AND THE WINNER IS…

Over the past 20 years, the two closest collaborators of the writer-director Quentin Tarantino have been producer Lawrence Bender and studio chief Harvey Weinstein, both of whom are Jewish. The trio’s latest collaboration, the best picture nominated “Inglourious Basterds,” depicts the ultimate Jewish revenge-fantasy: a group of Jews kill Adolf Hitler (along with a bunch of other Nazis) before he has the opportunity to kill 6 million of them. And now, just in time for the Jewish festival of Purim (Sunday through Monday) and the close of Oscar voting (Tuesday), several rabbis from the Los Angeles area have strongly endorsed the film, arguing that it is a first-rate retelling of the story that inspired Purim.

The trend appears to trace back to Monday, November 30, 2009, when a private screening of “Basterds” was held for the Board of Rabbis of Southern California — a group composed of more than 300 rabbis from the region — followed by a Q&A with Tarantino, Bender, and actors Christoph Waltz (who plays “The Jew Hunter,” a sadistic Nazi colonel, in the film) and Eli Roth (who plays “The Bear Jew,” a sadistic Jewish warrior, in the film). The event was “sponsored” by the Jewish Journal, the Israeli Consulate, and the Southern California Board of Rabbis, and obviously appears to have had the full blessing and support of The Weinstein Company, which is distributing the film domestically.

Four days later, on December 4, 2009, Rabbi Mark S. Diamond — the Executive Vice President of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California — wrote about the event and the film on “Bloggish,” a blog on the Jewish Journal Web site. He was also the first person to connect the film to Purim:

For me, “Inglourious Basterds” is a modern-day Midrash on the Purim story. With apologies to my traditional friends, I see the Biblical Book of Esther as an ancient Jewish fable of justice and revenge. To wit, what would happen if the tables were turned and we had power over our enemies? With all the merrymaking and child-centered focus of the Purim holiday, we tend to forget that the Jews of Shushan kill 75,000 of their foes toward the end of the narrative (Esther 9:16). Then they go out and have a big party to celebrate their success.

Then, on February 20, 2010, Rabbi Judith HaLevy of the Malibu Jewish Center & Synagogue — who is also on the Board of Directors of the aforementioned Board of Rabbis of Southern California — introduced a screening of “Basterds” at her synagogue’s sanctuary, which hosts the the Malibu Film Society, a recently-established group of local cineastes (many of whom work in the film industry and some of whom are Academy members). HaLevy, with whom I spoke by phone on Saturday evening, told me that Roth was scheduled to attend the “Basterds” screening but had to cancel at the last moment.

One person who was in attendance that night was Dick Guttman, a Malibu resident and veteran publicist who has worked on Weinstein films in the past. Upon hearing HaLevy’s introduction to the film — in which she, too, connected it to Purim — she says Guttman urged her to put it into writing, suggesting that he could get it published in the Malibu Times or even on The Huffington Post. HaLevy told me she was happy to oblige and wrote a piece, entitled “Fantasy Time,” that did not end up being published anywhere but was provided to me by publicists working on the “Basterds” campaign:

This is the season of two great Jewish holidays in Malibu — the Academy Awards and the Festival of Purim. Who knew that “Inglourious Basterds,” a front-runner for top honors, is actually a classic retelling of the Purim tale? What do Nazi scalps have to do with the Purim carnival, with its rides and prizes, or children dressed as kings and queens delivering baskets of sweet-filled pastries called “hammentashen”?

It all depends on your fantasy. If you are a persecuted and oppressed people, subject to discrimination and harsh treatment for millennia, it is easy to imagine a fantasy of bloody revenge against your oppressors. The story does not have to be true to be deeply satisfying to the psyche.

The story of Purim takes place in Persia over 2,500 years ago. A foolish king (there have been so many) gives his advisor, Haman, the right to annihilate all the Jews in his kingdom, just because they are a people with their own beliefs. From this point onwards, the story moves into fantasy and farce. Esther, a beautiful Jewish maiden, takes top honors in a beauty contest and becomes Queen of Persia. Her Uncle Mordecai, watching her from outside the palace gates, overhears a plot and saves the king’s life, only to be challenged by the evil Haman. In a plot spin worthy of Moliere and Tarentino, the tables are turned. Esther saves her people, Mordecai is given the highest honors, and Haman hangs on the gallows built for Mordecai. Let’s eat!

The tale ends, however, on a darker note. In this age old revenge fantasy, once the Jews are saved, they wreak vengeance on their enemies. Not only are Haman’s ten sons hung from the gallows, but 75,000 Persians are killed in revenge. Of course, there is not a shred of evidence that this is true, but it’s a great fantasy for a people constantly forced to abandon their lands and wander in exile.

“Inglourious Basterds” is a midrash, or interpretation of this Jewish revenge story. Shoshana is our beautiful Queen Esther, and the Bear Jew clubbing his Nazi victims to death echoes the fantasy killing of 75,000 Persians so long ago. Neither story is true, but the fantasy satisfies a deep desire for the tables to be turned, the righteous to triumph, and the weak to become strong. “Inglourious Basterds” continues the tradition in fine form. Fantasy rocks! Let’s eat!

Then, last Tuesday, February 23, 2010, Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, the Executive Rabbi at JconnectLA and Director at Jewlicious Festivals — who Tweeted throughout the “Basterds” screening & Q&A for the Board of Rabbis of Southern California — wrote a post on the Jewlicious blog entitled “An Oscar for Tarantino” in which he also discussed the Purim-”Basterds” connection:

With all the buzz in LA this week about the Oscar voting, here is my vote: “Inglorious Basterds” should win best picture and many other accolades for Quentin Tarantino and his brilliant cast. “Basterds” is the most intriguing movie about WWII and the Holocaust to be made in decades.

