1. This sounds promising: Fox Searchlight has greenlit the first film by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris since their 2006 Oscar-winner Little Miss Sunshine. He Loves Me, which will reunite the filmmaking team with Paul Dano, also stars his girlfriend, Zoe Kazan, who wrote the script. [via Deadline]
2. Battlestar Galactica star Edward James Olmos is joining the cast of season six of Dexter; he’ll be playing “an enlightened religious studies professor” who we’re guessing has something to do with Mos Def’s storyline on the show. [via Screen Rant]
3. Strange but possibly true: Is Lady Gaga planning to spend her summer in a new home on Martha’s Vineyard that she has dubbed “GG’s Playpen”? [via Boston Herald]
4. The Barbican has announced the flagship arts programming planned around the 2012 London Olympics, and the highlights include theater productions starring Juliette Binoche and Cate Blanchett, a major Bauhaus retrospective, and the UK premiere of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. [via Arts Journal]
5. The Kardashians are working on a novel that’s due out next November about “a glamorous, high profile and complicated family,” and they want your suggestions on what it should be called — but you won’t be paid if they pick your title. [via WaPo]
Bonus link: Take a Quiz in Honor of National Wine Day
At the time of this writing, Natalie Portman’s odds of winning the Academy Award for Best Actress — for her portrayal of a certifiable prima in Black Swan — are hovering somewhere between 1/11 and 1/12. In other words, Portman is so likely to win that to pry a dollar from a bookie on such an outcome, you’ll have to lay down twelve times that amount. If Annette Bening, the 13/2 favorite to upset Natalie Portman, wins Best Actress, the film will go on to double or triple its modest $20M earnings to date, and J. Todd Harris and Focus Features stand to make an unholy sum. Translation: When it comes to Oscar upsets, the stakes are incredibly high.
With that in mind, after the jump, our list of the greatest upsets of the past 20 years. Leave comment on which wins you feel were actually deserved.
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Jean Cocteau once said that, “In Paris everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.” Yet, in writer/director Cédric Klapisch’s latest ensemble film, Paris, a dancer (Romain Duris) afflicted with a failing heart discovers the vicarious solace of the gaze, Rear Window-style. When his concerned social-worker sister (Juliette Binoche) moves in with her three children to care for him during the wait for a heart transplant, he sums up his passing days with a simple phrase: “I watch other people live.” Through this prism of mortality, Klapisch explores his luminous hometown with affection and with what one character describes as a “curiosity for heritage,” offering vignettes that come to life across the postcard-ready arrondissements. Read More »
At the outset of Olivier Assayas’ pensive and wonderfully impressionistic Summer Hours, grandchildren traipse around a restful, sun-dappled estate just outside the hectic reaches of Paris. The mood here is warm, conversational, and inviting. The villa belongs to 75-year-old Hélène (Edith Scob of Eyes Without a Face fame), a widow so aware of her dwindling days that she pulls eldest son Frédéric (an exemplary Charles Berling) aside during her birthday fete to go over the home’s litany of valuable objets d’art that have been present since the time of the past resident, Paul Berthier, an illustrious painter and Hélène’s uncle (a relationship perhaps a tad more amorous than avuncular). Included in the priceless inventory are two Corot landscapes, decorative Odilon Redon panels, an orchid desk by Louis Majorelle, and a few Félix Bracquemond vases — all paragons of 19th century French art. Read More »
