Before this morning’s Academy Award nominees get their shot at Oscar, they will first have to contend with the Golden Globes.
The Globes offer a decent barometer as to who will go home with Hollywood’s most coveted award. As the town ramps up for the Globes on Sunday, January 13, Celebuzz takes a look at each nominee in the major acting and film categories.
First up: Who will – and should – win Best Actress.
With the Oscar nominations announced, there is some expected overlap between the Academy’s picks and the Hollywood Foreign Press.
Favorites Naomi Watts(The Impossible), Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) and Jennifer Lawrence (The Silver Linings Playbook) have emerged as the frontrunners for both awards, with Chastain and Lawrence seemingly in a dead heat for victory.
While a Golden Globe win does not guarantee an Academy Award, it does provide a decent indicator as to who should start making extra room on their mantle.
Check out our breakdown of the actresses in contention and their chances, then share with us your predictions in the comments below!
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Hey Teen readers in NYC and the Houston, Texas area — want to see Jessica Chastain‘s newest movie BEFORE it hits the multiplex? We’ve got you covered! We’re giving away 10 pairs of tickets to see the scary flick Mama at screenings in both NYC and Houston, Texas. So, you and a friend can head to the theater and get freaked out by this edge-of-your-seat thriller.
Produced by scare master Guillermo del Toro, Mama is about a couple who take in their young nieces after they were abandoned in the wild for five years. However, there are some supernatural forces at hand that suggest these girls weren’t exactly alone.
The screenings will each take place on January 15 at their respective locations. In NYC, you’ll be heading to AMC 34th Street, while if you score tickets for the Houston screening, you’ll go to Edwards Grand Place. Both screenings will take place at 7 PM.
Update: All the tickets have been snatched up!Click HERE to register for the NYC showing, and click HERE if you want to see it in Houston. And make sure you get there early, since seating is first come, first serve!
Half the fun of awards shows is what happens beforehand.
We’re talking about the red carpet fashion show that precedes all the season’s big awards show, from the People’s Choice Awards to the Golden Globes and Oscars.
If it weren’t for the red carpet, how would Angelina Jolie’s left leg ever have launched its career as an Internet meme? Or how would we have seen Ryan Seacrest falter as Sacha Baron Cohen (aka “The Dictator”) dumped ashes on his shiny new tux — and hair.
And of course, without the pre-show red carpet extravaganza, we wouldn’t get some of the most memorable fashion moments.
While the ridiculous easily come to mind (recall: Bjork‘s swan costume at the 2001 Oscars or Lara Flynn Boyle’s ballerina costume at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards), some red carpet gowns have been responsible for launching a career or two. Nicole Kidman’s chartreuse Dior Haute Couture dress at the 1997 Oscars and Michelle Williams’ canary Vera Wang confection at the 2006 Oscars are just two examples of game-changing gowns.
Who are this year’s front contenders for the red carpet’s best-dressed lists? And which stars could launch their red carpet career this awards show season?
To prep you for the official start of this year’s Awards Show Season — which starts this week with the People’s Choice Awards on Wednesday followed by the Golden Globes on Sunday — we’ve rounded up a list of the starlets to look out for on the red carpet.
A few are best-dressed regulars, while others have had one or two…or three (but who’s counting?) fashion mishaps before. (One actress even challenges the standard convention that pants are necessary in public, but that makes her all the more interesting to watch, no?)
One of 2012’s most highly-anticipated movies, Zero Dark Thirty has drawn praise and criticism for its portrait of the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden. But regardless of its depiction of the events that led to the terrorist leader’s apprehension and killing, star Jessica Chastain said it was important the film didn’t become another sort of “issue” story: namely, about the real or perceived glass ceiling for women in the military.
“I’m not interested in the movie that becomes like an issue about women in the CIA,” she told Celebuzz. “I’m interested in the film that shows an amazing woman doing an amazing job that doesn’t remind me every five seconds, ‘BUT she’s a woman’.”
Zero Dark Thirty provides little information about Chastain’s character, a woman named Maya who (according to the film) spends more than a decade doing little other than investigating bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Chastain said that she had to do all of the same work as should would exploring any other character, regardless, how little of that knowledge would be revealed on screen.
“I have to be able to answer any questions anyone could possibly have,” she said. “I knew what Maya’s favorite American candy was. I had to define all of that for the character.”
Ultimately, Chastain said that playing Maya was less a matter of creating a performance than challenging herself to connect with a character that seemed dramatically different than herself.
“I’m not playing ‘Jessica Chastain as a CIA agent’,” she said. “It was a very different role; I’m a much more emotional person, and this character was trained to be unemotional, and analytically precise.”
