Oscar 2012: National Society of Film Critics Awards

Always with a reputation for being headstrong, the National Society of Film Critics (or the “NSFC”) isn’t really “national” in the sense that they represent a broad cross-section of American cineastes. Rather, the group has a heavy overlap with the New York Film Critics and thus their choices tend to match in their annual awards-giving. They are unapologetically tony and, if there was ever a group that was accused of being snobbish in its choices, this is it.

Best Film: Melancholia

One quirk this group has is that since they have access to every film ever released in the United States, their choices can become head-scratching and extremely obscure. Past winners of their acting prizes include Sylvie, Marilia Pera, Per Oscarsson, Emily Lloyd, Alison Steadman, Yolande Moreau and last year’s winner, Giovanna Mezzogiorno. They tend to favour character actors rather than going with the consensus. Having said that, they have also been innovative enough to recognize emerging talent such as Emily Watson, Chloe Sevigny, Amy Adams and Javier Bardem, each of which earned Oscar nominations on the strength of their victories with the NSFC.

Best Actor: Pitt

This year’s winners are:

Best Film: Melancholia
Best Director: Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life)
Best Actor: Brad Pitt (Moneyball)
Best Actress: Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia)
Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks (Drive)
Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life, Take Shelter, The Help)
Best Screenplay: A Separation
Best Foreign Film: A Separation
Best Cinematography: The Tree of Life

Best Supporting Actress: Chastain

The status quo appears to be the same with Brooks and Chastain, who are both on romp, nearly sweeping their categories in the run-up to Oscar nominations. The Tree of Life now seems guaranteed for nominations in cinematography and directing, although it might still be too divisive to earn a spot in Best Picture. Pitt gains further strength in the lead actor race, which should now put him head-to-head with good buddy George Clooney. And I had previously indicated that A Separation might earn a writing nomination in addition to foreign language film. Its screenplay victory here, combined with the same prize from the LA Film Critics, means it’s no fluke. So many critics and festival audiences mentioned that the film starts off as one thing but is an entirely different creature, and said that the twists and turns were what made the film so memorable. This win here, despite the lack of a Writers’ Guild of America nomination (its writer is not a member of the WGA), plants it firmly in that category and the sheer critical momentum might propel it to a surprise Best Picture nomination.

Oscar 2012: Washington, DC Area Film Critics Awards

In continuing coverage of this year’s Academy Awards and the pre-Oscar critics choice awards, here are the winners for the Washington DC Area Film Critics (WAFCA) prizes, announced today:

Best Film: The Artist
Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Best Actor: George Clooney, The Descendants
Best Actress: Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn
Best Supporting Actor: Albert Brooks, Drive
Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, The Help
Best Cast: Bridesmaids (!!)
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Descendants
Best Original Screenplay: 50/50
Best Foreign Film: The Skin I Live In
Best Documentary: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Best Animation: Rango
Best Cinematography: The Tree of Life
Best Production Design: Hugo
Best Music: The Artist

In reading the tea leaves, here are some observations:

Another winner! The Artist snags another Best Film prize

As with the prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review, the status quo remains for The Artist and Hugo to gear up for across-the-board nominations including Best Picture and Director for both. Clooney, The Descendants and Brooks are shoring up support for nominations in their respective categories, with Descendants also looking at Best Picture. Emmanuel Lubezki’s work on The Tree of Life, even if the film is divisive, looks more like the film to beat for Best Cinematography as the season wears on. 

There are four notable winners here who should get a leg up from this latest round of awards-giving. Click after the jump for a brief analysis.

Oscar 2012: New York Film Critics Circle Awards

It’s that time right after Thanksgiving and before Christmas when magazines and other media outlets start naming their “best of the year” selections. That also extends to film critics groups, and their opinions on which films and performances were the most worthy of attention all year. It is also, for less sophisticated or mainstream audiences not privy to artier fare, an opportunity to see what the tastemakers consider the greatest.

Award-winner prognostication is not an exact science, nor is it really an art. It’s more inexact alchemy concocted in a crystal ball and subject to the votes of a group of about 5,000 film industry professionals and the marketing and PR departments hired to influence their choices. In presidential election terms, consider this part of the annual Oscar race the equivalent of the New Hampshire primaries: they may not decide the final outcome, but they at least identify the major players and alert those not named that they have to get their name out there and step up the campaign.

I love awards shows and I love watching and handicapping the races, which produce inevitably and alternatively sensible and baffling choices (I’m still angry that Crash won Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain, but let’s debate that another time).

Today, the New York Film Critics Circle (the “NYFCC”) announced their winners. In this piece, I will attempt to analyze the winners and determine if they should clear off the final weekend of February so that they can be in L.A. and, more precisely, at the Kodak Theater.

