Howard Who?

The Oscars are here, and it seems that all the awards have been handed out already.

There is very little disagreement about which movies and artists are destined to win. Best picture has been expanded to 10 from 5 but only two of those films are being given attention as the possible award winner…Avatar and The Hurt Locker.

The Oscar nominations were announced Feb. 2, the same day that Avatar beat Titanic’s record of $600 million. For those who want to give the movie’s box office title an asterisk (possibly the dumbest thing ever), let’s also consider the fact that when Titanic made $600 million it was over a period of 10 months, and it just barely made it over $600 million. Meanwhile, after 50 days in theaters, Avatar has not only beaten $600 million, it has remained the top movie in the country. So something like $650 is not too unrealistic although everyone says the 3D Avatar-killer Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland will stop it in April.

And as for arguments that Avatar has a higher ticket price, well, it’s equally silly to give Gone with the Wind an asterisk because it didn’t have to contend with TV, video games, the Internet, and iPods in its day. The champ is the champ. Moving on…

The rest of the “inevitable” winners are Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart, Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side, Christoph Waltz for Inglorious Basterds, Mo’Nique for Precious, Up for Animated film, The White Ribbon for foreign language film, (NEW EDIT) The Cove for documentary feature…and director…well, it could go to Cameron, but I’m hoping it’s Kathryn Bigelow, whose win would be the first time a female director won.

Heck, even the film scoring category seems a foregone conclusion. Michael Giacchino for years has been putting in great work with little Oscar recognition. I thought his score for The Incredibles should have won, but it wasn’t even nominated. His scores for Alias and Lost are landmarks in TV scoring. Ratatouille, his first Oscar nomination, was an awesome score that grows the more you hear it. Earlier his Star Trek score was very tasteful, and in the general vein of the great Star Trek scores of the past by Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, and Leonard Rosenman. And any composer who uses the erhu is fine by me. I think it’s about time he gets the trophy.

If we were giving trophies to the most generous composer, it might have to go to Marco Beltrami, who is co-nominated for scoring The Hurt Locker. The guy has become a specialist in horror/action/suspense, but according to his website, he started off as a pretty serious composer. He studied in Italy with Luigi Nono, and later at Yale with Jacob Druckman, and at USC with Jerry Goldsmith.

The generosity comes in the form of FREE FILM SCORES that he passes out on his website. Pick a movie, and you can download the musical track, and in some cases, you can down a PDF of the sheet music. I’ve not seen a composer that eager to give away this much of his work, but it definitely shows a lot of confidence to bare yourself to the discerning public out there. Bravo!

Bible Study from 3:10 TO YUMA - Marco Beltrami (mp3) BUY

It’s odd to think of movies as being made by their composer. But the New Beverly is hosting a double bill of films scored by David Shire. And not only will they have the films, David Shire is slated to be there in person!

Who is David Shire? Well, I first blogged about him a couple of years ago. I was impressed by the way he handled a 12-tone row in writing a funk-inspired film score for The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 (not the recent film that was a remake but the one from 1974).

Just last year, I got intimate with David Shire through playing his music for his Broadway revue Closer Than Ever (above). I had no idea that the man had written Broadway musicals let alone been nominated for two Tony Awards (Baby and Big). My experience with his music is that he is real deal…complex, difficult, and full of emotion and humor.

One final thing: I knew early on that David Shire was married to Talia Shire of the Coppola clan. I did not know that he remarried Didi Conn, the actress that played Frenchy in the film version of Grease. Weird.

So go see his movies and meet the guy already!

Taiwanese news is amazing. Pundits screaming at each other, responding to people calling in to the television station, Chinese captions below keeping a meticulous written record of the debate, the endless pitter patter of verbiage sometimes in several different dialects (Mandarin and Taiwanese mostly). And this isn’t even one or two channels but 44!!! This is what a country that is engaged in democracy looks and sounds like…a country where 80 percent of its registered voters actually voted for President in 2008…a country where elected officials bitch slap each other during a Parlimentary address.

It’s not surprising then that they’d come up with CG simulations of the news that is about as entertaining as anything on TV. Taiwanese TV presents it matter of factly, like this is what we expect from top notch news. The above one is the Leno/Conan debacle of NBC. Watch another excellent one here about the Tiger Woods accident.

