In Contention

Tag: The Temptation of St Tony

  • 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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  • 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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  • Finally, the 10 best of the 2010 LFF

    For those of you who were loyally following my London Film Festival coverage this year, I must apologize for leaving it somewhat in limbo. Though I did eventually find time for a lengthy discussion of fest closer “127 Hours,” a snowballing workload put paid to my hopes of squeezing in a few more review roundups. And frankly, since the festival wrapped on Thursday after four weeks of press screenings, I so relished having ownership of my days again that I let things lie longer than I intended.

    But by way of a belated send-off, here’s a gathering of the films that made the LFF for me this year. I saw precisely 60 films at the festival, in addition to 27 I’d already seen at previous fests, so I was naïve to hope I might get round to discussing most of them.

    Some of the  clunkers (glum German childbirth drama “Blessed Events,” Ferzan Ozpetek’s lead-footed gay comedy “Loose Cannons”) barely merit appraisal; other, more interesting, disappointments (Xavier Dolan’s meticulous but terminally precious love triangle “Heartbeats,” Benedik Flieugauf’s visually startling but sketchily conceived sci-fi “Womb”) at least deserved a few paragraphs. Ah, well.

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  • LONDON: Five foreign Oscar contenders

    (Please note that one of the films reviewed here, “Aftershock,” was not screened as part of the London Film Festival programme — but since I saw it this week, it made sense to include it in this discussion.)

    Admittedly, 11 out of 65 is a figure that is only impressive if you’re counting the listenable tracks on most latter-day hip-hop albums, but as a measure of the number of Best Foreign Language Film contenders I’ve seen, it’s more than I’ve ever managed by this early point in the race. For that, I have my growing trail of film festivals to thank (even if I also have Venice schedulers to blame for ensuring that I missed Canada’s hot prospect “Incendies” in favour of — of all things — “Miral”), and this year’s London Film Festival has served me particularly well in this regard.

    I’ll be seeing Belgium and Spain’s entries toward the back end of the festival, but having attended screenings of five contenders in the past week (four of them at the fest), it seemed a neat number for a cluster-review. (I’ve already discussed the hopefuls from Algeria, Czech Republic, Greece, Mexico, South Africa and Thailand on these pages, as well as in Friday’s episode of Oscar Talk. Meanwhile, I thought it less curmudgeonly to limit myself to a 140-character review of India’s entry a few weeks back.)

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  • Academy announces official list of 65 foreign Oscar entries

    For the past few months, we’ve been keeping you abreast of the submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, so this finalized list of contenders, which was sleuthed by Pete Hammond earlier this morning (and officially unveiled by AMPAS via press release here), doesn’t contain too many surprises.

    As usual, however, a few low-profile late entries have snuck into the mix since the October 1 submissions deadline, while one film (Afghanistan’s entry “Black Tulip”) appears to have been disqualified, as the country does not feature on the Academy screening schedule. An eligibility-date snafu, I’ll be bound.

    The four titles new to our list come from Ethiopia (“The Athlete”), Georgia (“Street Days”), Greenland (“Nuummloq”) and Kyrgyzstan (“The Light Thief”). I’m hoping to see the last of those — reportedly a heartwarmer about an electrician coming to the aid of an impoverished rural community — at the London fest later this week, but the other three are unfamiliar to me. Always nice to see more African countries in the running, however.

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