Daniel Day-Lewis agrees to be honored by Santa Barbara Film Festival

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - The Santa Barbara International Film Festival has landed one of the top prizes of awards season, announcing on Tuesday that it will host the celebrated but elusive "Lincoln" star Daniel Day-Lewis with a tribute at its festival in the coastal town north of Los Angeles.

Day-Lewis has been dominating critics' awards with his performance as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's film, and is considered one of the best actors working today. But he seldom participates in the rituals of awards season, of which a Santa Barbara tribute has long been a late-season staple.

Day-Lewis will receive the festival's Montecito Award, which in the past has gone to the likes of Julianne Moore, Kate Winslet, Javier Bardem, Geoffrey Rush and Annette Bening.

"Daniel Day-Lewis continues to inspire the industry and the public by his approach to tackling the most complex of characters and delivering brilliant performances time after time," said SBIFF's executive director, Roger Durling, in a statement announcing the award.

For his performance in "Lincoln," Day-Lewis may well become the first person to win three Best Actor Academy Awards. He has previously won for "My Left Foot" and "There Will Be Blood," and has been nominated for "In the Name of the Father" and (as Best Supporting Actor) for "Gangs of New York."

The festival begins on January 24 and runs through February 3. The tribute to Day-Lewis will take place at the Arlighton Theatre on Saturday, January 26.

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"Game of Thrones" gets expanded episodes for Season 3

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - As the drama grows on "Game of Thrones," so do the episodes.

HBO's hit fantasy series will air expanded episodes for its third season, a spokeswoman for HBO told TheWrap on Tuesday, with each of the episodes running slightly longer.

"Thrones" co-creator and co-showrunner Dan Weiss told EW.com that nearly an hour of extra material will be included over the course of the season.

"There's almost another full episode's worth of extra minutes spread across the season," Weiss said. "One of the great liberties with HBO is we're not forced to come in at a specific time. We can't be under 50 minutes or over 60, but that gives us a lot of flexibility."

It's understandable that the series would be expanded for its upcoming run. The third season of "Game of Thrones" is based on the first half of "A Storm of Swords," the third novel from George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" book series. At 992 pages, it is one of the lengthiest books of the series.

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Tom Hooper, Mychael Danna join crowded slate of Palm Springs honorees

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - "Les Miserables" director Tom Hooper and "Life of Pi" composer Mychael Danna are the latest awards-season hopefuls to be added to the slate of honorees at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, PSIFF organizers announced on Tuesday.

The two will join a list of honorees that in recent days has expanded to include Helen Mirren, Richard Gere, Bradley Cooper and Sally Field. Other awards will go to Helen Hunt, Naomi Watts, Robert Zemeckis and the cast of "Argo."

Hooper will receive the Sonny Bono Visionary Award, named in honor of the singer/producer/actor and Palm Springs mayor who launched the festival. Past recipients include Danny Boyle, Quentin Tarantino, Baz Luhrmann and last year's winner, "The Artist" director Michel Hazanavicius.

"Tom Hooper brilliantly transforms the classic stage musical 'Les Misérables' into a cinema marvel," said festival chairman Harold Matzner in a press release announcing the awards. "By asking his amazing cast of actors to sing live on film, Hooper allows them to connect even further with their characters, resulting in emotional powerhouse performances that are enthralling audiences worldwide."

Danna, who has won acclaim for his score to Ang Lee's "Life of Pi," will receive the Frederick Loewe Award for Film Composing, a PSIFF honor that in the past has gone to T Bone Burnett, Alexandre Desplat, Danny Elfman, Randy Newman and Diane Warren.

Danna previously wrote music for Lee's films "The Ice Storm" and "Ride With the Devil." "Mychael Danna is a pioneer in creating original compositions that are as dramatic and innovative as the films in which they are featured," said Matzner in the release.

PSIFF's Awards Gala will take place on Saturday, January 5, and the festival will run from January 3 through January 14.

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"Zero Dark Thirty" review: Like a really good "Law & Order" - with waterboarding

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - It's always a challenge to tell a story where the audience knows the ending. The trick comes in offering a new perspective on familiar events or at least generating suspense in a way that makes us nervous that Apollo 13 might not land safely, even when history tells us otherwise.

