UP AND AT 'EM: WHY ANIMATION MATTERS IN THIS YEAR'S OSCAR RACE...

We're happy to be proven completely wrong on this but for the time being, fuck it, let's make a prediction: on 7th March 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, an animated film will NOT win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Now, under usual circumstances this wouldn't exactly be the scoop of the century, but the fact is that 2009 was a pretty bumper year for high-end, mainstream animation at the multiplex. On the other hand, early live-action favourites such as the Rob Marshall musical Nine (currently lumbered with a meagre 45% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones have underwhelmed critics, while others have simply fallen by the wayside (including, ironically, John Hillcoat's wonderful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.) And with the record breaking success of James Cameron's mo-cap epic Avatar still perplexing the hell out of just about everyone, Hollywood's suddenly found itself in a bit of a Jake Sully-style identity crisis just in time for awards season.

The last time an animated feature even came close to picking up the coveted gold-plated statuette was in 1992 when Disney's Beauty & the Beast became the first ever animated film to be nominated for the main award. Sadly, despite securing nominations for 6 Oscars in total, Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise's retelling of the classic fairytale had to settle for just 2 wins on the night, Best Score & Best Song, losing out in the Best Picture category to that year's juggernaut winner Silence of the Lambs. (In truth, the "Lambs" landslide wasn't completely unexpected in what was, overall, a weak year - also in the running were bland gangster epic Bugsy and dull-as dishwater Streisand drama Prince of Tides, both of which failed to excite audiences... JFK got the final nod, but its controversial subject matter was never going to go down well with traditionally conservative Academy voters.) Anyway, it was the start of something, and in the same year that Beauty and the Beast hit theatres, Pixar and Disney inked the deal which led to the production of the world's first fully computer generated feature film, John Lasseter's stone-cold classic Toy Story.

So much so that in 2001, the Academy Awards were forced to present an award for Best Animated Film Feature for the very first time. In its inaugural year, Dreamworks were triumphant with box-office smash Shrek (a franchise devalued with each and every instalment, like Lethal Weapon or Indiana Jones.) However, critics of the new award argued that by effectively ghettoising animated films within its own category, the Academy had severely damaged the chances of an animated feature being taken seriously in the main Oscar race. And so far, they've been bang on the money. Not one single animated film has been nominated for Best Picture since, which is a shame because the selection this year is, well, brilliant.

All in all, a total of five films will go head-to-head in the final shortlist for the Best Animated Feature category. Up's nomination goes without saying - it's almost unthinkable that Pixar would be excluded from the category they've helped to define since its inception (Pixar have 4 wins out of 6 attempts in this category: Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E.) Similarly, it would be a massive shock if both the marvellous Coraline and Fantastic Mr Fox don't get nods for Henry Selick and Wes Anderson respectively, given the critical acclaim shared by both this year. Also expect Studio Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki's gorgeous Ponyo to feature somewhere - weirdly, the last time 5 films were shortlisted for the Oscar was in 2003 when Miyazaki's Spirited Away took the prize (competition wasn't exactly fierce, the other nominees being Lilo & Stitch, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Ice Age and Disney's epic flop, Treasure Planet.) There could also be recognition for the traditional Disney animation Princess & the Frog (the first hand-drawn effort from Disney since Lasseter took over the reigns at the House of Mouse albeit one that's disappointed at the box-office) and Sony's 3D sleeper Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.

All things considered, this will be the strongest ever year for Best Animated Feature nods, which could spell bad news for Up, easily the front-runner in this category given its pedigree. With so much competition there's a real chance the vote will be split between some very good, very classy movies. Check that list again. It's 100% ace.

Of course, there have been some good live action films. In the last couple of weeks, Kathryn Bigelow's searing Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker has emerged as the front red-hot front-runner, gobbling up pretty much every major critics prize it's been competing for. No doubt about it, this one's a heavyweight and probably the film to beat this season. Similarly, we reckon Jason Reitman's contemplative comedy/drama Up In The Air is a solid bet to take home something - the movie's had glowing reviews across the board and Reitman has previous following his last nod for Juno. The film's getting a lot of love from US critics right now and let's be honest, taking into account sterling work in Fantastic Mr Fox and The Men Who Stare At Goats, it's been a pretty positive year for George Clooney, who's sitting pretty for a Best Actor nomination. And then there's that giant James Cameron-sized elephant in the room. The one strapped with machine guns and pot pourri. Say what you will about Avatar, even the most cynical moviegoer would deny that it's now gone from folly to bona fide pop culture phenomenon. The 3D Smurftravaganza could even be The Hurt Locker's main competition depending on how sentimental the Academy's feeling this year.

