Movies Dearz

On this Oscar Eve, the results are in ... if you picked 'em, the Oscars would go to:

Best Picture was as close as it probably is in reality, with the three front-runners taking nearly 60% of the vote and only 3.6% separating them from victory. In the end, The Hurt Locker triumphed, with Avatar and Inglourious Basterds nipping at its heels.

Mamma Mia! co-stars (and Movie Dearest faves) Colin Firth (A Single Man) and Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia) are your lead acting victors, besting the favored Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart) and Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side).


As for the supporting races, you went with the consensus: Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds and Mo’Nique in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. The surprises here were second place finishes for Stanley Tucci in The Lovely Bones and Anna Kendrick in Up in the Air.

See the comments section below for the complete stats in all five polls.

Of course, we'll find out how well our picks match up with the real thing tomorrow night when ABC presents the 82nd Annual Academy Awards live from Los Angeles.

Illustration by Tavis Coburn for the BAFTA Awards.

This year's "Fearless Oscar Predictions" is brought to you by* the delectable creations found in Eleni's Oscar Season cookies! Above you'll find the five Best Actor edibles, which brings up the inevitable question, "Who would you rather nibble, Colin Firth or Jeremy Renner?" Now on to business ...

This year's predictions aren't quite so fearless as there are several sure things in the mix, including at least three of the four acting categories. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of tight races, including the expanded Best Picture field and the highly competitive Best Actress category (both envisioned in dessert form below).  And now, on to the predictions (click here for the complete list of nominees) ...


Best Picture: Despite recent scandals, The Hurt Locker should best its closest competition, Avatar.
Best Actor: An Oscar Bait role and previous losses will make Crazy Heart's Jeff Bridges this year's Kate Winslet.
Best Actress: It's a diva smack down, with The Blind Side's Sandra Bullock expected to come out on top.
Best Supporting Actor: There's no surer thing than Inglourious Basterds' Christoph Waltz ...
Best Supporting Actress: ... except Precious' Mo'Nique.
Best Director: It's pretty much a foregone conclusion now that Locker's Kathryn Bigelow will become the first female winner in this category.
Adapted Screenplay: Up in the Air's best chance for a win.
Original Screenplay: Another close call, between Locker and Basterds, with the edge going to the talkier Tarantino.
Cinematography: Probably the toughest race of all. Will say Avatar in a tech sweep, which will also include Art Direction, Sound Editing and Visual Effects ...
Film Editing and Sound Mixing: ... with Hurt Locker picking up a few too.


Costume Design: Royalty reigns here of late, so The Young Victoria will be victorious.
Original Score: Michael Giacchino's Up music is irresistible.
Original Song: Crazy Heart's "The Weary Kind" will continue its sweep of this category.
Makeup: Star Trek's first ever Oscar.
Animated Feature: Best Picture nominee Up should sail away with the prize.
Foreign Language Film: Last year's dark horse won, so I'm going out on a limb with Argentina's The Secret in Their Eyes.
Documentary Feature: The Cove elicits the right amount of righteous outrage ...
Documentary Short: ... as does China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province.
Animated Short: Wallace and Gromit's latest escapade, A Matter of Loaf and Death, will continue their hold on this category.
Live Action Short: The Door has the dramatic edge.

Who do you think will win at this year's Oscars? We'll find out this Sunday when ABC presents the 82nd Annual Academy Awards live from Los Angeles.

* Not really.

The Los Angeles premieres this past week of the Ginger Rogers bio-musical Backwards in High Heels as well as Robert Longbottom's revised and revamped revival of Dreamgirls proved to be cause for celebration. With one's subject a Hollywood Golden Age icon and the other a thinly-veiled account of the backstage travails that afflicted Diana Ross and the Supremes, it has been a while since local stages have seen this much glamorous girl power unleashed at once.

Backwards in High Heels is the inaugural production of International City Theatre of Long Beach's 25th season. (For the unitiated, Long Beach is part of Los Angeles county, with ICT long an acclaimed part of the LA theatre scene.) This new musical, conceived and developed by Lynnette Barkley and Christopher McGovern, draws its title from the assertion that "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels."

It opens with 15-year old Virginia Rogers auditioning against her mother's will for a Texas talent show, and culminates in the grown-up Ginger winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for 1940's Kitty Foyle. Along the way, audience members are treated to often-uncanny imitations of James Stewart, Bette Davis, Ethel Merman and choreographer Hermes Pan, among others.

