From the Oscars, the Emmys and the Golden Globes to the various guild (SAG, WGA, Costume Designers, etc.) and critics kudofests, I've written about nearly every film and TV award program in Hollywood, exploring the inspirations and the creative processes, detailing the production, post-production and marketing, analyzing the rules and handicapping the races, and even tracing the journey of the statuettes from the steel mold of the factory to the presentation table backstage.
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How a Revamped Golden Globes Could Impact Awards Season
Will the revamped Golden Globes be a polite, Disney-fied, virgin margarita version of the boozy irreverent kudocast that has viewers longing for the bad old days like aged hipsters waxing rhapsodic about when the mob ran Las Vegas or a legit challenger to the Academy Awards?
SAG Producers on Celebrating 30th Awards Ceremony After Historic Strike, Guild Wins
The SAG Awards have long been one of the most important events on the kudocast calendar, but this year’s edition at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall Feb. 24 is especially significant. Not only does it mark the 30th year of the awards, it also comes on the heels of the longest strike in the history of the actors union, which represents some 160,000 performers across the U.S.
How Sound Pros for ‘Oppenheimer,’ ‘Maestro’ and ‘Spider-Man’ Found the Right Mix for Their CAS-Nominated Work
Sound doesn’t get a lot of high-profile recognition during movie awards season, outside of a single category at the Oscars. That’s why the 60th Cinema Audio Society Awards are such an important date on the entertainment industry calendar.
The awards honor the work of sound teams across eight categories — from live action and animated movies to one-hour and half-hour TV series — that has them navigating complex technical challenges, while applying sonic shadings and narrative arcs that are often virtually undetectable to audiences. How Social Media Can Point to Potential Oscar Nominees and Winners
In the old days, Oscar watchers would look to Las Vegas to get a quick breakdown of which nominees were mostly likely to take home a statuette on awards night. Today, they can gauge the potential winners, as well as gain actionable insights on how to better market their films, via a process known as “social listening,” an automated analysis of mentions on platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
Check out the full article in Variety. 
Try not to scream as I pull back the curtain for a close-up look at individual members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., the mysterious and oft-mocked organization that puts on the Golden Globe Awards.
 A scene from Poland's "In Darkness."
Critics and auds alike have seen it time and time again: achingly serious foreign-language film Oscar submissions that seem
to have been chosen for the nobility of their intentions rather than their entertainment value. "Anything that tugs at the heartstrings and sets it against a grand historical backdrop tends to have an advantage, whether or not it's actually good," says Box Office Magazine and KPCC "FilmWeek" film critic Wade Major. "If you talk to people on the foreign-language selection committee, some of the younger members, they're very often fatigued by all the well-meaning, earnest movies about World War II, the Holocaust and oppression in foreign lands -- whether it's China or Iran -- or families losing farms." But 2011 has brought a crop of foreign-language films in which po-faced pedantry has taken a back seat to dynamic storytelling. Click here to read my entire article from Variety's Eye on the Oscars: Foreign Language special issue. 
A few years ago, J. Michael Straczynski, a one-time journalist who had become an established writer on television shows like "Babylon 5," got a call from an old source at Los Angeles City Hall. They were burning old records, the man said, and there was something he should see before it got tossed into the incinerator.
Straczynski rushed downtown, where he was handed a transcript of a City Council welfare hearing in the long-forgotten case of Christine Collins, a single mother whose 9-year-old son Walter went missing in 1928. "I was astonished to see what had happened, what this woman had endured," he says. For my complete "Anatomy of a Contender" piece on "Changeling" in The Hollywood Reporter, click here. 
In early 2007, Dustin Lance Black was making yet another trip up the Golden State Freeway to San Francisco.
For the past two and a half years, he'd been driving there from Los Angeles on breaks from his job as a staff writer on HBO's "Big Love," interviewing friends and foes of Harvey Milk -- the gay San Francisco city supervisor who was assassinated in 1978 -- in an effort to put together a big-screen biopic about him. Others had tried and failed, and they had studio backing. Black had no development deal, no stars or producers attached -- nothing other than a personal credit card to pay for expenses and an obsessive passion for his subject. Click here to read my entire "Anatomy of a Contender" article about "Milk," starring Sean Penn, in The Hollywood Reporter. 
