We’re not the only ones getting our Academy Award ballots ready!

Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain attended a dinner thrown by Harvey Weinstein in honor of the 40th anniversary of Sir Charlie Chaplin‘s Academy Award at Chateau Marmont Tuesday in Hollywood.

Jessica, 30, who looked stunning in a sheer Elie Saab gown (“I can’t move too much or else it will be a whole show!” she laughed) filled Celebuzz in on her plans for Oscar Sunday. Chastain is nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Help, but she’s up against her costar Octavia Spencer who has cleaned up this awards season. So are the ladies making a friendly bet to keep the Academy Awards interesting this weekend?

“You know we did have a bet!” Jessica said. “In the very beginning we were traveling from New York to LA, it was before the Golden Globes. We’re sitting there, and Octavia–who is so humble and beautiful–never thought she was going to win anything. I was like ‘Honey, you’re taking it all! I bet you you’re going to win the Golden Globe.’ She was like ‘Oh no, I’m not.’ I said ‘Okay, I bet you $1,000!’”

“Octavia took the bet!” laughed Jessica. “Then about two minutes later I tried to get rid of the bet because I would not be able to take money from her. I felt so guilty! I felt like I set her up to give me money because she was obviously going to win! Instead we bet a spa day. So we’re going to do a spa day once all this is over. That will be our bet for Oscar Sunday.”

Love it! So has Miss Chastain found the dress?

“I have three fittings scheduled, but I don’t have a dress picked yet. I have three dresses and three designers. I’m not entirely serious with what I’m about to say because it will be a much different thing– but my whole life, since I was a little girl I’ve wanted to go to the Oscars. I’ve imagined what that day would be like, very much in the same way a little girl imagines what her wedding dress was going to be. This is my first time at the Oscars! Billy Crystal is hosting and I’m nominated! It’s a dream! To me it’s as emotional as choosing a wedding dress.”

After telling Jessica I’m far from an Oscar dress and a wedding dress, she laughed: “Me too…well, not far from the Oscars. The other one!”

Still, she says that what she’s looking for during her fittings is something “feminine, yet modern.”

Jessica, who had seven films out this past year, is definitely one of the most sought after actresses in Hollywood, and rightfully so. However, there have definitely been roles she wanted that she missed out on, too.

Oh my God, all the time,” she answered when asked if there was a part that got away. “I have a Facebook fan page and someone wrote in and asked me that same question. She was an actress who missed out. I’d rather not say which role in particular because the actress who got it deserved the part. But there is more than one role, definitely.

Source

CASTING JESSICA CHASTAIN AS CELIA

Chastain was already attached to the 2011 film Texas Killing Fields when Barden and Schnee began working on that movie. But hearing they were starting to cast The Help, her manager sent Barden a copy of Chastain’s 2008 movie Jolene. ”I watched that and really liked what she had done and made special efforts to get her in,” he says. “She was shooting in New Orleans in the swamps, and I called her manager and knew that she had four days off that would make her available to come in for the audition. She came in and was just unbelievably wonderful.”

Barden says Chastain also read two different scenes: the one where Celia first meets Minny and the one where she’s come home after the bridge club made her stand out on the porch. “We continued seeing people after her audition, but after her read it was pretty clear that she was who we all wanted,” Barden says. She moved them to tears. “Oh my God, yes. As soon as her audition was out, we were just a mess — which is good, when somebody moves you that way after you’ve seen 50 other people reading the [same] lines and doing very good jobs. It’s such a well-written script that it’s hard to screw it up, and obviously, at the level of actresses coming in to audition, they were more than competent. But when an audition scene in 10 minutes is that deep, you just kinda know that it’s something special — which is what Jessica is.”

Even if she wasn’t the Marilyn-esque figure Celia was described as in the book… “When you’re casting a fictional character you have a little more leeway,” Barden says. “It is about trying to find the best actor for the role, somebody who has the heart and soul of the character, and then if it’s not exactly the look that’s written in the book — like Emma Stone’s not six feet tall and gawky — you make it work. Clearly, Jessica is a phenomenal actress.”

Source: EW Special Oscars 2012 coverage

EW’s Pop Watch posted an article about “The Help” into their “Best Picture Nominees” reviews.

Why The Help should win Best Picture: It was a smash at the box office, and among all of this year’s nine nominated films, it’s probably the one that most average moviegoers have seen. It’s a much-discussed question: Why shouldn’t the most commercially successful film be given the crown? Moreover, the film boasts some truly brilliant performances by three of the most remarkable actresses of the year. If The Help wins, it will largely be due to awe-inspiring turns by its heavenly leading duo, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, and a marvelous supporting turn by Jessica Chastain.

