Twentieth Century Fox Studio chief Tom Rothman once again voiced his intention of giving actor Andy Serkis a push for a Best Supprting Actor Academy Award nomination for hismotion capture performance work in this past summer’s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter at the Gotham Independent Film Awards on Monday, the studio exec confirmed what had been reported at the beginning of the month.

I think we may be at the place where we will see a first-ever in Hollywood this year, which is to see Andy Serkis get nominated for a best supporting actor for Planet of the Apes, even though his face never actually appears… But his performance appears, so we are going to push that hard.

Serkis has been at the forefront of the motion capture performance wave. His work as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings trilogy was noted by fans and critics but ignored by the industry at awards time. A similar fate awaited his work on Jackson’s remake of King Kong when he played the titular giant gorilla.

But Roth man thinks that the Academy is smart enough to recognize that the computer generated image placed over a motion captured performance is no different than an actor’s use of costuming or make-up. They just need a little education.

I think part of what we have to do is help educate people to understand that that is 100 percent his performance. It is great emotional acting. Tom Hanks didn’t have to say any dialogue in Castaway for it to be a great performance… The emotionality – what you see and what you feel – he did it. I saw him. I watched him. Then they digitally overlaid – you can think of it as a costume – the skin and the hair of an ape. But I tell you the thing that people felt – and a lot of people where moved when they saw the movie – is because of his performance.

As we head into the awards season, it should be interesting to see how people react.

The recently discovered only surviving print of an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon will be going up for auction next month in Los Angeles. The animated short Hungry Hobos from 1928 was discovered in the United Kingdom’s Huntley Film Archives in Herefordshire after having been thought lost for decades.

The cartoon is being auctioned by Bonhams Entertainment Memorabilia, whose catalog describes the film thusly -

Walt Disney Hungry Hobos, 1928, the only known copy of the film previously recorded as lost, featuring Oswald The Lucky Rabbit and Peg Leg Pete, comprising a 16mm double perforated celluloid acetate positive print, silent, probably dating from around its distribution date of late 20s/early 30s, total running time 5 minutes, 21 seconds and 2 frames at a running speed of 24 frames per second.

Estimate: US$30,000 – 40,000

The Huntley Film Archives is planning on putting the proceeds from the sale towards the many of the 80,000 titles in their collection that are in need of restoration. I would not be surprised if Disney were to be the ones to swoop in and snatch this piece of their history up.

The Oswald The Lucky Rabbit series was created by Walt Disney and animator Ub Iwerks wfor Universal Studios. They created a total of 26 Oswald shorts, 12 of which are still considered missing. When Disney asked for and was refused a raise in the cartoon series’s budget in 1928, he left with Iwerks to found his own cartoon studio with a new animated star – Mickey Mouse.

Ironically, Hungry Hobos first premiered on May 14, 1928, one day before Disney held the first test screening of Mickey Mouse.

Director Mike Mills’ Beginners was the big winner last night as the awards season officially kicked off with the 21st annual Gotham Independent Film Awards. The drama shared the Best Feature award with Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life and was the surprise winner of the Best Ensemble Performance prize, beating out higher profile nominees The Descendants, Take Shelter and Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Highlighting independent films and voted on by juries of various industry types, the Gotham Awards tend to have a bit more eclectic prizes than the usual statues given out at other award shows. The producers of Scenes Of A Crime, the winner of the Best Film Not Seen In A Theater Near You award, will have their film screened for one week at the Cinema Village in New York City.

