Fan Fare

Name your favorite in the Oscar movie race.

After months of watching movies, listening to punditry and seeing critics’ picks, the Oscar race has rounded the final corner and is in the home stretch. Nomination ballots are due at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this week, and the world’s top film awards will be given out on Sunday, Feb. 22, in Hollywood.

Most Oscar watchers favor ”Slumdog Millionaire” to take the best motion picture award and its director Danny Boyle to win the directing trophy. Danny gives it the thumbs up. After all, ”Slumdog” has scooped up nearly every other award in sight this Oscar season, and it is clearly a crowd pleaser with an overall U.S. box office slowly inching upward to the $100 milion mark.

But is it really the best movie? Does it have the artistry and cinematic appeal of rivals “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Frost/Nixon”? Can it match the hope and inspiration of gay themed “Milk” with Sean Penn in an award-winning performance? Is it missing the weightiness of Holocaust-era drama “The Reader” led by star Kate Winslet?

Will the popular appeal and critical success of “Slumdog,” the rags-to-riches tale of an Indian boy competing for love and money on a TV game show, be enough to sway Academy Award voters. Now may be your last chance to weigh-in here. How would you vote?

Brad Pitt shows scorn for Paparazzi

(writing and reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis)

In recent weeks as he has been promoting his new film, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Brad Pitt has professed nothing but disdain for the paparazzi, and now the actor has told Rolling Stone magazine it was constant hounding by celebrity photographers that forced him and partner Angelina Jolie to move their family to France, where she gave birth to twins earlier this year.

In an interview released on Wednesday, Pitt said he often is trailed by a dozen paparazzi cars and several motorbikes, and he and his family have been “run out of every major city” by the paparazzi.

We found this anecdote particularly surprising: “One guy bought out a hospital room above us, in France, and was trying to poke through the ceiling. That’s illegal, of course, but he paid,” Pitt told the magazine.

When Jolie, 33, gave birth in July at a hospital in southern France, the paparazzi jockeyed to be the first to catch a multi-million dollar picture of the babies. They failed, and in the end, People magazine won North American rights and British gossip magazine Hello! got all other territories.

Pitt told Rolling Stone they sold the pictures – giving the money to charity – to “kill that bounty” which he said was placed on images of the children.

Pitt and others have called for laws protecting celebrities from the paparazzi, but the paps claim any restrictions put on them would take away their U.S. constitutional rights. But c’mon, cutting a hole through the floor in a hospital? That seems extreme to us here on the Fan Fare blog. Others of you may think differently.