“And when doing something like that, I had to find the humanity, and her journey within those boundaries.”
Zero Dark Thirty is playing in theaters nationwide. Watch Celebuzz’ interview with Chastain’s co-star Jason Clarke, and then le us know what you thought of the film in the comments section below!
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Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar, taking home the statuette in 2009 for her Iraqi bomb squad thriller The Hurt Locker. And this season she could do it again with Zero Dark Thirty, the gritty new procedural about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
“I found it very surprising that women were central to this operation,” Bigelow told reporters about her new film starring Jessica Chastain as a CIA operative — recruited out of high school — who spent 10 years tracking the man behind 9/11. “Keeping the honesty of the piece, that’s what motivated me more than anything else.”
When Bigelow reunited with investigative reporter and The Hurt Locker scribe, Mark Boal for Zero Dark, their original idea was to do a movie following a special forces team in the Tora Bora mountain range in southern Afghanistan during the months after 9/11.
But then, May 2nd, 2011 happened, and the writer-director team found themselves with an irrelevant story to tell as Seal Team 6 captured and killed bin Laden. So Bigelow and Boal began again from scratch, basing their story on a CIA agent who ultimately tracked bin Laden through a courier leading to the Al Qaeda leader’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The film and Chastain are being touted for Oscars on the heels of winning the National Board of Review award for Best Film as well as well as the New York Film Critics Award. Nominated for Best Supporting Actress for The Help, Chastain delivers a finely-tuned, internalized performance as a newbie thrown into a torture interrogation moments after arriving in Afghanistan.
“I was thinking about her like a computer, a woman who’s really good with facts and details and putting a puzzle together, and what happens when that woman is put in a situation that is much bigger than she ever imaged she’d be involved in,” Chastain said. “Just because she’s trained to be unemotional and analytical, precise, doesn’t mean she’s unemotional.”
“It’s a character defined by action,” added Bigelow. “That necessitates a very, very strong actor, an actor who can give you a very strong landscape just defined by action. I think there’s something very brave and exciting and extremely brilliant about those choices. It’s also a testament to the talent of Jessica to find the finely-calibrated nuances of emotion within a character that had to be so precise.”
Trying to excel in a man’s world, Chastain’s character, Maya, bears some resemblance to Bigelow herself who has accelerated as a filmmaker in a field dominated by men. And her work is not confined to frothy rom-coms or weepy chick-flicks. Bigelow excels makes the kind of movies most audiences associate with men, the 1991 surfer bank robber movie Point Break, sci-fi thriller Strange Days, and the submarine suspense saga K-9: The Widowmaker.
Such titles stand out for their testosterone-fueled, white-knuckled thrills as well as their moments of humanity and humor.
“It’s that somebody has tremendous facility to convey humanity, and humanity takes on a lot of different permutations,” said Bigelow about Jason Clarke’s character, Dan, a torturer who grows weary of the beatings, preferring the company of his pet monkeys. “Those moments of levity allow you a minute to decompress before you engage again.”
The movie’s final moments show Chastain’s character boarding a military cargo plane alone, after the killing of bin Laden. Strapping in for the flight home, she breaks down in tears.
“It’s not a victory because finally at the end of the day you’re left with much larger questions such as where does she go from here? Where do we go from here? Now what?” asked Bigelow. “It leaves you with a very interesting question.”
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While the climax of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty somewhat obviously focuses on the physical hunt for Osama bin Laden, the beginning of the film opens on a decidedly more controversial act: the torture of detainees in order to try and secure information that leads to the terrorist leader.
And while the film’s motive for showing these acts is to simply chronicle the events leading up to bin Laden’s capture, star Jason Clarke says that he was never interested in judging his interrogator character’s behavior, no matter how questionable he might personally find it.
“That’s very straightforward,” he told Celebuzz. “As an actor, I’m not here to question the ifs, ands or buts, or my, Jason’s standpoint. I’m here to portray a real person and real events, and do them justice to the best that I can.”
Clarke observed that it was doubly important to remain objective about the events in the film since they were once actually performed by a real person.
“Because people did this and went through this, and the least I can do is give my all without putting my comment on it,” he said.
Simultaneously, Clarke said that the torture scenes set an unusual tone for the film which indicates right off the bat that it’s not going to be either a newsreel-style retelling nor a heroic dramatization of the hunt for bin Laden.
“It brings the audience straight into this film, and it impacts you in a way that you’re not really expecting,” he said. “And it keeps going, even though we know the beginning and the end, the way it draws you in, this film is constantly telling a narrative in a way we’ve not experienced before.”
