“Let me get this straight. The one’s about a precocious computer geek who’s also a bit of an asshole.”
“Yeah.”
“And the other’s about King George VI.”
“Yeah.”
“And King George VI has a disability.”
“Well, he has a stutter. I mean, it’s not crippling or anything — ”
“But it’s an obstacle that needs to be overcome.”
“Yeah.”
“And I assume, at the end, he does. And becomes King.”
(Updated predictions available here.)
I shan’t often find room for Gaspar Noé’s name in a space ostensibly dedicated to the Oscar race, so bear with me if this seems an unlikely opening gambit, but inspiration for this week’s column began with a conversation about his fluorescent, drug-addled ghost story “Enter the Void.”
A friend had recently caught up with it, and found herself disappointed: having been promised a psychotropic headfuck, she instead found something more sentimental and less questioning than his previous work. “At this rate,” she muttered aggrievedly, “he’s about 10 years away from a bloody Oscar nomination.”
That’s a flip exaggeration, of course, but there’s a kernel of truth in it: the Academy likes its enfants terribles most when they’ve passed the teething stage and begin to play nice — or at least safe. There’s a long and illustrious list of adventurous, iconoclastic directors who scored with AMPAS either by putting a leash on their wilder creative instincts or making sly concessions to the mainstream.
It’s not exactly a booming news day and I’m slow to get back into the groove after a weekend away, so forgive the frivolity of this. I thought it was kind of awesome.
Although, I have a beef. This looks closer to an 8-bit thing than a 16-bit thing, and 16-bit is necessary if you’re going to slap the “Super” prefix on there, right? (Like I said, slow news day.)
Anyway, this video, to the best of my knowledge, showed up on Geek Tyrant first but it’s been making the rounds the last week or so. If only the creator had cooked this up back in 2007. Freshness is key!
Someone get busy on, I don’t know, an NES-style representation of “Inception.” (Or have they totally done that already?) Check out the video game adventures of Daniel Plainview after the jump.
In exactly one week’s time, we’ll have a brand new list of Oscar nominations to pore over, pick apart and eventually file away in our subconscious with the other 81 editions of this annual collective. For Oscar geeks, nomination day is in many ways more exciting than the ceremony itself, celebrating a broader spectrum of work and throwing up far more surprises along the way.
For all that, once the winners are announced, the nomination list as a whole tends to be disregarded, returned to only by trivia buffs and the geekiest of Oscar geeks. (Guilty on both counts.) And that’s shame, because a field of five nominees can often be more illuminating viewed collectively than even the worthiest of individual champions.
Today’s list, then, is devoted to that most elusive of Oscar holy grails: the perfect nominee field.
Yes, more often than not, the Academy will nominate several notable achievements in a single category. But rarer than hen’s teeth are the robust Oscar categories that feature a full house of five outstanding nominees, five contenders that would all be worthy of a win in any other year. No unremarkable coaster nominees sliding in on the coattails of a popular picture. No bad films with an expensively studio-bought nominations. No filler. No fat. Just five superb achievements.
You can never have too many of these, right? Right?
Right?
1. “Mulholland Drive”
2. “There Will Be Blood”
3. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
4. “Brokeback Mountain”
5. (tie) “No Country for Old Men” and “Zodiac”
6. “Yi Yi”
7. (tie) “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and “The Lord of the Rings”
8. “Spirited Away”
9. (tie) “United 93” and “Y Tu Mama Tambien”
10. “Sideways”
Yesterday, I began my countdown of my 50 favorite — do note that last word, I hesitate to say “best” — films of the 2000s. Today, we creep up another ten rungs on the ladder.
I wrote this in my introduction to the list yesterday, but it bears repeating: don’t read too much into the rankings at this level. I’m not the kind of person who can scientifically determine whether my 37th favorite film of the decade is marginally — but conclusively — superior to my 38th favorite. Just today, I did some mild shuffling with the following titles, only to change my mind a few minutes later.
Bottom line: I think they’re all pretty darn special. The list continues after the cut.
• In case you missed this morning’s announcement, “Inglourious Basterds” and “Nine” led the field of BFCA nominees. [In Contention]
• Frank Rich op-eds a love letter to “Up in the Air.” [New York Times]
• Steve Pond painstakingly assembles a primer on how many votes a contender needs for an Oscar nomination per category. [The Odds]
I don’t feel anywhere near ready to present my Best of 2009 list, much less my Best of the 2000s one, yet — too many movies to watch, re-watch and contemplate before the brutal culling and shuffling of titles can begin. Still, a lot of critics and bloggers are clearly more organized than me — as each day brings a new pile of Top 10s.
Our friend Anne Thompson has one of the more individual lists out there: I won’t steal her thunder by replicating her entire collective, but here’s her top 5, which I rather like. (She adds the caveat that she had not seen “Avatar” at the time of posting.)