While Backwards in High Heels is never less than engrossing, the musical's book (by McGovern) is a straightforward, episodic affair. It's score, however, is a wonderful mélange of standards such as "Fascinating Rhythm," "A Fine Romance," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" and "You'll Never Know" and new songs by McGovern. Of the latter, "The Domesticity" — in which Ginger endures a brief life as housewife in her first, ill-fated marriage — and "The Sport of Art" are standouts. Only the classic "Baby Face" falls flat, especially when it is used — strangely — to recount Ginger's abduction by her father while she was an infant.


caryn desai (sic), who also serves as ICT's General Manager, directs with a sure hand and an obvious love for the period of film history recounted by Backwards in High Heels. Melissa Giattino's choreography (with an assist from Richard Schwartz) is also period perfect, and her re-creations of Rogers and Astaire's dances particularly impressive. The hollow, unvarnished stage they perform on here isn't the best aurally for the show's tap numbers, but the performers' precision shines through.

The production's small cast of six allows most of them to play multiple roles. The multi-talented Robin De Lano (who contributed music to the 2000 gay-themed movie, The Broken Hearts Club) flawlessly assays the aforementioned Hollywood divas, plus Katherine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich. Matt Bauer is extraordinary as Fred Astaire, nailing the beloved actor-dancer's body language and coming darn close to matching Astaire's dance perfection, which is no easy task.

The heart of the musical, though, is the close, well-documented relationship between Ginger and her mother, Lela. As Ginger, Anna Aimee White is effervescent, even if she doesn't age convincingly during the approximately 20-year period covered in Backwards in High Heels. Heather Lee is excellent as Lela, tightly wound as Ginger's protector and very moving as she gradually loses control over her superstar daughter.

Lavish and evocative despite its small-scale trappings, ICT's Backwards in High Heels is well worth seeing. It plays at the Center Theatre of the Long Beach Performing Arts Center through March 21. For more information and tickets, visit ICT's official website.


About 20 miles to the north, Dreamgirls opened March 2 at the Ahmanson Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. This touring production of the contemporary classic's recent, well-received mounting at the Apollo Theater in New York — in the wake of its successful 2006 film adaptation by gay screenwriter-director Bill Condon — is running through April 4.

The current tour provided me with my first opportunity to see Dreamgirls on stage. While I can't compare it to Michael Bennett's legendary original production or any other theatrical incarnation, this version definitely delivers the musical and visual electricity that Condon sparked in his movie. Longbottom's direction and choreography are spectacular, as are the scenic design by Robin Wagner (who also designed the original Broadway production) and William Ivey Long's costumes. Indeed, the frequent, onstage but swift and invisible costume changes consistently drew applause.

Tom Eyen's captivating if melodramatic book and the songs by Eyen and Henry Krieger retain their power, and none more so than the now-iconic Act I closer "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going." This production also adds the Oscar-nominated song "Listen" from the movie, but it has been re-fashioned into a mutually-apologetic duet between the Diana Ross-esque Deena (the excellent Syesha Mercado, an American Idol runner-up making her professional theatre debut) and the strong-willed-to-a-fault Effie (Moya Angela, making the histrionic most of a show-stopping role).


This Dreamgirls cast is uniformly superb, with standout turns by Adrienne Warren as the "third Dreamgirl", Lorrell; Chester Gregory, who played Seaweed in Hairspray and Terk in Tarzan on Broadway, as Jimmy "Thunder" Early (the scene-stealing role for which Eddie Murphy was nominated for an Academy Award in the film); Chaz Lamar Shepherd as the group's shifty manager, Curtis; and Trevon Davis as C.C., Effie's songwriting brother.

During the opening night performance, I sat next to a friend/PR rep for Syesha Mercado who urged me to rate her and this production "a 17 out of 10"! While I don't use a rating scale in my theatre or movie reviews, Dreamgirls at the Ahmanson is worth at least a solid 10. Run, don't walk, to catch the Dreams!

Review by Rev. Chris Carpenter, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and the Orange County and Long Beach Blade.

Movie Dearest's sister site, The QuOD - The Queer Online Database, has been nominated for Best LGBT Blog in the 1st Annual TLA Gaybie Awards!

Click here to vote for the "most outstanding (or perhaps outrageous) work in gay-themed entertainment throughout the past year", including categories covering film, television, books, comics and, yes, blogs!

To say that I was surprised is an understatement, and I am thrilled that The QuOD was named alongside so many other well-known websites. Voting continues through the month of March, so vote as often as you like! Award winners will be announced April 15th.

Loosely based on the Hans Christian Andersen classic The Little Mermaid, Ponyo (available this week on Disney Blu-ray and DVD) is yet another jewel in the crown of legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli. Marking his return to lighter fare following his darker and more mature Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo is a delight-filled feast for all the senses … and not just for its young target audience.

As is usual for his films, Miyazaki fills every corner of the screen with gorgeously intricate detail. His imagination practically seeps out of the edges, as one can see immediately from the very first sequence of Ponyo, a prologue set in a veritable octopus’ garden teeming with all sorts of exotic undersea creatures.


Here we meet the enigmatic Fujimoto, a human sorcerer who, à la Captain Nemo, has rejected mankind for what it has done to his beloved oceans. We are also introduced to the film’s heroine, a feisty little fish who swims off seeking adventure, only to find trouble in the littered waters of a nearby seaport village. She is rescued by a little boy named Sosuke, who names his strange new friend Ponyo.