Speaking of late night, for the first time in Letterman history, Dave asked his musical guest The Heavy to play an encore. Not too shabby…

Colleen (live version) - The Heavy MP3    BUY

Philip Glass is probably the classical composer with the most luck in comedy and being seen by a huge huge audience. Just last night he was on the Colbert Report, accompanying a ridiculous performance piece sketch on the piano. Glass even was compelled to play Shave and a Haircut. What???

Glass has been on Saturday Night Live as a guest. Actually, when it aired on Comedy Central, I was amazed by how amazing it was to have an avant-garde composer get on SNL and play relatively avant-garde music. Even more exciting was that this was the episode that Francis Ford Coppola shows up and decides to make the show super gritty like his films. It’s off the cultural geek meters.

Finally Glass was referenced on the infamous South Park Christmas special, which I wrote about here. If you recall, he was responsible for the music of the failed experimental Christmas play. And the cartoon version of him played keyboards in the arpeggiated style he’s known for.

Glass is easily the most commercial of the major classical composers of the last 20 or 30 years. His film scores are Oscar-nominated. He worked on music with people like Paul Simon and David Bowie. And in some respects, he is the most ridiculous since his music is such a trademark and so easy to parody.

In the age of increasing classical music dabblers due to easy mp3 access, I wonder how sales of Glass may increase…at least on the long tail. Not merely a funny musical performance, Glass’ appearance on the show is also a plug for his 7th Symphony.

Recently there was a movie so big that it seemed unstoppable…breaking records along the way in seemingly once-in-a-lifetime movie experience. That movie was The Dark Knight.

And The Dark Knight stopped short of the all-time great, Titanic. Now we have a movie that has a significant chance to take that prize. But it’s not so much a question of money-making ability. It’s how it made that money and is making that money.

Movies of late tend to open big and last a month if they are lucky. It is a movie strategy based on marketing rather than filmmaking. A typical movie is Transformers 2, which opened at a big big weekend number…about $109 million. After that point, the movie steadily loses about half of that each weekend. So we get weekend 2 at $42 million, weekend 3 at $24 million, weekend 4 at 13 million, etc. The reason is generally that these movies are big budget spectacles, made exciting and attention-grabbing enough for a one-time viewing and pumped out to meet the demand that marketing has hopefully created. Stemming the ebb of viewers after that opening weekend is the holy grail for movies.

If you keep your audience every week, your movie probably good and probably will make a lot of money. This is how The Hangover made more money at the box office than Star Trek. Or how My Big Fat Greek Wedding somehow made an incredible $200 million. The King of this is James Cameron, whose Titanic went from week to week, month to month as strong as the day it opened.

So how do you keep your audiences week after week after week? You make the movie really good. You make it so good they’d want to see it more than once. You make it so good that they tell everyone they know that they have to see it…and not just on DVD but in a movie theater. And you jack up the price of the tickets by making the movie a 3D experience, something the audience can’t possibly see at home.

I guess you could call that the recipe for Avatar’s success. But of course, before the movie came out (as with Titanic), many people were haters, imagining how horrible the movie’s CG would look and how much money it would lose. In fact, it will make money. And in fact, it’s making it by being a superior movie experience that can’t be ignored no matter how much its haters complain.

For the record,

Avatar weekend 1 $77 million, modest by today’s blockbuster standards (see Transformers 2 opening).

Weekend 2 $75 million, a new record barely beating The Dark Knight.

Weekend 3 $68 million, clobbering all other movies by a $23 million margin.

Weekend 4 $50 million, clobbering the previous record holder which was Titanic.

At this rate, Avatar is assured to beat The Dark Knight’s eventual $533 million haul. But will it reach the $600 million height scaled by Titanic? That’s a very good question, and potentially game changing in an era when people are getting more and more comfortable staying home and downloading or renting. A movie that can create a legion of “Avatards” is a formidable one. The box office geek in me gets excited, but I think more than simply “winning” status as the top, this is really about a new kind of filmmaking era that is changing what the audience wants and perhaps even expects out of movies today.

Not related to Avatar, but check out this song:

Paris to London - Satellite Crush (mp3) BUY CD