In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • Ruiz’s ‘Lisbon’ takes Louis Delluc prize

    Well, here’s an awards announcement a million miles away from “The Social Network” — the Louis Delluc Prize, the single most prestigious award in French cinema. (Yes, loftier than the César Awards.) And I do mean “single”: awarded to one film from a shortlist of eight by a jury of French journalists and industry types, it’s one of the simpler ceremonies on the block.

    While last year’s award went to the ubiquitous crossover hit “A Prophet,” this year’s jury (headed by Cannes festival president Gilles Jacob) threw a slight curveball: the award was handed this morning to Raul Ruiz’s epic Portuguese-French production “Mysteries of Lisbon,” a dreamy 272-minute period puzzle piece that I was thoroughly bewitched by at the London Film Festival. (Rebecca Zlotowski’s “Belle Epine” received debut filmmaker honors.)

    The film beat out one hell of a heavyweight shortlist, listed after the cut.

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  • 2010: At the Movies

    This time last year, we featured a nifty video summation of 2009 in film by one Zack Young, and today, he’s been good enough to hook us up with the 2010 edition. Nice work, Zack.

  • ‘Social Network’ leads Chicago critics’ nods, wins in Detroit

    I’ll give you a moment to recover from the shock. [Moment.] There, may I continue? Of the B-list critics’ awards, the Chicago Film Critics’ Association attracts more eyeballs than most, largely because it’s Roger Ebert’s stomping ground — though the list of nominees they announced this morning suggests a lot of autopilot voting with a few welcome flashes of inspiration.

    “The Social Network” tops their list with eight bids, including slightly less obvious mentions for Armie Hammer and DP Jeff Cronenweth, while their matchy-matchy Picture and Director lists include such ubiquitous titles as “Black Swan,” “The King’s Speech,” “Winter’s Bone” (nice get for Debra Granik there) and, perhaps less predictably from a critics’ group, “Inception.”

    Surprises are in short supply in the acting categories–though it’s nice to see some respect for Lesley Manville after a rough week on the precursor trail–and in Best Foreign Language Film, where a group of actual film critics somehow sees fit to nominate “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” alongside the likes of “Mother” and “A Prophet.”

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Follow the leader

    [Updated Oscar predictions here.]

    Hey, have you heard of this movie called “The Social Network?” You should probably check it out. It’s about Facebook and stuff and it’s supposed to be really good. So good, in fact, that it’s managed to tame the single most argumentative species in the animal kigdom, The Lesser Spotted Film Critic, into silent agreement. Of the 12 American critics’ groups to dish out awards so far, 11 have given their top honor to the film. (“Winter’s Bone,” you say? Get with the program, San Diego.)

    The enthusiasm for the film, of course, extends beyond the sometimes soundproof critics’ chamber, as less distinguished media collectives like the HFPA and the BFCA have voiced their approval – while this morning, give or take a Supporting Actor snub, the film passed its first industry award test with two key Screen Actors’ Guild bids. Expect the Directors’, Producers’, Writers’ and Editors’ Guilds to follow suit in the New Year.

    So, we can basically tie a ribbon around Oscar’s neck and hand him over to Scott Rudin and David Fincher now, can’t we? After all, against all its on-paper disadvantages, “The Hurt Locker” was in a similar position this time last year, and it didn’t budge, did it? (Indeed, it didn’t even unite the critics’ groups to this extent – of the 12 awarding bodies I mentioned above, only five selected Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq actioner last year.) Scarcely anyone has a word to say against the film, so let’s sit back and let the sweep wash over us, right?

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  • ‘Fighter’ and ‘King’s Speech’ lead SAG nominations

    Well, we got ourselves a surprise or two, after all. If you predicted Hilary Swank’s out-of-nowhere Best Actress nomination for “Conviction,” go out and buy yourself a congratulatory drink. (While you’re at the bar, buy a commiserative one for Nathaniel Rogers too.)

    I doubt the nomination will launch her into the Academy’s five (unless story-mongers really are desperate to see another round in the Swank vs. Bening grudge match), but it does demonstrate how up for grabs that fifth slot is. Lesley Manville and Michelle Williams, the ball is still in your court.

    Nothing on the list matches that nomination for sheer unexpectedness, but I suspect a fair few people didn’t see “Winter’s Bone” star John Hawkes coming in the Best Supporting Actor category — much less at the expense of the season’s nominal frontrunner, “The Social Network.” I wrote in my predictions last night that I wasn’t sure how fully SAG would warm to the film’s young, non-insider cast: while I predicted a snub for Jesse Eisenberg, it was actually Andrew Garfield who got the shaft.

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  • Defending LAFCA

    There’s been an awful lot of online sniping at the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association for having the audacity to look beyond the obvious Oscar fodder and reward deserving foreign-language performances by Kim Hye-ja and Niels Arestrup (not to mention Olivier Assayas for Best Director).

    David Poland described the choices as an “overreach,” Jeff Wells resorted to his usual “dweeb” jabs, while tired accusations of “snobbery” and “contrarianism” did the rounds.

