The Now Film Festival

The Now Film Festival lasts 25 weeks. That's a heck of a long time - but thankfully it isn't a full-on, seven days a week affair. Instead, this works on an everyone-can-manage-it, one-film-a-week arrangement.

If you haven't heard of The Now Film Festival at all, it works like this: you submit your films online where, before October 10th, the rate is just $25 per film; after that there is a $35 per film price tag. Films must be no more than 25 minutes in length - 25 is quite a popular number with these guys.

Then, as of October 17th this year, through the full 25 weeks, a new film will be unveiled on their website every Wednesday. After this, the entire selection of 25 films will be screened at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Last year, in fact, one of the Now Festival films went on to win an Oscar, so they should feel quite at home up there.

The top prize, for the best film of the fest, is to be a Panasonic AG-HVX200 "or similar". That's definitely a very nice prize. And, of course, the exposure never hurt anybody.

Here's my top tip: enter early. They need films for those early slots, and there's bound to be much less competition in the opening weeks.

I'll be going back to their site on October 17th to see the first film. Fingers crossed they'll be able to manage an unbroken run of 25 gems.

Not The Oscars

You can call these The Notscars, if you want. Here are my awards for films of 2007, in some of the categories that were featured in the Academy's delusion-fest last night. I've left the acting selections well alone.

Visual Effects
Children of Men

Animated Feature
Cars

Costume Design
Tideland

Makeup
Hostel

Art Direction
Tideland

Music (Score)
Little Miss Sunshine

Music (Song)
Borat

Sound Editing
Cars

Foreign Language Film
Pan's Labyrinth

Film Editing
Dave Chappelle's Block Party

Cinematography
Nicola Pecorini, Tideland

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni, Tideland

Writing (Original Screenplay)
Rian Johnson, Brick

Directing
Terry Gilliam, Tideland

Best Picture
Tideland

- and even though the Academy refuses to honour stunt people -

Action Direction
Casino Royale

The Magic Bullet

According to Nikki Finke, the bearded triumvirate of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg have been lined up to present the Best Director Oscar together this Sunday. The thinking seems to be that Scorsese is a shoo in, and the four of them will make for a historical photo opportunity.

The only thing that could come close to turning this shudder-fest around would be Little Miss Sunshine picking up Best Picture right afterwards but, sadly, I'm not expecting that to happen.

Genies Snub Magic

Tideland has been snubbed at the Canadian Genie awards, the only major prizes for which it had been nominated. Instead - and in the typical partisan style that always marrs the Baftas, Cesars, Oscars and so on - the gongs were handed out in a genuinely confusing fashion.

The Rocket scooped Best Director for Charles Biname plus Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume, Editing, Lead Actor and Actress and Supporting Actor and Sound Editing - but not best film.

That went to Eric Canuel's Bon Cop, Bad Cop (the Canadian Hot Fuzz) which was also rewarded with Acheivement in Overall Sound and the Golden Reel.

I know - it doesn't add up. A film supposedly towers above its competition which, somehow, is actually better in most regards. Typical. This stuff drives me nuts. It seem like all they were doing was rewarding Bon Cop, Bad Cop for it's record breaking box office.

Grrrrr! And please 'don't get me started' on the Dayton/Faris snub in the Directing category of the Oscars this year. I'll go supernova.

How You Say, Er, Densitometer?

Reuters sez: Maggie Gyllenhaal, presenter of the technical Oscars ceremony this last Saturday night, received a rapturous round of applause for correctly pronouncing the word densitometer. I witnessed something similar in a screening of Elizabethtown when Kirsten Dunst nailed Lousville - and to think that people tease me for giving the Langley sequence in Mission: Impossible a standing ovation.

Invisibles Out

The news of on the street - that is, Cartoon Brew Blvd, amongst other places - is that Arthur and the Invisibles is being removed from the running for a best Animated Film Oscar. Unfortunately for Arthur, the cumulative footage count of animated sequences in the film has been tallied at under 75% of the overall length.

This will mean that only fifteen films are eligible for the award - one short, sixteen being the magic number that would permit five official nominations. Now, with only three animations allowed in the final ballot, the upshot is not only a more closely comptetive final hurlong, but less overall promotion for animation, and two films denied all of the publicity Oscar brings.

A shame.

Singalonga Oscar

The list of songs eligible for next year's Best Original Song Academy Award is, of course, a mixed bunch. There are a total of 56 and giving them the once over, the first thing that struck me was how completely unaware I was that most of these songs even existed - and that includes a number apparently included in films I had seen, sometimes even loved. Where on earth does The Book I Write appear in Stranger Than Fiction, for example? Over the end credits? Would that even count?

Here's my list of picks - based mostly on the song, though sometimes (and admittedly spuriously - in the style of the Academy) on the film the song was apparently written for. Despite Dreamgirls and Over The Hedge placing three songs each, I'm not going to select even one from either:

The Girl in Byakkoya - White Tiger Field from Paprika; O Kazakhstan from Borat; Real Gone from Cars; PJ and Rooster from Idlewild; 'Til The End of Time from Little Miss Sunshine; Upside Down from Curious George.

The next stage is an odd one. A meeting will be held where clips from the 56 films will be played so that the 'music branch' of the Academy might select three to five nominations. Who makes up this 'music branch'? How many people? And will they hear the entire songs, or just the fragments featured in the films? If a song is reprised several time sin the movie, will they get to hear every slice?

As ever, the Academy's approach is far from an exact science.

I precit that 'Til The End of Time from Little Miss Sunshine will win - in fact, I expect something of a Little Miss landslide come awards night.

The 2005 Scientific and Technical Oscars

Do you know who won the Scientific and Technical Oscars this year? Well, this spoddy sidebar took place a few weeks back, hosted by Rachel McAdams, and is set to be excerpted very briefly on Sunday night's big broadcast. The tech awards see the people who really, honestly make moviemaking possible - but don't come with all the glitz and glamour - get their moment in the spotlight, however fleeting, and however downplayed it sadly always is. This is where a genius like Garrett Brown gets a little pat on the back and reserved nod of the head - sadly in lieu of the standing ovations they so richly deserve.

I'm always disappointed how little respect the tech winners are given. The poor souls don't even have a shot at a real Oscar statuette, with the best they can hope for being a second-tier trophy, a plaque that, I'd imagine, you wouldn't recognise as an Oscar if it fell on your foot.

It's good that disciplines such as Cinematography and Editing are deemed suitable for the central awards section, but it is probably because popular misconceptions prevail about just what those particular roles entail, and that these fictional versions are somehow seen as "on a par" with Acting and Directing. Nobody has any illusions about the man dreaming up emulsions down at the film stock plant

All filmmaking is craftsmanship. It is a science. And yes, it is an art. But it is also a very technical process guided by rules and governed by laws. Many films come around each year that show a less-than-perfect understanding of these arts and sciences, yet still get nominated for any number of Oscars. Take Munich for example. Or Crash. And to a lesser extent, Brokeback Mountain.

On each of those films, the best work, the greatest achievements, were those of the backroom boys, the people who greased the wheels and made sure that the very machinery of filmmaking was ticking over at the level of the smallest cogs. These are the people recognised only in these ostracised, geek ghetto awards while the egoists up front, the Paul Haggises and the Spielbergs and the Keira Knightleys, are feted again and again and again.