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.

Oscar 2012: Best Director

To start, there are a few simple rules for predicting the Best Director Oscar winner. In general, here they are:

1. The winning director has almost always won the Directors Guild of America (“DGA”) prize a few weeks before the Oscar ceremony.
2. The Best Director Oscar often goes hand-in-hand with a Best Picture win for the same film.
3. If the DGA and Best Picture Oscar don’t match, the Best Director often goes to the DGA winner anyway (cf. Born on the Fourth of July, Saving Private Ryan, Brokeback Mountain).

And now, as with all rules, there are a few exceptions. These aren’t hard-and-fast loopholes or rules, they just … happened when the envelops were opened and the winner announced.

1. The first instance of the DGA prize not matching up with Oscar was at the 1968 awards, when DGA winner Anthony Harvey lost for The Lion in Winter to Carol Reed for Oliver!
2. Further to exception #1, there have been a few instances when the match-up failed to materialize: 1995 (Mel Gibson over Ron Howard); 2000 (Steven Soderbergh over Ang Lee); 2002 (Roman Polanski over Rob Marshall).

In other words, all things being equal, the DGA winner is the single most powerful prognosticator of who may win the Best Picture Oscar. Last year, David Fincher looked absolutely unstoppable for the Oscar, until Tom Hooper scooped the DGA and went on to claim the Oscar, and The King’s Speech outdrew The Social Network for the top prize. In other words, the DGA is almost absolutely authoritative when it comes to predicting the Oscar, like a Supreme Court decision with little to no room for appeal. It also has a domino effect, as the prize also often dictates the Best Picture winner, and may have a trickle-down effect in the lesser categories, resulting in a Slumdog Millionaire-style sweep.

We already know that Michel Hazanivicius won the DGA for The Artist. This already gives away who I think will take home the Oscar. But in the event of an upset – such as the jaw-dropping victory Roman Polanski pulled off in 2002 for The Pianist over Chicago’s Rob Marshall – let’s consider how the other nominees stack up against him.

Michel Hazanivicius for The Artist

For him: DGA winner. Also just scooped up the BAFTA. He has been responsible for the entire picture, from writing the script to directing it, and even editing it long after production ended. Hazanivicius is nominated for three, count’em three, Oscars this year, for each of those efforts. It shows creative complete control from beginning to end, short of actually coming up with the funds to produce the picture. In terms of money, it helps that Hazanivicius made his film for a lean, mean $12 million and it’s already turned out a tidy profit.

Against him: In the event that the Academy sees fit to award him Best Original Screenplay instead, and he’s the shoo-in for Best Editing, they may elect to give the prize to someone else in an effort to spread the wealth. Plus, no one in Hollywood seems to be able to pronounce, let alone spell, his name correctly. (Think about the presenter who may flub it up at the podium.)

Alexander Payne for The Descendants

For him: Critical darling who made three back-to-back Oscar-recognized films, including 2004’s Adapted Screenplay winner Sideways, returns with a slice-of-life dramedy made on a shoestring budget, yet with a major star, and turns it into a critical and commercial success. Payne is recognized as being one of the medium’s best writer-directors, and actors clamor to be in his character-based films the way they do for Woody Allen.

Against him: He’s already won in the past, and there may be a perception that his greater strength might seem to be in screenwriting rather than in directing. The small character-based Descendants has the look and feel of an intimate drama, and up against period pieces and experimental, avant-garde competition, looks relatively small in comparison. He’ll have a better shot at Adapted Screenplay, where he’s one of the front-runners.

Martin Scorsese for Hugo

For him: Ah, Marty! He has the Golden Globe and National Board of Review prizes to back him up, and his film is up for a leading 11 nominations, more than for even purported front-runner The Artist. He’s an industry legend who lost for such landmark films as Goodfellas, Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, and he’s worked with just about everyone in Hollywood. One of the industry’s favourite sons, his victory for The Dpearted five years ago was greeted with one of the longest standing ovations in Oscar history and was a popular win.

Against him: He’s already had his Oscar payday, and Hugo was a $150 million money pit that couldn’t turn great reviews and critical prizes into long box office play. Hollywood doesn’t really like to honour films that don’t make money, or at the very least break even.

