Oscar Nominations 2021: 4 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

3. CODA, Licorice Pizza, Being the Ricardos, and The Lost Daughter

 

The Tragedy of Macbeth

3 Nominations

• Actor: Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel, Esq., Fences, Flight, Training Day, The Hurricane, Malcolm X, Glory, Cry Freedom)
• Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel (Darkest Hour, Inside Llewyn Davis, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, A Very Long Engagement, Amélie)
• Production Design: Nancy Haigh (Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, Hail, Caesar!, True Grit, Dreamgirls, Road to Perdition, Forrest Gump, Bugsy, Barton Fink) & Stefan Dechant

Director: Joel Coen

Cast: Washington, Frances McDormand, Kathryn Hunter, Alex Hassell, Bertie Carvel, Corey Hawkins, Brendan Gleeson, Harry Melling, Moses Ingram, Miles Anderson, Matt Helm

I'm really glad this was recognized for its outstanding production design and gorgeous cinematography. This is Bruno Delbonnel's 6th nomination, and he won't win for this, so he is coming due. Hopefully he wins something soon! I recommend The Tragedy of Macbeth; I really liked it, and although it has a few problems, it's the best Shakespeare adaptation I've seen in a long time. Denzel Washington is so good that I think the production design and cinematography had to be that good just to compete with him for screentime. I don't think this movie will win anything, though.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #14 out of 57

Encanto

3 Nominations

• Score: Germaine Franco
• Animated Feature
• Song: Lin-Manuel Miranda (Moana)

Director: Jared Bush, Byron Howard

Cast: Stephanie Beatriz, Maria Cecilia Botero, John Leguizamo, Wilmer Valderrama, Jessica Darrow, Angie Cepeda, Diane Guerrero, Mauro Castillo, Carolina Gaitán, Maluma, Rhenzy Feliz

This is a beautiful movie with really fun songs and some lovely animation. I thought it was really funny and it also works a lot like a stage musical instead of a movie musical, and I think I liked that... at least for an animated movie like this. Now, everyone knows that the real hit of Encanto in terms of the songs is "We Don't Talk about Bruno", but the song "Dos Oruguitas", the eleven o'clock number that had me in tears, is the song that is nominated. I can see this, but of course this means that the Academy missed the boat on the song from the movie that actually matters a great deal to people at this moment. This was a mistake. Shout out, too, to Germaine Franco. This is her first nomination for original score, and the music branch doesn't frequently let composers into this club and still frequently women composers. So good for her! It isn't my favorite animated film of the year, but I don't think Encanto can lose Animated Feature. It's the one of the five with the most nominations, and it's been racking up wins in other places.

Will Win: Animated Feature

Could Win: Song
My Rating: #17 out of 57

No Time to Die

3 Nominations

• Sound
• Visual Effects
• Song: Billie Eilish & Finneas O'Connell

Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga

Cast: Daniel Craig, Lashana Lynch, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz, Rami Malek, Ana de Armas, Ralph Fiennes, Jeffrey Wright, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Billy Magnussen, Rory Kinnear

Sure, sure, sure. You have to nominated the Bond movie for these things, and the movie is loud and its visual effects are cool, and the song is... a Bond song. So, ok. Bond 25 was not that great, though, and I think everybody knows it. I mean, it has Rami Malek as a villain, and he spends the whole movie trying to get the audience's sympathy instead of being a terrible villain who wants to destroy the world. This movie is looooong and it has way too many feelings that I didn't understand.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Song

My Rating: #50 out of 57

Flee (Flugt)

3 Nominations

• Documentary Feature
• International Feature: Denmark (Another Round, Under Sandet, A War, The Hunt, A Royal Affair, In a Better World, After the Wedding, Waltzing Regitze, Pelle the Conqueror, Babette's Feast, Harry and the Butler, Paw, Qivitoq: the Mountain Wanderer)
• Animated Feature

Director: Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Cast: Amin Nawabi, Daniel Karimyar, Fardin Mijdzadeh, Milad Eskandari, Belal Faiz, Elaha Faiz, Zahra Mehrwarz, Sadia Faiz 

This is one of the best movies of the year. I absolutely loved it, and I'd recommend it to anyone. It's an animated documentary film about a man talking about fleeing Afghanistan and trying to live as a refugee in Europe – first in Russia and then in Denmark. This movie documents illegal border crossings and their difficulties and terrors, but it also gets to something else. This is the story of a man who is now safe, who is now living as a refugee in Denmark and doesn't have too much to worry about, but he can't help but feel, always, like he needs to flee. It is ingrained in him to run away, to mistrust others. And Flee tries to tell the story of how this man must try, then, to develop the loving relationships we all need to flourish in this world. It's a great movie.

