Oscar silly season in full swing

What is the difference between reading Oscar bloggers writing about the Academy Awards and crackpot conspiracy theorists spinning yarns about the CIA killing JFK or the Israeli secret service being behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks? At this time of year: Not much. With the Oscar ballots in the mail, the silly season has begun, when everyone on the Oscar blogging front starts wildly speculating about who's pulling dirty tricks or which movie--often for the most bizarrely inexplicable reasons--is poised to leap into contention in the best picture race.

The wonderers who wonder have come out of the woodwork, especially with a new controversy involving best picture favorite "Slumdog Millionaire" moving from back-burner to front-page headline status. As we wrote earlier this week, this is hardly a surprise, with virtually every modern-day Oscar front-runner getting hazed by the media, who love to build 'em up and then tear 'em down. But that didn't stop the New York Post's Lou Lumenick from idly speculating: "Is someone connected with one of the other best picture nominees behind a desperate smear campaign to stop prohibitive favorite 'Slumdog Millionaire'? Smells that way to me."

Lumenick's proof? None actually, though he finds it highly suspicious--as opposed to highly coincidental--that the news about 'Slumdog's' payments to its child actors "broke the same day as academy ballots were mailed out." (The italics are his.) Lumenick goes on to say: "We all know which truth-and ethically challenged mogul would benefit most from an upset," an obvious not-so veiled reference to "The Reader's" Harvey Weinstein, who, putting aside any ethical challenges, is the only studio chief today with enough personality to merit being called a mogul. Whatever Harvey's possible past offenses, I think he deserves to remain innocent until proven guilty. If Lou has some evidence, we should hear it, instead of getting pure innuendo.

But everywhere you look, someone is cooking up a crackpot Oscar theory. What are the silliest ones? Keep reading:

SAG chief Alan Rosenberg: Singing the blues

In the early days of Alan Rosenberg's tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild, I wrote admiringly of his commitment to challenge the status quo. People scoffed, saying the idealistic TV actor -- he even played a softhearted children's legal advocate on "The Guardian" -- was the wrong guy to run SAG during what was sure to be a critical contract negotiation with the studios.

I didn't take the criticism that seriously. Why not an idealist? After all, Alan's older brother, Mark Rosenberg, was one of Hollywood's best-known student radicals turned movie executives back in the 1980s. People said Alan was the wrong guy at the wrong time, that he was the kind of self-dramatizing liberal crusader who thought he was born to lead a heroic strike against the coldblooded media conglomerates. Having him at the head of SAG would be a disaster.

Well, even though I agree with the part about the coldblooded media conglomerates, who are certainly no friend to any union, you'd still have to say that Rosenberg's critics were right and I was wrong. Everything at SAG has to gone to hell in a handbasket, with the union having ousted its chief negotiator, Doug Allen, and marginalized Rosenberg. Has he learned anything from the experience? Apparently not. In a truly sad, self-involved interview that only a narcissistic actor could give -- reported here by The Wrap's Sharon Waxman -- Rosenberg wallowed in self-pity, complaining that all his hard work of the past three years has amounted to nothing. As he put it: "My life sucks. Here I am, my partner [Doug Allen] was fired. I'm muzzled.... The liars and manipulators have won."

Then, just to remind us all why SAG has so often been ridiculed as the kookiest union on the planet, Rosenberg broke out his guitar and literally sang the blues, crooning an original composition in a froggy rasp complete with lyrics that, well, don't exactly evoke comparisons to Bob Dylan, much less Billy Joe Shaver or Steve Earle. (Rosenberg acknowledged that he's no singer, though he has impressive family bloodlines -- his first cousin is Steely Dan's Donald Fagen.)

The song is written from the perspective of a wealthy, weaselly actor who only cares about his own paycheck, not the betterment of his less fortunate guild brethren, perhaps aimed at the George Clooneys of the world who've opposed Rosenberg's hard-line negotiating style. Sample lyrics: "We don't care about the future, we only care about us/And if you don't earn what I think I can earn, I will throw you underneath a bus/I sure do love my union, it gave me my pension and my health/But don't expect me to stand up for nobody till I've had a chance to accumulate some wealth."