Growing up in South Africa, Anthony Peckham hated playing rugby.
"I dreaded it," the screenwriter says of his homeland's national sport, which often resembles a full-contact game of keep-away. "I'm pretty small, and I got just annihilated." That all changed in 2006, when producer Mace Neufeld gave Peckham the proposal for John Carlin's book "Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation." The author outlined how Mandela, newly elected as the first black president of South Africa, magnanimously put aside any bitterness he might have felt after being imprisoned for 27 years by the white minority government and used the 1995 Rugby World Cup Finals as a catalyst for reconciling post-apartheid race relations. "Halfway through reading it, I found myself in tears," says Peckham, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1981 to study film at San Francisco State University. "I thought, 'I have to write this. This has everything.' " Click here to read my entire "Anatomy of a Contender" piece on director Clint Eastwood's "Invictus" from The Hollywood Reporter. 
Ten years ago, writer Grant Nieporte struck up a conversation with a stranger at his brother's 30th birthday party. About a half-hour into their talk, he realized that he was speaking to the saddest person he'd ever met."Later, I asked my mom, 'Did he just get out of prison for killing someone?' because that was the kind of weight it seemed like he was wrestling with," Nieporte recalls. "She said, 'No, but he feels responsible in his professional life for a national tragedy and the loss of life that accompanied that.'"
Click here to read the entire article about the Will Smith-starrer "Seven Pounds" from The Hollywood Reporter. 
Costume designer Janie Bryant's retro fashions in AMC's "Mad Men."
Are Awards EligibilitY Rules Trickier Than The Tax Code?
Over the years, Emmy organizers have displayed a commendable willingness to add and subtract categories and alter their rules as the medium and its technologies have changed. The upside is that this has allowed a wide variety of TV craftspeople to be honored for their work. The downside is that it has created an unwieldy tangle of categories, nearly as complex and mercurial as the U.S. tax code, with anywhere from three to seven awards for each crafts discipline operating under a variety of different voting formulas. (In contrast, the Oscars have a total of eight crafts awards.)
Click here for my entire article about the complexities of the Emmy crafts categories. Unfortunately, this article about Oscar rules got chopped in half due when The Hollywood Reporter decided to trim the issue, but I was still able to deliver the reassuring news that "Yogi Bear" had been deemed ineligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar was because the Academy determined that it did not satisfy the requirement that “animation "… figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time.” 
In 2002, I called on an illustrious list of former Academy Award-winners and nominees to get their opinions on the Oscar race, including Ernest Borgnine, Jon Voight, Chloë Sevigny, Marlee Matlin, Benicio Del Toro, Rod Steiger, Anne Archer and Elizabeth Taylor.
Click here to read the article from The Hollywood Reporter.  Russell Means.
In early 2010, The Hollywood Reporter asked me to assemble a collection of experts
to comment on the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. I tracked down some interesting
ones for the piece, including a Beverly Hills rabbi who attended school with
the Coen brothers who vouched for the accuracy "A Serious Man" and a statistics
professor from M.I.T. who analyzed the chances of George Clooney's forever-flying
character in "Up in the Air"
being in a plane crash.
