How to Earn an Oscar Nod in Ten Easy Steps

Over at The Hollywood Reporter, Anne Thompson has a compelling piece up about what it took behind the scenes for ThinkFilm to get Ryan Gosling that Oscar nod. Whether you're a filmmaker who thinks, "that'll never happen to me" or "Man, I wish that was me," or just your average cinephile who lives for that kind of geekerific stuff, it's an interesting read.

I remember hearing buzz about Half Nelson at Sundance 2006 and being irked that I'd not caught it there -- I didn't even manage to catch it until months later, at the Seattle International Film Festival. It's fascinating, looking back now, to read all that was going on behind-the-scenes at Sundance a year ago. A major fest like Sundance is this big hive of activity where what you see crawling around on the surface is maybe 20 percent of everything that's going on. And behind the scenes at Sundance last year, while Half Nelson was only quietly beginning to buzz for most folks, ThinkFilm's Mark Urman was already thinking, if only in a whisper, "Oscar?" And now here we are, a little over a year later, with Ryan Gosling actually nominated for Best Actor against some major studio muscle, which is pretty damn cool.