Writing about the film this week, a few days before the holiday of Purim, I am drawn to a parallel between “Basterds” and Purim. In the Purim story, Jewish salvation came not at the hands of politicians and power-brokers, but through a Jewish woman who had hidden her identity from everyone including her husband. In “Basterds,” it is also a Jewish woman, whose past and Jewish identity are a secret, and is being romanced by a Nazi poster-boy, who is the heroine.

“Basterds” is a film about WWII and the “face of Jewish revenge” portrayed by a band of American Jews scalping Nazis behind enemy lines. There is also the Jewish woman who plots to murder the entire Nazi leadership as revenge for her murdered family. None of these things actually happened, “Basterds” is a fairy tale.

The film is brilliant from every angle. It has drama, humor, romance, and suspense. The plot twists are compelling. The story, the photography, the script, the acting, and the drama all are detailed, textured, nuanced, colorful, and captivating.

I was apprehensive. I had never seen a Tarantino film, and heard there is a lot of violence. While “Basterds” has some pretty graphic violence, it is a WWII movie after all. The scalping made everyone cringe. Yet the violence pales in comparison to portrayals of mass murder by Nazi death squads or gas chambers.

The Jews are tough in this film. More James Bond than Woody Allen, more Mossad than Seinfeld. There are no sheep being led to the slaughter. The Nazis are brutal, interesting, grotesque — not unlike the real Nazis. The leader of the Basterds played by Brad Pitt brands Nazis with Swastikas on their foreheads so they cannot escape into regular life afterward. They cannot escape what they have done.

It is clear that Tarantino did a ton of research on his subject matter. He read up on the Nazi film industry, and the war, and real life WWII spy stuff. He digested all the previously exulted WWII movies and hints of them appear in the film

I enjoyed many parts of the film for their poetic justice, suspense, and dialogue — but this one I love to retell.

Winston Churchill, when hearing of the Germans plans to replace Jewish cinema with Nazi cinema, says “You say [Goebbels] wants to take on the Jews at their own game?”

If we cannot laugh we cannot heal. If we cannot dream we cannot move on. Tarantino’s film helps us heal, and move on, but that is not why he made it — he made it because it needed to be made.

If they would have murdered Hitler, millions would have been saved, but it was not the priority of the Allied forces. In fact, the only ones that made a serious attempt at it late in the war were fellow Germans.

The Allies tried to win the war the old-fashioned way, with infantry, tanks, planes and bombs, with propaganda, cloaks, daggers and brute force. I don’t know if this was Tarantino’s goal, but Basterds shows that redemption can come from average people doing extraordinary things. To stop an evil tyrant we cannot depend solely on conventional means, and conventional players, we need to act and hope that we are helped by the hand of God.

I should also mention two other articles about “Basterds” by prominent Jews, even though neither discuss the subject of Purim. Back on August 26, 2009, Rabbi Irwin Kula penned a piece for The Huffington Post entitled “‘Inglourious Basterds,’ Vengeance And Redemption” in which he described the film as “a fun, action-packed Jewish revenge fantasy.” He also wrote, “Lawrence Bender and Harvey and Bob Weinstein deserve great credit for having the courage to back this extraordinary film. Yet, it takes a gentile to go where no Holocaust story has gone before. Personally, I would give Tarantino an honorary membership in the Jewish people (no circumcision required, as he’s been hacking, slicing and ruminating about this Jewish vengeance orgy for over a decade) for bringing consciousness of feelings and desires that many Jews could never bring up in mixed company to the screen.” More recently, on February 18, 2010, Abraham H. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor who is now the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote his own piece on The Huffington Post entitled “‘Inglourious Basterds’ Should Be Recognized with An Academy Award.”

In addition to reaching out to rabbis, the folks behind “Basterds” have also reached out to Holocaust survivors and their families. On Thursday, February 4, 2010, they took out a full-page ad (copied below) in the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times announcing a special screening of the film that night at the Museum of Tolerance and thanking Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper “for their continuing support of the movie.” (Hier, a member of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, had agreed to moderate a post-screening panel; Cooper was among the panelists.) Pete Hammond of the Los Angeles Times later reported that “the screening drew many elderly Holocaust survivors and/or family members.”

Bender, meanwhile, has mentioned in many interviews that he particularly appreciated Tarantino’s revenge fantasy because he faced anti-Semitism as a young Jewish kid growing up in South Jersey. For instance, on August 18, 2009, he told the Jewish Journal, “I got pushed around for being Jewish. People would call me ‘Bender kike’ and throw me up against the lockers.” And he told me last Thursday that after reading the “Basterds” script for the first time, his first words to Tarantino were: “I thank you as a fan, I thank you as a producing partner, and I thank you as a member of the Jewish tribe for writing this script.”

Incidentally, while preparing for my interview with Bender, I came across an earlier interview in which he shared a piece of information that was certainly news to me: Waltz, who portrays one of the most sadistic Nazis in film history in “Basterds,” was actually married to American-born Jew; has a son who is in rabbinical school in Israel; and has a daughter who is an Orthodox Jew.

NOTE: I am told by a person close to Tarantino that he wasn’t at all familiar with the Purim story when he wrote “Basterds” but has thoroughly enjoyed reading several of the comparisons.

