Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 4 of 12

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
Part 4 of 12:

Selma

2 Nominations

• Picture
• Original Song: Common & John Legend

Director: Ava DuVernay

Cast: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, André Holland, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Common, Wendell Pierce, Lorraine Toussaint, Giovanni Ribisi, Tim Roth, Stephen Root, Colman Domingo, Stephan James, Trai Byers, Oprah Winfrey

This is one of the best films of the year. It is my #10 for 2014. It's excellent; it's hard hitting. It is also – and this is quite an achievement – a film about the past that is also fundamentally a film about the present. DuVernay has made a film about the importance of the Voting Rights Act to USAmerican politics. This is hugely important – the Supreme Court, just two years ago, gutted the Voting Rights Act, declaring (is that the correct term? no.) cynically pretending, with its head firmly in the sand, that people of color are not systematically kept away from the polls in Southern states. DuVernay's film is superb, and anyone who has seen her previous work knows that she is only going to get better. There are more things that need to be said about Selma and Oscar, though. Here it is in the Best Picture category, but its director, lead actor, screenwriters, and costume designer didn't get nominated. Many people have cried foul, and I am inclined to join them. The Best Actor category was crowded: it almost always is, in fact. As for director... the Directors branch was clearly being foolish this year because nominating Morten Tyldum in this slot over Ava DuVernay was short-sighted and silly. The Imitation Game is an asinine piece of calculated feel-good Oscar machinery, and Selma is a hard-hitting historical exposé that speaks to our contemporary moment. But, you know, the Academy is mostly old white men (and their old, white wives). I will say, though, that Selma was way too late to the party. This film and others that were released on or after December 25 (A Most Violent Year, Cake, Still Alice) did not do well with the Academy. They need time to watch those screeners, and these films need time to build buzz. Selma's campaign was mismanaged. I blame racism for a lot of things, and racism was surely partially to blame for Selma's weak showing with Oscar. But this is also the fault of Selma's publicity team. This was a mismanaged campaign; do not mistake it.

Will Win: Song

Could Win: Picture

My Rating: #10 out of 76

Wild

2 Nominations

• Actress: Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line)
• Supporting Actress: Laura Dern (Rambling Rose)

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée

Cast: Witherspoon, Dern, Thomas Sadoski, W. Earl Brown, Keene McRae, Michiel Huisman

This movie was a surprise to me; I had no idea it was going to be as good as it turned out to be. It is an unimaginative nominee here, though. Witherspoon is hardly giving a notable performance here. It's a nice role and a smart movie, but not anything brilliant. Dern is brilliant here, and I was so happy to see her name on nomination morning that I actually cheered quite loudly in my apartment. She is the best thing about the movie, and my companion and I left the film praising Laura Dern and remembering all of the great work she has done over the years. Neither woman has a chance of winning on Oscar night, but I will be rooting for Laura Dern nonetheless.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #27 out of 76

Inherent Vice

2 Nominations

• Adapted Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood)
• Costume Design: Mark Bridges (The Artist)

Director: Anderson

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Katherine Waterston, Joanna Newsom, Owen Wilson, Josh Brolin, Hong Chau, Jena Malone, Benicio Del Toro, Eric Roberts, Reese Witherspoon, Michael Kenneth Williams, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short

A stoner movie that is way, way more than a stoner movie. This is a film about how mass culture is sold to us and how – in the best tradition of socialist critique – everything is immanent to capitalism. It's also fun and trippy and has plenty of what-the-fuck moments. I found the script difficult, as well, but I loved it for its difficulty and its complexity, and I loved the difficult, conflicted characters at this film's center. I'm not going around recommending Inherent Vice, but I enjoyed it thoroughly, and the script is incredibly good; its nomination was well deserved.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #34 out of 76

Ida

2 Nominations

• Cinematography: Ryszard Lenczewski & Łukasz Żal
• Foreign Language Picture: Poland (In Darkness, Katyń, Man of Iron, The Young Girls of Wilko, The Deluge, Promised Land, Pharaoh, Knife in the Water)

Director: Paweł Pawlikowski

Cast: Agata Trzebuchowska, Agata Kulesza, Dawid Ogrodnik, Adam Szyszkowski, Jerzy Trela, Halina Skoczyńska

