In Contention

Author: Guy Lodge

  • DGA doc nominees include ‘Cove,’ ‘Anvil,’ ‘Agnes’

    Agnes Varda in The Beaches of AgnesMuch like last week’s announcement in their top category, most of the usual suspects are present in the Guild’s documentary lineup.

    I’m particularly pleased to see French New Wave veteran Agnès Varda continue to rack up a healthy precursor tally; at this rate, she’s on course for her first Oscar nomination. (She’d be breaking an Oscar age record in the process, too.)

    Of course, the DGA and the Academy don’t enjoy nearly same hand-in-hand relationship in Best Documentary as they do in Best Picture. Not since 1991 have the two agreed on a winner (Barbara Kopple’s “American Dream”), and even then, it was in separate years.

    Meanwhile, a measly three of the last 17 DGA doc winners were also Oscar nominees. (It’s not much better in reverse: only seven of the last 18 Oscar winners also scored DGA nods.)

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  • Steve Pond on Oscar’s “broken” song category

    Kate Hudson in NineThe Best Original Song race gets an awful lot of stick for its wonky voting system and sometimes questionable musical judgment — problems that have lately converged to scupper the hopes of many well-regarded contenders, with last year’s snub of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wrestler” raising particularly widespread ire.

    I’ll start, however, by saying a few words in the category’s favor. The odd egregious snub aside, the standard of competition has improved notably in recent years — some have complained that the Academy no longer recognizes familiar chart hits with the regularity that they did in the 1980s, but their musical range has expanded. The last decade has seen them embrace hip-hop, world music and folk, including several numbers that were imaginatively integrated into the cinematic fabric of certain films.

    Do they still nominate the occasional stinker? Sure. But by and large, we’re in a better, more adventurous place than we were 10 years ago, when dreary MOR balladeering from the likes of Phil Collins, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston ruled the race.

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  • BAFTA Rising Star nominees

    Tahar Rahim in A ProphetBAFTA has just revealed the five young actors in contention for this year’s Rising Star Award, the winner of which will be determined by a public vote. Previous winners include James McAvoy, Eva Green, Shia LaBeouf and Noel Clarke.

    The 12-member jury charged with deciding this year’s nominees was chaired by Oscar-winning producer David Parfitt (“Shakespeare in Love”), and I must say that — blinding snub for Katie Jarvis aside — they’ve chosen quite well.

    I’m surprised, though not unpleasantly so, that “Avatar” fever didn’t secure Sam Worthington a mention. Instead, Kristen Stewart gets the populist nod.

    Given that it’s a publicly voted award, Stewart is the one to beat, too — I highly doubt the fanbases of the other four can compete with the texting “Twilight” hordes, unless “A Single Man” star Nicholas Hoult’s popularity from TV’s “Skins” carries him over.

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  • Streep at NYFCC Awards

    Courtesy of Jeff Wells, here’s Meryl Streep accepting Best Actress from the New York Film Critics’ Circle. Streep should really offer tutorials in award acceptance — the format of a critics’ award dinner allows her to ramble more than at more formal ceremonies, but her wit and sincerity hits home every time. I loved this zinger:

    I’d like to thank Sony and Amy Pascal for sending me to REAL Paris, unlike Fox on “The Devil Wears Prada,” who sent me Midtown…

  • R.I.P. Éric Rohmer

    Eric RohmerIt is with great sadness that I read of the passing of Éric Rohmer, a titan of French cinema who remained creatively active almost to the end of his 89-year life.

    Boasting arguably the mellowest, most droll filmography of his New Wave brethren, the esteemed writer-director (and former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma) delighted in the literary and sociological possibilities of dialogue — he’s largely responsible for the “talky” tag that clings to French art film today, but that’s a virtue rather than a debit.

    Few writers in film could define a character through the patterns and concerns of their speech as precisely as Rohmer, his sphere of influence extending from Woody Allen to any number of figures in current American indie cinema.

    If you’re as keen on his work as I am, of course, you don’t need to be told this. If you haven’t yet made his acquaintance, begin with any of his Six Moral Tales (the most well-known of which, “My Night at Maud’s,” garnered him his lone Oscar nomination for writing), which mine rich humor and psychological insight from a series of anecdotal narratives.

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  • “Nothing that’s shitty is going to make $100 million.”

    Jennifer LopezJennifer Lopez, in an Elle interview, on why “Maid in Manhattan” and “Monster-in-Law” are actually “very layered movies.” Oh, Jennifer.

