The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies
The Star Online: Entertainment: Movies |
- 'Zero Dark Thirty', 'Argo' win top Writers Guild Awards
- Nic Cage ready to make DreamWorks romp into franchise
- Could 9-year-old win youngest best actress Oscar?
| 'Zero Dark Thirty', 'Argo' win top Writers Guild Awards Posted: 17 Feb 2013 10:26 PM PST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. film and television writers gave their top two movie awards on Sunday to Zero Dark Thirty and Argo in the final Hollywood guild awards show before next week's Oscars. Writer Mark Boal won the Writers Guild of America award for Best Original Screenplay for Zero Dark Thirty, which chronicles the intense U.S. manhunt and daring raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Asked backstage what message he hoped to send to audiences with the film, Boal said: "I think (director Kathryn Bigelow) said it best when she said she wanted to shine a light on a dark decade. I don't know that I could put it any better than that." Argo, about the Hollywood-assisted rescue of American hostages in Iran during the 1979 revolution, earned writer Chris Terrio WGA's trophy for Best Adapted Screenplay. "I've never actually won a call-your-name award before," an overwhelmed Terrio said backstage at the awards. The WGA awards gave the winning films a last boost in the race for the Oscars, the world's top film honors, because many guild members also belong to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that hands out the Oscars on 24 February. The guild gave a special nod to Lincoln, honouring screen writer Tony Kushner with a special award recognizing work that embodies the spirit of civil rights and liberties. Lincoln, a drama about President Abraham Lincoln's fight to abolish slavery, was up against Argo for WGA's Best Adapted Screenplay. Argo and Lincoln are considered front-runners for this year's Best Picture Oscar, although Argo recently has taken a slight edge after also nabbing the top prize from both the director and producer guilds, which each have strong records of predicting Oscar winners. Searching For Sugar Man writer-director Malik Bendjelloul nabbed the WGA award for documentary screenwriting. Breaking Bad won for Best TV Drama Series and the writers of Louie claimed the prize for TV Comedy Series. Girls was named for Best New TV Series. |
| Nic Cage ready to make DreamWorks romp into franchise Posted: 17 Feb 2013 08:12 PM PST BERLIN (AFP) - The makers of the new DreamWorks 3-D animated movie The Croods, including stars Nicolas Cage and Emma Stone, said Friday they're ready to turn it into the studio's next sequels juggernaut. Following monster-hit series like Shrek, Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda, DreamWorks made The Croods, a prehistoric romp directed by Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders that had its world premiere at the 63rd Berlinale. The movie, which got a warm reception at the festival, features the overprotective caveman dad Grug (voiced by Cage) trying to shield his family from the dangers of an unknown world beyond their grotto hideaway. But his teenager daughter Eep (Stone) has a rebellious streak that gets stoked by a lone wolf (Ryan Reynolds) who introduces her to fire and lures her to "follow the light" and leave her sheltered life behind. Asked whether The Croods could be the start of another successful franchise, Cage said: "Yes, I would like to see another adventure with The Croods." Sanders said he thought the characters -- including a stunning array of now-extinct beasts -- had "universal" appeal. "I can't even tell you how many sequences we didn't really ever end up putting in the film so if we did have to make another one, we could pull it together with lots of spare parts right now, with lots of good stuff left over," Sanders said. Stone, best known for The Amazing Spider-Man and Crazy, Stupid, Love, said playing Eep was "one of the most fun things I've ever gotten to do". "The Croods has elements of all of my favorite movies which is that it's not just funny and it's not just heartbreaking, it takes you on a journey throughout the entire film," she said. "It's different than any other animated movie I've ever seen in the sense that it feels so true to life the entire time even though we are in the Stone Age." Cage said he considered animation work good training and called the sweet-natured family tale "a very heartwarming experience". "Fifty percent of performance is voice and in between some of the other movies that I make it was a great opportunity for me to stay in shape, stay in tune. I consider all acting to be musical on some level," the actor, who won an Oscar for the 1995 alcoholism drama Leaving Las Vegas, said. "Acting is voice and imagination. Even though Emma and I weren't really in the room together (when doing the voiceovers) I could listen to what she did and I could imagine her being there and I could riff off of that... it would be like jazz. "It's a marvellous exercise to stay in shape as an actor to be able to do animated features," he said. With its trademark brand of kids' movies that have enough winks and nudges for adults to join in on the fun, DreamWorks animated features have pulled in more than US$10 billion in global ticket sales, according to the US trade press. |
| Could 9-year-old win youngest best actress Oscar? Posted: 17 Feb 2013 07:11 PM PST LOS ANGELES: She landed the part by lying about her age: Quvenzhane Wallis was five, and the filmmakers were only auditioning girls at least six years old. But they believed her fib and tried her out - and were blown away, giving her the starring role in the low-budget "Beasts of the Southern Wild" over 4,000 other hopefuls. And now she could become the youngest ever winner of the best actress Oscar, at the 85th Academy Awards, the climax of Hollywood's annual awards season, next weekend. "It was very clear ...you don't meet six-year-olds who have that quality," said director Benh Zeitlin, recalling her audition. "She just had this natural charisma and focus and fierceness and wiseness and morality. "Coming out of a body that small and a mind that young, it's almost alien and alien in a way that goes kind of straight at your heart .. It's her perspective that unlocks the truth in the film." That charisma is obvious when you see Wallis being interviewed to promote the movie over recent months, even before it was elevated to the stratosphere by being nominated for four Oscars in January, including best picture. "I was in my bedroom half asleep," Wallis told Jay Leno, about waking last month to learn she was nominated alongside Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, Naomi Watts and Emmanuelle Riva, the oldest ever best actress nominee, at 85. "So nothing reacted on the outside, but I was like flipping cartwheels and stuff on the inside," she told the talk show host, whom she admonished - cutely - for asking her a question more appropriate for the director. In the movie Wallis plays Hushpuppy, living in the Louisiana bayou with her hot-tempered and ailing father Wink, in a community threatened by floods driven by melting ice-caps. "Beasts of the Southern Wild" won the prestigious Camera d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival in France, and the Grand Jury Prize for a dramatic film at Sundance. The movie's setting was close to Wallis' home: the actress - her first name is pronounced Qua-ven-zhah-nay - was born in Houma, Louisiana, on August 28, 2003. The "zhane" part of her name means fairy in Swahili. "Beasts" was her first acting job, and she only got it after ignoring the filmmaker's audition rules - perhaps, appropriately, like the character she was asked to play. "It was for a six-to-nine-year-old. So my Mom said I couldn't go 'cause I was only five. But we just went and we act like we're having nothin' to do; we had done nothin' wrong," she said. "The character who is Hushpuppy, she does what is right and she is fearless and that's what I did at the audition." Wallis is the youngest best actress Oscar nominee by four years: the next is Keisha Castle-Hughes, who was 13 when nominated for "Whale Rider" in 2003. The third, Lawrence, nominated again this year, was first tapped in 2010 at age 20 for "Winter's Bone." The youngest ever best actress Oscar winner is Marlee Matlin, who took the prize in 1986 for "Children of a Lesser God" at the positively mature age of 21 years and 218 days. The youngest person to ever win an Oscar in any competitive category is Tatum O'Neal, who was just 10 when she took home the best supporting actress prize in 1973. Wallis is already on her third film - "Twelve Years a Slave," with Brad Pitt, Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Fassbender, due out in September. She has also made "Boneshaker," a short about an African family lost in America. Whether she wins an Oscar on Sunday or not - the favorites are Chastain and Lawrence, admittedly - she is clearly a force to be reckoned with, and an actress to watch out for in years to come. - AFP |
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