Oscar Nominees 2016: Part 3 of 11

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

Room

4 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Lenny Abrahamson
• Actress: Brie Larson
• Adapted Screenplay: Emma Donoghue

Director: Abrahamson

Cast: Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, Tom McCamus, Sean Bridgers, Wendy Crewson, William H. Macy

I was telling two colleagues about this movie last night and they both started to get tears in their eyes and said that they didn't know if they'd be able to handle it. I liked Room and it's well made. The way the film works, however, is (especially considering its subject matter) a kind of sentimental business, and so I think I liked it less than I might have had the director taken a more hard-hitting approach. Because the film is partially about seeing the world for the first time and the sort of wonders that the material world holds, Room also works in a through-the-eyes-of-a-child Steven-Spielberg kind of way. This perspective is something the Academy (and most everyone, actually) really loves. The world is magical and beautiful, even though sometimes really horrific things happen. This is not my view of the world, and I guess this is what I mean by sentimental vs. hard-hitting. In any case, the acting in Room is superb. Larson (who had her breakout three years ago with a film called Short Term 12), Tremblay, and Allen are aces, and the film is very moving.

Will Win: Actress

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #29 out of 62

The Danish Girl

4 Nominations

• Actor: Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything)
• Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander
• Production Design: Eve Stewart (Les Misérables, The King's Speech, Topsy-Turvy) & Michael Standish
• Costume Design: Paco Delgado (Les Misérables)

Director: Tom Hooper

Cast: Redmayne, Vikander, Matthias Schoenaerts, Amber Heard, Ben Whishaw, Sebastian Koch

I surprised myself by really liking The Danish Girl. I think mostly because as much as the film is about gender, it is about confusion and mystery surrounding gender. The acting in this film, too, is quite excellent, and I (who was very skeptical of his showy performance in the tepid Theory of Everything) thought Eddie Redmayne was just wonderful in The Danish Girl. The film still has many problems – it is too long, too weepy, the cinematography almost never makes any sense, and the film (rather conspicuously) seems to ignore sex – but the acting is great, Alicia Vikander is lovable in the extreme, the costumes are exquisite, and the score is lovely. Vikander's nomination in the supporting category is a total fraud – she might even have more screentime than Redmayne, and you come away from the film almost feeling like she might be the eponymous Danish girl – but I'd say that that makes her win more likely, not less. This is especially true because she was memorably stunning in another of this year's nominated movies: Ex Machina.

Will Win: Supporting Actress

Could Win: Production Design, Costume Design
My Rating: #28 out of 62

Brooklyn

3 Nominations

• Picture
• Actress: Saoirse Ronan (Atonement)
• Adapted Screenplay: Nick Hornby (An Education)

Director: John Crowley

Cast: Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Emma Lowe, Maeve McGrath, Fiona Glascott, Eileen O'Higgins, Emily Bett Rickards, Eve Macklin, Nora-Jane Noone, Samantha Munro, Jessica Paré, Emma Lowe

This is a beautiful film. When I recommend it to anyone, I keep reminding people that it is a small film. This is a romantic drama, a story of immigration and coming of age, and it isn't a deep film about the soul or about politics or about world affairs. That is to say, Brooklyn is not at all self important. It knows what it is and simply goes about being itself. Because of this, I fell in love with Brooklyn and fell deeply in love with its characters and their performers. Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, and Domhnall Gleeson are so wonderful in this film, and they are a joy to watch. This kind of simple, beautiful character portrayal doesn't often get as much awards press as this film is getting, and I find Brooklyn to be a delightful anomaly. Julie Walters, I should add, is completely charming. Prepare to fall in love. Side note on Domhnall Gleeson: Is he having the best 2015 of anyone? My friend Tom mentioned this to me a day or two ago and I feel like he is exactly correct. With plum roles in Brooklyn, Ex Machina, The Force Awakens, and what I suspect will be eventual Best-Picture-winner The Revenant, Bill Weasley has surely arrived in Hollywood as a dependable and excellent character actor.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Actress, Adapted Screenplay

My Rating: #21 out of 62

The Hateful Eight

3 Nominations

• Supporting Actress: Jennifer Jason Leigh
• Cinematography: Robert Richardson (Django Unchained, Hugo, Inglorious Basterds, The Aviator, Snow Falling on Cedars, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon)
• Original Score: Ennio Morricone (Malèna, Bugsy, The Untouchables, The Mission, Days of Heaven)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demián Bichir, Tim Roth, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Channing Tatum, Dana Gourrier

