In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • FIRST-HALF FYC: Best Picture

    For the past eight weeks, I’ve been spotlighting nomination-worthy names,  in all major Ocar categories, from the first half of the US release calendar. Today, we close out the series with an alternative January-to-June Best Picture 10, though it comes a week after ballots closed — timing was never my strong suit.

    A look at this category on the Oscar side of things proves why I felt this series of columns necessary in the first place. Of the films currently being mooted for a place on the Academy’s Best Picture list, only two — “Toy Story 3” and “Winter’s Bone” — were released prior to July 2010. If the latter does wind up making the cut, it raises hope that small-scale indies can override voters’ perilously short memories. If it doesn’t, well, we must just accept that the first six months of the year contained no Oscar-worthy adult drama. Or, you know, not.

    There’s no doubting nine of the films on my list below are wild long-shots to show up in Tuesday’s nomination announcement — indeed, several of the titles aren’t present on the Academy’s list of eligible productions.

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  • Greece makes foreign Oscar shortlist, France snubbed

    “Dogtooth.” That’s the title an every Oscar pundit’s lips right now, as Greece’s critically beloved but super-outré submission — which includes inter-sibling sex and feline homicide in its curious bag of tricks — stunned pretty much everyone by showing up on the nine-title shortlist for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. I can hardly believe I’m typing this myself.

    There can be no doubt whatsoever that this is the work of the Academy’s executive committee, which was set up two years ago to give more challenging fare a leg up in the Oscar race by hand-picking an extra three titles to go on the shortlist compiled by general voters in the category. They’ve certainly done their job on this occasion — bravo, guys. (Japan’s reportedly edgy “Confessions” appears to be the second film they saved; the third is open to question.)

    As it turned out, I predicted only four of the nine — not hard in the case of Denmark’s Golden Globe winner “In a Better World,” Canada’s “Incendies” and Mexico’s “Biutiful,” which have been installed as favorites for weeks now.

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  • Predicting the foreign-language Oscar shortlist

    Tomorrow, we get the last of the Academy’s crucial pre-nomination shortlists, as the list of 65 entries for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is slashed to just nine titles, from which the eventual nominees will be announced in a week’s time. Predicting these nine is a vague and mostly thankless task, but I am nothing if not vague and thankless, so let’s give it a go.

    Remember, here’s the system as it currently stands: six of the nine titles on the shortlist are voted in by the general committee of volunteer voters in the category, based on the scores given at each film’s official Academy screening. The remaining three are selected by a hand-picked executive committee, with the specific intention of “saving” significant and/or challenging titles that didn’t win the approval of the larger, more conservative body of voters.

    This curious system was set up two years ago, following the uproar that greeted the exclusion of critically beloved Palme d’Or winner “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” in the 2007 race.

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  • ‘White Material’ gets the Criterion treatment

    When you’ve been doggedly championing a film for the better part of 18 months, as I have with Claire Denis’s “White Material,” you do start to feel weirdly parental. So I was oddly touched by the raft of emails and tweets I got from assorted readers to inform me that the film has been revealed as one of Criterion’s April titles — it was as if I was being congratulated for someone else’s triumph.

    I’ve said before that I don’t really do the Criterion thing: US import charges making the discs even more of an indulgence for me, after all. If I make an exception for anything, however, it’ll be for the film that further viewings have established (after an already ecstatic first encounter) as my favorite of the last half-decade or so.

    Each revisit opens up both new avenues of political enquiry and an alternative set of possible answers, while the filmmaking also stuns on rotating, mood-dependent levels. One day, it’s Denis’s still-life camera that seems to lead the rich, fever-dream sound design; another, quite the reverse.

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  • ‘King’s Speech’ leads BAFTA list with 14 nods

    If you’ve been with us for a couple of years, you’ll know that the BAFTA nominations infuriate me on an annual basis. However, my therapist recently advised me that I need to heal my relationship with BAFTA through forgiveness, so I’ll lead with few the things that pleased me about this morning’s announcement.