Related Reading:

• “INTERVIEW: Lawrence Bender Looks Back on 20 Years with QT” (2/27/10)
• “INTERVIEW: Harvey Weinstein Dishes on Life, Work, and Oscars” (2/20/10)
• “INTERVIEW: Quentin Tarantino… He’s Still One of a Kind” (2/11/10)
• “The Holocaust: A Subject the Academy Never Forgets” (2/8/09)

Randy Szuch, a 20-year-old film student, wasn’t among the first to point out the tremendous similarities between “Avatar” (2009) and “Pocahontas” (1995), but he has certainly done so in the most compelling way yet…

Last year, a similar mash-up of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008) and “Forrest Gump” (1994) certainly didn’t help the former’s best picture prospects…

JUST TO BE CLEAR, THE FOLLOWING IS HOW *I* WOULD VOTE, NOT HOW I THINK THE ACADEMY WILL VOTE.

Win count: 5 – “The Hurt Locker”; 4 – “Avatar”; 2 – “Up”; 1 – “An Education,” “The Cove,” “Crazy Heart,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Instead of Abracadabra,” “The Lady and the Reaper,” “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” “Precious,” “The Secret in Their Eyes,” “A Single Man,” “Star Trek,” “Up in the Air,” “The Young Victoria”

BEST PICTURE

• 1. “The Hurt Locker” (Summit, 6/26, trailer)
• 2. “Up in the Air” (Paramount, 12/4, trailer)
• 3. “A Serious Man” (Focus Features, 10/2, trailer)
• 4. “An Education” (Sony Pictures Classics, 10/9, trailer)
  
• 5. “Avatar” (20th Century Fox, 12/18, trailer)
• 6. “Inglourious Basterds” (The Weinstein Company, 8/21, trailer)
• 7. “Up” (Disney, 5/29, trailer)
• 8. “District 9” (TriStar, 8/14, trailer)
• 9. “Precious” (Lions Gate, 11/6, trailer)
  
• 10. “The Blind Side” (Warner Brothers, 11/20, trailer)

BEST DIRECTOR

• Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”)

BEST ACTOR

• Colin Firth (“A Single Man”)

BEST ACTRESS

• Carey Mulligan (“An Education”)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

• Christoph Waltz (“Inglourious Basterds”)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

• Mo’Nique (“Precious”)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

• Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner (“Up in the Air”)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

• Mark Boal (“The Hurt Locker”)

BEST ANIMATED FILM

• “Up” (Disney)

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM

• “The Cove” (Roadside Attractions, 7/31, trailer)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

• “The Secret in Their Eyes” (Argentina)

BEST ART DIRECTION

• “Avatar” (Rick Carter, Robert Stromberg, Kim Sinclair

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

• “The Hurt Locker” (Barry Ackroyd)

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

• “The Young Victoria” (Sandy Powell)

BEST FILM EDITING

• “The Hurt Locker” (Bob Murawski, Chris Innis)

BEST MAKEUP

• “Star Trek” (Barney Burman, Mindy Hall, Joel Harlow)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

• “Up” (Michael Giacchino)

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

• “The Weary Kind” (“Crazy Heart”)

BEST SOUND EDITING

• “Avatar” (Christopher Boyes, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle)

BEST SOUND MIXING

• “Avatar” (Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, Tony Johnson)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

• “Avatar” (Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, Andrew R. Jones)

BEST SHORT FILM (ANIMATED)

• “The Lady and the Reaper” (Javier Recio Gracia)

BEST SHORT FILM (DOCUMENTARY)

• “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant”

BEST SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION)

• “Instead of Abracadabra” (Patrik Eklund and Mathias Fjellström)

Photo: Brian Geraghty and Guy Pearce in a scene from “The Hurt Locker.” Credit: Summit Entertainment.

There have been many famous acting teams (Laurel & Hardy, Lewis & Martin, Hepburn & Tracy), actor-director teams (De Niro & Scorsese, Keaton & Allen, Cruz & Almodovar), and even actor-cinematographer teams (Garbo & Daniels). But when it comes to director-producer pairings, few have lasted longer or have borne more fruit than that of Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender.

It’s not the likeliest of partnerships. The latter is a Jewish kid from the Bronx with a college degree in civil engineering who tried his hand at ballet before injuries led him into acting and then low-budget producing, while the former is a kid of Irish-Italian descent from Tennessee who dropped out of school during the 9th grade and worked at a video store for a few years. But after the two were introduced in 1989 at a barbeque at the home of director Scott Spiegel (for whom Bender had produced his first movie, “Intruder,” that same year), it quickly became clear to both that they were going to work together. As Bender told me during a phone interview last Thursday, “We got excited with each other. We were both struggling. We were both outsiders. We both were trying to fight our way into the system. And we just starting talking about, “Let’s make a movie together.”

Bender had remembered Tarantino’s name from a script that he’d previously read and found impressive, “True Romance,” and asked him what he was working on at the moment. Tarantino told him he had written another script, too, “Reservoir Dogs,” which, to his great frustration, had also failed to take off at that point. Fed up with waiting, Tarantino said he was ready to self-finance it as a super-low-budget, black-and-white, 16mm film, but Bender asked him to wait just a little longer so that he could read it over. It didnt take him long to get back to Tarantino: “I was just, like, ‘Man, this is too amazing… let’s raise some real money.’”

Tarantino acquiesced, and Bender went to work. “I went to every person I knew, and asked them to go to every person that they knew.” Bender recalls that some interesting offers came up around that time: “At one point, we had one guy who was gonna give us $500,000; at one point, we had someone who was gonna give us $1.5 million if Mr. Black was played by a girl — his girlfriend; and someone else said, ‘We’ll give you a million-five, but the end needs to be like ‘The Sting’ where everyone’s not really dead’ rather than have a movie where everyone dies at the end. But we held to our guns.”