1. “Bright Star”
2. “A Serious Man”
3. “A Prophet”
4. “Up”
5. “Red Cliff”
For all the movement in the awards game this week – Jeff Bridges leap-frogging into contention, the animation race swelling to five nominees, “Precious” continuing to gather momentum – my head hasn’t really been in it this week.
That’s partly because we’re all still making blind prognoses until four unseen juggernauts – “Nine,” “Avatar,” “The Lovely Bones,” and “Invictus” – finally deign to show their faces. And partly because I’m only looking forward to one of those titles with sincere movie-fan enthusiasm, as opposed to professional curiosity. Sometimes you just get the wholly subjective feeling that it isn’t going to be ‘your’ Oscar season – and while I’m not there yet, the fear is setting in.
So, with no current awards developments getting me particularly enthralled or incensed, I’ve spent most of my time lately in a reflective state. With ‘best of the 2000s’ lists already coming thick and fast, and my DVD trawl through the decade’s leftovers for my own list in full swing, Oscar’s own performance over the last 10 years has been on my mind.
As I discussed in this space a few weeks ago, it’s been a slightly schizophrenic decade of Oscar winners, one that has blurred long-held definitions of “Oscar-bait.” One does have to wonder about the identity or cultural relevance of any group that can alternately celebrate such disparate achievements as “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Gladiator” and “No Country for Old Men.” Who are these people, and what do they know?
From that Sky Movies stuff, which yielded Tarantino’s top 20 films released since 1992:
(Courtesy: The Film Experience)
It is nothing new for a film to be released, find no audience, no critical favor, and disappear to be discovered by a new generation and raised to the level of masterpiece. In fact, this has been going on since the silents.
Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece “City Lights” was released four years after the advent of sound, and though popular at the time with both audiences and critics, it was some years later that it was finally hailed as Chaplin’s finest work. “The Wizard of Oz,” one of the most beloved films of all time that celebrates a 70th anniversary this month, was a dismal box office flop when released in 1939. It wasn’t terribly popular with the critics either, but years later it was finally championed as a work of art and, of course, now the film is considered one of the greatest films of all time and perhaps a more worthy Best Picture choice than the eventual winner that year, “Gone with the Wind.”
The “Citizen Kane” tale is so well documented I need not continue, and John Ford’s magnificent “The Searchers,” written off as just another John Wayne western, was discovered by film school professors who taught its brilliance to such young minds as Martin Scorsese, John Milius and Francis Coppola. Even Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” failed out of the gate with both audiences and critics, but within a year of its release, many of those same critics had changed their minds about the film. Within 10 years it was being declared as important a film as “Citizen Kane.”
When “Gandhi” won eight Academy Awards in 1982, no one was terribly surprised. Yet within a year there were rumblings within the Academy that a mistake had been made and the rightful winner should have been “E.T. : The Extra-Terrestrial,” now recognized as a sublime work of art. And that same year, “Blade Runner” began its life as a major flop, only to re-discovered on home video over the years and become a cult classic.
Looking back over the last decade or so, which films released since will be recognized 50 years from now? Which films that were passed over by audiences, critics and/or the Oscars will be hailed as masterpieces in the years to come? I took a stab as choosing a group of films I believe could fall under this label.
By now, “Watchmen” has been assessed and widely shat on from a large array of angles, but one voice I didn’t necessarily expect to pipe in was that of classical music critic Tom Service. Writing for the Guardian, Service praises the film’s “carefully conceived” use of existing music, particularly the heavily intertextual use of Wagner, though he complains:
A shame, then, that they go for the easy option of Mozart’s Requiem, in a poorly edited version, near the end of Watchmen, after the pseudo-apocalypse that wipes out Manhattan. Surely a bit of 80s electro would have made the point better, and saved Mozart from becoming yet more of a morbid musical cliche?
Against such familiar themes, however, Service is distinctly unimpressed by Tyler Bates’ original score for the film, and uses this as a springboard for a broader lament on the state of Hollywood scores in general. He claims composers have recently “trodden the path of the generic or the frankly redundant” — with Jonny Greenwood’s extraordinary work on “There Will Be Blood” the last notable exception.
I tend to agree with him, having found 2008 a particularly weak year for film scores in general. But we part ways when Service chooses to single out for criticism one of the few scores that actually got under my skin (and onto my iTunes) last year:
Anyone remember “The Dark Knight’s” score? Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s music, I thought, got mired in a single idea, an obsessively repeated minor third, that gloomy interval of impending doom, but could not generate any real tension or dramatic counterpoint with the onscreen action. It’s a pity, given the complexity of drama and ideas in both films (“Knight” and “Watchmen”), that the music didn’t add to the experience.
To each their own, I guess.
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.)
The National Board of Review has announced its list of winners for the 2008 awards season and Fox Searchlight’s “Slumdog Millionaire” is the big champ, taking down three awards including Best Film and a tie for Best Adapted Screenplay with Eric Roth’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Dev Patel also won the award for Breakthrough Performance by an Actor.
