Paramount Steps Up to Contest for Oscars
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?Like its namesake character, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Hollywood’s take on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, has been aging in reverse.
Fitzgerald’s tale begins in 1860 and stretches through the First World War. The version set for release by Paramount Pictures on Christmas Day kicks Button’s life span all the way forward to Hurricane Katrina and uses computer wizardry that could make the author’s Jazz Age fable feel almost young.
If it is all that Paramount executives hope, the movie, directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt, will also mark the birth of the next phase at the aging studio. Brad Grey, Paramount’s chairman, has been eager to show that he can sell tickets and win Oscars without the help of his DreamWorks partners — Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Stacey Snider — who are leaving to form a company of their own.
Mr. Grey is not the only studio chieftain chasing Oscar glory. This year a clutch of late-season releases promises to push several big studios heavily into the Oscar fray, as they move to fill space left by the closing or reorientation of specialty divisions like Warner Independent Pictures, Picturehouse and Paramount Vantage, which had come to dominate the awards race in recent years.
Some publicists who specialize in Oscar campaigns are privately predicting a year-end shootout between “Button” and “Frost/Nixon,” a planned December release from Universal Pictures, directed by Ron Howard and with Michael Sheen and Frank Langella in the title roles. The films have been seen by few, but the campaign machinery is already lining up behind them.
Next month Universal plans to release “Flash of Genius,” directed by Marc Abraham and starring Greg Kinnear, and “Changeling,” directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie.
Paramount’s DreamWorks division, though winding down, plans to release “The Soloist,” with Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, in November.
Other coming award contenders include “Australia,” with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, from 20th Century Fox. Sony Pictures has yet another drama, “Seven Pounds,” with Will Smith, as well as a James Bond film, “Quantum of Solace,” that has provoked early Oscar talk.
- from NYTimes