It's a sad end to what could've been a bright new chapter in guild history, with Rosenberg going out, not with a bang, but a not entirely melodious whimper. If you want to hear the song for yourself, here's where you can listen:

Photo of Alan Rosenberg by Spencer Weiner/Los Angeles Times.

Frank Langella slays 'em at Oscar round table

Ah, actors. As a weary filmmaker once told me, having barely survived a lengthy shoot with two especially loopy movie stars, "All actors are crazy. The only difference is whether they're crazy on the outside or on the inside." On the other hand, when they're on their best behavior, as they usually are during Oscar season, no one is more entertaining and enchanting -- as is evident in Newsweek's wonderful round-table interview with a scrum of this year's Oscar nominees. Although Newsweek's David Ansen and Ramin Setoodeh ostensibly conducted the discussion, it quickly becomes apparent that the round table's real driving force is "Frost/Nixon" star Frank Langella, who not only puts on a dazzling show himself but inspires his peers to loosen up and have fun, even the normally glum Brad Pitt, who usually has about as much charm with the media as the L.A. Dodgers' famously dour Jeff Kent. (Asked if he'd ever Googled himself, Pitt replies: "Dear God, no. First of all, I don't really know how to operate a computer.")

Langella is a hoot, theater actors as a rule being far more engaging and high-spirited than our generation of cautious, coddled movie stars. Apropos of very little, Langella says, "Would you like to hear my most favorite line I have said onstage, after 75 plays?" proceeding to exclaim, with great relish, a truly profane schoolyard insult -- far too profane to be repeated in our squeaky-clean blog. "I said it to Christine Baranski every night for four months, and I couldn't wait to say it," he explains. "It was such a great line."

Langella asks his own questions -- "Did everybody know since 5 or 6 or 7 that they wanted to be an actor?" -- admits that he never had a publicist and says the best advice he could ever give a young actor would be to learn how to get out of his or her own way. Although he says he was fearless on stage, he acknowledges that "I was like an old Italian lady in my first couple of movies. I thought my soul was being taken by the camera. So I had to find a way to be utterly open and free."

Speaking in such a bizarre hipster patois that he makes Mickey Rourke sound like an Oxford don, Robert Downey Jr. tells an interminable story about getting food poisoning doing publicity for "Iron Man" in Japan, explaining that he was "doubled over for Yoo-hoo status for the next two days." Puzzled, Langella says "I don't know what that means." Downey says: "I got a parasite and I was Yoo-hoo. I was Brown Betty for two days." Clearly amused, Langella responds: "See, he has his own language."

Inspired by Langella's candor, the other actors begin to open up. After Langella exhorts his peers to stay away from the celebrity machine, Anne Hathaway, conscience-stricken, blurts out a confession: "OK, I lied before when you asked if I Googled myself. I do. I'm so embarrassed." Downey calls making an indie film "50 monkeys [having sex with] a football." Even Pitt gets off a good line, saying that he played such a geek in "Burn After Reading" that when Angelina Jolie visited the set, "I was in gym gear and hair and she said, 'This is the first time I can honestly say I'm not sexually attracted to you.' "

The whole story is a great read, so check it out for yourself. Even better, take time one night and stage your own Langella Film Festival. In his 40-year career, Langella has had far more triumphs on stage, but every once in a while he's landed a juicy TV or film part, having played everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Count Dracula. I'm open to hearing suggestions of everyone's favorite Langella moments. But here's a trio of Langella roles I loved: The president's amoral chief of staff in "Dave," the insidious Clare Quilty in Adrian Lyne's "Lolita" and the imposing William Paley in "Good Night, and Good Luck." He's a delight in all three films, as he is in the Newsweek round table, which ends with Langella getting the last laugh, saying, "I'd like to say, for the record, I'm the oldest male at the table and the only one who didn't get up to go to the bathroom."

Photo of Frank Langella as Richard Nixon in "Frost/Nixon" by Ralph Nelson / Universal Pictures

'Slumdog' backlash: Fair or foul?

