In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • THE LONG SHOT: Critical mass

    Guy’s updated Oscar predictions here.

    Just one week on from the first formal awards announcements of the season, the Oscar season may still be taking its first steps, but my personal interest in the precursor trail is nonetheless set to peak this very weekend.

    That, of course, is when the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association weigh in with their selections of the year’s best, showing up the likes of the nominee-naming Washington group as the pretenders they are, while classing up the season with some unapologetically idiosyncratic film smarts.

    Or so we hope – for as much as the major critics’ groups often delight us by throwing caution (and Oscar-soothsaying cred) to the wind with rebellious left-field picks, they are equally capable of falling dully into line behind pre-anointed favourites. I was recently chased by Tom O’Neil’s resurrected Gold Derby site for my NYFCC and LAFCA predictions, and while I’m as game as anyone for a spot of light-hearted, consequence-free punting, the irony of the exercise still nagged away at me: the day I predict either group’s set of winners accurately is the day they’ll cease to matter to me.

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  • Bring on spring already

    Okay, I know we’re all jacked up for the next few months of awards-watching, but would anyone mind if we just fast-forwarded straight to May? I’ll miss the Oscars, but frankly, the winter freeze is getting me down, the movies have petered out, and then I read a Cannes-teasing tweet like this from the ever well-informed Cédric Succivalli. Here it is, short and (very) sweet:

    Almodovar, Despentes, Kar Wai, Malick, Ramsay, Sorrentino, von Trier on their way to Cannes ’11.

    Cédric is a reliable source on all matters Croisette-related — so this would appear to cement the LA Times’s report yesterday of a “likely” Cannes debut for “Tree of Life,” though the film’s festival-shadowing US release date of May 27 was already something of a clue. In that LAT piece, meanwhile, Steven Zeitchik writes that Fox Searchlight plan to market Malick’s long-delayed opus as an “event” befitting its summer status.

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  • FIRST-HALF FYC: Best Supporting Actor

    Only two weeks into my new feature and I’m already a day late — apologies. My laptop (now cured, at least until its next mood swing) will graciously accept the blame.

    If you missed last week’s introductory instalment, the game is a simple one. In the run-up to nomination day, I’m picking five outstanding contenders in each major category in films from the first half of the 2010 release schedule: a period repeatedly neglected by voters in favor of newer, shinier delights. We started with Best Supporting Actress — during which I learned that a lot of you really don’t like Taylor Swift, but you still all saw “Valentine’s Day” — and this week we fill in the male half of the equation.

    Keen as I am on all five performances I dredged up from the January-to-June wilderness, I was somewhat disappointed to note a very similar template forming to last week’s list: one French breakthrough talent, one blockbuster high point, even one star from a particular film. All accidental, I assure you… but to think I complain about “slot” mentality in the Oscar-analysis game.

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  • ‘King’s Speech’ rules BIFAs, ‘Ghost Writer’ sweeps EFAs

    Apologies for getting to both these announcement so late: my laptop is currently (perhaps terminally) hospitalized, so posting is rather spotty on my end. The timing is particularly bad, since this past weekend’s awards activity included two major European ceremonies that I should have been all over.

    That said, if you paid even vague attention to the nominee lists for the British Independent Film Awards and the European Film Awards when they were announced, you probably could have guessed how they panned out without much help from me.

    In both ceremonies, the nomination leader emerged easily as top dog. With the BIFA voters throwing fewer curveballs than usual for them, “The King’s Speech” won five of its eight bids, including Best British Independent Film and three of the four acting races. It was left to scrappy sci-fi sleeper “Monsters” to disrupt the yawnfest, as debut helmer Gareth Edwards pipped Tom Hooper to the Best Director prize. (He lost Best Debut Director the same night, incidentally — such is the spread-the-wealth logic of juried awards.)

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  • Predicting the National Board of Review awards

    Even more so than the Indie Spirit nods that landed yesterday, the National Board of Review honors are seen by many as the season’s official starting gun — though there are just as many who would question their right to such significance.

    The NBR gets stick on an annual basis for a range of middlebrow sins: their weakness for soft literary awards bait, their unwavering loyalty to Clint Eastwood (watch “Hereafter” aggravate everyone by showing up in tomorrow’s announcement) and their odd concessions to broad studio fare. (They’ll never live down the inclusion of “The Bucket List” — over “There Will Be Blood,” to boot — in the 2007 Top 10.)

