Oscar Nominations 2019: Part 11 of 11 & Final Predictions

Part 1: Roma, The Favourite, Vice, A Star Is Born.
Part 2: Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody.
Part 3: Mary Poppins Returns, First Man, Cold War.
Part 4: Can You Ever Forgive Me?, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Part 5: Never Look Away, Mary Queen of Scots, Isle of Dogs, The Wife.
Part 6: Detainment, Marguerite, Skin, Madre, Fauve.
Part 7: At Eternity's Gate, First Reformed, Shoplifters, Capernaum.
Part 8: Spider man: into the Spider-verse, Incredibles 2, Mirai, Ralph Breaks the Internet.
Part 9: Bao, Animal Behaviour, One Small Step, Late Afternoon, Weekends.
Part 10: Avengers: Infinity War, Solo: a Star Wars Story, Ready Player One, Christopher Robin.
Part 11:

A Quiet Place

1 Nomination

• Sound Editing

Director: John Krasinski

Cast: Emily Blunt, Krasinksi, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward, Evil Aliens

This is harmless and tight, but it is certainly not a reinvention of the genre. In fact, A Quiet Place is quite the opposite of a reinvention, referencing numerous films as it goes along. This film would not have been possible without the genre it supposedly reinvents. I found this to be more of a set of quotations than a real movie, if I'm honest, and it contains some really serious plot holes and clunky exposition. Still, I love monsters in movies, and this one has a really cool-looking bunch of monsters. I was into that, and rather enjoyed myself.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #41 out of 71

Gräns (Border)

1 Nomination

• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Ali Abbasi

Cast: Eva Melander, Eero Milonoff, Jörgen Thorsson, Ann Petrén, Stan Ljunggren, Kjell Wilhelmsen, Rakel Wärmländer, Andreas Kundler, Matti Boustedt, Tomas Åhnstrand, Josefin Neldén, Henrik Johansson, Ibrahim Faal

This is an audacious, exciting movie that I completely loved. It was Sweden's submission for the Foreign Language Picture Oscar, but it didn't make the shortlist, and it was not nominated in that category. There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being the explicit sexuality of this film and the true discomfort that this film has the ability to generate. I cannot wait to talk about this film with other people who have seen it. It's a weird, weird movie, and you would do well to go into it completely blind, knowing nothing more than that I'm telling you I loved it. (Of course, me telling you that it is super weird and that I loved it should mean for many of you that you ought to stay away.) This is a really, really smart film, despite its ostensible generic trappings. Oh, did I mention that this movie is also really sexy? It's really sexy, although after you see it you'll probably think I'm very strange for saying so.
Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #10 out of 71

RBG

1 Nomination

• Song – "I'll Fight": Diane Warren (Marshall, The Hunting Ground, Beyond the Lights, Pearl Harbor, Music of the Heart, Armageddon, Con Air, Up Close & Personal, Mannequin)

Director: Julie Cohen, Betsy West

This was a sweet little piece of hagiography, and I am inclined to believe in Ginsburg's sainthood. As a film this isn't really interesting, but it was nice to learn more about Ginsburg's early years of marriage and the way she put her husband through law school while he was battling cancer while also doing her own work in law school. What an impressive human being! As for Diane Warren, she had about 15 years where she was not nominated all, after being nominated year after year in the 1990s. Well, now she's back and she gets nominated almost every year. She will have to lose yet again (her 10th nomination without a win) this year because her old writing partner from The Hunting Ground, Lady Gaga, is going to win. Maybe next year, Diane.

Will Win: N/A
Could Win: N/A
My Rating: Not Ranked

Final Predictions:
Actor in a Leading Role: Christian Bale, Vice
Actor in a Supporting Role: Mahershala Ali, Green Book
Actress in a Leading Role: Glenn Close, The Wife
Actress in a Supporting Role: Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Animated Feature Film: Spider-man: into the Spider-verse
Animated Short Film: Bao
Cinematography: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma
Costume Design: Sandy Powell, The Favourite
Director: Alfonso Cuarón, Roma 
Documentary Feature Film: Minding the Gap
Documentary Short Subject: End Game
Film Editing: Barry Alexander Brown, BlacKkKlansman
Foreign Language Film: Mexico, Roma
Live-action Short Film: Detainment
Makeup & Hairstyling: Vice
Music - Original Song: Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando & Andrew Wyatt, A Star Is Born
Music - Original Score: Marc Shaiman, Mary Poppins Returns
Production Design: Eugenio Caballero & Bárbara Enríquez, Roma
Sound Editing: Black Panther
Sound Mixing: A Star Is Born
Visual Effects: First Man
Writing - Adapted Screenplay: Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk
Writing - Original Screenplay: Deborah David, Tony McNamara, The Favourite
Picture: Roma

Hush... Hush, Sweet John Krasinski

A Quiet Place is nice and tight with a great score. I also loved Noah Jupe in it. Almost all of its running time is devoted to quoting other movies, but... I sort of didn't mind that too much and thought it worked well enough. The monster is especially cool. I will say that there are some ridiculously gaping plot holes, and some of what we see is patently absurd (the whiteboard in the basement is clearly there only so dim audience members will be able to follow along even if they haven't been paying attention – it couldn't possibly be of any use to the main character). Still, as I say, it's a tight little thing, and even if some of A Quiet Place's plot defies all logic, it's an inoffensive, fun little picture.