“Eventually,” Bender says, “a friend of mine led me to Monte Hellman; Monte Hellman said, ‘Okay, great’; and he gave it to his friend Richard Gladstein, who was at Live Entertainment.” [Hellman and Gladstein helped finance the film and became executive producers.] Then, Bender adds, my acting teacher gave the script to Harvey Keitel, who liked what he read and signed on to play Mr. White, and whose commitment to participate led to additional financing and interested actors. “That’s how I did it,” Bender laughs.

Bender recalls that “Reservoir Dogs” (1994) was received as “a cool indie movie that people were watching, if not loving.” Two years later, though, “Pulp Fiction” (1994), his second collaboration with Tarantino, became a massive hit at the box-office that “sort of rewrote the way things are” and “became a reference-point in cinema history.” Since then, Bender has continued to produce every film that Tarantino has directed: “Four Rooms” (1995, a segment of which was directed by Tarantino), “Jackie Brown” (1997), “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” (2003), “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” (2004), and, most recently, “Inglourious Basterds” (2009), which has earned eight Oscar nominations including best director and best screenwriter for Tarantino and best picture for Bender.

Bender, who has also produced movies apart from Tarantino like “Good Will Hunting” (1997) and “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), explains that a producer’s job is different on every movie. “Many times,” he says, “what happens is the producer will option a piece of material, find a writer, meet with studio and financier, bring in a director, and work with the director to hire all the main people.” He adds that during production, “people regress sometimes, and it’s the producer’s job to make sure everyone gets along and everything gets resolved.” Then, a producer helps the director during post-production, works on marketing/distribution, and is essentially the last man off the film.

But, Bender emphasizes, it’s different when he works on a film by Tarantino, who he regards as a true auteur: “He comes up with an idea; he spends time writing it; and maybe, if I’m lucky, he’ll read me pages. When he gets excited about a scene, he’ll include me as one of the people that he reads these scenes to — you come over to his house, and you sit there, and he’ll just read stuff, and it’ll be very exciting. But the day he’s finished, he puts it in my lap; he says ‘What do you think?’; it’s never been anything less than ‘I love it’; and then we sit down together and map out a course of action.”

On a Tarantino film, at least, that’s when Bender’s work really starts — and he says he has never faced more challenging work than on Tarantino’s latest, “Inglourious Basterds.” On July 3, 2008, Tarantino notified Bender that the script was finished. As Bender recalls, “I went to my kitchen, sat in this really hard chair, and figured I was gonna read about 10 pages and then go over to the couch. I never got up off the chair. I read the whole thing. I went to pick up the phone, and then I said, ‘Hell, I gotta read this again.’ I read it again. And then I spoke to Quentin, and I said to him, ‘I thank you as a fan, I thank you as a producing partner, and I thank you as a member of the Jewish tribe for writing this script.’”

Tarantino then presented him Bender some startling news: he wanted to get the done in time for the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009 and asked Bender if he felt it would be possible to do so. Bender pulled out his Blackberry, looked at the calendar, counted the weeks, and then addressed Tarantino: “I said, ‘Look, we have to start shooting 14 weeks from today to give us 13 weeks to shoot and 12 weeks of post. And every one of those markers are almost impossible to pull off. But yeah, we can do it — if you want to do it, we can do it, but you have to really want it and I have to really want it.’ We both agreed we really wanted it.”

Within the next three days, Bender interviewed and hired a line producer, production designer, and three casting directors who had offices in both Los Angeles and Berlin. A day later, his production designer was on the ground in Berlin. And two weeks later, so, too, were Tarantino and Bender, who began meeting with local actors for the parts of German characters. Just twelve weeks after that, the film began shooting at the historic Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany. “It was one of the toughest things I ever pulled off,” Bender says. “And I was thrilled to do it.”

* * *

DID YOU KNOW?

There’s a perk to being Tarantino’s producer: cameo appearances in his films. Bender chuckles, “The most famous of my performances is ‘long-haired yuppie scum,’” a part that he was credited as playing not once but twice, in “Pulp Fiction” (1994) and “Four Rooms” (1995, a segment of which Tarantino directed). “On ‘Pulp Fiction’ he gave me a choice of being a ‘Hollywood type’ or a ‘long-haired yuppie scum,” so I took long-haired yuppie scum — the better of the two.”

RELATED READING:

• “EXCLUSIVE: Harvey Dishes on Life, Work, and Oscars” (2/20/10)
• “INTERVIEW: Tarantino… He’s Still One of a Kind” (2/11/10)

Photo: Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender at a ceremony celebrating the creation of a “Quentin Tarantino Street” on the historic Studio Babelsberg’s backlot in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany. Credit: Soeren Stache (EPA).

BARRING ANY *MAJOR* DEVELOPMENTS BETWEEN NOW AND THE CLOSE OF VOTING A WEEK FROM TODAY, THESE WILL BE MY FINAL PROJECTIONS. I WILL CLEARLY NOTE ANY CHANGES HERE.

Projected win count: 5 – “The Hurt Locker”; 4 – “Avatar”; 2 – “Crazy Heart,” “Up”; 1 – “The Blind Side,” “The Cove,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “The Last Truck: Closing of a G.M. Plant,” “A Matter of Loaf and Death,” “Miracle Fish,” “Precious,” “The Secret in Their Eyes,” “Star Trek,” “Up in the Air,” “The Young Victoria”

BEST PICTURE

“The Hurt Locker” (Summit Entertainment)

BEST DIRECTOR

Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”)

BEST ACTOR

Jeff Bridges (“Crazy Heart”)

BEST ACTRESS

Sandra Bullock (“The Blind Side”)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Christoph Waltz (“Inglourious Basterds”)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Mo’Nique (“Precious”)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner (“Up in the Air”)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Mark Boal (“The Hurt Locker”)

BEST ANIMATED FILM

“Up” (Disney)

