Birdman, which is a top contender for best picture also stars Emma Stone who is nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category. PHOTO: REUTERS
LOS ANGELES: To the outside world, Hollywood might ooze effortless glamour, but just about anyone who makes movies will say the process is a long grind, and a continual blow to the ego and bank account.
That might explain why two films that embody the inherent struggle of show business — Birdman and Boyhood are top contenders for best picture at Sunday’s 87th Academy Awards.
The strength of Birdman lies not only in its nine Oscar nominations but also in a story the appeals to the Academy’s largest voting bloc: actors.
Director Alejando G. Inarritu presents a washed up, former superhero actor trying to make a comeback, portrayed by Michael Keaton, whose own career sagged after his Batman heydey.
“I think everybody in the Academy can relate to that because that’s the state of normalcy for the film industry, that you spend a lot of time unemployed,” he added.
Keaton could therefore win best actor over Eddie Redmayne, who has won a slew of awards for his portrayal of physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.
Boyhood is a more simple story of a boy of divorced parents coming of age, but director Richard Linklater earned respect from the industry for a marathon undertaking never before attempted: making the film over 12 years with the same actors. And he did it on a shoestring budget.
It could be that the top contenders split best picture and best director, as 12 Years a Slave and Gravity did last year.
The film that has been most popular with audiences is American Sniper, director Clint Eastwood’s gritty portrayal of late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the US military’s most lethal sharpshooter after his four tours in the Iraq war.
It has earned $307 million at the domestic box office, more than the other seven best picture nominees combined, and gathered strength in recent weeks amidst a heated debate about war and snipers.
Selma, the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, drew early support but lost steam after it earned only two nods and became the symbol of the lack of diversity among this year’s nominees.
With one of the smallest collective box office showings for best picture nominees in recent times, the Academy faces a challenging year for its telecast. It is betting on big music acts and first-time host Neil Patrick Harris to bring in the young audience.
Amid the entire Oscar hullabaloo, a bomb scare triggered by an erratic motorist brandishing a propane tank at a shopping strip near the Hollywood venue for the upcoming Oscars show proved to be a false alarm on Thursday, but the man was detained, Los Angeles police said.
Bomb squad investigators cordoned off a row of storefronts and the front entrance of a hotel across the street after a man who was driving recklessly in the area emerged from his car with the propane cannister.
The man told police who stopped him that he also had two canisters of nitrous oxide, a non-flammable gas also known as laughing gas. He was taken into custody while the bomb squad was called to investigate the situation, police said.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 21st, 2015.
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