Whenever there's an overwhelming favorite in the Oscar race, you can be sure, human nature being human nature and the media being the media -- in short, an institution that likes to build 'em up and then knock 'em down -- that the overwhelming favorite will soon find itself fighting off a nasty backlash.

That's exactly what's happening right now in the Oscar race to Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire," which in recent days has gone from beloved underdog to embattled front-runner. When I was on the phone earlier this month with Fox Searchlight marketing chief Nancy Utley, she wondered, perhaps wanting to get an outsider's perspective, how the movie was doing. At the time, I told her: "Not that you can really control it, but the only thing you have to worry about is peaking too soon."

I guess you can say the peaking has begun. Alice Miles has a column in the London Times calling the film "poverty porn," hammering the writers and critics who've labeled "Slumdog" as a feel-good film when it is filled with "scenes of utter misery and depravity." Time magazine posted a piece Monday saying the film was "no hit" in India, with only 25% of theater seats occupied (an assessment hotly dispute by distributor Fox Searchlight.) A number of Mumbai slum residents have objected to being labeled "slumdogs." My own newspaper had a front page piece, headlined "Indians Don't Feel Good About Slumdog,' " contending that "some Indians are groaning over what they see as another stereotyped depiction of their nation, accentuating squalor, corruption and impoverished if resilient natives." And now Slate magazine has posted a withering assessment of the film by Dennis Lim, a regular contributor to both the N.Y. Times and L.A. Times, who scoffs at director Danny Boyle's "fairytale vision of squalid poverty," arguing that Boyle is guilty of "aestheticizing poverty."

Lim is a formidable essayist, whether embracing or attacking a film, so his words pack quite a wallop. His argument, in part, goes as follows:

"I would contend that the movie's real sin is not its surfeit of style but the fact that its style is in service of so very little. The flimsiness of Simon Beaufoy's scenario, a jumble of one-note characterizations and rank implausibility, makes Boyle's exertions seem ornamental, even decadent... A slippery and self-conscious concoction, 'Slumdog' has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy. It ladles on brutality only to dispel it with frivolity. The film's evasiveness is especially dismaying when compared to the purpose and clarity of urban-poverty fables like Luis Bunuel's 'Los Olvidados,' set among Mexico City street kids, or Charles Burnett's 'Killer of Sheep,' set in inner-city Los Angeles. It's hard to fault 'Slumdog' for what it is not and never tries to be. But what it is -- a simulation of 'the real India,' which it hasn't bothered to populate with real people -- is dissonant to the point of incoherence."   

Why is 'Slumdog' suddenly coming under attack? Is it the work of a whispering campaign by nefarious Oscar rivals? Keep reading:

Studio Report Card, Part 6: Universal

It was hardly a shocker to see the news that Universal is keeping its dynamic duo, Marc Shmuger and David Linde, as studio chairmen through 2013. There were lots of initial industry doubts about their ability to follow in the big footsteps of former studio boss Stacey Snider, not to mention the whole idea of a power-sharing relationship that was something of an arranged marriage. But the two men have proved the skeptics (myself included) wrong. Universal enjoyed one of its best years in 2008, largely thanks to their steady, capable leadership. But what matters most isn't just the raw numbers, but the fact that Universal managed to assemble a slate of pictures that was reminiscent of the fabled days in the business when movie studios aimed for class and quality as well as box-office receipts.   

Universal's biggest successes of 2008 offered a good indicator of its strengths. (Our box-office totals, courtesy of Media By Numbers, are through Jan. 4.) The studio's top-grossing film, "Mamma Mia!," made an astounding $430 million overseas, roughly three times what it did in the U.S., thanks to the continuing strength of the studio's international distribution system. In fact, the studio's top three performers from last year ("Mamma Mia!, "The Mummy 3" and "Wanted") all did far more business overseas than in America. "Wanted" was an especially gratifying success, since it was a modestly budgeted ($75 million) summer action extravaganza that created a new franchise--the studio is already at work on a sequel--while showcasing the studio's risk-taking by putting the film in the hands of Timur Bekmambetov, a Russian filmmaker who is a brilliant visual stylist but was totally an unknown commodity, having never enjoyed any commercial success outside his native land.

