Oscar Noms 2017: 4 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

2 Nominations

• Actress: Meryl Streep (Into the Woods, August: Osage County, The Iron Lady, Julie & Julia, Doubt, The Devil Wears Prada, Adaptation., Music of the Heart, One True Thing, The Bridges of Madison County, Postcards from the Edge, A Cry in the Dark, Ironweed, Out of Africa, Silkwood, Sophie's Choice, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Deer Hunter)
• Costume Design: Consolata Boyle (The Queen)

Director: Stephen Frears

Cast: Streep, Hugh Grant, Simon Helberg, Rebecca Ferguson, Nina Arianda, Stanley Townsend, John Kavanagh

I've already trashed this movie plenty on this blog – and this was easy to do because there were two movies about Florence Foster Jenkins out this year, and the one nominated for 2 Oscars was the one that wasn't any good. But I am going to keep trashing it, because now it has been nominated for two Oscars, and Meryl Streep, who has already been nominated more times than any actor in Academy history, keeps actively campaigning for these nominations for reasons (apparently related to ego) that I simply cannot understand. What is fascinating to me is that people actually quite enjoyed this movie. I was trashing it in front of some of my colleagues in the School of Performing Arts where I teach and a lot of them were quick to jump in and defend the film – "Oh! You didn't like it? I thought it was great". I was sort of shocked. Consolata Boyle's nomination here is well deserved, but Streep's decidedly is not. And that she was nominated over Amy Adams in Arrival or Annette Bening in 20th Century Women is a legitimate travesty. The Academy had an opportunity to award a brilliant actress at the top of her game in Bening or a young work-horse of an actress who consistently delivers great performances, and instead they nominated Streep yet again. Don't get me wrong; I think Streep is great, but she isn't great in FFJ and she could afford to sit a few Oscar ceremonies out. If you want to see a good movie about FFJ, watch Marguerite and see Catherine Frot give a superb performance as the singer.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #74 out of 87

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

2 Nominations

• Production Design: Stuart Craig (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The English Patient, Chaplin, Dangerous Liaisons, The Mission, Gandhi, The Elephant Man) & Anna Pinnock (Into the Woods, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Life of Pi, The Golden Compass, Gosford Park)
• Costume Design: Colleen Atwood (Snow White and the Huntsman, Into the Woods, Alice in Wonderland, Nine, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Memoirs of a Geisha, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Chicago, Sleepy Hollow, Beloved, Little Women)

Director: David Yates

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Colin Farrell, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Samantha Morton, Carmen Ejogo, Faith Wood-Balgrove, Kevin Guthrie, Jon Voight, Zoë Kravitz, Johnny Depp

This was cute. It was mostly a movie preparing us for twenty sequels, I thought, but I was very fond of the performances, except for Eddie Redmayne's (did he mumble through the whole thing or was it just me?), and I thought the art direction, the imagery of the fantastic beasts, and the story were fun. The storyline, of course, circulates around a metaphor for queerness and the closet, and that is fine if a little tired (like, that is the whole point of the X-men, already), but Ezra Miller (!) and Colin Farrell and an insane Samantha Morton made all of that worth watching. I also adored Alison Sudol and Dan Fogler in the movie. It is a real shame that the sequel(s) will trade Johnny Depp for Farrell; I'll miss him.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #60 out of 87

Passengers

2 Nominations

• Production Design: Guy Hendrix Dyas (Inception) & Gene Serdena (Her)
• Score: Thomas Newman (Bridge of Spies, Saving Mr. Banks, Skyfall, WALL·E, The Good German, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Finding Nemo, Road to Perdition, American Beauty, Unstrung Heroes, Little Women, The Shawshank Redemption)

Director: Morten Tyldum

Cast: Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Laurence Fishburne, Michael Sheen, Julee Cerda