    I was going to express my annoyance at this narrow take on things, but since I pretty much anticipated the issue in last week’s Long Shot column, I held back. Thankfully, Variety critic and LAFCA voter Justin Chang, responding to a comment by Scott Feinberg in a Hollywood Elsewhere thread, has neatly said everything I wanted to say on the matter.

    Chang’s elegant defense after the cut.

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  • Make your SAG predictions

    Now that most of the major critics’ groups have had their say, tomorrow begins the second phase of the precursor season, as the Screen Actors’ Guild makes the first of this year’s industry award pronouncements.

    I always feel a twinge of dread about the SAG nomination list — frequently more middle-of-the-road than the critics’ picks, though with odd flashes of peer affection for unlikely veterans and character actors, they have a way of reducing the pool of Oscar hopefuls rather aggressively. More often than not, boredom ensues: last year, 19 of the 20 SAG individual performance nominees went on to repeat at the Oscars.

    Suffice to say, a snub from these guys stings more than one from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but Marcia Gay Harden will forever remain a beacon of hope to the SAG-ignored: 10 years ago, a diss from the Guild (and indeed from virtually every other precursor, save the New York critics) didn’t stop her taking the golden boy home for “Pollock.”

    Predictions after the jump.

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  • ‘The Tree of Life’ trailer

    It’s heeeeeeere. Honestly, I’m not sure I even want to watch this, so I’ll leave it to you guys to comment. Click on the image below to watch it at Apple, or check out the embed after the jump.

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  • TIME fuels the ‘Social Network’ fire

    You’ve probably heard by now that Mark Zuckerberg has been named TIME magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year, a selection that couldn’t dovetail any more neatly with “The Social Network”‘s currently roaring Oscar campaign if the film’s publicists had engineered it themselves.

    After all, what’s really being acknowledged here: Zuckerberg’s own achievements over the year, or the raised public profile granted him by the success of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s biopic? The time to laud Zuckerberg for the creation of Facebook, no longer the hippest social network on the block, was surely several years ago; this is a testament to the media influence wielded by a single movie.

    In turn, the film gets to borrow a measure of the prestige and currency associated with this annual honor: how often can an Oscar contender claim to be about the reigning Person of the Year? Academy voters concerned with the capital-I Importance of their choices can hardly ask for more than that. Well done, everybody.

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  • First Berlinale selections revealed, ‘True Grit’ to open fest

    Of all the festivals I attended this year, Berlin was perhaps the one with the most covert significance. At the time, it seemed critics were foraging for scraps amid a dismal competition lineup and a confusingly scattered selection of sidebars — and yet so many of the films I caught there (and some that I didn’t) are still with me at the year’s end.

    Prizewinners like “The Ghost Writer” and “How I Ended This Summer” continue to grow in stature in Europe, Sundance follow-ons like “Winter’s Bone,” “The Kids Are All Right” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop” are in the thick of the Oscar conversation, and you probably all know by now how I feel about the 2010 Berlinale’s most buried world premiere, “The Illusionist.”

    In other words, there’s little way of telling what treasure might be gleaned from the festival lineup until you’re actually there. That said, although that tantalizing, briefly-floated possibility of the Berlinale snagging “Tree of Life” didn’t pan out, this morning’s freshly unveiled list of the fest’s first eight official selections offers smaller notes of intrigue.

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  • Sports Illustrated celebrates ‘The Fighter’

    Vanity Fair and Entertainment Weekly covers may occasionally factor into the Oscar conversation, but here’s a rag we don’t normally discuss much during the season. In a neat bit of cross-media hype, Sports Illustrated has declared “The Fighter” the “sports movie of the decade” (rather a young decade, really, but they mean the last 10 years), and has granted it the cover of their “Year in Sports Media” issue. Also featured, apparently: “Secretariat” and “127 Hours.”

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  • FIRST HALF FYC: Best Screenplay (Original and Adapted)

    For the third episode in our new Oscar-season feature, we take a recess from the acting races and look instead to the screenplays that roped the actors in to begin with. If you’re new to the feature (or even if you aren’t), the game is simple: railing against awards voters’ usual bias towards late-year releases, we’re highlighting a ballot’s worth of notable contenders in each major category, from films released in the first half of the year.

    I’ve been doing the categories on a one-by-one basis, but today I’m doubling down and covering both the Original and Adapted Screenplay races. This is partly in order to squeeze in everything I want to cover before Oscar nomination morning, but also partly because one of the categories proved less than rewarding on its own: starting with the adaptations and finding the pickings so slim, I decided that a beefier post was to be created from twinning the categories.

    That’s not to dismiss the films and screenplays I’ve selected, even the least of which offer substantial points of interest — and for which I still have more affection than some of the bigger names being  tossed into the Oscar ring. Indeed, the films in this list that don’t entirely click for me are no less (and often more) intriguing than those that do.

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  • ‘King’s Speech’ leads Globe nods, ‘True Grit’ shut out

    True to form, the Golden Globe nominations are a buffet of the good, the bad and the unconscionably hideous — with perhaps a touch more emphasis than usual on the third of those this year. I refer, of course, to those largely mortifying Comedy/Musical races, where HFPA voters solved the lack of obvious contenders this year by giving in to their randiest star-shagging urges.

