The combo of last week’s DGA contract agreement and yesterday’s announcement of the Oscar noms may have set the WGA in a new direction towards ending the writer’s strike. Yesterday afternoon the WGA announced it had withdrawn demands for jurisdiction over reality and animation, which the AMTPT was dead against recognizing. The two sides are reportedly meeting together today.
Even if the strike is not over in a month, let alone today, there will still definitely be an Oscar telecast. It will be heavy on clips honoring the past 80s years of cinema, according to Gil Cates, who compared the strike to the presidential race.
As far as the Oscar-nominee responses go, the most noteworthy are those of Julian Schnabel, who is sorry The Diving Bell and the Butterfly didn’t get a Best Picture nod but who feels he could one day have his Departed moment, and Jason Reitman, who points out that if he can be nominated for directing Juno then his father, Ivan, should have been nominated three or four times (sure, for Ghostbusters, Dave and Stripes, but what would be the fourth? Father’s Day?). It made me think of the above scene from papa Reitman’s Kindergarten Cop.
2008 Oscar-nominee Michael Moore is making a stand on the issue of documentary and foreign film exhibition, stating that his new year’s resolution is to sit down with theater owners and urge them to reserve one auditorium per multiplex devoted to specialty films. Hopefully he’ll document it, and one day we can sit in that auditorium and watch the result.
The fate of Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has not been officially announced yet, but Variety points out that Heath Ledger’s involvement in the movie was integral to its financing. I doubt the film could easily replace the late actor and go back and reshoot all of his scenes, but I also hope Gilliam isn’t left with another unfinished work (ala The Man Who Killed Don Quixote). Could Gilliam & Co. go the route of The Crow and digitally add Ledger’s face to a double?
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