Oscar Nominations 2021: 3 of 9

1. The Power of the Dog, Dune, Belfast, and West Side Story

2. King Richard, Drive My Car, Don't Look Up, and Nightmare Alley

 

CODA

3 Nominations

• Picture
• Adapted Screenplay: Siân Heder
• Supporting Actor: Troy Kotsur

Director: Heder

Cast: Emilia Jones, Eugenio Derbez, Daniel Durant, Kotsur, Marlee Matlin, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Amy Forsyth

Can CODA win Best Picture? I think this is the question everyone is asking. This is a sweet, heartfelt film with a very good cast (except for Eugenio Derbez, if you ask me. I don't know what he's doing with his performance). And I get why this movie has become a kind of sentimental favorite, but the favor it's being shown is much, much more than I think anyone expected. People love this movie. I think its complete lack of irony and total sincerity and earnestness make it a kind of breath of fresh air in this evil world. It's also about a hatred of bureaucracy and a valorization of entrepreneurship, so maybe that has something to do with it. In any case, Troy Kotsur is going to win Best Supporting Actor, and it might be wise to bet on this film winning Best Adapted Screenplay and maybe even Best Picture.

Will Win: Supporting Actor

Could Win: Picture, Adapted Screenplay

My Rating: #31 out of 56

Licorice Pizza

3 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread, There Will Be Blood)
• Original Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson (Inherent Vice, There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, Boogie Nights)

Director: Anderson

Cast: Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Skyler Gisondo, Bradley Cooper, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Christine Ebersole, Benny Safdie, Maya Rudolph, John C. Reilly, Will Angarola, Griff Giacchino, James Kelley

This movie is very, very funny and also totally weird and quirky. The Academy loves Paul Thomas Anderson sort of unabashedly now, and I always think it's surprising that they do because his movies all seem so... idiosyncratic. But, I mean, even Inherent Vice got a Best Screenplay nomination! I really enjoyed Licorice Pizza, although I think I never stopped thinking it was weird. This is the portrait of one very eager teenager's childhood, and it's completely charming and very well directed. I really don't have anything negative to say about it except to remark on the overwhelming whiteness of its gaze. Still, it's one of my favorite movies of the year, and it makes sense that Anderson just went full-in on his own memories and his own picture of Los Angeles in the 1970s. It was a very different time in the world, and this film feels like it gets to the truth of that in some fascinating ways. Is this the year for Anderson to win the Original Screenplay Oscar? He doesn't have one yet, and his competition seems thinner than usual. I'm betting on him. 

Will Win: Original Screenplay

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #10 out of 56

Being the Ricardos

3 Nominations

• Best Actor: Javier Bardem (Biutiful, No Country for Old Men, Before Night Falls)
• Best Actress: Nicole Kidman (Lion, Rabbit Hole, The Hours, Moulin Rouge!)
• Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons (Whiplash)

Director: Aaron Sorkin

Cast: Kidman, Bardem, Simmons, Nina Arianda, Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lacy, Clark Gregg, Brian Howe, Jeff Holman, Ronny Cox, Linda Lavin, John Rubinstein

This is one of the worst movies I saw this year, but I think people must like it? J.K. Simmons' nomination was a big surprise, and the fact that he got nominated means that the Academy actually likes the movie a lot more than anyone thought. Indeed, Nicole Kidman ended up taking home the Golden Globe award for Best Actress, so it definitely has some support behind it. But, like, if you're home and need a movie to watch, don't watch this one. It's absurd. And there are actual good movies nominated this year. Kidman could win a second Oscar here, but I don't think she will. I'm hoping everyone has figured out by now that this movie is a mess.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #55 out of 56

The Lost Daughter

3 Nominations

• Actress: Olivia Colman (The Father, The Favorite)
• Adapted Screenplay: Maggie Gyllenhaal
• Supporting Actress: Jessie Buckley

Director: Gyllenhaal

Cast: Colman, Dakota Johnson, Buckley, Ed Harris, Paul Mescal, Jack Farthing, Peter Sarsgaard, Dagmara Dominczyk, Oliver Jackson-Cohen

