Report

Bay Area's Pixar rises again at Oscars

Cementing its status as the preeminent animation company of the ‘00s, Pixar won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for the third time in seven years. Up director Pete Docter collected his first trophy in six trips, a stunning run that includes original screenplay nominations for Toy Story (1995), Wall-E (2008) and Up. The helium-fueled adventure was further buoyed by Michael Giacchino’s Oscar for original score, the category in which he was nominated two years ago for Ratatouille.

Pixar received five nominations altogether, including Best Picture (snagged by The Hurt Locker, directed by San Carlos native and San Francisco Art Institute alum Kathryn Bigelow), Original Screenplay (awarded to Mark Boal’s for The Hurt Locker over Docter and co-writer Bob Peterson) and Mixing.

topics: activism, animation, awards, bay area, hollywood, independent film, oscars

Critic's Notebook

As Oscars Approach, Winners are Still Up in the Air

Last month’s Oscar nominations announcement was anticipated with unusual interest—largely because of exiting AMPAS Sid Ganis’ surprise announcement some months ago that the Academy would henceforth revert to ten Best Picture nominees, a practice abandoned in 1943. Back then, mainstream Hollywood product was pretty much all there was, and coming up with ten admirable titles wasn’t too hard a stretch. Today, with so much major Hollywood product devoted to sequels, remakes and popcorn franchises, any viable Top Ten would have to draw on indie, animated, possibly foreign and documentary features.

topics: actors, african american cinema, bay area, critics year end, directors, dramatic films, hollywood, oscars

Q&A

Ehrlich, Goldsmith on Unearthing, Reclassifying ‘Pentagon Papers’

Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s Academy Award nomination for The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is, among other things, a validation of the documentary’s right-now relevance. In revisiting the suspenseful events surrounding the formerly hawkish military analyst’s principled decision to leak the military’s classified history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times and 18 other newspapers in 1971, the Berkeley filmmakers inevitably call to mind the Bush Administration’s hyped case for invading Iraq and the media’s abdication of its responsibility to question and investigate. The Most Dangerous Man in America flows naturally from both Ehrlich’s 2002 doc The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It (co-directed with Rick Tejada-Flores) and Goldsmith’s 1996 Oscar nominee, Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press. I sat down separately with Goldsmith and Ehrlich at the Zaentz Media Center in December, smack between their local premiere in the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Academy Award announcement. Currently beginning its national theatrical release through First Run Features, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers opens Friday, February 19, in San Francisco and Berkeley.

topics: activism, awards, bay area, documentary, oscars

Platform

Sam Green Brings 'Utopia' to Sundance

Sundance was just days away when I found Sam Green deep in preparation for the live performance of his latest piece, Utopia in Four Movements. But even as he was ironing out the final kinks, he found a few minutes to walk me through the greatest dreams and worst nightmares of the 20th century, offering up the connections between an American exile in Cuba, the world’s largest shopping mall, which lies dormant in China, the history of Esperanto and the work of forensic anthropologists. In the years since The Weather Underground earned him an Oscar nomination, Green’s moved away from the traditional documentary format into more experimental narratives and offbeat shorts, such as lot 63, grave c, a melancholic look at the legacy of Altamont victim Meredith Hunter. His new work, a live-music infused, first-personal tour through a century of dashed hopes finds Green pushing boundaries of all sorts.

[Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in SF360’s Blogs. Green performed Utopia in Four Movements to adoring crowds at Sundance this past week. He added an epilogue to the story as the festival was closing.]

topics: activism, directors, diy, documentary, oscars, performance, sundance

Experience

"The Greatest Year in Film" turns 70 at the Castro

What was the best year ever for painting? Music? Literature? Any answers would be arbitrary at worst, debatable at best—the truth being, of course, that these art forms are just too vast, historied and changeable for the question to be useful at all.

Yet ask when was the best year for movies (Hollywood movies, that is), and there is actually a consensus so widespread it’s gone from opinion to virtual fact. That year would be 1939, when for whatever reasons—some explicable, others just accidents of timing—Hollywood’s “golden age” went platinum, delivering so many classic features it still beggars belief they all arrived in such close proximity.

topics: actors, castro theatre, exhibition, genre films, hollywood, oscars

Platform

Debra Chasnoff goes back to school with "Straightlaced"

In eighth grade, Debra Chasnoff was already a tall, attractive brunette with beautiful blue eyes, who yearned to be noticed by a boy named Sammy but he didn’t have eyes for her. Although she had a crush on him, what he saw and wrote in the class yearbook was "To the girl who gets As in French class. I don’t know how or why."

Now a 51-year old prize-winning filmmaker and the mother of two boys, 14 and 20, Chasnoff laughed as she recalled being "devastated" by Sammy’s comment. "The thing he had noticed about me was that I was really smart and not that I was someone appealing to him. I felt a lot of pressure because I was smarter than you were supposed to be if you were a girl."

topics: bay area, directors, documentary film, film history, gay lesbian cinema, oscars, political film

Found

The San Francisco Irish Film Festival

The Fifth Annual Irish Film Festival begins this Wednesday at the Roxie with a slate of narratives and documentaries imbued with Ireland’s particularly unique sense of time and place in the modern world; the people, the pubs, and that iconic, green pastoral landscape.

Irish actor and comedian Pat Shortt stars in the opening night film Garage (rhymes with ‘carriage’ when said with the appropriate accent) though the film utilizes his talents less for comedic value and more for his ability to believably portray the subtle mannerisms of Josie, the well-meaning, deeply lonely town simpleton. This is the second collaboration by director Leonard Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran, whose first feature Adam & Paul, was a similar, heavily character-driven narrative marked by what seems to be emerging as a thematic trademark: sympathetic characters in inescapably tragic situations. Garage took home the C.I.C.A.E. Award at Cannes in 2007.

topics: actors, directors, documentary, independent film, irish cinema, oscars, shorts, sundance film festival