Oscar 2012: A Personal Ballot

I’ve been writing all about who I think will take home Academy Awards this year. While some of my own choices overlap, let’s face it, the Academy doesn’t give a fat flying turd what I think should win. And quite frankly, writing letters to the likes of Gavin MacLeod, Jaclyn Smith and Erik Estrada (yes, they’re all Academy members!!) isn’t going to change that.

So, purely for the pleasure of entertaining and horrifying readers, here are my choices for the major categories. As usual, I’ve attached links to the original reviews for some of these films.

Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay: Midnight in Paris

I could watch this movie over and over and over again, and repeat. When I was an English major over a decade ago, I fantasized about traveling to a time period when I could rub shoulders and befriend the literary glitterati of a certain era. For me, that was the Bloomsbury Group in the 1930s in the UK. I used to daydream about watching Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey act like the early frontrunners of Will & Grace, warding off E.M. Forster’s advances, listening to Vita Sackville-West read out her letters and trying gently to tell Virginia Woolf to stop bumming everyone one before putting her on the train and returning to the café and gossiping about the similarly-themed Algonquin Table in New York. Woody Allen dreamed of Paris, and he made it come true. This was the screenplay I wished I had written all those years ago, and he did it better than I could ever write it. It may not be an earth-shattering achievement with political substance like Milk, or a genre masterpiece like Pan’s Labyrinth, or a game-changer like Inception, but Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris easily, comfortably sits amongst his masterpieces.

Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Art Direction: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Tomas Alfredson’s quiet spy game is unquestionably one of the greatest espionage films ever made. This was what that whole world was really like: men in stuffy suits sitting in soundproof war rooms, barely getting to see the sun let alone run around the world cracking Russian war codes and chasing rogue agents with guns and surviving ten-story falls. Spy work, while exciting, could also be exacting, and absolutely requires that only a mind well-suited to playing chess could or would survive in that environment. Gary Oldman gives a brilliantly muted performance as the immortal George Smiley, carrying on with an intelligence burning like an eternal flame behind his eyes, yet saying or giving away nothing. The labyrinthine script by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O’Connor requires your full attention, and sometimes you may be confused by what you hear, but it is assembled like a Monet: up close, you can’t make sense of it, but far away, it makes perfect sense. And Maria Djurkovic’s period art direction doesn’t look like a fancy movie set: it looks like the entire era had been lifted wholesale and put into Shepperton Studios. It’s an incredible film that I’ll be returning to repeatedly.

Best Director, Best Supporting Actress and Best Costume Design: The Artist

Consider this a pair of valentines for the husband-and-wife team of Michel Hazanavicius and Bérénice Bejo. Everyone has been going on about this lovely diamond of a film’s star Jean Dujardin, which I will not question, but Bejo is the find of the picture. She’s its heart and without her soulful presence, the whole thing might have been more sentimental than it had any right to be. Hazanavicius created this lovely homage without giving a damn about its commercial viability and made one of the most charming, all-out entertaining films in a long time. I could show this to my relatives who don’t speak a lick of English and they would understand everything and enjoy it. It helps that the period’s costume design by Mark Bridges never feels over-the-top, but appropriate to the period without overwhelming the rest of the visuals (and they’re stunning). I reward his gumption, dedication and execution, and I found few other performances by anyone, male or female, to be this breathtaking all year.

Best Actress: Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, both for Melancholia

This is a film about depression, and yet it’s one of the most searing masterpieces of this or any year. Dunst makes a ferocious comeback performance as the depressed bride Justine, who cannot find purpose or joy on her wedding day, and does and says things to spite people and just to feel, well, anything. Having seen friends gone through the same process, I can say that Dunst has it exactly right. It’s so powerful a work and a performance that those same friends of mine (no names mentioned) refuse to see this film no matter how well they are doing, because it may trigger something. And Gainsbourg, one of the most adventurous, toughest, courageous actors of our time, matches Dunst as the uptight sister who, in the face of inevitable cosmic peril, finds that all of her faculties, intelligence and talents fail her in a moment of extreme crisis. I reward them both with my Best Actress prize because one could not have existed without the other.

More categories and who I predict to win the Oscars, after the jump.

Cinematically Inclined: “Pina”

“Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.” – Pina Bausch

Not everyone communicates in the same way. I have the gift of gab, and therefore talk and write for a living. Others convey meaning using numbers. Still others do it through a combination of speech and body language, often in a different role that requires them to do so. And there are still others who can only express themselves wordlessly, through the art of dance.

The late German choreographer Philippina “Pina” Bausch is remembered by the members of her dance company as a woman who spoke little, but who observed and conveyed volumes while using a near-extreme economy of words. She was a great ballet director and founder of the Wuppertal Tanztheater, arguably the world’s most innovative contemporary dance company. The great German film director Wim Wenders admired her, and together they were going to make a film about her life’s work. Unfortunately, just days before filming started in the summer of 2009, tragedy struck when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died less than a week after her prognosis, mere days before filming began. Wenders and Wuppertal Tanztheater continued with the planned documentary in 2010, reconfiguring it not as a narrative documentary on her life, but as a free-flowing art film comprised of her most famous pieces, staged and re-imagined.