It wasn't a fluke that Universal embraced Bekmambetov. The studio has been aggressively setting up deals with gifted filmmakers in a variety of countries, including China, Russia (where it's in business with Bekmambetov, who's overseeing a slate of homegrown films), Brazil (where Universal has a deal with Fernando Meirelles) and Mexico, where the studio has an ongoing partnership with Cha Cha Cha, a company led by three top filmmakers, Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo del Toro (the latter having directed the studio's profitable "Hellboy 2" last year). Whether its simply a shrewd way to expand its presence in growing national markets or a way to ally itself with top filmmakers, the strategy is a good example of the studio's aspirations to balance quality with commerce.

Universal still had its share of missteps. It bankrolled a pair of utter flops: a costly George Clooney comedy ("Leatherheads") and "The Express," a drama about football star Ernie Davis. But the studio had solid successes with a string of sharply written comedies, notably "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and "Role Models," which came out of Universal's relationships with producers Judd Apatow and Scott Stuber. Universal also is in the thick of the Oscar race, thanks to "Frost/Nixon," a collaboration from another pair of its top producers, Working Title and Imagine Entertainment. Industry insiders say a big part of Universal's strength comes from its diverse leadership (including well-liked production chief Donna Langley), who are unfailingly talent friendly, willing to trust their filmmakers and blessed with a canny understanding of what they do well and what they don't.

Most important, Universal is that rare modern-day studio that still aspires to make quality films a significant part of its portfolio. "We don't make a simple, single kind of movie," says Shmuger. "The whole goal for us is to come up with a slate that cuts across all genres and makes movies of all shapes and sizes. For us, that's the ideal for a studio to aspire to. One of our big objectives in 2008 was to launch new franchises, which we did with 'Wanted' and 'Mamma Mia!'  But we also wanted to keep working with filmmakers who would bring us diverse projects and execute them with ingenuity and invention, not just massive scale." 

Performance: A-minus   Quality: A-minus   Overall: A-minus

Studio Report Card: 20th Century Fox

Studio Report Card: Disney

Studio Report Card: Paramount

Studio Report Card: Sony

Studio Report Card: Warners

The Harvey Weinstein zoo has a new lion

I hate to be so blunt about this, but one of the biggest problems the Weinstein Co. has faced in recent years is bad karma, which is sometimes worse than bad box office. Because of the Weinstein brothers' long history of bullying rivals and engaging in all sorts of bad behavior, they've been trying to survive in a business that is eager to see them fail. But that may change with the news that the Weinsteins have hired longtime Lionsgate top exec Tom Ortenberg to be the company's president of theatrical films, overseeing its marketing, distribution and acquisitions.

Popular with the press and respected by virtually all of his studio rivals, Ortenberg will bring a huge breadth of experience, not to mention some much needed no-drama maturity to the chaotic Weinstein operation. I've spent a lot of time with Ortenberg at film festivals, watching his Lionsgate team engage in heated bidding wars for new films, and I've never failed to be impressed by his cool under fire -- he's a shrewd judge of a film's strengths and weaknesses, rarely allowing his emotions to color his judgment.

Lionsgate will miss his collegial professionalism. Even after Ortenberg had agreed to leave, he still went up to Sundance to help the company scout and acquire new films. Contrary to some inaccurate early blog reports, Ortenberg was not pushed out of his job. It was his choice to leave early, even though he still had time on his latest deal, a 15-month contract that would've expired in June. Ortenberg had his share of policy disagreements with Joe Drake, the Lionsgate motion picture chief who arrived in the fall of 2007. But the real source of tension was between Ortenberg and Lionsgate chief exec Jon Feltheimer, who often second-guessed Ortenberg's decisions and made no secret of his disdain for his theatrical film chief.