Easily one of the best films of the year and currently available on Netflix Instant. This is a tight little gem of a film; it's short at 90 minutes, and it is cruel and cold and unsparing, as well as gorgeous and clear and always surprising. I cannot say enough good things about it. It's my number two movie for the year and when I saw it in the theatre I had to sit in my seat for a solid five minutes after the movie ended before I was able to talk to my friends or think about moving around. This is superb filmmaking. Oddly enough I don't think it is going to win the Best Foreign Language Oscar. We'll see. I haven't yet seen Leviathan, but it currently seems to have the buzz on its side. None of that matters, though, move Ida to the top of your Instant queue. It is shockingly good.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: Foreign Language Picture
My Rating: #2 out of 76

Wild

Wild is the story of a woman who has a lot of problems, and who – in order to find something out about herself, about the world, about who she wishes to be – hikes the Pacific Coast trail beginning in the California desert and ending way up north in Oregon. The movie is based on a memoir. It stars Reese Witherspoon, and it is really good.

I was totally skeptical of Wild. Mostly because I am skeptical of Reese Witherspoon and skeptical of Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed the awesome C.R.A.Z.Y. but also directed the Dallas Buyers Club and The Young Victoria. These two most recent films are straightforward narratives, and I didn't care for either of them, but Vallée's newest film is about memory, longing, and desire in the way that C.R.A.Z.Y. was, and this is what the director does really, really well. Reese hikes the trail, but she flashes back to events in her past, some of which we get only in the briefest of glimpses. The character confronts her memories piece by piece, as her hike is a way to deal with the things she has done, to come to terms with her grief and her own outrageous behavior.

The film is, by turns, quite funny, really intense, and even suspenseful at times. But this is not a movie about hiking or the inspirational possibilities of nature or anything like that. This is a movie about a woman dealing with herself and her situation in life. The director of the film society here referred to it as a more realistic Eat, Pray, Love, and maybe the comparison is a good one. Unlike EPL, though, this is a story about pushing one's self to the limits of one's own abilities in order to see if one can handle both the past and the future.

I want to be sure to note, though, that what's on show here is really excellent storytelling, most importantly accomplished through editing and direction. Memories come at the main character quickly, and then they are quickly pushed back if she doesn't want to deal with them. We get inside the character's head, and this learning about her doesn't work to explain her behavior as much as it works to help us process these things along with the character. As the things in the past happen, they feel less like revelations or ways of understanding why this character has done what she has done, and more like things we begin to shoulder with her. There is no third-act aha! moment that makes it all clear and helps us understand her. Instead, slowly but surely, we confront her past the way she confronts her past.

I have to say one more thing about Wild. Laura Dern plays Reese Witherspoon's mother in this, and she is amazing. It is a beautiful, beautiful performance. Even if Wild weren't as good as it is, it would totally be worth checking out just for her. As it is, Wild is worth it all around.

***

The Bunch

Can we also note that there are a million movies with Wild in the title? I mention this because I recently (finally) saw Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and it is as awesome as everyone working on violence in cinema has been saying forever. (I would call it downright inspirational. It is just a genius film from start to finish.) But there's also Into the Wild, Wild Things, The Call of the Wild, The River Wild, as well as another famous movie starring Laura Dern: Wild at Heart. And I haven't even mentioned Wilde yet. There're a lot of Wilds, that's all I'm saying, and calling a movie simply Wild doesn't help things much; I'm also (to be honest) not sure what it has to do with the movie.

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 2 of 14

Dallas Buyers Club

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Actor: Matthew McConaughey
• Original Screenplay: Craig Borten
• Supporting Actor: Jared Leto
• Film Editing: John Mac McMurphy
• Makeup

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée

Cast: McConaughey, Leto, Jennifer Garner, Steve Zahn, Denis O'Hare, Dallas Roberts, Griffin Dunne, Deneen Tyler

I didn't really care for this, but six nominations including Best Picture, Film Editing, and Original Screenplay (especially in a year with so many good original screenplays) is a lot of love. The Academy clearly really likes this picture, and there's no reason to think it's going to stop loving it any time soon. McConaughey, who has been doing respectable work for three years now (after all of those years of silly rom-coms) is the overwhelming favorite for his category, and Leto (also never before nominated) is the favorite in his. The other Makeup nominees are The Lone Ranger and Bad Grandpa, so I will expect DBC to win in that category too. In fact, I should probably bet on this to win Screenplay while we're at it, but I just can't bring myself to do so.