Complete list of winners are as follows -

Best Feature / Tie
Beginners – Directed by Mike Mills
The Tree Of Life – Directed by Terrence Malick

Best Documentary
Better This World – Directed by Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega

Breakthrough Director Award
Dee Rees – Writer and director of Pariah

Breakthrough Actor
Felecity Jones – Like Crazy

Best Ensemble Performance Award
Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, Goran Visnjic, Kai Lennox,Mary Page Keller, Keegan Boos in Beginners

Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You Award
Scenes Of A Crime – Directed by Blue Hadaegh & Grover Babcock

Gotham Independent Film Audience Award
Girlfriend – Justin Lerner, Director

In advance of a new trailer that should hit sometime tomorrow, Disney has released a new poster for the upcoming John Carter. As you can see below, the film capitalizes on the  film’s Martian setting with a big red tint. The art work recalls, as others have also pointed out, science-fiction paperback covers from the 1970s. Although, not particularly the ones that featured the adventures of the Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp hero being adapted in this film.

Click on the poster for a much larger version.

Director Andrew Stanton’s John Carter stars Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy, Daryl Sabara, Polly Walker, Bryan Cranston, Thomas Hayden Church, and Willem Dafoe. It opens on March 9th.

South Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s revenge thriller has Oldboy has earned it self a considerable fan base here inthe United States. And I think it would be fair to say that most of them are eying the English-language remake with a bit of suspicion. Perhaps some of that will be allayed when they hear what producer Roy Lee had to say in a recent interview with Collider.

Lee stated that the when the film goes into production in March, it will be with a new draft of the script written by Mark Protosevich. Based on both Park Chan-Wook’s film and the original manga that inspired it, the script will also contain a few new surprises.

It’s very similar, but we’ve added new elements. Or, Mark Protosevich has come up with new elements to it that will throw off the audience who have seen the original movie because there are new characters and new situations that present themselves in a way that changes the story but eventually go in the same direction… The ending will be something that the audiences will all be…especially the fans of the original will be very happy with. In fact, some may consider it to be a bit darker.

Ummm… darker? If you’ve seen the original film, you know that it ends on a pretty dark, and downright icky, note. The notion that they have found an even darker place to go than the ending of the film has my head-reeling.Ironically, I honestly thought the original’s ending was too dark and twisted for any Hollywood studio to go for, so for them to be going in the opposite direction as it were is really something to look forward to.

The Americanized Oldboy will be directed by Spike Lee and star Colin Firth and Josh Brolin.

The music of the Grateful Dead may be featured in a jukebox musical, much in the same way that director Julie Taymor’s Across The Universe was built around in the song catalog of the Beatles.

ICM literary agent Bruce Kaufman has just secured the rights to the seminal jam band’s musical catalog and is looking to put together a package of talent that would create a musical around those songs much in the same way he was the behind-the-scenes motivator for Across The Universe.

Deadline, who broke the story, stated that “the expectation is that the music will be used not for a biopic, but rather a film that captures that psychedelic Haight-Ashbury hippie spirit of the late 60s and early 70s.”

Dead fans who may be worried that this may be a quick cash grab off of the band’s legacy may find some condolence in the fact that Kaufman is working with Grateful Dead archivist David Lenieux and the manager of Grateful Dead Properties Mark Pinkus on the project.

On the surface, this certainly does seem like a good idea. And I think that the Dead is a band that automatically invokes the 1960s, even as they continued to perform into the 1990s. But while the Dead certainly are one of the most famous bands on the planet, I question whether their catalog contains enough hits to fill a film’s narrative. A project like this is going to need to rely on a number of hits and can non-Dead fans even name more than three or four songs from the band? I know that I can’t and I used to DJ classic rock, including the music of t he Dead, for three years in college. They have the name recognition, but I doubt they have the hit recognition needed to make this film appealing to the general public.

Maverick British film director Ken Russell, director of the controversial The Devils (1971), the film adaption of The Who’s rock opera Tommy, Whore (1991), Altered States (1980) and the Academy Award winning Women In Love (1969), died yesterday in London following a series of strokes. He was 84.

Russell’s career started making documentary shorts for the BBC, often about the lives of composers. His fascination with music and composers continued through to films like Tommy, The Music Lovers (1970), which looked atthe life of composer Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, Mahler (1974) which examined the life of the titular composer and Lisztomania, which starred Roger Daltry and explored the power of music to do both good and evil.

