Oscar Nominations 2018: Part 4 of 12

Back to Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3.

My Best of 2017.

Baby Driver

3 Nominations

• Film Editing: Jonathan Amos & Paul Machliss
• Sound Mixing
• Sound Editing

Director: Edgar Wright

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Kevin Spacey, Jon Hamm, Jaime Foxx, Eiza González, CJ Jones, Jon Bernthal

This is the year's best musical – I think we can all agree on that – and it works very well and deserves all three of its nominations. Maybe it will even win one or two of them? The Academy has been much better about these categories lately, giving a very deserved film editing Oscar to Tom Cross for Whiplash just three years ago. The year after that the Oscar went to Mad Max: Fury Road, and last year it went, not to Moonlight or La La Land but to Hacksaw Ridge. So who knows. Maybe Baby Driver will win an Oscar. Somehow I don't think so, though. I don't think the movie will play well to most Academy voters (it's so young and hip and smug), and it also has the currently-anathema Kevin Spacey in a very large role.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

My Rating: #30 out of 79

The Post

2 Nominations

• Picture
• Actress: Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins, 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)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Bruce Greenwood, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford, Sarah Paulson, Matthew Rhys, Alison Brie, Carrie Coon, Jesse Plemons, Michael Stuhlbarg, David Cross

Sigh. Meryl Streep again. The Academy does this every year. This year, however, she deserves her nomination, even if she didn't deserve the last three. There is plenty to say about The Post, too. It's the Best Picture nominee with the least number of nominations, which means it was passed over in the Screenplay category, editing, other acting slots, and direction. I liked The Post a lot, but I think this is still the right decision. The film feels slightly unfinished, as though it was rushed into production and rushed (ahem) in post. It's a Spielberg picture, too, so it is mostly interested in feelings and not really invested in interrogating the material problems of the press's relationship with the U.S. government or the press's relationship to the public. Instead, Spielberg zooms in on his characters' emotional journeys, giving short shrift to intellectual exploration of any kind. And then he tacks on (as usual) an extra ending. The film can't just end once; it has to end a second time with an on-the-nose Watergate reference that anyone could see a mile away. Since this film has only two nominations, Best Picture and Best Actress, this is a good place to talk about something I noticed about this year's Best Picture nominees. Normally, commentators (correctly) note that Best Picture is generally linked very closely with Best Actor. But this year, the film's are split evenly: four films (Three Billboards, Lady Bird, Shape of Water, The Post) are nominated for both Best Picture and Best Actress, and four films (Phantom Thread, Get Out, Call Me by Your Name, Darkest Hour) are nominated for both Best Picture and Best Actor. No film shares a Best Actor and a Best Actress nominee this year. I am not sure this is a trend or anything, but I think it is worth noting.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #20 out of 79

Beauty and the Beast

2 Nominations

• Production Design: Sarah Greenwood (Darkest Hour, Anna Karenina, Sherlock Holmes, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) & Katie Spencer (Darkest Hour, Anna Karenina, Sherlock Holmes, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice)
  
• Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran (Darkest Hour, Mr. Turner, Anna Karenina, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice)

Director: Bill Condon

Cast: Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Ewan MacGregor, Ian McKellen, Emma Thompson, Audra McDonald, Stanley Tucci, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Nathan Mack, Hattie Morahan

I hated at least six movies this year, and we could add to that another ten or eleven that I didn't like very much. But no movie this year was as useless as this Bill Condon mess, which is easily the year's worst musical while also being a complete waste of time. In the first place, this movie is simply a rehash of a film that is, if 25 years old, very very popular and widely remembered. In the second place, Condon brings absolutely nothing new to this remake. It is, to put it quite simply the same movie, with just a few things that are different – or rather they're out of place. I remember the original film so well, that anything that doesn't copy the original feels wrong, as though I am watching a nicely done but slightly off community theatre production of a play whose every word I've had memorized for twenty years. In the third place, they've treated Emma Watson's voice, which makes her singing sound strange and artificial. (What is the point of doing a live action movie if you're not going to let your actors sing?) In the fourth place, is this film even live action? Just like last year's Jungle Book, there's so much CGI in Beauty and the Beast that I can't imagine why anyone is bothering with this at all. (The number "Be Our Guest" is animated in its entirety, as far as I can tell.) The questions abound. Why is Audra McDonald using an Italian accent? Why is Lumiere's lover some kind of bird creature? Why is Emma Watson so bad in this? Why isn't Ewan McGregor Jerry Orbach? Why isn't Emma Thompson Angela Lansbury? (Thank goodness Céline Dion is still Céline Dion.) Poor Luke Evans, who I really really want to be in a good movie sometime soon, does a very good job trying to keep this movie afloat, but Beauty and the Beast sinks all the same. What a cynical, colossal waste of time!