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM

“The Cove” (Roadside Attractions)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

“The Secret in Their Eyes” (Argentina)

BEST ART DIRECTION

“Avatar” (Rick Carter, Robert Stromberg, Kim Sinclair)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

“The Hurt Locker” (Barry Ackroyd)

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

“The Young Victoria” (Sandy Powell)

BEST FILM EDITING

“The Hurt Locker” (Bob Murawski, Chris Innis)

BEST MAKEUP

“Star Trek” (Barney Burman, Mindy Hall, Joel Harlow)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

“Up” (Michael Giacchino)

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

“The Weary Kind” (“Crazy Heart”)

BEST SOUND EDITING

“Avatar” (Christopher Boyes, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle)

BEST SOUND MIXING

“Avatar” (Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, Tony Johnson)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

“Avatar” (Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, Andrew R. Jones)

BEST SHORT FILM (ANIMATED)

“A Matter of Loaf and Death” (Nick Park)

BEST SHORT FILM (DOCUMENTARY)

“The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant” (Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert)

BEST SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION)

“Miracle Fish” (Luke Doolan and Drew Bailey)

Photo: Anthony Mackie in “The Hurt Locker.” Credit: Summit Entertainment.

Not even Warner Brothers, the studio that distributed “The Blind Side,” expected awards attention for “The Blind Side” or star Sandra Bullock until late in 2009. Now, both the film and the actress are Academy Award nominees, with Bullock widely regarded as the favorite to win the best actress Oscar since she’s already won the Golden Globe for best actress (drama) and the Screen Actors Guild Award for best actress.

As if the prospects didn’t already look bleak enough for Bullock’s competition — Helen Mirren (“The Last Station”), Carey Mulligan (“An Education”), Gabby Sidibe (“Precious”), and above all Meryl Streep (“Julie & Julia”) — I’ve just dug up a few new statistics that seem to indicate that she holds an even greater advantages over her competition than we had previously realized.

• 51 of the 82 best actress winners (there was 1 tie) in Oscar history won for a performance in a film that was nominated for best picture. This bodes well for Bullock, as well as for Mulligan and Sidibe, but not for Mirren and Streep.
  

• Only 11 of the 82 best actress winners (there was 1 tie) in Oscar history were the sole nominee from their film. This bodes well for Bullock, as well as for Mirren, Mulligan, and Sidibe, but not for Streep.

• Since the first SAG Awards in 1994, only 4 women have won the Golden Globe for best actress (either drama or comedy/musical) but not the SAG Award for best actress and still gone on to win the best actress Oscar. This bodes well for Bullock, but not for Streep.

• Since the first SAG Awards in 1994, no woman has ever lost both the Golden Globe for best actress (either drama or comedy/musical) and the SAG Award for best actress and still gone on to win the best actress Oscar. This bodes well for Bullock, as well as for Streep, but not for Mirren, Mulligan, or Sidibe.

And that’s before you consider that Streep has already won two Oscars and garnered 16 Oscar nominations; Mirren won an Oscar only 3 years ago; and Mulligan and Sidibe are nominated for their first starring roles; whereas this is the first nomination of Bullock’s long career as a leading lady.

One can never say never when it comes to Streep, in particular, but it appears that even someone with as much stature as she is going to face an tremendous uphill climb in terms of beating Bullock.

Photo: Sandra Bullock in “The Blind Side.” Credit: Warner Brothers.

Three best picture Oscar nominees — “An Education” (3 total nods), “District 9″ (4 total nods), and “A Serious Man” (2 total nods) — are poised to make history on March 7, but not in a way that the other seven best picture nominees will envy. Based on my analysis of the other categories, they will, in all likelihood, become only the 135th, 136th, and 137th best picture nominees in 82 years of Oscars to go home completely empty-handed.

When one considers that the best picture field was expanded to include more than five nominees this year (10, to be precise) for the only time since the period between 1931/1932 and 1943, it’s hardly surprising that this is the case. During that previous era, it was fairly common for more than one best picture nominee to lose all of its nominations, as you can see here:

• Two lost all in 1928/1929, 1937
• Three lost all in 1927/1928, 1930/1931
• Four lost all in 1931/1932, 1936, 1938, 1939, 1941, 1943
• Six lost all in 1933, 1935, 1940, 1942
• Seven lost all in 1934

The truth is that it’s actually been a fairly regular occurence even with just five nominees. Indeed, there have only been 18 ceremonies in which every best picture nominee did win an Oscar: 1945, 1948, 1949, 1953, 1955, 1963, 1967, 1969, 1975, 1979, 1986, 1988, 1995, 1997, 2004, 2006, 2007.

For a listing of every Oscar-less best picture nominee from the past 81 years, along with their total number of unsuccessful nominations, click below…

(more…)

Want to know how to win your Oscar pool? You better correctly predict the winners of the three categories celebrating short films — live action, animated, and documentary shorts. It’s not easy, and most people just blindly guess the winners because they haven’t seen any of the nominees, but you don’t have to. Why? Because I’ve seen them all for you. Here is my first of three reports on the shorts (beware of spoilers)…

Best Short (Live Action)

Nominee #1: “The Door”
Somber piece about the after-effects of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster on a family that lived nearby. Begins with lengthy, wordless opening sequence in which a man appears to have broken into a house. Eventually becomes clear that he was breaking into his own house — in an area from which he and his neighbors had been banned after the incident — in order to steal a door frame on which to bury his young daughter, who died from exposure to radiation.

Nominee #2: “Instead of Abracadabra”
Charmingly funny story of a directionless, eccentric young man who lives with his parents while practicing his hobby of magic. Sight gags, love story, quest for stern father’s approval, and eventual redemption make it rather endearing. Seems like a tamer version of something Sacha Baron Cohen might make, and visually resembles “Napoleon Dynamite,” “Juno,” and “Lars and the Real Girl.”