It was a lot of fun until my editor saw what Indian activist Russell Means had to say about imperialist paternalism in "Avatar." "The film is nothing more than a updated fanciful science fiction depiction of an American Indian film being made in the 1940s," said Means, who at the time served as the "chief facilitator" for the Republic of Lakotah. "The Indians have no plan and no defenses, except some feeble arrows, and some other force has to come in and rescue them. I did like the part where they said, 'Everything is connected,' but that was just a fleeting moment of wisdom in a horrible movie about cowboys and Indians. 'Dances with Wolves' was the same thing, for crying out loud. There's always got to be a liberal white hero that saves the tribe. I thought Hollywood was getting it, but I feel offended." Means comments didn't work, my editor said. I knew that was code for we don't want to piss off Fox Studios, James Cameron, et al, but I let it drop like a good soldier -- or a just another cowardly corporate lackey selling my soul for spare change from Big Brother, effectively perpetuating the sad history of white European oppression. I'd like to say I wouldn't do it again, but my kids will only eat brand name peanut butter and I can't give up the premium DirecTV package. I ended up replacing it with a Princeton astrophysics professor's comments on the accuracy of the film's science. When I told Means' wife, she wasn't surprised. Things like this happen all the time, she said. Prior to this, I thought Means to be a bit kooky-- and he may have been -- but I can't blame the guy for feeling paranoid. Click here to view the article on thelongwellfiles. 
Experience the wonder and amazement as I handicap the art direction, costume design and makeup races for the 2010 Academy Awards in The Hollywood Reporter.
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PGA Heads Reflect on Guild’s Success Predicting Best Picture Oscar Winners
Many awards ceremonies champion themselves as stepping stones to the Oscars, but the Producers Guild of America Awards have an enviable track record to support the claim. The winner of the PGA’s top prize, the Darryl F. Zanuck Award, has matched the Oscar winner for best picture for 15 of the last 20 years, and 24 of the 33 years since the first ceremony in 1990.
Chris Rock, John Mulaney Among Top Contenders in New Golden Globes Stand-Up Category
In addition to a top-to-bottom organization overall, thehas added the Golden Globes have two new categories for its next awards, for cinematic and box office achievement and stand-up comedy performance on television.
Can The Dude Outdo The Duke?
In this "Anatomy of a Contender" feature from The Hollywood Reporter, filmmakers Joel & Ethan Coen and stars Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon and a very Lebowski-esque Jeff Bridges talk about the challenge of bringing Charles Portis' True Grit to the big screen, while working in the shadow of John Wayne, who won an Oscar for his performance in the 1969 adaptation of the novel.
Click here to read the article. 
I'm embarrassed to say it, but when I interviewed writer/director/star Ben Affleck for an "Anatomy of a Contender" feature in The Hollywood Reporter about his crime film "The Town," he was one of the nicest guys I've ever dealt with in the world of show business, second only to his pal Matt Damon. One has to wonder if he really is a nice guy or he just fakes it exceptionally well. But, either way, the end effect is the same: a pleasant experience.
If Nick Schenk wins an Academy Award for his "Gran Torino" script, his acceptance speech should include a shout-out to the folks at Grumpy's, the bar in northeast Minneapolis where he wrote it in longhand over the course of several weeks in 2007.
"I'd have a frozen bar pizza, throw darts, sip a beer and scribble," Schenk says in a thick Minnesota accent that makes him sound like a character from "Fargo." "The bartender, Tim Kennedy, is one of my best friends, so I'd ask him questions. I'd say, 'Tim, what's the dumbest name for a man?' And he'd say, 'Glenn with two N's.' There's a joke like that in the script, and I think that came right from Tim." Click here for the full story from The Hollywood Reporter. Also read my in depth "Anatomy of Contender" piece on "Gran Torino." Reality, Non-Fiction Emmy Races Produce Odd Rivals
Ben Timlett and Bill Jones can be excused for feeling perplexed about where their six-part IFC Channel documentary "Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyers' Cut)" stands in the Emmy race.
Frankly, their competition is a bit strange. In the nonfiction directing category, fellow nominees include CBS' globetrotting game show "The Amazing Race" and an installment of PBS' "The American Experience" about the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, while in the nonfiction program category, nominees include the fishing adventure series "Deadliest Catch" and PBS' "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," produced by Ken Burns. "It runs the whole gamut of what you can do in a program, really," says Jones, son of "Python" member Terry Jones. "It's weird being up against natural history and stuff," Timlett agrees. Such is the diversity of the reality Emmy categories. Click here to read the entire article from The Hollywood Reporter. 
