Piranha 3D, Oscar winner? Corey Hall hoots!

Pic of the year!

As an entertainment writer my inbox gets clogged with press releases fairly quickly , usually at a rate of three or four a week. Most of them proclaim that shooting has started on the latest Micheal Bay epic, or that weepy Ben Affleck has begun personally scrubbing turtles clean in the gulf, that sort of usual  boilerplate hype. You get the idea. Occasionally though, they can be a real hoot, like this drolly hilarious missive from the Weinstein Company.

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY FIRES THE FIRST SALVO IN THE AWARDS RACE

DIMENSION FILMS’ PIRANHA 3D HOPES TO MAKE A SPLASH AS BEST PICTURE

New York, NY – August 17, 2010 – The Weinstein Company is making a splash with this year’s first “For Your Consideration” ad touting the upcoming Dimension Films action thriller Piranha 3D as a top candidate for Best Picture of the year. The Weinstein Company and Dimension Films partnered with FunnyOrDie.com, a wildly popular comedy website founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, in making the star-studded video advertisement promoting Piranha 3D – which was directed by French filmmaker Alex Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors) – for Best Picture.

The Weinstein Company Co-Chairman Harvey Weinstein is best known for his strategic and aggressive campaigns during the infamous Hollywood awards season – the months leading up to the annual Academy Awards(R) where movies vie for votes from the members of prestigious critics’ groups and members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences(R). Today, Weinstein momentarily set aside the critically acclaimed documentary film The Tillman Story and the dramatic acting performances featured in upcoming films Blue Valentine and The King’s Speech, and he has planted a flag for Piranha 3D as Best Picture.

Pretty funny right? Absolute scream. Kudos to them for planting tongues  in cheeks and having a good belly laugh over their admittedly cheesy horror flick.

The only minor snag is that the studio Dimension, and it’s parent company Weinstein didn’t bother to actually pre-screen Piranha 3Df or critics.  That’s generally a pretty bad sign, reserved for the crappiest of movies.

Is this the end of the world? No, not really. It’s 90 more free minutes for me in a week. But the move is cheap, pointless, and foolishly shortsighted, because this is exactly the sort of over-the-topness that geek critics go wild for. Currently Pirahna3D sits at an 81% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
From the looks of it, and just based on the trailer, the movie looks like a riot. I would have loved to tell you firsthand what a bloody good time it is, but I didn’t get the chance. I also would have like to see Kelly Brook naked in 3-D, but nope. And the other shame is that for all the wink-wink irony of the press release, a worthy piece of challenging, probing documentary filmmaking like The Tillman Story won’t get a smidgen of the promotional budget that a flick about mutant fish chowing on bikini-clad ginch.

Ah, well, that’s par for the course in this long hot summer at the movies.

Tags: Piranha 3d, Weinstein Company.