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Production Design

My Rating: #79 out of 79

Victoria and Abdul

2 Nominations

• Costume Design: Consolata Boyle (Florence Foster Jenkins, The Queen)
  
• Makeup & Hairstyling

Director: Stephen Frears

Cast: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal, Eddie Izzard, Tim Piggot-Smith, Michael Gambon, Adeel Akhtar, Paul Higgins, Olivia Williams, Fenella Woolgar, Julian Badham, Robin Soans, Simon Callow, Ruth McCabe

The only thing I want to say about these two nominations is to brag about having successfully pregamed this movie. I don't think it can win either of these two Oscars and I don't think it should. I didn't think much of Victoria and Abdul, and I can't really figure out who likes things like this. I found the whole thing to be a kind of bizarre love letter to the British colonialism of India. But good for Consolata Boyle. I am glad she has gotten her third nomination, in any case.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A
My Rating: #68 out of 79

Victoria and Abdul

Yes, apparently people make movies like this. But I'm not really sure why. I know everyone needs movies; they can't all be made just for me to enjoy. But who is a movie like this for? In the first place, Victoria and Abdul is just a retread of Mrs Brown. That movie also starred Judi Dench. So, we've already had our let's-humanize-Queen-Victoria moment. In fact, The Young Victoria (also a ridiculous film) tried this as well. Why do we need to have another one of these?

Worse yet, this let's-humanize-Queen-Victoria movie has this entirely absurd colonialist apology as its basis. The whole point of Victoria and Abdul is to show us how much this Muslim Indian man loved Queen Victoria and was loyal to her, even after she died.

What is the point of this? So this man was loyal to the woman who was in charge of the imperial power that colonized his country and enslaved his people. This is a good thing? We are supposed to be moved / pleased / charmed that this man loved Queen Victoria and that they had some sort of friendship?

This movie would still be bad, of course, even if it hated colonialism, but I am not sure I understand why this movie loves colonialism. I just don't get it.

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

The Program

This movie, with its terrible title – The Program – has a very good central performance by Ben Foster, who I love.

But as it turns out this is just a rather conventional film about a terrible person. The Program is about disgraced Tour de France winner ... actually I've forgotten his name at the moment and I refuse to look it up. You'll remember him, though. He's the U.S. American who did performance-enhancing drugs so that he could win the Tour de France seven consecutive times and then refused to admit he did anything wrong.

Well... the problem with The Program, even though Ben Foster is really great in the movie, is: we know he did it up front, we learn that he was doping all along and just hid it really really well, and he never ever has any remorse about it.

This is sort of hard to swallow, in the sense that there is no one for whom one can root in The Program. We know this criminal will get stripped of his titles. We know he will be caught. And we know he will never admit "defeat", i.e. the fact that he cheated. 

There are a couple of side plots designed to keep us emotionally interested, but none of them really works.

The Program does what it does well enough, but it can't help but be a kind of procedural in which the crime has always already been solved by the intrepid reporter.

Two Films about Florence Foster Jenkins

Remember when there were back-to-back movies about Yves Saint Laurent and it seemed rather strange that they could end up being so different from one another? Well, this year, there are back-to-back films about Florence Foster Jenkins, a much less famous person, and they are, once again, very very different from one another. Stephen Frears' Florence Foster Jenkins (released on August 12) explores a little section of time near the end of the life of an amateur singer and socialite, her relationship with her devoted husband St. Clair, and her desire to sing a concert of operatic music at Carnegie Hall, although she is, in fact, a terrible singer. Frears' film stars Meryl Streep and will dutifully get a great deal of Oscar buzz and probably a couple nominations (Streep and Consolata Boyle for the costumes). The other film is Xavier Giannoli's Marguerite, which fictionalizes the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, sets it in France, and changes the names but essentially explores an identical plotline.

If you've seen the trailer for Florence, then you know what Frears is going for. Florence is a glossy, silly cartoon of a film, that is interested primarily in a kind of emotional reversal, whereby we spend most of the film laughing at Lady Florence and then over time, as we come to think of her as a lost, desperate soul, we begin to pity her in many ways. This approach is a kind of standard movie-making approach to these kinds of characters, it seems to me, and Frears knows how to do something like this well. Big movie studios also have the tendency to treat this period of time in frivolous ways – one might think immediately of last year's execrable Trumbo and its version of the 1950s as a kind of cartoon (Saving Mr. Banks and Hitchcock did this as well). In any case, the point is that Florence is, like the three movies I've just mentioned, more interested in the true story of this really interesting real person and what she did than in actually exploring who the person was, how she might have felt, why she might have made the choices she made, and what the impact of those choices might have been on the people to whom she was closest.

Florence fails as a film because, frankly, it isn't that much interested in Florence herself as a person. Florence looks at Florence as a freak, a curiosity whose story is fascinating because it is so outrageous but who isn't interesting as an artist. In many ways, although Florence is played by the great Meryl Streep, the film pays no attention to the woman's humanity. This is not only because the film's tone is absurd, but also because the plot itself follows Florence's husband, St. Clair Bayfield, and Florence's accompanist, Cosmé McMoon, more closely than it does Florence herself. In fact, we spend more time alone with the two of them than we do with Florence by herself. In other words we see Florence through other people's eyes most of the time, and much of the way we look at her is mocking.

Of course, it is hard not to mock. Florence Foster Jenkins was a terrible singer, and she gave an infamously terrible concert at Carnegie Hall. This is the stuff of legend. And no matter how one slices it, it is pretty hilarious to hear Meryl Streep screech through the Queen of the Night aria or an aria from Lakmé. But this is as deep as the film is content to go. And the film, in fact, has nothing to say about any of this. Just that it happened. Florence Foster Jenkins is a real missed opportunity, and it seemed to me like a retread of Frears' earlier Mrs Henderson Presents. I was bored.

* * *

Marguerite (which was released in the U.S. on March 11) is something else altogether. Xavier Giannoli transposes the WWII-era tale of FFJ to France between the two wars, setting the story in Paris in 1920 and 1921. Marguerite is a wealthy, eccentric socialite with a love of opera and a huge collection of costumes, recordings, scores, and props. She adores opera, performs concerts for a club that meets in her home, and seems to have no idea that her voice is awful.