Here's the thing: as soon as the father and his boy went to the river I was like Right, there's no way they'll hear you at the river. So why didn't they just live at the goddamn river? Was there some sort of reason they needed to live in the middle of a fucking cornfield? Live near the river; give birth near the river; raise your kids by the river. It'll be great. No monsters will hear you and kill you.

Oh and you're telling me miss thing gave birth without making a sound? Consider me skeptical.

Oscar Noms 2017: 11 of 13

Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films
Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna

Part 11:

Allied

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Joanna Johnston (Lincoln)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Matthew Goode, Lizzy Caplan, Simon McBurney, Anton Lesser, August Diehl, Camille Cottin, Charlotte Hope, Marion Bailey, Thierry Frémont

I pregamed this film, thinking that it might, on an off chance, snag a costume nomination... and it did. This nomination for such a bad movie actually quite surprised me. You can read my original thoughts if you follow the link, but let's just leave it at me telling you that this movie makes no actual sense. A shame, too, because the parts in act one when Cotillard and Pitt are doing spy shit like randomly killing SS officers and upending tables in order to more easily see the enemy before grabbing a machine gun and cutting Nazis in half. That part is all quite cool. The second half is very boring.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #76 out of 95

The Jungle Book

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Neel Sethi, Ben Kingsley, Bill Murray, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong'o, Scarlett Johansson, Christopher Walken, Giancarlo Esposito

This was pleasant enough, but I guess I'm not really sure what the point of making it was. The visual effects look cool, although to my mind the animals don't look like animals so much as they look like very good CGI version of animals. In other words, visual effects are the purpose of this movie, so it is fitting that The Jungle Book got nominated for precisely that. But the new Jungle Book is no more realistic than the 1967 cartoon – it's still filled with talking animals, silly jokes, and the same songs as the original. Or at least a couple of them. And it is here where the film really can't find its footing. The new movie has not figured out a way to make The Jungle Book the live-action extravaganza it wants while also keeping "The Bare Necessities" and "I Want to Be like You". Favreau has the animals sing "Bare Necessities" half-heartedly, as a way of splitting the difference between a musical and a regular film, but then when Christopher Walken appears as King Louie, he sings his own song in full voice like it's a musical number. The whole thing felt uneven, and I was left thinking why they bothered at all. It wasn't a bad movie, but its not different enough from the original to matter at all.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #68 out of 95

Doctor Strange

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Scott Derrickson

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Benedict Wong, Mads Mikkelsen, Michael Stuhlbarg

This was another of my pregames that paid off. I complained in my original post that all of these Marvel movies are about the potential destruction of the known universe and that every single time the entire universe manages to be saved by the Marvel hero. As one reader pointed out, this isn't precisely true. There are plenty of Marvel movies where total apocalypse is not threatening the human race, but that doesn't stop Doctor Strange from being perhaps the most formulaic of the Marvel films yet. There have been so many of them, and this one comes so late, so I get that the well is running a bit dry, but they really need to ask more of these films. Doctor Strange has a great number of cool visual effects, but it hasn't a thing to say about anything. I was fairly bored.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #69 out of 95

13 Hours

1 Nomination

• Sound Mixing

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: John Krasinski, James Badge Dale, Pablo Schreiber, David Denman, Dominic Fumusa, Max Martini, David Costabile, Alexia Barlier, Peyman Moaadi, Matt Letscher, Toby Stephens, Demetrius Grosse, David Giuntoli


And then there's this steaming pile of garbage. First off, this bloated action movie (like all of Bay's overstuffed action movies) refuses to trim itself down to a normal action-movie length. Instead, we are treated to what felt like 13 hours of footage. It just kept going! But it wasn't the length that made 13 Hours so distasteful. I don't know enough about what actually happened in Benghazi to speak to this film's interpretation of events vis-à-vis history, but I can easily say that if this is what happened, I don't understand why everyone has been talking about Benghazi for the last year and a half. The film follows four or five mostly interchangeable macho, fratboy assholes, played mostly by Schreiber, Krasinski, Dale, and Denman, as they swagger around Libya and act like they own the place. As far as I can tell they do not work for the military, but are hired guns who work for the CIA's secret base in Benghazi. So far so bro. But these guys have no desire to work for their actual bosses. They know how things are supposed to be done here in Libya, and they're interested in telling everyone else what to do. I thought all of them were assholes from the absolute get-go. From the very beginning of the film they follow no orders at all and, from what I gathered, they break the secret base's cover by deciding (the film thinks heroically) to go save the U.S. ambassador's life after he is attacked at a mansion where he and his security detail are staying. The ambassador is dead already, and our fratboys disobey orders to go to the compound to try to save him and his guys. Fine. But then the saved guys and the swaggerers with guns lead their attackers directly to the no longer secret CIA base where they endanger the lives of some 75 operatives who had been working in secret in Libya but who are now exposed as U.S. spies. Then the bros defend the base for the last hour or so of the movie. This anti-intellectual film (a Harvard degree is an indication of total cluelessness in this movie) is photographed more than anything else like a single-person shooter video game, and the effects look comparable to one of them. It's designed to celebrate blowing things up, to take pleasure in shooting nameless and mostly faceless Africans, and to justify U.S. presence in North Africa. Perhaps what is most interesting about 13 Hours is its own blindness to the fact that it caused its own problems. The characters wouldn't have needed to be saved if they hadn't have been swaggering idiots in the first place. And Americans wouldn't be dead if they weren't holed up in a secret CIA base in North Africa to begin with. What is so extraordinarily distasteful about a movie like this is that it believes that no one in the military knows anything about what to do in a situation like the one the film describes. Apparently the only people who know anything at all are the men with the guns. And they know what to do simply by virtue of having guns. Because the right thing to do is always to shoot. When the right thing to do is always to kill people, it is the men with the guns who always seem to be able to do the right thing. I hated every second of this.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #95 out of 95