From the ridiculous to the sublime. The Lost Daughter was a total surprise to me. It's beautifully, terrifyingly directed, and its protagonist is a fascinating, incredible character. This movie is scary all the way through – scarier than The Power of the Dog, if you ask me – and the film is very well acted. This is one of my favorite films of the year, and honestly I can't say enough good things about it. It's on Netflix, and if you haven't watched it yet, you really must. Gyllenhaal's adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel is excellent, and this is a very good movie, even though I don't think it'll take home any statues on Oscar Sunday.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #9 out of 56

4. The Tragedy of Macbeth, Encanto, No Time to Die, and Flee
5. Tick, Tick... Boom!, Parallel Mothers, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and The Worst Person in the World
6. Cruella, Spencer, The Hand of God, and Lunana: a Yak in the Classroom
7. Cyrano, The Mitchells vs the Machines, Luca, and Raya and the Last Dragon
8. Spider-man: No Way Home, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Free Guy

9. House of Gucci, Coming 2 America, and Four Good Days

Lucy and Desi

I am not sure why Aaron Sorkin's movie wound up being called Being the Ricardos. I think I Love Desi would have been a better title, or Lucy and Desi, which was apparently its title for a while. Not that any of that really matters. I really didn't connect with this film at all. The entire thing just felt completely phony to me. 

And I have nothing bad to say about Nicole Kidman or the casting of any of the other actors, really. I blame Aaron Sorkin. This thing is soulless.

I liked the sequences where Kidman played Ball playing Lucy in black-and-white in the show, but I don't think I liked anything else. Everything else just felt like it went through twelve committees.

And the politics of Being the Ricardos are awful. This movie is very clear that it hates anti-communists but it also manages to hate communists? There's even a moment when we all... cheer for J. Edgar Hoover. It's a dramatic moment, perhaps the most dramatic moment in the film, and I know why it is there, but the physics of it repulsed me.

I didn't understand this movie. It thinks it's very clever, but its charms don't work.

Chicago 1969 Double Feature

I have to say that I really didn't know much about this trial before watching The Trial of the Chicago 7. But it is stunning to watch a conspiracy of criminals sit in judgment and purport to represent law and order in the United States with impunity. It's stunning to watch because it's so obviously part of the very fabric of this country. Villainous, terrible people literally running the government and bringing the entirety of their considerable violence and might against unarmed people in order to silence them and get them to bend their knees to force. Justice? I don't see much of it. The government does what it wants, and then it tells everyone what it did was right. 

The film itself... is fine. It's a little bit too self satisfied for my taste. It has a kind of smugness that I found a bit distasteful. Its emotional tone, too, is a little bit too Steven Spielberg for me. I'm not sure why Sacha Baron Cohen is receiving the accolades he's receiving. He's fine but not great. I liked Jeremy Strong a lot. And Kelvin Harrison Jr.

Judas and the Black Messiah is a better movie than The Trial of the Chicago 7, but I'm glad I watched them together. They belong together. Judas and the Black Messiah is also a movie about terrorist, murdering, arsonist policemen and FBI agents who assassinated Fred Hampton and called it justice. Watching these kinds of stories is so difficult and even unsatisfying. It's unbelievable to me that people still trust the police to mete out justice in this nation. This film documents a violent racist campaign by our federal government to destroy a revolutionary hero who was attempting to make people's lives better. The acting in this film is great. Daniel Kaluuya, especially, is fantastic. It is completely and totally category fraud to try to sell Kaluuya in the supporting actor category, though, and this might backfire. There's no reason he couldn't be a solid contender in the Best Actor group. It's one of the best performances of the year.

I watched The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix. Judas and the Black Messiah is on HBOmax.

Oscar Nominations 2018: Part 5 of 12

Back to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4.

My Best of 2017.

