But for Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman, producers of Sunday night’s 82nd Annual Academy Awards, the anxiety is just beginning. Although they’ve adopted the motto “expect the unexpected” to generate viewer interest in the broadcast, that doesn’t mean they themselves want to be surprised.

But Oscar shows rarely stick to the script.

Weather is the first unknown: Weatherunderground.com is predicting that Sunday will be mostly cloudy, with highs in the mid-50s to lower-60s and a 40% chance of showers — all of which suggests that the red carpet won’t be the warmest place on Earth.

National and international events also can intervene. That happened most recently in 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq five days before the show, and the Academy chose to shut down the red carpet altogether.

The real nightmare that haunts every Oscar producer is that the show itself turns into a globally broadcast pratfall.

The 61st Academy Awards, held March 29, 1989, at the Shrine, stands as the great object lesson.

“Rain Man” was named best picture, and that movie’s Dustin Hoffman and “The Accused’s” Jodie Foster won the top awards. But that’s not why the evening is remembered. Instead, Oscarologists still shake their heads over the infamous opening production number in which Merv Griffin sang “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts!” amid an onstage re-creation of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub before turning the stage over to a high-pitched Snow White, who boogalooed with Rob Lowe to the tune of “Proud Mary.”

As producer of that year’s show, Allan Carr was the man responsible. As author Robert Hofler writes in a dishy new biography of Carr, “Party Animals: A History of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr,” which Da Capo Press is publishing this month, “Allan tried to reinvent the Oscars through camp comedy.” But the Academy’s old guard saw it differently.

In an open letter, 17 prominent Hollywood figures, including past Academy president Gregory Peck, proclaimed the ceremony “an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry. It is neither fitting nor acceptable that the best work in motion pictures be acknowledged in such a demeaning fashion.”

Was it really as bad as all that? Certainly, earlier Oscar shows had seen their share of misconceived production numbers. But, yes, the 61st opener did manage to combine over-the-top excess with breathtakingly amateur execution.

To be sure, that wasn’t the initial plan.

Carr accepted the challenge because he was nothing if not a showman. He’d parlayed a career as a manager, turning performers like Ann-Margret into Las Vegas mainstays, into a successful gig as producer of “Grease,” which, at $188 million, still holds the domestic title of top-grossing movie musical. He’d also scored a hit on Broadway with the musical “La Cage aux Folles.”

But his luck ran out with 1980’s “Can’t Stop the Music,” in which he tried to package the Village People for mainstream consumption just at the moment disco died.

An inveterate party-giver, who’d entertained most of Old and New Hollywood at his Hillhaven Lodge in Benedict Canyon, Carr viewed the Oscars as the ultimate party at which he’d mix old-time stars with up-and-comers.

His biggest mistake was falling in love with San Francisco’s long-running musical revue “Beach Blanket Babylon,” inviting its producer and creator Steve Silver to devise the opening number. But what worked in a Frisco nightclub simply didn’t translate to the expansive stage of the Shrine. The nominees, just settling into their seats, didn’t know what to make of Ellen Bowman’s simpering Snow White. And while five years later Disney would bring dancing silverware to Broadway in its musical version of “Beauty and the Beast,” the dancing tables that took over the stage on Oscar Night just looked silly.

A second number — featuring such young actors as Patrick Dempsey, Christian Slater and Ricki Lake cavorting around the stage as they sang of dreams of becoming an Oscar winner — was almost as much of a bomb.

And the morning after the show, Carr’s phone was virtually silent instead of ringing off the hook with the customary kudos. A few days later, Disney sued the Academy for copyright infringement for inviting Show White to its ball, forcing the Academy to make a formal apology.

Never one to shy away from hyperbole, Carr told THR in advance of the show: “If nothing else, this will be the most beautiful Academy Awards of all time. It will be the antithesis of tacky.” When it turned out to be exactly the opposite, the Hollywood establishment pounced — the producer’s partisans suspected a certain amount of homophobia was directed at the unapologetically gay Carr — and his career was effectively over. His party days behind him, Carr retreated into relatively seclusion until his death in 1999.

The irony, though, is that for all his missteps, Carr introduced elements that since have become awards-show staples.

Hofler credits him with changing the presenter’s mantra “And the winner is …” to “And the award goes to. …” Carr drafted Rodeo Drive retailer Fred Hayman to urge designers to dress the stars. He emphasized the red carpet arrivals during the first minutes of the show, an element that has since been spun off into its own preshow. And his broadcast actually saw the best ratings the Oscars had seen in five years.

