Brian Clemens, OBE

Delighted to hear confirmation of the OBE for Brian Clemens in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. I'm no big royalist but these are national honours and, much as I'd like to imagine Her Maj slipping in an Avengers DVD to keep the grandkids entertained, there's more at work here than just patronage and whim.

Although it's fascinating to see the cultural forces at work, determining who gets what. Awards are an odd mixture of politics, crowd-pleasing, and genuine appreciation of merit. Punch a clock on a soap for long enough and you'll qualify as a national treasure. Recognition for those with significant but behind-the-scenes achievements is much more hard-won.

Play heroes and you get a knighthood; create those heroes and they stand you in a different line. In BAFTA's case they even shunt your awards to a different night, the one that no one watches.

But that's a whole nother argument.

Oscars, Before and After

I was going to drive down to Hollywood Boulevard last night to take a look at the Oscar preparations, but it was raining fairly steadily ('a storm', in local parlance) and I was frankly not that arsed. At the moment, everything's locked up around there - when I last looked they appeared to be tenting over several blocks because the forecast was for the rain to continue. I didn't even try to get through to Amoeba for a mooch around the world's most amazing DVD section.

I don't think I've ever watched an Oscar TV show before but I suppose I'll watch this one because I'm here. I'm rooting for Bigelow and The Hurt Locker. Despite what I said in an earlier post, I managed to see Avatar (and Sherlock Holmes) before BAFTA voting closed. I think Avatar's okay; a very high level of okay, but best picture? Seriously, no. At the bottom line it's a technically spectacular presentation of a routine fantasy.

Which has no bearing on how the Academy might vote, at all. These are the people who voted Ghandi the Best Costume Design award.

I have a bet on the Oscars. Well, it's not really a bet. I filled out a form at Trader Joe's where you get a $75 voucher if you pick all the winners and yours comes out of the hat.

So, I'm invested.

UPDATE:

F*** me! Do they always draw it out this much? Since this show started I've been able to drive into town, shop, cook dinner, eat and wash up, and it's still going on! It's like having your bone marrow sucked out.

UPDATE 2:

But... Yay! Bigelow and The Hurt Locker!

With those and the other categories my picks all came in, 100%.

Do you see that, Trader Joe?

Movies of the Year

It's awards voting time again and although in previous years I've kept a strict silence over my preferences, I've noticed that I seem to be the only one doing it. I suppose it's hubris to imagine that anyone really cares... so in the interests of humility I'll tell you what I've liked this year.

I've been able to raise my movies-seen-in-a-cinema quotient this year, so now I'm using screeners to catch up on the contenders I've missed. On Wednesday I watched The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and the second of Vincent Cassell's Mesrine movies, both flawed-and-interesting, neither the best work of the people involved. Gilliam's a genius, but I'm beginning to wonder if he actually knows what a story is. Parnassus closely resembles his Baron Munchausen, replicating most of its pleasures and its faults.

It's interesting to compare the back-to-back Mesrine movies with Michael Mann's Public Enemies. Whereas Public Enemies follows the Hollywood model by elevating and mythologising its subject, there's never any doubt that Cassell's Jacques Mesrine is a genuinely nasty piece of work, and all the more fascinating for it. It's not necessary to romanticise in order to understand.

So far my favourite movies of the year have been Let the Right One In, Up, The Hurt Locker, District 9, Up in the Air, Star Trek... I enjoyed Me and Orson Welles despite the slightness of its coming-of-age story, mainly because of Christian McKay's spot-on turn as Welles. It goes beyond mimicry and into real character work. He's from Bury, Lancashire, and has mostly done theatre before this. His challenge now is to build a career that doesn't involve forever being 'the Orson Welles guy'.

A combination of travel, location, weather and workload make it unlikely that I'll get to see either of the late-released Avatar or Sherlock Holmes before voting closes. From what I'm hearing I suspect I'll find things to like in both of them, but since the rule is that you don't vote for anything you haven't seen, they'll probably have to struggle through without my support.

Guilty pleasure; the French '60s spy spoof OSS 117: Rio Ne Repond Plus. Biggest disappointment; The Lovely Bones. I'd been hoping for another Heavenly Creatures - for me, Jackson's masterwork - but I found it about half as good as an average episode of Dead Like Me.