Coco

2 Nominations

• Animated Feature
• Song – "Remember Me": Kristen Anderson-Lopez (Frozen) & Robert Lopez (Frozen)

Director: Lee Unkrich

Cast: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach, Renee Victor, Jaime Camil, Alfonso Arau, Herbert Sigüenza

This is easily the best animated feature of the year (I'll talk more about the scraping of the bottom of the barrel that this year's nominations are in another post). But, don't let the lack of competition fool you. Coco is actually brilliant. It may look like a retread of The Book of Life; it's not. This movie is breathtakingly gorgeous, vividly imagined, and the story is told beautifully. The songs are lovely, the acting is wonderful, and I cried several times. There was a moment in the middle of the movie when Miguel, the young protagonist, has his guitar taken from him by his abuela, and I reacted so strongly and violently that I realized I was completely in love with Coco, and that was before little Miguel reached the land of the dead and I realized that this was going to be the most finely realized Pixar movie yet. The animation is stunning. This is in my top ten films of the year. It's better than The Shape of Water; it's better than Three Billboards; it's better than Lady Bird; it's better than Get Out. And it deserves to win both of the Oscars for which it is nominated.

Will Win: Animated Feature, Song

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #9 out of 80

Roman J. Israel, Esq.

1 Nomination

• Actor: Denzel Washington (Fences, Flight, Training Day, The Hurricane, Malcolm X, Glory, Cry Freedom)

Director: Dan Gilroy

Cast: Washington, Carmen Ejogo, Colin Farrell, Lynda Gravátt, Amanda Warren, Tony Plana, Hugo Armstrong, Amari Cheatom, DeRon Horton, Sam Gilroy, Ludwig Manukian

This isn't terrible, honestly. Denzel is quite excellent, and I'm glad he got nominated (especially since I pregamed this movie), but this movie has serious script problems. I rather liked it for much of its running time, and watching Washington make the acting moves he makes is very interesting. As I said in my longer review, he is constantly surprising, and the part is really different from parts he usually plays these days, but I think that is really the only selling point this movie might have. It is a clunkily told story about ethics in Los Angeles that can't quite ever seem to focus on its themes because it is too obsessed with its plot – a plot which is not as well thought-out as it might have been in the first place. Washington can't win this year, even though most people agree he was a close runner-up to last year's award. He'll need to be part of a movie more widely loved in order to win this trophy again, but this nomination is well-deserved.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #45 out of 80

Molly's Game

1 Nomination

• Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin (Moneyball, The Social Network)

Director: Sorkin

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner, Michael Cera, Jeremy Strong, Chris O'Dowd, Bill Camp, Angela Gots, Brian d'Arcy James, J.C. MacKenzie

I thought this worked really well and I liked it a lot. It moves quickly and with purpose, and it only gets slowed down twice. (There's a stupid sequence in which we learn about Molly using drugs and another slow sequence in which she heals from a violent attack. Both of these sequences break the contract the narrator and filmmaker have made with the audience.) But actually – and this surprised me – I thought Sorkin's direction was mostly great. This is perhaps not too surprising, and it is also true that this film might have been better with a more experienced director reining him in at certain times, but I confess that I like this snappy Sorkin dialogue, and if I wasn't completely on board with the film's ethical arguments (which quote Arthur Miller directly), I had fun at this movie. It felt like a window into something I know nothing about, and the lightness of the whole thing was amusing throughout.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #31 out of 80

The Disaster Artist

1 Nomination

• Adapted Screenplay: Michael H. Weber & Scott Neustadter

Director: James Franco

Cast: Franco, Dave Franco, Zac Efron, Seth Rogen, Alison Brie, Jacki Weaver, Ari Graynor, Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, Megan Mullally

I've written about this film and its drawbacks already, so I won't rehearse all that again. What I didn't say is that this film does feel like a kind of extension of Franco's work. I think Franco is building a kind of film directing oeuvre that makes sense, or at least he is making films that hang together in some way. The Disaster Artist is, in many ways, very similar to Interior. Leather Bar., for example. Mostly, though, I think The Disaster Artist falls short of what it could have been. It doesn't explore Tommy Wiseau deeply enough to be really interesting, and it is too busy laughing at him to get under his skin. Is Wiseau gay? Is Wiseau an obsessive? Is he clueless? In love? Terrified? Desperate? Who is this dude? It isn't enough to say "no one knows", but that is what this film chooses to do.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #55 out of 80

Oscar Nominees 2016: Part 4 of 11

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6. Part 7. Part 8. Part 9. Part 10. Part 11.