Ennio Morricone has never won an Oscar, and I say that it is time. So does Harvey Weinstein – in fact, he was saying that back when Morricone was nominated for Malèna fifteen years ago. But let's talk about Tarantino's movie. It is a very Tarantino movie, perhaps the most Tarantino of all Tarantino movies, in the sense that it is distilled. Nine people stuck in a cabin  threatening one another and eventually killing each other. The Hateful Eight is, of course, too long – all of his movies are too long – and this is because The Hateful Eight is also in love with its own cleverness. In truth, all of this is sort of fine. I rather enjoyed the movie. I like all the actors and I had a fairly good time. (Walton Goggins, by the way, is the standout performer here.) But one does have the feeling that Tarantino sort of missed a couple of boats with this movie. At one point, Hateful Eight feels like it might become a mystery film, akin to And Then There Were None, but Tarantino consistently abandons generic conventions, opting instead for his own generic brand. But what is that? What is the Tarantino genre? I know what the style looks like – bloody, pitiless, comic, witty, clever – but what kinds of stories are these? I guess they're Westerns; The Hateful Eight is obviously set in the "west". But I can't help feeling that if Tarantino had been clearer himself about the conventions of the story he was telling, the film would've been better. A last note on black actors and #oscarssowhite: how come no one has brought up Samuel L. Jackson's name as one of the black actors that got snubbed by the Academy? He is the star of this film, but literally no one has mentioned him in this context as far as I can tell. Isn't that a little odd?

Will Win: Original Score

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #26 out of 62

Far-too-quick 2015 Movie Roundup

I've been seeing a ton of stuff over the last two weeks, cramming everything that is in wide release (i.e. in theatres in Orlando) in before I get to Los Angeles, so that I can spend time seeing the limited-release stuff like Youth and Carol and 45 Years while I'm there. I have already posted about Creed, so I won't review that, but here's some other good stuff. Almost all of these movies are really good, so get out to the movies.

Brooklyn is a beautiful, small picture with some absolutely lovely performances. Saoirse Ronan is a lock for a best actress nomination, and she carries the picture with her deep, beautiful eyes and enigmatic smile. But, in truth, the movie itself doesn't need a lot of carrying. It is elegantly scripted by Nick Hornby, and the supporting performances are all spot on thoroughly enjoyable. Julie Walters, in particular, is very funny while simultaneously feeling richly created; she takes a simple part and makes it into something legitimately fascinating. Domnhall Gleeson, too, gives his usual excellent performance, quietly moving through his role with sensitivity and care. But for me the breakout here is Emory Cohen, who plays an Italian boy Ronan meets in Brooklyn at an Irish dance. Cohen's performance is buoyant, endlessly lovable, and overwhelmingly charming. I was in love with him in under five minutes, but he looks at Ronan with such love in his eyes and half-smile that it seemed to me impossible not to love him back. It is, perhaps, a relatively simple role, in what turns out to be a relatively simple movie, but I found the whole thing emotionally satisfying and wonderfully romantic.

Oscar possibilities for Brooklyn: quite a few, I'd wager. Actress, picture, adapted screenplay, score, costumes. And that's a conservative estimate.

* * *

The Good Dinosaur... was better when it was called The Lion King. The plot is simple and clichéd, like most kids movies, I guess. The look of the film is its most interesting feature – which isn't to say that it is good because the look of the film is decidedly odd.

The scenery in The Good Dinosaur is hyperrealistic. Beautiful water, gorgeous trees and sunsets. And then there are storms and weather: all of these are done pristinely, as though this were CGI for a Marvel movie, ready to be inhabited by basically realistic-looking humans and animals. But then the dinosaurs in The Good Dinosaur, and the other animals as well, all look like they were drawn by an intrepid sixth grader. All of the actual inhabitants of the world of this film look like cartoons. Cartoon creatures and humans living in a carefully crafted realistic world. The effect is bizarre, to say the least, and contributes to a kind of constant, nagging confusion I had while watching the movie. Still, the script is charming and funny (particularly the sequences with Sam Neill and Steve Zahn), and I quite liked The Good Dinosaur while never quite feeling comfortable with it.

Oscar possibilities for The Good Dinosaur: a definite nomination in the animated feature category. That's it, though.

* * *

I loved Spotlight, on the other hand. Directed by Tom McCarthy, who has directed some excellent movies over the years (The Station Agent, Win Win, The Visitor), this is his best film yet. Spotlight is an ensemble picture that follows the story of the sex-abuse scandal in the Boston archdiocese of the Catholic church. I honestly don't think I have much to say about this because I just thought it was solid, and I enjoyed it completely.