Woody Allen for Midnight in Paris

For him: Nominated for just about every single precursor award, he made his highest-grossing film ever on a relatively flimsy budget, and garnered some of the best reviews of his career along the way. A frequent nominee in this category (this is seventh attempt) he’s won just once, for 1977’s Annie Hall.

Against him: If Allen is true to form, he won’t even show up to collect his Oscar if he were to win (he’s only ever gone to the Oscars once, in a 9/11 tribute for the 2001 awards). The Academy likes to see winners gush, and even Scorsese turned up every single time he was nominated and faced his losses with good humour and on-camera. This is not to say that Allen’s a sore loser, it’s just to say that the Academy Awards just aren’t his thing, and maybe that perception might hurt him. Plus, he’s one of the front-runners for Best Original Screenplay and already has three career awards, indicating that there may be no need to honour him here.

Terrence Malick for The Tree of Life

For him: He swept through the critics’ prizes, winning more awards than just about anyone this year. He’s a previous nominee who hasn’t won yet, despite his reputation for being a true auteur and a major force in American filmmaking. The film is a searing, uncompromising vision signaling complete artistic freedom, with minimal studio interference, which a lot of directors will recognize and respect.

Against him: He’s painfully slow at releasing movies, at one point taking 20 years between films. His uncompromising vision is also a complete turn-off for a lot of people who flat-out despise his work. Malick doesn’t make crowd-pleasers and he is not a journeyman director who could happily switch between blockbusters and artistic offerings (cf. Martin Scorsese). He also didn’t make the DGA shortlist, indicating a lack of industry support. But if anyone’s going to pull off an upset, it just might be him.

The lowdown

Team France! Hazanavicius has this in the bag, but I’m going with a no-guts-no-glory call for Malick should Hazanavicius’s name not be the one called out on Oscar night.

The Oscar will go to: Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist.

Oscar 2012: Golden Globe and Critics Choice Winners

In continuing awards season coverage, let’s take the pulse of the Oscar race following the Critics Choice and Golden Globes Awards.

Mr. Popular: Clooney wins Globes and Critics' Choice Awards

The big winner of these two groups is the silent comedy that could, Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist. Sweeping four prizes including film and directing honours at Critics Choice, combined with three top awards including film and lead actor at the Globes, just elevated it to the very top of the heap, after it topped New York and Boston. And why wouldn’t it be? Critics love it, it made the rounds to rapturous applause at film festivals everywhere, and the industry is clearly enjoying its homage to the golden age of Hollywood. However, it’s also very French, it’s silent, and the film has made a rather puny $8 million in domestic box office receipts. In other words, the Academy might enjoy it enough to nominate it for a bunch of awards, but they might not consider it to have the weight of important subject matter. Plus, Best Picture winners tend to be out-and-out box office winners, but the likes of Crash and The Hurt Locker have proven otherwise. Perhaps The Artist will win out of sheer excellence, and it’s still too early to call it a done deal.

"Love, and a bit with a dog." - The Artist is named Best Film

Tonight was a chance for Hollywood to know who is top dog, and by George it was, er, George … Clooney, that is. Getting Best Actor citations at both Critics Choice and Globes for The Descendants has made him the candidate to beat for the Oscar, ahead of his close friend and likely fellow nominee Brad Pitt. Arriving at the Globe stage with a cane, Clooney clearly was lapping up the attention. He is the consummate leading man of the moment, with acting chops, the passion to take on humanitarian endeavours, and the energy to direct a well-received work like the multi-Globe nominated The Ides of March. Let’s not forget that although he has an Oscar, it was in Best Supporting Actor, and a star of his stature necessarily requires a lead acting Oscar for his mantelpiece. Unless Pitt draws even with him by winning the Screen Actors Guild Award in two weeks’ time, call Clooney to take home the Oscar.

Michelle Williams needed the Globe, in addition to her long string of smaller awards, including the Boston and Washington prizes and nominations for the Critics Choice and SAG, to make her presence greater felt, and she got it. It’s a bit contested as to whether or not My Week with Marilyn is a “comedy” per se, but the marketing team chose well to place her there, and her win officially cut off Charlize Theron’s and Kristen Wiig’s chances at getting into the final five for Oscar. It should be noted that every year, Harvey Weinstein champions a single Best Actress potential nominee and he has personally helped shape the campaign to get her the big win. This has proven successful for the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet in the past, and with Viola Davis and Meryl Streep still at the forefront of the race, he will undoubtedly put Williams front-and-centre in the campaign.

