By Steven Zeitchik

The Oscar battle for animated film <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN0133454320071101
“>was intense last year.

But it may be even more wild this year.

So wild, it may not even just be about best animated film anymore.

Ever since the best ani category was created seven years ago, the conventional wisdom is that no movie eligible for the category will ever work its way into the best picture race. (”Beauty and the Beast” was nommed, but that was in 1991, long before a separate category was created that siphoned off best pic votes.)

But Wall-E is getting serious critical acclaim, not to mention pop-cultural cachet, as film editor Gregg Kilday notes in his recent story. (Check out the THR review here.)

And while predicting Oscars in June is like predicting a World Series winner in February, this may in fact be the year that the Pixar set crashes the party.

People forecast that every year, you say? They said it with Ratatouille last year? Sure. But 2008 is different. Last year at this time Cannes had already offered a few frontrunners like “No Country,” which wound up landing best pic. This year there are no obvious candidates so far (we’re still not anywhere near sold on “Changeling”).  

There will also be a lot fewer specialty releases overall – about 20% fewer, by the count of one recent exec –and thus less competition.

And Ratatouille, for all its polish, took on relatively modest themes like the subjectivity of taste. This one, set in the future but urgently about the weird and fraught path we’re on today, is a clever metaphor about the hubris of human ambition, an environmentalist cri de coeur and a cautionary tale about the power of technology. Bigger stuff than what does or doesn’t make for a good bouillabaisse.

There are also a lot fewer of the traditional Pixar touches — no cartoonish villain or madcap child-friendly pacing — that we suspect puts off some Oscar voters.

What’s more, as well-reviewed as it was, “Ratatouille” trails even “Wall-E” when it comes to a critical Q rating; at 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s one tick higher than that film (and also higher than any best picture winner in nearly a decade).

There is the money problem — contemporary wisdom, after all, says that when it comes to the Oscars, box-office is a bell curve; you can’t earn too much or too little — but given all the Oscar movies that didn’t make money last year, there may be a sympathy vote to counteract that.

“Wall-E” isn’t the only animated pic with an intriguing Oscar storyline. A film with Academy potential did get a bow in Cannes — and it, too, wasn’t live action. “Waltz with Bashir,” Israeli Ari Folman’s first-person animated docu in which he tries to reclaim blacked-out memories of his time fighting in the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war (it’s not Rotoscoping — he interviewed his subjects and then hand-drew them, so it feels more animated than actorly). We caught the movie in Cannes and it’s a work of dreamlike poignancy, a rebuke against war even as it methodically tracks war’s twists and turns.

At first glance, the SPC pickup follows in the footsteps of its previous arthouse animated faves which earned ani Oscar nominations, like “Persepolis” and “Triples of Belleville.” But Bashir may have a few more swings of the bat — it’s the only pic that we know of that’s ever been potentially eligible for best picture, best documentary, best animated and (assuming Israel puts it forth as its selection) best foreign film.

So the year is nearly half over, and among the few early Oscar contenders, two are animated movies. Maybe Andrew Stanton and the creators of “Wall-E” are right — we do live in strange times.

By Steven Zeitchik

A “low-budget effects movie” sounds like something you attempted with your cousin Tommy in the basement of his house on Long Island circa 1985, using a few matches and an old car battery to create the exact series of explosions from the last scene of Star Wars.

But low-budget effects is exactly the kind of paradox “300″ so effectively pulled off last year, along with concepts like “word-of-mouth commercial smash” and “movies with homoerotic undertones that millions of aggro teenage boys didn’t seem to notice.”

It’s always been a a bit of a mystery why studios didn’t push for a “300″ follow-up more quickly after Warners’ early March release topped $450 million worldwide with little else but a bag of greenscreen tricks. The Hollywood epic is already a time-tested genre, and now that it’s appealing even to a quadrant that once might have shunned it, it would seem like a marketing no-brainer.

Well, those waiting on tenterhooks for 300: 2 (600?), toss out your anti-anxiety pills. The producers who brought you that film, Gianni Nunnari and Mark Canton are, like the Spartans and Megarans in the Archidamian stage of the Peloponnesian war, joining forces to come up with a new film. It’s called “War of the Gods,” it’s been snapped up and will be financed by Relativity (and produced by Ryan Kavanaugh), and the hook is that, this time, the gods actually come down to fight.