    For one thing, though the longlists already tipped us off to most of the “surprises” here, I’m happy to see Julianne Moore finally nominated alongside her “The Kids Are All Right” co-star Annette Bening in a serious Best Actress race. Pete Postlethwaite’s posthumous nomination for “The Town” (his first from BAFTA, unbelievably, and the only one for Ben Affleck’s film) is shamelessly rooted in sentiment, but happily, it happens to come for a striking mini-performance anyway.

    While it was inevitable that Brit hit “The King’s Speech” would lead the field, it’s nice to “Black Swan” close behind with 12 nods, including mentions for its contemporary production and costume design.

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  • ‘King’s Speech’ continues to coin it

    It may have lost six of its seven bids at last night’s Golden Globe Awards, but there was consolatory news for “The King’s Speech” in the box office receipts — on both sides of the Atlantic. Nabbing the #4 spot Stateside after upping its screen count was a handy achievement, but it’s in its home country that the film has attained jaw-dropping phenomenon status.

    Not only did the royal biopic hold onto the top spot at the UK box office, comfortably elbowing superhero flick (and US #1) “The Green Hornet” into the runner-up spot, but it actually exceeded its opening-weekend gross, taking £4.72 million compared to “just” £3.52 million a week ago. (Figures filched from the trusty Charles Gant’s Twitter feed.)

    Tom Hooper’s film is currently sitting on a total haul of £10.72 million (roughly $16.69 million, if you like your maths in American English). For the sake of comparison, that’s more in a fortnight than “The Social Network” took in its entire UK theatrical run. Crazy.

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  • Five things I learned from the Golden Globes

    Appropriately enough for the occasion, I watched last night’s Golden Globe awards in a celebratory alcoholic fog (the night having coincided with a friend’s birthday) so thick it took most of today to sleep it off — hence the apologetically late posting.

    My memory of the evening’s finer details is therefore about as clear as, say, Ricky Gervais’s, though I do recall cheering so manically for “Carlos”‘s win in the TV Miniseries category (even if the film is, by its director’s own admission, a work of cinema) that I inadvertently tossed red wine in my hair. That, and so many green dresses on screen that I briefly wondered if the collected stylists of Hollywood had been roped into a particularly gratuitous product placement scheme for the weekend’s box office champ.

    The awards themselves, meanwhile, were both well-judged and helpful, tying (or at least tidying) up a few loose ends remaining on the circuit — and even allowing me some minor bragging rights for calling the widely unfancied Paul Giamatti. (For an hour, at least, until my inevitably doomed prediction of a Best Picture upset missed outright — awards season giveth, and it taketh away.)

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  • Golden Globes: who will win, and who should

    My predictions for tonight’s Golden Globe awards have been in black-and-white over at Gold Derby since the nominations were announced, but I thought I’d make them clear on these pages — along with a note or two on my personal favorites in each category.

    The Globes may get a lot of flak from journos and pundits, but even if they’ve failed to steer the Academy’s eventual Best Picture selection for five of the past six years, they can hold more sway than most people like to credit them with — particularly in races with no clear frontrunner yet. (Case in point: Rachel Weisz’s widely unexpected win at the 2005 Globes, which certainly set the narrative for the rest of season.)

    Bottom line, however: they’re a fun evening, and should be taken as such. I may or may not be Twittering on the evening’s developments — though it seems only right to have a few drinks in solidarity with the stars, so that plan may fall away. Meanwhile, check out my picks after the jump, Kris’s here… and those of many far wiser pundits over at Gold Derby.

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  • “Quentin, I’ve got webbed toes.”

    Dear Academy, please nominate Jacki Weaver for Best Supporting Actress. Quite aside from her terrific performance in “Animal Kingdom,” as long as she continues to be this delightful in person, it’d be nice to have her on the publicity circuit for a few more weeks. From David Poland’s Hot Blog:

  • ‘Social Network’ rules BFCA Critics’ Choice Awards

    I’m sure Kris is having entirely too good a time at the post-awards party to huddle over a computer screen — perhaps he’ll have some insider perspective to add later — so let’s run through a couple of the most salient points for now.

