Great Scot: Tilda Swinton in Viktor & Rolf

“If I ever get a chance to meet Joyce DeWitt … I will thank her, for while she may have looked like a Liza Minnelli doll that was damaged in a fire, at least she didn’t look like everyone else.” – Tina Fey, Bossypants

What Fey was referring to was that when she was growing up in the 1970s, the standard of beauty was largely Nordic-influenced, and was best represented in pop culture by Farrah Fawcett. In the same vein, the standard of beauty has been widened and defined so broadly these days that it has room for the entire gender spectrum, including that great androgynous thespian beauty, Tilda Swinton.

Those who may think she looks “too weird”, or “too much like an alien”, or just define beauty by whether or not you would “tap that” should not be reading my column. Off you go, now, while I spend more time preaching to the converted.

They say that great art cannot come into being without the presence of a muse, a being who inspires one to creative apotheosis. The fashion designers Viktor & Rolf clearly understood this and took as inspiration for their fall 2003 / spring 2004 collection Swinton’s androgynous beauty. With her high cheekbones, shock of red hair, alabaster skin, regal composure, stature and rich voice, it was no surprise that they would consider her such a striking figure, a face that could launch a thousand outfits if not ships. They devoted the look of their fall/winter runway show to Swinton’s aesthetic, and made up all of the models to look like her. There is no greater flattery than imitation done out of admiration. At the very least, she didn’t – and still doesn’t – look like anyone else. You would never mistake her for more conventional notions of beauty embodied by one of the Kardashians or Sienna Miller. She is unmistakably Tilda Swinton, and that is her greatest gift to fashion.

Clearly, neither Viktor & Rolf nor I am in the minority on this. The lovely Heather and Jessica at Go Fug Yourself affectionately mock and admire her aesthetic, particularly her strange sartorial choices (they refer to her simply as “SWINTON” and every time she appears on a red carpet, they get Tweeted with simply her name in block capitals and a lot of exclamation marks as a shout of approval). At Lainey Gossip, the consensus is that Swinton could wear a garbage bag unmistakably designed just for her, and make it look interesting and fashionable, even if it’s not conventionally “pretty”. “Pretty” does not do Swinton justice, and to call her so would reduce her to ordinary levels of beauty when she is anything but. And there’s the remarkable blog called F-Yeah Tilda Swinton!, dedicated solely to the portraits she has done for magazine photo shoots, publicity shots, fashion spreads and other artistic endeavours. It is not wonder that Sally Potter chose her to star in Orlando, for only she in the world could convincingly portray an Elizabeth lord who transitions into a contemporary woman, relying on her body language and voice to make the change subtle but believable. Plus, she looks remarkable in all the impossibly elaborate attire on display.

I’ve attached the preview to Viktor & Rolf fashion show below, and am also including the link to a detailed article on the show with complete video here. If you can’t get enough of her, keep in mind that you can see her role in the challenging drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, for which she was not nominated for an Academy Award (boo), in limited release now and in wider release on February 3.

Oscar 2012: BAFTA Nominations

Think that the Oscar campaigning only occurs in L.A. and New York? There’s usually one trans-Atlantic trip required in the season and that’s to London for the annual British Academy of Film and Television, or BAFTA, Awards.

Long thought of as an afterthought to the more prestigious Oscars, the BAFTAs took on new life once they moved their awards ceremony to late February starting in 2001, and with the truncated Oscar schedule in 2004, they moved it up to a scant two weeks before the actual Oscar ceremony. The effect was felt immediately, as the BAFTAs became an important, if not always accurate, indicator of how the Academy might vote and may influence last-minute voters. Most interestingly, the BAFTAs correctly forecast in the last few years some surprise Oscar winners, including Marion Cotillard, Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett, and allowed them to pull away from the pack of other frontrunners. This is why the BAFTAs have, in the last decade, proven to be an influential, if not always reliable indicator of who wins the Academy Awards.

The BAFTAs tend to favour homegrown product. This is why films that did not receive much love from the Academy, such as Girl with a Pearl Earring and Cold Mountain, tend to fare better at these awards. Having said that, there is often a strong overlap between what the Academy eventually nominates and the BAFTAs.

