So last week, Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier sent out an email telling people to vote for his movie, along with a backhanded diss to Avatar.  It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary until that fat idiot Pete Hammond decided to write about it.  Then Chartier had to apologize, and it was over again.  Except the media are still falling all over themselves trying to make it seem relevant to the actual awards.  Here’s the latest breathy sensationalism from The Daily Beast:

Moments before Oscar ballots are due, The Hurt Locker has gone from awards darling to awards disaster. [bolding is theirs]
“Kathryn Bigelow and [Avatar producer Jon Landau]‘s relationship goes back a long time, and everyone understands that we wish each other well,” Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal told The Daily Beast. “All sides have been extremely supportive of each other… Kathryn was shocked and appalled and embarrassed by Nick’s poor judgment, and condemned it.”
And so a bomb was detonated in what has suddenly become a very nasty Oscar battlefield.
In the wake of The Hurt Locker controversy, one publicist claimed that some members of the Academy are demanding new ballots in order to change their vote.

Oh my gosh, a bomb and a disaster?  Tell me more!  It’s not until you’re almost to the end of the article that you get the real story: Read the rest of this entry »

I have a confession: I’m not really an insider.  Hollywood people don’t send me emails urging me to vote for their movies at the Oscars.  So yesterday, when I posted this letter that got Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier (second from left) in trouble, and I said it wasn’t a big deal, I was only using my powers of basic logic and reading comprehension.  But if you don’t believe me (and why would you), here’s what Nikki Finke, who does claim to be an insider, said about the same thing:

So what if on Feb 19th Chartier sent out that e-mail message asking for Hurt Locker votes and not that “$500M film”. When it appeared in my email, I laughed. Not only because the Voltage Pictures partner didn’t have the guts to even mention Avatar by name. But for months now I have been sent so many emails from so many studios and filmmakers and flacks and insiders badmouthing every rival nominee this Oscar season and talking up their own. How the hell am I to tell them apart? Or tattle on them all? This is the down and dirty system which AMPAS hath wrought and doth condone. And no one is surprised by it, least of all the Academy. In fact, this morning AMPAS’ Ryan Dekorte, the executive offices awards assistant, forwarded today’s New York Times‘ “Carpetbagger” blog account of the Chartier email to every Hollywood flack and Oscar campaigner. So now the Academy was badmouthing The Hurt Locker for badmouthing Avatar!

So why did it become a big deal?  Probably because everyone’s favorite d-bag Pete Hammond wrote about it.  If everyone’s doing it, why would he single this one out?  Does he have ulterior motives?  Hard to say. All I know is he can’t seem to decide whether he wants to be a film critic or a super-cool Hollywood insider.  Honestly, I just like making fun of the guy.  Haha, have some more chocolate, fatty.  In fact, I heard Pete Hammond only writes such breathless reviews because the act of typing leaves him out of breath.

Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier sent out what seems like a pretty honest and logical email urging people to choose Hurt Locker as best picture, which the fun-hating shrivs at the academy have since made him apologize for.  Here’s the original email, which Chartier has since called “extremely inappropriate.”

I hope all is well with you. I just wanted to write you and say I hope you liked Hurt Locker and if you did and want us to win, please tell (name deleted) and your friends who vote for the Oscars, tell actors, directors, crew members, art directors, special effects people, if everyone tells one or two of their friends, we will win and not a $500M film, we need independent movies to win like the movies you and I do, so if you believe The Hurt Locker is the best movie of 2010, help us!

I’m sure you know plenty of people you’ve worked with who are academy members whether a publicist, a writer, a sound engineer, please take 5 minutes and contact them. Please call one or two persons, everything will help!

best regards,

Nicolas Chartier Voltage Pictures

(gasp!) An honest plea for to vote for the best movie of the year (which deserved to earn far more than its $12 million domestic take) instead of the highest-grossing movie of all time which doesn’t need an award?  The dastard!  Let’s get that fat moron Pete Hammond to write an article about this!

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The Hurt Locker and Avatar were both nominated for eight awards at the BAFTAS (the British Oscars, basically) last night, with The Hurt Locker taking home six, including awards for best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay; and Avatar two, for production design and visual effects. 58-year-old Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win a BAFTA, great strides toward equality, feminism, girl power, blah blah blah,  I think I speak for all the guys when I say I wouldn’t mind gettin’ mauled by that cougar, gnome sayin’? Subjoke: It’s not surprising James Cameron would fall for a 12-foot-tall cougar.

And you know it was a classy affair because Mickey Rourke showed up wearing a vest, no shirt, a sweet necklace, and a 24-year-old Russian model.  Later when he presented the nominees for best actress, he couldn’t read the teleprompter because he said he hadn’t brought his glasses.  God I love that man.  When I run an awards show, Mickey Rourke will win all of them and instead of statuettes, we’ll hand out small dogs.  (full list of winners after the jump)

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Our friend Awkward Josh Horowitz over at MTV recently sat down for a long interview with James Cameron, who, as it turns out, is actually the voice of reason on this ridiculous 3D craze.

“There’s an evolution, and people are starting to not accept inferior forms, which is good.  But it’s typical of Hollywood to get it wrong. We do a film that’s natively authored in 3D — it’s shot in 3D.  So they assume from the success of that, that they can just turn movies into 3D.  In 8 weeks.  You know, just throw a switch on 3D and that’s gonna work somehow.  If you wanna make a movie in 3D, MAKE the movie in 3D. It should be a filmmaker-driven process and not a studio-driven process.”

Of course, that’s nothing that me and everyone outside of the studio-exec-coke-party circuit hasn’t already been saying for months.  But Cameron has billions of dollars so he gets to do whatever he wants, like tell the truth, or have a lady’s hairstyle, and no one can say sh-t.  Sadly, he then had to go and ruin it by saying that he wants Kathryn Bigelow to win the Best Director Oscar — because he has too many already.

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