(This is the logline, by the way: “A purported bastard who retains an allegiance to his mother despite the fact that he longs to join the quest of a king who is battling demons in ancient Greece later embarks on a grail of discovery that has him finding he is the king’s son and also fated to become his country’s greatest hero as he leads the successful war against long-imprisoned Titans who are hoping to use the demons to restore their power.”)

Anyway.  

It all seems like an eminently commercial idea, and for all its techno-wizardy, in many ways it reps the kind of epic storytelling purists complain Hollywood doesn’t do much of anymore.

Only here’s the thing: Warners has been working on a similar epic-style greenscreen project. It’s called “Clash of the Titans,” it has Louis Leterrier already attached, and, well, it’s going to be a little tough to release two similar movies going after pretty much the same audience in close proximity.

Warners thought so, because there was even talk at the studio of the company buying the “Gods” project — whose script was said to be further along — and swapping in that script for the “Titans” one (but still calling it “Titans”).

In the end the studio decided to pass and just go ahead with its own movie, leaving Relativity to make the purchase and fast-track the pic. This won’t move at the centennial pace of the Grecian wars (or many studio productions); the company could begin shooting as early as the first quarter of 2009.

So from a post-”300″ vacuum to two rival projects battling it out to get to production first, to get to theaters quickest, to position itself as the true follow-up to “300.” Now there’s an epic battle someone should make a movie of.

By Steven Zeitchik

The path to the development graveyard is littered with television stars who dreamt too big. Sure, George Clooney and Johnny Depp made the trip from primetime to opening weekend. But don’t try too hard to find many other “Facts of Life,” “ER” or “21 Jump Street” stars who managed same.

So is Sarah Jessica Parker another Johnny Depp or another Peter Deluise?

There’s of course no way to know yet whether SJP can make it on the bigscreen without her ensemble, her Michael Patrick King writing, her gratuitous shoe references. Parker’s hits, after all, can be attributed to to other reasons (McConaughey in “Failure to Launch”) and her misses (the undermarketed “Smart People”) just as easily explained away.

But there’s little doubt about how Warners thinks. The studio is hign on SJP, betting that “Sex” is, well, merely foreplay. Execs brought a number of projects to Parker after “SATC” went from urbane HBO brand to megamillions machine.  Parker dutifully took a look, but one in particular, a project called “The Ivy Chronicles,” set her heart aflutter more than a pair of Manolos turns Carrie girlish.  (Jeez, it’s contagious.)

And this project that tempts so many headline writers to ‘ivy growing’ puns? It’s a story about a mother, jolted by a divorce and a career crisis, who starts over again using her ingenuity and persistence. The territory lies somewhere between “The Starter Wife” and “The Nanny Diaries,” only here the mother is the protagonist.

The real question of course is not whether the story is any good — have you seen “Failure to Launch”? –  but how much of a card-carrying star Parker, post-”Sex,” is in her own right.

The star game is a tricky one. Some franchises need stars and some stars need franchises. “Pirates” without Johnny Depp is just a bad “Hook” remake. Tobey Maguire without “Spider Man,” on the other hand, is a guy badly in need of a superhero vehicle. Whether Parker without her girls is one-fourth the star or, in fact, the one who was carrying “Sex” all along, will be for Warners to learn — and for the public to address, one pair of Jimmy Choos at a time.

By Steven Zeitchik

The word today that MSNBC will use “Dear Zachary” as a springboard to increase involvement in feature-length documentaries was welcome news for a category that’s been harassed by some tough times at the box office, and almost as many news stories belaboring same.

So what really is the state of the documentary? From the movies we caught at the Silverdocs festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, this past weekend, not as shabby as the doomer stories would suggest. There’s a more innovative and interesting group of filmmakers out there than ever, even if the market has yet to demonstrate the Spurlockian and Penguin-ish vigor of 2004. Sure, some of the movies can be a little rough around the edges. But anyone bemoaning the state of American filmmaking as cookie-cutter and studio-compliant, beset by the same foreign competition as cars and computers (damn you, Romania), would have been heartened by a trip to this quiet middle-class suburb on the Edgar Allan Poe side of the D.C.-Maryland border.

