As many as 45 countries have submitted movies for consideration as best foreign-language film at next spring's Oscars ceremony. And while anything is possible in this most unpredictable of Oscar categories, the five most likely to get on to the nominations shortlist will probably come from the nine strongest contenders: Run Lola Run (Germany), Life Is Beautiful (Italy), The Dream Life Of Angels (France), Central Station (Brazil), Festen/The Celebration (Denmark), The Powder Keg (Yugoslavia), Tango (Argentina), Eternity And A Day (Greece), The Inheritors (Austria) and The Barber Of Siberia (Russia).
The date for the announcement of the Oscar nominations in all categories is February 9th next, and the ceremony itself is set for March 21st, as the Academy moves to a Sunday slot from the traditional Monday. Bad news for anyone who has relied on the BBC for live overnight coverage of the full Oscars ceremony in recent years: having lost Barry Norman earlier this year, the BBC has now lost the rights to live Oscars coverage - again to the Sky Movies subscription service.
With John Boorman's Dublin crime thriller, The General, set to open in the US on December 18th in time to qualify for Oscar consideration, the film has already gained one high-profile American advocate in Francis Ford Coppola - himself no slouch when it comes to gangster movies, as the first two films in The Godfather trilogy proved. On the subject of The General, Coppola says: "The film is shot in crisp black-and-white scope by Seamus Deasy, whose work, along with the production design provide imaginative and powerful scenes that are as good as any I've seen. Every element of the film was exciting to me."
Carole Bouquet and Mel Smith will compere this year's European Film Awards, which take place tonight at the Old Vic theatre in London. Irish interest resides in Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy, which has two nominations, for best European film of the year, and best European cinematographer, Adrian Biddle.
The European Critics' Award will be presented to the Yugoslavian director, Goran Paskaljevic for The Powder Keg, his searing picture of simmering violence over the course of one eventful night in Belgrade in the winter of 1995. Subscribers to the Sky Movies Premier Channel will have an opportunity to see the awards ceremony next Sunday night at 9.30.
The guest list for the 10th Dublin French Film Festival, which opened last night, will include Gaspar Noe, whose feature film debut, Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone) is certain to be the event's most provocative and controversial movie. Noe will attend its screening at the IFC on Thursday night.
Director Bruno Podalydes will introduce his film, Dieu Seul Me Voit (Only God Sees Me), which stars his brother, Denis, on Monday evening. And the closing film on Sunday week, Eric Rohmer's Conte d'Autumne (An Autumn Tale) will be represented by one of its two stars, Marie Riviere, whose long association with Rohmer includes key roles in The Aviator's Wife and The Green Ray.
Written and directed by Peter Sheridan, The Break- fast won the Prix Arte (Europe) award at the Brest International Short Film Festival last month. It was produced by Pat Boylan for the RTE/ Irish Film Board Short Cuts scheme.
The 18-minute film features Gavin Dowdall as a young inmate of an Irish industrial school. His principal duty is to bring the head brother, a disciplinarian (Frank McDonald) his breakfast every day. One day the head finds a hair in his breakfast . . .
How's about this for the cast of a new Irish movie: George Clooney, Kenneth Branagh, Melanie Griffith, Chazz Palminteri and director Bryan Singer. Well, not strictly the cast list, but they all make cameo appearances in The Book That Wrote Itself, a low-budget road movie written and directed by Liam O Mochain, who also takes the central role of Vincent Macken, a young Irish writer convinced he has written the best post-modern novel ever, a Celtic saga titled The Daughter Of Conn, which he believes has the potential for a hit movie.
The film was shot in Dublin, Wicklow, Wexford, Cork, Clare, Galway, and Venice - where O Mochain secured a press card for this year's film festival and went to press conferences, where he tried to persuade the aforementioned celebs to take part in his character's proposed film of The Daughter Of Conn.
The award for best film at the recent San Sebastian Film Festival went to director Alejandro Agresti for the imaginatively-titled El Viento Se Llevo lo Que, which translates as Wind With The Gone. It's set in an isolated Patagonian village in the 1970s, where the only form of entertainment are the old movies screened nightly. The prints invariably arrive in a battered state, with reels missing and scenes spliced in randomly from other movies - or even upside down. Hence the title.
The director James Cameron follows his enormously successful Titanic with Terminator 23-D, a new "virtual adventure" due to open next spring at the Universal Studios theme park in Los Angeles. The attraction, for which Cameron shares directing credits with special effects wizard Stan Winston, combines live-action stunts with a 12-minute original film described as "frame-by-frame, the most expensive live-action motion picture ever produced." Nothing new there for Mr Cameron.
The "virtual adventure" is described as a "sequel" to Cameron's 1991 hit movie, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and it features original cast member Edward Furlong in a battle to save humanity from destruction. Projected on three giant screens billed as "the world's largest 3-D installation," the attraction is reported to have cost nearly £50 million.
Sean Penn and Marlon Brando are in talks regarding a film of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, The Autumn Of The Patriarch. Penn is planning to direct it with Brando in a starring role. Brando is also in talks with the British director Tony Kaye, who made the recent American History X, about starring in a film of the Tennessee Williams story, One Arm, while Penn is in negotiations to direct the Death Row drama, Monster's Ball.
Casting around: The Yugoslavian film-maker, Emir Kusturica - whose latest movie, Black Cat, White Cat opens here in the spring - is turning actor to co-star with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil in La Veuve de Saint Pierre, the next film from director Patrice Leconte . . . The Australian actor, Russell Crowe, from Romper Stomper and LA Confidential, has been signed to star in Ridley Scott's Gladiator, a $100 million production from DreamWorks and Universal Pictures . . . and Gabriel Byrne is tipped to join Arnold Schwarzenegger in The End of Days, an action thriller set in New York and to be directed by Peter Hyams.
The second Galaxie Lounge season of classic movies continues next Tuesday night at Virgin Cinemas in Dublin with Norman Jewison's racial drama, In The Heat Of The Night, featuring Rod Steiger in his Oscar-winning performance and Sidney Poitier, and on Tuesday week with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Both screenings start at 8.45 p.m.
Film Four, the new subscription film channel from Channel 4, took a double-page advertisement in last Sunday's broad-sheets to announce its wares. The line-up is as hip and eclectic as one would expect from C4 - except that it promises as one of its attractions "Scorsese's The Deer Hunter". Fascinating as that prospect might be, the ad suggests that someone at C4 doesn't know their "This is this" from their "You talkin' to me?".
If you felt there was just not really quite enough irony in all those recent, very knowing teens-in-peril horror movies, they are now about to be spoofed in the comedy, Scream If You Know What I Did Last Summer.
Meanwhile, the (comparatively) straight-faced I Still Know What You Did Last Summer has just opened in the US. It's enough to make one want to, well, scream.
