Sundance Oscars

from Moviemaker : http://www.moviemaker.com/articles/article/sundance_movies_are_oscar_nominees_20080122/

Sundance Movies Are Oscar Nominees

by Jennifer M. Wood | Published January 22, 2008

Markéta Irglová and Glen Hansard are Oscar nominees for Best Original Song for Once (2006).
Markéta Irglová and Glen Hansard are Oscar nominees for Best Original Song for Once (2006).

Forget the Golden Globes as the most reliable Oscar predictor. The Sundance Film Festival is proving some serious powers of prognostication as well. As AMPAS announced its 2008 Oscar nominations earlier this morning, Sundance programmers couldn't help noticing that several of this year's nominated films and filmmakers were Sundance alumni.

Julie Christie and Laura Linney showcased their best leading actress-nominated performances (in Away from Her and The Savages, respectively) at Sundance last year, their talented writer-directors, Sarah Polley and Tamara Jenkins, have also landed writing nominations.

Though Juno never made its way to Park City, the film's director, Jason Reitman, has been a Sundance staple: Three of his short films have screened here-Operation (1998), In God We Trust (2000) and Gulp (2001)-while his feature debut, Thank You for Smoking, screened in 2006. He is also a Short Film Juror at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. (Note: Oscar nominee Ellen Page is at Sundance this year with Smart People, too.)

Documentaries have proven particularly popular, with No End in Sight and War/Dance competing for a statue in the Best Documentary Feature category and Freeheld, La Corona and Salim Baba all in contention for the Best Documentary Short Subject Oscar.

Rounding out the nominations in a variety of categories are nominees Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, whose "Falling Slowly" from Once (2007 World Cinema Audience Award Winner) is up for Best Original Song; I Met the Walrus for Best Animated Short; and Il Supplente (The Substitute) for Best Live Action Short.

For the latest movie buzz-including Oscar and Sundance updates-check back to MovieMaker.com.


from:  Aaron Barnhartt, KC: http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2008/01/sundances-oscar.html

Sundance's Oscar noms

Madametutli
“Madame Tutli-Putli”

Levitan
“I Met the Walrus”

I've already covered one of the three selections at this year's Sundance Film Festival nominated today for Academy Awards — that would be "La Corona," which I featured in my first (and so far only) video.

The other two nominees are also shorts. One, "Madame Tutli-Putli," is a weird little metaphorical thing where a spindly, three-dimensional woman with eerily lifelike eyeballs goes through a very bad train trip slash existential crisis. The website of the National Film Board of Canada, that much-honored home of leading-edge animation, sets it up this way: "Madame Tutli-Putli boards the night train, weighed down with all her earthly possessions and the ghosts of her past." Okay ...

If "Madame Tutli-Putli" is strenuously obscure, "I Met the Walrus," by Josh Raskin and Jerry Levitan, is LOL accessible. This hippy-trippy five-minute retro-toon manages to present an actual peace message from John Lennon in a completely fresh way.

In 1969 Levitan, then a fourteen-year-old Toronto kid, skipped school because he'd heard the Beatle he adored was in town. Using shoe leather and a preposterous getup — he strapped a reel-to-reel tape recorder and microphone to his scrawny frame, figured out where Lennon, Yoko Ono and others were staying and as he writes on the website, "barged in, and made myself at home. John laughed at the spectacle, and let me stay."

The short, simply put, combines Robert Smigel's "Fun with Real Audio" segment with the original animation style for the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" (but without color). Though featured at Sundance, it premiered last year and one can only assume will arrive on DVD soon.

Posted by Aaron Barnhart on January 22, 2008 at 01:23 PM in TV Barn |