Nominee #3: “Kavi”
Violent, deeply disturbing vignette about modern-day slavery in India. Centers around a young boy who looks like/experience similar things to young Jamal from “Slumdog Millionaire.” That film won best picture last year, and while many are reading that as a positive omen for this short I’m actually inclined to believe that people will find it too similar and opt for another option instead.

Nominee #4: “Miracle Fish”
Quiet, moving story about a young Australian boy from a poor family who is bullied at school. On his birthday, his mother gives him a simple present that his classmates mock but eventually helps to save his life when a crazed gunman confronts him in a classroom. It’s not entirely clear what the moral of the story is, but it is nonetheless visually beautiful, suspenseful, and stars a sympathetic kid, which may be enough to carry it the distance.

Nominee #5: “The New Tenants”
Woody Allen’s chatter and angst meets the Coen brothers’ twisted humor and violence in this ridiculous but endlessly amusing story. Essentially, a gay couple move into an apartment previously occupied by a man who was cheating on another’s man’s wife while also hiding a big bag of heroin under his sink, which the new tenants thought was flour and loaned to a neighbor. When someone comes looking for the flour, complications ensue. (Vincent D’Onofrio makes a cameo.)

PROJECTED WINNER: “MIRACLE FISH”
It’s incredibly hard to pick from this field of nominees, any one of which are plausible winners. My suspicion, though, is that voters will shy away from the two social-conscience options, “The Door” and Kavi,” partly because they’re very dark and partly because they don’t really offer any sense of hope or suggestion for how to improve the situations they address. (I’d also be surprised if “Kavi” isn’t hurt by the fact that it so closely follows/deals with such similar material to “Slumdog Millionaire.”) That leaves the two comedies, “Instead of Abracadabra” and “The New Tenants,” and the bleak drama “Miracle Fish.” I suspect that the first two will each have their fans, but that the third will prevail in the end because it features a cute kid, has a cool title, displays strong production values, ends powerfully, and generally feels more substantive. (Besides, we know that the people who vote in this category have a thing for difficult subject matter: they gave last year’s prize to a morose film about the Holocaust!)

Photo: Karl Beattie in “Miracle Fish.” Credit: Druid Films/Blue-Tongue Films/Qoob

With just two weeks to go until the announcement of the 82nd Academy Awards, we can now say with more than a fair degree of certainty that we know which film will win the top Oscar. Sure, arguments can be made for other films (and both studios and pundits are making them) and upsets can happen (you don’t have to remind me). But the fact of the matter is that the raw data (precursor awards) and anecdotal evidence (conversations with actual voters) have rarely, if ever, given the same indication as clearly and consistently as they have this year: “The Hurt Locker” will win the 2009 best picture Oscar. Believe it — it’s true.

I had the same reservations as everyone else: it tackles the last subject that people want to go to the movies to see (the Iraq War); it did poorly at the box-office (only $12.7 million domestically); it has no household-names among its cast; etc.

But at some point you have to stop arguing with reality. To paraphrase Sally Field, people like it… they really like it! And they respect it, too. It has won with the BFCA, GIFA, IPA, NSFC, NYFCC, LAFCA, ACE, BAFTA, WGA, DGA, and PGA (over a movie that has earned 139 times as much money as it has, and under the same preferential balloting system that the Academy is now using); it garnered a co-leading nine AMPAS nods, including the vital ones for directing, acting (which “Avatar” doesn’t have), screenwriting (which “Avatar” doesn’t have), and editing (which “Brokeback Mountain” didn’t have); its director is going to win (even her rivals have acknowledged that at this point); and — as was the case in 2006 when “The Departed” won on Martin Scorsese‘s coattails — not enough voters feel they can justify splitting their picture/director votes to deny the film a win, as well. (“Did the best picture direct itself?”)

So, considering that, I think now is probably as appropriate a time as any to unload several fascinating tidbits about the film that I’ve gathered over the past nine months from conversations with the people most responsible for the film: writer/co-producer Mark Boal, director/co-producer Kathryn Bigelow, and actors Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty. I first chatted with Boal and Bigelow following a MoMA screening of their film on June 23; then moderated a lengthy Q&A with Renner and Mackie following a SAG screening of the film on November 21; then saw them four of them, along with Geraghty, after they won best picture at the Gotham Independent Film Awards on November 30; and then interviewed Boal and Bigelow this past Friday.

So, for your consideration, here are 20 things that you may not already know about “The Hurt Locker”…

1. The characters in the film are composites of several real people.

Boal spent two weeks time in Iraq embedded with Explosive Ordnance Disposal (E.O.D.) units like the one portrayed in the film. The characters in his script, however, derive their traits and experiences from numerous people he encountered or heard about, not any one specifically.

2. Casting decisions were made with the goal of defying audience expectations.

Boal and Bigelow realized from the start that their story wouldn’t work if they cast well-known actors as any of the three members of the central E.O.D. squad. Why? Because audiences know that — with the exception of Alfred Hitchcock and Janet Leigh in “Psycho” — directors don’t kill off their movie’s stars early in the picture. A big part of what makes “The Hurt Locker” work — and what it’s like to be in Iraq right now — is the sense of not knowing what to expect next, which wouldn’t have been possible without casting relative unknowns Renner, Mackie, and Brian Geraghty as the co-leads. (Incidentally, the cameo performances by actors who are well-known — namely Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes — add a lot to the movie because we don’t expect them to be killed but they are.)

