From commercial prospects to Academy Awards, nothing is for sure in Hollywood - but you'd better plan for it anyway, writes Michael Dwyer
Fromthe awards season in early spring through the battle of the blockbusters at the summer box-office, 2006 was another year of winners and losers, yielding more than a few surprises that defied conventional wisdom. The first came as the most boring Oscars show in years crawled to an end. Jack Nicholson opened the Best Picture envelope and seemed so surprised that he had to look again before declaring that the most coveted Academy Award was going to Crash.
With that single word, Nicholson sent shockwaves through the auditorium and around the world. This was the biggest Oscar upset in decades. And, for the second year in a row, the most hotly fancied film fell at the final hurdle, as Brokeback Mountain finally lost the momentum it had built on the awards circuit.
Last year Martin Scorsese's The Aviator suffered a similar fate, entering the ceremony as front-runner and losing out to Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, which was scripted by Crash director Paul Haggis. The crucial difference is that Eastwood's film was far more deserving of the major award than The Aviator, whereas Crash, for all its merits, cannot compare with Brokeback Mountain as a film-making achievement.
The beginning of May marked the traditional start of the blockbuster season, and first into the fray was the expensive, effects-laden Mission: Impossible III, carrying high commercial expectations that were dashed by the end of its opening weekend. The special effects served the narrative, rather than the other way round, and the action set-pieces were spectacular, orchestrated with cinematic flair and exemplary stunt work.
The problem was perceived to be the star, Tom Cruise, whose long-held status as Hollywood's golden boy was tarnished overnight. It was all about image, and the consensus was that several missteps - his excessive declarations of love for Katie Holmes, his attacks on Brooke Shields for using anti-depressants to deal with post-natal depression - alienated a substantial share of his audience: women. Cruise and Shields later made up, and she even attended his highly publicised wedding to Holmes in Italy last month. But the powerful owner of Paramount Pictures, Sumner Redstone - prompted by his wife, he said - severed the studio's association with Cruise in August.
The actor who replaced Cruise at the top of the box-office pile was Johnny Depp - an outcome that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, when Depp was a stalwart of edgy, offbeat productions. His amusingly mannered portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow propelled Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest into the commercial stratosphere, eclipsing every other movie released here and around the world in 2006. Most critics, however, failed to share the enthusiasm of audiences for what was rated as an unwisely over-extended yarn that sank whenever Depp was off screen.
The chasm between audiences and critics had come into sharp focus a few weeks earlier, when Ron Howard's movie of The Da Vinci Code was lambasted in the media and cleaned up at the box-office, riding on the coat-tails of Dan Brown's mega-seller novel.
Some distributors bit the bullet and opened movies without advance press screenings, which paid off for a few genre franchises such as Saw 3. The early internet buzz surrounding Snakes on a Plane convinced its distributors that website hype was a viable alternative to curmudgeonly critics, but the movie's indifferent box-office results told a different story. And the most unsympathetic character in M Night Shyamalan's risibly self-indulgent folly, Lady in the Water, was a sniffy film critic who came to a sorry end, just like the movie itself when it opened and quickly closed.
The chorus of disapproval over The Da Vinci Code echoed around the world within hours of its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, overshadowing, at least for a few days, many far superior movies showing in competition. When it came to awards night in Cannes, there was another big surprise.
Pedro Alomodóvar was the hot favourite to take his first Palme d'Or for the widely admired Volver, but the jury opted to give its most prestigious prize to Ken Loach for his Irish Civil War drama, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, shot entirely in Co Cork with a predominantly Irish cast and crew.
"This is extraordinary," Loach told The Irish Times after he accepted the award. "I hope Ireland feels it's their film. It is their film." The Irish audience agreed, turning out in such numbers to see it that only Pirates of the Caribbean 2 kept Loach's film off the top of the Irish box-office chart for the first 11 months of the year. Only Casino Royale (featuring another of the year's surprise winners, Daniel Craig, laying firm claim to the 007 role) has any prospect of dislodging it before the end of the year.
Apart from Neil Jordan's adventurous Breakfast on Pluto, which enjoyed a successful Irish release in January, it was a disappointing year for Irish productions on home turf. John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail and David Gleeson's The Front Line, topical contemporary pictures that received more favourable reviews in the international film trade papers than in the Irish media, fell well short of expectations at the Irish box-office, as did Paul Mercier's Studs, and cinema admissions for Brian Kirk's Middletown, Billy O'Brien's Isolation and Anthony Byrne's Short Order were much lower.
More than 70 productions received Irish Film Board funding during 2006, including feature films, TV series, animation, documentaries and shorts. Most of the features were at the lower end of the budget scale and the industry was boosted by more elaborate TV series.