I'm betting Feltheimer will miss Ortenberg's steady hand. Ortenberg played a key role in a long line of Lionsgate successes. He was a key advocate for acquiring "Crash" at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival, even though the film had received mixed reviews and was believed -- even by some key Lionsgate execs -- to be a huge commercial question mark. The film, of course, went on with the best picture Oscar. Ortenberg championed the Sundance acquisition of "Open Water," telling so many people that the company could sell the low-budget thriller as "Jaws" meets "Blair Witch" that several media festival wrap-ups, notably one in Newsweek, used the same line in describing the film. Ortenberg quickly snapped up Bill Maher's "Religulous" in Cannes after only seeing a promo reel and was a primary factor in the Weinstein's striking up a partnership with Lionsgate to release Michael Moore's controversial "Fahrenheit 9/11" after Disney refused to distribute the picture. 

With his fondness for detail and statistical analysis, Ortenberg often reminds me of a Billy Beane-style baseball general manager. When Lionsgate had "Monster's Ball," one of the company's most profitable pictures in recent memory, it was Ortenberg who set about convincing Halle Berry, the film's star, that her Oscar chances were completely intertwined with the film's commercial performance. Months before the film was released, Ortenberg had lunch with Berry and her manager, bringing along a big flow chart tracing the box-office performance of every film in the past 20 years whose leading lady had won the best actress Oscar. The chart showed that only two actresses had won for a movie that had made less than $10 million. Ortenberg bluntly told Berry: "You need to do every red carpet event, every talk show, every interview possible, because if you want to win an Oscar, the picture has to break out of the art-house world and be a commercial hit."

Berry didn't pass up a single media opportunity and went home a winner. It will be interesting to see if Ortenberg can work the same kind of magic at the troubled Weinstein Co. If he left Lionsgate looking for a new challenge, he's certainly found one.

Photo of Tom Ortenberg from Lionsgate Films.

Top critics wallop Oscar nominees

Having heard all the dismissive talk about the hapless new "At the Movies" team of Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz, I have a suggestion: If you want Must See Movie Critic TV, it's time to dump those lightweights and hire the New York Times' A.O. Scott and the New Yorker's David Denby, who put on a heady demonstration of critical fireworks Friday night on the Charlie Rose show. Although clearly a bit taken aback by the critics' rough treatment of the hallowed Oscar nominees, Rose still knew he'd seen two cultural observers at the top of their game, saying at show's end that it was "the best conversation about movies that's ever taken place at this table." For once, Charlie was actually understating the case. Eager to hear about the Oscar best picture and actor nominations, Rose got an earful from Denby and Scott, who both thought the best picture category would've been a lot stronger if it had a few films with real bite and depth, like "Rachel Getting Married" or "Wall-E."

Scott perfectly grasps the underlying flaw of the Academy Awards, which has led to oh-so-many dazzling films being ignored in favor of middlebrow crowd-pleasers like "A Beautiful Mind." As he put it: "I think the Oscars are an odd phenomena because what they're really about is not the best movies of a given year, but the American film industry's image of itself." After sharing solid enthusiasm for "Milk" and engaging in a fierce debate over "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the critical duo--Denby looking like a natty college professor, Scott like a brainy Rand analyst--proceeded to strafe the remainder of the best picture field, damning best picture favorite "Slumdog Millionaire" with the faintest of praise (Denby called it "fun and sentimental, but not a great film in any way") before dismissing "Frost/Nixon" (Scott calling it "a well-done minor film that should allow itself to be minor") and heaping scorn on "The Reader." And what scorn!

Scott: "It's not a serious film. It's a self-serious film. The novel [it's based on] is a pretentious, sentimental consecration of an idea of literature that is just nonsensical and preposterous."

Denby on Ralph Fiennes' dreary performance: "What you got was his handsome face looking into nowhere for an hour. I wanted to give him a kick. Just do something!"

But it was their lively, biting exchange over "Benjamin Button" that really hit paydirt.