Back to:
Part 1 - La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival
Part 2 - Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion
Part 3 - Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Jackie
Part 4 - Florence Foster Jenkins, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Passengers, Rogue One
Part 5 - Deepwater Horizon, Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, A Man Called Ove
Part 6 - Captain Fantastic, Elle, Loving, Nocturnal Animals
Part 7 - The Lobster, 20th Century Women, Silence, Hail, Caesar!
Part 8 - Live-action Short Films
Part 9 - Animated Short Films 

Part 10 - Toni Erdmann, The Salesman, Land of Mine, Tanna

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 13 of 14

The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Cast: Hideaki Anno, Miori Takimoto, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masahiko Nishimura, Stephen Alpert, Keiko Takeshita, Mirai Shida, Jun Kunimura, Shinobu Otake, Nomura Mansai (except that they all spoke English when I saw it, so: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Martin Short, Stanley Tucci, Werner Herzog, William H. Macy, Jennifer Grey)

This is apparently not going to be (as has been reported) Miyazaki's final film. We should all breathe a sigh of relief at this. The subject matter of The Wind Rises is not Miyazaki's usual fanciful content, so I was sort of worried that The Wind Rises wouldn't be as magical as his previous films. I oughtn't to have worried one bit. This is a film about an artist, and his visions of what he can create are told through beautiful, fanciful dreams that feel like nothing but magic. It is gorgeous. The score is beautiful (and really should've taken Philomena's spot – who remembers that score?), but what's really on show here are Miyazaki's beautiful vistas, intriguing ways of looking at things, memorable quirky characters, and fanciful storytelling. This is a director who tells us that a couple is falling in love by having them fly paper airplanes to one another from the ground to a third-story window. The planes in flight are breathtaking, and the film itself becomes about what it is like to love something, to dedicate your life to something only to have it destroyed by something else (the military, illness). This is beautiful stuff and is easily my favorite in the Animated Feature category, not that that means it's going to win; it hasn't a prayer.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win:N/A

My Rating: #21 out of 82

Ernest et Célestine (Ernest & Celestine)

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner

Cast: Lambert Wilson, Pauline Brunner, Dominique Maurin, Anne-Marie Loop

I don't get to see this before the Academy Awards, and my bet is that most people won't have seen it. It, frankly, looks adorable, and captures the look of the children's books on which it is based (the books are by Gabrielle Vincent and you can see them – some are even translated into English – here). French animation has soared in this category recently, and it has become a safe bet for a nomination almost every single year, though (it would appear) not for the win. Films like Une Vie de Chat, Persepolis, and Sylvain Chomet's superb L'Illusionniste and Les Triplettes de Belleville have all gotten nominations, but none has gone on to the win (despite L'Illusionniste's superiority to almost all of the films – animated or not – that were released in 2010). Ernest et Célestine is released in the U.S. today, so if you live in a city bigger than mine you may have better luck than I catching this picture. 
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not ranked

The Croods

1 Nomination

• Animated Feature

Director: Kirk DeMicco, Chris Sanders

Cast:Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener, Cloris Leachman

I liked this film more than most of my friends did, and I liked it mostly for the kinds of lovely visuals you can see in the image above. The Croods is a silly little story, with characters who are, for the most part, unattractive (they are cro-magnons, after all). The plot covers a family who are running away from the splitting of the supercontinent Pangaea. It is, more importantly a story of learning new things – adapting to new technologies and new ideas. It is about parents learning to listen to their kids and kids learning to listen to their parents. In the ideology of this film, the parents don't know the best way to do things, but they have much bigger hearts than the children. All of this is sort of sweet, and the tone is tongue-in-cheek enough that it didn't make me groan too heavily at any point. And then there is the art design! It is gorgeous. There are millions of bizarre little creatures and plants that look like something out of a prettified Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel painting. The Croods is worth watching for these inventive visuals alone.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #60 out of 82