In the process, though, Carr learned the hard way a fact that every Oscar producer since has had to be wary of: When it comes to injecting showmanship into the Academy Awards, you can be damned if you don’t but also damned if you do.

Source: hollywoodreporter

Not a complete cease-fire, of course: For the A-list actors and big-name directors who dominate the race, the gathering is one more opportunity to charm some of the key voters in the Academy — albeit in a low-key way.

And because the seating is intentionally democratic — with stars sharing tables with sound mixers, feature directors seated next to creators of short films — it’s also a chance for all the nominees from different categories to introduce themselves to each other, free of the anxiety about who will ultimately win that takes over on Oscar night.

On the way into the pre-lunch mingle at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, some of the name nominees stopped by for a brief interview session with the media.

Asked who she was looking forward to meeting, best actress nominee Gabourey Sidibe, charmingly offered, “Steve Martin is the person I want to meet. My mom had a crush on Steve Martin and we used to watch ‘The Jerk’ every day. I’m excited that the show will be hosted by Jack Donaghy and the Jerk.”

Once inside, the guests chatted about the weather: Documentary feature nominee Rebecca Cammisa (“Which Way Home”) was happy to have escaped the cold back east for the California sunshine. Others volunteered their plans for the coming weeks: Anna Wydra, nominated for the short doc “Rabbit a la Berlin,” said she’d come all the way from Warsaw and intended to hang around until the awards take place on March 7. And still others engaged in friendly shop talk: “The Blind Side,” its profile burnished with a best pic nomination, opens in March in the U.K. and Germany, Broderick Johnson, one of its producers, was telling Summit co-chairman and CEO Rob Friedman.

Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman, who are producing the live broadcast, were busy making the rounds as well. Faced with introducing 10 best picture nominees, Shankman promised that film clips are being chosen with care so they’d be “deeper and richer,” making the case for why a film had been nominated.

Working to streamline the show, they’re also planning to use film clips, rather than performances, to spotlight the nominated songs.

One bit they revealed: The show will open with a film piece in which past winners talk about “what the awards mean to me,” and they previewed some unedited footage from Diablo Cody, Renee Zellweger and director Davis Guggenheim.

Other details are still being nailed down. Monday morning, Mechanic was awakened at 3 a.m. with news that one element of the show — he declined to be more specific — had fallen through, and so was immediately on the phone with Shankman till 5:30 a.m., discussing how to handle it.

Mechanic greeted Quentin Tarantino, a double nominee as both writer and director of “Inglourious Basterds,” who’s agreed to be a presenter. Did Quentin want something written for him, or did he want to write it himself, Mechanic wanted to know. Just write something for him, Tarantino said, and then he’d play with it.

“Thank you for coming today to our annual seminar on the inner workings of the preferential voting system,” Academy president Tom Sherak joked as he called the luncheon, which drew 121 nominees, to order.

The Academy Awards have two purposes, Sherak said: First, to recognize the work of outstanding film artists, and second, to encourage a larger conservation about movies.

This year, he argued, that conversation is especially wide-ranging. Noting that there are five nominees in the animated feature film category for the fiirst time in seven years; five documentary shorts for the first time in five years; and those ten best picture nominees, he applauded the Academy for extending its reach. “This year, it seems to be more lively, more interesting than it’s been in a while,” he said.

With that, the nominees were invited to assemble for the annual group photo: Jeff Bridges stood side by side Sandra Bullock, George Clooney was elbow to elbow with James Cameron, and honorary Oscar winner Roger Corman sat up against an oversized replica of the Oscar statuette.

As their names were called out in reverse alphabetic order — “Sherlock Holmes” composer Hans Zimmer was first and short documentary filmmaker Jon Alpert came last — each of the nominees was presented with a certificate of nomination. “Yeah,” called out Jason Reitman, a triple nominee for “Up in the Air,” as, just after him, his father, Ivan Reitman, one of that movie’s producers, was singled out.

Before the lunch wrapped, Shankman and Mechanic took a moment for the plea that Oscar show producers make every year, with mixed success: Winners should avoid laundry-list of thank-yous. “We want you to express what this once-in-a-lifetime moment feels like to you,” Mechanic said.

Winners have 45 seconds to express their gratitude. And in the case of those awards that recognize more than one person, the producers warned, the microphone will be muted once one winner speaks for the group.

But what if winners can’t decide among themselves who should be the designated acceptee? That could set up a couple of exciting sprints to the microphone.