    But as ill-advised and frequently obvious as their choices can be, the NBR can occasionally throw us a real curveball: nobody saw Campbell Scott’s Best Actor win for “Roger Dodger” coming in 2002, while the Best Picture hopes of “Quills” began and ended with its out-of-step triumph at the 2000 awards. And remember that if anyone can resist a seemingly sure thing, it’s these guys: last year, this was pretty much the only stop that sweepers Christoph Waltz and Mo’Nique missed on the awards track all season.

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  • FIRST-HALF FYC: Best Supporting Actress

    It’s an Oscar complaint as unfailingly annual as telecast overlength and foreign-language category blunders: with the season so geared towards the glut of prestige titles released in the year’s final quarter, standout contenders from the mist-shrouded months of spring and the previous winter have to fight that much harder to be heard – that is, if anyone is listening at all.

    Year after year, numerous early-seen gems slip through the cracks as critics and voters alike rush to crown never, shinier attractions. With that in mind, welcome to First-Half FYC: a new weekly feature at InContention, wherein I’ll shine a light on the worthiest Oscar possibilities (or impossibilities) from the first six months of the 2010 release calendar.

    Each week, a different major category will be covered with alternative ballot of five potential nominees – some serious, others playful, some widely celebrated, others largely buried. All, however, are films or individuals that would breathe some fresh air into their respective races.

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  • ‘Winter’s Bone’ leads Indie Spirits with 7 nods

    Well, quelle surprise. I’ve been saying for months now that Debra Granik’s solemn Ozark thriller is — even more so than the sunnier, starrier “The Kids Are All Right” — this year’s annointed indie cause in the Oscar race, and this only cements that belief. The film’s impressive showing this morning, coming on the heels of last night’s Gotham Awards triumph, has me more confident than ever that the tiny pic is set to repeat the trajectory “Precious” made last year from Sundance champ to Best Picture nominee.

    A number of its companions in the Best Feature race could join in there too, as the Spirits largely favored big-name fare in the top categories: “The Kids Are All Right” took second place in the nomination count, with five, while “Black Swan” and “Rabbit Hole” (which clearly just missed the cut in the feature race) are just behind with four apiece.

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  • Listen to Christina Aguilera’s ‘Bound to You’ from ‘Burlesque’

    I’ve already stated my qualified admiration for Steven Antin’s “Burlesque,” likely the only live-action musical angling for a spot in this year’s Best Original Song race. Or two spots, given that we already featured Cher’s deliriously kitsch Diane Warren power ballad “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me” a couple of weeks ago.

    Today, it’s Christina Aguilera’s turn to bust her lungs with a nine-octave belter from the film that she herself co-wrote — so while we’re unlikely to be mentioning her name much in the Best Actress race, Xtina could yet add “Academy Award nominee” to her résumé.

    The song is something of an anomaly in the gaudy, thrust-heavy production: a stately, classically arranged torch ballad that sounds rather like an offcut from Aguilera’s retro-styled 2006 album “Back to Basics.” (It’s more likely, however, to be an offshoot of her 2010 release “Bionic,” in which the song’s co-writers Sia Furler and Samuel Dixon had a heavy hand.)

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  • Sight & Sound names ‘Social Network’ best of 2010

    It’s been five years since an American film topped the annual poll of venerable British film mag Sight & Sound, and even longer since a major studio picture took the honor. So congratulations are in order to “The Social Network,” which received the most votes across the selection of 85 international critics invited to submit their top five films of 2010, following in the footsteps of “Brokeback Mountain,” “Hidden,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” “Hunger” and “A Prophet.” (The last-named film appears again in this year’s list, thanks to the votes of critics who came to it later.)

    That David Fincher’s film should have won out in a poll traditionally dominated by world arthouse cinema suggests it could well be the most-favored title in next month’s avalanche of US critics’ awards, positioning it as the discerning voter’s alternative to more milquetoast bait in the Oscar race. “The King’s Speech,” of course, doesn’t even come near the magazine’s Top 12 (usually a Top 10, extended due to ties); indeed, of all films even remotely in the Oscar conversation, only “Another Year” and “Winter’s Bone” (surfacing in some interesting places, that one) feature.

