In Contention

Tag: Everyone Else

  • My dream Oscar ballot, part two

    Yesterday, I began my very far-fetched (and in some cases, frankly impossible) wishlist for Tuesday’s Oscar nominations with my favorite achievements in the technical categories. Today, I offer up my picks in the top races, and I don’t mind telling you things got pretty agonizing in some categories.

    “Why can’t I have 15 nominees for Best Supporting Actress?” one half of my brain asked earlier this morning, as I once more marvelled that any pundits could once have deemed that particular race “weak.” Cooler instincts prevailed, but it bears repeating just what a staggering, and pleasingly varied, year it’s been for female performances on both sides of the category divide. I was also surprised to see how many performances stood tall from films that weren’t necessarily on their stars’ level — I like to think there aren’t too many coattail picks here.

    I’ve veered from Academy format in one respect: I’ve dispensed with a Best Foreign Language Film category. Not only do I dislike the award in principle — it’s a different language, not a different medium — but my general picks are heavy enough on foreign fare that a ghetto category seemed superfluous. Check out my picks after the cut, and share your thoughts in the comments.

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  • My dream Oscar ballot, part one

    For the past two years running, I’ve celebrated Oscar Nomination Eve by assembling my own ideal (and, usually, incredibly far-fetched) ballot, so here we go again. As well as a kind of last-ditch prayer to the Oscar gods, I also look on it as a salute to the worthy contenders who haven’t a hope in hell of hearing their names read out on Tuesday morning.

    At the request of some readers, I’ve bent the rules to accommodate several titles unfairly ineligible for Oscar consideration in any category: most of you are aware of the arcane ruling that has denied “A Prophet” the chance to ever compete in a non-ghetto category, while the TV airings of “Red Riding” and “Carlos” keep them out of the game too. I’m less clear on why the likes of “White Material” and “Fish Tank” aren’t on the Academy’s list of eligible titles, but they aren’t, and I must make my peace with that.

    Anyway, screw ’em: this ballot represents what I found most awards-worthy from all the theatrical features released in the US last year, and you can’t get fairer than that. I’ll begin, as usual, with the ten technical categories — in which I was pleased to end up with a healthy spread of 33 films across 48 slots. Jump in after the cut, and share your own thoughts in the comments. (Also, check out Kris’s very different ideal ballot here.)

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  • FIRST-HALF FYC: Best Picture

    For the past eight weeks, I’ve been spotlighting nomination-worthy names,  in all major Ocar categories, from the first half of the US release calendar. Today, we close out the series with an alternative January-to-June Best Picture 10, though it comes a week after ballots closed — timing was never my strong suit.

    A look at this category on the Oscar side of things proves why I felt this series of columns necessary in the first place. Of the films currently being mooted for a place on the Academy’s Best Picture list, only two — “Toy Story 3” and “Winter’s Bone” — were released prior to July 2010. If the latter does wind up making the cut, it raises hope that small-scale indies can override voters’ perilously short memories. If it doesn’t, well, we must just accept that the first six months of the year contained no Oscar-worthy adult drama. Or, you know, not.

    There’s no doubting nine of the films on my list below are wild long-shots to show up in Tuesday’s nomination announcement — indeed, several of the titles aren’t present on the Academy’s list of eligible productions.

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  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: Chad’s best of 2010

    When it came time to choose a snappy title for my year-end retrospective, the one that seemed to fit best is the one given to all my columns at In Contention this year. Oscar and I have shared a mutual disinterest in what the other feels to be award-worthy for a few years now and it doesn’t look like the trend is going to change much in 2011. For those interested, my top 20 last year garnered a whopping three nominations between them (two coming in the Best Animated Feature category).

    If there was any kind of trend or narrative to my taste this year, I guess it would be the rise of documentaries. Nearly 50% of my top 20 is comprised of the medium (including a few hybrids that blur the line), compared to a single entry last year. My guess it has more to do with a growing disenchantment towards lazy screenwriting than a noticeable uptick in quality non-fiction film. Regardless, truth was truly more interesting than fiction for me in 2010.

    Elsewhere, a number of high ranking films have to do with relationships and their struggles, possibly connected to the fact that breaking up with my girlfriend of four years was probably the defining event of my year, personally. Sometimes a movie hits you when and where you need to be hit.

