What do John and Haley Mills, John and Angelica Huston, Francis and Sofia Coppola and Jon Voight and Angelina Jolie have in common?  Well, if you’re one of those (okay, one of us) Oscar obsessives, you recognized quite quickly that those names represent the short list of father/daughter Oscar winning combos.

This year, there might be a new addition.

Vanessa Roth has been immersed in the film industry for much of her life.  Her father is Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”), and Vanessa has been behind the camera for over a decade as it is.  Her nomination this year for the documentary short “Freeheld” is her first brush with major film awards success after a long line of socially conscious filmmaking.

“My grandparents were very socially active and political, and I guess because of my dad, I always thought I would be a writer or be telling stories,” Vanessa said.  “The thing to me is that I feel like I can do better social work by making films and have a bigger impact on people and on systems.”

Indeed, Ms. Roth began both undergraduate and graduate study with the intention of building a sociological knowledge base that she would implement in her work as a filmmaker.  She holds a masters degree in social work and said she is typically interested in issues with children in her filmmaking.

“I was always drawn to news about kids and kids not having a real voice in their lives and being disempowered,” she said.

“Freeheld,” then, is a slight departure for Vanessa, and she said it was never anyone’s intention to do an issue film in any case.  But the doc centers on a topical issue to say the least: life assets being left in the hands of homosexual partners.  Filmmaker Cynthia Wade was the film’s director, and in the life of Lieutenant Laurel Hester, she found a microcosm for an issue of personal passion.

“She saw an article right when these things were happening, when they were going to freeholders to get their pension, and she was adamant that the story be told on the screen,” Vanessa said.

A New Jersey detective of over 20 years, Hester discovered in 2005 that she was dying of cancer.  Her final wish was to leave her pension benefits to her partner, Stacie, but the couple quickly found bureaucracy and, frankly, old-world mentality impeding those wishes.



Vanessa served as producer on the film.  She was just finishing up post-production on another project, “The Third Monday in October,” when Wade came to her with the idea to film the events as a documentary short.

Much like her father’s efforts in the world of fiction, Vanessa said she is interested in getting inside of people’s heads and finding out how they work, what their lives are like and how that informs their actions.

“With documentaries, you really get access to people’s lives more than you would in any other field,” she said.  “And the thing with documentaries that is interesting is that the writing comes in the editing.  The challenge is having this person’s life and figuring out how to make a story from that.”

Vanessa said she is quite comfortable in the non-fiction arena and doesn’t have a current interest in crossing over to join her father on the narrative side of things.

Speaking of Eric, I called him up to get his take on “Freeheld.”  He said he was very impressed with the film, having recently seen a completed version.  And those who know him would certainly concede his honesty about what he likes and doesn’t like to be a significant feature of his personality -- so compliments shouldn’t be considered handouts.

“I always thought she'd make a great journalist,” Eric said.  “I thought it was a very emotional piece.  And it’s  such a personal and intimate story, it’s hard not to feel something when you watch it.”

While Vanessa is experiencing her first brush with Oscar, Eric has become something of a seasoned pro where awards attention is concerned.  He captured his first Academy Award 14 years ago for “Forrest Gump” and has been in the rat race two other times, for “The Insider” in 1999 and “Munich” in 2005.  With “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” on the slate for 2008 and the Johnny Depp-produced “Shantaram” rejuvenated now that the writers strike has come to an end, he certainly shows no signs of slowing down.

That might be a daunting shadow to walk in, but Vanessa said she is lucky in that she has never felt like a seal of approval from her father was any sort of prerequisite.

“He’s always been really supportive of the work I do, but he wants it to be mine,” she said.  As for the Oscar frenzy, Eric has “just been telling me to enjoy it,” she said.

So far, Vanessa said she has had the most fun at the nominees’ luncheon, where she sat next to one of the producers of “Juno” and expressed some playful jealousy at the fact that Wade was seated next to actress Julie Christie.  Calling the experience “completely surreal,” Vanessa said the last two weeks have been “so much different than working on a documentary,” where she is more of a fly on the wall than a contender in the spotlight.