Yo Bafta

So, the Bafta results are out. Read 'em here.

But don't expect to see Sweeney Todd much represented, and don't take that as an critique of its quality. Despite being (in my humble opinion) one of the top of this year's crop, a dark masterpiece with a superbly sweet and sad turn from Helena Bonham Carter, its release so late in the qualifying period is bound to have kept it off the radar of many voters. True, the distributors put on a number of member screenings just before Christmas, but most were in central London and many of those were during working hours. And the great thing about the Baftas is, they're mainly voted by industry pros.

For anyone who's interested in how the awards process works: it started in early December when notice went out that this year's voting applet was available for downloading. Up to that point I thought I'd been keeping up pretty well with the year's releases but as soon as I saw the list of eligible titles, I knew I had some serious catching-up to do.

Screeners started hitting the mat soon after. In the first round of voting, you can make up to a dozen nominations in each craft and performance category. Nobody can see everything but if everybody chooses by their own lights and pushes their personal boundaries a bit then a credible shortlist ought to emerge. For some categories there are also 'chapters', juries who can add to the shortlists in areas of membership ignorance.

All voting takes place online. When the shortlist is announced a few days later, I always try to make sure that I've seen every movie on it before voting again. That round produces the list of nominees, the people who sweat with the TV cameras on them as the gold envelope is opened.

I don't know how the Oscar process works but I imagine it's something similar. The Oscars are treated like some ultimate standard of deep worth, like God has peeped into each movie's soul and issued the final word on its value. But they're basically a poll of opinion amongst people who work in the industry and pay their academy subs.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I take my Bafta voting really seriously. I see it as a chance to exercise my own judgement, not to confirm the anointed. And I seem to be pretty good at anticipating the winners; my 'hit rate' over the past four or five years seems to have been a fairly consistent 70%.

For example; Marion Cotillard was described as a 'surprise winner' in the Best Actress category. Not to me.

Her Edith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose isn't what I'd call a great movie. It's one of those life histories that shovels on the misery with the energy of a stoker on a speeding train - I know it's all true, but cramming it all into two hours is a dangerous business. Genuine tragedy risks a descent into bathos.

But the whole thing is held together by Cotillard's astonishing performance. The only comparison I can think of is de Niro in Raging Bull, and he didn't sing; Cotillard mimes to recordings of the later Piaf but supplies her own voice for the earlier numbers, and there's no visible join.

The screenplay follows a pattern that seems to have become de rigeur for biopics; start at the peak, flash back to the beginning, a fantasy sequence or two along the way, go out on some well-known moment of triumph.

If I noticed a trend this year it was toward narratives that unravel rather than conclude, and thus purport to be 'more like life'. I'm not saying that I demand pat solutions but if someone's going to insist on telling me a story, I listen because I'm expecting them to make a point with it.

I don't always get it right. When I saw Before the Devil Knows You're Dead I immediately added Sidney Lumet to my Best Director noms list. Ditto with Hoffman (Philip Seymour, not Dustin) and Marisa Tomei for best actor and supporting actress.

But the true standout film for me was German Stasi thriller The Lives of Others - touching, tragic, scary, realistic, suspenseful, beautifully acted and shot, and quietly educative. And it has a proper ending! But it's also a 'foreign language film', which means it'll always get nods, but never the scale of nod it deserves.

I wanted to say something about the Kenneth Branagh remake of Sleuth, but I'll just say this: don't go.

Independent Filmmaking

This readable, likeable handbook was my bible back in the 70s when its combination of practical sense and friendly encouragement meant that it served both as craft manual and comfort read.

Its user's-view of various Super 8 cameras, wind-up 16mm Bolexes and optical printing techniques may have little-to-no application in this digital age but the laid-back, know-your-tools-and-do-some-stuff aesthetic seems as relevant to me now as it ever was.

(UPDATE: There's been, so I'm told, something of a recent upsurge of interest in Super 8 as a production medium for its purely aesthetic qualities, and Lipton's book - along with its companion piece The Super 8 Book - continues to be recommended as a user's vade mecum.)