    I’m rather enjoying Lopez’s recent rewriting of her career history. Perhaps you caught her statement last week on her supposedly scandalous Oscar snub for “El Cantante”:

    I feel like I had that [Oscar worthy role] in ‘El Cantante,’ but I don’t think the Academy members saw it … It is a little bit frustrating. When the Oscars were on, I had just given birth on the 22nd, and the Oscars I think were a day or two later. I was sitting there with my twins — and I couldn’t have been happier — but I was like ‘How dope would it have been if I would’ve won the Oscar and been here in my hospital bed accepting the award?

    Just like those neglectful Academy members, I never saw the film, so I’m not judging. But the days of her really rather excellent work in “Out of Sight” feel very distant, don’t they?

  • Narrow their options

    Well, this is one way of getting around public indifference to a film. Snapped in London’s West End by Ultra Culture:

  • For the completists

    Better late than never. A reader emailed me to remind us that we never mentioned the winners of the Satellite Awards, which got lost in our holiday hiatus last month. Just in case you’ve been on tenterhooks, they’re after the cut — with “The Hurt Locker” again dominating, and a unique choice for Best Actress.

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  • Mea culpa, ‘1974’

    Andrew Garfield in Red Riding: 1974With a resurgence of talk about the “Red Riding” trilogy of films ahead of their U.S. release next month, I’ve been reminded of a critical omission I made in my Best of 2009 list a few weeks back.

    As I wrote when the films premiered on British TV around 10 months ago, they are wholly cinematic works and deserve to be considered (and distributed) as such — but because they were introduced to me as television, my mind keeps skipping over them when I think back on the year in film.

    All of which is terribly unfair on Julian Jarrold’s “1974,” the first of the three tonally and structurally separate films, which I described as follows in the spring:

    Following Andrew (”Boy A”) Garfield’s swaggering rookie journalist as he investigates the link between three missing girls and rapidly finds himself in over his head, it’s an astonishingly textured, sensory film, awash in dusk-coloured light and a gorgeous Northern soul soundtrack, that recalls “Zodiac” in its measured narrative approach and even shades of “Twin Peaks” in the alluring strangeness cast over its very ordinary locale.

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  • African-American critics’ group splits after voting scandal

    Gabourey Sidibe in PreciousYou may well disagree, but I’ve never really understood the point of awards bodies that define themselves along racial lines.

    Perhaps I’m missing the point, but when an African-American critic like Armond White is head of the NYFCC, or a film like “Precious” is receiving mainstream awards attention, the existence of a group like the African-American Film Critics’ Association seems a little self-marginalizing to me.

    In any case, The Carpetbagger’s Melena Ryzik reports that the stature of the group has taken a knock after a number of AAFCA members left its ranks to form a rival group, the Black Film Critics’ Circle. This follows dissent within the group after AAFCA president Gil Robertson IV allegedly rigged the Best Actress vote to deny top vote-getter Gabourey Sidibe, in favor of “American Violet” star Nicole Beharie.

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  • Cahiers, Sight & Sound offer decade lists

    Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning in The War of the WorldsThe recent barrage of end-of-decade collectives has probably been enough to sate the appetite of even the keenest listoholic — but having consciously avoided most such lists while I worked on my own, I’m still wallowing in them.

    So I can’t resist mentioning out the lists of two of the world’s leading film magazines — the eccentric, über-cinephilic Cahiers du Cinéma, and my own favorite, Sight & Sound. The Cahiers list is exactly what you’d expect from them, with a cineaste’s twisted valentine to Hollywood atop the pile, while its one concession to populist commercial cinema is a typically perverse choice:

    1. “Mulholland Drive” (David Lynch)
    2. “Elephant” (Gus van Sant)
    3. “Tropical Malady” (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
    4. “The Host” (Bong Joon-ho)
    5. “A History of Violence” (David Cronenberg)
    6. “The Secret of the Grain” (Abdelatif Kechiche)
    7. “West of the Tracks” (Wang Bing)
    8. “War of the Worlds” (Steven Spielberg)
    9. “The New World” (Terrence Malick)
    10. “Ten” (Abbas Kiarostami)

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  • Ebert on ‘Avatar’ logic

    Sam Worthington in AvatarRoger Ebert is on fire in Slate’s vastly entertaining The Movie Club feature — it’s all good stuff (as are the contributions from other critics), but his discussion of his plot issues with “Avatar” had me nodding in relieved agreement. I thought I was the only one wondering this:

    Assuming that an avatar can live with no connection to the mother ship, what does it think with? When its human master dies, who is upstairs? Does the mind of Jake Sully transfer? I have an eerie feeling I may once again have missed a crucial plot detail, but if Jake Sully’s mind can be inside his avatar, then that really is Michael Keaton inside the snow man in Jack Frost.

