The actor expressed regret for his criticism of Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning film, saying he also wanted to ‘apologise to the cast … brilliant actors all’
The actor Sam Elliott has apologised for comments he made last month about Jane Campion’s western The Power of the Dog.
While speaking with Marc Maron on the latter’s WTF podcast, Elliott had described the film as a “piece of shit” western with “allusions of homosexuality”.
Continue reading...Despite more than 100 screen credits of his own, the actor sounded pretty confused about the basics on Marc Maron’s podcast
For approximately a full hour, the latest episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast goes absolutely swimmingly. The episode’s guest, Sam Elliott, rumbles on amiably about all manner of subjects, and he seems to be building a genuine rapport with Maron. And then, almost as a closing afterthought, Maron asks Elliott: “Did you see Power of the Dog?”
And then everything went to hell.
Continue reading...The film-maker is the first woman to be nominated twice for the best director Oscar – but thanks to her example, others will surely follow soon
The nomination of Jane Campion for best director at the 2022 Academy Awards – her second, following her 1994 nomination for The Piano – is more noteworthy for what it says about the institution than for its validation of the 67-year-old director, absent from feature film-making for more than a decade.
To date, only two women – Kathryn Bigelow and Chloé Zhao – have ever won best director. If that sounds unreasonable, consider this: in 93 years, just seven women have even been nominated for the award – Lina Wertmüller in 1977 (for Seven Beauties), Campion in 1994, Sofia Coppola in 2003 (for Lost in Translation), Bigelow in 2010 (for The Hurt Locker), Greta Gerwig in 2018 (for Lady Bird), Emerald Fennell in 2021 (for Promising Young Woman) and Zhao that same year, victorious with Nomadland. For the first half-century of the awards, double-X chromosomes and the ability to successfully oversee a motion picture were apparently believed to be irreconcilable. (Something to consider the next time the rightwing media complains about Hollywood’s liberal bias.)
Continue reading...Ahead of the official Academy nominations on Tuesday, Observer film critics pick their own favourites
Amid the hype over her acclaimed performance as Diana, Princess of Wales in Spencer, Kristen Stewart briefly stopped awards pundits dead in their tracks when, upon being asked about her Oscar buzz, she drily admitted, “I don’t give a shit.” Sacrilege! Some of the best films and performances of all time haven’t been considered by the Academy, she continued. “There’s five spots. What the fuck are you going to do?”
Nobody disagrees with Stewart on any of this: just ask our critics, whose ideal Oscar ballots below are knowingly far from the expected reality of next week’s nominations. That the actor’s comments made showbiz headlines anyway speaks to the strange aura the Oscars maintain as a gold standard of cinematic achievement: for several months a year, people fret and discuss and strategise about them, while companies expensively campaign for them, only to spend the rest of the year complaining that they don’t mean anything anyway. Even Stewart’s scepticism emerged while on the campaign trail, being interviewed on a Variety podcast named Awards Circuit. Should she win for Spencer, she’ll doubtless turn up and give a humbly grateful speech anyway. That’s the game. Nobody gives a shit about the Oscars, after all, except when everyone does.
Here, then, are our critics’ picks of who and what should be on those Oscars shortlists. Guy Lodge
PETITE MAMAN
Summer of Soul
The Green Knight
Titane
Censor
Continue reading...Jane Campion’s Netflix drama and HBO hit triumph as stars distance themselves from Hollywood Foreign Press Association
The Power of the Dog and Succession were the big winners at an unusual, stripped-back Golden Globes.
Traditionally, the ceremony is a glitzy telecast with A-listers in attendance but after a year of controversies surrounding diversity and amoral practices, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lost its footing in the industry, with publicity firms, studios and celebrities choosing to distance themselves.
Continue reading...Nicole Kidman is one of Hollywood’s most brilliant stars, but her everyday concerns are familiar to all of us. She talks candidly about sleepless nights, melancholy moments and why she still has so much to get done
Nicole Kidman sleeps badly. Recently she got up at 3am to Google that thing, with the leg, where, “It feels like it needs to move?” But more often she will lie there in the dark beside her husband, in her Nashville bed, their two daughters sleeping some rooms away, and make decisions. She will “contemplate”. Between midnight and seven, she says, coolly, is the most “confronting time”.
It says a lot about Kidman, her prolific career, her sustained presence on film and glossy TV, that we can immediately picture her there, hair coiled on a pillow, eyes wide, the restless sense she has become claustrophobic in her own body. Kidman, 54, has been acting since she was 14, already 5ft 9in then, with skin that burned easily. She started in theatre partly as a way to get out of the Australian sun – a year later she was known locally (she told an early interviewer) for playing “older, sexually frustrated women”. Over the next 40 years she extended that repertoire, so now she is known for playing cryptic, adventurous, troubled women, too, in brave work that might not have been made were it not for her glittering star-power.