Sicario

3 Nominations

• Cinematography: Roger Deakins (Unbroken, Prisoners, Skyfall, True Grit, The Reader, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, The Man Who Wasn't There, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Kundun, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption)
• Original Score: Jóhann Jóhannsson (The Theory of Everything)
• Sound Editing

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro, Daniel Kaluuya, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Donovan, Victor Garber, Raoul Trujillo, Julia Cesar Cedillo, Bernardo Saracino, Maximiliano Hernandez, Lora Martinez-Cunningham, Edgar Arreola, Rio Alexander

I tried to stop hating this movie, but every time I think more about it I hate it more. It's exciting to watch, with many good performances, but what this message has to say about violence, about torture, about war, about international action, and about the violence perpetrated by our government is (to my mind) reprehensible. Still, I am glad that Jóhann Jóhannson got a nomination here. His score is interesting and creepy and metallic, and I am glad the Academy is recognizing scores like this. Roger Deakins' photography is gorgeous, as always; one day he will finally shoot a movie that people can really get behind and he can win an Oscar. This is thirteenth nomination. He's never won. But we might ask ourselves, as Judith Butler does in Frames of War, "As we watch a video or see an image, what kind of solicitation is at work? Are we being invited to take aim? Are we conscripted into the trajectory of the bullet or missile?" It is clear to me, as Butler says a little later, "that such visual and conceptual frames are ways of building and destroying populations as objects of knowledge and targets of war, and that such frames are the means through which social norms are relayed and made effective." Sicario celebrates violence, torture, and USAmerican exceptionalism far too much for me to have enjoyed watching it.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #51 out of 62

Steve Jobs

2 Nominations

• Actor: Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave)
• Supporting Actress: Kate Winslet (The Reader, Little Children, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Iris, Titanic, Sense and Sensibility)

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Fassbender, Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg, Katherine Waterston, Sarah Snook, Perla Haney-Jardine, Makenzie Moss

Steve Jobs! I never wrote about this movie; I kept meaning to, but I just never got around to it, I guess. The thing is I really liked it. I thought it worked very well in its own way, and I loved the performances – Fassbender and Winslet, but also Katherine Waterston and Michael Stuhlbarg. Jobs is a fascinating figure, and the movie peels him apart and demonstrates how personal life and career (for a creative type) are so intertwined. I am not sure I know why people disliked this movie as much as they did, but I will say that it's structure is really stagey. It is as though Steve Jobs was a stage play that somehow found its way to the big screen, but Aaron Sorkin didn't seem to bother to update it so that it would work for film. This is mitigated somewhat by Danny Boyle, but no one could make this screenplay less of a stage play. It's embedded in the structure itself. Each of the film's three acts takes place in basically the same location, and we begin each of the acts by jumping forward in time many years so that the audience spends the first couple of minutes of the act figuring out when we are and what has happened in the interim. And then we watch what happens with Jobs in the minutes leading up to a new product-launch. One of these happens at the end of each act. At one point in the film, Jobs complains that "It’s like 5 minutes before every launch everyone goes to a bar, gets drunk and tells me what they really think." This isn't so much a line that describes how Jobs is feeling as a line that describes how Sorkin's screenplay works. That's exactly what happens in the film. Still, in many ways this is an interesting history of the technological advancement of the last 30 years and some of the people who made that happen, and, as I said, I loved the acting.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Supporting Actress
My Rating: #20 out of 62

Inside Out

2 Nominations

• Original Screenplay: Pete Docter (Up, WALL·E, Toy Story), Ronnie del Carmen, Josh Cooley, & Meg LeFauve
• Animated Feature

Director: Pete Docter

Cast: Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Richard Kind, Kaitlyn Dias, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Paula Poundstone, Bobby Moynihan, Josh Cooley, John Ratzenberger, Rashida Jones