This was not as terrible as I was led to believe it would be. Passengers is a completely absurd melodrama, with big set pieces, lots of action, and tons of cool visual effects. It's much more interesting than any Marvel movie I saw this year, for instance, and much of that – to give this Oscar nomination its proper due – is to the credit of Guy Hendrix Dyas. The problem with Passengers is that it is completely, totally untethered from reality. Nothing that happens in the film is remotely related to anything that might happen in real life. No one in the film makes any decisions even vaguely connected to decisions a real human might make. It's a total fantasy – a kind of perverse Sleeping Beauty in which Aurora actually wants to sleep for another 90 years but is instead awakened by a prince she doesn't want but then falls in love with him anyway. (The character's name, incidentally, is actually Aurora, in case you thought the screenwriter was penning realistic science fiction.) But honestly, as insane and unrealistic as that all is, I wasn't really expecting reality anyway, and the movie drew me in – like any good melodrama should. There were cool effects, the two stars are fun and sexy (and this comes from someone who thinks Jennifer Lawrence is a mostly bad actress), and I rather enjoyed myself. Also, Passengers honestly deserved both of these nominations. It is hard to begrudge this team its recognition. In regard to Thomas Newman, of course, he is a great composer but he will (again) not be going home with an Oscar. This is his thirteenth nomination in this category and fourteenth overall. He will win eventually, but it's gotta be frustrating the hell out of him at this point.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #54 out of 87

Rogue One

2 Nominations

• Visual Effects
• Sound Mixing

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Alan Tudyk, Forest Whitaker, Riz Ahmed, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, Genevieve O'Reilly, Guy Henry, Mads Mikkelsen, Jimmy Smits

I really liked this. It was exciting and fun... and just dark enough that I didn't get bored by the sort of standard Disney Star Wars cheese that usually accompanies one of these movies. The ending (when Lord Vader arrives) is a surprise of pure pleasure, certainly, and this is the highlight of the film, but the journey itself is also quite enjoyable, and I love Diego Luna (he doesn't get enough press these days; I do wonder why his friend Gael García Bernal got so much more popular than he did) and especially Riz Ahmed, who gives such a touching performance as the pilot. Also, we should note just how cool it is that Disney made this sort of one-off Star Wars movie. It would be interesting to get to watch more films taking place in the Star Wars universe that are only slightly related to the central storyline arc, preferably by different directors experimenting with different things. I have high hopes. We should also have high hopes for Rogue One to win an Oscar: the first for a Star Wars movie since Jedi's single win (also for Visual Effects) in 1984.
Will Win: Visual Effects

Could Win: Sound Mixing

My Rating: #22 out of 87

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

Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 1 of 12

Every year in the weeks leading up the Academy Awards ceremony, I post my thoughts on all of the nominees, although I exempt myself from the documentaries because I don't really like documentaries all that much. For me that means 50 films this year (2 more than last year). 2015 somehow seems even stranger than last year. Selma's director, actor, costume designer, and screenwriter were snubbed; Best Picture is newly up in the air; and two very deserving pictures (Grand Budapest Hotel and Whiplash managed to surprise with a ton of nominations). Because my favorite thing about all of this movie hubbub is the surprises, I am, as usual, loving Oscar season even though a great many of the big movies this year totally suck.

I say this every year, but most of the films in my top ten for the year were passed over (Under the Skin, Like Father Like Son, Fury, Force Majeure), but some scored a nomination or two (Ida, Two Days One Night) and three were nominated for Best Picture (Selma, Grand Budapest, Whiplash – that's one more than last year). In any case, I am excited for what is going to happen.

Oh, and if you're thinking why does he even care about this? I don't blame you. But I have an elaborate set of reasons for still loving the Oscars that I've explained here.

If the nominee has been nominated for Oscars previously, he or she will be listed next to his/her name in parentheses).

