Name Dropping

By Alan Appel
Television ratings were once HUGE, but audience interest for Oscar broadcasts in recent years does seem to be plummeting faster than Harrison Ford’s career. Maybe if more sophisticated, crowd-pleasing films were nominated, and maybe if the Academy could settle on a quick-witted, continuing-year-to-year host (come home, Billy Crystal) , and maybe if telecasts didn’t have painfully long running times to accommodate lame performance segments and lamer acceptance speeches for even the minor awards, there would be hope. I’m not holding my breath that this year’s 83rd ceremony, slated for Feb. 27 at the Kodak Theater, will be an appreciably livelier or better-paced affair.
On another gloomy front, there’s yet another film adaptation of The Great Gatsby in the works, this one to star Leonardo DiCaprio  and Carey Mulligan  and directed by Baz Luhrmann. Listen up, old sports: some Great American Novels simply defy adaptation; five previous versions didn’t work, and if Francis Ford Coppola’s script couldn’t save the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow Gatsby from 1974, then just give it up. Another remake in production, however, does have intriguing possibilities—Colin Firth in a big-screen version of John LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which got a spectacular six-part adaptation back in 1979 on PBS’s Great Performances franchise.

By Alan Appel
Sometimes, more isn’t actually less; it’s effectively more . . . and better. That came to mind as I watched HBO’s telecast of Avatar. James Cameron’s
boldly imaginative and technically eye-popping fusion of sci-fi adventure and ecological fable set on the planet Pandora is—even in a televised non-3D format—an epic for the ages.
Yes, it won three second-tier Oscars (for art direction, cinematography and visual effects) and has become the highest grossing movie of all time (presently at $760 million, and that’s only domestic, and counting), but it was not last year’s Best Picture. Nor was Cameron the Best Director. Those honors went to The Hurt Locker and its gifted director Kathryn Bigelow (Cameron’s ex-wife). That movie is the lowest grossing Best Picture of all time.
Which demonstrates, once again, that audience approval, even on a globally grand scale, sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t in forecasting the Oscar for Best Picture. Or maybe the Academy just doesn’t get sci-fi films. I mean, we all love Annie Hall, but beating out Star Wars in 1977?
What the critical consensus is for the Most Important Picture can be a better barometer. Here, story and cast do count, but a weighty message—and the artfully visceral way it’s delivered—can seal the deal. And make no mistake, The Hurt Locker, an almost unbearably intense chronicle of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal Team in Iraq—how they defuse devices, why they do it and, if they survive, how it leaves them—is an important piece of work. More meaningful, for sure, but in what impressively ambitious technical or narrative sense was it more Oscar-worthy than Avatar?
And that’s the odd, totally unpredictable (and irritating) thing about the Oscars and what exactly “Best” means. Cameron gets jobbed last year, yet won the big prize more than a decade ago for Titanic, a soggy romance with a pair of dream boats in the leads. Call it “reverse payback.”
That is, belatedly rewarding the veteran, even legendary, actor (or director or writer) for a lesser film to make up for past oversights (how else to explain John Wayne for True Grit or Paul Newman in The Color of Money or, yes, even Sandra Bullock  last year for The Blind Side), is one thing (and makes only sentimental sense), but the Academy, getting all guilty conscience on us, is occasionally wont to stiff an artist for superior work if that person somehow previously copped an underserved prize. Maybe that explains Cameron’s loss last year and, never mind how he must have felt--it screwed up our Oscar pools.
So what’s the Best Picture outlook for 2011, sprawl vs. small? Expensively mounted (and mega-hyped) studio entertainments vs. provocatively themed smaller, independent films? Next week we’ll size up the early field of favorites—including one much-touted drama that pairs prime candidates for “payback” and “reverse payback” Oscars.
Read more: http://technorati.com/entertainment/film/article/oscar-emmy-watch-musings-misgivings-reverse/page-2/#ixzz15MeyZJAT

By Alan Appel


There have been a handful of long-ago significant exceptions along the way (Dallas, The Rockford Files, Miami Vice and The Brady Bunch among them), but generally speaking, Friday night, in terms of viewer numbers, is a graveyard for TV shows. Yes, it is marginally better broadcasting real estate than Saturday night but that’s not saying much. So what’s a network to do when it suddenly strikes ratings (and critical) gold with a Friday show—as, for example, CBS did in the fall of 1990 with a little number titled CSI , which became the first TV crime series ever to be No. 1 in the Nielsen charts (and explains why it continues to spin off a seemingly unending parade of other CSI hours)?

As in the case of the original CSI, it quickly expanded its audience by moving it to another night, and while the official network line at present is that there are no plans to shift the Tom Selleck  drama Blue Bloods, don’t bet against it. The series is just too artfully written, performed, directed and photographed (in New York), and it along with Selleck—whose one and only Emmy came more than 25 years ago for Magnum P.I. —will not likely be forgotten when it comes to end-of-season nominations.