Continue reading...After a year of criticism over diversity, the Golden Globes have come up with a decent slate of nominees, with Gaga surely the favourite for best actress
• Full list of 2020 nominations
The Golden Globes nomination list has been announced with a solemn introduction from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s president Helen Hoehne, to the effect that the Globes’ much-criticised controlling body was “trying to be better” and that its constituent membership was more diverse than at any other time in its history. Which is better, I suppose, than being less diverse than at any time in its history.
At any rate, leading the pack are Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s unashamed heartwarmer about the home town of his early childhood, with seven nominations and Jane Campion’s stark, twisty western-Gothic psychodrama The Power of the Dog, set in 1920s Montana with Benedict Cumberbatch as the troubled, angry cattleman who begins a toxic duel with his new sister-in-law played by Kirsten Dunst and her sensitive teenage son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Continue reading...Kim Gillingham explains how her work on The Power of the Dog enabled the ‘lioness of an artist’ and her ‘translucent’ star to access their inmost drives
To access his dreams the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí napped while sitting on a chair, holding keys over an upturned metal plate. After he lost consciousness, the keys dropped onto the plate, jangling him awake so he could paint fresh from his unconscious. Kim Gillingham tells this story to connect her practice to the history of artistic endeavour. She is a Jungian dream coach, based in LA, who combines ideas from psychoanalysis and the method acting of the Actors Studio to, in her words: “access the incredible resource of the unconscious through dreams and through work with the body and to use that material to bring authenticity, truth and aliveness up through whatever discipline the artist is working in”.
Jane Campion sought Gillingham’s services to help conjure the forces at play in her first film in 12 years, The Power of the Dog. It’s a western adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel that riffs on themes of masculinity and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank, a toxic alpha cowboy whose personality is designed to hide a secret that would have made him vulnerable in the story’s setting of 1920s Montana.
The Power of the Dog is streaming now on Netflix.
Continue reading...Despite the presence of an unusually menacing Benedict Cumberbatch unnerving all on set, it’s this young Australian actor’s otherworldly stillness that lights up Jane Campion’s western psychodrama
Jane Campion’s psycho-sexual western The Power of the Dog is a tremendous film but it is the power of Kodi Smit-McPhee that really adds bite to its bark. The 25-year-old Australian actor has been a fragile, hypnotic presence, with an eerie knack for stillness and intensity, ever since his earliest performances. At the age of 10, he played a boy coping with the desertion of one parent and the breakdown of the other in Romulus, My Father. At 12, he trudged through a post-apocalyptic hell-scape in The Road, then fell in love with a vampire at 13 in Let Me In, the US remake of the Swedish horror hit Let the Right One In. Even his multiplex movies, such as the X-Men outings (Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix) in which he played the blue-skinned Nightcrawler, have felt that bit stranger thanks to his delicate, androgynous features and those pool-sized anime eyes set far apart on his face.
His uncanny quality is crucial to Campion’s movie, which is set in early 2oth-century Montana. Smit-McPhee plays the gangly, effeminate Peter, who spends his days crafting intricate paper flowers and sketching dead animals. His life is destabilised when his mother (Kirsten Dunst), a widowed innkeeper, takes up with a new partner. It is not this stepfather (Jesse Plemons) who poses a threat so much as his sadistic, bullying brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), who taunts Peter and mocks the way he “creeps all over the place, big eyes goggling”.
Continue reading...With a more normal awards season on the way, it’s time to sift through what’s been loved and hated and look forward to what performances could make an impact
As we all edge slowly closer to something vaguely sorta kinda resembling a loose idea of normality, so too does Hollywood, its relatively fixed annual schedule going from blurry to a bit less blurry. After an almost normal summer, the fall festivals followed and while they weren’t quite back up to snuff (some had a semi-virtual element, some big films were notably missing), there was a dramatic improvement from 2020 and, importantly, they were pulled off with very few infections.
Related: ‘We want people to freak out’: inside Hollywood’s Museum of Motion Pictures
Continue reading...After a year of delays, the next 12 months offers a wealth of big, awards-aiming movies from intimate dramas to historical epics
It’s not often that the word unusual gets attached to the Oscars, one of the most staid and predictable nights of the year, as sober as the Golden Globes is drunk. But after an unusual year, the awards season followed suit, extended by two months, films dropping in and out of the race and some that might otherwise have been ignored instead taking centre stage.
Related: And this year’s Oscar for inclusivity goes to … the Academy!
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