More so, if anything. I'm in the midst of a screener-viewing frenzy as this year's BAFTA voting deadline approaches, and there's a low-budget Irish musical shot on the streets of Dublin with a handheld DV camera that's outclassing all the Hollywood blockbusters for heart and originality. It's called Once. I heard somewhere that the budget was £150,000, or it might even have been Euros. Which, in mogul-speak, is "chump change".

Lenny Lipton, of course, was also the co-author of PUFF, THE MAGIC DRAGON.

Memories of Water

One of the bonuses of BAFTA membership is that you get sent copies of trade publications during the runup to the awards season. Oscar (R) follows BAFTA, which means that the studios can cover both sets of voters with the same ad campaigns.

Imagine the upward direction of my eyebrows when I opened The Hollywood Reporter and read this article, headed, "Boathouse in dry dock: Harried Peace Arch puts pic on hold."

But no; it isn't the adaptation of my novel The Boat House, currently under development with Dimension Films for director Iain Softley, but an Ontario-shot psychological thriller "set at an idyllic summer cottage where a young woman confronts the truth about her role in the disappearance of her mentor."

Peace Arch's Boathouse was set to begin production next week, but has been stalled by the arrest of company CEO Gary Howsam on "bank fraud charges involving some $7 million". The charges relate to Howsam's time with another company, so the arrest's likely impact on the production slate is uncertain (Peace Arch also backs Showtime's The Tudors, now filming its second season).

Title clash aside, I hope those people get to make their movie. I know exactly how it feels to take a project all the way up to the starting gate only to see it stalled or sabotaged by factors you can't control. Getting the money for a production is like getting a celebrity to show up for your party; all your timing needs to be just right, because if things ain't ready then neither will hang around.

As to my Boat House... I can't tell you a lot about it, as it's been a while since I was in the loop. Iain Softley first optioned the book in the late 90s - although to be more precise it was his wife, producer Sarah Curtis, who first took the option, and Iain wasn't part of the picture. Sarah and I went along to pitch the project to the Film Council (or whatever the main UK development fund was called before it was the Film Council), which is how we secured the finance for the screenplay.

After the first draft we started making a wish list of directors. Top of mine, as I recall, was Peter Weir, whose imperfect-but-superior The Last Wave had stayed in my mind as an example of the kind of charged reality I was reaching for; a fantasy film whose content you can't dismiss as fantasy. I also remember that Sarah was particularly enthusiastic about George Romero, and suggested Tilda Swinton to play the ethereal Russian emigre at the heart of the story. I'm pretty sure that Iain was added to the directors' list at my suggestion. Sarah was concerned not to see their careers merge for the wrong reasons.

After three drafts and a polish, I was no longer on the team. Was that painful? Are you kidding? But that screenplay made a showpiece that's landed me at least three jobs since. Ace production designer John Beard went scouting for Lake District locations and the brilliant Eduardo Serra was lined up as DP. Milla Jovovich was to play Alina, and I believe they were after Jude Law for boatyard hand/viewpoint character Peter McCarthy. Law wasn't a big star then; he was just breaking out, and this was the first time I'd really heard of him.

The movie was supposed to shoot in 1998 for a 1999 release, but it fell through for reasons that I'm not party to. Can't even speculate, aside from the inevitable fevered fantasy that none of their subsequent scripts was a patch on the one I'd left them with. As a lesson in why you should never entirely trust the internet for information, a number of sites feature The Boat House as a completed movie on Milla Jovovich's CV, complete with a dodgy plot synopsis.

The rights came back to me after that, albeit with a hefty turnaround charge attached to my script that would put it out of the range of most UK producers. I had a couple of interested approaches, but they were from people looking simply to rip out the central idea and Americanise it. So when Iain came back a couple of years ago with the backing of Bob Weinstein's Dimension Films, I was minded to let him take another crack at it.

And that's pretty much everything I can tell you... right now I know nothing more than what's contained in this Variety piece, in which it's apparently now "Loucka's Boathouse" in reference to David Loucka, the latest of the writers to be attached. Hollywood.com still lists me as first credited screenwriter, but I wouldn't go betting any money on that.

And listen, people. It's The Boat House. The Boat House. Three words. Not "The Boathouse".

"The Boathouse" is a completely different movie. It's the one that's having all those problems right now.