Category: Oscars

Here we are again! Oscar 2013 is right around the corner, which means it’s time for me to release my predictions. I generally do a fairly good job (but of course, the award shows are generally fairly easy to predict), but this year, there are some categories that are definitely up in the air. If you missed my first post, detailing what I consider to be the best films of the year, check it out here. As always, any film marked in red is one I did not see, so take that into consideration. Away we go!

Best Original Screenplay

Best Adapted Screenplay

Best Sound Mixing

Best Sound Editing

Best Live-Action Short Film

Best Animated Short Film

Production Design

Best Original Song

Best Original Score

Best Makeup

Best Foreign Language Film

Best Film Editing

Best Supporting Actor

Best Actress

Best Actor

Best Picture

Yay! It’s Oscar season again! AREN’T YOU EXCITED? Well, probably not — most people enjoy lambasting our OBSESSION WITH CELEBRITIES, so honest interest in the Academy Awards is often seen as antediluvian these days. That’s all right. There are certainly more important things, but then, I enjoy celebrating art, and the awards are an opportunity for me (and many others) to see films that we otherwise might not check out … films not about robots or superhumans punching each other.

With that out of the way, let’s start with the rundown of my favorite movies of the year. In no particular order!

1 – Cloud Atlas

2 – Les Misérables

3 – Argo

Of course, as great as the tension is (especially in the final scene — WOW!) some of the best parts of the movie are the humorous ones. Alan Arkin surely deserves his Supporting Actor nomination, though it’s sort of surprising that John Goodman didn’t garner one as well.

4 – Django Unchained

I love Quentin Tarantino. There, I said it. There’s sort of a nouveaux-hipster mentality among some film fans and critics that Tarantino’s films are overrated, silly, overly violent or just plain bad. I’ve heard it said that he’s been unable to match the brilliance of Pulp Fiction, and is now just sort of flailing around, splattering blood everywhere.

Which is pretty much crap, in my opinion. While I can understand the divisiveness of Kill Bill (I love it, but it’s a very stylized movie created as an ode to a relatively obscure genre), his next film, Inglorious Basterds, is a straightforward tale (other than the alternate history) and has the honor of being one of my favorite movies ever (as well as my favorite Tarantino flick).

While Django didn’t quite knock Basterds out of the top spot, it still blew me away. As I said on Facebook some time ago, the movie automatically gets points for being one of the few movies about slavery that isn’t about either a) the quiet bravery that rests in the soul every black slave, or b) how awesome a certain group of white people were for ending it.

No, Django is about a freed slave’s vengeance, pure and simple. While it’s a bit more personal in scope, the issue of slavery plays a massive role, and any movie that can address old ideas in a new matter is worthwhile. Thankfully, Django is also brilliant. Jaime Foxx reminds us that, yes, he can act pretty damn well, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a wonderfully sadistic villain, and Christoph Waltz is astounding in his role as the somewhat-more-educated Yankee bounty hunter. To be sure, this movie’s views of slavery and race relations are not, shall-we-say, layered. There’s no, “well, slavery was a complex issue, the south wasn’t racist, per se…” Nope. The South’s a pretty ass-backwards place, and Southern slaveowners are straight up pieces of shit. I liked it. Some might not.

Oh, and there’s Kanye on the soundtrack. So there’s that.

5 – Cabin in the Woods

Every year, I like to include a dark horse of sorts. A film that was never expected to get nominated for much of anything, nor was it ever seriously in contention, but one I still think represents a filmmaking or storytelling achievement.

This year, that film is Cabin in the Woods. It’s hard to say too much about it without spoiling it — and if you haven’t seen it, you absolutely should. I promise you it’s not a run-of-the-mill slasher film. At all. In fact, the movie is all about critiquing your run-of-the-mill slasher films. It’s one of the most pointed criticisms of that genre I think I’ve seen, and the film is able to make those judgments while still providing an absurdly entertaining story that takes place, more or less, within the horror genre itself. And even further than simply criticizing the people who make the horror films, it’s criticizing the people who watch the films — which include a fair portion of Cabin’s audience, as well as its filmmakers. Brilliant.

Oh, and there’s REO Speedwagon on the soundtrack. So there’s that.

Honorable Mentions

The Master

The artiest film on this list, The Master is not quite what I expected going in. I’d been hoping for a takedown of Scientology and its benefactor, L. Ron Hubbard. I was actually worried when I’d heard they’d changed the title character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman into a pastiche who was only inspired by Hubbard.

The Master is not about Scientology, and while there are criticisms, they aren’t as important to the film as I’d hoped. And yet, the film is still powerful. Like Django, it takes a broad issue and makes it extremely personal. Joaquin Phoenix portrays a broken man whose unidentified illness makes him somewhat immune to Hoffman’s brand of ‘healing,’ but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, the film leaves as an open question. Amy Adams is similarly fantastic, and were it not for Anne Hathway, I’d say she was the favorite for Best Supporting Actress.