Zero Dark Thirty opens nationwide December 19. Watch Celebuzz’ full interview with Clarke, and then the film’s trailer below. What do you think of the controversy surrounding its depiction of torture? Let us know in the comments section.
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2012 was an amazing year for movies, anchored by some of the best female performances in recent years.
Where in the past actresses have found enormous success perhaps primarily in supporting roles, this year they took center stage, not simply keeping pace with their male co-stars but outshining them and showing Hollywood that women can command the screen every bit as effectively as men.
Celebuzz assembled a shortlist of some of our favorite female performances, all of which were hugely significant in the films from which they came. From Jennifer Lawrence to Jessica Chastain to Anne Hathaway, check out our list!
Lawrence proved to be the year’s MVP, with not one but two fantastic performances, in The Hunger Games and then again in Silver Linings Playbook.
But she was hardly the only woman to prove her mettle on the silver screen. Chastain and Hathaway continue to dominate high-rpofile roles and prove they deserve them, even as newcomers like Quvenzhane Wallis and Brit Marling establish themselves as forces to be reckoned with.
Watch The trailer for Silver Linings Playbook below, and let us know which female performance was your favorite in 2012!
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Someone forgot to tell Mark Wahlberg that the end of the year is for winding down. Earlier this week, he announced plans to produce a thriller about “hacking”, and now he is set to star and produce Paramount new drug trafficking thriller. American Desperado, based on the book American Desperado: My Life as a Cocaine Cowboy, centers on real-life criminal Jon Roberts (Wahlberg), who made millions smuggling cocaine into the U.S. for a major drug cartel. The project reunites Wahlberg with Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed), who will rewrite the script. [Deadline]
Disney is fast-tracking Tron 3, and they’re bringing Tron: Legacy’s leading man with them.
Although he was originally signed for a multi-picture deal, it was confirmed Thursday that Garrett Hedlund will reprise the role of Sam Flynn in the threequel, currently being rewritten by Jesse Wigutow. Legacy director Joseph Kosinski is also set to return for the film. [NextMovie]
Fans of this year’s Taken 2 will be happy to know that the film’s director has lined up his next action-filled project. Olivier Megaton will direct Taking Gotham, a fact-based story about a secret unit of NYPD officers created in response to a series of brutal robberies in the city. When an operation goes south, the unit is disavowed and they must go off the grid to prove their names. Production is schedule to begin early 2013. [Deadline]
The final trailer for Oscar-favorite Zero Dark Thirty was released on Thursday. The film, directed by Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow, follows the CIA’s relentless hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Jessica Chastainplays the CIA’s point person in charge of the Bin Laden search, and the new trailer highlights the actress’ compelling performance which anchors the film. Watch below!
Which bit of movie news are you excited about? Weigh in below!
As a mysterious CIA operative on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty,Jessica Chastain had many dark moments during filming. But with the help of her Oscar-winning director, she created some lighter moments to get through the heavy material.
“The interrogation scenes were very tough to film [for] Kathryn Bigelow and myself. It was probably the worst week of work we had,” Chastain told Celebuzz at the Los Angeles premiere of the film Monday night.
“But the really sweet thing about it was that I would go home, and I’d be super-depressed after those days of work, and we would send each other videos of animals getting rescued.”
Chastain explained that she and Bigelow — who won best director at the 2009 Academy Awards for TheHurt Locker – used the images of the furry friends to mentally escape from the often-intense scenes filmed to tell the story of the decade-long hunt for the Al-Qaeda terrorist leader.
“It was a reminder that, ‘Okay, this isn’t our life right now,’” said the 35-year-old, who herself was nominated for an Oscar for 2011′s The Help. “We’re here making this movie, but there is another life, and there is joy and love.”
Meanwhile, Chastain admitted that she’s nothing like her super-guarded character, Maya.
“This is a woman who is trained to be unemotional and analytically precise,” she said. “Almost the majority of my life I’ve been trained to be emotional… so that was the hardest… [to] put it under a lid.
“I just try and have everyone that I know understand my gratitude that they’re here and my love for them, and so any time I have to do a scene where that is not in play, it hurts my heart a little bit.”
Zero Dark Thirty will be in limited release Dec.19 and open nationwide on Jan. 11.
Will you be seeing Zero Dark Thirty? Weigh in below, and watch the full video above to hear what else Chastain reveals about her role in the film.
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We’re only midway through the week, and we’re already struggling to keep up with all the fab fashion style stars have been sporting this week.
