Thursday, December 20, 2007

SAG Nominations; Knightley Snubbed


The Screen Actors Guild has announced its nominations for the year. Here's the run-down:

ACTOR

George Clooney - "Michael Clayton"
Daniel Day-Lewis - "There Will Be Blood"
Ryan Gosling - "Lars And The Real Girl"
Emile Hirsch- "Into the Wild"
Viggo Mortensen - "Eastern Promises"

ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett - "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"
Julie Christie - "Away From Her"
Marion Cotillard - "La Vie en rose"
Angelina Jolie - "A Mighty Heart"
Ellen Page - "Juno"

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Casey Affleck - "The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford"
Javier Bardem - "No Country For Old Men"
Tommy Lee Jones - "No Country for Old Men"
Hal Holbrook - "Into the Wild"
Tom Wilkinson - "Michael Clayton

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett - "I’m Not There"
Ruby Dee - "American Gangster"
Catherine Keener - "Into the Wild"
Amy Ryan - "Gone Baby Gone"
Tilda Swinton - "Michael Clayton"

ENSEMBLE CAST
"3:10 to Yuma" - Christian Bale, Russell Crowe, Peter Fonda, Gretchen Mol, Dallas Roberts, Vinessa Shaw, Ben Foster, Alan Tudyk, Logan Lerman
"American Gangster" - Armand Assante, Josh Brolin , Russell Crowe, Ruby Dee, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Idris Elba, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Carla Gugino, John Hawkes, Ted Levine, Joe Morton, Lymari Nadal, John Ortiz, Rza, Yul Vazquez, Denzel Washington
"Hairspray" - Nikki Blonsky, Amanda Bynes, Paul Dooley, Zac Efron, Allison Janney, Elijah Kelley, James Marsden, Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah, Brittany Snow, Jerry Stiller, John Travolta, Christopher Walken
"Into the Wild" - Brian Dierker, Marcia Gay Harden, Emile Hirsch, Hal Holbrook, William Hurt, Catherine Keener, Jena Malone, Kristen Stewart, Vince Vaughn
"No Country for Old Men" - Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Garret Dillahunt, Tess Harper, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly Macdonald

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A STUNT ENSEMBLE IN A MOTION PICTURE
"300" (Warner Bros.)
"The Bourne Ultimatum" (Universal)
"I Am Legend" (Warner Bros.)
"The Kingdom" (Universal)
"Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End" (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)


The big news is that Keira Knightley didn't get nominated for Best Actress for Atonement. I'm sure she'll be pissed about it too. I am officially throwing my full support behind Marion Cotillard who is devastatingly fabulously amazingly awesome in La Vie en Rose, the life-story of Edith Piaf. I can't think of too many more moving moments than the end of this when she sings "Non, je ne regrette rien" in the midst of dying of liver cancer. By the way, all these little flitheads like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears who think abusing their bodies is so hilarious - think about Edith looking like a 70-year-old woman when she wasn't even 50 yet. And Edith had a lot of good reasons to hate life and abuse herself too. And oh by the way starlets - they ain't gonna be making biopics about your sorry asses forty years down the road. Certainly not ones starring actors as brilliant as Marion, who's like a grittier, less precious, much sexier Giulietta Masina.

Other than that I don't know. I liked Viggo's naked wrestling match with the two knife-wielding thugs at the end of the thoroughly-unpleasant yet compelling and beautifully-crafted Eastern Promises, but I'm not sure that qualifies him to win any awards. Ruby Dee in American Gangster is sort of a joke to me cause she only has one big scene where she tells Denzel Washington that even she knows you don't kill cops, and that scene felt like it needed a couple more takes to me in all honesty (I guess Ridley Scott was too polite to make Ruby do it again). And Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There - it's supposed to be this great impersonation of Bob Dylan but the point of the movie, as I understood it, is that the actors aren't really playing Bob Dylan but characters inspired by Dylan's own personal mythology who resemble Dylan but have different names and stories and therefore aren't actually him. So she's not really impersonating Dylan but is only playing a character who is sort of Dylan but actually not. Getting an idea of what a wank-off this movie is? It wouldn't have annoyed me so much except that Todd Haynes was trying so hard to do a Fellini thing with the Blanchett section, as if the not-Dylan were really Guido from 8 1/2 crossed with Anita Ekberg from La Dolce Vita, and it just seemed so superficial, like a film-school student doing some limp homage. And don't even get me started with the Richard Gere end-of-the-world jive. The only good part of that movie was Heath Ledger as the pissy actor and the amazing and fantastic Charlotte Gainsbourg as his wife. I could've watched two full hours of Heath and Charlotte slowly getting more angry at each other. I'm glad Charlotte's okay after her brain injury too. Love her.

(source)