Best Film: The Artist

Alexander Korda Award for Outstanding British Film of the Year: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best Actor: Jean Dujardin, for The Artist

Best Actress: Meryl Streep, for The Iron Lady

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, for Beginners

Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, for The Help

David Lean Award for Achievement in Direction: Michel Hazanavicius, for The Artist

Best Original Screenplay: The Artist

Best Adapted Screenplay: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best Film not in the English Language: The Skin I Live In

Best Animated Feature Film: Rango

And here’s your obligatory joke about a silent movie winning Best Original Screenplay: Best Original Screenplay!? It’s a silent movie!! Boom.

Who will pen such a light-hearted family romp? The guy who wrote The Book of Eli, of course. If you can write for Denzel, you can definitely write for some dumb little kid who’s stuck with a bunch of aliens. That’s screenwriting 101, folks.

The source material for New Kid is an online comic published by Penny Arcade, which has found some success as a creator of blogs, videos games, and even a TV series. Now they’re gonna be movie producers. What a country! (THR)

Taking up second place was the weird-in-a-less-commercially-viable way The Adjustment Bureau with $20.9 million, with the modern-teenager adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, Beastly in third with a measly $10 million. You can get more detailed numbers, including just how badly Take Me Home Tonight bombed, at Box Office Mojo.

Rango is so weird I can’t believe they got to make this movie. It’s a good kind of weird but I don’t know if it’s fun. It’s certainly difficult to make any sense of it, but you’ve got to appreciate that a crazy movie like this exists.

Rango (Johnny Depp) acts out scenes in his little aquarium, which is already weird because he seems to hear voices. He gets bounced out of a moving car into the desert, where armadillo roadkill and a cowgirl named Bean (Isla Fisher) lead him to a western frontier town inhabited by reptiles and rodents.

It feels like the film is finding its story as it goes along. Rango takes a long way of getting to this town. He ends up playing the role of the sheriff. Pretending to be tough actually makes him an authority. It gets around to addressing a water shortage, but no ideas for solving it. Even in the process of seeking a source of more water, Rango still takes time out to interact with a random drunken rooster or bank robbing moles.

It may be all some new wave way to deconstruct all animated quest movies and hero stories in general, let alone the western. We always get the outcast who finds a surrogate family and redeems himself. That sort of happens here, but more often the mob of talking animals just tries to out-weird each other. I think the rodent that shares he once found a human spine in his fecal matter wins. Or the bird with the arrow through his eye FOR THE ENTIRE MOVIE.I don’t remember another animated movie that incorporated hardcore gunplay. It’s like how Legend of the Guardians did 300 battles with owls, Rango really does Clint Eastwood with animals. Rango’s “Spirit of the West” vision even calls out The Man With No Name. Letting little Priscilla (Abigail Breslin) point a gun at herself is really irresponsible, in the weirdest, greatest way. I mean, a cartoon for kids pushes those boundaries and doesn’t care!

I might enjoy Rango more with the sound off, just watching the visual construction of cartoon antics like Rango’s vending machine hideout. Or the cave system that seems to cross The Goonies with Pirates of the Caribbean with a giant eye staring on the wall. It’s just so. Damn. Weird.

Rango, the Johnny Depp 3D animated western that’s looking sharp (shootin’) in previews, has made an enemy out of Smoke Free Movies. They want to have a shoot-out with the family film because minor characters are shown smoking. First you can’t smoke in restaurants, now you can’t smoke in fictional universes where animals talk? What gives?

Smoke Free Movies took out an ad in Hollywood Reporter reading:

“How many studio execs did it take to OK smoking in a ‘PG‘ movie?” the ad’s headline screams, before asking, “What was Paramount thinking?”

Maybe they were thinking that characters smoke all the time in classic westerns, so they worried about releasing an authentic, badass western, instead of a western where everybody smokes candy cigarettes or some lame cop-out like that.

“Does’Rango‘ show much smoking? Few PG films do. So why include it at all? It’s a bad guy who smokes? No excuse, either. The research finds that bad guys can have more influence than good guys on kids’ starting to smoke.”

Look, I’m not a smoker, and I don’t like it when people blow smoke in my face. But I also don’t like it when people blow smoke up my ass either, which is what this all sounds like. When I was growing up, cartoon characters were constantly telling me to go to the local library for more information on things, and I won’t be caught dead in a library to this very day. *Research Eliminated*

Also, if anything, I want to see more cartoon characters smoke, like in that old “Flintstones” commercial where Fred and Barney light up. Ahhh… that cool, ink & painty flavor. (TheWrap)

Director: Gore Verbinski

Cast: Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Alfred Molina

Synopsis: The story of a chameleon with an identity crisis.

*For a cleared space on my Netflix queue 11 months from now. (Collider)

Now that New England has been knocked out of the running, I guess the only reason I have to watch the Super Bowl is for the commercials. A lot of big films will run previews during this year’s game, so it looks like there’s something for everybody. Unless you were hoping to see mutants. Despite expectations, X-Men: First Class will not air a Super Bowl trailer.

Here’s a rundown of the movie trailers that will air in between talking baby ads, Doritos wannabes, and horses farting:

Super 8

Captain America: The First Avenger

Thor

Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

Rango

Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Cowboys & Aliens

Limitless

(THR)

I recently posted a faaaaar out teaser for Rango which turned out to be a teaser for the website. Now Paramount has released the official trailer. The film stars Johnny Depp as a Hunter S. Thompson look-a-like chameleon with an identity crisis. The trailer has me just as baffled as the Inception trailer. Screenwriter John Logan might have been tripping off computer duster whippets while pounding away at this adventure. Ideas don’t just come out on their own, right John? **Whoosh of air**

Rango is directed by Gore Verbinski, who did the awesome Mousehunt, as well as those Caribbean Pirates movies. Befriending and/or beguiling Depp in the film are Isla Fisher, Alfred Molina, Timothy Olyphant, and Bill Nighy.

Rango scampers into theaters March 18, 2011.

Check out the trailer after the jump…

Rango — New Trailer – Watch more Movie Trailers

Yeah, uhhhhhh, here’s the teaser trailer for Rango? Directed by Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Ring), it’s tells the story of a chameleon with an identity crisis. I guess he’s a fish in this teaser that does more confusing than teasing. However, the best women of the night have both down to such an art that a John usually can’t tell the difference. So maybe this teaser is just like a skilled prostitute. Or Hunter S. Thompson’s wet dream.

The film stars the voice talents of Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Bill Nighy, Stephen Root, Ray Winstone, Beth Grant, Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton, and Alfred Molina. But you won’t hear any of them in the teaser. That’s the tease. Are you titillated?

Check out the teaser for Rango after the jump.

Rango — Trailer – Watch more Movie Trailers