It all started when Scott teased Denby, saying "I don't adore 'Button,' but I certainly didn't think it was the worst movie of the year [gesturing toward Denby] as you did." Denby laughed, saying, "Well, that was a little bit of a riff," with Scott shooting back, "You obviously didn't see 'The Love Guru.' ''

But that was just the beginning. How brutal was Denby's dissection of "Button?"  Keep reading:

 

'Inventing L.A.': New documentary about the Los Angeles Times

When I was a young pup at the Los Angeles Times, every once in a while a buzz would go around the newsroom and everyone would run to a corner window over looking 2nd Street to catch a glimpse of Otis Chandler emerge from whatever absurdly cool car he was driving back then. I wasn't around for the glory days when Otis was the paper's groundbreaking publisher. But even in the mid-1980s, after he'd stepped down and been replaced by Tom Johnson, Otis still had his mojo intact, being the dashing, high-minded, third-generation Chandler who'd transformed The Times into a world-class newspaper.

The potent, imperious and often dysfunctional Chandler family is the subject of a new documentary, "Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times," which has its world premiere this weekend at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. (It plays Saturday at 4:30 p.m. at the Lobero Theatre, with a another screening scheduled for Sunday at 6:30 p.m. at Victoria Hall.) Directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Peter Jones (and narrated by Liev Schreiber), "Inventing L.A." is a fascinating historical portrait of a family of urban plantation owners, the plantation, of course, being Los Angeles. Until Otis took control of The Times in 1960, the real value of the paper was as a tool to market L.A. as a subtropical paradise, bludgeon unions and extend the family's reach as the real-estate barons of Southern California.

In other words, the Chandlers saw The Times more as a vehicle for promoting economic expansion than as a journalistic endeavor. The family's pioneering empire builder was Harrison Gray Otis, who was famous for writing fire-breathing editorials attacking everyone from labor insurgents--Otis dubbed them "gas-pipe ruffians" and "midnight assassins"--to supporters of the power-hungry Southern Pacific railroad, whom he wrote off as "lackeys and lickspittles." Otis was succeeded by his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, a staunch Republican who amassed one of the great fortunes in Southern California, famously (see "Chinatown") using the paper to support his efforts to bring water to Los Angeles, even if the aqueduct carrying the precious water conveniently stopped in the San Fernando Valley, where Harry had most of his real-estate holdings.

How rich and powerful were the Chandlers? And what led to their fall? Keep reading:

'The Reader,' Scott Rudin and Hollywood schadenfreude

Once everyone finished grousing yesterday about how the elderly motion picture academy stiffed "The Dark Knight," the incredibly successful and well-reviewed Hollywood blockbuster that seems to only appeal to non-academy members--in other words, people under the age of 55--attention turned to a more pressing, schadenfreude-style area of concern: How was Scott Rudin handling the news that the two movies he produced, "Revolutionary Road" and "Doubt," failed to get best picture nods, while "The Reader," the one movie he removed his name from, ended up as a surprise best picture nominee?

As one studio chief I spoke to yesterday put it: "Wouldn't you love to have been a fly on the wall in Rudin's office when the nominations were announced? That must've been quite a scene." All I can say is, given Rudin's propensity for hurling objects when upset, I hope flies can duck. As you may recall, Rudin took his name off "The Reader" after a messy dispute with Harvey Weinstein, with Rudin claiming that Weinstein was rushing the film into release without giving filmmaker Stephen Daldry proper time to finish the picture. The academy's endorsement seems to offer plenty of support for Weinstein's contention that the picture was ready to go and--more important--was good enough to justify an Oscar campaign. (Dear Harvey: My apologies about all those disparaging references to "The Reader's" best picture chances. You were right. I was wrong. I guess that's why you have all those Oscars and I don't.)

As you may have noticed, when the academy announced "The Reader's" nomination, it had a big "TBD" sign next to the film, meaning that the academy hasn't settled the issue of which of the film's four listed producers are eligible to accept the Oscar if the film were to win. Upset over the scrum of producers who showed up on stage when "Shakespeare in Love" won for best picture a decade ago, the academy has a bizarre rule limiting a film to three producers, a rule that caused a furor when the academy arbitrarily disqualified two of the five "Little Miss Sunshine" producers when that film was up for best picture in 2007.