You can access the full list of nominees on the BAFTA website and on the Hollywood Reporter’s list.  Here are some of the major nominees:

11 nominations including Best Film

Best Film: The Artist, The Descendants, Drive, The Help, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best British Film: My Week with Marilyn, Senna, Shame, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Best Director: Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), Nicholas Winding Refn (Drive), Martin Scorsese (Hugo), Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

Best Actor: George Clooney (The Descendants), Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Michael Fassbender (Shame), Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Brad Pitt (Moneyball)

Best Actress: Berenice Bejo (The Artist), Viola Davis (The Help), Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin), Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn)

Best Supporting Actor: Kenneth Branagh (My Week with Marilyn), Jim Broadbent (The Iron Lady), Jonah Hill (Moneyball), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (The Ides of March), Christopher Plummer (Beginners)

Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain (The Help), Judi Dench (My Week with Marilyn), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Carey Mulligan (Drive), Octavia Spencer (The Help)

Best Original Screenplay: The Artist, Bridesmaids, The Guard, The Iron Lady, Midnight in Paris

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Descendants, The Help, The Ides of March, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Brits are talking about Kevin

Overall, the nominations haven’t substantively changed the status quo, as the likes of The Artist (with a leading 12 nominations), The Descendants and Moneyball still put them front-and-center in the Oscar race. However, it did give certain British films an opportunity to earn more love than they might have at the Academy. Chief among these are three films starring Best Actress nominees that bagged multiple citations: My Week with Marilyn, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and The Iron Lady. None of these are in the conversation for the Best Picture Oscar, but their presence indicates that these projects are indeed strong female-centered vehicles. It should also be noted that the BAFTAs also tend to honour their own, and each major category often produces a left-field nominee who just happens to be British. This year, they include names that haven’t figured into this year’s Oscar race yet, such as Judi Dench, Lynne Ramsay, and Abi Morgan for her otherwise much-criticized script for The Iron Lady. Similar beneficiaries include Senna, The Guard and Coriolanus.

Oscar 2012: National Board of Review Awards

Traditionally always the first film critics’ group to charge out with the year-end prize-giving, the National Board of Review (“NBR”) was beaten to the punch this year by the New York Film Critics. That doesn’t mean that their awards are any less worthy of attention, they are just one of a series of groups that recognize the year’s best in cinema.

Generally, the NBR gives plenty more prizes in cinema that extend beyond Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects. As they are a juried award-giving body, they have the flexibility to honour films in a list format rather than the standard nominee-and-single-winner scheme, or even just a list of single winners per category. They name a list of the ten best films, and also produce lists for Best Documentary and Best Foreign Language Film, indicating an arguably less competitive and more egalitarian form of award-giving. Here are the winners of this year’s prizes, and a brief analysis of each.

Best Film and Best Director: Hugo and Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese’s crowd-pleasing new release was an unusual choice, partly because it was not violent (like his The Age of Innocence) and partly because it was a family-oriented picture. It opened to better-than-expected box office over Thanksgiving and was not widely considered major awards bait, but this big prize, combined with steady business and rapturous reviews, should help make the film a contender for Oscar.

Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Screenplay: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley and The Descendants

They love Clooney at this group: love him. This is his third prize from the NBR within the last five years, having also been named Best Actor for 2007’s Michael Clayton and 2009’s Up in the Air. This should get him notice and solidify his slot in the Oscars. Woodley’s victory should only put her in greater steady for Best Supporting Actress, and the script a shoo-in nominee if not outright winner. Curiously, these three prizes mimic three of the four categories Up in the Air won two years ago, with the exception of the Best Picture prize (although The Descendants was named one of the year’s ten best films).

Swinton

Best Actress: Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk about Kevin

Swinton has always been a critics’ darling, if not a major critics’ group champion. Her work as the mother who gave birth to a demon child was long considered the one to beat for Oscar and here she just upped her chances at landing a slot in the big race. She’s already won an Oscar, for Michael Clayton, and has an excellent chance at duking it out with the likes of Meryl Streep, Glenn Close and Charlize Theron in this year’s competitive Best Actress race.

Caveat: the NBR’s choice for Best Actress last year, Leslie Manville, was completely ignored in the Oscar race and didn’t even land a nomination. This was not helped with category confusion as to whether or not Manville’s role was considered a lead of supporting one. However, Swinton’s higher profile should keep her name in the competition.

Plummer, with Ewan McGregor

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer in Beginners

Plummer has, at age 81, only one previous Oscar nomination to date, for The Last Station in 2009. His role as the father who comes out of the closet at age 75 and lives a full gay life before he dies is a touching, subtle one, and considered by many to be a career capper. Not that he needed critic’s notices to stay in the conversation, but this will help him over the long season.