Johnny Depp to Move to London: FALSE, and Sweeney Todd and the Oscars

So earlier reported was the rumor (form many sources) that Johnny had bought a £2million-plus home but when his publicis was asked about it it was said to be false. Read more about this story at www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk.

Also from The Envelope and LA Times:

Here's how Oscar voting works: the actual ballot process

Believe it or not, it's done by hand. Accountants sort the nomination ballots into stacks based upon what contenders get ranked first. Let's say that 5,200 people out of the academy's 5,800 members vote for best picture. We'll use that number and category as an example of how the process works, but keep in mind that most other categories are determined by peer group. Thus the acting nominees are decided only by the 1,260 members in that academy branch.

In order to be nominated, a film needs one-sixth of the votes plus one — that's about 868 out of 5,200 votes. As soon as accountants figure that, say, "Sweeney Todd" reaps that tally, they stop counting and set those ballots aside, decreeing "Sweeney" a best pic nominee. The remaining ballots with "Sweeney" on top get distributed to other stacks based upon their second-ranked choices.

If no other movie has enough number-one votes or those number twos once the stray "Sweeney" ballots are re-distributed, then accountants turn to the movies with the fewest votes and redistribute those ballots based upon number-two votes.

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Over and over they repeat the process, working from the smallest stacks to the largest, until a film has the magic 868 votes. Then counting for that film stops, the stack is set aside and the remaining ballots in that stack get re-distributed, too, based on the film with the highest next ranking. Over all, about a dozen rounds of redistribution occur before the five nominees are settled.

This voting process benefits films with a passionate following. It doesn't matter if a movie is absent from the vast majority of ballots. If it nabs one-sixth of the votes plus one, it's in. That's how movies like "Little Miss Sunshine" and "The Full Monty" got nominated in the past. Those highly commercial, feel-good films were probably snubbed by most academy members, who tend to be snobs, and they probably wouldn't have been nominated if the Oscars used a weighted ballot, but they had enough rabid devotees to survive preferential voting.

Sweeney Posters, Designing Sweeney, and Helena's "Pregnancy Gripes"

Five new Sweeney posters have been released, here's the complete set of them all:

From The Envelope, "Styling Sweeney"

Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti brings a dark and bloody Victorian England to its full Grand Guignol life in Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd," a gothic horror tale of revenge and love based on Stephen Sondheim's Tony-winning musical. Originally, it was planned that there would be minimal sets built for the film starring Johnny Depp as the demon barber of Fleet Street. The majority of the design would be done with computer graphics.

"Then we started to prepare the movie, we thought maybe it would be better to build it on a set and then complete it with CGI," says Ferretti. "We built everything from scratch. It's not difficult to do a movie in all visual effects, but this kind of movie, actors have to be surrounded by something that is real." Ferretti says that, visually, "Sweeney Todd," which opens next month, is two movies. The reality is "very dark and very heavy" -- Todd's barbershop, for example, is sparsely furnished, almost institutional, with a big window the main light source. But the flashbacks and dream sequences are more colorful and lush, such as Sweeney's daughter's bedroom.

Here's 5 of Helena's gripes from http://www.raisingkids.co.uk, click the link to read the rest.

The RK office just loves this article in the current issue of Blackbook magazine, by actress Helena Bonham Carter on things that annoy her while she's pregnant. It's so good, we're just going to reprint it in full. Enjoy!

Here is my knee-jerk list of the little things in life that irritate. (I’m pregnant, so basically everything annoys me.) Such as:

1. People-particularly men-saying with surprise, “You’re still drinking caffeine?” as if I’m performing a criminal act on my unborn as I tuck into my treasured one-a-day cup of tea/coffee. Yeah. You try nine months of gestation and self-abnegation before you start censoring my diet. Your mother was probably on vodka, and do you have three heads?

2. People who say, “Is there another in there?,” or, “Wow, you are soooo big!!!” One might not be technically fat, but still “big” does not work for me.

3. People I don’t know who, unsolicited, guess, with absolute conviction, what sex of child I’m going to have. (I have no idea.)

4. Seeing actresses in films and models in catalogues pretending to be pregnant with a solitary neat football of a bump on an otherwise unchanged body. Haven’t they noticed that everything inflates… boobs, bum, legs.

5. The congestion charge in London. And the fact you can’t buy a bulk amount of credit in advance, which means that if you forget to pay, you get charged for your amnesia.