Will Win: Actor, Supporting Actor, Makeup

Could Win: Original Screenplay

My Rating: #58 out of 73

Nebraska

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Alexander Payne (The Descendants, Sideways)
• Actor: Bruce Dern (Coming Home)
• Original Screenplay: Bob Nelson
• Supporting Actress: June Squibb
• Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael 

Director: Payne

Cast: Dern, Will Forte, Squibb, Bob Odenkirk, Stacy Keach, Mary Louise Wilson, Rance Howard, Angela McEwan, Tim Driscoll, Devin Ratray,

This has gotten better and better in my mind upon reflection. I think, however, that the opposite is probably true for the Academy. This is a pretty good picture, but one that will have worn out its welcome with voters by the time the Awards roll around. It's a quirky movie, too: a funny film that's subject matter is aging and mortality. It's gorgeously shot, but much of the time the camera's gaze is directed at dilapidated old buildings or claustrophobic interiors. Everyone acknowledges that the acting is stellar, but no one feels as though they know Bruce Dern or June Squibb, and both play characters that are not exactly lovable. Six nominations is a lot of love, but Nebraska is an also-ran this year.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #40 out of 73

Captain Phillips

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Adapted Screenplay: Billy Ray
• Supporting Actor: Barkhad Abdi
• Film Editing: Christopher Rouse (The Bourne Ultimatum, United 93)
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing 

Director: Paul Greengrass

Cast: Tom Hanks, Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed, Mahat M. Ali, Corey Johnson, Michael Chernus, David Warshofsky, Chris Mulkey, Catherine Keener

Big surprises on this front on the morning of the nominations. Captain Phillips was supposed to get a Best Director and a Best Actor nomination, as well. You can see from the love for the film's screenplay and its editing, that a majority of Academy members really loved this picture – its USAmerican imperialist/superiority theme surely helps on this front – and yet Tom Hanks (who is absolutely excellent in the movie) and Paul Greengrass (who was nominated before for his excellent film United 93) were no-shows when the names were read out. It's an odd thing, and I am not sure I know why this happened except that The Wolf of Wall Street really took the slot where this picture would've appeared in the Best Actor and Best Director categories. Maybe if it had been released just a little bit later... who knows. In any case, six nominations or not, don't expect Captain Phillips to go home with any little gold men. It is out of the running in all categories.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #50 out of 73

Dallas Buyers Club: Not My Drug of Choice

I don't think I'll have much to say about Dallas Buyers Club, although it's the kind of stuff everyone eats up. Matthew McConaughey (who I have been sincerely liking in things lately – not this) and Jared Leto both lose lots and lots of weight for the movie. Their characters are both HIV+ in 1985, and they both want to be nominated for Oscars, so the weight loss makes a lot of sense (that totally worked for the never-before-nominated Christian Bale a couple years ago).

Dallas Buyers reminded me a lot of 2011's Puncture, which I apparently never reviewed but which I disliked quite a bit. (Side note on Puncture: it wanted to be a kind of twenty-first century Silkwood, but it just never really worked.) It reminded me of Puncture because it has a similar kind of fighting-against-the-medical-establishment theme. McConaughey's character, Ron Woodroof is a homophobic Texas asshole who is used to getting everything that he wants in life (did I mention he's a white guy?), so when he contracts HIV he starts paying an orderly to smuggle him out the drugs when he can't get them a legal way.

He keeps drinking and using coke, of course, and so he passes out again - this dude is really sick. Blah blah blah. Anyway, he starts to believe AZT is killing people (it is) and that the big pharma is trying to make money off selling AZT to sick people (it is) and so he tries to bring drugs that the FDA hasn't approved into the U.S. by smuggling them in. The real goal here is to make a lot of money quickly by selling drugs to other HIV+ Texans (almost all gay men – people Woodroof continues to refer to in derogatory terms).