This is a really sweet children's movie, or, I guess, a movie for adolescents. It didn't really feel aimed at someone like me, so I have to say that I was sometimes bored in it. It was a little too cutesy and generic for me – the image above is a great example of the CandyLand way the film is designed. But everyone seemed to really like this movie, and I expect it to win the Oscar for Animated Feature. As much as filmmakers have tried to shift the perceptions of people toward animated film, most people still seem to see animated film as made for children (perhaps I include myself in "most people", as well). Inside Out strikes me as definitely not a film for adults, but adults have seemed to enjoy it, so I guess my initial impression is incorrect. I've linked above to where I have written a little about this, so I won't belabor the point, but I just never bought into the geography of the world inside the little girl's brain. It seemed at all times to be arbitrary, that is, the writers, at any given moment, would have been able to fix the problem – let the train leave just a little later and take Joy and Sadness back to central command, or whatever it is called, or let Joy and Sadness jump into the little memory chute that sends memories back up to HQ like Rob Lowe's shirt getting caught in that pneumatic tube in Tommy Boy. And a few times the writers did just adjust the rules of this brain-world whenever they wanted – the sequence where Bing Bong helps Joy escape the area of the little girl's brain where things are forgotten forever might pose a few questions for us such as: why can't the writers just make the wall of that place just a little lower? and: If that location means that things are forgotten forever, how is it that one is able to leave that place at all?
Will Win: Animated Feature

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #38 out of 62

Ex Machina

2 Nominations

• Original Screenplay: Alex Garland
• Visual Effects

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno, Corey Johnson

I was definitely into Ex Machina, and I wrote a meditation on what I see as the important depths of the film's amazing screenplay, that I recommend you read if you've seen the movie. I am really happy about these two nominations – I don't think it can win an Oscar in either category, but Alex Garland has written a couple of great screenplays in his career so far: 28 Days Later... and Sunshine, a personal favorite. He deserves this nomination and deserves to be more widely recognized for his work. Obviously Gleeson, Isaac, and Vikander are all having a great year, too, so that's excellent. If only there were an Oscar category for choreography: I want to nominate the dance sequence in Ex Machina for an Oscar (even if it would lose to Cinderella). In any case, if you haven't seen Ex Machina, you really must. It's an exciting, deep thriller.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #24 out of 62

The Romantic in Me

Bennett Miller's Moneyball is just superb. It will be one of my favorite films of the year. It would be easy to say that Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian's script is really the showcase here, but that is simply not the case. The script is, without question, excellent. No debate there. It's smart writing that constantly reminds us that baseball is nothing we should be romanticizing. It's a numbers game, and everything behind the scenes is numbers. Romance, the film says, is for the fans.

Except that the film also allows us to romanticize baseball... and how can we not? That amazing crack as the bat hits the ball. It's just electrifying. And the film reminds us that not everything is numbers. Sure, a lot of it can be numbers, but some of it is just heart, pouring everything you have into something you care about. I bought this stuff hook, line, and sinker. But, then, maybe I'm just a romantic.

Brad Pitt is excellent, as usual, and probably deserves an Oscar nomination for the movie. And the supporting cast is uniformly good, including a toned-down Jonah Hill who demonstrates excellent timing. The big supporting standout for me is Parks & Recreation's Chris Pratt, who plays a first-baseman who's scared of the ball. I loved his performance. He has this innocent, nervous quality that just shines. He's wonderful.

And then there's the direction. Miller's work here is just outstanding. He has the ability to make scenes in offices and cubicles just as compelling as what happens out on the field, and he does this thing where he lets our imaginations run away, letting us get fully invested into the game, praying that everything works out. Then he'll remind us that what we've just watched was just a game, no big deal at all. I've never seen a film this in love with baseball and also this able to take a detached look at baseball. It's just an excellent film. One of my favorites of the year, for sure, and it's only September!

Anyway, go.

2011's Nominees: Part 1 of 12

I can't believe I am trying to commit to making 12 posts about the Oscars before they arrive on February 27th at the same time as I study for my comprehensive exams, but I am. This is also partially because of my friend Julie and our (competitive? yes) quest to see all of the year's films. There are 36 films in competition this year (I am exempting myself from the documentaries and the shorts) and I will go through each nominee one by one. Hopefully this is a fun exercise, and if I am down on your favorite film of the year, please feel free to speak up and defend it. I expect that my opinion about this year's favored movie might engender a few raised eyebrows. So, here goes:

THE KING'S SPEECH

12 Nominations:

  · Best Picture

  · Best Director: Tom Hooper

  · Best Original Screenplay: David Seidler

  · Best Actor: Colin Firth (A Single Man)

  · Best Supporting Actor: Geoffrey Rush (Quills, Shine, Shakespeare in Love)

  · Best Supporting Actress: Helena Bonham Carter (The Wings of the Dove)

