Salvador Dali Interview

"At the base of his ideas is cauliflowers & rhinoceros horn" Salvador Dali, everyone! This is great for so many reasons: Dali, the authentic period eccentricities, the very high importance placed on the cigarette... By way of current zeitgeist reference, it's like Mad Men meets Midnight in Paris. 

Awards Tracker: Best Picture

The critics agreed on a top five that took the significant majority of their nominations, and all their wins: The Artist (18), The Tree of Life (18), The Descendants (15), Drive (15), Hugo (13).

The next five are a mixed bunch: Midnight in Paris (8), Moneyball (6), The Help (5), Win Win (4) & Take Shelter (4).

The awards groups took things a little more sentimentally; arthouse darlings Tree of Life & Drive are pushed out of the top five (& snubbed out of the Producers Guild top ten), replaced by War Horse & The Help. The Tree of Life & Drive do feature in the overall top ten, together with Moneyball, Midnight in Paris & Bridesmaids, but the Producers Guild snubs (in favour of Ides of March & Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) are not a good sign. If you ask me, the Critics Choice came the closest to a healthy mix of art & mainstream, but the BAFTAs have the classiest Top 5.

It is nigh on impossible to predict Best Picture accurately this year, as we do not know how many nominees there will be (the voting system determines the number of nominees based on a required percentage of support). All in all, I'm going to aim for the quality in the middle of the road, with some wishful thinking thrown in for good measure:

If there are 8:

The Artist

The Descendants

Hugo

The Help

Midnight in Paris

Moneyball

The Tree of Life

War Horse

If there are 10: 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Ides of March

Alternates:

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (don't bet against Stephen Daldry)

Bridesmaids

Midnight in Paris - Preview

Woody Allen's latest, Midnight in Paris, has won over the early critics in Cannes, although mostly everyone seems to agree that they don't dislike it.

'Allen had made one of his best, probably without giving it too much thought' - Sasha Stone

Allen's whimsical Parisian fantasy is being called silly and sweet but also delightful. The consensus seems to be that it is one of Allen's most focused and entertaining efforts of the past 10 years and, thankfully, it features no older men making it with young girls.

A romantic and nostalgic love letter to the City of Lights, it follows Owen Wilson as unlikely - but reportedly charming - Woody Allen surrogate, Gil, a dissatisfied Hollywood screenwriter / wannabe novelist drawing inspiration from & engaging - quite literally, thanks to a handy time-travel mechanism - with Paris's cultural history.


Midnight in Paris boasts a typically impressive cast, but while the real-world characters are said to be written as broad stereotypes (Rachel McAdams & Michael Sheen are wasted as annoying fiancé & stuck up snob, respectively), the fantasy-world offer more complex and beguiling character - Kathy Bates as a straight-talking Gertrude Stein, Adrian Brody as Pablo Picasso, Marion Cotillard as a mysterious beauty with a taste for seducing artists, and most notably Corey Stall as scene-stealing, contradictory Ernest Hemingway.

Allen has commented lately on his disappointment in his own work as an artist and, in Midnight in Paris, he seems to be contemplating the flawed human personalities that create great art, particularly great literature, and the nostalgia that imbues greatness on the ordinariness of the past.

Allen has worked in Paris before (as writer / actor in 1965's What's New Pussycat, and briefly in 1996's Everyone Says I Love You) but this is the first time the city has taken center stage. New European locations seem to be Woody's creative Viagra, making their mark on his titles and box office returns, but repeat visits seem to yield diminishing returns (London revived his career with Match Point, but not so much with Scoop & Cassandra's Dream). Curiously, Allen has yet to explore America beyond the borders of Manhattan - Republican America may be far more foreign to him than the artists of Europe. 

Europe also holds obvious travelogue appeal, and cinematographer Darius Khondji is unsurprisingly being celebrated for shooting the Paris of everyone's imagination.