of members that pass each year and we can’t get them all in,” says SAG Awards producer Kathy Connell. The film academy gives its final list of in-memoriam honorees to the producer of the segment just days before the big show. Chuck Workman, who is producing the memorial montage for Sunday’s telecast, says he was working with a temporary list until last week. Many of the names made the final cut, he says, but some did not. “It’s a constant balance for the academy,” says Workman, who has 20 years of experience making film montages for the Oscar show. “They do try their best, but there’s only so many spots.” Workman says his first step would normally be to choose “some schmaltzy music” to accompany the segment, but
Bullock, Bridges other nominees to be presenters LOS ANGELES (AP) — Academy Awards front-runners Sandra Bullock and Jeff Bridges and at least four other nominees are hitting the Oscar stage as presenters. Joining Bridges and Bullock as Oscar presenters will be fellow acting nominees Matt Damon, Anna Kendrick and Carey Mulligan and directing contender Quentin Tarantino. Bridges is the best-actor favorite for “Crazy Heart” at Sunday’s show, and Bullock is widely expected to win best actress for “The Blind Side.” Mulligan also is nominated for best actress for “An Education.” Damon is up for supporting actor in “Invictus,” and Kendrick is up for supporting actress for “Up in the Air.” Tarantino is nominated for “Inglourious Basterds.”
Heath Ledger
Patrick Swayze
this year the music “is coming directly from something they’re doing for the show.” Workman’s task, then, is to find footage and photographs that best represent the 30 or so people in the memorial piece. He looks for images that “they would be proud of, their families would be proud of and the people in the audience would be proud of.” For Patrick Swayze, who died Sept. 14, Workman picked clips from “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost.” But Workman notes that “In ‘Ghost,’ you don’t want it to look too much like he died.” Using computers and digital editing software, he assembles the sequence like a puzzle. “It’s very tricky,” he says. “You want a good juxtaposition, but you don’t want it to be too cute. It’s really an honor to the people who died.” Davis, meanwhile, is already prepared for the calls he always gets after the show from family members upset that their loved one wasn’t included in the memorial piece. “They’re brokenhearted sometimes,” Davis says. “There’s nothing you can say that will make them feel better. “I always hope that they take some comfort that the very fact that they worked in movies confers a certain amount of immortality ... and their work lasts longer than being briefly acknowledged in a short clip sequence at one show in one year.” Still, he takes the calls personally and feels the callers’ pain. Davis says he’s “never had an enjoyable year” working on Oscar’s memorial segment. But it’s always worth it to pay tribute to those who have died. “Even though I’ve been keeping the list as we went along, it’s always stirring to see it all assembled and just remember how much extraordinary work a list of 25 to 30 people may represent,” he says. “It’s important because even though every given Academy Awards broadcast is about the year just past, this is a way of evoking the whole history of movies.”
The associaTed press
The character Neytiri, voiced by Zoe Saldana, right, and the character Jake, voiced by Sam Worthington, in “Avatar”
Sci-fi spectacles have history of losing at Oscars LOS ANGELES (AP) — The first two times science-fiction blockbusters were nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards, Woody Allen and Gandhi beat up on them. Allen’s small comic drama “Annie Hall” won best picture and director for 1977 over George Lucas’ “Star Wars,” which was then the biggest modern blockbuster. Five years later, Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi,” the film biography of Mohandas K. Gandhi, won best picture and director over Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. the ExtraTerrestrial,” which supplanted “Star Wars” at No. 1 on the box-office chart. James Cameron’s “Avatar, which now tops the revenue chart with more than $700 million domestically, is in a similar Oscar race against a modest box-office competitor, Kathryn Bigelow’s waron-terror drama “The Hurt Locker.” With $12.6 million domestically, “The Hurt Locker” is among the lowest-grossing best-picture nominees ever. Yet it’s head-to-head with “Avatar” at the Oscars, both films leading the field with nine nominations each, the two considered the favorites
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Box-office figures are sketchy for Hollywood’s glory years, before television whittled down the movie audience in the late 1940s and early ’50s. to win the top prize. “Avatar” has taken in nearly 60 times the domestic receipts rung up by “The Hurt Locker.” By comparison, “E.T.” pulled in $359 million in its initial 1982-83 run, about seven times more than the $52.8 million haul of “Gandhi.” “Star Wars” did $221 million over its original 1977-78 release, about 5.5 times the $39.2 million take of “Annie Hall.” (Counting rereleases, “Star Wars” has totaled $461 million domestically, and “E.T.” has climbed to $435 million.) Should “The Hurt Locker” win, it might be the least-seen best-picture recipient in Oscar history — at least in theaters.
The film has been expanding its audience since coming out on DVD in January, ranking in the top 10 on the sales and rental lists. Box-office figures are sketchy for Hollywood’s glory years, before television whittled down the movie audience in the late 1940s and early ’50s. But best-picture winners typically were big-audience favorites such as 1951’s “An American in Paris” or 1939’s “Gone With the Wind” still considered the top all-time hit adjusted for inflation. In today’s dollars, “Gone With the Wind” took in an estimated $1.46 billion domestically, more than twice the take
so far for “Avatar,” according to box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian at Hollywood. com. “Annie Hall” stands as one of the lowest-grossing bestpicture winners, but even that film would be a $100 million hit in today’s dollars. In recent years, 2005’s “Crash” is the lowest best-picture recipient on the revenue chart with $55.6 million. The king of modern Oscar blockbusters is Cameron’s “Titanic,” which won best picture, director and nine other awards for 1997. This season marks only the third time that science fiction has made it into the best-picture lineup. And with the category newly expanded to 10 movies instead of the usual five, “Avatar” was joined by another sci-fi hit competing for best picture — “District 9.”