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  • REVIEW: “Burlesque” (***)

    (We don’t usually post reviews after the US release, but this one got snarled up in my hard drive earlier this week and I didn’t want to waste it. I’ve noticed a number of readers posting thoughts on the film in yesterday’s Cinejabber post, so look on this as your “Tell us what you thought of Burlesque’” post into the bargain.)

    “There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure,” a music-critic friend once told me. “Just songs that work and songs that don’t. And any song that works is a pleasure.” He may have been talking about pop music (and justifying the expense spent on some rather dubious concert tickets), but the sentiment is just as true of cinema: there are enough wholly joyless bad films out there that one needn’t feel remorse for liking those that sparkle a little.

    Or a lot, as in the case of Steven Antin’s sweetly stupid and gleefully tatty backstage musical “Burlesque,” a kind of cinematic party horn that unfurls for nearly two full hours, pausing only occasionally for wheezily abridged plot extension. Heroically spry performances adjoin rancidly inept ones, peppery one-liners encircle bat-brained narrative turns, even the music veers from choice cabaret to hoary album offcuts – and this gurning, flailing whole is held together with the irrepressibly sincere let’s-put-on-a-show enthusiasm of a high-school drama teacher given a dream budget. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that Antin is just out of shot throughout, wielding a glue gun and a spare bag of sequins.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: When you’re strange

    (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.

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  • ‘Brighton Rock’ trailer

    I’m not sure who at The Guardian called Rowan Joffe’s new adaptation of “Brighton Rock” a “masterpiece,” as this new trailer boasts they did — I like to think they were talking about Graham Greene’s still blood-fresh source novel instead. From where I’m standing, Joffe’s directorial debut, which I reviewed out of the London Film Festival last month, stands as one of the year’s most bewildering disappointments: from its fundamental misread of the text to its tonally scattered ensemble to its egregiously aggressive score. Still, it apparently found enough fans to scoop four BIFA nominations, so there’s no accounting for taste. I’d almost lay money on a 2011 Oscar nod for Best Art Direction, too — that is, if a US distributor ever steps forward. It hits UK screens in February, just in time for BAFTA eligibility.

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  • AMPAS pays tribute to Jeremy Thomas

    It’s not as formal an honor as one of the Governors’ Awards they dished out last week, but nonetheless, Thursday will find the Academy still in a laudatory mood as they cross the Atlantic to celebrate the career of boundary-busting British producer Jeremy Thomas. AMPAS is holding a Thomas tribute evening in London, with Keira Knightley, Stephen Frears and Cannes festival director Thierry Fremaux among those taking part.

    It’s heartening to see the Academy acknowledge a globally-minded career that has largely been dedicated to shepherding milestone films most of their voters wouldn’t touch with a bargepole: Nicolas Roeg’s “Bad Timing,” David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and “Naked Lunch,” Nagisa Ôshima’s “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” Jonathan Glazer’s “Sexy Beast” and so on.

    He’s still busy, to: two of his productions, “Essential Killing” and the superb “13 Assassins,” were in competition at Venice in September, while 2011 will see him renew his partnership with Cronenberg for the eagerly awaited (by me, at least) “A Dangerous Method.”

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  • 15 films shortlisted for documentary feature Oscar

    Cue the annual outcry over what titles didn’t make it — judging from the Twitter reaction, this year’s most-mourned snubee is the Chinese critical darling “Last Train Home.” (I’d join the pitchfork-wielders, but I haven’t had an opportunity to see the film yet.) More surprising, however, is the omission of such widely fancied contenders as “The Oath” and “A Film Unfinished” — yes, folks, hell is experiencing a cold snap and the Academy snubbed a Holocaust documentary.

    Beyond that, hoewever, most of the perceived frontrunners are present, including “Inside Job,” “Waiting for Superman,” “Restrepo,” “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer” and “Waste Land.” Joining them on the list, I’m happy to say, is “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” which I suspected would fall foul of the Academy’s usual resistance to crowdpleasing pop-culture docs. (The likes of “Catfish” and “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” took that bullet instead, unfortunately.)

    At this stage, I’m afraid I’ve seen only a third of the shortlist — from which Banksy’s shape-shifting, satirical art study is comfortably my favourite. (Come on, Academy: aren’t you a little curious to see who will show up if you nominate him?) “Inside Job,” however, plainly remains the film to beat. Full list after the cut.

