Front Page, Industry News

What Oscar voters think of ‘Social Network’

Columbia’s fall hopeful “The Social Network” passed two crucial hurdles during the weekend.

The first was opening No. 1 at the domestic box office. The other was a smaller but no less telling test: pleasing an early audience of Academy voters.

As general audiences sampled David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s take on the origins of Facebook, a large group of Academy voters — including actors Angie Dickinson and Robert Forster and “Little Miss Sunshine” producer Ron Yerxa — settled into an 8 p.m. screening Saturday at the lush and voluminous Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy’s Beverly Hills headquarters. The 1,012-seat theater was packed with members and their guests, many, but not all, playing on the back nine of life.

Which is what made the screening notable.

Critics’ takes on the film, including The Hollywood Reporter’s own Kirk Honeycutt’s, so far have been almost universally positive (some extremely so), with definitive predictions about the movie’s Oscar prospects. But while younger audiences were expected to show up to get a peek at the movie’s zeitgeist-y content, a Hollywood sign-sized question mark has hung over the reactions from older voters unlikely to be as connected to the material.

If Saturday’s early look is any indication, the movie has made quite a few friends in that demographic, too.

“I love it,” said one older person, who described the film as “a story of winning at all costs and its consequences.”

A woman in her 80s echoed the sentiment. “It broke my heart,” she said. “It’s a story of friendship and betrayal.”

Their connection to the material seemed to bypass the real-life historical context of Facebook’s creation and instead stem from the tragic universality of the shattered friendship at its center.

“If you haven’t been betrayed, you haven’t lived, they say,” another viewer said.

Those with a less positive view of the film grumbled about its two-hour length, and others griped about having “trouble with the postmodern structure.” Younger audiences growing up with film in the post-“Pulp Fiction” era tend to find that kind of forward-and-back rhythm more energizing than challenging.

In general, the dreaded generational split was not in evidence. From the whirlwind first scene, in which Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg jousts with Rooney Mara as his besieged college girlfriend in a campus bar, the crowd was laughing right along. And the majority of the people stayed through the credits.

One multigenerational family in the lobby after the screening consisted of a woman in her 30s, her father and her grandmother. They all gave the movie an enthusiastic thumbs-up, with the grandmother saying, “I don’t think it’s a generational question at all.”

Also drawing positive comments were the performances of Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield (“Did you know he is English? You can’t take your eyes off him,” one viewer said). The jury was more split on Timberlake.

Even as “Social’s” first-weekend gross came in under many watchers’ predictions, its opening haul represents about half the project’s production budget. Long legs at theaters not only will throw the studio’s bottom line into the black, but it could keep awards momentum going for what is shaping up to be one of the strongest contenders for this year’s biggest prizes.

And it will need it, if this crowd was representative of the awards struggle ahead. “The King’s Speech,” the Weinstein Co. drama that has been drawing raves since its first festival screenings a month ago in Telluride and Toronto, was on the audience’s mind even Saturday night.

One Academy veteran admitted that “Speech’s” traditional elements — it’s a British period drama about a royal overcoming a personal obstacle at a time of war — “hits the sweet spot of Oscar voters.”

When approached about the film, one lady exclaimed, “Oh, ‘King’s Speech!’ That’s the one that’s going to win the Oscar!”

Source: The Hollywood Reporter