Directors Guild Awards 2007

2007 Directors Guild Awards
2007 Directors Guild of America nominations: feature film nominees on January 9, 2007; made-for-TV movies on January 10, 2007; other television nominees on January 11; and documentary and commercials nominees on January 16, 2007
2007 DGA Award winners: Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles on February 3, 2007
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

Steven Spielberg, DGA winner Martin Scorsese, and Leonardo DiCaprio © DGA
 

Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film:
BILL CONDON – Dreamgirls (Paramount Pictures)
Bill Condon’s Directorial Team:
Unit Production Manager: Patricia Whitcher
First Assistant Director: Richard Graves
Second Assistant Director: Eric Sherman
Second Second Assistant Director: Renee Hill-Sweet
JONATHAN DAYTON & VALERIE FARIS – Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ Directorial Team:
Unit Production Manager: Michael Beugg
First Assistant [...]

Oscar 2007 Nominations

Penélope Cruz told Academy members to vote for her — or else.
Pedro Almodóvar should have used the same vote-getting technique.

"There’s so many Mexicans!" exclaimed Mexican actress Salma Hayek, too excited to conjugate her verbs properly, upon announcing — along with Academy president Sid Ganis — some of the nominees for the 2007 Academy Awards.
Indeed. Best supporting actress nominee Adriana Barraza (for Babel); best direction nominee Alejandro González Iñárritu, who also happens to be one of the producers of best picture nominee Babel; best original screenplay nominee Guillermo del Toro, whose Pan’s Labyrinth was also nominated in the best foreign-language film category; best adapted screenplay nominee Alfonso Cuarón, one of the screenwriters of Children of Men (which he also directed — [...]

DGA Awards 2007: Nominations

Helen Mirren in The Queen (top); Brad Pitt in Babel (middle); Jennifer Hudson, Beyoncé Knowles, Anika Noni Rose in Dreamgirls (bottom)

The Directors Guild of America has announced the five features nominated for the 2007 DGA Award.
The biggest surprise was the absence of the much-revered Clint Eastwood — for either Flags of Our Fathers or Letters from Iwo Jima, or both — winner of last year’s DGA Lifetime Achievement Award. (In The Envelope, Tom O’Neil states that DGA members, who weren’t able to receive screeners this year, didn’t get a chance to check out Letters from Iwo Jima, which opened late in December.)
Also missing from the DGA list were Paul Greengrass, whose United 93 has been chosen best film of [...]

Satellite Awards 2006

2006 Satellite Awards
2006 International Press Academy’s Satellite Award nominations: November 30, 2006
2006 Satellite Award winners: Imperial Ballroom of le Méridian in Beverly Hills on December 17, 2006
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

Leonardo DiCaprio, Vera Farmiga in The Departed
 

MOTION PICTURES
Motion Picture, Drama
Half Nelson
* The Departed
Flags of Our Fathers
The Queen
The Last King of Scotland
Babel
Little Children
Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
Little Miss Sunshine
Thank You for Smoking
The Devil Wears Prada
Stranger Than Fiction
Venus
* Dreamgirls
Motion Picture, Foreign Language
The Lives of Others, Germany
* Volver, Spain
Changing Times, France
Water, Canada
The Syrian Bride, Israel
Apocalypto, U.S.
Motion Picture, Animated or Mixed Media
Cars
Ice Age: The Meltdown
Happy Feet
Flushed Away
* Pan’s Labyrinth
Motion Picture, Documentary
* Deliver Us from Evil
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
An [...]

KINSEY Notes

Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) and his wife Clara had four children. Only three are shown in Bill Condon’s biopic Kinsey. Their firstborn, Don, died from diabetes shortly before his fifth birthday. Clara Kinsey died in 1982 at the age of 83.
In the film, Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard) is seen seducing Alfred Kinsey. According to Kinsey’s biographers, Kinsey pursued Clyde, who became the researcher’s somewhat reluctant sex partner.
Kinsey never saw his father after his parents divorced. In the film, Kinsey is shown at his father’s home after his mother dies.
Indiana University came up with the money necessary to fund Kinsey’s research after the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its support due to pressure from right-wing and religious leaders. In the film, the [...]

KINSEY II – Liam Neeson

KINSEY Review: Part I
Like the controversial hero of another biopic, Dustin Hoffman’s Lenny Bruce in Lenny, Kinsey is ostracized because he dares tell the uncomfortable truth to a hypocritical society that wants none of it. But unlike Hoffman’s neurotic and abrasive stand-up comedian, Condon’s Kinsey is an eccentric but wholly likable fellow. And therein lies the film’s biggest flaw.
Since this is a (mostly) American movie, we can accept hunky Liam Neeson playing the role of the hound-faced Alfred Kinsey, a carbon copy of actor Tom Ewell (the quasi-errant husband in The Seven Year Itch). But it is difficult to accept a sex-obsessed hero who is hardly ever shown enjoying the pleasures of sex. Even if Kinsey was more interested in [...]

KINSEY d: Bill Condon

Kinsey (2004)
Direction and screenplay: Bill Condon (There’s a "thank you" credit to Kinsey biographer Johnathan Gathorne-Hardy and his book, Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things)
Cast: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O’Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Tim Curry, Oliver Platt, Lynn Redgrave
 

 

At one point in Kinsey, Liam Neeson’s polemical Dr. Alfred Kinsey tells a reporter that it would be "useless" to make a film of his 1948 tome on male sexuality. Be that as it may, even Kinsey himself would probably have recognized that his difficult, extraordinary life could well be the stuff that great movies are made of. Writer-director Bill Condon surely thinks so, and his Kinsey is an honorable attempt to portray the [...]