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| An Education leads Bafta longlists First round of Bafta voting puts the Lone Scherfig film in the running for 17 awards, with Avatar, The Hurt Locker and District 9 following close behindLone Scherfig's An Education is officially the frontrunner for this year's British Academy film awards, following the publication of the Bafta longlists. Avatar, The Hurt Locker and – perhaps the biggest surprise – District 9 also emerged as strong contenders. And Moon looks like the main rival to An Education for the title of best British film.The longlists are the result of the first round of Bafta voting, when the list of contenders is narrowed to 15 in each category. The second round, which closes 19 January and is announced two days later, whittles these down to the five nominees. The third round, of course, picks the winners, to be revealed on 21 February.So many films are included in the longlists that they are very imprecise guides to the eventual victors. Two years ago, Atonement was the most longlisted film, but ended up winning just two Baftas (though one was best picture). This year, An Education leads the way with 17 longlist entries (including seven in the acting categories alone), followed by Inglourious Basterds with 15.But that doesn't necessarily mean much. More revealing are the votes by Bafta's specialist chapters, which offer a strong clue to the likely nominees. Bafta helpfully puts an asterisk by the five candidates on each longlist which received the most support from the relevant chapters. In other words, you can tell which performances the actors voted for, or which editors were picked by their peers. Last year, the chapter selections on the longlists turned out to match almost exactly the eventual nominations.By that yardstick, An Education still emerges as the frontrunner. It picked up seven chapter asterisks, for director, adapted screenplay, makeup and hair, costume design and three actors (Carey Mulligan, Alfred Molina and Rosamund Pike).Avatar, The Hurt Locker and District 9 came close behind, with six asterisks each. That's a particularly impressive result for District 9 and Avatar, because neither appeared at all on the acting longlists (hugely unjust, in the case of District 9's Sharlto Copley). They evidently have deep support across all the technical chapters.If the nominations do mirror the chapter votes, then the best actor prize will be contested by Andy Serkis, Colin Firth, George Clooney, Jeremy Renner and Morgan Freeman. It's rare that Bafta recognises actors who aren't in the Oscar race, so Serkis will do well to get a nod for his turn as Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, which has yet to find an American distributor.By the same calculation, best actress would include Abbie Cornish, Mulligan, Gabourey Sidibe, Meryl Streep and Saoirse Ronan – a list notable, Streep apart, for its extreme youth. At 59, Streep is more than twice the age of her fellow contenders.The directors' chapter sprang a surprise by putting an asterisk by French director Jacques Audiard for A Prophet (Un Prophète), which only got one other longlist entry, for original screenplay, although it's already shortlisted for best foreign language film.Elsewhere on the longlists, Bafta members fell over themselves to honour Clint Eastwood, who they have tended to snub in the past. As well as voting for Invictus, they chose to remember Gran Torino, even though it was released a year ago and Warner Bros didn't campaign for it. Eastwood got two entries apiece on the best film and director list, and also showed up on the best actor list for Gran Torino.An Education is one of just two British candidates on the best film list, alongside Moon, bearing out the suggestion of a weak year for UK cinema. Bright Star, made in Britain by the Australian director Jane Campion, missed the best film cut but figured strongly in other sections. Andrea Arnold also made the director list for Fish Tank, and there were mentions here and there for Nowhere Boy, Damned United, In the Loop, Me and Orson Welles, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Young Victoria and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. But Ken Loach's Looking for Eric was notable by its omission.BaftasAwards and prizesMeryl StreepJacques AudiardClint EastwoodAndrea ArnoldOscarsAdam Dawtreyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Eric Rohmer: philosopher, rhetorician, and an ally of the young The French director's movies were quintessentially studenty - in the best possible senseEric Rohmer's death at the age of 89 is a reminder of the incredible energy, tenacity and longevity of France's great nouvelle vague generation. Rohmer had released his last film only last year, the sublimely unworldly pastoral fantasy Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrea and Celadon): a gentle, reflective movie, of course, but by no means lacking in energy or wit. And, meanwhile, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol – at the respective ages of 79, 81, 81 and 79 – are all still with us, all nursing projects. Rohmer came from the New Wave tradition of critic-turned-director; he was a former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, and became the distinctively romantic philosopher of the New Wave and the great master of what was sometimes called "intimist" cinema: delicate, un-showy movie-making about not especially startling people, people often in their 20s, whose lives are dramatised at a kind of walking, talking pace. He avoided dramatic close-up, and tended to avoid music, except that that is supposed to be heard by the characters in the action from radios, for example – Lars von Trier's minimalist Dogme movement was in the spirit of Rohmer's modus operandi.What was utterly characteristic was Rohmer's feel for what the real life of a young person – albeit a certain type of middle-class, educated, young person – was like: that is, not shiny and sexy or grungy or funny in the Hollywood manner, but uncertain, tentative, vulnerable and more often than not dominated by a quotidian type of travel: bus travel, subway travel, train travel; travel to get somewhere for the summer, or to see a girlfriend or boyfriend.The first Rohmer film I saw was Le rayon vert (The Green Ray), with my girlfriend, when we were both students, at the old Cambridge Arts Cinema in the 80s. I thought then and think now that Rohmer's films are quintessentially studenty – in the best possible sense. Young, callow-ish people do a lot of talking, in the way we all did, about what was wrong (or right) with their lives and relationships, and about the perfect place to go for the summer. In this film, a young woman is unable to think what to do for the summer. She tries various places with various people, but always finds herself heading back to Paris, drawn perhaps to a place in which possibilities have not been thinned and options narrowed. Eventually, she finds herself at the beach, about to experience the legendary "rayon vert", or flash of green light you can see at the moment the