In Contention

Tag: Last Days

  • The best films of a decade

    Tom Cruise in Minority ReportThis column has been the elephant in my living room for months.

    Putting together a list of the year’s best films is easy. It’s fresh. It’s in your mind. It’s, in many ways, the expected culmination.

    Putting together a list of the decade’s best films is a different chore altogether. Yearly rankings fly out the window as a proper gauge, because tastes shift and impacts either dwindle or deepen. Revisiting films is called for, but fitting in the works you missed along the way is also imperative. It can be maddening.

    And the truth is, you can’t see everything. All you can do is try to be as honest about how you feel as you can. And even then, no list can be definitive on a personal level, let alone authoritative.

    And so the whittling begins, and in many ways, the process is the reward. The ultimate collective is a mere reminder of the journey through 10 years of film product. But some things stuck out along the way.

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  • Best in show 2005: the year in superlatives

    It’s time to really round out the year and offer up my picks for awards in 2005.

    In addition to the typical categories – which finally see their winners announced today – you’ll find some other fun arenas for awards citation. Call it a mish-mash of MTV-Awards-type kudos and other frequently heralded categories we find time to time in various critics’ awards and precursor ceremonies.

    No one is better at this sort of thing than Nat Rogers over at The Film Experience, so I recommend you all take a look at his Film Bitch awards when he dishes them out in the coming weeks.

    These will likely be my last extensive thoughts on the awards season this year, barring any brief comments I may or may not make here and/or there. There will, of course, be one final predictions update before the end of the year.

    It feels good to wrap everything up before Christmas vacation, I have to tell you. But the Oscar season is by no means over, so I’ll be diving right back in once 2006 finally rolls around.

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  • If I had a ballot

    Customarily, here in the midst of our year in review, it is time for me to fill out my ballot.

    I do this every year, pretending, for one brief moment, to be one of the 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and fulfilling my own fantasies about who does and does not deserve Academy recognition in their numerous categories.

    Be sure to check back on Friday as we wrap up the “Year in Review” with a list of superlatives. There you will find the respective winners of the categories listed below (given the top ten list you can easily discern Best Picture), as well as a bevy of other random categories for your reading pleasure.

    If I had a ballot:

    Best Picture
    Batman Begins (Warner Bros. Pictures)
    Crash (Lions Gate Films)
    A History of Violence (New Line Cinema)
    Last Days (Fine Line Features)
    March of the Penguins (Warner Independent Pictures)

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