Will Win: Documentary Feature

Could Win: International Feature
My Rating: #3 out of 57

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

Bond 25

I recognize that for many, the long-term storylines of the five Daniel Craig Bond films have been one of the series' assets, but this long-term structure doesn't really work for me. I know these actors have been in Bond films before, but I'm looking at Léa Seydoux and Christoph Waltz and Jeffrey Wright (and Eva Green's picture), and if I'm honest, I can't remember who any of them is. James, Moneypenny, Q: these people are people I know. The rest of these characters? No clue. Of course, they're archetypes too, just as much as Moneypenny and Q are. The woman Bond loves, the friend he trusts, the woman he gave up, the supervillain. I think the weird thing for me is that Cary Joji Fukunaga's film just behaves as though I have feelings about all of these characters, and I don't have a single feeling about any one of them.

No Time to Die is a long business. And there are way too many feelings in it for my taste (I had the same problem with Casino Royale if I recall correctly). I like my Bond movies high tech and shallow with a cool villain who wants to destroy the world in an intriguing way. (The destruction of the world in this film is plotted in an intriguing way, to be fair.) But mostly this film just sort of plods along. There is a very exciting sequence with Ana de Armas in Santiago de Cuba. I enjoyed that a lot. And the first sequence in the Mediterranean was also very fun. Pio Amato (from A Ciambra and Mediterranea – both brilliant films) even makes an extended appearance! It's still a Bond film, and some of it is very cool.

But this film's villain is Rami Malek, and he is boring. He's a sad, lonely man who just wants to be loved. He's not really nefarious and evil, just sort of pathetic. It isn't even fun to hope Bond beats him; he's already such a loser.

Beasts of No Nation

Clearly one of the best films of the year so far is Cary Joji Fukunaga's Beasts of No Nation.

It is true that I generally find it difficult to find a lot of words when I am talking about a movie that I simply love without almost any reservation, but I am holed up in the Portland airport waiting for a red-eye back to Central Florida from the ASTR conference, and I am way too tired to read. In other words, forgive me if this post is out of control; know that I have slept very little the last few days and won't get to sleep for another large number of hours.

Beasts of No Nation is a film about child soldiers, better even than 2013's War Witch. This is a film mostly in English and it is upsetting a lot of people because it is being released on Netflix simultaneously with its (Academy-qualifying) theatrical release. Distributors can say whatever they like about this, however. It will not alter the fact that this is a superb film.

If War Witch is Beasts of No Nation's most obvious recent cinematic reference point, if you ask me the film's debts are primarily to the ecologically minded utter genius filmmaker Terrence Malick. Malick's style isn't copied here – that would be profoundly unfair – but many of Fukunaga's questions about the world are the same. Like Malick, Fukunaga is fundamentally interested in the natural world that violence destroys and the ways that adults have powerful effects on children.

I am evoking Malick, too, because Fukunaga uses (but does not overuse, as some of Malick's acolytes do) a voiceover technique, where the film's main character articulates to us the reasons he has made the decisions he's made and the ways he deals with the psychic wounds of having done what he has been forced to do. This allows Fukunaga (who also wrote the screenplay) to describe the wounds experienced by a character while at the same time turning his camera on the jungle or on plant- or animal life.

Both filmmakers also present the violence in their films in fundamentally ethical ways, treating acts of bloodshed with horror and surprising the audience with the viciousness exhibited by their characters. Fukunaga doesn't let us be sentimental about violence without then following sentiment with ruin, with terrifying details that shock us out of our tendency only to mobilize the default emotions of pity or fear. (I guess I shouldn't speak for all of us, but I am convinced that this is how these things work so I'm just going to keep talking.) Sequences of excessive violence treated with a truly horrifying perspective have the power to unsettle us deeply, so that once we move past pity or shallow sentimentality, we can move into an area where we no longer feel like we understand this violence's limits. What I think this refusal to allow us to see violence's limits does is transmit to us a deep feeling that we no longer understand what humans are capable of doing. It becomes clear – we know in our bodies – that there are worse things than the director has allowed us to see. We know we have not understood. Beasts of No Nation does not let us rest in the complacency of believing we "get" it. The limit Fukunaga's film makes clear is not the limit of the violence of child soldiery but the limit of our ability to think it.

It is this kind of superb moviemaking for which Fukunaga has come to be recognized. Think about some of the sequences in True Detective's first season; there were entire sections of that show when my jaw was in a permanently dropped position.

Mr. Attah

It goes without saying that the film's photography is breathtakingly detailed and exquisite. Fukunaga was his own DP, and the film's cinematography is precisely what we have come to expect from his camera: images worthy of Malick himself. His camera, like the master's, lingers lovingly on the land, treats with beauty and respect the bodies that have been destroyed, refuses the pleasure that audiences desire when they watch violence. And he has set the film in the most gorgeous locations. Characters slog through trenches of bright red clay, the sun on the ocean serves the function of allowing the film finally to breathe near its end, and the banal, artificial lighting of the war rooms and bunkers allow the audience to appreciate beauty where the film wishes us to do so, and feel constrained and even slightly nauseous when such a feeling is merited.

