Ben Barnes, the British actor who is best known for his role as Prince Caspian in The Chronicles Of Narnia franchise, is in negotiations to join Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore in The Seventh Son according to Variety.

Warner Bros. were previously in talks with Sam Claflin (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) but those talks fell through, so the studio moved onto Barnes.

The movie was previously known as The Spook’s Apprentice and is an adaptation of the Joseph Delaney book series. The story follows Tom (Barnes), a young apprentice to an exorcist (Bridges) who battles ghosts and witches in the 1700s. A long time ago the Spook had bound a witch called Mother Malkin (Moore), who sucks the blood out of young women to keep her youth, to a pit in the ground. However Mother Malkin breaks out of her pit prison and the Spook and his apprentice must use their powers to defeat her. Alicia Vikander will play a witch named Alice who joins Tom on his journey.

Mongol director Sergey Bodrov is directing and the aim is to begin shooting later this year.

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It is as though the British Academy of Film and Television Arts heard my cry.  Just as I was beginning to get bored with the awards season, the BAFTA nominations show up and rattle the crowd a bit.

The King’s Speech grabbed the most nominations with 14, including Best Film, Director (Tom Hooper), Leading Actor (Colin Firth), and Supporting Actress (Helena Bonham Carter).  Firth will more than likely still win his category if no other reason than he’s British and the BAFTAs inevitably favor British nominees.

It seems I spoke too soon regarding the Supporting Actress category, as I deemed Melissa Leo (The Fighter) this year’s frontrunner after her Golden Globe win on Sunday.  As it turns out, the BAFTAs didn’t even nominate her.  They also neglected Mila Kunis (Black Swan) and Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom), both who have been around for much of the awards season.  It’ll be hard to predict a winner in this category now, as three of the nominees – Barbara Hershey (Black Swan), Lesley Manville (Another Year), and Miranda Richardson (Made in Dagenham) – have hardly shown up in most awards shows.

Likewise, the Leading Actress category got shaken up.  The two heavyweights, Natalie Portman (Black Swan) and Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right) are still present, but other strong contenders such as Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) and Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine) are noticeably absent.  It is also interesting that both Julianne Moore (The Kids Are All Right) and Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) wound up in the Leading Actress as oppose to Supporting Actress category.

Another conspicuous absence is Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor (The Social Network) in the Original Music category, as they also just won a Golden Globe and have often won that category this season.

In fact, it looks like The Social Network might be losing momentum, getting only 6 nominations.  While that is nothing to scoff at, it appears underwhelming standing next to The King’s Speech with 14 and Black Swan with 12.  I still think The Social Network is the movie to beat for Best Film, but with the BAFTAs being a British based awards show, and with the strength of The King’s Speech and its nominations, we might just have an upset on our hands.

You can see the full list of nominations here.

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The National Federation of the Blind will be protesting at 75 theaters across America on Friday, carrying signs that read: “I’m not an actor. But I play a blind person in real life.” The reason? Julianne Moore has a movie coming out called Blindness, and some blind people aren’t happy about it.

Blind people quarantined in a mental asylum, attacking each other, soiling themselves, trading sex for food. For Marc Maurer, who’s blind, such a scenario as shown in the movie “Blindness” is not a clever allegory for a breakdown in society.

Instead, it’s an offensive and chilling depiction that Maurer fears could undermine efforts to integrate blind people into the mainstream.

“The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie,” said Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind. “Blindness doesn’t turn decent people into monsters.”

Blindness imagines a mysterious epidemic that causes people to see nothing but fuzzy white light resulting in a collapse of the social order in an unnamed city. Julianne Moore stars as the wife of an eye doctor who loses his sight; she feigns blindness to stay with her husband and eventually leads a revolt of the quarantined patients.

I’m going to have to be very careful with my wording here because I don’t want to offend anyone…

Can’t they see that it is just a movie? When I saw the trailer I thought it looked quite interesting. I mean, you can tell by the look of the film that it won’t be a huge blockbuster, so lots of people won’t be flocking to see it. I would expect the movie to draw the more mature audience, who have more insight to know that not all blind people trade sex for food.

What is your view on this?

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