The film begins when a young singer from the city, a young reporter from a Paris newspaper, and a young poet all arrive on the scene and manage to hear Marguerite perform. We see this first concert through their eyes, and we get to know the three young people, but as the film progresses, it is Marguerite whom we get to know. The other characters fall away. They are only a kind of narrative way into the story of the singer herself.

The story takes off after the reporter, Lucien Beaumont, writes a review of her work – never lying about her abilities but describing her singing in the generous terms that someone who is fond of the singer might use – calling her courageous and raw and natural and compelling. And she is compelling. When Marguerite sings, Giannoli doesn't simply ask us to cringe or laugh; he asks us to watch her, to try to see her, to understand what this is. I should say, too, that Marguerite is played exquisitely by Catherine Frot, who won a César award for her work. And in fact, the acting is excellent all around (my other favorite was Sylvain Dieuaide who plays Lucien).

On her way to the Dada Festival

Marguerite does some other interesting things, too, sort of merging the lives of Florence Foster Jenkins and Raymond Roussel. Once Marguerite becomes popular with the young artists in Paris, befriending them and beginning to hang out with them, she agrees to perform at a Dada salon (a truncated version of the "Dada Festival" from 26 May 1920), singing the Marsellaise while a film is projected onto her dress. Marguerite becomes a hit with these young people. She is a delightful person, and they enjoy spending time with her, and she is also interesting to them as a bad artist. The Dadas, of course, are interested in "bad" art, in pushing the boundaries of art, in asking us to find art in unexpected places, and their affection for Marguerite's skill-less singing and unbridled love of performing is genuine if tinged with class envy. (Incidentally, I should say that the young poet in these sequences is designed to look exactly like Tristan Tzara but is a kind of amalgam of Tzara and two other Dadas, Hugo Ball and André Breton.)

the brilliant Catherine Frot

What Marguerite does best is allow us in to Marguerite's life. Of course she is delusional. Of course her singing is laughable. Fine. But Marguerite, in its generosity toward this character, sees further. There is not only her bad singing and her silly artistic whims. Marguerite is not a comedy. It is, instead, a real exploration of the life of a frustrated artist and the ways she is exploited and derided in various ways. Much of Giannoli's film is outrageous, certainly – it was an insane time to be a member of the avant-garde in Paris – and so there are a lot of laughs to be had, and it is very funny at times, but Marguerite never stops being about beauty and art and the deep desire each of us has to be loved.

Paradoxically, Marguerite, the 2016 film that completely fictionalizes the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, is a deeper, more fascinating exploration of that artist's life than the film entitled Florence Foster Jenkins.

Oscar Nominees 2014: Part 3 of 14

The Wolf of Wall Street

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Director: Martin Scorsese (Hugo, The Departed, The Aviator, Gangs of New York, GoodFellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull)
• Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio (What's Eating Gilbert Grape, The Aviator, Blood Diamond)
• Adapted Screenplay: Terence Winter
• Supporting Actor: Jonah Hill (Moneyball)

Director: Scorsese

Cast: DiCaprio, Hill, Margot Robbie, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Bernthal, Jon Favreau, Joanna Lumley, Jean Dujardin, P.J. Byrne, Kenneth Choi, Brian Sacca, Henry Zebrowski, Matthew McConaughey, Jake Hoffman, Shea Wigham

I am not sure we can call Wolf's performance on the morning of the nominations an enormous surprise given the Academy's apparent love for all things Scorsese; Scorsese's nomination, for one, was a sure thing. But the nominations of Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio were big surprises. DiCaprio in particular moved into a slot that was predicted to go to either Robert Redford for All Is Lost (more on that when we get to AIL) or Tom Hanks for Captain Phillips, which the Academy apparently loved but didn't love as much as we thought it would. I disliked this movie, and I had heard early on that Academy members were not responding politely to Wolf's unlikable protagonist, its decadence, its smugness, its filthy language, but five nominations is rather a lot, and this, I think, particularly means that Wolf is well liked by the acting branch (i.e. the branch with the most votes). I don't think this translates into any statues on Oscar Sunday, but it just might.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: Actor, Adapted Screenplay

My Rating: #67 out of 74

Her

5 Nominations

• Picture
• Original Screenplay: Spike Jonze
• Production Design: K.K. Barrett & Gene Serdena
• Original Score: William Butler & Owen Pallett
• Original Song: Spike Jonze & Karen O 

Director: Jonze

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson, Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, Olivia Wilde, Matt Letscher, Portia Doubleday, Laura Kai Chen.