What awards show has honored Sarah Silverman for her song "I'm F***ing Matt Damon" (from ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live), blasphemed Jesus and featured a nonagenarian fitness guru leading its audience in calisthenics? It's the Creative Arts Emmys -- or, as Kathy Griffin likes to call them, the Schmemmys -- the most unpredictable show biz kudofest this side of the Golden Globes.
Click here for the article in The Hollywood Reporter. 
Where Credit Is Due
Should there be a special Oscar created for stuntpeople? With the World Stunt Awards, the stunt community finally has the opportunity to honor its own, but many think it's high time that Hollywood's most august body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, recognize them as well. "Eighteen years ago, I started trying to get the Academy to establish a best stunt coordinating category, and they have just been totally against it," says Jack Gill, a stunt coordinator and second unit director whose credits include the recent "Showtime" and the upcoming "Austin Powers in Goldmember." "It just surprises me that we can't get them to move a little faster." Click here to read the entire article from The Hollywood Reporter. 
The life of an Emmy statuette begins far from the lights and cameras of Hollywood in a non-descript building in a residential industrial neighborhood in a Northwest Chicago. "Passing by, you wouldn't have a clue," says Noreen Prohaska, account executive for the building's tenant R.S. Owens, manufacturers of the Emmys and numerous other prestigious awards, including the Oscars. "But it's an 82,000-square-foot factory and we employ about 170 workers."
Each Emmy statuette takes about 15 man hours to complete, and all the work is done by hand. Production typically commences in late June. Using a single steel mold... Click here to read the entire article in The Hollywood Reporter. 
Will there come a day when effects artists receive acting awards? I pose the question crafts people people the digital characters in "King Kong," "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith," "War of the Worlds" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" in this article from The Hollywood Reporter.
 Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away."
Last year's battle for the inaugural best animated feature film Oscar was basically a footrace between a green ogre (DreamWorks' "Shrek") and a big, furry creature (Buena Vista's "Monsters, Inc."), with a precocious, pompadoured tyke (Paramount's "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius") nipping at their heels. The ogre won.
Click here to see how I handicapped the 2003 race for the Best Animated Feature Oscar with assists from film critic Leonard Maltin and DreamWorks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. Awards Shake-Ups
 Roger Corman, Lauren Bacall & Gordon Willis with their Oscars.
B-movie king Roger Corman learned he would finally get some A-level respect from Hollywood in the form of an honorary Academy Award.
Then came the disappointing news: the Academy's Board of Governors had decided to bump the honorary awards presentation from the Oscar broadcast to a nontelevised event on Nov. 14. "I actually agree with that decision," Corman says of the effort to create a sleeker, more ratings-friendly telecast. "It's just unfortunate that the year I get an award is the year they decide to switch away from putting these awards on the program." The move is one of several major shake-ups this year... Click here to read the full article from The Hollywood Reporter. 
Media pundits have long asserted that the Golden Globes are the proper barometer of who and what will take home Academy Awards, but that might be changing: Statistics show that the Critics' Choice nods might well be award-dom's best Oscar prognosticator.
Click here to read the article from The Hollywood Reporter. 
Click on image to read the article from The Hollywood Reporter.
Giving Back
The Taurus World Stunt Awards Foundation supports those injured on the job. The World Stunt Awards do not exist just to give the stunt community an opportunity to pat itself on the back in front of a national TV audience, they also serve as a vehicle to raise funds for the Taurus World Stunt Awards Foundation, an organization that was established to help support stunt performers who have suffered debilitating injuries in the line of duty. "You have to be fairly catastrophically injured to qualify," says veteran stuntwoman Jeannie Epper-Kimack, who recently performed in such films as "Wild Wild West" and "The Princess Diaries" and sits on the six-person committee of veteran stunt performers that selects the grant recipients. "It has to be the result of a stunt-related event that occurred during the last year or during the making of a movie that was released last year. You can't be someone who was driving home from work and got in a car accident." Click here to read the article from The Hollywood Reporter. |