And you know what that means — the holiday party season must be in full-gear. From an array of fashionable fetes and charity galas to KIIS FM’s Jingle Ball extravaganza and celebrations honoring music and film legends, A-listers have had plenty of excuses to dress up these past few days.
And dress up they did, with Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Diane Kruger and many more stars pulling out all the style stops for the latest seasonal celebrations.
Just as we were starting to tire of some of fall’s more played-out trends, we were treated to a fresh new crop of party styles.
From Swift’s ladylike twist on metallics at the 2012 Ripple of Hope Gala in New York City (hosted by her ex ConnorKennedy‘s family) and Kruger’s skirted spin on sheer in a ruffled Prabal Gurung gown at an event honoring director Quentin Tarantino to the grassy alternative to emerald that Katy Perry wore at a celebration for Carole King, stylish stars introduced us to a whole new set of trends just in time for your to adopt them before your fete-filled weekend.
At the CMT Artists of the Year awards show, the evening’s co-hostHayden Panettiere made magenta’s place among the holidays’ hot hues official. The Nashville star rocked a vibrant pink one-shoulder gown on the red carpet before changing into two more bright looks during the show. Offering another hot alternative to oxblood, Kristin Cavallari gave crimson a flirty spin for the launch of her new shoe line for Chinese Laundry on Tuesday.
The fashionable crowd at HBO’s screening of In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye introduced stylish new ways of putting outfits together you’ll want to steal, while Jessica Chastain showed off the must-have work-to-cocktails dresses you’ll want to add to your winter wardrobe, and the stylish stars at the Mon Cheri Barbara Tag event in Munich, Germany showed how to make a floor-length gown look fresh and cool, not stuffy.
And that’s only a taste of the week’s festive fashion to whet your sartorial appetites. Click through the gallery for all the week’s fab holiday fashion.
Share your favorite holiday look so far in the comments below.
Now that you’re up to speed on the latest star styles, get your royal fashion fix in the video below.
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Director Kathryn Bigelow follows up her award-winning master-class in tension The Hurt Locker with Zero Dark Thirty, an unapologetically factual depiction of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Originally conceived as a literal exercise in futility – the film was all but completed when President Obama surprised the world with the news of Bin Laden’s death – Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal reworked and expanded their film into a portrait of dogged determination (if not utter obsession) in the face of ever dwindling odds.
But does Bigelow’s decidedly cold presentation of one woman’s decade-long manhunt succeed in its matter-of-factness or stumble in its refusal to evoke emotion?
“Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is a refreshing ‘just the facts’ procedural drama that maintains an almost allergic aversion to melodrama. The film is ice-cold throughout, maintaining an even-keeled approach to the decade-long manhunt for Osama Bin Laden, pausing only occasionally to acknowledge the aftermath of violence.”
“The result is neither particularly entertaining nor especially artful, as the filmmakers take a lean, All the President’s Men-style approach to dramatizing an investigation that took nearly a decade to bear fruit…The script’s blood runs thick with observational detail and military jargon, skipping forward years at a time between scenes to focus on one of two types of incident.”
“Kathryn Bigelow’s and Mark Boal’s heavily researched successor to Oscar winner The Hurt Locker will be tough for some viewers to take, not only for its early scenes of torture, including waterboarding, but due to its denial of conventional emotionalism and non-gung ho approach to cathartic revenge-taking. Films touching on 9/11, such as United 93, World Trade Center and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, have proved commercially toxic, and while this one has a ‘happy’ ending, its rigorous, unsparing approach will inspire genuine enthusiasm among the serious, hardcore film crowd more than with the wider public.”
“Zero Dark Thirty tracks a full range of emotions associated with the proverbial war on terror, from the naivete of its earliest stirrings to the spirit of vengeance that gave its apparent victory such a vital quality in the Western world. At the same time, the movie questions the certitude of the transition from despair to triumph, enabling Zero Dark Thirty to realize the power of its immediacy while giving the proceedings a lasting value.”
“The Hurt Locker was something of a master class in tension exercise, and one of the most well-paced movies ever made. Zero Dark Thirty, while certainly loaded with suspense, doesn’t have the precise and narrow focus needed for this sort of emotional workout. It’s a needle in a haystack picture and, as such, needs to be a little all over the place.”
“I can’t tell you for sure that the film has anything to do with the unvarnished truth, but I can tell you that this feels accurate. It has an integrity to it that is bracing and adult, and it manages to deliver a major visceral experience without ever once bending to Hollywood convention. This is a film that knows exactly what it’s doing, and does it without compromise.”
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