This is so good. I didn't write a regular review about it because, well, it is hard to talk about things that are really, really good. Her is a beautiful and fascinating meditation (it might even be described as a kind of filmic experiment or improvisation) on the theme of our relationships with the sentient and semi-sentient operating systems in our lives. (If you tell me you don't have a relationship with your phone or with your computer you are lying.) But more importantly, Her is about all of our relationships: not just the ones we have with object or operating systems. Samantha, the consciousness that exists in Theodore Twombly's telephone, is just like any other beloved person, any other person with whom one might try to have a relationship. And the film is so smart about her, about how he behaves with her, about what he wants from her. Let me give just one example that I don't think is a spoiler: when I am in a relationship with someone, I have to struggle to remind myself that my beloved is not mine. He feels like mine, sometimes, and of course I occasionally have wanted to possess the men I have loved. And in Her, of course, Samantha is his. She is a conscious, living, being, but he paid for her. He owns her. She works for him. And so she stands in for the fantasy of the beloved whom we can possess, who can become truly and completely our very own and no one else's. What the film does with this is so smart and truthful, that I found myself constantly moved by what happens. It's gorgeous stuff. I should add, too, that Joaquin Phoenix should most definitely have gotten an Oscar nomination for this performance, and if it had been me in charge I would've nominated Amy Adams, as well. I am voting for the Original Screenplay to take home a statue, but it may be that the film has more of a shot in Original Score. Owen Pallett and William Butler's music is probably the most innovative and the most beautiful of the year.

Will Win: Original Screenplay

Could Win: Production Design, Original Score, Original Song

My Rating: #4 out of 75

Philomena

4 Nominations

• Picture
• Actress: Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal, Mrs Henderson Presents, Iris, Chocolat, Shakespeare in Love, Mrs. Brown) 
• Adapted Screenplay: Steve Coogan & Jeff Pope
• Original Score: Alexandre Desplat (Argo, The King's Speech, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Queen) 

Director: Stephen Frears

Cast: Judi Dench, Steve Coogan, Michelle Fairley, Anna Maxwell-Martin, Barbara Jefford, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Mare Winningham, Peter Hermann, Wunmi Mosaku

Philomena is an okay film. I am not sure why everyone is so into it. I guess because it's a true story. People like movies to be (as they say) based on a true story. I've never understood that very much, myself. Anyway, the Academy liked this picture a lot. Dench is brilliant in it and deserves her nomination, but all the other love I find sort of baffling. Best Picture? You'll see what I mean if you see it. Baffling. The score nomination is rather unfortunate too. It's a serviceable score but nowhere near Desplat's best efforts. (Desplat is incredibly prolific at the moment, so why not pick one of his truly excellent scores to nominate? As I say: baffling.) In any case, don't expect this to go home with any Oscars.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #53 out of 75

Angels and Old Irish Ladies

Stephen Frears' Philomena is a star vehicle. This is the only real approach to the movie that makes any sense, as far as I can tell. I say this mostly because there simply isn't much to this movie. An old woman's son was taken from her when he was very small and when she was just a teenager.

By evil nuns.

And now, fifty years later, she tries to find out what happened to him.

This is a small story, and one I rather thought would be more emotional affecting than I eventually found it to be. In its favor, Frears's film admits its "human-interest-story angle" up front. It's not as though the filmmakers are pretending they're not tugging at my heartstrings. But, then, the tale never quite takes off. It's a true story, and that's probably a large part of its trouble. The filmmakers needed to be true to the book on which the tale is based and so they felt bad about changing things and (as a consequence) didn't quite hit all the emotional points they might've hit.

There is a long stretch of film where her son's partner won't see her. Why? There could've been some quality emotional payoffs in there that are left untapped. The film avoids other interesting avenues of inquiry, as well: a young woman who doesn't want to know anything about her birth mother, a possible reunion between Philomena and other mothers whose babies were taken from them, the joys of adopted families. The film leaves any big ideas alone, really, and tells, instead, the story of this one character.

And Philomena is a character, make no mistake. She says things like "in England we have Indians instead of Mexicans and everybody loves curry." What? And she reads silly romance novels and relates the stories to her companions as though they're Flaubert. She sees the good in everyone and thinks everyone is out to help everyone else (she apparently did not go through TSA security upon arrival in the United States).

Ms. Dench
(definite Oscar nomination this year)

I had more difficulty with Philomena's moral point of view. The film can't decide whether to forgive people or be angry about what these evil nuns did and continue to do. We have two characters, an angry one and a forgiving one, but which one is right? The film wants it both ways. We should be angry and we should also forgive. But this point of view is not only toothless, it's ethically untenable. Philomena acts as though the point of view of these evil nuns is a relic of the past, as though there is only one frail, lonely person left in all of Christendom who thinks sex is evil, the pain of childbirth is a punishment for sin, or HIV is a punishment for going against the will of the god. But this isn't true at all! This point of view pervades our societies across the globe. So it is all fine and well for Philomena to forgive the evil nuns, but what about the mothers whose children the nuns are still hiding from them? And what about the Catholic church's continued ludicrousness toward female sexuality? And what about trying to fix the evil that they've done? Philomena comes down on the side of the institution here: forgive and forget and try to focus on Jesus. Yeah. No thanks.

Judi Dench is wonderful. As much of a cartoon as this character might have been, Dench plays Philomena straight at every moment, never judging her, never commenting on her. It is a beautiful performance, quiet and sad and very, very lovely. I didn't always like this character, but Dench is stunning.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

It's Dangerous Liaisons set in 1930s Shanghai!

What this means first of all is beautiful, expensive costumes (by Miggy Cheng). The production design, the dresses, the suits, a sumptuous scene at the Chinese opera: these are all exquisitely rendered.

The acting, too, is uniformly excellent, with a fun and humane lead performance by the Korean actor Jang Dong-gun (The Promise, The Coast Guard, Tae Guk Gi) and really superb performance by Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hero, 2046, House of Flying Daggers). I have not always loved her work (Memoirs of a Geisha is a particular stain on my memory), but here she is just so good! She plays the Michelle Pfeiffer role – the respectable woman who is seduced by the lothario and ends up falling for him. The director, Hur Jin-ho, makes this role much bigger than it is in the Stephen Frears version, and one can understand why with this beautiful performance at the film's center.

