cinderella man Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The members of the Screen Actors Guild last night refused to bow to awards-related peer pressure, dammit. Brokeback Mountain? Totally not that good. (And some of their best friends - not to mention the guy played by their best actor winner - are gay, so just shut up about that homophobia crap, alright?) Instead of continuing to heap praise on the gay cowboys, SAG spread their awards around, and not a single one ended up in the hands of anyone associated with Ang Lee's film.

Despite ignoring Brokeback entirely, the SAG awards resembled the Golden Globes in other ways, namely in their choices for best actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), actress (Reese Witherspoon), and supporting actress (Rachel Weisz) - and they also honored Sandra Oh for her work on Grey's Anatomy, as the Hollywood Foreign Press did. The other movie awards went to Oh's Sideways costar Paul Giamatti (best supporting actor for Cinderella Man) and the cast of Crash, which was voted best ensemble.

Though the absence of Brokeback is initially shocking, the film hasn't exactly been piling up acting awards - it's been Lee and the movie in general that win. So, in that way, SAG actually followed the script more closely than it would initially appear. While Heath Ledger has showed up on all the of lists of best actor nominees, he's only been the winner of a few regional (New York, San Francisco) critics' awards. If the Academy follows this trend, while we can be pretty sure his name will be included tomorrow morning when the nominees are revealed, a win seems increasingly unlikely.

Sony chairman Howard Stringer led a major presentation at CES this morning, including a look at the technology behind Ron Howard's upcoming feature version of Da Vinci Code. Howard, prodcucer Brian Grazer, and star Tom Hanks all showed up to help Stringer shill, and according to our big brothers at Engadget, Hanks did a teleprompter-mocking schtick that made the morning. Paul Boutin writes:

"Hanks walks on and gets huge laughs by pretending to squint at the teleprompter:  "Thank you, Howard.  It's a great honor (SQUINTS) to be here today (SQUINTS) to deliver (SQUINTS) these heartfelt comments about Sony's new SXRD High-Definition Television.""

But I'm more interested in a bit of dialogue between Howard and Grazer. The duo, whose last collaboration, Cinderella Man, was one of the most infamous flops of a landmark low box office year, used the opportunity to agressively push moviegoing-as-mantra. At the end of a section of the talk on Sony's new digital theatrical projectors, Grazer said, "There are five or six movies every year that are a social experience ... I only want to see them by driving to a theater." Howard concurred: "Nothing's going to replace the shared social experience of going to a theater." Just keep on saying it, Ronnie ... eventually, even you'll believe it.