I will also say that the lack of nomination for Best Cinematography is absolutely the biggest snub on this year’s list — especially given the fact that it was beaten by Anna Karenina and Skyfall.

The Sessions

A sweet little film about a disabled man and a sex therapist. There’s not really much more to say about it than that. The films progresses exactly as you’d expect, and other than a wholly unecessary epilogue, there aren’t really any twists and turns.

The film’s success rests squarely on the shoulders of its two lead actors — John Hawkes and Helen Hunt. The fact that Hawkes failed to get a nomination, but Bradley Freaking Cooper in the dreadful Silver Linings Playbook was picked, is the second biggest snub of the night.

And the rest

Yes, I’m woefully late. In fact, if everything goes as plan, this will be posted mere hours before the Academy Awards. Oh well! That just means you won’t have to wait long to see how utterly crap my predictions are. Last year I did this as a two-parter, but since I’m already running late, we’re going to shove it into a single post. First up, the list of my favorite movies of 2011. Following that, my Oscar predictions. Without further ado, and in no particular order….

The Artist – Smart money’s on The Artist to win ALL OF THE THINGS! so let’s go ahead and start there. It’s great. It’s unique — a mostly-silent film about a silent film actor, the effortlessly charming George Valentin, who’s suddenly not as effortless when those new-fangled talkies start making waves in the film industry.

Jean Dujardin, a French actor who I’ve never seen in anything else, is friggin’ fantastic as Valentin. I don’t want to spoil anything for the prediction section … so I won’t. But Dujardin makes the film. The cinematography is similarly excellent — some really beautiful shots. The editing, directing — all top notch.

If I have one qualm, it’s that the story is somewhat simple. Not that there’s anything wrong with a simple story, but the film hints that it could have been somewhat more layered. Near the beginning of the film, Valentin has a dream that’s suddenly audible to us, the audience — and, to his terror, to him as well. I feel like director Michel Hazanavicius missed a chance to carry that metaphor through the rest of the film. But even so, The Artist is thoroughly enjoyable.

Midnight in Paris – I think I liked this movie more than I should — more than nonwriters would. Seeing Ernest Hemingway chatting with Gertrude Stein is almost as fantastically satisfying as seeing Thor smash a Frost Giant in the face with Mjollnir.

On the surface level, there’s not a huge amount of story here. Guy’s writing a book. Gets inspiration by imagining (or perhaps not?) writers of old giving him advice. Guy finishes book and learns a bit about life. But the sheer brilliance Woody Allen employs in the relationships between the various artists, and the intriguing (if not-too-subtle) grass-is-always-greener theme, make this a joy to watch, and Allen’s best film in years.

The Help – The Help got a lot of criticism for whitewashing (pun-intended) history, and that’s a fair point. But on some level, a good story is more important than getting every detail right. And The Help is a great story.

Yes, we get a little bit too close to “White angel” syndrome here, but I think the key difference between this and, say, The Blind Side, is that Emma Stone’s character in The Help is simply a mouthpiece — she just helps to make these women’s voices heard. And that’s generally the main thing privileged allies for underpriviliged people are expected to do.

The acting is the most important part, here. Viola Davis is fantastic, of course, but Octavia Spencer makes the movie for me. I think I laughed harder at her performance than at most of the comedies this year.

Super 8 – WHAT? Yes, like Tangled last year, Super 8 is my “dark horse.” While the wife wasn’t impressed, I found J.J. Abrams’s love song to Steven Spielberg entertaining as hell (and, ironically, infinitely more entertaining than Spielberg’s own War Horse, but then, what isn’t).

Super 8 has everything you could want — aliens, explosions, adorable children (who can actually act!). It’s E.T. on steroids — in fact, I have a suspicion that Elle Fanning is actually Drew Barrymore’s bastard child.

While Abrams still doesn’t seem to know how to handle giant monsters (Cloverfield wasn’t shown/explained enough, while Super 8’s creature is explained too much), it doesn’t hurt the movie enough for me to dislike it.

I’d like to again mention that War Horse was terrible.

I WISH

Moneyball – Rounding up my favorites is something rare for me — a sports movie. But it’s a sports movie where the sport is somewhat tangential. This isn’t about the kid with a heart of gold fighting adversity, though it is sort of an underdog story. Instead, it’s about statistics, and any story that can entertain while simultaneously showing that, guess what, math is real and has real power — well, that’s a good movie in my book.

Brad Pitt is fantastic as always, imbuing Billy Beane with a subtle humanity that’s interesting, but not overdone. Jonah Hill (excuse me, Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill) is great as the nerdy number cruncher, and I think he’s proved to everyone that he can do more than make dick jokes. Philip Seymour Hoffman did a great job as well, and I’m surprised he didn’t get more attention for this (in fact, he probably deserved the Supporting Actor role over Hill).