    If you need to be told “The Social Network” triumphed in the top categories, well, welcome back from your spiritual retreat in the far reaches of Nepal. I hope you’re well rested. Interesting to see the film’s sway extending to the Best Original Score category, where Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross very coolly upset Hans Zimmer — though “Inception” fans will be pleased to note the film’s impressive haul elsewhere in the techs.

    No surprises whatsoever in the acting races, though I’m pleased to see Melissa Leo holding on to her early-season momentum in the supporting actress race; Hailee Steinfeld had to settle for the Best Young Actor prize.

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  • IFC takes on ‘Brighton Rock’

    Way back in the autumn festival phase, it seemed like Rowan Joffe’s update of “Brighton Rock” might have some kind of awards presence, as praise trickled out of Toronto for breakout star Andrea Riseborough. Things went deadly quiet around the film, however, when no US distributor stepped forward.

    A month later, when it had its homeland premiere at the London Film Festival, I learned the reason for the silence: Joffe’s film is a badly botched attempt to recast Graham Greene’s stark moral thriller as a swinging youth nostalgia piece. I might have let my disappointment show a little in my review:

    [S]carcely a potential avenue for error has been left unexplored here, as the film’s self-conscious (and technically over-egged) noir stylings bristle against a clearly overworked script that fidgets to no effect with Greene’s plotting, with a cast that never coalesces floating somewhere amid the wreckage.

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  • Lubezki opens up on ‘Tree of Life’

    If, as is the accepted (if hardly certain) wisdom, the Academy makes up their debt to Roger Deakins next month, it’s tempting to speculate that 2011 could be the year for another shamefully unrewarded lenser: Emmanuel Lubezki.

    The ace Mexican DP, whom pretty much everyone but a majority of AMPAS voters agrees was robbed of the win for “Children of Men” in 2006, earned a nomination for his first collaboration with Terrence Malick on “The New World” — and expectations are already off the charts for their second teaming. (Do I need to give the title?) But while we know, from our glimpses of the loooong-delayed film thus far, to expect some lush imagery, this LA Times interview with Lubezki suggests they’re not making things easy for themselves.

    It seems Malick and Lubezki dispensed with traditional “coverage” of actors, instead taking a more intuitive approach.

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  • The lost contenders of ‘For Colored Girls’

    Thanks to a crippling flu attack during the film’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it UK release, I was late in getting round to Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” — a rumored Oscar spoiler for about seven-and-a-half minutes back in the autumn, before Lionsgate got curiously tentative about publicizing it.

    A paucity of press screenings meant several key online voices missed the film entirely; they haven’t been that generous with awards screeners, either.

    Given Perry’s history, and the steamroller-subtle nature of the film, the studio can’t have been expecting a critical hit — though it found some prominent supporters anyway, chief among them Manohla Dargis. I heard from a number of people I trust that the film, a free adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s beloved 1970s “choreopoem,” was messy and misjudged, while others acknowledged that it retained an inelegant brute power.

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  • On the costumes of ‘The Fighter’

    When the Costume Designers’ Guild announce their nominees next week, I have no doubt that Mark Bridges’ work on “The Fighter” will show up in their contemporary category — not really the right classification for a film whose lurid early-1990s threads are as meticulously era-specific as any of 2010’s more lavish period spectacles. (If you didn’t cringe and/or chuckle at the first sight of Christian Bale’s balloon pants, chances are you weren’t alive in 1991.)

    Either way, it remains perhaps my favorite costuming of the year, even if the Academy is unlikely to agree. That said, they’ve been warming to more modern work in recent years — with nods for the high-gloss couture of “The Devil Wears Prada” and the cheap 70s duds of “Milk” — even if corsets and hoop skirts invariably eke out the win.