Zhang Ziyi is fascinating in this.

The camerawork and direction in this Dangerous Liaisions are much less impressive, and the CGI which recreates the 1930s city, skyline, and port is nowhere near as successful as the beautiful costumes and production design are. Hur Jin-ho, too, focuses on the morality of the Dangerous Liaisons tale, aligning the moral positions he dislikes with conspicuous wealth and the moral positions with which he identifies as either impoverished or showing great sympathy to the poor. I find this kind of easy moralizing Manichaeistic and therefore unimaginative (i.e. boring).

But, then, the truth is that I wind up disappointed at every version of Dangerous Liaisons I've ever seen. Because I want the story to end differently, but no one ever rewrites the thing the way I want to see it. This is my fault, of course, and not the fault of the original novel's author (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos). He was writing in the 18th century and all. I get that. But I detest the novel's moral point of view. I find it facile and (actually) a little idiotic, and it surprises me that no one has thought to revise the novel's ending completely when adapting it for the screen.

The story (if you haven't seen Cruel Intentions) is that two experienced cynics make a bet that involves ruining a respectable lady as well as thwarting the love-plans of two young people (who are basically pawns in the game, though they have no idea). At the end, the male protagonist is killed by the female protagonist, and then she (usually) weeps or is in some way shown to be sad about what she has done. In some versions (Cruel Intentions and the 1988 Liaisons), the female protagonist also gets some kind of comeuppance.

Jang Dong-gun wears a suit like this in every scene. And wears it well.

Why must the protagonist die? I don't mind so much that he falls in love, that he abandons his principles, that he loses the bet. But when he decides at the end that he will destroy his rival, he isn't even given a chance to do that. She is so much more powerful than he and always was, and he was always just her tool. But why hasn't anyone any pity for him?

We're supposed to have pity for the two young people (who are both outrageously stupid in every version I've ever seen); we're supposed to want them to be together even though they both do things just as "bad" as the protagonists. Why should we pity them and not the protagonists? The answer, I think, is because the young people are stupid. Because they don't know any better, because they are immature, because they act out of love and hurt instead of out of cynicism and calculation.

But I say that that is ridiculous. I have pity on the cynics, too. And even more, I admire the bet itself and the skill with which it is accomplished. I envision a version of Les Liaisons where the protagonists get what they want. Where they form a union (tenuous, perhaps, but isn't that interesting too?) or have a brief affair and then grow bored of one another. Or even where they agree to go their separate ways. I'd be equally happy with, say, a version where the male protagonist actually gets to live with his respectable girlfriend and make some kind of life without being killed. Something. Anything. I've been watching versions of this story for years and they always end the same.

Have pity, I say, on the villains.

Oscar Nominees 2013: Part 11 of 13

Hitchcock

1 Nomination

• Hair & Makeup

Director: Sacha Gervasi

Cast: Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, Danny Huston, Scarlett Johannson, Toni Collette, Jessica Biel, James D'Arcy

Apparently no one in the Academy liked this picture, because although Mirren looked like a shoo-in for a Best Actress nomination, she was beat out by five actresses, none of whom is as famous as she. Mirren already has an Oscar, of course (the year The Queen came out no one talked about anyone else), so the other five needed their nominations much more than she, and I can't feel too sorry for her, especially since her role really isn't that interesting here. Truth be told, the acting really isn't the showcase in Hitchcock, and Anthony Hopkins (despite being an Oscar-winner himself) was apparently on no one's radar as a Best Actor candidate. Now, I liked this movie. I thought it was charming and quite funny in a totally unrealistic, whimsical sort of way that the film cultivated. But I thought the prosthetics used to make Hopkins look like Hitchcock were decidedly unsuccessful and did nothing but look like prosethetics. I didn't believe them for one second, and indeed found Hopkins' look so distracting that I couldn't take even his serious scenes seriously. And though the Academy has often nominated the people-in-fat-suits look for Best Makeup (Norbit, Click, The Nutty Professor), those films rarely have gone on to win the Oscar. Don't expect Sacha Gervasi's film to take home a little gold man either.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #38 out of 65

Chasing Ice

1 Nomination

• Original Song: J. Ralph

Director: Jeff Orlowski

Cast: James Balog, Svavar Jonatansson, Adam LeWinter, Louie Psihoyos, Kitty Boone, Orlowski

This is one of the only nominees this year that I haven't seen. I guess I'll see it eventually, but Chasing Ice has not been released anywhere near where I live. If you haven't heard the nominated song, you should click here to hear it. It's a song about – well, actually, I am not quite sure what it's about (maybe growing old before one ought to?) – anyway its melody is quite beautiful. It is also sung by Scarlett Johansson, who goes quite flat on the low notes, but whose voice is lovely when it is in range.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not Ranked - Documentary

Ted

1 Nomination

• Song: Seth MacFarlane & Walter Murphy

Director: MacFarlane

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Seth MacFarlane, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel McHale, Patrick Warburton, Patrick Stewart, Jessica Barth

I really disliked this movie, but I should perhaps start by saying that I love Mark Wahlberg. I love Mark Wahlberg so much that I think his movies are worth seeing just because he is in them even when they are terrible movies. Still, Ted made me pretty irritated. The Oscar-nominated song in the movie, which plays over the opening credits, is charming enough, I suppose, if unmemorable, but I really want to just take this moment to voice my complete bafflement over the exclusion of John Legend's awesome "Who Did That to You?" from the Best Original Song category. Seriously, that song is so good and it comes at a crucial turning point in Django Unchained that is instantly memorable. My companions and I all left the theatre talking about that song. With Ted I left the theatre talking about Giovanni Ribisi.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #56 out of 65

Pfeiffer Plays Courtesan

Stephen Frears' Chéri is an uneven romance set in Paris during the Belle Époque. The movie stars Michelle Pfeiffer as the courtesan Léa, Rupert Friend as her lover Fred (whose nickname Chéri provides the film with its title), as well as Kathy Bates and Harriet Walter. The film is based on two books by French novelist Colette.