  · Best Editing: Tariq Anwar (American Beauty)

  · Best Cinematography: Danny Cohen

  · Best Art Direction: Eve Stewart (Topsy-Turvy) and Judy Farr

  · Best Costume Design: Jenny Beaven (The Bostonians, A Room with a View, Maurice, Howards End, The Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility, Anna and the King, Gosford Park)

  · Best Original Score: Alexandre Desplat (The Queen, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fantastic Mr. Fox)

  · Best Sound Mixing

Director: Hooper
Cast: Firth, Carter, Rush, Guy Pearce, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi, Jennifer Ehle, Claire Bloom, Eve Best, Timothy Spall

 
Twelve nominations is a whole Hell of a lot. I don't think anyone expected this good of a showing from this small film, but here it is. The King's Speech is a crowd pleaser and a feel-good film and an overcoming-my-disability narrative. I also find the film to be rather sex-negative, for what it's worth. But everyone seems to love it. I mean, it's okay and all that, but it's rather uneven at times and – just take a look up there at the poster – is it a comedy? a WWII drama? I don't think Tom Hooper has any idea, actually. What I do know is that this film is heartwarming and is going to win Best Picture. Zzzzz.
Will Win: Picture, Actor, Original Screenplay, Costume Design, Score
Might Also Win: Director, Art Direction
My Rating: #19 out of 40

TRUE GRIT

10 Nominations:

  · Best Picture

  · Best Director: Joel Coen (Fargo, No Country for Old Men) & Ethan Coen (No Country)

  · Best Adapted Screenplay: Coens (Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, No Country, A Serious Man)

  · Best Actor: Jeff Bridges (The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Starman, The Contender, Crazy Heart)

  · Best Supporting Actress: Hailee Steinfeld

  · Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins (The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Kundun, O Brother, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Reader)

  · Best Art Direction: Nancy Haigh (Barton Fink, Bugsy, Forrest Gump, Road to Perdition, Dreamgirls) and Jess Gonchor

  · Best Costume Design: Mary Zophres

  · Best Sound Mixing

  · Best Sound Editing

Director: Coens
Cast: Bridges, Steinfeld, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Barry Pepper

 
I don't think anyone expected this film to do as well as it did, and it looks as though it would have made a Best Picture nomination even if there had only been five. I think this is a big surprise and I am delighted by it. The Coens have always been superb filmmakers and that the Academy has come to love them as much as they have is really very cool. Tone down the excitement, though. It's not going to win that many.
Will Win: Cinematography
Might Win: Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Adapted Screenplay
My Rating: #8 out of 40

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

8 Nominations:

  · Best Picture

  · Best Director: David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)

  · Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin

  · Best Actor: Jesse Eisenberg

  · Best Editing: Kirk Baxter & Angus Wall (both for Benjamin Button)

  · Best Cinematography: Jeff Cronenweth

  · Best Original Score: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross

  · Best Sound Mixing

Director: Fincher
Cast: Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Erica Albright, Rashida Jones

 
This was the frontrunner for months, won every critics' award under the sun — like a juggernaut that couldn't be stopped. But on the morning when the nominees were announced, the wind went out of the sails of Fincher's movie. It's a shame, really. The Social Network is a much better movie than The King's Speech. But it also isn't a real Oscar-type of a movie. And it is about something that the old white people voting for the little gold men do not really understand: the facebook. Still, I am expecting it to do well on February 27th.
Will Win: Director, Screenplay, Editing
Might Win: Cinematography, Sound Mixing
My Rating: #10 out of 40

The Facebook Movie(s)

There are people in the world who are not on facebook, I know, but I have to admit to being surprised every time that I meet one of them. "You're not on facebook? How do you keep in contact with people?" My indignation and confusion are justifiable. The ubiquity of facebook is not just my imagination. Take the poster for David Fincher's The Social Network as an example:

The poster recreates the blue facebook address bar and uses the facebook font for its title. The only other indication that this poster is for "the facebook movie" – as we were all calling it in the months before it came out – is the (newly redefined) word "friends" in the tagline. How, in fact, could anyone make 500 million friends without facebook.