Source: hollywoodreporter

Funnyman Martin won an Emmy Award nomination for hosting the 73rd Academy Awards and returned to take charge of the 75th event, but Baldwin has never fronted the big show.

Making the announcement on Tuesday (03Nov09), new Oscar telecast producers Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman stated, “We think the team of Steve and Alec are the perfect pair of hosts for the Oscars.

“Steve will bring the experience of having hosted the show in the past and Alec will be a completely fresh personality for this event.”

Martin jokes, “I am happy to co-host the Oscars with my enemy Alec Baldwin,” while The Cooler star Baldwin added, “I’m thrilled to be hosting the Oscars. I’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Baldwin was nominated for an Academy Award in 2003 for his supporting role in The Cooler. That year also marked his most recent appearance as a presenter on the show.

The Oscars will be presented on 7 March (10) at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

This year’s (09) big show was hosted by Aussie star Hugh Jackman.

Source: hollywoodupclose

The story of an 11-year-old girl’s adventures in an alternate universe, “Coraline” comes by its disturbing qualities honestly, through the efforts of writer-director Henry Selick and novelist Neil Gaiman. It may be rated PG, but it is more suitable for adults than the very small among us.

Gaiman, one of the premier dark fantasists of his generation, wrote the original novel, which has been translated into 30 languages and sold a million copies worldwide. As for Selick, his past as the director of the deliciously creepy “The Nightmare Before Christmas” tells you everything you need to know.

If you’ve seen “Nightmare,” you know that Selick is the preeminent practitioner of stop-motion animation, which makes “Coraline” the first 3-D film to be made in that painstaking, labor-intensive process that involves the frame-by-frame manipulation of three-dimensional models. Stop-motion and 3-D may seem like strange bedfellows, but in fact they complement each other beautifully.

That’s because while stop-motion creates a fantastical imaginary world, the addition of the third dimension makes it so unblinkingly real we feel we could walk around in it. The third dimension is how the universe rattling around in Selick’s head gains authenticity on-screen, and to watch it unfold that way makes the theatrical experience feel special in a way it often hasn’t in years.

Coraline Jones, the film’s feisty heroine (expertly voiced by Dakota Fanning), is introduced with a crisis on her hands. She and her unnamed parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) have moved from Michigan to dark and rainy Ashland, Ore., taking up rooms in a large Victorian called the Pink Palace, where Coraline is bored, bored, bored.

That’s in large part because her parents are oblivious to her existence and given to saying things like “I’m really, really busy” whenever she tries to get their attention. Even the appearance of a local boy named Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) doesn’t help.

So Coraline is more than delighted when she discovers a hidden door in the house that opens onto a rabbit hole that leads down to a parallel world. There she meets her Other Mother and her Other Father, the attentive, devoted parents she’s always wanted. They look and sound like her real parents, with one unsettling exception: Their active eyes have been replaced by large black buttons.

Everything in this other world is livelier and more exotic than the one upstairs. Even Coraline’s neighbors, the furtive acrobat known as the Amazing Bobinsky (Ian McShane) and the retired actresses called Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (the British comedy team of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) are much wilder and crazier down here than in the real world.

It’s in this thrilling other world that the combination of stop-motion and 3-D really comes into its own. A jumping mouse circus has 61 mice on-screen (and took 66 days to animate), and an entire audience of Scottie dogs, 248 strong, watches a theatrical performance. It’s impossible not to be impressed.

The more wonderful this world becomes, the more the Other Mother pressures Coraline to stay forever, to trade in her eyes for buttons. It becomes harder and harder for the girl to return to her real home, and the entire experience turns slowly but inexorably into the kind of nightmare you can’t wake up from no matter how hard you try. Advised by a self-possessed talking cat (Keith David), Coraline has to realize what is important in life and fight to keep herself and her family alive.

To bring this complex, unexpected world to the screen required a punishing investment of time and energy. “Coraline” spent two years in preproduction and then shot for 83 weeks on more than 50 small stages at Laika, an Oregon animation studio owned by Nike’s Phil Knight.

Every frame of film, wrote director of photography Pete Kozachik in American Cinematographer magazine, was “so dearly bought.” But while you’re watching “Coraline,” you are aware of none of that. Instead, you are captured completely by what is going on. How rare, and how wonderful, is that?

Cast & Crew:

Genre: Animation, Family, Fantasy, Horror

Starring: Ian McShane, Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders,

Director: Henry Selick

Producer: Bill Mechanic, Harry Linden, Mary Sandell

Writer: Henry Selick based on the book by Neil Gaiman

Click here to watch Coraline Trailer