The Orange County Film Society, a membership organization that strives to keep the Newport Beach Film Festival experience going during non-festival months, has a lineup of possible Oscar contenders this week: Saving Mr. Banks tonight, 12 Years a Slave (with the screenwriter!) Wednesday and Inside Llewyn Davis Thursday. But an OCFS award already went out last week, for “Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture,” during an advance screening that included one of those cast members.
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The film shown Tuesday night was August: Osage County, and the star who was out to lap up the praise was Juliette Lewis, who we at the Weekly remember fondly from her performing with Juliette and the Licks at a staff party in October 2004. As shown below, Ms. Lewis has not aged a bit since, further proof that Hollywood show people drink the blood of sacrificed babies:
August Osage County, directed by John Wells and written by and based on Tracy Letts' Broadway play of the same name, “tells the story of the women of the Weston family, whose lives have diverged until a family crisis brings them back to the Midwest house they grew up in–and to the dysfunctional woman who raised them.”
There's already chatter about Meryl Streep scoring another Academy Award nomination from the film that also stars Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Margo Martindale, Dermot Mulroney, Julianne Nicholson, Sam Shepard, Misty Upham and, of course, Ms. Lewis.
See the trailer on the next page …
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“The Orange County Film Society is extremely proud to recognize the outstanding performances of the cast of August: Osage County,” said Gregg Schwenk, executive director and co-founder of the OCFS (which are also his Newport Beach Film Festival roles). “The talent was exceptional–each character was fully and completely developed–a true team effort from start to finish.”
This is the first year OCFS has recognized the best ensemble performance of the year, but it's not the first year the organization has honored worthy films. The OCFS picks for best picture for the last three years have all gone on to win best picture at the Academy Awards.
Annual membership in the OCFS is $129 per person, and that gets you into a set number of advance screenings. But the nonprofit routinely adds even more surprise showings that seem to fall out of the Hollywood sky, especially during awards-consideration season. Like now. Go to OrangeCountyFilmSociety.com for membership details.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.