In Contention

Tag: Julia

  • Things of beauty: Guy’s best of 2009

    Julianne Moore and Colin Firth in A Single ManThe year of the woman. The year of animation. The year of science-fiction. Depending on who you read (and believe), the final year of the decade has been an awful lot of things.

    If you’re with Kris, it’s also the best cinematic year of the last ten. If you’re with an awful lot of others, it’s quite the opposite. I’ll stop short of rewriting the first page of “A Tale of Two Cities,” but suffice to say it’s been different things to different people.

    What kind of year has it been for me? I think I’ll need another year to figure that out in detail. But as I compiled the list you’re about to read, I happily concluded that it’s been, at the very least, a good one: the 25 titles gathered here were jotted down with minimal brain-racking, with still more fighting from the sidelines.

    None of them are grudging inclusions, either: I sincerely liked most of these titles too much to allow room for popular or critical phenomena that are worthy of respect, but nonetheless didn’t connect with me personally. There was a sufficient range of quality work in 2009 (following a lean 2008) that any film lover could afford to construct his own playlist of future treasures without resorting to consensus.

    Before we begin, a note on the construction of the list. In addition to my Top 10, there are 15 honorable mentions here, five of them singled out for extra consideration. Some of you will quibble that I opt to include international or festival releases that have yet to surface in the U.S.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Consider this

    John Malkovich and Jessica Haines in DisgraceThere’s nothing like an Oscar season to prove what a small number five (or even ten) is.

    We may only be in November, but already, months of conversation, covering a broad canvas of Oscar sure-shots and long-shots alike, have devolved into a ruthless mathematical elimination process, as previously five-wide categories fill up with safe bets. Before you know it, scores of previously fancied contenders are jostling for a mere one or two supposedly “free” slots on the ballot, and with each week that passes, the pool of possibles is culled further.

    This is, of course, hardest on independent or leftfield contenders. Having fought mightily even to enter the discussion in the first place, they must then rely on a flaky combination of precursors, DVD screeners and prayer to stay afloat.

    Miracles do happen, of course, thanks largely to the Academy’s weighted ballot system, where a number-one vote is all. (Nobody was talking about Tommy Lee Jones to take the last Best Actor slot in 2007, but there he was nonetheless. Ditto the recent likes of Michael Shannon, Samantha Morton and “City of God.”)

    With that in mind, I’d like to spotlight one contender in each major category that deserves a similarly happy outcome. Many of them are names I’ve championed before. Most of them are sitting on the furthest reaches of the sidelines. All of them deserve better.

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  • David Poland’s Oscar underdogs … where are the ladies?

    Tilda Swinton in JuliaFor those of you bored of reading the same ever-narrowing list of names in the assorted Oscar-speculation pieces across the web, David Poland’s latest column is a slight breath of fresh air.

    Decrying the fact that many pundits are making ludicrous long-shot calls like “This Is It” for Best Picture, while ignoring more deserving contenders who could use the attention, Poland provides a list of less-hyped contenders in the top categories that he feels merit consideration.

    His definition of the term “underdog” ranges from genuinely fanciful contenders (Catherine O’Hara and James Gandolfini for “Where the Wild Things Are,” “In the Loop” for Best Picture) to names still very much in the race who  have lately lost a bit of steam (Matt Damon, Jeremy Renner and Viggo Mortensen, all in the Best Actor category).

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  • Hey, the rest of the year counts too

    Marion Cotillard in Public EnemiesAs we sit in the flurry of festival season, with the even more flurry-ful (sorry, I’m tired) awards season upcoming, everyone’s eyes are pointed forward, as we impatiently await the supposedly Oscar-tailored collection of movies peppered across the next 3 or 4 months.

    At this point, it’s easy to forget that the year is actually 12 months long, and that the warmer seasons offer their (admittedly, usually smaller) share of work worthy of celebration.

    So I’m grateful to friend, reader and generally superb film writer Nick Davis for assembling this handy (though very idiosyncratic) alterna-Oscar ballot of the best work released in 2009 thus far.

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  • It’s not so dire, Mr. Friedman

    Shohreh Aghdashloo in The Stoning of Soraya MObviously Hollywood Reporter gossip hound Roger Friedman hasn’t been reading our Contenders section, or else he’d know there are plenty of lead actress hopefuls out there, not the dearth he apparently perceives.

