Following last weekend's announcement of the awards given by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Directors Guild of America (DGA), American Beauty has moved further ahead as the favourite for major awards at tomorrow week's Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles. On Saturday night its director Sam Mendes received the best director award from the DGA. In its 52-year history, only four DGA winners have not gone on to receive the Oscar.
On Sunday, the stars of American Beauty, Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey, took the awards for best actress and best actor at the SAG ceremony, and the film also won the guild's award for ensemble acting. Receiving her award, Bening, who is eight months pregnant with her and Warren Beatty's fourth child, said: "One thing to all the actresses out there. Don't wait to have a baby. Do it now."
The SAG awards for supporting roles went to Angelina Jolie for Girl, Interrupted and Michael Caine for The Cider House Rules. Over the past five years, the actors guild has chosen nine of the 10 performers who went on to win Oscars for leading roles. The guild has a 50-50 record on predicting Oscar winners for supporting roles.
While the enthusiastic US and British reviews for Paul Thomas Anderson's enthralling Magnolia may have whetted your appetite, be prepared to wait until as late as May 19th for it to open here. Released in the US before Christmas and in London yesterday, it won the Golden Bear for best film at last month's Berlin Film Festival and has three Oscar nominations - for best supporting actor (a revelatory Tom Cruise), original screenplay (Anderson) and song (Aimee Mann's Save Me). This superbly acted drama, observing eight characters over the course of one eventful day, also features Julianne Moore, Jason Robards, William H. Macy, John C. Reilly, Melora Waters and Philip Baker Hall.
Entertainment, the London-based company which has the UK and Irish rights to Magnolia, also subjected Irish audiences to a two-month delay with Anderson's previous picture, Boogie Nights. And there is no sign of Entertainment giving an Irish release to Tumbleweeds, which opened in London a fortnight ago and has earned British actress Janet McTeer an Oscar nomination for best actress this year.
An even more puzzling distribution story involves Woody Allen's spirited and very funny new movie, Sweet and Low-down, a faux documentary on an allegedly brilliant jazz guitarist, which has picked up Oscar nominations for Sean Penn as best actor and Samantha Morton as best supporting actress. Seven months after the movie was launched at Venice and Toronto, it has yet to be acquired for distribution in Britain and Ireland.
There is some good news on the distribution front. Two of the more under-valued competition entries from the 1998 Cannes Film Festival finally have been picked up and will open at the IFC during the summer - Patrice Chereau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, with Pascal Gregory, Charles Berling and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Lodge Kerrigan's Claire Dolan, featuring Katrin Cartlidge, Vincent D'Onofrio and Colm Meaney.
French distributor Thierry Decourcelle of Ocean Films promptly snapped up the French distribution rights to Damien O'Donnell's East is East at Cannes last year. But as he prepared for the movie's recent opening in Paris, he had a problem. "The title East is East would simply be impossible in France both in terms of phonetics and meaning," he told Screen International. "We looked at all sorts of possibilities with the word Pakistani or similar, but decided that they were all too ethnic. Eventually we hit on Fish and Chips. For the French population that phrase is absolutely evocative of Britain in the 1970s before hamburgers took over. It is easy to say and it is a central motif from the film."
Tullamore Lions Club will host the Irish premiere of the new Kenneth Branagh film, Love's Labour's Lost, as a fund-raising event in aid of Offaly Women in Crisis. It takes place at the Omniplex cinema in Tullamore on March 30th, followed by a buffet supper and entertainment at the Bridge House Hotel. Tickets cost £30 each.
Branagh's adaptation of the Shakespeare play, a romantic comedy, involves transposing it to a late 1930s setting and embellishing it with song and dance numbers composed by George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. Branagh, who also directs the film, stars in it with Alessandro Nivola, Alicia Silverstone, Natasha McElhone and Matthew Lillard.
For further details on the premiere call 086-256-8432 or 086-232-3965.
Michael Dwyer can be contacted at mdwyer@irish-times.ie