The gamble paid off. Wenders’s stunning, otherworldly Pina (which I previewed here) is amongst the finest documentaries made since the turn of the century. Rather than editing together documentary footage of interviews in a talking-heads format, the company instead staged Bausch’s greatest works for the cinema. We see her famous “Café Müller”, a treatise on the inability of people to communicate in arguably the most social setting, a café. There is also her raw treatment of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, attacked by the dancers on a stage covered in actual dirt and standing in as a feral episode of sexual awakening. Performers pair off or dance solo in glass houses, on the edge of cliffs, in a gymnasium, on the Berlin U-Bahn and even on a water-filled, gloriously rainy stage against a gigantic boulder the size of a small house. Each sequence is dazzling and constitutes a minor masterpiece in and of itself, made complete when viewed collectively.

The purpose is for each dancer to appear as if at a wake for their beloved teacher, each sharing small memories of how they will remember her. The sense of loyalty is strong, as the dancers range in age, body type and ethnicity, and communicate in brief voiceovers in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Slovenian and other languages. No matter how they verbalized, what they communicated through dance requires no translation. Maya Angelou put it best when she said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. And the dancers convey their feelings for Pina Bausch for us through dance, for that is how she made them feel and how they most freely express themselves. When caught speechless, all that is left is the dance.

A word must be said of the use of 3-D technology in the film. In a crass big-budget Hollywood blockbuster, the effects are used to show you giant robots or monsters laying waste to civilization, or to make your eyeballs singe with hurt while explosions cause seizures. It has been criticized as a cash grab and a vulgar stand-in for the absence of cinematic substance. The use of 3-D for what is essentially a formless dance narrative may seem incongruous at first, but is actually appropriate. The effect is that you see these pieces as if you were from the balcony of the Wuppertal dance theatre itself, watching a live performance. The use of 3-D doesn’t make itself conscious or obvious. It blends itself so subtly into the staging that it feels organic and doesn’t distract. In other words, it is the cleverest, subtlest, most artistically purposeful use of 3-D in the cinema. Perhaps there is hope for the technology after all.

Wenders’s sublime film is subtitled “a film for Pina Bausch”, not about her. That is exactly correct: this is a labour of love, made not for commercial gain, but for someone who has given purpose and breathed real life into people.  

Pina is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and is the first time I’ve ever said that the extra money to pay for 3-D was worth every penny, and more. It is one of the very best films released in 2011. I’ll gladly see it again, surcharge be damned, anytime.

Trailer Park: Wim Wenders’s “Pina”

Some film trailers are so mesmerizing that they inspire you to find out more about its subject matter. That happened for me recently with Wim Wenders’s dance documentary Pina.

Originally, this was supposed to be a film documentary made in collaboration with famed German contemporary dance pioneer, choreographer and dancer Philippina “Pina” Bausch. In mid-2009, as she was collaborating with Wenders on the project, she was diagnosed with cancer and shockingly died less than a week after being diagnosed. The film project went ahead without her, but the focus shifted from being a collaborative endeavour to a valediction on her legacy.

Bausch’s style of choreography was often matched with jarring body rhythms that seemed incongruous or not of modern dance, but her use of repetition to convey raw energy and feeling were what made her one of the leading lights of the dance world. In particular, her magnificent Rite of Spring is one of her trademark pieces, focusing the word “rite” to highlight the physical aspect of human sacrifice. With the dancers barefoot on a stage covered entirely in dirt, and the lead dancer acting as the sacrificial lamb, the effect is visceral and disturbing, yet beautiful:

Similarly, another of her trademark pieces if the Café Muller chairs sequence, consisting of dancers moving in a space populated by chairs, using them as metaphors for the obstacles and facilitators of life’s struggles. This was popularized in Pedro Almodovar’s film Talk to Her and is still considered part of the contemporary dance canon:

Wenders’s film, shot in 3-D, is a majestic tribute to Bauch’s work and shows us her aesthetics, how it influences people, and the beauty of movement. It is a celebration of the human body. And it’s just been short-listed as one of the finalists (the last step before the nominations are finalized) for Best Documentary Feature for next year’s Oscars. Pina, already a sensation at film festivals around the globe, will receive a North American limited release on December 23. In the meantime, you can view the magnificent trailer below:

Additionally, I recommend you also consider their influence on other art forms. The three-time world champion figure skaters and 2010 Olympic bronze medalists from Germany, Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy, have brought Bausch’s aesthetic to create some radical choreography in figure skating, as seen at a recent tournament. Note the jagged edges and deconstructed, broken-down body positions that are in contrast to more “classical”, balletic movements and clean lines favoured in the sport. It seems that even after her death, Bausch’s influence lives on.

You can find out more on Pina on the film’s website.