But she got a considerable kick out of the fashion extravaganza, offering this jaw dropping anecdote about her and her co-nominee hunting down threads for the show:

“Certain designers have been nice enough to loan us something.  But a friend of mine said she had a nice connection to a someone, and that designer’s response to her was that they already had an Academy Award nominee and that they didn’t consider documentary filmmaking to be ‘red carpet material!’”

OUCH.  Well, said designer might feel a bit silly if the world doesn’t get a chance to see his or her threads on display, should Vanessa join that shortlist of Oscar-winning fathers and daughters.  “Freeheld” has a great shot at the gold, but Vanessa said she is also very impressed with her fellow nominees.

“I think everything is really strong, and they’re so different from each other,” she said.  “The one thing they have in common is the length!”

When the Oscar nominations were unveiled two days ago, one name I felt certain would pop up was cinematographer Harris Savides, who was responsible for the lensing of two well-respected genre pictures in 2007: David Fincher's "Zodiac" and Ridley Scott's "American Gangster."  Alas, it wasn't to be, as the nominees included Seamus McGarvey, Robert Elswitt, Janusz Kaminski and Roger Deakins (squared).

It may not have been surprising to other Oscar forecasters out there, seeing as Savides hadn't necessarily popped up during the precursor season and has found himself coming up short in the awards arena for some time.  But there is certainly no shortage of respect for the lenser, considered by many to be the most talented photographer in the business.  It didn't take Tony Gilroy, for instance, more than a moment's thought to call Savides "probably the greatest working cinematographer there is" when I interviewed him back in October, and any given colleague I spoke to over the course of the season (Kaminski, Deakins and Elswitt among them) was quick to call him a personal favorite.

Why, then, has Oscar glory eluded Savides so far?

Granted, the lion's share of his work to date has been in the independent arena.  Savides has found himself the lenser of choice for helmer Gus Van Sant ("Elephant," "Gerry," "Last Days"), having brushes with mainstrem Hollywood entertainment here and there ("Heaven's Prisoners," "The Game," "Finding Forrester").  Perhaps his greatest work behind the camera so far came for a tiny, yet brilliant film that no one might have seen had Nicole Kidman not been in the lead (Jonathan Glazer's "Birth").  But 2007 was a real opportunity for Savides' fellow craftsmen to honor his work, as he had a chance to chew on some of his most commercially accesible material to date.

But a nomination just wasn't in the cards.  Maybe someday soon Savides will get that tip of the hat that his colleagues clearly feel he deserves.  He's hard at work preparing Van Sant's "Milk" at the moment, which may or may not provide that opportunity.

I had the pleasure of speaking to Savides back in December.  Ironically enough, he first called when I was vacationing in San Francisco, the setting of Fincher's grisly account of the Zodiac murders which has become one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year.

On the project, Savides treaded out into the unfamiliar territory of mixing his work with CGI material.  A number of sequences in the flm were manufactured through visual effects technology, something of a necessity, given the urban development of the Bay Area since the days of the Zodiac killer.

Savides and Fincher took a good look at Alan Pakula's "All the President's Men" while prepping, mainly for the simplicity of structure and, of course, the grit of the newsroom.  The filmmaker had already amassed a considerable amount of research before Savides came on board, but the real starting point for the lenser was studying still photography for the film's ultimate look.

"Steven Shore had these banal kind of images of America in the 70s, which were a great reference for colors and for props, and for the world that we were to inhabit and make the audience feel they were watching," he said.  "Something that did concern me, however, was that it was very dialogue-driven, and I wanted to do things that were more cinematic.  But all of David's references were these wonderful movies that had this structure that I became interested in.  The approach that he wanted to take was exciting for me."

Fincher proposed Eric Rohmer's "La Collectionnuese" and Ingmar Bergman's "The Passion of Anna" as source viewing on the project.  Savides says he is quite the fan of Bergman, and that Fincher's preparation techniques have made him an even bigger fan of Rohmer than he already was.

"I didn't come to appreciate Rohmer's movies until I studied this film," he said.

