The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences mailed out nomination ballots for the 83rd Annual Academy Awards today to all 5,755 members of the Academy. This comes one day after the Coen brothers’ True Grit landed the #2 spot at the holiday box-office and Black Swan and The Fighter also landed in the top six slots.
I know several readers of this site have been commenting on the Weinstein Co.’s slow roll-out of The King’s Speech, which added 657 theaters on Christmas Day to bring its total to a whopping 700 theaters. The film ended up in eleventh position for the weekend and had the brothers Weinstein expanded to 700 theaters one day earlier it surely would have made the top ten. Oh well, opportunity missed.
All of this box-office success comes just as ballots are being mailed out and this weekend Blue Valentine, Another Year, Biutiful and The Way Back will all have Oscar qualifying runs. The Way Back and Biutiful are the quieter releases of the four with Peter Weir’s The Way Back only releasing in Los Angeles while Biutiful will run in New York (Sunshine) and Los Angeles (AMC Century City). Both will expand in late January.
With an announced 248 feature films eligible for the 2010 Academy Award for Best Picture perhaps you can now see why the Weinsteins delayed the expansion of The King’s Speech for so long. Additionally, with Blue Valentine they earned several positive reviews all year long from Sundance to Toronto, not to mention the good will earned during — what appears like an Oscar move in itself — the NC-17 MPAA ratings controversy.
The only film releasing this week that seems to have lost all its buzz is Mike Leigh’s Another Year, which is easily one of the best films of the year and yet you’d think Sony Pictures Classics couldn’t care less. It’s almost as if they’re trying to sabotage not only its Oscar chances but its box-office chances as well. Weird strategy if you ask me.
The question now is with so much buzz surrounding The Social Network after a long series of critical victories, can any of these films step up and dethrown the Facebook feature? The most likely candidate probably remains The King’s Speech, but the once thought dark horse, Black Swan, has come on quite strong with 28 wins, 60 nominations and six runners-up this award season.
Does True Grit stand a chance? How about The Fighter?
Right now in my Best Picture predictions I have True Grit hardly making it, but I also have 127 Hours much higher than it may actually stand at the moment as buzz around that film has pretty much disappeared entirely.
The nominations for the 2011 Oscars will be announced live on Tuesday, January 25, 2011, at 5:30 a.m. PT and I will be here reporting on it all as we make our way to the big day on Sunday, February 27, 2011. It’s nice to have a bit of curiosity leading into the big show this year.te