This year's nominees:

Birdman or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

9 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel)
• Actor: Michael Keaton
• Original Screenplay: Iñárritu & Armando Bo & Alexander Dinelares Jr. & Nicolás Giacobone
• Supporting Actor: Edward Norton (American History X, Primal Fear)
• Supporting Actress: Emma Stone
• Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Children of Men, The New World, Sleepy Hollow, A Little Princess)
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: Iñárritu

Cast: Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Norton, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, Stone, Amy Ryan, Lindsay Duncan

I liked Birdman, but I wasn't as in love with it as most of the people I know. The movie's central gimmick works really well, and it's a kind of stunning, virtuosic picture with some great performances (Andrea Riseborough's being the standout in my mind). Edward Norton gets lots of points for being willing to lampoon his own over-earnest image. Keaton is not great in the movie, as far as I am concerned, but he is right for the picture. It seems written for him and perfect for him. Much hullabaloo has been made about the score by Antonio Sánchez being disqualified by the Academy's music branch – it was determined that the movie relies too heavily on music from other sources (notably Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Adams). In any case, you might think it's a little odd that the Academy loved this weird movie as much as it did, but this is a movie about actors and acting, and the Academy loves movies about that.

Will Win: Actor, Cinematography

Could Win: Original Screenplay, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

My Rating: #29 out of 73

The Grand Budapest Hotel

9 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Wes Anderson
• Original Screenplay: Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom, The Royal Tenenbaums)
• Cinematography: Robert Yeoman
• Film Editing: Barney Pilling
• Original Score: Alexandre Desplat (The Imitation Game, Philomena, Argo, The King's Speech, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Queen)
• Production Design: Anna Pinnock (Into the Woods, Life of Pi, The Golden Compass, Gosford Park) & Adam Stockhausen (12 Years a Slave)
• Costume Design: Milena Canonero (Marie Antoinette, The Affair of the Necklace, Titus, Dick Tracy, Tucker: the Man and His Dream, Out of Africa, Chariots of Fire, Barry Lyndon)

Director: Anderson

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Jude Law, F. Murray Abraham, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Jeff Goldblum, Edward Norton

This is my favorite of the Best Picture nominees and, as with Birdman, I am surprised the Academy liked this movie as much as it did. First of all, it's funny, which usually means that a movie isn't going to be taken seriously. I saw this movie with a whole group of friends (including my friend Walter – he and I cemented our friendship while drinking viognier and talking about Wes Anderson five years ago). Also, and this is a huge deal, the exquisite production designs for Anderson's films have never before been acknowledged by the Academy. This is an enormous first and a very exciting one. I don't expect this movie to win the big statue, but I do expect it to do very well, including Anderson's first Oscar for writing.

Will Win: Original Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design

Could Win: Cinematography, Film Editing, Makeup
My Rating: #5 out of 73

The Imitation Game

8 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Morten Tyldum
• Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch
• Adapted Screenplay: Graham Moore
• Supporting Actress: Keira Knightley (Pride & Prejudice)
• Film Editing: William Goldenberg (Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Seabiscuit, The Insider)
• Original Score: Alexandre Desplat (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Philomena, Argo, The King's Speech, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Queen)
• Production Design: Maria Djurkovic & Tatiana Macdonald

Director: Tyldum

Cast: Cumberbatch, Knightley, Rory Kinnear, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong, Charles Dance, Matthew Beard, Allen Leach, John Northcote

Snoozefest. When you see this, I hope you're able to stay awake. This is not the film among the nominees that caused me the most ire, but it is way up there. In all honesty, too, I see why people loved it so much. It makes one feel very superior to people from the past. Oh, we're so much more evolved now and isn't it sad what they did to that poor genius over there in Britain, and didn't he just overcome? I can hardly bear it. This film's host of nominations are particularly upsetting because Tyldum's slot in the Director lineup really could've gone instead to AvaDuvernay for her work on Selma or, barring that, to someone else who made a superb film this year – Paweł Pawlikowski, say, or the Dardenne Brothers, or (more within the realm of possibility) Damien Chazelle. I have a feeling, though, that nomination morning was the high point for The Imitation Game, and the wind is now out of its sails completely; we saw this phenomenon last year with American Hustle.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #58 out of 73

Boyhood

6 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Richard Linklater
• Original Screenplay: Richard Linklater (Before Midnight, Before Sunset)
• Supporting Actor: Ethan Hawke (Training Day)
• Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette
• Film Editing: Sandra Adair