A couple of the movies have been on the fest circuit, and a few more will open in the coming months. Here’s our take on a few of them — including “Zachary” – as well as some of the premieres.

“Man on Wire:” — There’s really no better testament to quixotic whimsy than James Marsh’s look at Philippe Petit’s walk across the twin towers in the mid-1970’s, a film that Magnolia releases next month. Marsh’s Erroll Morris-esque use of re-enactment may trouble some purists, but quirkiness and persistence of vision, the sheer _Frenchness_ of it, is more than just charming — it’s inspiring.

“Holy Land Hardball” — Is it “Hoop Dreams” or an Alex Gibney-style look at the shortsightedness of institutional who say they have it all under control? A little of both, as directors Brett Rapkin and Erik Kesten capture moments of striking grandiosity and stunning cluelessness in the bid to bring America’s pastime to Israel. The lesson: If you want to bring baseball to a country that’s never had it, maybe make sure they have dirt for a pitching mound first.

“The Garden” — One of the buzzed-about titles we didn’t get to see, in part because our first reaction was: Community garden in South Central? Just another tale that’s a triumph of the spirit, or at least of the chrysanthemums. But people who have seen it report back on a twisty tale of civic neglect, community power and, of course, botany.

“American Teen” — Nanette Burstein’s take on a group of disparate high-school seniors at an Indiana school shows that you can portray both types and individuated characters at the same time. The movie is interested in people more than storylines, though that doesn’t mean it doesn’t embrace the natural dramatic calendar of a school year (graduation, prom, basketball season). It’s a thinking man’s “Laguna Beach,” though Vantage’s marketing is very “Breakfast Club,” minus the Simple Minds theme song. (You know you remember.)

“Dear Zachary” — Painting concentric circles around the story of an elderly couple who lost their 28-year-old son after a psychologically disturbed ex-girlfriend allegedly murdered him — while pregnant with his child — Kurt Kuenne makes a movie for the ages. If this was five years ago, when dark docs were more commercially fashionable, it would be as successful as “Capturing the Fredmans.” As it is, it’s still a really solid movie that hopefully a few million people will watch on TV and a few more in theaters. “Zachary” is an indictment of a (Canadian) legal system, a portrait of a lost friend  and a minutely detailed study of determination in the face of great pain, with a shocking event at the center. The rapid cuts sometimes seem to put effect over substance, but no matter — the movie’s power derives from intensely traumatic events happening in real-time to one very real family.

What documentaries should do, in other words.

By Borys Kit

Don’t call Timur Bekmambetov a Russian. Meet the director of the Russian-language “Nightwatch” and the new Angelina Jolie comic-book movie “Wanted,” and he’ll be quick to tell you that he’s not Russian and that living in Russia hasn’t influenced his fantasy-flavored filmmaking at all.

The Soviet Union? Well, that’s a different matter. Timur grew up behind the Iron Curtain, and was so deeply embedded in it that among his influences he cites…Josef Stalin?

“(The Soviet Union) was a fantasy world created by one man, and his name was Stalin, and he created and controlled everything,” Timur said. “How to dress, how to drink, how to talk, how to think. He was the producer.”

Timur continued,  ”We lived for seventy years in a fantasy movie created by one person. It gave us a sensibility and the ability to believe different things. That influences your way of thinking.”

If that’s the case, then the legacy of the Cold War may not be as grim after all. Timur’s new film has a kind of Fight Club-meets-The Matrix vibe, takes effective jabs at corporate culture and offers some pretty stylish slow-mo gun action. Just don’t look for the Beatles and blue jeans.

By Steven Zeitchik

Maybe it’s the recent move to studio pictures like “Inside Man” and “Miracle at St. Anna,” or just the general stylized intensity of his work, but we’d sort of forgotten how strong a documentarian Spike Lee really is. At Silverdocs, where we spent a dizzing few days taking in all manner of nonfiction novelty and nobility, we also caught a Q&A Lee gave after he received the Charles Guggenheim award, the fest’s equivalent of a lifetime achievement prize.

We’d forgotten, for instance, how startling “When the Levees Broke” and “Four Little Girls” really are — no other doc director working today can combine testimony, images and a sense of historical urgency in quite the same way. But the one that really brought it all back is his 2002 Showtime short “We Wuz Robbed.” The quick cuts between the various Gore staffers describing that fateful 2000 election night was as artful and jolting as HBO’s recent “Recount,” the Danny Strong docudrama that was solid but which took a lot more years and film to basically tell the same story.

