Although Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain opens in Britain today, a decision has yet to be made on whether or not it will get an Irish release.
"The competition is very strong at the moment with so many films on release," according to Sharon McGarry, manager of 20th Century Fox in Ireland. "We will wait and see how it fares in the UK before making a decision on opening it here."
Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz play multiple roles in The Fountain, which is set across three eras - in 1500, 2000 and 2500 - and follows a quest for the Tree of Life, as noted in an opening quote from Genesis. Ellen Burstyn co-stars in the film, which fared disappointingly in the US, where it made just over $10 million.
A High Point hire
Producer-director Tom Collins will head High Point Ireland, the new division of international film and TV sales agent and distributor High Point Films.
"I'm looking forward to attracting quality productions from other European countries to Ireland and developing good films within Ireland," Collins told Reel News. "At its simplest, it means that High Point Ireland can offer access to a sales agent, British and Irish tax money as well as Eurimages, the Irish Film Board and the Northern Ireland Film Commission, a funding template we developed for Kings."
Collins, who directed Bogwoman, Dead Long Enough and the Undertones documentary Teenage Kicks, is in post-production on his new feature, Kings, which stars Colm Meaney, Donal O'Kelly and Brendan Conroy.
Sag nods an Oscar preview?
Channel 6 will show the Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony at 9.30pm on Monday, less than 24 hours after the event takes place in Los Angeles. The electorate for the Sag awards comprises the 2,100 guild members, all actors, who constitute the biggest voting group in the Oscars. The only clue that last year's surprise Oscar winner for best picture would be Crash came when it won the prestigious Sag award for best ensemble cast.
This year's Sag nominees in that category are Bobby (which was shut out of the Oscars), Dreamgirls (which led the Oscar nominations with eight places, but did not get nominated for best picture), Little Miss Sunshine, The Departed and Babel. The Sag nomination lists for individual performances are a direct match with the Oscar shortlists in all four categories with one exception: Sag nominated Leonardo DiCaprio as best supporting actor for The Departed, instead of Mark Wahlberg, who got an Oscar nomination for the same film.
Big money-makers a no-show
There have been years when the Oscars were perfectly in synch with the box-office, and never more so than when the commercial blockbuster Titanic collected 11 Oscars, equalling the record set by another big hit, Ben-Hur. However, the combined forces of last year's top 10 movies at the US box-office managed to collect a total of just eight nominations this year, most of them in technical categories.
The year's biggest hit, Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest, got four nominations. Cars collected two and there was one each for Superman Returns and Happy Feet. The other six hits were shut out: X-Men: The Last Stand, The Da Vinci Code, Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, Over the Hedge, Casino Royale and Talladega Nights.
Meanwhile, the 007 movie has received nine Bafta nominations, including one for Daniel Craig as best actor.
Eco-friendly song nominee
It came as no surprise when An Inconvenient Truth, which illustrates Al Gore's warnings on global warming, received an Oscar nomination as best documentary on Tuesday. It unexpectedly collected a second nomination in the category of best original song, which went to Melissa Etheridge for her composition, I Need to Wake Up.
This isn't the first time a documentary has yielded a best song Oscar nominee. It happened in 1964 when a nomination went to More, the song from Mondo Cane, the sensationalist and commercially successful documentary that purported to expose of such shocking sights as cannibal rituals, pig killing in New Guinea, dog eating in Taipei, and drunken Germans staggering home after a long night on the town.