But Ponyo is no ordinary little fish. She is actually the daughter of Fujimoto, with magical powers of her own. Once she gets a taste (literally) of human life, she wants to be a part of that world. Her overprotective father will have none of that, and he will do everything in his power to return her to him under the sea ...

Click here to continue reading my Toon Talk review of Ponyo at LaughingPlace.com.

The success of the musical [title of show] is a “bit of a Cinderella story,” according to its co-creator Hunter Bell. “I pinch myself every day.”

The show about two gay guys (“Two Nobodies in New York”) and their gal pals who decide to create a musical just to see how far they can take it is currently being staged by Arizona Theatre Company for its regional premiere. Bell (who was nominated for a Tony Award for writing the [tos] book) and composer Jeff Bowen wanted to enter the New York Musical Festival, but they discovered that it was more fun to write a musical about writing a musical. They made themselves characters in the story, brought in Susan Blackwell and Heidi Bickenstaff as secondary characters, and [title of show] was born.


“I’d love to say it was part of a master plan and moderate a seminar on getting your show to Broadway, but it began very simply with seeing an e-mail about an original musical theater festival in New York City,” Bell said. “We used that deadline just as a way to get us writing again. We found that the thing we loved most was us writing about us writing, and writing about the state of musical theater and pop culture and art.”

The show’s success is “a combination of dreaming and working our asses off,” Bell said. He also said it helped to align with a great creative team and producers.  Bell isn’t currently performing the role he created, but he’s busy helping theaters stage his labor of love.  Bell said he is looking forward to seeing different takes on the show by new actors. “The great thing is that in no way do people have to mimic us or our personas. People can walk in and see any size or shape actor playing these guys,” he said. “We weren’t your cookie-cutter kind of Broadway folk.”


The openly gay Bell added, “We were really proud that we were who we were on stage. I didn’t think we were flaunting our sexuality on our sleeves. We were just our awesome, fantastic selves.  After it opened on Broadway, it was not lost on Jeff or me, and it made us proud to create a Broadway musical with two male leads who are openly gay characters. It doesn’t happen that often. It wasn’t the point of the show, but it wasn’t ‘not’ the point of the show. We were just being our proud selves.”

Want more [tos]? Well, "[tossers]", look no further than the official [tos] website and The [title of show] Show channel on YouTube. The former features the hilarious [blog of show] that is regularly updated with material by Hunter, Susan, Jeff and Heidi. The latter includes [title of show] Tony fever and special guest star Cheyenne Jackson.

[title of show] is currently playing at Arizona Theatre Company in Phoenix through March 7. For more information and tickets, visit the theater's official website.

Interview by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.

Historians point to many reasons why the German people allowed Hitler’s rise and permitted the Holocaust to occur. Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke gives his own profoundly disturbing reasons in his award-winning black and white feature, The White Ribbon, by not directly addressing the question at all.

The film, nominated for Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and Cinematography, is set in 1913-14 in the village of Eichwald, Germany, where a series of seemingly random acts of violence threatens to topple the baronial and male hierarchy of the community. Told in flashback as the memories of the village’s schoolteacher (Ernst Jacobi as narrator, Christian Friedel on screen), The White Ribbon unfolds as a morality tale gone horribly wrong.


First, the local doctor is felled on his horse by a tripwire stretched across his garden entrance. Was he being punished for having a relationship with his midwife after the death of his wife, or was it for something darker and more disturbing? Then a farmer’s wife dies in an accident in the Baron’s sawmill. Soon, it is the children of Eichwald who become the targets of devastating attacks, beginning with the baron’s son. Are the other children somehow involved?

Haneke layers his film with deeper and more disturbing themes and situations, and it becomes apparent that the sins of the fathers (the doctor, the baron, his steward and the pastor) are being taken out upon their children, even as the pastor is meting out severe punishment to his own slightly creepy brood. He ties his eldest son’s arms to his bed when he fears the boy is masturbating and visits his harshest punishment onto his eldest daughter. The title of the film refers to white ribbons the pastor makes his children wear like scarlet letters, signifying the “purity” that eludes them.


The most disturbing scenes in The White Ribbon are not violence, but emotionally bruising scenes of the men in the village exerting their dominance over their women and children, most notably the doctor cruelly dismissing his lover, the midwife. Haneke seems to ask: Is it any wonder that this generation grew up to blindly follow Hitler and his perverse Pied Piper’s song?

The White Ribbon is a slow and methodical film that ends with many questions unanswered, but Haneke makes a compelling case that the misery, humiliation and hopelessness the people suffer in Eichwald made them eager for the deliverance that Hitler would promise a generation later.

UPDATE: The White Ribbon is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.com.

Review by Neil Cohen, resident film critic of Movie Dearest and Phoenix's Echo Magazine.