I'll get right to it. The film doesn't work from the get-go and then continues unevenly for most of its remaining running time. I am calling Chéri uneven because it constantly aspires to be a better film than it is, and those flashes of hope appear every once in a while, making believe that underneath this film a really good movie was just waiting to come out. The writing is occasionally very clever, but more often than not it feels stilted and even awkward.

The acting doesn't always work either. Rupert Friend is very pretty, and that is his main job in the film (looking pretty is the character's primary vocation, as well), but his concept of the character is dour and moody, which left me constantly wishing he would crack a smile or give a wink every once in a while. The trouble here is that the audience needed to fall in love with Chéri, but instead we just wonder what he's thinking about that makes him so unhappy. We worry for him instead of adoring him. I wish Rupert Friend had taken a slightly more light-hearted approach. I understand that having everything that one wants in the world can be a little depressing, but it is certainly enjoyable on occasion, and, after all, a young man in love ought to at the very least get a modicum of pleasure out of the object of his affection.

The production design is kind of a mess, too. The costumes are beautiful, but the film is in the lower-budget range and, unfortunately, looks it. There are only about four exterior sequences and Paris looks very empty. Perhaps it seems distasteful to gripe about this, but much of the pleasure of a period piece, I think, is derived from viewing a series of ridiculously gorgeous costumes and eye-popping set pieces. Chéri's producers cannot really deliver on this, and the film suffers as a consequence.

Okay, I am saying a lot of bad things and I want to move on to the reason why this film—despite these problems—is going to be so high on my 2009 list.

Chéri's ending is superb. It's an awesome, bold, fantastic ending for this film. The end of the movie is so good that the more I think about Chéri the more I like it. I can't get the film's last minutes out of my head. I am not going to spoil it, but the finale somehow makes everything that led up to it worthwhile and sensible. An example of this is the voiceover narration that takes over at a couple of points in the movie. I found this slightly irksome during the picture itself, but the masterful ending needs the narration to work as well as it does, and so it justifies its use earlier in the picture.

Anyway, Chéri, to sum up, doesn't really work. And then it works. Really well.

The Nominees: Part I of VIII

I did this last year and I like how it turned out, so I'm going to do it again. There are more films this year (40 as opposed to last year's 35) and I've seen fewer (I had seen 81 by this time last year and this year I've seen a mere 67). Also, you should note that I have 34 films I'd like to see before I close the books on 2006, and so this list and especially the rankings remain in flux--since I know I'm seeing Marie Antoinette tomorrow evening and will doubtless see The Black Dahlia this weekend, etc., etc. At any rate, this is the first of eight planned entries, so from the top:

DREAMGIRLS

8 Nominations:

Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson

Best Costume Design: Sharen Davis (Ray)

Best Art Direction: John Myhre (last year's winner: Memoirs of a Geisha), Nancy Haigh (who also has a trophy, for Bugsy)

Best Sound Mixing

Best Original Song: "Listen" sung by Beyoncé Knowles and written by Henry Kreiger, Scott Cutler and Anne Preven

Best Original Song: "Love You I Do" sung by Jennifer Hudson and written by Henry Kreiger and Siedah Garrett

Best Original Song: "Patience" sung by Eddie Murphy & Anika Noni Rose and written by Henry Kreiger and Willie Reale

Director: Bill Condon (Kinsey, Gods and Monsters)
Cast: Beyoncé Knowles, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Hudson, Eddie Murphy, Anika Noni Rose, Danny Glover, Keith Robinson

This movie was slated as the frontrunner for Best Picture by pundits and was thought to be the frontrunner for the big trophy on Oscar night but, alas, the film was not nearly as good as everyone predicted it would be and failed to get its predicted Best Picture nomination. Bill Condon also got snubbed as Best Director. The film failed for all sorts of reasons, but critics mostly agree that the film's stars, Beyoncé Knowles and Jamie Foxx, are the ones who really failed. Nevertheless, it looks pretty (much like last year's Memoirs of a Geisha) and got the most nominations of any film. Oscar was paying attention to this movie, but didn't particularly care for it.
Will Win: Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Sound Mixing
Might Also Win: Best Art Direction, Best Original Song
My Rating: #34 out of 67

BABEL

7 Nominations:

Best Picture

Best Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Best Supporting Actress: Rinko Kikuchi

Best Supporting Actress: Adriana Barraza

Best Original Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga

Best Original Score: Gustavo Santaloalla (last year's winner Brokeback Mountain)

Best Film Editing

Director: Iñárritu (21 Grams, Amores Perros)
Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Adriana Barraza, Rinko Kikuchi, Kôji Yakusho, Michael Peña, Clifton Collins Jr.