Moment most worthy of an Oscar: Davis, Spencer, and Chastain each had moments in which they proved why they could win individually, but there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when the truth about Skeeter’s maid Constantine was revealed; the exchange between Emma Stone and Allison Janney, intercut with a heartbreaking flashback showing Constantine’s painful termination from the Phelan household, was devastating to watch.

Best fashion moment: Celia Foote’s fashion faux pas at the charity benefit may not have won favor among the stiff housewives, but it certainly wasn’t painful to look at. In fact, nothing she wears in the film is painful to look at.

Read the whole article at Pop Watch

So Jessica did it! She got an Oscar nomination for her outstanding work as Celia Foote in “The Help”!

Other nominees in this category are Bérénice Bejo, Melissa McCarthy, Janet McTeer and, of course, Octavia Spencer.

The Help and Tree of Life were also nominated as Best Picture. The Tree of Life got a Cinematography nomination and Terence Malick was nominated also. The amazing Viola Davis got her “Best Actress” nomination, also.

Congratulations to Jessica! The 84rd Academy Awards will take place on the 26th of February this year.

The National Society of Film Critics has named Jessica Chastain the best supporting actress for Tree of Life, Take Shelter and The Help! Congratulations to her!

The National Society, which is chaired by David Sterritt, consists of 58 critics from around the country. They named Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia the movie of the year, while best director was handled to Terrence Malick for his Tree of Life. Check the whole list here at The Hollywood Reporter

The Golden Globe nominations have just been announced, and Jessica has been shortlisted for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture for her work in The Help. The Golden Globes will take place on January 15.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
Bérénice Bejo for The Artist (2011)
Jessica Chastain for The Help (2011)
Janet McTeer for Albert Nobbs (2011)
Octavia Spencer for The Help (2011)
Shailene Woodley for The Descendants (2011)

She also got a nomination yesterday at the SAG awards, also for her role at “The Help”. It surely was a great year for Jessica, and we’re really help (and proud) of her. Congratulations, Jessica!

Finally I managed to take high quality screen captures of Jessica part as the adorable Celia Foote in the acclaimed movie “The Help”. Check it:

The Help will be out in DVD/Blu-Ray in December 06th, remember to pre-order your copy.

People’s Choice Nominees Selections are now up. Voice your choice to determine this year’s nominees. The top five in each category will become the official nominees of People’s Choice Awards 2012.

Vote for Jessica Chastain as:
- Favorite Movie Actress (including her name in the ballot, under ‘other’)
- Favorite Movie: The Help
- Favorite Ensemble Movie Cast – The Help
- Favorite Drama Movie – The Debt and The Help

DreamWorks’ “The Help” helped itself to the $100 million mark at the domestic box office, the studio announced Wednesday.

The $25 million period drama has been one of the summer’s surprise breakout hits, winning the domestic box office during its second and third weekends of release.

“We went from opening not No. 1 to being No. 1, which is unusual in itself,” Dave Hollis, Disney’s executive VP of distribution, told TheWrap. Disney handles distribution for DreamWorks.

Three weeks into its run, “The Help” is actually adding locations: It opened with 2,534 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, expanded by 156 in its second week, by another 88 in its third and is going up by some 65 more this weekend, Hollis said. The movie opens in its first international territory, Australia, this weekend.

Source: Reuters

When Jessica Chastain left her theater training at Juilliard and started landing movie roles, she got a gift. None of the movies came out right away. It took a while before anyone saw her work in Al Pacino’s Wilde Salome (which finally debuts in Venice), or Terrence Malick’s mystical The Tree of Life (which Fox Searchlight premiered in Cannes before a summer opening), or John Madden’s Mossad thriller The Debt, which post-Disney Miramax finally sold to distributor Focus Features (August 31).

The delayed openings meant that Chastain remained a hot actress—and a blank slate. Nobody projected her last movie onto what they thought she could do. So she was able to be a chameleon, playing a dramatic actress, a sweetly luminous idealized 50s mother, and a tough-as-nails assassin. She also earned raves as brassy southern blonde Celia in summer lit hit The Help, and starred opposite Michael Shannon as his wife in the ominously atmospheric drama Take Shelter, which played Sundance and Cannes, and will show on the fest circuit before Sony Pictures Classics opens it September 30. Ralph Fiennes also cast her as his wife in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, where she stood her ground against both him and the magnificent Vanessa Redgrave as her mother-in-law. Weinstein Co. picked up the film after it earned raves in Berlin; it will play Toronto before its December release. And Chastain also landed a spot in another fall fest film, Texas Killing Fields, as well as TWC’s upcoming period gangster ensemble Wettest County. We talk about all these films below.