Unfortunately, not all of Lee’s work resonated. Auds watched a ten-minute promo reel of “St. Anna,” and the movie just didn’t compel in the same way. It had the urgency, but a it too much of it, ladling on the melodrama in a way that certain wartime pictures do. It’s going to be very interesting to see if Lee’s indie-feature skills translate  to a big wartime epic the way they did in a bank-heist movie like “Inside Man.”

Lee also revealed some good bits about upcoming projects. Get ready for the year-in-the-life Michael Jordan docu at Cannes and the day-in-the-life Kobe pic on ABC/ESPN at the start of the ‘08 season  (if only there were some Knick players worthy of a day-in-the-life-docu; heck, we’d settle for ten seconds).

And speaking of drama, the director is one of those interview subjects that makes people in the audience pity the interviewer– in this case the Denver Post’s Lisa Kennedy — at least until said questioner realizes that a)his orneriness is no reflection on you b)you may as well stay on the topics close to his heart because those are the only ones he’s going to talk about anyway. Kennedy didn’t get anywhere with subjects like the difference between helmng fiction and docs. But Lee was by his standards downright gregarious  when he got onto Barack Obama and a certain other black filmmaker.

After saying “there’s no if” on Obama and he was already making his hotel reservations for the inauguration, Lee said, “It changes everything, so its going to be BB and AB, Before Obama and After Obama. Some folks need to get used this because they’re still clinging.”

And then he took a dig at Tyler Perry for what he apparently feels is, er, derivative, filmmaking. After saying Lee couldn’t make a Martin Luther King film because “I can’t do everything – I’ve got to leave something for Tyler Perry” he then added an extra poke, in what may be the world’s first crypto-poetic dig, that he’d been in Perry territory long before the playwright-turned-brand. ”I made the movie. (It was called) ‘Bamboozled.’ Coonie buffoonery.”

Now that’s nonfiction gold.

By Steven Zeitchik

Steven Wright once asked how young you can be to die of old age. Hollywood has a different version of the question these days: how old can an era be for a movie to be made about it?

Plenty of different (old) ages, apparently. As a story we’ve spent the last few days tinkering with shows, no era is too far back for the studios and specialty divisions, which are prepping literally dozens of period movies for this fall. You want duchesses and courtiers circa 1780? Hollywood’s got it. Priests and nuns in an early 60’s Catholic school –or Southern estates in the same period? Searchlight and Miramax won’t let you down. World War II romance in China, Australia and Europe? The Weinstein Company, Fox and Par Vantage are all here to help.

There are so many period movies set to hit in September it’ll actually be the bigger anomaly when people in movies wear recognizable clothing and use cellphones.

So why is retro the new contemporary? It’s hard to put a finger on what’s behind this thinking on the bigscreen (and on television, where nearly every Emmy-nominated movie this year seems to be a period piece as well). But critics and execs have plenty of ideas, the most palatable of which is that it’s a lot easier to make the kind of binary good-versus-evil movies that are seen as reliable standbys if you remove it from the last thirty years. Postmodernism what? Relativism who?

Maybe that’s why the most modern of the period pieces takes place pretty much at the moment when the era of innocence ended and the the age of skepticism and ambiguity began — the Watergate period, the birth of which is what Ron Howard’s fall entry “Frost/Nixon” examines.

Of course consumers may not embrace the simplicity of the old with the same gusto. After all, the common thinking has it that last year brought too many dark movies about our current reality. Well, now we’ve got more hope….except  it’s hope about our grandparents’ reality.

By Jenna Bordelon

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Upon accepting the Visionary Award at The Hollywood Reporter’s Key Art Awards event Friday, Judd Apatow took time out to share a very special in-house email exchange with the audience at the Beverly Hilton.

In an acceptance piece tour-de-force, Apatow chronicles his attempts to convince Universal marketing exec Maria Pekurovskaya to change a promo reel’s content from a litany of dirty jokes to a list of his accomplishments. As Judd put it: "Less dick, more heart, hello?"

Check out both the reel and Judd’s pained reaction in our video exclusive.