The show handlers (and writers) Mitchell Burgess  and Robin Green —yet two more veterans of The Sopranos who have gone on to a follow-up success—like to describe the multi-generational Blue Bloods as an ensemble family series melded with a police procedural, and there’s something to that. But the greater truth is that Selleck—as widowed Police Commissioner Frank Reagan, whose sons (played by Donnie Wahlberg  and Will Estes are also cops, daughter (Bridget Moynahan) is a prosecuting attorney and own father (Len Cariou) is a former police official—is its wise if somewhat rigid center, investing a commanding multi-layered character with a raw emotional depth that seems to lift the series around him.

Like few other male TV legends (only James Garner comes to mind), Selleck’s easy charm, a mix of humor and vulnerability, has largely defined his three-decade-plus durability as a star. He never really got his due on the big screen (check out, in particular, a terrific performance in Quigley Down Under  and wonderful comedic turns in 3 Men and a Baby and In & Out), but charisma together with fan loyalty goes a long way and now, in Blue Bloods, we’re reminded once again of just how accomplished an actor he is.
Go to: http://technorati.com/entertainment/tv/article/oscar-emmy-watch-musings-misgivings-blue/

Will Mad Men win the Best Drama Emmy for the fourth consecutive year?
Probably, though its season finale two Sundays ago was a real head scratcher, what with Don Draper somehow deciding that ravenous secretary Megan was worth marrying based on the romantic epiphany that, hey, any woman who could remain composed and calm in the face of his kid spilling a strawberry
shake was someone to spend the rest of his life with.
In my book, that’s worth giving an engagement ring (even if it once belonged to another woman, the wife that Don adored of a man whose identity he took! You Mad Men neophytes have a lot of catching up to do.) Plus, where exactly has partner Bert Cooper gone? Will jilted Dr. Faye tell her mob-connected father?
And what ever did become of Sal? Still, why quibble—Mad Men, in all its opaque brilliance, is rightly in the pantheon of Great Shows We Love and will return
next season.
Not so the AMC series Rubicon that preceded it on Sunday nights, and whose renewal is up in the air. Here is the perfect candidate for the Woody Allen-coined (in his film Manhattan) Academy of the Overrated. Really, has there ever been a more highly praised (though, let’s be honest, cheap-looking) conspiracy thriller with more loose ends, false leads and red herrings?
Ordinarily, any series in this genre that plants clues in a DVD copy of Meet Me in St. Louis would have my attention, but Rubicon goes down so many blind alleys with so many bland, button-down types constantly shuffling papers (or folders) that nothing dramatic ever seems to happen. There was one intriguing mystery, however: why the show’s best character actor, the wonderful Harris Yulin, was killed off in the first episode and given virtually nothing to do?
No, come Emmy-nomination time, there will be two new faces in the Best Drama field, and Rubicon, despite the hype, if there’s any justice, won’t be one of them. One of the newcomers is a chalk pick, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (more about it in a later column) and the other demonstrates that while even a great star (like Jimmy Smits in Outlaw) cannot save a deeply flawed series), sometimes an icon (Tom Selleck in Blue Bloods) can elevate a solid ensemble cop drama into a bona fide keeper. Now let's see if CBS is smart enough to move it from its graveyard Friday-night slot.

Has there been a better character actor than Steve Buscemi over the past two decades? Not really. A wiry and weirdly endearing presence in a spate of Independent films, and a favorite of filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino (beginning with Reservoir Dogs) and the Coen Brothers   —he was the bungling kidnapper deposited head first into the wood chipper near the end of Fargo.
Buscemi is a uniquely riveting and idiosyncratic performer, making an art of portraying characters who seem somewhat menacing, if forlorn, wild-eyed eccentrics. I love the range he has and his dramatic sense, and also his sense of humor, Martin Scorsese (who directed him in the first episode of HBO’s sensational Prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire) told a gathering of TV critics this past summer. There’s something that’s very, very strong on camera. .  with Steve as a character, whatever he plays.

Buscemi has been Emmy-nominated before. He was Tony Soprano’s doomed trying-to-go-straight cousin in The Sopranos , and he directed several episodes in that series, including the much-acclaimed season-3 Pine Barrens. Considerable Sopranos writing and directing talent is involved with Boardwalk Empire, and halfway through its 12-episode first year (a second season is on order), it seems almost a foregone conclusion that the next round of Emmy nominations will present the lion’s share of nominations in all major categories, including Best Drama, to (again) Mad Men (created by another Sopranos alum, Matthew Weiner)  and Boardwalk Empire.
Veteran character actors can sometimes make the sudden leap to top-line star. Certainly James Gandolfini  did just that in The Sopranos, and on the big screen, Anthony Quinn and Walter Matthau are among a handful who used an Oscar win to instantly propel them to marquee attractions. In Quinn’s case, a revitalized career followed supporting Oscars for Viva Zapata! and Lust for Life; for Matthau, it came after a supporting Oscar for The Fortune Cookie. By the same token, some of our best character actors remained forever just that—wonderfully invaluable, below-the-title performers essential to their films. But unable to carry them.


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