However, despite a few big hitters, the usual crop of adult dramas has been, on the whole, disappointing. That could be why the Producers Guild of America has resorted to including genre movies such as Star Trek and District 9 in its final shortlist. Neither film has generated any prior awards buzz despite proving to be genuine crowd-pleasers and yet there they are, both standing tall, Na'avi-style, on the list. With 10 films making up the shortlist this year, Pixar have to confident that Up, one of the few non-arthouse movies that every major critic seemed to like, will have an opportunity to gatecrash the nominations and bag itself a Best Picture nod, regardless of how it performs in the Best Animated category.

So is Oscar finally ready to give Best Picture to an animated feature? No. No it isn't. Not unless your animated feature's called Avatar. But Up's very inclusion may well be enough to split the vote and cause an upset on the big night. Why? Because as far as Oscar is concerned, for the first time in years, animated films really matter. Result.

(Btw, if you're looking for an outside bet, you'd do worse than put a few on Precious - full title: Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire - a movie that has buzz coming out of its ears.)

"MY NAME IS STUART TOWNSEND AND I WILL WIPE BUM FOR CASH"

Charlize Theron knows him as Charlize Theron's boyfriend. The rest of the world know him as that guy from that film once. Oh, AND Charlize Theron's boyfriend. And now the star of Queen of the Damned and all-round Icon of Cinema Stuart Townsend IS the man who's just been kicked off Thor the day before the start of principal photography.

The reason this is 100% newsworthy? Well, we've been here before... Cast your mind back and you'll remember that Stuart Townsend was famously cast as Aragorn in a small independent film called Lord of the Rings (you may have heard of it?) before getting the boot by a certain Kiwi director called Peter Jackson (you may have heard of him?) upon the realisation of a grave and monumental error. The part eventually went to poet, photographer, legend, Mr. Viggo Mortensen (you may have heard of him, too?)

The official reason for Townsend's departure is "creative differences" although rumours are all over the place that he showed up 6 hours for a crucial screen test thus provoking the ire of King of All Luvvies and saviour of existentialist Swedish cop drama Kenneth Branagh, the man behind the camera on Marvel's latest mega-project. Seriously - getting kicked off one multi-million dollar fantasy franchise is unlucky, getting kicked off two is just, well, plain rubbish.

Townsend had been lined up to play Fandral, sidekick of Thor. His replacement is Joshua Dallas, whose most high profile role to date was a turn in the recent Descent sequel. Oh, he also played "Node 2" in the "Silence In The Library" episode of Doctor Who. As Scotty says, "exciting!"

Of course, we may well be selling Townsend short here. It could just be that he simply is the single most uncompromising bad-ass in Hollywood. Either that or he's a total c***.

ANTICHRIST = AMAZINGCHRIST!

So I finally got round to watching Antichrist the other day and, well, I've really got to hand it to Lars Von Trier. Let's be honest, he doesn't exactly do things in halves.

Take, for example, Breaking the Waves, his breakthrough English language hit and darling of the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. Frankly, it was beyond grim - it was double-grim topped with extra cheesy grimness. For an unrelenting two hours and forty minutes, no less. In 1998, Von Trier went one better with The Idiots, a staggeringly offensive film in which a bunch of middle class folk go full retard and indulge in hot spaz sex for a hefty chunk of the movie's not insubstantial running time. AO Scott of the New York Times described it as having "nothing on its mind besides the squirming discomfort of its audience." And he was quite right. Then last year, as if to rub it all into our disgusting, bourgeois faces, there was Antichrist.

To say that Antichrist split the critics down the middle is an understatement. In a lovely piece of Kubrickian symmetry, the movie finished up with a straight-down-the-line 50% average on Rotten Tomatoes. Starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple struggling to cope with the trauma caused by the death of their young son, it was the film that finally proved that Von Trier wasn't so much the enfant terrible of European cinema as much as its fucked up little cousin who may or may not be illegitimate. Some people thought it should be banned. And at its now infamous Cannes press conference, Von Trier was even challenged to justify the film's existence by one particularly hateful critic (hello, Baz Bamigboye!) Von Trier countered by declaring he was the best film director in the world, which is untrue, but a fairly typical and not entirely unexpected response from the Danish auteur.