Flying the Irish flag at the Oscars, Martin McDonagh's simmeringly powerful Six Shooter, starring Brendan Gleeson and Ruaidhri Conroy, took the award for Best Short Film. And Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers collected the prize for Best Actor in a TV Drama or Mini-series for Elvis, in which he played the title role, at the Golden Globe awards, where Cillian Murphy was a nominee for Breakfast on Pluto.
Robert Altman, who was nominated five times as Best Director without ever winning an Academy Award, received an honorary Oscar and the night's only standing ovation. Altman died towards the end of a year that marked the passing of such distinctive talents as directors Gillo Pontecorvo, Richard Fleischer, Val Guest, Daryl Duke, Shohei Imamura, Fabián Bielinsky, Gordon Parks and Eloy de la Iglesia; producers Kevin McClory and Zelda Barron; screenwriters Jay Presson Allen, Gérard Brach and Leonard Schrader; cinematographer Sven Nykvist; production designer Henry Bumstead; composers Malcolm Arnold and Basil Poledouris; and actors Philippe Noiret, Shelley Winters, Jack Palance, Glenn Ford, Maureen Stapleton, Alida Valli, Jack Warden, Jack Wild, June Allyson, Tom Bell, Adrienne Shelley, Moira Shearer, Dennis Weaver, Arthur Hill, Barnard Hughes, Chris Penn, Tamara Dobson, Bruno Kirby, Jane Wyatt, Anthony Franciosa, Edward Albert, Darren McGavin and Brendan Cauldwell.
TOP 20 MOVIES RELEASED IN IRELAND IN 2006
1. Brokeback Mountain
2. L'enfant
3. United 93
4. The Departed
5. Fateless
6. Hidden/Caché
7. Capote
8. The Queen
9. Breakfast on Pluto
10. Little Children
11. Children of Men
12. Volver
13. Pan's Labyrinth
14. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
15. Flags of Our Fathers (opening next Friday)
16. Little Miss Sunshine
17. The Squid and the Whale
18. Red Road
19. Time to Leave/Le Temps Qui Reste
20. District 13
Near misses: Paradise Now, The Proposition, Match Point, Syriana, Tsotsi, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Miami Vice, Inside Man, Munich, Junebug, Heading South, A Cock and Bull Story, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Superman Returns, Shortbus, Borat
TOP 10 TURKEYS OF 2006
1. Lady in the Water
2. Manderlay
3. Romance & Cigarettes
4. RV - Runaway Vacation
5. Beerfest
6. Pulse
7. Jackass Number Two
8. The Fog
9. Big Momma's House 2
10. An Unfinished Life
THE BEST AND WORST OF 2006
Film of the year:Brokeback Mountain
Director of the year:Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain
New director of the year:Lajos Koltai for Fateless
Irish director of the year:Neil Jordan for Breakfast on Pluto
Best actress:Helen Mirren for The Queen
Best actor:Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain and Candy
Best supporting actor:Jake Gyllenhaal for Brokeback Mountain
Best supporting actress:Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada
Comeback of the year:Jackie Earle Haley for Little Children and All the King's Men
Most promising new actress:Déborah François for L'Enfant and The Page Turner
Most promising new actor:Samuel Barnett for The History Boys
Best Irish actor:Cillian Murphy for Breakfast on Pluto and The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Best Irish actress:Eva Birthistle for Middletown and Breakfast on Pluto
Best Irish actress in a supporting role:Fionnula Flanagan for Transamerica
Best Irish actor in a supporting role:Ciarán Hinds for Munich
Best new Irish actor or actress:Padraic Delaney for The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Best documentary:Jonathan Demme for Neil Young: Heart of Gold
Best animated feature:Gil Kenan for Monster House
Best original screenplay:Peter Morgan for The Queen
Best adapted screenplay:Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for Brokeback Mountain
Best cinematography:Caleb Deschanel for Ask the Dust
Best original score:Gustavo Santaolalla for Brokeback Mountain
Best original film song:Chris Cornell for You Know My Name in Casino Royale
Best compilation soundtrack:Breakfast on Pluto
Best film editing:Thelma Schoonmaker for The Departed
Best production design:Eugenio Caballero for Pan's Labyrinth
Best costume design:Consolata Boyle for The Queen
Best casting:Ellen Lewis for The Departed
Best sound:Flags of Our Fathers
Best visual effects:Superman Returns
Best remake:Martin Scorsese for The Departed
Worst remake:Rupert Wainwright for The Fog
Most underrated film:Pierre Morel for District 13
Most overrated film:Mary Harron for The Notorious Bettie Page
Most misconceived film:Steven Zaillian for All the King's Men
Most miscast actor:Russell Crowe in A Good Year
Worst actress:Jennifer Lopez in An Unfinished Life
Worst actor:James Gandolfini for Romance & Cigarettes
Worst film:M Night Shyamalan for Lady in the Water