Everyone seems to think this film has prestige written all over it. It has some great movie-star-in-makeup-that-makes-me-look-ugly parts and is genuinely emotionally affecting if heavy-handed. The film has support across the board, though it may end up going home with nothing, like last year's Good Night, and Good Luck.
Will Win: N/A
Might Also Win: Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Film Editing, Best Origina; Score
My Rating: #24 out of 67

THE QUEEN

6 Nominations:

Best Picture

Best Director: Stephen Frears (The Grifters)

Best Actress: Helen Mirren (Gosford Park, The Madness of King George)

Best Original Screenplay: Peter Morgan

Best Costume Design: Consolata Boyle

Best Original Score: Alexandre Desplat

Director: Frears (Mrs Henderson Presents, Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity, Dangerous Liaisons, My Beautiful Laundrette)
Cast: Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, Helen McCrory, James Cromwell, Sylvia Syms, Alex Jennings

Michael Sheen was totally robbed for a nomination. I also really loved Helen McCrory in this film. This is easily my favorite of the Best Picture nominees. As far as Oscar goes, I think for them this film is "The Helen Mirren Show" and not much more, a lot like last year's Capote.
Will Win: Best Actress, Best Original Score
Might Also Win: Best Original Screenplay
My Rating: #9 out of 67

EL LABERINTO DEL FAUNO (PAN'S LABYRINTH)

6 Nominations:

Best Original Screenplay: Guillermo Del Toro

Best Foreign Language Film: Mexico (El Crimen del Padre Amaro, Amores Perros)

Best Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro

Best Art Direction: Eugenio Caballero, Pilar Revuelta

Best Original Score: Javier Navarrete

Best Makeup

Director: Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, The Devil's Backbone, Blade II, Mimic)
Cast: Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Ivana Baquero, Ariadna Gil, Álex Angulo, Doug Jones

This is a horror film! The fact that it's doing so well with the Academy is a bit of an anomaly. Fantasy films occasionally do well--okay not that often. But that a horror film did this well is really shocking. These nominations surprised a lot of people, me included, but the film is excellent and I feel like the Academy really did something right here.
Will Win: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Makeup
Might Also Win: Best Cinematography
My Rating: #16 out of 67

THE DEPARTED

5 Nominations:

Best Picture

Best Director: Martin Scorsese (The Aviator, Gangs of New York, GoodFellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Taxi Driver)

Best Supporting Actor: Mark Wahlberg

Best Adapted Screenplay: William Monahan

Best Film Editing

Director: Scorsese (Bringing Out the Dead, Kundun, Casino, The Age of Innocence, Cape Fear, The Color of Money, Raging Bull)
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, Anthony Anderson, Alec Baldwin

This movie is probably the most widely loved of all the candidates this year (as opposed to just generally supported). And the public loves this movie too. It made tons of money and boasts--bar none--the best acting ensemble of any film this year, in my opinion. Warner completely botched the marketing of this film, or you would see many more nominations than you do, including one for Best Actor, one for Cinematography, and an additional one for Best Supporting Actor. The performances in this movie are really outstanding. I expect this movie to take the big prize at the end of the night, but we all know that Best Picture is the most confusing it's been in forever, so who knows what will happen. let me just give one final shout out to the Academy for nominating the perennially underappreciated Mark Wahlberg. His was my favorite performance in the film and I was as excited as I've ever been on nomination morning to hear his name read. Now, if they could just get around to recognizing the brilliance that is Alec Baldwin...
Will Win: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing
Might Also Win: N/A
My Rating: #30 out of 67

More to come...

Soap Suds and Thatcherism

I rewatched Stephen Frears' brilliant My Beautiful Laundrette this evening for Dramaturgy. Just thought I'd share. The picture could be fleshed out a little, I think: the screenplay that is a required text for the class feels fuller and more developed, but it's a wonderful film nonetheless and a very insightful social commentary.
*
And I'm on page fourteen of my huge Wally Shawn paper. Hooray.

A Few Brief Thoughts on Things I've Seen This Week

Before I go off to the office to compose a lecture for Monday morning...

Running with Scissors is alright. Actually, it's not that good. I mean, I liked it okay, but it isn't nearly as shocking and outrageous as the book, and the film has trouble finding Augusten Burroughs' voice. The book is awkwardly written in the first place, and lacking in an overarching narrative, so I understand why it would be difficult to film the book, but the fun thing about Burroughs' book is how outlandish everything in it is. The ridiculous things that go on in that doctor's house are so funny and so horrifying at the same time. In the book this really comes through, but in the film it doesn't work. I think this is due to cinematography, frankly. The movie is too pretty, and the audience never really gets an idea of the squalor that exists in that doctor's house. I don't know. I was never shocked or surprised in the film, and although it's funny in parts, it's no great shakes. Annette Bening is wonderful as usual, and Alec Baldwin is great, but I think the movie is awkwardly done.

The Queen is a brilliant movie, though. I saw it yesterday and absolutely loved it. Helen Mirren is superb and surely getting an Oscar nomination (she'll probably take the statue home, too.) Michael Sheen as Tony Blair is also really great. This film (directed by Stephen Frears) is a subtle, fascinating portrait of the monarchy and of human nature. I highly recommend it.