Why the ire? Well, that's easy. The movie starts with a close-up penetration shot intercut with the accidental and violent death of a child. The action quickly moves to a cabin in the woods in which all kinds of allegorical horrors take place. These include a scene in which a fox eats its own intestines and some pretty horrific close-up images of genital mutilation in the film's surreal finale. It's horrible. It's unnerving. It's also pretty unforgettable. Like his Palmes D'or winner Dancer In The Dark, Von Trier's film takes its audience to an extreme place and leaves it there to fend for itself. And while it may be dripping with dread and terror, Antichrist is never a depressing experience. In fact, there's more despair in your average Rob Schneider movie or those strange American Pie sequels that always go straight to video (you know the ones, films like American Pie: Band Camp, American Pie: The Naked Mile and, perhaps most shockingly of all, American Pie: Excuse Me While I Skewer My Own Cock With A Pitchfork.)

Of course, compared to some of the more extreme Japanese horror films, like the stuff Takashi Miike's been putting out for years, Antichrist is about as offensive as the Garbage Pail Kids Movie (a whopping 2.7 on the IMDB - that's pretty terrible but still higher than several Uwe Boll films, dirge fans.) There is, however, another key reason people hate this movie and that's Von Trier's apparently rampant misogyny. The film really doesn't like women. How else could it justify a scene in which the primary character chops off her own clitoris? Ok, so she did smash in her fella's penis a few scenes before, but that's just fanning the flames...this chick's got issues. After putting Bjork through all kinds of torture in Dancer In The Dark, and subjecting Nicole Kidman to hell on earth in Dogville (actually, we'll forgive them that one) Von Trier's probably not exactly the most popular person down the Women's Institute these days.

But no matter. Dodgy sexual politics aside (and the politics are EXTREMELY dodgy, I'm just not the best person to comment) Antichrist is a cinematic experience as much as, I don't know, Avatar. Like James Cameron's space extravaganza, it doesn't necessarily have the greatest screenplay in the world (neither film makes that much sense) but it doesn't need it. It's more interested in the sheer visceral possiblities of cinema than anything else. Viewed purely in terms of genre conventions, Antichrist is a cracking video nasty, a twisted, gothic body horror laced with spine-chilling tension. The suggestion that Gainsbourg might not just be batshit crazy, that she actually might be possessed by the Devil itself is a pretty tantalising intepretation.

So the critics can say what they like about Lars Von Trier. Beyond the controversy, and despite all the hype that threatens to drown everything he does, the simple fact is that the guy can really make films.

WE'VE SEEN THE FUTURE OF MOVIE MARKETING AND HIS NAME IS RONALD...OH, AND HE'S "GOING VIRAL"...

Youth In Revolt Red Band Trailer - watch more funny videos

Forget the internet, the future of movie marketing is 100% tramp. That's according to Hollywood producer David Permut, one of the guys behind blockbusters such as Face/Off and the latest film from Superbad star Michael Cera, Youth In Revolt.

Top industry blog Deadline Hollywood reports that Permut paid $100 to a homeless fella called Ronald to hold up a Youth In Revolt poster on the corner of San Vincente Wilshire in exciting Brentwood, Los Angeles this weekend.

Here's the post.

Now we can't decide if this really is the wonderful idea it seems or simply the shameless exploitation of the under-privileged (the guy did get $100 out of it.) Either way, Permut's plan was hardly successful: the film opened with a modest $7mil this weekend.

For our part, we're excited by the movie, which is directed by Miguel Arteta, the guy behind indie staples The Good Girl and Chuck & Buck. The novel by CD Payne was a classic coming-of age tale (think Catcher In Rye reimagined by Chuck Palahniuk) and it will finally prove to the world that Michael Cera can play roles other than Michael Cera.

Youth In Revolt currently has a respectable 7.1 on the IMDB and hits UK cinemas on 5th February 2010.

FIRST THINGS FIRST...

We weren't around too much over Christmas. The truth is that we were far too busy stuffing our faces with mince pies and watching Blu Rays to worry too much about trivialities such as the internet or the multi-billion dollar global film industry (our Blu haul this year included Moon, Inglourious Basterds, Bourne trilogy and Fringe S1, just in case you're wondering.)

This was deeply wrong of us.

Rest assured, just like that albino dude in The Da Vinci Code, we're flagellating ourselves silly in penance as we write this. We will be around LOTS in 2010, however, and by way of an apology, here's a round up of some of the key Chrimbo releases:-

Sherlock Holmes = Good
Avatar = Better
Nine = gonna wait for the DVD

That's pretty much all you need to know.

So, what's new with you?

THE WEATHER...WITH WERNER HERZOG

"I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony,
but chaos, hostility and murder."

Today's weather: HEAVY SNOW.