Ms. Leto

He learns lessons, he makes friends with a transvestite (Jared Leto, who I liked more as the film went on), he goes to court, he stops thinking about only himself and starts thinking about the community. You get the drift. The film is absolutely filled to the brim with clichés, and the point is that we are supposed to better understand the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s from the point of view of this homophobic white Texan, instead of the overwhelming number of gay men who are suffering from the disease (to whom, presumably, we would be less likely to relate). I found the whole thing tiresome. It's also filmed in this standard, realistic, hagiographic kind of style that isn't, in fact, a style. From a formerly exciting filmmaker like Jean-Marc Vallée, this is particularly disappointing.

One more thing: Puncture was about fixing a problem with the medical establishment that is still in existence. In other words, the Kassen Brothers were trying to make a film about a particular social problem and to correct something pernicious in our current society. It was a movie about the invention of a syringe that was designed so that you couldn't re-use it. An invention that would actually save the lives of many, many drug-users. Dallas Buyers, on the other hand, is really about rehearsing an injustice from 1985 – all good and well; I write history myself – but the film never brings us into the present day. How has big pharma changed? How does the FDA continue to support big business while getting wealthy off of sick people? If you're gonna make a realist film about social problems, it's fine to set your film in the '80s, but at least bring us all up to speed.

Telluride at Dartmouth #2

Last night's film was Nikolaj Arcel's A Royal Affair (in Danish – En Kongelig Affære) which stars Mads Mikkelsen (who you might recognize as the villain Le Chiffre from the Bond-movie Casino Royale, but who is much more important as the brother Jacob in Susanne Bier's After the Wedding).

A Royal Affair also stars Alicia Vikander and (in an amazing performance) Mikkel Boe Følsgaard as Denmark's King Christian VII. Arcel's film is a beautiful costume-piece, a historical epic about 18th-century Denmark and the country's movement towards the Enlightenment, greater freedoms for its citizenry, and the end of serfdom.

The film's main character is the Christian's queen Caroline, who was an English royal, sent to Denmark as the King's bride. The King, as it turns out, is either insane or incredibly moody, and the Queen's life is decidedly unhappy.

Mikkelsen plays an avid reader of Voltaire and Rousseau who is also a surgeon. He becomes, through a series of intrigues, Christian's personal physician, and comes to the palace in Copenhagen to live. Drama ensues as the Queen and the doctor begin to fall in love and the King becomes more and more ill. The Enlightenment, of course, also has its enemies, and even if the two were not in love, they would have been targeted by other forces among the nobility and the church. The stakes are quite high, indeed.

Arcel films this story like one of the French historical epics from the 1980s – something like Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel or Patrice Chéreau's La Reine Margot or one of the Jean-Paul Rappeneau historical epics (films like The Horseman on the Roof or Cyrano de Bergerac). A Royal Affair is much better made than a film like Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria.

Denmark has not, of late, selected films like this as its submission for the Foreign Language Film Oscar, but this may be the year, depending on how good this year's Susanne Bier movie is. (We find out tomorrow, September 18th, in any case.)

I found A Royal Affair quite moving. Its subjects are fascinating, its costumes are gorgeous (I cannot imagine it not getting an Oscar nomination for this. I mean, if Anonymous can get one...), and the acting is wonderful. I was a fan.

Two Movies for Yesterday

Finally saw last year's Canadian submission for the foreign language Oscar, Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y., which I totally loved. It's a father/son love story about a young gay man with four brothers in the seventies coming to terms with his sexuality and his father's relationship with that. In a lot of ways the film is been-there-done-that, but I loved it nonetheless for the artistry of the story being told (Vallée's scipt is excellent) and the wonderful lead performance from Marc-André Grondin. The film is filled with musical references: Pink Floyd and Bowie, mostly, though the title refers to Patsy Cline's song by the same name. The film, interestingly enough, also seems to be about the fading of the Catholic Church in French-Canada. In any case, I loved it.

The same cannot be said for the idiotic Eragon. This film gives us exposition for about an hour (seriously), a few skirmishes and then a final battle that is boring and bloodless. This is a children's movie and is filmed like one. I love me some dragons, so I was going to see it anyway, but this movie is stupid and boring. When that baby dragon hatches in the first third of the movie, though, prepare to melt.