The Critics' Choice: Viola Davis for The Help

Speaking of Davis and Streep, both just made real and substantive cases for them to take home the Oscar, in terms of precursor groups’ wins. Davis won Critics Choice and did a double whammy by taking home the ensemble prize for The Help as well. She hasn’t won any of the other major prizes for her role, and almost everyone agrees that she is the very best thing in the whole film. The Critics Choice trophy put her neck-and-neck with Williams. Streep, with The Iron lady opening to respectable modest business in platform release and win her eighth(!!) Golden Globe, positioned herself further as the frontrunner by just a smidgen in the race for the Oscar. It’s not a slam-dunk yet, as she herself was out by a hair’s breadth two years ago and still lost for Julie and Julia, but she’s definitely one of the three co-favourites with Davis and Williams. And with her gracious speech at the Globes proving to be yet another charming performance, wherein she praised the talents of her fellow nominees, Academy voters should take note. In other words, the Best Actress race is a real race.

Oscar 2012: the Golden Globe Nominations

Until the guilds and the Critics Choice Awards wielded greater influence, the Golden Globes were considered the traditional bellwether of who would eventually be nominated for, and win, Academy Awards. Their choices today still make an impact and keep films and the associated talent in the conversation. If nothing else, they remain an excellent venue for Ricky Gervais to ridicule movie stars in their natural element and for stars to be legitimately inebriated on live television (hello Ryan Philippe in 2006, with Reese Witherspoon’s smile turning into a clenched grin as the evening wore on).

I won’t bore you by explaining how the status quo remains unchanged for The Artist, Hugo, Moneyball, The Descendants and The Help. Look for just about each of these films to receive at least one prize each when the winners are unveiled on January 15. Let’s instead focus on the films that got a boost today from their recognition.

Top of mind is George Clooney’s other effort, his The Ides of March. Everyone knows that the Hollywood Foreign Press, who determines the nominees and winners, absolutely loves Clooney the way the National Board of Review does. This year, they nominated him not just for his almost-assured Oscar nom for The Descendants, they honoured him as a Best Director and a Best Screenplay finalist. Ides was floundering in the race and its four high-profile nominations keep it in the mix. It’s not over for the critically acclaimed fall drama quite yet. In fact, the film’s more serious adult drama tone bears a lot of similarities in the run-up to Oscar for 2007’s Michael Clayton, which also starred Clooney. What Ides needs to be kept top of mind are nominations from the producers’, writers’ and directors’ guilds to make a serious play for Oscar.

Another double nominee and surprise beneficiary is Ryan Gosling, seemingly everywhere as a leading man this year. Both of his nods this morning are surprises: one for Ides, the other in the Musical / Comedy Actor race for Crazy Stupid Love. He received a Crix Choice nom the other day for Drive, which was considered the stronger of his two films, and which was shockingly shut out yesterday when the Screen Actors Guild Award nominations were announced. Unfortunately, despite all this recognition, Oscar does not honour a body of work and Gosling, a former nominee in 2006 for Half Nelson, might be kept out due not only to the fierce competition for Best Actor, but also by his body of work this year alone. Remember that last year he was cruelly left off the ballot while co-star Michelle Williams landed in the Best Actress race for their Blue Valentine.

Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard in
Midnight in Paris

The Hollywood Foreign Press loves Woody Allen. They were the first group to recognize his major return to form for 2005’s Match Point, and three years ago they named Vicky Cristina Barcelona the best Musical / Comedy Film of 2008. Given the excellent critical and commercial response to this year’s Midnight in Paris, a nominee in four major categories, we should keep the film in conversation for Oscar. It’s not a guarantee of course, but it’s certainly not out of the question. The film’s DVD / Blu-Ray release next week, timed to coincide with the crucial voting period, will remind those critics who initially loved the film in the summer of how worthy it is.

Glenn Close and Janet McTeer are on the upswing again after blanking out at Critics Choice. They both earned SAG nominations yesterday and today they each received Globe nominations as well. It’s not really a surprise that the guild honoured Close, as she is a veteran actress well-respected and loved by her peers. What she needs is to hit the circuit hard and remind everyone that Albert Nobbs is a passion project. She played the role onstage in the early 80s, when it was an obscure play, then lobbied for the last 30 years to get it filmed. The added bonus is that Close co-wrote the script and is a double nominee, having also been nominated for co-writing the film’s song. Critical response to the film has been soft, but given the goodwill she has earned from her peers and her continuously remarkable work on television in the last few years, including Damages, The Lion in Winter and The Wire, Close should find herself invited to the Kodak in some way, shape or form.

Cinematically Inclined: Midnight in Paris

Want a little intellect with your cinema? Woody Allen’s latest concoction, Midnight in Paris, is a joyful piece of tantalizingly literary cinematic candy.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a Hollywood screenwriter engaged to a Park Avenue princess (Rachel McAdams). They are on holiday in Paris with her moneyed Republican parents. Mother and daughter are the sort who enjoy art not for art’s sake, but for its acquisitional value. They run into a couple she knows, in particular a dilettante (Michael Sheen) who enjoys correcting local tour guides on the information they provide in their tours. Needless to say, this is the type who does not take kindly to being corrected, even in the face of irrefutable evidence.

One evening at midnight, Gil is wandering around and comes to a stop at a particular street corner. A car pulls up and invites him to attend a party. He accepts, unaware that the party acts as a time machine to the 1920s. How does he know about that the party takes place in that era? He meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at that party, that’s how. Soon, every night, he is at that same street corner and whisked away to drink with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), take editorial meetings with Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and hobnob with the Surrealists. Tampering his enthusiasm somewhat is the angelic Adriana. She is a flapper girl who blithely declares that Paris in the 1920s just isn’t that great, not compared to the belle époque of the turn of the century. Pretty soon, the future in-laws suspect that Gil’s up to something and the fiancée is spending increasingly more with the dilettante …

  

At this stage in his career, Allen has moved beyond the confines of his nebbish New Yorker persona. Gone is the neurotic, therapy-heavy, self-deprecating humour that tied so much of his previous work to Manhattan. Given the continuing propensity of Hollywood to make craptcular, mass-marketed action films, Allen wisely makes all of his films in Europe, with European money. It’s a great decision that has rejuvenated his creative spurt. Since 2005, he has produced the Bergman-esque thriller Match Point, the sexy ménage-a-trois comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and now Midnight in Paris. It’s appeared that The Old World has released new creative juices in our favourite neurotic Manhattanite.

Modern Film Classics: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

“Lemon, the dating world is a lot like your haircut: sometimes, awkward triangles occur.” – Alec Baldwin to Tina Fey on 30 Rock

 

The good news is that both Woody Allen and Penélope Cruz currently have films at the Cannes Film Festival. The bad news is that they’re not working together. The truly terrible news is that while Allen’s presenting his much-admired Midnight in Paris, Cruz stars in the latest budget-busting, surefire-money-making, soulless Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. While the Blogger respects an Oscar-winning actor’s right to make a film solely for a paycheque as a break from continually stretching artistic boundaries the way Cruz has done in the last five years, why the Pirates franchise refuses to die like World.com is beyond his comprehension.

Allen’s comic romance Vicky Cristina Barcelona premiered to considerable acclaim at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, became one of his most successful films, and won Cruz numerous prizes including an Academy Award for her inspired comic work. It remains one of the Blogger’s favourite films, and will form one of the first entries in his Modern Film Classics selections (look for the tag on the side for other titles).

The premise is simple: two American college students, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) spend the summer in the titular Spanish city. The sensible, risk-averse Vicky is engaged to Doug, a stable lawyer in New York who has a suburban life waiting for them to settle into in Connecticut. Cristina is artistic and impulsive, evidenced by her sudden romance with local artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). The two friends are locked in a quintessential Apollonian / Dionysian contrast. Things get complicated as Vicky slept with Juan Antonio while Cristina was convalescing from food poisoning, Doug shows up to surprise Vicky on holiday, and Juan Antonio’s volatile ex-wife Marie Elena (Cruz) shows up, having tried to kill herself and needing care. In probably the strangest twist of all, Cristina, Juan Antonio and Marie Elena take each other as lovers and begin a three-way common-law marriage, and are impossibly happy. Or are they? And can it last?