"The Reader's" producer credit issue is even more sensitive, since two of its four producers--filmmakers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack--died last year before the film's release. The other two producers are Donna Gigliotti (one of the scrum of producers who won for "Shakespeare in Love" and a former USA Films production chief who made "Traffic" and "Gosford Park") and Redmond Morris, a veteran line producer and production manager who is a longtime Neil Jordan collaborator. After a lengthy vetting process, the Producers Guild recently recommended to the academy that all four producers share credit. But the academy isn't taking the PGA's advice, insisting that one of the four be excluded. Insiders say Morris will be the one to go, with Gigliotti and her late colleagues remaining the producers of record.

Interestingly, Morris didn't initially have a producer credit. But after Rudin took his name off the picture, Morris went to the Producers Guild and requested the credit, with Rudin's backing. Believing Morris had done ample work to merit the credit, the PGA approved him. By the time "The Reader" was released in December, his name was in the producer's credit box along with Gigliotti, Minghella and Pollack. As it stands, "The Reader" will end up as a true rarity--a film with three producers, all of whom have won Oscars. 

Photo of Scott Rudin by Kevin Winter / Getty Images

Studio Report Card, Part 5: 20th Century Fox

For several years now, 20th Century Fox has earned the unenviable reputation of being the least talent-friendly studio in town, avoiding strong producers, rarely working with A-list directors and keeping an uncomfortably short leash on the filmmakers that do manage to get projects going on the lot. In the past, Fox Co-Chairman Tom Rothman (who takes the lead on production decisions) had such a good instinct for mass-appeal ideas that the studio could crank out box-office hits with mediocre talent. But in 2008, the chickens came home to roost, with the studio failing for the first time in years to place even one film in the Top 10 highest-grossing films around the world. As a comparison: Paramount released four movies that all easily outperformed "Horton Hears a Who," Fox's top-grossing film of the year.

To make matters worse, Baz Luhrmann's "Australia," the one film that was supposed to appeal to both the cognoscenti and the popcorn crowd, failed to do either, staggering to a lackluster $46.9 million in the U.S., barely half of what Fox executives had predicted for the film. The reviews weren't pretty, with the New Yorker's David Denby capturing the critical tone: "The movie joins a 1939 plot to contemporary technology--old Hollywood cheesiness meets new Hollywood cheesiness." The studio had a few other modest success stories, most notably the thriller "Jumper" (co-produced with Regency), the broad comedy "What Happens in Vegas," the remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (which has done well internationally) and M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening," which ended up making a tidy profit thanks to its strong overseas performance. (All our box-office figures, provided by Media By Numbers, are through Jan 4.) But the numbers for those hits paled in comparison to the performance of Fox pictures in years past.

The studio's classiest fare came from Elizabeth Gabler's Fox 2000 unit, which delivered the year-end hit "Marley & Me" (though the studio hedged it bets by sharing the financing with Regency) and the year's first film, the low-budget success "27 Dresses." Unfortunately, much of the remainder of the slate was populated with movies that aimed low--and missed, including a tired "X-Files" sequel and the hapless Eddie Murphy comedy "Meet Dave." Many of Fox's other failures were films that were financed by outside investors, including "Space Chimps," "Mirrors," "Shutter" and "Deception," but even if the studio had little or no money in the films, its willingness to gum up its release schedule with such forgettable product only reinforced the studio's reputation as a schlock factory.

Having scared away most top talent with its tough dealmaking and rigidly controlled production process, Fox rarely seems to nourish any original ideas, leaving it stuck in a formulaic rut. When its summer films faltered badly, the top brass pointed to its potent 2009 summer lineup, which is just as lacking in originality--the three big films are all sequels. Co-Chairman Jim Gianopulos acknowledges that the studio got a good punch in the nose last summer, but he defends its filmmaking process. "We believe our business strategies and our studio management are sound," he told me. "We had a great streak--seven years of record profits--and every streak comes to an end. But we'd call it a disappointment, hardly a tragedy. We expect to be back on top again this year."   

Performance: C-plus.  Quality: D-plus.    Overall: C-minus.

STUDIO REPORT CARD: DISNEY

STUDIO REPORT CARD: PARAMOUNT

STUDIO REPORT CARD: SONY

STUDIO REPORT CARD: WARNER BROS.