Awards Season Gets Underway

Quvenzhané Wallis gives her director Behn Zeitlin a big hug.

IFP Gotham Awards Ceremony Lights Up Dark Night

The red carpet was aglow with the incandescent twinkle of Hollywood’s stars on Monday night at the 22nd annual Independent Film Project Gotham Awards. With Oscar winners Matt Damon and Marion Cotillard amongst the evening’s honorees and the likes of Jack Black, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski and so many more blazing a trail through the double doors of Wall St.’s Cipriani’s, it was no wonder that the less glamorous side of the velvet rope was a veritable press feeding frenzy. Lucky for us, then, that we had sharpened our claws.

As the guests took their seats for the ceremony, The Observer was whisked upstairs to a private viewing room, lest we cavort too rambunctiously with the delicate A-List crowd. There we watched over the evening’s events like demi-gods looking down from the heavens upon the cherubs pecking away at their meals, with eight year old nominee Quvenzhané Williams and 13 year old Jared Gilman leading the underage coterie.

The awards soon got underway, much to the delight of the recipients. Honoring their intentions as champions of independent cinema, the jury not only rewarded the biggest Hollywood names but the industry’s up-and-comers for their contribution to film. Beasts of the Southern Wild writer and director Benh Zeitlin was undoubtedly the big winner of the night, scooping statuettes – well, glass cuboids – for Breakthrough Director alongside the Bingham Ray Award, dedicated to the late film executive. Read More

The Eight-Day Week

marion

To Do Monday: Almost Oscar

Awards season begins in earnest tonight, as Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon and director David O. Russell will be among those getting a new tchotchke at the Gotham Independent Film Awards. Those very famous people receive honorary awards tonight, while still-emerging talents are nominated for the balance of the prizes. Among them: This American Life stalwart Read More

Thursday Night Ciné

Marion Cotillard chatting away.

No Bones About It!

Just when we were sick and tired of cinema screenings and movie premiere parties (Hello nomination-baiting season!), The Cinema Society alongside Dior and Vanity Fair hosted one of its best shindigs yet, at the legendary Indochine restaurant following a showing of the Rust and Bone, Jacques Audiard’s 2012 French-Belgian film, which stars Marion Cotillard and dizzyingly sexy Matthias Schoenaerts.

“I’m gonna need eight glasses of Champagne to lift myself up from that one!” one power publicist bellowed to The Observer over the roaring crowd.

“But Marion Cotillard was just amazing!”

This writer unfortunately missed the screening in order to support wounded U.S. servicemen and women uptown for Stand Up For Heroes event, which featured performances by John Mayer, Roger Waters and Bruce Springsteen.

We were hoping for a sighting and perhaps to bavarder with the Oscar-winner.

“Marion had to immediately catch an international flight,” one social stalwart dutifully informed us. Of course she had plenty of time to pose for the cameras in her Dior couture, flashing her wondrous baby-bump. Read More

The Eight-Day Week

Marion Cotillard (Getty Images)

To Do Sunday: Cannes East

There’s another week left in the New York Film Festival—but we’re headed out of town! Last-gasp tumbleweeds like us aren’t going to be anywhere near Lincoln Center today. After our morning coffee (iced—we’re already waxing nostalgic for summer) at Golden Pear, we’ll be heading to the Hamptons International Film Festival, where today’s screenings include early Read More

Letter from Cannes

Marion Cotillard with director Jacques Audiard and costar Matthias Schoenaerts on the red carpet. (Getty Images)

Cannes, Day Deux: Marion Cotillard’s Whale of a Movie

CANNES, FRANCE, MAY 19— Love is in the air here at Cannes, and so is at least one Oscar prospect. Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard is first out of the gate this year with a riveting performance as a double amputee in Jacques Audiard’s tough, achingly beautiful drama Rust and Bone. Crippled by a freak killer whale accident in the south of France (yeah, I just wrote that), Orca trainer Cotillard mends a shattered life by finding mutual redemption in the arms of a stoic single father and amateur kickboxer (played with muscular intensity by human bicep Matthias Schoenaerts). Read More

Can Someone Please Explain Inception to Me?

At the movies, incomprehensible gibberish has become a way of life, but it usually takes time before it’s clear that a movie really stinks. Inception, Christopher Nolan’s latest assault on rational coherence, wastes no time. It cuts straight to the chase that leads to the junkpile without passing go, although before it drags Read More

Best of the Met

It’s that time of year again when we get to marvel at the many things worn at Anna Wintour’s party the Costume Institute gala at the Met. This year’s theme, “The American Woman,” was perhaps a little bit easier for sartorially challenged celebrities to understand and therefore please their red carpet audiences.

After all, the Read More

Opening This Weekend: A Little Something Called Avatar, Daniel Day-Lewis and Jeff Bridges Sing, and The Morgans Make Us Want to Enter Witness Protection

With only thirteen days left in 2009—seriously, where did this year go?—it should come as no surprise that Hollywood is pulling out the big guns. Five films reach theaters today, but all everyone will really care about come Monday is the one with 10-foot tall blue aliens. As we do every Friday, here’s a handy Read More