I assume everyone has already seen The Social Network, so by now you know that "the facebook movie" is not so much about facebook as it is the story of the people who where there when facebook started and when facebook became the awesome juggernaut of a communication phenomenon that it is today. The Social Network is nominally a movie about the young men who designed and built facebook, the lawsuits that they have since filed against one another disputing each other's claim to facebook's invention, and Mark Zuckerberg himself, the world's youngest billionaire.

The Social Network is a very good movie. Beautifully directed, it has David Fincher's usual technologically marvelous touch: take the Winklevoss twins, who are played by a single actor (Armie Hammer, who is excellent). The movie boasts some great acting all around. Jesse Eisenberg gives one of my favorite performances of the year as Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield is great, Justin Timberlake is perfectly cast and does a stellar job, and the movie has a flawless supporting cast.

The real star of The Social Network is Aaron Sorkin, of course, and this is clear from the first few minutes of the film. Sorkin crafts an opening sequence that tells us almost all the movie's ever going to tell us about the inner workings of Mark Zuckerberg, and the scene moves so quickly and with such unadulterated joy (at moviemaking, at itself, at the flexibility of the English language) that one cannot help but grin watching it. The Social Network is excellent, there is no denying it, and yet, it left me a little cold. In this sense: I kept wanting to know more about Mark Zuckerberg, about what he was thinking, why he did the things he did, how friendship and business fit together for him. The Social Network does not tell us these things.

It is not as though Sorkin, Fincher, and company are not interested in Zuckerberg's inner workings. They deliberately obfuscate them. The film designs Zuckerberg as a mystery. We do not know what is going on in his head and the film makes it clear that we cannot, or that we are not supposed to, that what is inside Zuckerberg's head is going to stay there. The scene where Mark has his (apparently) first sexual experience (in a restaurant bathroom, no less) is representative of what I am talking about. Our main character is experiencing something life-altering, brand new, eminently pleasurable, and the camera never finds him. The camera stays on his friend in the next bathroom stall and we hear Zuckerberg and the young lady but never have access to how he feels about this very important experience in his life.

This is what The Social Network is, after all, about, of course: mystery, the failings of memory, the missed connections of friendship, the inability to get back to concrete truths, the difficulties of putting things in order, of saying what came before what, even a few days or weeks after things have happened. This is also a testament to how fast the world moves nowadays. Things get away from us. Before we know it, in The Social Network, so much has happened! Suddenly everyone has read your livejournal entry. Suddenly your website has 200,000 hits. Suddenly the man is a billionaire. It's a whole new world.

This world is further explored – and in a movie that I liked even more than Fincher's – in a documentary called Catfish by filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Catfish is flat-out brilliant and everyone needs to go see it as soon as you can.

The film follows Ariel Schulman's brother Nēv, a New York photographer, as he begins an internet relationship with a seven-year old girl who is a painter and who lives in Michigan. The correspondence with the seven-year-old transforms into a regular correspondence with the little girl's nineteen-year-old sister Meghan, who is a dancer and who plays guitar. They correspond regularly, and though they meet through facebook, they begin talking on the phone, texting, emailing, etc. Then the filmmakers follow Nēv to Michigan to meet Meghan.

Do not let anyone tell you what they find there before you watch this movie.

Every review of Catfish has danced around what the boys find when they get to Michigan, and I am not going to spoil it here. Part of the pleasure of the movie is the suspense that the movie builds. There are moments in Catfish when I was squirming in my seat I was so nervous about what they were going to find.

But Catfish is even more than a movie about great thrills and suspense. It (unlike The Social Network) is really a movie about how facebook has changed our real lives, and how the abilities to connect that facebook provides us have powerful impacts on us and how we see ourselves.

The final forty minutes of Catfish are a kind of double character study, exploring the power of the virtual, the real gravity of the imaginary – even when we know we are imagining it! Catfish figures out that there are real feelings in all of those online data, real emotions swept up in the pokes and the pictures and the tags and the status updates. Those projections – call them imaginary at your peril – affect us so profoundly, and they have become so much a part of who we are and how we understand ourselves, that to pretend that they are "just" words or "just" data or "just" pictures is not only foolish it is to fundamentally miss what it means to communicate in the twenty-first century.

I completely loved Catfish. Go see it. Take a friend. You will still be thinking about it weeks later. I promise.