That tie for adapted screenplay does little to separate those two competitors at this point, both in that category and in the big race, which most concede is neck-and-neck at the moment. David Fincher also took the NBR’s Best Director award.
The immediate point of interest is the love for “Gran Torino.” Clint Eastwood seized the Best Actor trophy, perhaps the first in an upcoming slew of awards for the actor’s swan song performance, perhaps simply indicative of the NBR’s affinity for Warner Bros. product. Nick Schenk won the award for Best Original Screenplay, which will lead many to think this film is a major Oscar player. Hmm…
Another interesting tid-bit: Paramount Vantage was virtually shut out of the proceedings, with only a single mention for “Defiance” in the NBR top ten. Nothing for “Revolutionary Road.” But it is worth pointing out that “There Will Be Blood” was completely shut out of the group’s awards last year, and we all know how that turned out.
I think calling Viola Davis’s admittedly stunning performance in “Doubt” a “breakthrough” is a bit of a stretch considering how long the actress has been in the game, but the definition of that award shifts from year to year it seems.
And finally, after James Franco slipped into the Indie Spirit Award nominations for his supporting performance in “Milk,” Josh Brolin walks away with the win today in the same category. Who knows how it will turn out for Oscar? My bet is still on Brolin, who had a banner year with his performance here and in “W,” not to mention the left-over goodwill for his work in multiple films last year.
(Full list of winners after the jump.)
The Academy’s petty disqualification of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s score for “The Dark Knight” from Oscar contention has already caused much gnashing of teeth on these pages, so here’s something to compound the embarrassment.
It seems the Grammy voters are rather less fussy. Zimmer and Howard’s work was nominated yesterday in the category of (deep breath now) Best Score Soundtrack Album For Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media. (Still with me? Good.)
And hey, look who joins them on the list: none other than Jonny Greenwood for “There Will Be Blood,” who of course won last year’s Oscar because the work was simply too groundbreaking to be ignored. Oh right, except he didn’t, because he was disqualified. Sensing a pattern here?
We shouldn’t be surprised by now that a voting body unrelated to the field of film should exhibit more common sense than AMPAS’ music blue-hairs, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
Joining Greenwood, Zimmer and Howard on the list are three more 2008 contenders, Thomas Newman for “WALL-E,” Ramin Djawadi (surprise!) for “Iron Man” and John Williams (yawn) for “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
Sight & Sound’s annual Top Ten is, for my money, one of the most intelligent and respectable of all critics’ lists, and this year’s is no exception. Revealed in the magazine’s just-out January 2009 issue, the list is drawn from a poll of 50 international critics, including such heavyweights as Kenneth Turan, Amy Taubin, Armond White and Peter Bradshaw, and the results (for me, at least) are hard to argue with.
The list rather bluntly highlights the less-than-stellar year American cinema has had, with only one 2008 U.S. picture (“WALL-E”) making the cut. (The inclusion of “There Will Be Blood” stems from UK release date differences, which might also account for the low profile of some current year-end contenders.) But it’s a rich and exciting collection of films, however you look at it:
1. “Hunger” (Steve McQueen)
2. “There Will Be Blood” (Paul Thomas Anderson)
3. “WALL-E” (Andrew Stanton)
4. “Gomorrah” (Matteo Garrone)
=5. “A Christmas Tale” (Arnaud Desplechin)
=5. “The Class” (Laurent Cantet)
7. “Of Time and the City” (Terence Davies)
8. “Happy-Go-Lucky” (Mike Leigh)
=9. “The Headless Woman” (Lucrecia Martel)
=9. “Let the Right One In” (Tomas Alfredson)
I can’t tell you how much happier I would be if the eventual Best Picture nominees were drawn from that lot. We can but dream.
Every week, much to the delight of my children, several packages arrive at my door containing DVDs, movies that are not yet released in the home market that I am expected to review. Tough work, ain’t it? Seriously, I would do what I do just for the free movies.
That said, I have followed the history of DVD very closely and the manner in which several studios double dip with their releases. Most recently we have “The Godfather Restoration,” which is superb, but represents the third such DVD release for these films. The first came in 2001, The Godfather Trilogy, and then each film was released on its own so folks not wanting Part III could pass (sorry Kris).
Another film that went through many incarnations before the Ultimate Collector’s Edition was “Blade Runner,” though last year’s final release should be the final release. Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” went through several variations before coming to us in the ultimate edition, minus, of course, “Hearts of Darkness,” the splendid doc about the film’s making. What might have been cool is to see some footage of Harvey Keitel as Willard (if it exists).
But it all leads me to wonder which films out there deserve a double disc/special edition release.
I don’t know if this has popped up elsewhere before, but reading through the nominees for the upcoming World Soundtrack Awards at /Film (which include “WALL-E”‘s first nod of the year), I totally fell in love with this shot of “There Will Be Blood” composer Jonny Greenwood melded with a scene from the flick. Check it out:
