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.

Harry Potter & the Harvard Commencement Address

Now that the hysteria surrounding the record-breaking opening weekend of Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 has subsided, one is left with a feeling that the Hogwarts kids we’ve seen grow up and matured in the last decade has undergone a “graduation” of sorts. It’s a fitting time to reference JK Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Speech for the class of 2008. 

Rowling’s story has become one for the ages. A single mother who wrote the Harry Potter series while still on welfare, Rowling has seen her series grow from a cult children’s classic into a string best-selling of novels, wildly successful film series and theme park. Rowling herself said when she appeared for a one-on-one interview on Oprah that all of her accomplishments, including becoming the world’s first billionaire author, surpassed her wildest dreams.

For the Blogger and for so many others who have felt powerless, weakened, frustrated by career aspirations and paths, perhaps the most effective and rousing motivational speech ever delivered was Rowling’s now legendary Harvard Commencement Address.

The magic in Rowling’s speech comes from her title: “The Fringe Benefits of Failure”. She speaks of her time as a single mother, her failed marriage, her frustrated career path, her financial struggle and clinical depression. It’s not often to hear such a successful individual speak so candidly and honestly about the miseries in her own life, but Rowling does not truss up her accomplishments in the guise of false modesty, nor does she attempt to give self-help lessons that mean nothing. What guided her out of the dark was that at one point, she “stripped away the inessential ... and began directing all my energy to doing the only work that mattered to me”. That work happened to be the Harry Potter series.

I return to this speech from time to time. It’s wise, pithy, honest, candid, and yet at times screamingly funny. In short, it is pure perfection.

I can’t say much more than what’s already been said. All you have to do is to listen, and you will learn. Click after the jump to hear the remainder of the speech, and to see a copy of the speech.