When it came to preparing the Frank Lucas biopic "American Gangster" with Ridley Scott, Savides found himself again digging into still photography as source material, perhaps even more so than on "Zodiac."

"There's a book by Bruce Davidson called East 100th Street, one of those classic black and white monograph collections of Harlem," he said.  "It was the first night Ridley and I met in person, and everything he showed me was black and white, a style which I think was en vogue if you look at the time of Nicky Barnes and Frank Lucas."

Savides also referenced photographer Helen Levitt, looking at her work for color detail.  Scott's mandate, Savides said, was to make a color movie that felt black and white.  Savides took this as a broad gesture and set out to refrain from producing an over abundance of color in the lensing of the pic.

As for compositional techniques, Savides and Scott set out to film the Lucas sequences in a more formal fashion, while looseness was the key to the Richie Roberts portions.

"That's one of the rules I remember us laying down," he said.  "But in retrospect, I don't know if we actually did it!"

If nothing else, Savides comes across as truly passionate about the medium that employs him.  He sounds like the wide-eyed kid who grew up and pinches himself every day because he gets to soak in the fruits of photography and the moving image.  A somewhat raspy but soothing voice, peppered with just the right amount of Big Apple inflection, reveals the thoughts of a man happy to find himself transfixed by what he might find on screen.

"Only movies can to that, to your heart and and your mind," he said, "making this event happen to you.  And even though I'm saying that now, I don't think a movie can sustain that for the whole time.  But if it can do it two or three times while you're watching, that's a great thing."

Here's hoping Oscar catches up to him one of these days.

(This interview was set to go up yesterday afternoon; then the news of Heath Ledger's untimely death hit and it just didn't seem like the time.  I'm running it now in its entirety, and in the hopes that we can all move back into the normal activities of this blog.  It is, of course, with a heavy heart that we do so.)

With all the Oscar reactions being bandied about today, it seems you can go to any of a dozen sites and see similar comments coming from Amy Ryan, Marion Cotillard, Saoirse Ronan, etc.  Poor folks, I’m sure they’re getting tired of rattling off the same responses over and over.  Then again, they’re Oscar nominees now.  It would probably take a lot to push them off of cloud nine at this point.

My instinct this morning, however, wasn’t to catch up with the 20 individuals cited in the acting categories, but instead, to call up Greg P. Russell, who received his 12th – yes, 12th – Oscar nomination this year in the Best Sound Mixing category for “Transformers.”

Russell ended an 12-year partnership with fellow mixer Kevin O’Connell in 2007.  “Transformers” stands as the duo’s final collaboration.  But Oscar gold, as you have no doubt heard by now, has remained elusive for these two respected vets.  O’Connell’s 20th nomination today stands as the most nods without a win, while Russell’s 12th bid isn’t too far behind.

Calling from Sony Studios in Culver City, where he has been working on the mix for Paul Weiland’s upcoming “Made of Honor,” Russell told me that he was greeted with a massive bouquet of balloons from his wife and daughter.  Such an elaborate arrangement has become something of a tradition, given that this year’s announcement was certainly not the mixer’s first bar-be-cue.  But this time, there was something slightly different about the bouquet.

“It's a huge arrangement,” Russell said, “upwards of 15 feet tall.  And this year, it's all gold.  I just called them and said ‘I hope that translates!’”

The prospect of finally bringing home that first win is extra special to Russell this time around because of the fitting denouement it would be to his collaboration with O’Connell.  In fact, it was his co-nominee who called Russell this morning with the news of their nomination after Russell ran into troubles logging on to the internet to see for himself.

“Being a sound guy, I don’t think there’s any better sound than the phone ringing on a morning like this,” Russell said.  “Kevin and I have had such an extraordinary run.  It would be a poignant way to finish out our tenure together.”

I took a moment to get Russell’s thoughts on his fellow nominated mixers, and right off the top, he said that the field of contenders is a very satisfactory one full of talented and deserving individuals.  The only drag, he said, was that he hasn’t been able to see one of the nominees: “The Bourne Ultimatum.”