3. A year elapsed between the casting of Renner and the beginning of filming.

Renner received the script while in London filming “28 Days Later.” He wrote down three pages of questions for Bigelow; then spoke with her by phone for a couple of hours; committed to play the part; and then waited a full year before filming commenced (during which time Bigelow consulted with him on a number of key decisions pertaining to the film, including the casting of other major parts).

4. Mackie was initially wanted for the part of Eldridge, not Sanborn.

As Mackie recalls, “When I went in to meet, I went in to meet for Eldridge. And I was like, ‘Well, you know, Eldridge is a great character, but Imma tell you why I should play Sanborn.’ And, you know, by the end of the meeting, I was like, ‘I’m gonna play Sanborn, or they think I’m just a straight egotistical bastard.’” In the end, Mackie got to play Sanborn, and Geraghty was cast as Eldridge.

5. Renner took a day of bomb suit training at Fort Irwin in California.

Renner assumed that wearing the suit, which weights around one hundred pounds, “was gonna be no big deal.” He says, “They kept telling me, ‘It’s gonna be heavy, it’s gonna be hot.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, whatever, get this thing on!’ You feel pampered—it takes a couple of guys to get this thing on. And once it was on I was doing jumping jacks—I was like, ‘This is no problem!’” After a brief pause he adds, “A half an hour into it, I wanted to kill myself… it’s intense. Literally, it’s 45 minutes in the suit doing all these little tasks that aren’t so much strenuous as they are mentally straining.”

6. Mackie conducted most of his research for the film online.

“I took a day trip to Fort Bragg, and once I got there I realized I had no reason to be there,” Mackie recalls. “So I went online and just talked to a bunch of people. You’ll be surprised what you can find when you get on these blogs, and Web sites, and message boards, and stuff. So, you know, after talking to people, and listening to their experiences, and watching videos, and stuff, I realized my most important preparation would be once I got in the room with Jeremy and Brian because the cohesiveness of the unit was what was gonna make the film.

7. Bigelow quickly won her actors’ respect.

Renner, who previously made films with female directors Asia Argento, Catherine Hardwicke, and Niki Caro, says of Bigelow, “She’s tougher than all of us. She’s a monster! She’s smart. She’s a warrior. She’s a painter. Painfully shy. Not the greatest communicator. I got along with her, but I was on this project for a year prior to shooting so I got to spend a lot of time with her. I know the other guys didn’t get to spend as much time with her. It’s hard to get something out of her. She’s really good at just observing. She told me, ‘I hired you because I knew you could do the job, so I won’t tell you how to do it.’ I was like, ‘Perfect. I won’t tell you how to do yours either.’” Mackie, who was directed by females in numerous plays, adds, “She never apologized for being a woman,” and says it would have created problems if she had. “If you come in like, ‘Oh, I’m a girl, don’t be mean to me, oh!’ then everybody’s gonna shit on you. I mean, I would, you know? If you’re a man and you come in like, ‘Oh, I’m a guy,’ I’m gonna shit on you. That’s just animal nature, you know? But she never did that. She came in and she was like, ‘We got a story to tell, we got a job to do, let’s get it!’ So we followed. There was the one day I wanted to kill her; there was the one day I wanted to kill the writer; but that’s moviemaking. When your passionate about something, it’s just like anything else. But to have one day out of three months? That’s a pretty good batting-average, you know? So I’ve never had an issue with her being a woman, or taking orders or direction from a woman.”

8. The film wasn’t shot in Iraq, but it couldn’t have been shot much closer.

Ever since the Iraq War began in 2003, only a few movies have been shot within the country’s borders, most of which have been documentaries. In fact, the entire region is so dangerous that it’s nearly impossible to get a cast and crew insured to film there. But Bigelow and Boal desperately wanted an authentic setting for their film, and wound up shooting “The Hurt Locker” only only three miles outside of the Iraqi border, in Jordan, over the course of three months.

9. The weather conditions were brutal.

While filming in Jordan in the middle of the summer, the cast and crew faced regular sandstorms, windstorms, and temperatures that averaged around 120 degrees Fahrenheit (which felt exponentially hotter for Renner inside his bomb suit). Several took weekend “escapes” to the Dead Sea (along a part of the west coast of Jordan), Aqaba (a resort city in the far south of Jordan), and Egypt (which is just across the Gulf of Aqaba), where temperatures got as high as 135 degrees Fahrenheit! Renner chuckles, “We were gonna shoot in Kuwait, where it’s 150, so I’m glad we didn’t go there.”

10. The actors roughed it.

There were no movie star trailers or overflowing craft-service tables for the stars of this film. Instead, the actors stayed in makeshift Bedouin tents with thick sheets wrapped around them to provide some shade. “Sometimes we had a toilet; otherwise we’d go in a hole,” says Renner. “Or just find a rock,” adds Mackie. Worse, says Mackie, “They brought in this little portable air conditioner, but to make it work you had to put ice in the air conditioner, and we’re in the desert so there’s no ice!” But, Renner acknowledges, “Even if we had trailers, we wouldn’t have been in ‘em ’cause we were constantly moving.” As for fine dining? Renner says the unspoken rule was, “If you want to get away from the flies, just go around the food.” Mackie chuckles, “It was bad.”

11. The locals weren’t always welcoming.

Renner and Mackie emphasize that the majority of locals that the cast and crew encountered were “lovely,” but acknowledge that some were anything but. “Some of the locations were just hardcore,” says Mackie, to which Renner adds that a few were just “really awful, terrible places.” One, in particular, brings back bad memories for both men: a refugee camp. “That was brutal,” says Renner. Rocks were thrown at them; two-by-fours with nails sticking out of them were dropped from rooftops as they passed below; and there was even gunfire in their direction (though the shooters were too far away to pose much of a threat). “It was rough,” seconds Mackie.