    Friedman rattles off 12 contenders in a recent piece titled Shortage of “Best Actresses in the Coming Oscar Season,” but he misses some key possibilities.  Abbie Cornish in “Bright Star,” for one, who didn’t necessarily impress me much, but could certainly be in the hunt.  “Precious,” meanwhile, is considered a ripe opportunity for supporting contender Mo’Nique, but lead Gabourey Sidibe could certainly find her share of notices.

    Gwyneth Paltrow in “Two Lovers” and Zooey Deschanel in “(500) Days of Summer” are two extreme longshot contenders whose films have already been released, but Penelope Cruz deserves to be in the discussion for “Broken Embraces,” surely, as does Tilda Swinton in “Julia.”

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 first-half releases that deserved better

    Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston in He's Just Not That Into YouAround this time last year, we did a mid-year stocktake of sorts, wherein the site’s various contributors named the best (and worst) of what the cinematic year had presented thus far. You may have noticed that we haven’t offered up a similar piece for 2009. Time constraints may have had something to do with it, but given the slow start we had to the year, I suspect regular readers won’t have found it particularly hard to pick our favorites from the crop.

    As we’ve made clear on these pages, Kris and I are united in our admiration for such 2009 releases as “Public Enemies” on the large end of the scale, and “Sugar” on the much, much smaller end and, of course, “The Hurt Locker” somewhere in between. On our own individual tangents, Kris loudly declared his love for “Star Trek,” while back in May I went to bat for Olivier Assayas’s gorgeous “Summer Hours” – with the caveat that it wasn’t a 2009 release for me at all.

    (Release dates play havoc with such lists – using the U.S. release calendar as my guide, I could just as well hand year-best status to something like “Hunger,” if I hadn’t already done so in 2008. Even in the list below, I’ve technically cheated three times by including films that saw the light of day in my neck of the woods last year.)

    In any case, all of these are films that, wonderful as they are, either have already built devoted critical and/or public followings, or (as in the case of “Enemies”) hardly need further exposure. (Do you really need one more critic this summer to remind you about the wonders of Pixar?)

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  • 5/11 Web Round-up

    Tilda Swinton in Julia• With J.J. Abrams’s reboot landing in theaters this weekend, and Emmy talk on the brain, Tom O’Neil asks which versions of the popular series deserved small screen awards attention. [Gold Derby]

    • Geoff Boucher, meanwhile, talks to Leonard Nimoy and gets the actor to admit that some “Star Trek” fans can be “scary.” [Hero Complex]

    • Sukhdev Sandhu: “Why I love Cannes.” [Daily Telegraph]

    • The editing of an NPR review of “Outrage” sparks same. [indieWIRE]

    • Neil Gaiman discusses the adaptation of “Coraline” across the pond. [Empire]

    • Donna Freydkin talks to actress Tilda Swinton about her role in “Julia.” [USA Today]

    • David Poland loses himself in a dazzling 63-second shot from Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 film “The Limey.” [The Hot Blog]

    • Similarly, Glenn Kenny gets caught up on a “strangely evocative” frame from Sidney Pollack’s “Three Days of the Condor.” [Some Came Running]

    • Stephen Frears talks “Cheri,” which released in the UK over the weekend.  (Guy’s review here.) [The Guardian]

  • Standard crowns ‘Hunger’ best film

    I have to hand it to the Evening Standard Awards: they are a breath of fresh air in a suffocating awards season. While their choices can have a bit of an over-democratic, drawn-from-a-hat feel to them (Stephen Daldry for Best Director? On what planet?), they are never afraid to veer from the herd.

    And so they have done this year, justly and imaginatively handing their Best Film prize to Steve McQueen’s magnificent “Hunger” at last night’s London awards dinner. It’s a small but prestigious citation for the film, voted as it is by a panel of leading British critics, including Standard stalwart Derek Malcolm and the Telegraph’s excellent Tim Robey.

    If you ask me (which no one did, but I’ll say it anyway), they royally fluffed Best Actor, curiously settling on a tie between Michael Sheen and the admittedly very good Pat Shortt, which rather embarrassingly left Michael Fassbender — easily the most deserving nominee — the lone loser.