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  • FIRST-HALF FYC: Below-the-line standouts

    For the penultimate installment in our reflection on the most Oscar-worthy achievements from the largely forgotten first half of 2010’s release calendar, I’m backtracking away from the major categories to the place I should perhaps have started: the technical sphere.

    Had I thought to start this column 20-odd weeks in advance of nomination day, I could have given each craft category the attention it deserves — though if I’m being honest, picking five outstanding Best Sound Editing contenders from the year’s first six months wouldn’t be the easiest of tasks.

    As it stands, I’ve arrived at an admittedly drastic compromise: singling out five individual technical contributions, across the range of categories, that made a particularly strong impression. With such a doubly curtailed brief, the list of painfully excised honorable mentions inevitably runs very long indeed, so I’ll jump straight in with a few of them.

    As much as “Shutter Island” didn’t work for me as a whole, it delivered considerable rewards as a craft showcase: I was particularly tempted to include Dante Ferretti’s art direction, which will likely find its way to Oscar recognition without my help.

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  • Watching and waiting: Guy’s best and worst of 2010

    What kind of year was 2010 at the movies? You tell me. It’s virtually impossible to find one yardstick to measure 365 days of cinema for a collective audience whose interests seem ever more segregated.

    If your film interests are covered largely by the multiplex, chances are 2010 was an unusually unrewarding year for you, challenging even Hollywood’s standard quota of déjà vu — unless, of course, you’re an animation fiend, in which case there was a broad enough range of carefully crafted work to keep you happy.

    If you tend to bypass the mall on your way to the arthouse, however, there was any amount of adventurous indie and world cinema, both newly unveiled and backlogged from previous years, to chew on — if, of course, you’re privileged enough to live in a regrettably narrow radius. And if you’re an Academy voter sifting through the crop of generously campaigned prestige fare, 2010 looks rather like the usual, only a little more so.

    For me, 2010 was both immeasurably improved and somewhat complicated by the festival circuit — access to which is a luxury I shall never take for granted, but also one that inevitably skews my sense of how the film yearbook reads in the real world. When you’ve had access to most of the big-ticket winter warmers by early autumn, and when the likes of Cannes afford you a head start of many months or even years on certain international art films, things rather lose their shape.

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  • FIRST-HALF FYC: Best Director

    With precisely three weeks to go until Oscar nomination morning, we continue to flag up worthy work from 2010’s first half, much of it lost (or, indeed, never present) amid the crush of more recent awards contenders. You know the January-to-June drill by now: beyond that, we can get as far-fetched as we like.

    I certainly did this week, as my field of Best Director suggestions betrays the extent to which foreign arthouse fare rules the quality ranks in the early months of the year, while American studios save their prize ponies for summer. For this ballot to pan out, the Academy would have to overcome their usual resistance to subtitles several times over, while making history twice by nominating two women and a documentary filmmaker. Not much to ask, is it?

    Speaking of women, by the way, it bears repeating that opening months of the year were strong ones for female filmmakers: between the likes of Debra Granik, Jessica Hausner and Mia Hansen-Løve, all of whom were closely considered, I could have cheerfully assembled a ladies-only field.

    Finally, before I get into my picks, I should add that while many (certainly the Academy itself, on recent form) see the Best Picture and Director categories as interchangeable, I don’t quite work that way — as often as they inevitably overlap, sometimes a director’s formal ambition and achievement burns a little brighter than the whole.

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  • What came after “the year of the woman?”

    This time last year, we were still in the thick of a long-running “year of the woman” narrative, as female filmmakers enjoyed critical, festival and box-office success, plus an unprecedentedly high profile in the awards season –culminating in that history-making Best Director win for Kathryn Bigelow (as well as a Best Picture nod for Lone Scherfig’s “An Education”).

    Once the dust had settled on Bigelow’s Oscar, however, the narrative tailed off a bit; with that particular blip on their conscience eased, the industry at large could go back to business as usual. Right?

    Well, perhaps not. Although there’s been no major name like Bigelow for the media to make into a wider cause or mascot, when put under the microscope, 2010 has proved a quietly successful year for female filmmakers after all. Although none have managed the box-office presence that Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers had in 2009, women in the indie sector have taken the baton from Bigelow and kept running.

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