I also saw FSU's production of As You Like It. Blech. I think I've decided, after discussion with Roomie, that I hate this play. I think it is probably the most difficult of Shakespeare's plays to direct and though I don't think it's very poorly written, I do think it's boring and over-written. The characters are fun, but the play is no good. The ridiculous deus ex machina at the end, the silly cross-dressing construct: I'm over it. And FSU's production... sheesh. Let me not say too much about it, but I actually think it was worse than Six Degrees of Separation.

And this morning I watched Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa. Mankiewicz followed A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve with this nonsense? Whatever. It was a strange star vehicle with an incoherent plot, like something Gene Tierney would have done, only the star was Ava Gardner. Humphrey Bogart is good (this is the same year he made Sabrina), but the film is too long and too bloated... and frankly, not very interesting.

Am I being unkind this morning? Did I say how much I loved The Queen?

Off to write a lecture...

Oscar Nominees: Part Two

CINDERELLA MAN

3 Nominations: Best Supporting Actor, Best Film Editing, Best Makeup
Russell Crowe's excellent performance was overlooked this year, and though everyone talked up this obvious Oscar-baiter as in the running for Best Picture, no one seemed to actually like the film. I did, but I understand everyone's ho-hum attitude. It's like Seabiscuit all over again. And we all regret that little mistake.
Will Win: Nothing
Could Win: Supporting Actor
My Rating: #33 out of 81 films

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE

3 Nominations: Best Sound Recording, Best Visual Effects, Best Makeup
It didn't feel like a Jesus-movie to me, but everyone else saw it as such, or maybe it was just all of that right-wing noise about it being a Jesus-movie. At any rate, Jesus usually doesn't fare well with the Academy. Plus, comparisons with The Lord of the Rings Trilogy were inevitable and the writing and the scale of the thing just don't compare.
Will Win: Makeup
Could Win: Visual Effects
My Rating: #28 out of 81 films

WAR OF THE WORLDS

3 Nominations: Best Sound Recording, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects
I liked this picture (at least more than I liked Munich and a good deal more than other Spielberg pictures as well. At its heart, though, it's a B-movie, chock full of aliens, crowd scenes and lasers.
Will Win: Visual Effects
Could Win: Sound Editing
My Rating: #48 out of 81 films

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

2 Nominations: Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay
Cronenberg is definitely not the Academy's cup of tea. But they still really liked this film. I mean, a screenplay nomination is a big deal, and that William Hurt performance was really short and short is not usually up the Academy's alley, either. Still, there are lots of snubs here. Director and Actress among them.
Will Win: Nothing
Could Win: Nothing
My Rating: #6 out of 81 films

HUSTLE & FLOW

2 Nominations: Best Actor, Best Original Song
I think everyone is surprised by this film's popularity, and then they see the film and they understand why. It's formulaic and Hollywood, but boasts some excellent performances and a couple of great songs. Most importantly: to the Academy it's not a gritty, hand-held kind of a thing. It's clean and pretty looking and, like I said, has a lot going for it.
Will Win: Song
Could Win: Nothing
My Rating: #41 out of 81 films

SYRIANA

2 Nominations:Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay
Ah the Clooney. He is everywhere. This movie is a rough go. It looks more intelligent than it is, but it's alarmingly political and really exciting, if defeatist. Seriously,I thought The Constant Gardener was more upbeat, if that gives you any idea how depressing this film is.
Will Win: Supporting Actor
Could Win: Nothing
My Rating: #23 out of 81 films

NORTH COUNTRY

2 Nominations: Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress
No one liked this film and these nominations are just an example of the group-think mentality that is pervasive during awards season (and other seasons as well). Don't get me wrong, they think for themselves some of the time, but the Oscars (and maybe this is something that needs its own blog entry) so often wind up being, like any election, a contest between people that the Academy is settling for--not too outlandish, often formulaic, a lot of "give us more of what we already know." The problem with this is that more deserving artists are often overlooked because their work pushes the boundaries.
Will Win: Nothing
Could Win: Nothing
My Rating: #69 out of 81 films

MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS

2 Nominations: Best Actress, Best Costume Design
This movie should've been the favorite of all of the old people in the Academy. It came out a little late to really make a splash, and that's purely the fault of its studio. To get the elderly on board you have to come out much earlier than December 25th. Anyway, it's a light, if overly long, little piece.
Will Win: Nothing
Could Win: Nothing
My Rating: #16 out of 81 films

TRANSAMERICA

2 Nominations: Best Actress, Best Original Song
This movie sucks. I hated it and I'm sorry that it got any nominations at all (apologies to Dolly Parton and her song.) Kevin Zegers is cute, but I hated the film and I hated the lead performance--hell, all the performances. This subject matter has been covered much better before and I was truly sorry to see this film get the attention it did.
Will Win: Nothing
Could Win: Song
My Rating: #78 out of 81 films

Progress, a Play, and Baked Goods

Today I read a play and baked some brownies and sent out my requests for official GRE scores for my ten schools. After this is all over I will have to blog about how much this is all costing me. The GRE scores are $15 per school (!). Tomorrow: requests for official transcripts and maybe even an application or two.

The play I read is called Our Lady of 21st Street by Stephen Adley Giurgis. It was okay. Good with language, but very light on character and plot. Hopefully the next is better. It's called Jesus Hopped the A Train. Good title, anyway.

I also watched a little of My Beautiful Laundrette. I must've seen it when I was too young to get a lot of different stuff. I had forgotten that Saeed Jaffrey was even in it. I don't know who I thought that was if not Saeed Jaffrey, but anyway... It's a good movie. I will have to sit down and watch the whole thing again someday soon.