In truth, if I am honest with myself, Spotlight is a sort of conventional movie about truth and justice and doing the right thing and making the bad guys pay, but it felt so much more than that while I was watching it. McCarthy ratchets up the stakes, and for me Spotlight came to be about the way that each of us allows injustice to continue in the world because of (a) devotions and loyalties to various dogmas and traditions, (b) apathy and indifference about the real sufferings of other people, (c) actual fear that people might not like us, and (d) greed and self-interest. We watch the film's central characters struggle in different ways with all of these qualms and difficulties, and these miniature character studies are all very interesting, even compelling.

I enjoyed Spotlight from start to finish, admiring the filmmaking (it's shot cleverly and without ostentation) and the powerful ensemble work from Keaton, Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber, Rachel McAdams, Brian d'Arcy James, Len Cariou, and Billy Crudup. And I like the film's subject matter, too. It is so easy to cover up something instead of truly dealing with it, so simple (especially if you're getting your pockets lined) to choose to kowtow to the powerful and the wealthy instead of telling the truth. By the time Spotlight's end title cards rolled around, the sheer scope of the conspiracy that this team of reporters exposed bowled me over. This is a conventional film but a stunning story.

Oscar possibilities for Spotlight: This is currently the Best Picture frontrunner, so that means all of the nominations that go along with that: editing, screenplay, cinematography, supporting actor (Ruffalo? Keaton? who knows), and director.

* * *

I shall leave you on a sour note. I had crossed Trumbo off of my list because the trailer looked so... whimsical, but then the Screen Actors Guild nominated it for ensemble, best actor, and best supporting actress, and then the Golden Globes followed suit with nominations for best actor in a drama (even though it is a comedy) and (again) best supporting actress. So, I put Trumbo back on my list and headed over to the cineplex.

Trumbo is an awful film. It is ostensibly the story of Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted screenwriter of Roman Holiday and The Brave One and Spartacus, and I guess it is that, but this movie is so all over the place that one is never quite sure what it's about. It covers an enormous span of time, and its opinion about its protagonist shifts rather a lot, but this isn't really the problem with Trumbo. The problem is that the script is terrible, the acting is hammy and nonsensical, the makeup is too thick, the cinematography is inept, and the whole thing feels so phony that even though this is apparently a true story, one comes away from the film feeling as though it was rather a nice story, but not that our government actually, you know, was fascist and used violence and imprisonment to silence political dissidence. It is all designed to feel so charming: the good guys won. Of course they did. This is America! Utter nonsense.

Oh, and if you think this film might be about mid-century politics? Like Communism or Fascism? You would be wrong. Fascism in Trumbo is a mere plot device. Fascism in Trumbo is just an excuse for John Goodman to get laughs by swinging a baseball bat around an office and for Helen Mirren to say fuck.

I am not Spartacus, but I play him in the movies.

There is more to say about how bad Trumbo is, I guess, but it seems to me that perhaps the most egregious thing about this movie is Hollywood's obsession with having younger actors play famous bygone stars of yesteryear. Trumbo boasts Edward G. Robinson, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Otto Preminger, and Hedda Hopper as characters, so that younger actors do their best impressions of these Hollywood royalty, but it always feels so fake. Michael Stuhlbarg, a fine actor, does a rather awful Edward G. Robinson impersonation as it turns out, and although Dean O'Gorman and David James Elliott do very good impressions of Kirk Douglas and John Wayne (respectively), the impression is all they do; characterization is non-existent, as though because they're trying so hard to play the famous face they forgot how to play humans. As for the two racking up nominations, Bryan Cranston growls his way through his part, and as far as I can tell all Helen Mirren does to get into the part of Hedda Hopper is simply to half-heartedly drop her British accent.

As for old Hollywood itself? In Trumbo (as in Saving Mr. Banks and Hitchcock before it) 1940s and '50s Los Angeles looks like a candy store. It's as though the entire purpose of these movies is to increase nostalgic tourism in the city of Los Angeles. Trumbo looks nothing like the real world in either the mid-twentieth century or the early twenty-first. Avoid at all costs.

Oscar possibilities for Trumbo: I honestly don't see any. The Globes and the Actors Guild are fine, but I predict that Trumbo will follow its predecessors (Banks and Hitchcock) and score a single nomination in some below-the-line category. For Trumbo I predict costumes. The film is so bad that if it scores any more than a single nomination in January I'll be shocked. It could happen, of course, but I just can't see it.

Andrew Garfield

Currently risking a slight overexposure, Mr. Garfield has recently played significant roles in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (don't see it), and Boy A (see it!), and is currently doing excellent work in both The Social Network and (I've heard) in the film version of Never Let Me Go. He will also shortly be filling Tobey Maguire's shoes as the new Spider-Man, a development in which I have no interest whatsoever.

I'm a fan.