Oscar Buzz Begins
This is normally the time of year that becomes a dumping ground for movies. Once the big holiday movies had shot their wad, what’s left for the first month of the new year are movies that have been sitting on a shelf somewhere, or were deemed not worthy of release during a prime movie-going season. Sometimes it is considered a good spot to slip in an indie film, or a horror film that might get more attention when there is nothing else to go see.
Of course the movies we are talking about this time of year are not the brand new 2007 films, but the 2006 flicks that have Academy Award aspirations. Since the Atlantic City region is not exactly a prime movie locale, there are 2006 movies that have not yet trickled down to our area, playing only in major cities until the Academy Award nominations come out on Tuesday, Jan. 23.
Those movies include Clint Eastwood’s companion film to Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima; Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German and Notes On A Scandal. The Painted Veil, which has received some Oscar buzz, is opening locally this Friday (Jan. 12), as is a 2006 release with foreign language Oscar aspirations, Curse of the Golden Flower.
If I had been able to see Children of Men on Christmas day when it opened in a few markets, it would have made my Best Ten List published in Atlantic City Weekly on Jan. 4. Instead, ten years from now I’ll look at my 2006 list and say, “How the hell could I put Over the Hedge on my Best Ten List and not Children of Men?”
Speaking of the Oscars, make sure you check out my annual Oscar Tour Sheet in the Jan. 18 issue of ACW. I’ve been predicting the Oscar nominations in the form of a handicapping “tout” sheet for nearly thirty years, inspired by my late father Harry Hoffman, who did horseracing handicapping for many years as a sportswriter for the Press of Atlantic City. It’s a lot more fun and more challenging to predict the nominees prior to the announcement than it is to pick the winners once the nominees are known.
I’m going to give away a secret. One of my most helpful on-line tools for Oscar research is: http://www.oscarwatch.com/
Check it out.
Later