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PAUL MASSEY NOMINATED FOR BEST SOUND MIXING
When you're an A-list nominee, Oscar week is all about enjoying the adulation and just being your lovely self.
For Paul Massey, a Canadian up for best sound mixing for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, this week entails being sequestered at Skywalker Sound near San Francisco, working marathon shifts to finish the sound mix for the next Pirates sequel.
Eddie Murphy in Dreamgirls (AP)
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On a seven-days-a-week, 16-hours-a-day schedule, he can only manage to fly down the night before Sunday's awards and then fly back Monday morning. Endless parties? Forget it. And yet working away at Pirates 3, possibly the biggest film to come later this year, would be any sound engineer's career high. Rumour is that 22,000 prints of the film have been ordered for its first-weekend release.
"Apparently this is one of the largest, if not the largest print order that has ever been made for any film," says Massey, with a faint British accent. Born in England, he lived in Toronto for 13 years and holds Canadian citizenship. His early background was in music-recording engineering, then the studio he was working in branched out into TV post-production. The rest is award-winning history, including Genies, Geminis, BAFTAs and four previous Oscar nominations.
There's only one problem. He has been elected by the team of Pirates sound mixers to give the thank-you speech if they win Sunday. But he has been too busy to come up with one. "I've got a rough outline in my head, but it's not there yet. A little nerve-racking!" he added with a laugh.
JENNIFER HUDSON: NOMINATED FOR BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
She's been called "America's dream girl" for her scene-stealing portrayal of Effie in Dreamgirls — and for her Oscar nomination that was a kind of sweet revenge after being voted out early on American Idol.
But perhaps the highest praise for Jennifer Hudson's performance comes from Maxine Ballard, the sister of Florence Ballard, upon whom the character Effie was based.
"I thought that Jennifer Hudson did a great job," she said.
Like Effie, Florence Ballard had a triumphant return to the stage after her fall from grace from the Supremes.
Singing at Ford Auditorium in Detroit on June 25, 1975, Ballard shook off years of drinking and other troubles and put on a dynamic performance that drew wide acclaim and revived interest in her career.
But unlike Effie, Florence Ballard's road to a comeback didn't go much further than that night. In 1976, Ballard, one of the original Supremes, died of a heart attack at age 32.
While Diana Ross remains an international icon and Mary Wilson continues to perform across the U.S., Ballard is known, if at all, as a tragic figure.
Her family is hoping that Jennifer Hudson's performance will change all that. "She always had the drive and passion about everything," Ballard said of her sister. Associated Press
IRIS YAMASHITA: CO-NOMINATED WITH PAUL HAGGIS FOR BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The remarkable story of how Iris Yamashita was hired to write the script for the Clint Eastwood-directed war film Letters from Iwo Jima is one of the more unusual subplots at this year's Academy Awards.
Yamashita had been toiling as a web programmer when she was approached by Oscar-winning writer-director Paul Haggis to work on Iwo Jima, which tells the story of wartime fighting on the island from the Japanese perspective.
The 40-year-old had shared the same Hollywood agent as Haggis, who is Canadian, after winning a screenwriting contest in 2002. So when Haggis began casting around for a writer capable of understanding the cultural issues raised by the movie, which is shot entirely in Japanese, Yamashita appeared on the radar.
The two writers met, and soon afterwards, without ever having had a screenplay of her own produced before, Yamashita was being asked to pen a script for a Clint Eastwood film.
Said Yamashita: "One moment I had a full-time job as a web programmer, and the next moment I had Paul Haggis saying, 'Okay, you can quit your day job now.' "
RYAN GOSLING NOMINATED FOR BEST ACTOR
Sure he gave a great performance in Half Nelson, but the film's distributor ThinkFilm worked long and hard to help Canadian actor Ryan Gosling get his coveted nomination. Part one of the strategy: Get a head start and release the film in August, a month before Oscar-bound movies are usually unveiled.
As Mark Urman, ThinkFilm's marketing president, told the Hollywood Reporter: "We had to go out ahead of the pack."
Urman said it helped that critics raved about Gosling's performance and that the field of potential nominees was weaker than usual.
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