What, there weren’t any award-worthy acting performances in this year’s front-runner for the best-picture Oscar? Actors everywhere could be forgiven for feeling chills up their spines yesterday, as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences showered the effect-heavy epic The Return of the King with 11 Oscar nominations, but didn’t find even one of the movie’s actors worth mentioning. [More]
Category: Original TORn
F.X. Moon as well as a few others, including myself, caught this while watching the latest episode of the Buffy Spin-off, Angel.
When Andrew sees Spike for the first time since (Spoilers for non-North American viewers hidden!)Spike has returned from the dead, Andrew hugs him (very uncomfortably, based on Spike’s reaction), and mutters “It’s like Gandalf the White returning from the pit of the Balrog. He lives, Frodo, he lives” – very funny.
And then, a little later, Andrew makes a reference to Spike’s “Viggo Mortenson-like pecs”.
Ringer Spy Nerdanel writes: The Los Angeles Film Critics Association presented their 2003 awards Monday night at the St. Regis Hotel in Century City. (These awards were announced January 7.) The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King won two awards: Best Production Design (Grant Major) and Best Director (Peter Jackson). [More]
Ringer Spy Nerdanel writes: The Los Angeles Film Critics Association presented their 2003 awards Monday night at the St. Regis Hotel in Century City. (These awards were announced January 7.) The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King won two awards: Best Production Design (Grant Major) and Best Director (Peter Jackson). Barrie Osborne accepted the award for Grant Major, who is in New Zealand working on King Kong, reading from an email from Major. At one point Osborne said “and then he thanks me, but I’ll skip that,” which got him heckled by Peter Jackson.
Peter Jackson accepted his own award. He thanked, among others, Fran Walsh, also in attendance. He explained that he had met Walsh 18 years ago when she was recommended to him as someone who was good with scripts. At the time, Jackson was working on Bad Taste, which had no script, so he asked her to paint part of a set. She was not very good at that, he said, but he discovered she was indeed good with scripts.
In a conversation with Ringer Spy Nerdanel after dinner, Jackson said he had just finished editing the Extended Edition of RotK and that it was 4 hours and 10 minutes. Nerdanel was either too polite or too dense to ask whether that includes the credits.
Spending the night with the best kept secret in Hollywood. The two copy repairmen contaminated themselves by getting off an elevator on the wrong floor. They would have to be questioned — and possibly quarantined. What could they have picked up by walking onto the busy fifth floor, instead of the deserted sixth, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences headquarters? [More]
The most impressive movie spectacles of 2003, “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” and “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” both derived from famous sets of adventure novels by English writers, emerged as the top contenders for Academy Awards when nominations were announced yesterday in Beverly Hills, Calif. [More]