    They redeemed themselves, however, with an inspired choice in Best Actress. Bypassing the obvious Kate Winslet option, they instead honoured Tilda Swinton for her extraordinary, bruising work in “Julia,” which I’m beginning to think may well be the thesp’s finest performance to date. (No mean feat, that.) The fact that BAFTA essentially handed Swinton a nod for just showing up in “Burn After Reading,” but failed to even longlist her for “Julia,” is yet another reason why we shouldn’t even be paying attention to that particular shindig this year. (But hey, tune in for my BAFTA live-blog on Sunday!)

    Elsewhere, Martin McDonagh racked up another screenplay win, filmmaker Joanna Hogg deservedly took the Newcomer award (beating Dev Patel in the process), and the wonderful Sally Hawkins pipped co-star Eddie Marsan (now wouldn’t that have been a good tie opportunity?) to the Peter Sellers Award for Comedy. (I still wouldn’t quite call “Happy-Go-Lucky” a comedy, but let’s not split hairs.) Yep, the best performance of 2008 still won’t go away, no matter what the Academies on either side of the Atlantic think.

    Mike Leigh, meanwhile, bagged a career achievement award. Full list of nominees and winners (in italics) after the cut.

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  • Cesar nods include ‘Class,’ ‘Loved,’ Swinton

    Now here’s a set of nominations I can get behind. As I may have mentioned before, 2008 was all about the rejuvenation of French cinema for me, with Gallic productions occupying a quarter of my year-end Top 20, including the two poll spots.

    So it’s hardly surprising that I’m immensely pleased by the list of nominees revealed yesterday for the Cesar Awards, otherwise known as the French Oscars –- not least because my two list-topping films, “I’ve Loved You So Long” and newly-minted Oscar nominee “The Class,” feature strongly.

    The former grabbed 6 nods, including a surefire Best Actress bid for the sadly Oscar-snubbed Kristin Scott Thomas, while I’m pleased to see her wonderful co-star, Elsa Zylberstein, finally getting some awards love in the supporting category. “The Class” managed five, though I’m a little disappointed to see the film’s excellent ensemble go unacknowledged, even in the ‘young actor’ categories.

    Both films feature in the Best Picture lineup, as does “Public Enemy Number One,” a sprawling biopic of gangster Jacques Mesrine that has been a local box-office smash and leads all nominees with 10 bids. Close behind, with nine, is Arnaud Desplechin’s critical favourite “A Christmas Tale,” though I’m surprised to see its two most dynamic stars, Catherine Deneuve and last year’s Best Actor winner Mathieu Amalric, both snubbed.

    Incidentally, Kristin Scott Thomas wasn’t the only Brit to receive notice: also landing in the Best Actress lineup is Tilda Swinton, for her astounding performance in Erick Zoncka’s “Julia.” Together with the insane snubs of Scott Thomas and Sally Hawkins, the fact that this fearless piece of work never even entered the Oscar discussion boggles the mind. But I digress.

    (More thoughts, and a list of nominations, below the cut.)

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  • ‘Slumdog,’ ‘Hunger,’ ‘Happy’ rule London crix nods

    Sorry for following up on this so long after Kris’ teaser… what can I say? It’s Christmas party central round these parts.

    Anyway, the London Film Critics’ Circle Awards are a bit of an odd duck in the kudos calendar, but not an uninteresting one. They tend to try to have their cake and eat it — honouring both British and international achievements in categories that seem segregated at first glance, but actually aren’t. So this year, you’ll see Danny Boyle crop up in both the Director of the Year and British Director of the Year fields. The same goes for Kate Winslet in the actress races. (They also hedge their bets there, nominating her jointly for “Revolutionary Road” and “The Reader.”)

    Meanwhile, only one screenwriting category exists, while only British actors are singled out for supporting honours. Which is why non-British supporting players like Heath Ledger and Penelope Cruz are competing in the Actor and Actress of the Year categories, respectively — so don’t get too excited about that. (Meanwhile, the Brit supporting categories are a real stretch… I mean, Toby Jones?)

    If you’re confused, I don’t blame you. It’s a haphazard system, but nonetheless, when you dig through the nominations there’s some real gold to be found. The nod for Tilda Swinton’s extraordinary work in Eric Zoncka’s “Julia” is truly inspired, while one has to applaud the anti-herd mentality that leads to such inclusions as Josh Brolin for “W.” or Terence Davies in the British Director category. Compared to the dull-as-dishwater SAG nominees foisted upon us this morning, at least there’s a little initiative at play here.

    More commentary, and a full list of nominees, after the cut.

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