Best Film: The Artist

Best Film and Best Director: The Artist by Michael Hazanavicius

This silent comedy opened to rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival and immediately picked up a distribution with The Weinstein Company for the United States. Famed for his impeccable choices in Oscar vehicles, Harvey Weinstein undoubtedly has great plans for making this crowd-pleaser one of the Best Picture nominees, if not the outright winner. Perhaps the big win here might forecast the biggest win of all. Considering that the film also received the most nominations at the Independent Spirit Awards, the film has become, as of this moment (always a key operating term in the next few months as momentum is continually gauged), the movie to beat. What’s strange, however, is that NYFCC did not choose its star, Cannes prize winner Jean Dujardin, for Best Actor, which went to …

Best Actor: Brad Pitt in Moneyball and The Tree of Life

There’s an old story circulating somewhere on the Internet (that’s why you should take it with a pinch of salt) that the NYFCC allegedly chose Cameron Diaz as Best Actress of 1998 for There’s Something About Mary just because the group wanted to invite Diaz to their awards banquet to pick up her prize. That story is an insult not only to the group, but also to Diaz’s expert comic skill (she is, in my opinion, still one of the most underrated actors to this day: Being John Malkovich, anyone?). Does this explain why Brad Pitt was chosen as Best Actor? Again: insulting to both the group and the actor, so let's not go there, and move on.

Never quite a critics’ darling, Pitt’s big win here with the toniest of film critics’ groups is a sign that he’s finally recognized by the pundits and not just audiences as a serious actor. It helps that his role in the crowd-pleasing Moneyball includes plenty of big speeches and wordplay in a Best Picture frontrunner. Actors like big showy speeches and he’s got that in spades in Moneyball, which means he’ll have a wealth of scenes to choose from as his Oscar clip. It also helps that by contrasting this with a dramatic but less verbal role in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, he demonstrates how easily he shifts between more commercial fare and artier offerings. When it comes to getting an Oscar nomination, unless he splits his own ballot (actors cannot be nominated against themselves in any one category and shared-film nominations are not allowed), he’ll likely get called for at least a nomination with Moneyball.

Best Actress: Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady

Best Actress: Streep

With her winning turn as Margaret Thatcher, Streep becomes the most-decorated female actor in NYFCC history. There has been much buzz about her potentially winning a third Oscar, but be reminded that such buzz has been brewing in ebbs and flows since Reagan was still president. Affecting a British accent for the first time since that era, this much-anticipated film will now open at year’s end with more fanfare and the tantalizing possibility of at least a nomination for its star. That being said, remember that Streep’s been tapped as a sure-fire winner in the past decade for Julie & Julia, Doubt, The Devil Wears Prada and Adaptation, not counting her other extraordinary performances in A Cry in the Dark, Ironweed, The Bridges of Madison County, etc. Streep will likely lock in another nomination – which would make this the seventeenth(!!) in her stellar career – but forecasting a win is something to seriously consider in about two months’ time.

Mama Said

Albert Brooks’s 1996 film Mother is the underrated modern classic comedy (for those of us who saw it) that should have become required Mother’s Day viewing for the rest of recorded time.

The film is no fawning love letter or sentimental feel-good fraud that skirts real, substantive issues about human relations like conventional comedies.

The premise is simple yet restrained wackiness, if such a thing exists. Brooks plays a frustrated writer who has just finalized his second divorce. Sensing that his marital issues may have stemmed from a poor relationship with his retired mother (the unsinkable Debbie Reynolds), the son decides to stage an “experiment” by moving back in with her so that they could understand what makes him tick. He goes so far as to move back into his old bedroom in his childhood home and arrange it exactly the way he left it, complete with posters of Barbarella and 2001: A Space Odyssey. His mother is game, although somewhat befuddled by his rationale. 

Within moments of his arrival, mother and son are already at odds with something as basic as eating. Mother offers him various meat dishes for dinner, even though he is a strict vegetarian. When she offers him lamb and he declines, having already turned down beef stew and pastas in meat sauce, she replies, “I didn’t know if it was the animal you were siding with or the whole thing”. She also has a penchant for freezing all food items including salad, a slab of cheese the size of a hat box that expired three years ago, and sherbet. She insists that there is no way the food could have spoiled, and that the discolored sherbet is perfectly edible due to freezer burn that she mistakenly calls but sincerely believes to be a layer of “protective ice”. There’s also a parallel plot involving the writer’s younger brother, who despite being the more accomplished of the two sons, feigns incredulity at his brother’s experiment to disguise some thinly veiled jealousy (paging Dr. Freud).