Director: Linklater

Cast: Ellar Coltrane, Arquette, Lorelei Linklater, Hawke, Marco Perella, Brad Hawkins, Tom McTigue

I was soft on this picture for several reasons. It is not without its charms, for sure, and it has been quite popular with critics, but I found the whole thing rather boring. This was an awesome idea – really an awesome idea – but its execution simply wasn't all that spectacular. Still, who doesn't feel good about Richard Linklater finally getting his due as both a screenwriter and a director. He has been making great, quirky, interesting films for two decades now, and this is as good a time as any to honor his contributions to all of our lives. Don't let its comparatively paltry six nominations fool you: this is going to win the big one as well as two other Oscars.

Will Win: Picture, Director, Supporting Actress

Could Win: Original Screenplay, Film Editing

My Rating: #43 out of 73

Inspiration, Overcoming, and Oscar Bait

Somewhere near the end of act two of Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, the evil Japanese man who runs the P.O.W. camp where U.S. Olympian slash soldier Louie Zamperini is imprisoned forces the other Allied soldiers in the camp to punch Louie in the face. All of them. Louie takes their punches like a champ, screaming at his fellows who don't want to slug him Just hit me!

Jolie's film is a little bit like Louie at this moment in the movie.

It isn't that there aren't problems with the movie. There are plenty of them. But, like its hero, Unbroken seems to me a sort of resilient little guy. It tries and tries, and it wants to be something amazing. And as much as you might want to punch it in the face, it's just going to get up and stand there staring at you in defiance.

Unbroken, for the record, is based on a book by Laura Hillenbrand, and if you didn't know this before you started the movie, you will once you start watching. Anything that could happen to Louie Zamerpini happens to him. Hillebrand stuffs new events into Zamperni's life as though accretion will make him interesting, much like she did in the narrative she created that spawned Seabiscuit back in 2003. He is a first-generation immigrant; he takes control of his life as a small child by focusing on running; he runs in the Olympics; he is a bombardier in the Pacific theatre in the Second World War; his plane crashes not once but twice, and the second time the plane goes down in the Pacific and he survives. Then he survives in the middle of the ocean with only a tiger for company for like 45 days by literally catching sharks with his bare hands; he is finally rescued... by the Japanese; he is beaten; he is transferred to a POW camp in Tokyo where he is tormented by this crazy sadist named "the Bird", who has some kind of bizarre (erotic?) fascination with him; he appears on Japanese radio for some reason; he is then transferred to a new prison camp where he hauls coal; he lifts things above his head. (The poster, incidentally, really is iconic. I love it. Even if this movie never addresses anything approximating "redemption", whatever that is supposed to mean in this context.)

But all of that really happened to him, you might protest. Fine. But I am sure lots of other things happened to him, too. Like, I dunno, dancing with a girl for the first time, or learning to make gnocchi, or training to be a bombardier, or carrying his husband's blood around his neck in a vial. My point is that the film (of course it does) gets to choose what it shows us, and it chooses to show us all of the things that beggar belief. Even if they are all true, this compilation of events is not the same as a character study. Hillebrand and Jolie seem to believe that the fact that he made it through all of these events is a study of who the man is.

Garrett Hedlund: an unassuming bright spot in this movie

What it does to me, instead, is make him into a kind of superhuman figure, who represents resilience, unbrokenness (that old masculine preoccupation), triumph, even military victory, rather than being an actual human. We learn very little about Louie Zamperini himself, except that he is strong enough to take a punch.

There is plenty of sentiment here, too, and Unbroken is intended as a weeper: a deeply tearful story that makes us all hug our six children just a little tighter.

And now I imagine Louie getting back to his feet and looking at me with his clear, shallow eyes. See, in truth, this film is not really that much worse than the other big sentimental Oscar-bait movies of the year (The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game, Rosewater). In fact, I think it's a bit better than them. It's beautifully shot, and much less boring than those movies, and it doesn't have nearly as many cliché phrases as those three films, and if Unbroken focuses, like Theory, Imitation, and Rosewater, on a young man who is assailed by things he simply doesn't deserve and a world in which he feels lost and misunderstood, Unbroken at least does not ask us to pity our protagonist from some position of audience superiority; the other films do that in spades.