    His statement on the potential “Avatar” vs. “The Hurt Locker” Oscar battle after the cut.

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  • WEEKLY WRAP: Guilds, lists and disqualifications

    Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker• In a big week for precursor announcements, the DGA nominations were the biggest — and least surprising.

    • The PGA, meanwhile, found room for all three of the year’s hot sci-fi titles in its nominee slate.

    • “The Hurt Locker” triumphed at the National Society of Film Critics Awards, the first film in 12 years to sweep the three top critics’ prizes.

    • Over five days, I counted down my personal Top 50 films of the decade that was.

    • And we’re not done listing: Chad also gathered his 20 favorites of 2009.

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  • Small victories

    Veeeeery small. And silver medals rather than victories. But hey, kudos to the Central Ohio Film Critics Association for (almost) going where no one else will go:

    Best Actress: Carey Mulligan, “An Education”
    Runner-up: Charlotte Gainsbourg, “Antichrist”

    Best Cinematography: Robert Richardson, “Inglourious Basterds”
    Runner-up: Anthony Dod Mantle, “Antichrist”

  • Mo’Nique: “The performance is done.”

    Mo'NiqueIt’s interesting that David Carr’s interview with Mo’Nique in today’s New York Times appears on the main page of the paper’s website — there isn’t much more to say about her, shall we say, passive campaign for “Precious,” but it’s clearly become one of the dominant stories of the awards season.

    Not that she needs much of a boost, but I think this interview helps her cause: where some industry wags have made a shrill fuss over the actress’s reluctance to play the publicity game, portraying her as egotistical or ungrateful, with Carr she put forth her perspective in very rational, matter-of-fact terms:

    “Anytime I’ve been given an award, it has been because of the performance; what else goes into it?” she said, appearing genuinely mystified. “Look, it makes me appreciative any time someone says they may want to honor your performance. I’m appreciative at any talk in reference to any award, but there’s not much I can do about it now. The performance is done.”

    “I also have this show called ‘The Mo’Nique Show’ where I tape six shows a week. I have twins who are 4, so I have babies, I have an amazing husband and a son who’s 19. What I can participate in I’m more than happy to.”

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  • How relevant is Kathryn Bigelow’s gender?

    Kathryn BigelowAfter yesterday’s DGA announcement, there was a number of comments (some ecstatic, some more cynical) made about its demographic makeup of the nominees being more diverse than usual.

    Where most years see white men fill every space on the ballot, this year features both a female and a black contender (a gay man, at that) in the lineup — the seventh and first in DGA history, respectively.

    Trivia value notwithstanding, is this important? Does it mean that their artistic achievements should be measured any differently from those of their white, male peers?

    Of course not. “The Hurt Locker” would be as stirring and distinctive a film had it been directed by someone with testicles — and, though some will say otherwise, I think it would still have caught critics’ and awards voters’ fancy. A great movie is a great movie is a great movie, after all.

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  • ‘Fish Tank’ poster

    A few days ago, we posted the new U.S. trailer for Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank,” which opens in New York next week before rolling out later. I didn’t mind it as much as some, though it didn’t capture the film’s unusual rhythmic and sensual qualities. But I do like prefer this simple, declarative poster that was released at the same time.

    You know by now that I adore the film, which I thought not merely one of the best of 2009, but of the entire decade. I’ll be posting my interview with the remarkable Michael Fassbender in the coming week. (Thanks to Stale Popcorn for the image.)

    Fish Tank

  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The crafts of ‘The Hurt Locker’

    Jeremy Renner in The Hurt LockerWhen it comes to extravagant Hollywood blockbusters, we’ve become accustomed to the phrase “the money is up on the screen” – delighting in the filmmakers’ own delight in the tools and tricks at their disposal.

    “The Hurt Locker,” however, invites a very different kind of wonder. An independent with a budget of a mere $11 million, it is nonetheless more kinetic action film than many a title coming in at 10 times the price, immersing the audience in the sights, sounds and sensations of Iraq combat. The money is on the screen, sure, but the screen belies the money.

    For this, the already multi-laurelled Kathryn Bigelow shares the credit with a highly resourceful and imaginative team of craftsmen, variously bringing mainstream studio-picture experience and indie-sector knowhow (or both) to the table.

    I talked to cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, editors Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, sound designer Paul Ottosson and special effects supervisor Richard Stutsman about their contributions to this humble spectacular.

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