"Argo" and "Lincoln" are two films that successfully tread these waters, and now comes "Zero Dark Thirty," Kathryn Bigelow's eagerly awaited follow-up to "The Hurt Locker."

She and screenwriter Mark Boal have consciously chosen to take a just-the-facts-ma'am approach to the manhunt and subsequent killing of Osama bin Laden, and while there's no denying the skill with which they've gone about telling the tale, the results are simultaneously uninvolving and somewhat infuriating.

Uninvolving, to some extent, because the people in this movie are not so much characters as they are plot functionaries, chess pieces that move around strategically to capture their target. Jessica Chastain stars as Maya, a CIA agent who, with each passing year, grows more determined to nab the man behind the 9/11 attacks.

There's nothing wrong with this style of storytelling -- giving us some backstory about Maya's taste in men or love of antique cars or whatever wouldn't necessarily add anything to what Bigelow and Boal are trying to do here - but it's a gamble that doesn't quite pay off.

After spending its first half getting into the false leads and call-tracing and all the nitty-gritty of a manhunt, "Zero Dark Thirty" subjects its capable lead character to the requisite scene in which she snaps and barks at her bureaucrat boss (played by Kyle Chandler) that she's so close, and not to take her off the case.

It's a moment that feels like it might have come from any given episode of "Homeland" or any TNT show about a plucky female cop, and it capsizes a movie that, until that point, had been a fairly fascinating examination of the unglamorous sausage-making that goes into a worldwide search for a terrorist.

The somewhat infuriating facet comes early on, as we watch Maya observe seasoned interrogator Dan (Jason Clarke, giving a fascinating performance) torture terror suspects to find out what they know about September 11. The movie indirectly implies that waterboarding and electrodes to the genitals and all that other stuff that George W. Bush's consiglieri convinced him were kosher actually resulted in actionable intelligence, despite the reams of reportage that suggested otherwise.

I believe Bigelow and Boal's after-the-fact denials that they intended to glorify torture in any way, but when you include material like this in a movie that takes such a coolly detached tone in telling its story, you can't then be surprised later when some viewers interpret a filmmaker's neutral tone as an implicit endorsement.

Still, even if the eventual raid on the bin Laden compound isn't as exciting as the film's first half (this is where some "Argo"-style suspense might have come in handy), there's a lot to recommend about "Zero Dark Thirty," which more often than not reflects Bigelow's consummate abilities as an action filmmaker; her no-frills skills in mounting car chases, surveillance and the other tools of the CIA trade get a full workout.

The acting is also uniformly strong, although if you found the parade of famous faces popping up in "Lincoln" to be distracting, you ain't seen nothing yet. Many recognizable performers turn up very briefly for their chance to be in the new Bigelow movie, to the occasional point of distraction. (I started counting lines from well-known actors; "Torchwood" star John Barrowman? Two.)

And even if "Zero Dark Thirty" packs something less of a punch than "The Hurt Locker," it's still a movie that's going to part of the national discussion, both politically and artistically, and deservedly so. Whether you love it, hate it, or have mixed feelings, it's not to be ignored.

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Kelsey Grammer to host DGA awards again

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - "Boss" star Kelsey Grammer will host the 65th Annual DGA Awards, DGA president Taylor Hackford and 65th Annual DGA Awards Dinner Chair Michael Stevens said Tuesday.

This will mark the second consecutive year that Grammer has hosted the ceremony.

"We're so pleased to welcome Kelsey Grammer back as host of the DGA Awards for the second year in a row," Hackford said. "Last year, Kelsey kept the show (and the wine) flowing while both celebrating the craft of directing and poking fun in all the right places. The audience had a rousing good time and I know we are all looking forward to seeing what Kelsey comes up with this year."

A DGA member since 1996, Grammer was nominated for a DGA Award for outstanding directing in a comedy series, for the "Merry Christmas, Mrs. Moskowitz" episode of his former show "Frasier." In addition to that episode, Grammer directed dozens of episodes o the series. His directing credits also include "Everybody Hates Chris," "Out of Practice," "My Ex Life" and "Hank."

The 65th Annual DGA Awards will take place February 2, 2013 at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland in Los Angeles.

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