“You know, I saw the first two, but my wife never saw ‘The Bourne Supremacy,’” he said.  “Every time we’d pull out screeners, she would say ‘wait, I haven’t seen the second one!’  All I can tell you is I know Scott Milan and I love his work.  His signature is one of distinction and attention to detail.  Both of the other films in the trilogy sounded fantastic and were worthy of the possibility of a nomination, and clearly this one was, too.”

On “3:10 to Yuma,” mixed by a crew headed up by five-time nominee Paul Massey:

“I liked that movie a lot.  I felt like the sound was truly a character within the film.  It was a very clean-sounding, articulate sound job, well-crafted and well-mixed.”

On finding himself in the company of 12-time nominee Randy Thom, who racked up nominations 13 and 14 for Brad Bird’s “Ratatouille” this morning:

“I love what Randy does with these Pixar films,” he said.  “They’re just so unique and clever.  It’s a well-deserved representation of sound editing and sound mixing.  And Michael Semanick was on board with that.  He just blows me away.  The quality of his films and his versatility, this year on ‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘There Will be Blood,’ it just always impresses me.”

And finally, on what has been considered one of the most creatively mixed films of the year – “No Country for Old Men”:

“I thought it was very interesting and that things weren’t competing; you could really feel the sense of isolation with the lack of music driving through the scenes.  People were talking about this sound job early on and there was a buzz about it in the sound community based on the bold choices being made.”

Russell’s biggest sigh of relief, he joked, was that there wasn’t a musical in the mix (so to speak) this year.  He and O’Connell have certainly had their battles with musicals, having lost in the past to “Chicago,” “Ray” and, just last year, “Dreamgirls.”  Nonetheless, the exclusion of “Hairspray” and “Sweeney Todd” from this year’s list certainly caught Russell off guard.

“I have to say, there were surprises,” he said.  “But I really like the playing field.  They’re first-rate sound jobs across the board.”

The only specter lingering over Russell’s hopeful date with Oscar destiny is the prospect of a win without a telecast.  The writers’ guild strike has left plans for this year’s ceremony up in the air without any real indication of what to expect.  Producer Gil Cates continues to assure the media and fans that a show of some sort will happen, but real answers have been few and far between.  Win, lose or draw, however, Russell would rather see the winners of this year’s Academy Awards given their day in the sun than watch the event wither into film awards obscurity like this year's Golden Globes announcement.

“I’m really hoping they work out whatever deal they need to present a show,” Russell said.  “This is the pinnacle in entertainment.  After the fiasco of the Golden Globes, I think people are really looking forward to the satisfaction.  And, I mean, come on – it’s the 80th Oscars.  The 80th Oscars.  There has to be a show.”

In the last two days I've had the joy of speaking with two of the creative geniuses (yeah -- I think that's a fair term) behind "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" that AREN'T Julian Schnabel.

Ronald Harwood -- nicely juxtaposed with Diablo Cody earlier in the week by our own Anne Thompson -- is a delightful Brit with all the candor in the world.  Freshly back from The Hollywood Reporter's writer's roundtable, the talented scribe celebrated his 73rd birthday today.  Congrats, good sir.

Janusz Kaminski, meanwhile, has recently wrapped shooting "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and had nothing but enthusiasm to show for what he accomplished "Diving Bell."  He mentioned that even though his career has largely been dominated by the big budget Spielberg efforts of the last 14 years, he was quite refreshed by the ability to be so artistically expressive this time around.

Funnily enough, both gentlemen dropped the F-bomb in separately hilarious ways.  Harwood, regarding the obvious health drawbacks of a life-long smoking habit, stated calmly and smoothly, "I'm 72 and I don't give a f***."

Kaminski, on the other hand, when responding to a question regarding colleague reception of his work on "Diving Bell," said that he had prepared himself over the years due to this rejection or that.  "I don't give a f** what they think," he said, "because I made a great movie.  But I wish them well!"  Then he added a maniacal laugh that makes me chuckle just thinking about it.

Both are characters to say the least.