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  • Weinstein lawyers up on MPAA

    Well, we all knew Harvey Weinstein wasn’t going to take that head-scratching (and commercially damaging) ‘NC-17’ rating for “Blue Valentine” lying down. (While still generating maximum publicity from the unfortunate situation, natch.) The Weinstein Company today announced that it has gathered “a formidable legal team” to challenge the MPAA’s decision — and while they’re about it, they’re contesting that ‘R’ rating for “The King’s Speech” too.

    And Weinstein’s lawyers mean business: Bert Fields, the attorney overseeing the “Valentine” appeal, goes so far as to say the extreme age restriction “violates [the company’s] right to freedom of speech under the state and US constitution.” Alongside the legal speak, the press release issued today by TWC also includes this heartfelt, well-reasoned plea from star Michelle Williams:

    The MPAA’s decision on Blue Valentine unmasks a taboo in our culture, that an honest portrayal of a relationship is more threatening than a sensationalized one… Mainstream films often depict sex and violence in a manner that is disturbing and very far from reality. Yet, the MPAA regularly awards these films with a more audience friendly rating, enabling our culture’s desensitization to violence, rape, torture and brutality. Our film does not depict any of these attributes. It’s simply a candid look at the difficulties couples face in sustaining their relationships over time. Blue Valentine opens a door for couples to have a dialogue about the everyday realities of many relationships. This film was made in the spirit of love, honesty and intimacy. I hope that the MPAA will hear our pleas and reconsider their decision.

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  • Portman on ‘Black Swan’ eroticism: “Extreme, not raunchy”

    When it comes to Oscar campaigning, sex can be something of a double-edged sword. We all know that the Academy has often responded well to attractive young actresses baring flesh for their art: Kate Winslet was the most recent beneficiary, but Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Holly Hunter and Jane Fonda are among the other actresses who spun open onscreen sexuality into Oscar gold.

    That said, while raw sex scenes don’t necessarily offend the Academy’s delicate sensibilities, voters can nonetheless shy away from performances that delight in their own kinkiness: recent snubs for the likes of Naomi Watts in “Mulholland Drive” and Maggie Gyllenhaal in “Secretary” suggest that Oscar favors solemnly tasteful kitchen-sink eroticism over more heightened depictions of sexual pleasure. (After all, it wasn’t Diane Lane’s hot love scenes that earned her that unlikely Best Actress nod for “Unfaithful”; it was that guilt-ridden reaction shot on the train ride home.)

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  • First look at Jennifer Hudson in ‘Winnie’

    Thanks to reader Nicolas Mancuso for tipping me off to this extended promo trailer for “Winnie,” Darrell James Roodt’s Winnie Mandela biopic with Jennifer Hudson in her first dramatic headlining role. I was sceptical of this project when it was announced a year ago, and I’m afraid the trailer has only exacerbated my fears. A big-name screen treatment was always likely to smooth over some of the uglier wrinkles in Ms. Mandela’s personal and political life, but this looks to be a shameless whitewash job: seeing this troubled, charismatic criminal (and arguable murderess) given the fawning violin treatment, complete with laudatory intertitles like “Her Courage” and “Her Strength,” leaves a very sour taste indeed. (More, and the embedded trailer, after the cut.)

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  • Palm Springs fest to honor Portman and Firth

    The Palm Springs International Film Festival may claim independent thought in the rationing of their performance awards, but rather like Santa Barbara, any West Coast fest that takes place in prime awards-season territory can’t claim to be free of the Oscar campaign circuit.

    After all, when their press release states that the two actors being honored with their Desert Palm Achievement Awards (essentially Best Actor and Actress) “deliver Oscar-quality performances,” they’re effectively admitting to being another cog in the machine.

    So it is that for the last three years running, their male Desert Palm Achievement Award winner was gone on to scoop the Best Actor Oscar. These folks know what they’re doing. Try and conceal your astonishment, then, that this year’s honoree is Colin Firth, the unanimously agreed-upon frontrunner (and to my mind, lone contender) for the Oscar. “Colin Firth brings a regal versatility to each of his roles, but his portrayal of King George VI in his latest film, ‘The King’s Speech,’ is extraordinary,” says PSIFF director Harold Matzner.

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