    Welcome to the Best Picture race, “Red,” “The Tourist” and (pauses to cross himself and say three Hail Marys) “Alice in Wonderland.” Or, you know, not. Congratulations on your double-shot of well-deserved Best Actor nominations, Mr. Depp. Or, you know, not. Sorry, Sally Hawkins, we liked you just fine in “Made in Dagenham,” but Angelina Jolie was obviously working harder in her movie. Or, you know, not.

    Still, even as we strike down upon the HFPA with great vengeance and furious anger, I’m feeling pretty chipper about some things: reviled as it is by many, “Burlesque” is the kind of grandly gaudy goof-off that I’m happy to see livening up the category, while my biggest air-punch of the morning came when my actress of the year Emma Stone’s name was read out for “Easy A.”

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  • The rehabilitation of David O. Russell

    As “The Social Network” continues to steamroll its way through the season’s first act, and antsy analysts begin to look elsewhere for a bit of conflict in the race, I find myself wondering what kind of sneak attack David O. Russell’s “The Fighter” might yet launch in the Best Picture field.

    The film, which goes into wide release on Sunday, is perhaps the most rousing title in the Oscar mix, and if audiences take to it as an unexpected amount of critics have, it could supplant “The King’s Speech” as the warmer, scrappier alternative to the chilly precision of David Fincher’s precursor-guzzler.

    Earlier in the year, “The Fighter” seemed to face one sizable obstacle to Oscar glory — the thorny reputation of Russell himself, whose ugly meltdown on the set of “I Heart Huckabees” has unfortunately became the stuff of YouTube legend, despite being the kind of private professional lapse that only his collaborators should have been party to. Between that and the addled (and finally aborted) production of his his political satire “Nailed,” Russell didn’t really seem a viable contender for much industry backpatting.

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  • First Oscar presenters announced

    With the big night still over two months away, it’s rather early for us to be thinking of Oscar telecast details, but you can bet the show’s frantic producers aren’t feeling quite so calm about it all. As we speak, Rolodexes and little black books are being frantically rifled through as the list of presenters is drawn up, and today, we were given our first taste of what manner of star power will be joining hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco (still doesn’t sound right, does it?) on stage.

    No surprise that reigning Oscar champs Sandra Bullock and Jeff Bridges will be on hand, presumably to present the lead acting awards — the question is whether the producers will stick to the awkward “Logan’s Run”-style five-way presenting scheme they’ve used, to sharply diminishing effect, the last two years running. In the 2008 ceremony, they had the previous winners present their own category: Bridges’ likely repeat nomination this year should prevent that, though it’d be fun to watch him eulogize himself.

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  • Guessing the Globes

    [UPDATE: Musical/Comedy predictions amended following tip from readers that “Nowhere Boy” has correctly been entered as a drama.]

    A fundamentally silly exercise it may be, but predicting the Golden Globe nominees is more fun than most such rituals. This is largely because, year in and year out, we’re guaranteed at least a couple of heroically nutso jawdroppers (Tom Cruise for “Tropic Thunder,” anyone?), and trying to anticipate these means the increasingly tight circle of contenders is fleetingly broken.

    (MCN’s Gurus o’ Gold, including Kris, took a stab last week.)

    Of course, we mostly have the Comedy/Musical categories to thank for that, given how they’re equally liable to show up the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s shameless stargazing (hey, remember their scarily unbreakable crush on Renee Zellweger?) tendencies and their occasional flashes of inspiration (hey, remember that awesomely unexpected showing for “In Bruges” two years ago?).

    More musings, and a full list of predictions, after the jump.

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  • ‘Social Network’ rules Boston critics’ awards

    Okay, let’s lead with the really interesting news. By handing their Best Supporting Actress award to Juliette Lewis for her barnstorming, dialogue-jiggering hammery in “Conviction” (I mean that in wholly admiring terms, by the way), the Boston Society of Film Critics officially take the title for the coolest go-your-own-way pick of this admittedly young season. Is this win a one-night-only deal, or is Lewis a fun new name to add into the Oscar mix? The latter, I’m hoping.

    Beyond that, it was back to regular business, as “The Social Network” furthered its reputation is this year’s critical darling by sweeping the top categories — Best Picture, Director, Actor and Screenplay, as well as a citation of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score. Jesse Eisenberg toppled Colin Firth by a single vote to claim yet another handy precursor: that Oscar nomination is looking ever more comfortably in his grasp.

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  • Predict the LA and NY critics’ awards

    Tomorrow brings out the big guns in the critics’ awards derby, as the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Circle unveil their picks, with the New York Film Critics’ Circle following on Monday. (I believe the less prestigious but often interesting New York Online crix are announcing tomorrow too.)

    I offered some thoughts on the significance of these awards in this week’s Long Shot column. As for predictions, Kris and I both offered our best guesses in the top six categories over at Tom O’Neil’s Gold Derby site, so check ’em out there.

    I seem to be out on a limb with my LAFCA Best Picture prediction (though at least Sasha Stone thinks I’m onto something) — after last year’s overwhelming consensus among the critics’ groups, I can’t help sensing at least one of the majors will want to assert their individuality.

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