His first film, the comedy French Dressing (1963) was unsuccessful, but his career started in earnest after directing the 1967 spy film Billion Dollar Brain, part of the Harry Palmer series starring Michael Caine.

In 1969 Russell released Women In Love, based on the novel by D H Lawrence,  which received several Academy Award nominations, including one for Russell for Best Director. Star Glenda Jackson would receive an Oscar statue for Best Actress.

Sexuality and the Church were two other themes that Russell would explore through many of his films and combined the two most infamously in the controversial 1970 film The Devils which starred Oliver Reed. To this date, Russell’s original edit of The Devils has yet to receive a release in the United States.

After his 1980 science-fiction film Altered States, Russell found his career in decline, a victim of changing cinematic tastes. His later films were mostly produced independently of the big studios and include the two horror cult classics Gothic (1986) and The Lair Of The White Worm (1988), Salome’s Last Dance (1988), The Rainbow (1989), Russia House (1990) and Whore (1991).

With its release about four months away, it appears that Disney is starting to ramp up promotion for their big Edgar Rice Burroughs adaption John Carter. Earlier this week we saw one new photo featuring the titular hero as being played by Taylor Kitsch in a gladiatorial arena against a great martian white ape. Now we have six new pictures giving us a better idea of the epic scope of the story. (As always, click on each photo for a slightly larger view.)

John Carter also stars Lynn Collins, Samantha Morton, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Dominic West, James Purefoy, Daryl Sabara, Polly Walker, Bryan Cranston, Thomas Hayden Church, and Willem Dafoe.

With the Muppets making their return to the big screen this weekend after far too long an absence, we thought it would be fun to go back and look at some of the prep work done for the very first Muppet film, The Muppet Movie, back in 1978. Although Jim Henson was eager to bring his creations to the big screen, since the muppets had never appeared outside of studio sets before, it remained to be seen whether they would look believable in a real world setting. To that end Henson and the film’s director Jim Frawley shoot a series of tests featuring Kermit the Frog, Fozzy Bear, Miss Piggy and Sweetums in the English countryside. They’re not perfect. In the first video below you can catch a glimpse of Fozzy’s performer Frank Oz in the segment they filmed in a car. But beyond the curiosity value, these two videos are also entertaining just on their own for all of the improvised dialogue that Henson and Oz came up with. Fozzy Bear telling jokes to cows is hysterical!

With the 2006 reboot of the James Bond franchise, fans have been still waiting for one of the mainstays of the film series to make an appearance – Q, the the head of the British Secret Service division that creates all of those crazy gadgets that 007 uses on his missions.Fans can rest easy now as the Hollywood Reporter has learned that Ben Whishaw will be portraying the character in the currently in production Skyfall.

Whishaw had been a previously announced cast member, but producers were mum as to what his role would be, even avoiding the subject at the film’s recent beginning of production press conference.

Although his given name is Major Boothroyd, the head of the research and development division that creates all of 007′s gadgets is generally just known as Q. A mainstay of the Bond franchise, the character appeared in 19 out of the 20 pre-reboot films, with Live And Let Die being his only absence. Seventeen of those 19 times the character was played by Desmond Llewelyn, marking him as the series’ longest-running actor. (Peter Burton played him in the debut Bond film Dr. No.  John Cleese appeared alongside Llewelyn as Q’s assistant in The World Is Not Enough before his character assumed the title in Die Another Day.)

Reportedly, the British tabloids are making a big deal of the fact that this will mark the first time that an actor playing Q is younger than the actor playing Bond. Whishaw is 31 compared to Daniel Craig’s 43. Personally, I don’t care. I like the idea that the tech genius for the British Secret Service is a young guy. Maybe they’re reimagining the character so he’s on a similar level to some of the real world tech revolutionaries that have been changing society like a Steve Jobs or Marl Zuckerberg. That makes sense to me in light of the rebooted franchise’s more realistic approach to the films. I don’t think we’ll be seeing giant space lasers and invisible cars anytime soon.