    This year’s Costume Design field, however, is lean enough that a contemporary nominee or two could squeeze in.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Jawellnofine

    (Updated Oscar predictions here.)

    It’s six years this month since I left Johannesburg for the sodden streets of London, so it could just be that I’m in a commemorative mood, but the endlessly useful South African idiom “jawellnofine” (mostly redundant translation: “yes… well… no… fine”) has been on my mind rather a lot this week. It’s a versatile Frankenstein term that, like a more finely calibrated “whatever,” can express everything from dispassionate approval to passive-aggressive indifference to reluctant acceptance — or any combination of these at once.

    How am I currently feeling about the Oscar season, you ask? Jawellnofine.

    It’d be churlish for me to complain too vigorously about the current state of the race. After all, five of the films currently sitting in the “most likely” pile for a Best Picture nomination — “The Fighter,” “Black Swan,” “The Kids Are All Right,” “The Town” and “Winter’s Bone” — placed in my own Best of 2010 list last week: hardly an unhappy stat, even if my and the Academy’s respective Top Tens will have only a 20% overlap.

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  • ‘Enter the Void: Bigger, Longer and Uncut’

    Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void,” which was finally released in autumn after lying in distribution limbo since Cannes 2009, is not exactly a film that inspires widespread agreement.

    My own 2009 review of the French enfant terrible‘s deranged follow-up to “Irréversible” dismissed it as “fatuous… deploys an arsenal of tricked-out technique and a colossal running time of 163 minutes to make the startling revelations that death is, like, sad, and that drug-dealing is generally not a good idea.”

    Kris, by contrast, couldn’t have landed any further from me on this one, going so far as to name the film in his Top 10 of the year. It’s that kind of conversation-piece picture, and we’re grateful for them — and even more grateful now that IFC has announced plans to re-release the film theatrically in the form its maker intended.

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  • Foreign Oscar watch: Israel, Italy, Germany and Sweden

    A couple of months ago, I compiled some critical thoughts on five films in contention for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, ranging from the hotly fancied (France’s “Of Gods and Men”) to the longest of long shots (Estonia’s “The Temptation of St. Tony”). It was intended to be the first in a series of posts spotlighting as many of the 65 submissions as I could get my hands on — but alas, in the chaos of the season, my plans got away from me.

    Now, with exactly a week to go until the Academy announces the nine-film shortlist on 19 January, it’s time to belatedly return to the category. At this late stage, I’ve still seen only a third of the competing field, with a handful of unseen screeners patiently piled atop my DVD player. Sadly, two of the films most heavily tipped for a nomination — Canada’s “Incendies” and Denmark’s Golden Globe-nominated “In a Better World” — are not among them.

    I have, however, caught up with the submissions of four countries frequently favored by the Academy. My viewing, however, only confirmed the relative scarcity of obvious heavyweights in what is always an unpredictable race.

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  • DGA announces documentary nominees

    Two days after revealing their feature film nominees, the Directors’ Guild of America has named their five selections in the documentary category. It’s a list that mostly lends credence to the presumed Oscar frontrunners, with one notable exception: Chinese director Lixin Fan, whose lavishly acclaimed debut “Last Train Home” was left off the Academy’s 15-title documentary shortlist, to the dismay of many a critic.

    Fan isn’t the only first-timer to crack the DGA’s list: war journalist Sebastian Junger and photographer Tim Hetherington made the cut for their gutsy foray into filmmaking, “Restrepo.” Notably, if not surprisingly, absent is “Exit Through the Gift Shop” director Banksy — the Guild was never likely to tap a celebrity outsider who won’t even identify himself, and I suspect the Academy will have similar reservations.

    Meanwhile, note the three overlaps between the PGA and DGA lists, “Client 9,” “Waiting for Superman” and “Inside Job,” with only the last-named film also scoring with the Writers’ Guild. Just in case you hadn’t spotted the one to beat. Check out the nominees at The Circuit.

    [Photo: National Geographic Entertainment]