I must, of course, also tell you that the acting is excellent. Abraham Attah, a fourteen year old Ghanaian actor, is absolutely riveting as the lead character, Agu. And Idris Elba brings extraordinary depth to this terrific villain. His performance is so extraordinarily brave that the film, almost entirely through Elba's performance, is able to address the tensions of desire that exist between the exploiters and the exploited in this situation of child soldiery. I am using only the word desire (without qualification) here on purpose. What becomes clear throughout the film is a kind of longing for youth, for acolytes, for sexual subjectivity, for mastery, that comprises the exploitation of child soldiers. It is a harrowing insight from what is, finally, a brilliant film, absolutely not to be missed.

2012's Nominees: Part 7 of 10

Jane Eyre

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Michael O'Connor (The Duchess)

Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Judi Dench, Jamie Bell, Sally Hawkins, Su Elliot.

I can't remember this movie very well, to be honest. But I remember really liking it. The costumes are lovely, and I liked the horror-film style that Fukunaga brought to this Gothic novel. He, of course, does this at the expense of the novel's other elements, particularly its delightful comic moments. Still, it's an approach. With all of the flat approaches to older texts this year (I am thinking in particularly of Clooney's and Cronenberg's), at least Fukunaga's has a point of view. As for the costumes, they are interesting enough for the Academy's costume branch, but not enough for the full voting body. I don't think Mr. O'Connor can win; he's already won one anyway, so I won't feel too bad for him.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #23 out of 66

W.E.

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Arianne Phillips (Walk the Line)

Director: Madonna

Cast: Andrea Riseborough, James D'Arcy, Abbie Cornish, Oscar Isaac, Richard Coyle.

Here's another one I haven't seen. I have a lot of shame about this, but Madonna's movie just doesn't see fit to come to Tallahassee any time soon, and I have no choice. The costumes, however, look amazing, and though apparently no one likes W.E. as a film, I can't wait to see it. Truth be told, if I were voting, Phillips would get my vote first: there is, frankly, no reason for Sandy Powell to get another Oscar (especially when she is less than gracious about it) and Phillips's costumes are imaginative and lovely. Nevertheless, I expect Ms. Phillips will not go home with the Oscar on Sunday.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked

Anonymous

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Lisy Christl

Director: Roland Emmerich

Cast: Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Xavier Samuel, Sam Reed, Joely Richardson, Sebastian Armesto, Edward Hogg, David Thewlis, Sebastian Armesto, Rafe Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower.

This movie is terrible, and I actually don't understand why the costumes got singled out for honor except that I am sure they took quite a long time to build them all. They are not particularly interesting (they are clearly the poor man's version of Elizabeth or Shakespeare in Love), and they surely don't ask us to re-magine things we don't know about those styles. There are a few gems, but mostly I was bored. However, for a hilarious (at least we thought it was hilarious) live-blog of Anonymous, visit here.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #60 out of 66

Drive

1 Nomination

• Sound Editing

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Cary Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Oscar Isaac, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks.

The year's most ignored film. Now, if you recall, I wasn't as nutso over this film as everyone else, but Drive is very good, and Gosling is (as should be apparent to everyone at this point) a star. The thing is, this film is filled with excellent performances, terrifying moments, great chase sequences, and interestingly staged violence. And for this reason... I think it's going to win in the one category in which it's nominated. My theory behind this is, that as the Academy members go over their ballots, they will get to Sound Editing, see Drive at the top, and decide that they loved the film and wished they could've voted for it in other places. This happened with Black Hawk Down back in '02. I'm crossing my fingers.

Will Win: Sound Editing

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #25 out of 66

Fish Tank

Last night Drew and I watched Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank from last year's movie season. It's been released on DVD by the Criterion Collection, which is why I first took notice of the film. (It ought simply to be a fact in all of our lives that any movie released by the Criterion Collection automatically deserves our notice; I treat a Criterion release as though a person whose opinion I deeply respect has given a film a stamp of approval.)

But I have to be honest: the real reason I rented this movie was that it contains a performance by Michael Fassbender, who in the last couple of years has become one of my favorite actors to watch. He gave one of my favorite performances of 2009; he is flat-out brilliant in Steve McQueen's Hunger, and I recently enjoyed his work in Jane Eyre and (though I thought the film was fairly asinine) in X-men: First Class, as well.

But never mind Michael Fassbender, because Fish Tank is not about him.

Fish Tank is about poverty and living in a world where there simply aren't a lot of choices. And Fish Tank is about bad – bad, bad, bad – decisions, and how sometimes we can't stop ourselves from making them because we feel powerless and don't know what to do.

My roommate and I watched this film and talked back to it almost throughout its entirety, frustrated with the choices the characters made and wishing we could talk sense into them and knowing that was impossible. Fish Tank is troubling in many ways, and often extremely uncomfortable to sit through. We changed our loyalties to the characters many times throughout the film, and fought among ourselves about responsibility and proper behavior, as well as horror and taste (this girl thinks she is a dancer, but Drew and I agreed she is most definitely not).

Part of the pleasure of the film, it seems to me, is its ability to make its audience squirm in its seats. If this doesn't sound interesting, Fish Tank is definitely not for you. It won't be fun for most people, I'd wager.

But wow. This film is excellent. I absolutely loved it, I enjoyed it entirely, and I've moved it into my top fifteen for last year.