12. The production, which involved local Muslim actors and crew, overlapped with the holiest month of the Islamic year.

Mackie explains, “Well, we were in the Middle East during Ramadan, you know what I mean? That’s the hardest thing ever, you know? That’s like being a black dude at a Klan rally!” He elaborated, “It was so hard because you had to be respectful of the people around you because, you know, they were fasting during the day in 120-degree heat. We have on these huge suits, and we’re trying to stay focused, and have water and stuff… so that was a huge challenge.”

13. Renner’s first attempt at putting on the bomb suit on location was a disaster.

“[We put it] on backwards,” Renner confesses, as he and Mackie laugh at the memory. “It was bad,” adds Mackie, who explains, “We had to put it on [piece by piece], so we had to figure out how to get the helmet on, how to plug it in, how to get the fan on—it was something! But we finally got it right. It took, like, a half day, you know, figuring out how to put it on.”

14. Renner needed some technical advice while on location in the Middle East.

While wearing his bomb suit and preparing to shoot the scene in which he kicks open the trunk of a car, something caught Renner’s eye: what was supposed to be detonation cord was, he believed, actually electrical cord. He laughs now at how he decided to get an answer then: he rang up the guys at Fort Irwin. “I’m literally calling the guys in my bomb suit—like, I don’t know where they are, they could’ve been deployed at this point, you know—‘Hey! I got some det-cord here. It doesn’t look right. How do I render safe this I.E.D.?’”

15. The film was shot with “Ninja cameras.”

Bigelow hired Barry Ackroyd as her cinematographer because she admired his work on “United 93.” On this film, like that one, he frequently employed shaky hand-held cameras and zoomed in-and-out to make viewers feel like they, too, are in the heat of a confusing situation. The sets were massive and there were as many as four cameras rolling at a time (hidden behind props and even camels, leading the actors to call them “Ninja cameras”), providing the actors with an unusual sense of freedom. Renner says, “You never really saw Kathryn or her cameras for I think 80 percent of the movie.” Mackie adds, “We would do, like, 12 to 15 minute takes. And what was so crazy was the idea of not knowing where the cameras were. It put us in a position where we didn’t have to worry about hitting our light or facing out to the camera; it made it almost like a play, you know?”

16. The mercenary sequence was included, despite having little to do with the rest of the film, for a specific reason.

As Boal recently acknowledged, the only reason he and Bigelow included “the mercenary sequence in the middle of a bomb movie” was to provide Ralph Fiennes with a part that he would agree to play in the film. Fiennes, who had previously starred in Bigelow’s film “Strange Days” (1995), was initially presented with and turned down an offer to play a British Ambassador who harshly chides American troops in “The Hurt Locker,” telling Boal in no uncertain terms that he knew people who were in similar positions and would never do such a thing, and Bigelow that he had no desire to wear a suit on screen again. He was more amenable to making a brief appearance as a mercenary, though, and so the scene was added to the script.

17. Mackie grew to share something in common with his character.

Near the end of the film, in what Mackie calls “the most important scene in this film for me, Sanborn says he wants a son. Mackie, who had been single and childless prior to the film, was greatly impacted by his experience making it. “When I came back home I was emotionally, just, ‘Gah!’ And I just checked out. I moved back to New Orleans, bought a house, and started building a house. I was like, ‘Ah, psychotherapy!’ And, you know, it was one of those things where I realized my mortality. So, at that instant, I was like, ‘Find girl. Make baby. Put in house. Be happy.’ So I started dating my third-grade girlfriend; got engaged; and had a son.” Looking back, he says the film “made me realize how important right now is,” and that “the great thing about being an actor is that you get to live so many different lives, [which] helps you live your actual life.”

18. The film resembles World War II-era war films more than recent examples of the genre.

The majority of war films made over the past three decades — the era of the star-driven blockbuster — have focused on the individual military man, not the military unit. It hasn’t always been this way: many if not most war films made during/about World War II — movies like Howard Hawks’s “Air Force,” Henry King’s “Twelve O’Clock High,” and William Wellman’s “Battleground” — focused more on the military unit. “The Hurt Locker” returns to that sort of story partly because that’s how E.O.D. squads really operate and partly because it just makes for a better story, says Boal. Mackie adds, “Everything we did we did as a unit, on and off camera… we had this open-dialogue, we had this camaraderie, this relationship to where we really took care of each other.” As Renner puts it, “We leaned on each other a lot. And bottles of wine helped.” Mackie laughs, “For real!”

19. Bigelow could make history on Oscar night twice.

As has been widely reported, Bigelow has already become the first female to ever win the DGA Award and only the fourth female to ever be nominated for the best director Oscar, so much of the focus for Oscar night is on her quest to become the first female to ever win the best director Oscar. Bigelow followers should take note of something else, too: on February 2, she also became only the eighth female to ever direct or co-direct a film that was nominated for a best picture Oscar, and on March 7 she could become the first female director to have ever directed or co-directed a best picture Oscar winner. (Make those numbers ninth and second if you count Loveleen Tandan, who was credited as “co-director: India” on last year’s best picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire” but did not share in any of director Danny Boyle’s nominations or wins.)

20. Boal and Bigelow have already announced plans to team up again.

The writer and the director who brought you “The Hurt Locker” will soon be bringing you “Triple Frontier,” which Boal recently described as a “love story” set in “a lawless area” of South America “with crime, drugs, and kidnapping.” (And, since Kathryn Bigelow’s involved, expect lots of tension and violence!) Boal is penning the script; Bigelow will direct; and both will co-produce.

Photo: Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker.” Credit: Summit.