Why did the Academy like Theory of Everything and Imitation Game so much more than it liked Rosewater and Unbroken? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. It all feels so arbitrary to me. But it might be this feeling of superiority that we are allowed as we look at Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking in this year's movies about their lives. Imitation Game and Theory of Everything are completely invested in the idea that their protagonists "really" want to be "just like us"; they're designed to make us feel better about ourselves. Unbroken wants us to try to be better, to work harder, to lift that motherfucking piece of wood over our heads. It's a ridiculous film, but in this way, at least, it asks so much more of its audience than its fellow Oscar-bait films this year. Somehow I bet that it will eventually make more money than those other two movies, too. Because when you punch Louie Zamperini, he just gets back up.

The Imitation Game - A Beautiful Mind Lite

Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game is a real crowd-pleaser. It recently won the audience award at the Toronto Film festival, and both shows here at Dartmouth sold out quickly and easily – I know probably a dozen people who tried to get tickets and couldn't. I had to buy mine two weeks in advance in order to make sure I got one. The line was literally out the door. As I say, it's an intense crowd-pleaser, and the audience I was with just loved it; laughing at all the jokes; gasping at all the right moments; pretending to be surprised when something predictable happened; and clucking in a knowing and self-congratulatory way when the final title cards came up to tell us what happened after the events of the movie were over.

Ms. Knightley

But The Imitation Game is cheap, cynical Oscar bait through and through. It has a beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, a charming supporting performance by Keira Knightley, and a tic-filled teary-eyed central performance by everyone's favorite problem-solver Benedict Cumberbatch, but this is a movie that repeats to us a series of things that we already know so that we can feel good about knowing them. And the clichés! The one of these that stands out the most is the phrase It's the one no one imagines can do anything who can do the thing no one imagines or something like that. It is repeated no less than three times throughout the film, so often that I'm surprised the Weinstein Company isn't using the phrase in its marketing.

The film follows famed Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing, and it alternates between three time periods – the early 1940s, the early 1950s (after the war), and the 1920s when Turing is a young man. This is yet another film that intends to explain a character's interesting or seemingly inexplicable behavior through recourse to a past that is unfolded to the audience slowly. In Turing's case, he was in love as a very young man and this boyhood love somehow – well, the film doesn't really say, but it had a profound effect on him, and if The Imitation Game is not really clear about any concrete effects this young man had on Turing, the film makes us think that it has unlocked something deep about Turing and his (allegedly) mysterious life.

The sequences with Turing's fellow code-breakers are fun. And every scene with Keira Knightley is delightful, but the rest of the film is just one more narrative about a single-minded genius whom no one believed but who did his thing anyway, dammit, and turned out to be right, suckas. The film is ostensibly also about the persecution of homosexuality in the 1940s and '50s, but this is more an afterthought for the film than it is anything else. We never see Turing really as a homosexual. That is, he doesn't actually have sex with anyone in the film. He keeps saying he's a homosexual, and he's told that he needs to keep that a secret and all of that, but... legally, one isn't really a homosexual if one never has sex with anyone. I mean, how would anyone go about trying to prove it? The film's version of what a homosexual is is a person who knows a secret thing about himself – not a person who, you know, has sex with other men or even fantasizes about them.

And The Imitation Game goes further: everyone keeps secrets during the war. There are spies for the Soviets and secrets kept from the military and encoded messages from the Nazis. Being gay is just one more secret in a whole series of them – a comparison the film makes explicitly in a scene late in the film. In other words, the film doesn't explore the life of Alan Turing at all. Instead it explores what might have happened if a homosexual worked for MI6 during the Second World War. Everything in this film is approached generically.

Oh, but don't listen to me. I'm just a curmudgeon. The film comes out in late November, and most everyone will probably like it. Expect Oscar nominations for the writer, the composer, and the two main actors. That seems about right. It's a crowd-pleaser. It's about World War II. And it feels very important.