sun sets.Perhaps other twentysomethings, from a later era, would be more excited about finding the perfect beach in Thailand or Vietnam, but to us impecunious 1980s students, the idea of witnessing the "rayon vert" in Biarritz was a fascinating, exotic notion, and eminently plausible. It was as fascinating as absinthe. Yet everything was filmed in such a straightforward, realist way, and for someone in his mid-60s, Rohmer himself had a remarkable sympathy and un-patronising interest in young people.Later, in 1992, Rohmer would make Conte d'hiver (A Winter's Tale), as part of his "tales of four seasons" series, about a young man and woman who have a passionate holiday romance but somehow manage to mislay each other's details and lose touch. It seems almost inconceivable in our world of social networking sites and mobile phones, but at the time it was entirely plausible, and another demonstration of Rohmer's sure touch for sensing the anxieties and dreams of un-moneyed young people, looking for love and adventure – and, as ever, having to travel banally to get it. I think Richard Linklater, in his movies Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, about a missed love-connection, was trying to channel some of the spirit of Eric Rohmer.Rohmer's "talkiest" film is probably the one that made his name: Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night With Maud) from 1969, a black-and-white film that looks a little rickety now. A man is forced through snow to stay the night with an attractive stranger, and finds his resolve to marry someone else severely tested by having to sleep over in her bed. But this is not just about sex, and the lack of it, or the promise of it, but about talk, about the adventure of intimacy and all the subtle, almost infinitesimal things we reveal about ourselves in talking.In his later years – though perhaps Rohmer's entire mature career is one long, richly distinctive, "late phase" – the director turned to period drama, and this is the point at which pub-quizzers may raise the question of what unites Rohmer with Christopher Nolan. The answer is that both have cast the tremendous but underused and still underappreciated British actor Lucy Russell. Rohmer made her the French-speaking lead in his French revolutionary drama L'anglaise et le duc (The Lady and the Duke) from 2001.And finally, there is Rohmer's remarkable last film, Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon, a Shakespearean fantasia, a midsummer noon's reverie, conceived along uncompromisingly classical lines, and a thing of quiet joy. Along with his green ray – that flash of mystical revelation available to idealistic young people unencumbered by middle-aged banality – it is my favourite Eric Rohmer. The cinema has lost a philosopher, a quiet rhetorician and a gentle ally of the young.Eric RohmerFrancePeter Bradshawguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The Road to ruin Six gaffes in new movie The Road spotted by survival expert Jim RawlesThe Road illustrates some classic blunders in bushcraft and tactical movement, here's how.Following main arterial roads In a post-collapse environment, major roads will become linear ambush zones. To avoid trouble, "The Man" and "The Boy" should have travelled overland, or the smaller roads.Lighting large campfires … "Cold camps" or small tin can stoves would have been more appropriate to avoid detection.No security precautions when sleepingWithout enough manpower to provide a night watch, it's likely that they would've woken up dead. They could have easily set up trip wires attached to empty tin cans to provide a noise-making perimeter security. Or teamed up with another adult to keep watch.Ignoring basic camouflageTheir outer layers should have been all earth tones. They also left their bare faces showing. In the cold weather depicted, they should have been wearing earth-tone balaclavas.Not making improvised weapons "The Man" was depicted as having a revolver with only a very few cartridges. Yet, he did nothing to provide other weapons for self-defence. Even a sharpened stick with its point hardened in a fire would have been better than nothing.Leaving a safe, well-stocked shelter prematurelyThey should have foraged longer.SurvivalBlog.com, Jim's book How To Survive … (Penguin) is out nowguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Kylie Minogue admits she fancies women POP star Kylie Minogue admitted she fancies women as well as men and admitted there was an actress she'd had a crush on. news.com.au |
My outside scoop on Audiard: Haneke's better As with visual art, a classic is a classic. While real cineastes will have seen Audiard's A Prophet at the weekend, I compared his earlier work with Haneke's HiddenThat estimable news source The Onion has a film columnist who delivers worthless, third-hand industry gossip – the Outside Scoop. I'm pretty much in the same situation. Since meeting in the back row of an art cinema, ma femme et moi used to feed an addiction to cinema that meant we saw almost everything straight away. Now we've slightly grown up, it's the occasional DVD catch-up with films that cineastes saw years ago.Take the French director du jour, Jacques Audiard. If you are up to date with serious cinema you probably saw his new work A Prophet this weekend. Meanwhile, I have just caught up with his 2005 film The Beat That My Heart Skipped. While you're discussing what has been acclaimed as the first masterpiece of this decade, here's my take on one of the most respected movies of the last. It was bad luck for Audiard that we watched his film in between DVDs of Antonioni's The Passenger and Michael Haneke's Hidden. Both of those films actually are masterpieces. Seeing The Passenger again after some years was to be reminded of what great cinema is – and why, in the days when I was seeing films every week, it was the classics that stood out, the films of the 60s and 70s that were the real discoveries. As with visual art, a classic is a classic. Perhaps, indeed, the method of watching cinema on DVD is healthy: you can appreciate it as art, not news.The Beat That My Heart Skipped is not a great movie. It's quite good fun, with some terrific acting. It has the look and the atmosphere of some wonderful French films gone by. But it's really a bit silly, all the stuff about a criminal who really wants to be a concert pianist, and his tangled love life. A piece in the French mode (or rather, in the tradition of French homages to the American gangster film – it is based on an American original).So tell me – does A Prophet transcend its flaws to become a true classic? I find it hard to believe Audiard will ever match Haneke at his best. Seeing Hidden just after The Beat That My Heart Skipped was a different level of cinema experience. I still haven't seen all the touted best films of the noughties, but I know already Hidden is the one that matters. Haneke really is a European director to celebrate. But of course you know that.Jacques AudiardMichael HanekeMichelangelo AntonioniJonathan Jonesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |