In the ranks of major filmmakers never to have received so much as an Oscar nomination, David Cronenberg sits pretty high on the list. Though it has its critical champions, his 2012 effort “Cosmopolis” certainly isn’t going to change that — though in a Movieline interview marking the film’s DVD release, the veteran Canadian auteur says it doesn’t concern him one bit: “It’s not sour grapes… The people who are releasing the movie get excited, they want you to do more, and you understand it because the awards can maybe get more people to see the film. This, on its face, is a good thing. However, it is all bullshit, it is all annoying and it is all very problematical. But it gives people stuff to write about, gives structure, we understand. But I won’t be watching any of the awards shows.” [Movieline]

Dean Napolitano looks at the “disappointing” absence of any Asian films in the Academy’s shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film — and notes that none Asian film has been nominated since “Departures” in 2009. (In the latter case, however, he really means East Asian.) [Wall Street Journal]

Tom O’Neil considers the Best Picture contest, which he deems “the most fickle Oscar race [he’s] seen in years” — and it’s barely got going yet. [Gold Derby]

“I wanted to live another life and many lives at once.” A lovely interview with “Amour” star Emmanuelle Riva. All digits crossed for a Best Actress nod next week. [New York Times]

From Ezra Miller in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” to Diane Kruger’s Sapphically-inclined Marie Antoinette in “Farewell, My Queen,” Nathaniel rounds up 2012’s best LGBT characters in cinema. [Towleroad]

Also, thanks to Nathaniel for pointing out this neat range of “Django Unchained” dolls. Why didn’t I know about these before Christmas? [The Film Experience]

After reporting a few days ago on various Oscar voters unhappy with the e-voting process, Scott Feinberg gets the thoughts of a range of members, including Morgan Spurlock and Oren Moverman, on the situation. [THR]

Ewan McGregor was among the arts-related honorees (including veteran UK film critic Philip French) in the Queen’s New Year’s honors list. [Variety]

Ian Sandwell examines the European productions, from “Skyfall” to “The Intouchables,” that lit up the box office at home and abroad. [Screen Daily]

A nifty annual feature at Awards Daily: a simulated Oscar ballot featuring all the year’s eligible films. Vote and see how much the AD collective differs from the Academy’s choices next week. [Awards Daily]

And finally, Jay-Z is lending his talents to the score for Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby.” Say what you will, but I couldn’t be more psyched to finally see this. [The Guardian] 

“Argo” won top honors with the Phoenix Film Critics Society, which announced nominees two weeks ago. Kathryn Bigelow took the Best Director prize for “Zero Dark Thirty,” however. Daniel Day-Lewis and Jessica Chastain took top acting honors, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Anne Hathaway filling out the supporting ranks. Check out the full list of winners below and as always, keep track of it all at The Circuit.

Best Picture
“Argo”

Best Director
Kathryn Bigelow, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln”

Best Actress
Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Supporting Actor
Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Master”

Best Supporting Actress
Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables”

Best Adapted Screenplay
“Argo”

Best Original Screenplay
“Moonrise Kingdom”

Best Cinematography
“Life of Pi”

Best Costume Design
“Anna Karenina”

Best Film Editing
“Argo”

Best Original Score
“Skyfall”

Best Original Song
“Skyfall”

Best Production Design
“Moonrise Kingdom”

Best Visual Effects
“Life of Pi”

Best Animated Film
“Wreck-It Ralph”

Best Documentary
“Searching for Sugar Man”

Best Foreign Language Film
“The Intouchables”

Best Ensemble Acting
“Moonrise Kingdom”

Best Live Action Family Film
“Life of Pi”

Overlooked Film of the Year
“Safety Not Guaranteed”

Best Stunts
“Skyfall”

Breakthrough Performance on Camera
Quvenzhané Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Breakthrough Performance Behind the Camera
Benh Zeitlin, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Best Youth Performance in a Lead or Supporting Role (Male)
Tom Holland, “The Impossible”

Best Youth Performance in a Lead or Supporting Role (Female)
Quvenzhané Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

When asked this season what film I think will win Best Picture, I’ve said “Les Misérables” since about September. Obviously for a stretch that was sight-unseen. Then the film, and others, came along. And I stuck with it. Largely I had to defend the call against those who couldn’t see a film that is perceived as “divisive” (and boy are the detractors LOUD) winning the top prize, and they had a fair enough point.

The only thing is, I see passion for the film and the nay-sayers are a bit marginalized. Critics and industry people view this film differently. And those who love the film LOVE it. You can’t ignore that kind of embrace. Few films this year really have it. And it’s particularly important in a season that seems more up-for-grabs than any in recent history.

But as more and more members have finally caught up with the majority of the season’s offerings in the past few weeks, I’ve made sure I paid attention to one thing in particular in my conversations: consensus. Consensus and general agreement wins you Oscars. But many films have inherent marks against them. There are really only two films, though, that tend to be enjoyed, adored, respected and liked all the way across the board, and one of them has taken shape as the potential taker of the cake. That film is “Argo.”

The other film, by the way, is “Silver Linings Playbook,” but I don’t think it has the proper weight to carry through to a win. The Weinstein Company will put up a valiant fight, as they should. Gunning for three in a row is noble and they have another crowd-pleaser. But it’s not my bet.

When I rank these films here and at the Gurus o’ Gold collective at Movie City News, I approach it from the standpoint of “most likely to be nominated.” And passion drives that consideration more than it does in the vote for the win, given the process by which votes are counted. So “Les Mis” is still on top for me in that regard. Its champions are in love, moved, rocked by the film. But when all those number twos and number threes start to pile up in the vote for Best Picture during phase two, “Argo” is likely to pop up more often than “Les Misérables,” and that will obviously be key.

None of this is an epiphany. Guy has been picking “Argo” for a while for these same reasons. Many readers have, too. But it didn’t settle for me until I really got a (tangible) load of how much it is holding strong with Academy members. And boy is it ever.

When the rest of the season’s offerings came along, it seemed like Ben Affleck’s film had been elbowed out of the way. There were shiny new things for the press to play with and chew on and prop up. But it’s crucial to point out that “Argo” is the one nipping at the heels of “Zero Dark Thirty” for critics’ Best Picture prizes this season, not “Lincoln,” not “Silver Linings Playbook,” and obviously not “Les Mis.” It’s still here. It still comes up in every single conversation with members. It still feels like the thoroughbred it was out of the gate in Telluride.

“But ‘Argo’ can’t win anything else,” some say. Well, not true. It can win Best Director; Ben Affleck is well-liked and is seen as resurrected by his filmmaking career, while 2010’s “The Town” is perceived in many circles as a film that should have gone farther. It can win Best Adapted Screenplay; it’s a tough race with “Lincoln” and “Silver Linings Playbook” in there but Chris Terrio can easily take the prize with his “The Ends of the Earth” turning on actors and filmmakers behind the scenes right now. It can win Best Supporting Actor, believe it or not; Alan Arkin is in the same boat as Tommy Lee Jones, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert De Niro in that they’ve all won before, so it’s a level playing field. And it can win Best Film Editing; William Goldenberg will likely be duking it out with himself (and co-editor Dylan Tichenor) for the work that went into “Zero Dark Thirty” for that award.

Speaking of Kathryn Bigelow’s film, more members haven’t seen the film than I would have thought at this point. And a lot of ballots have already been turned in. That can also be said of films like “Amour” and “The Impossible.” The truncated schedule has sent things into a tizzy and that, by the way, is another thing currently in “Argo”‘s favor: it’s been visible for a long time. Early fall launches ended up being fortuitous in a schedule such as this. That’s also true of films like “Flight” and “Skyfall.”

Phase two is always a different beast and anything can happen. This year it will be uniquely interesting because it will be a massive six weeks rather than the usual four. It could get ugly, too, given how tight the race is. But “Argo” has survived the tempest so far and there’s no reason to think it can’t survive a little bit longer.

So as the year draws to a close, I would be tempted to move my chips — which I haven’t been overly vocal about, except by way of defense — over to Ben Affleck’s thrilling, crowd-pleasing, unassuming and well-regarded third feature film. But nothing’s a safe bet. “Les Misérables” could still win. “Lincoln” could win. It’s still a race, as much as it ever was.

And that’s why this year is so exciting.

Check out my updated predictions HERE and, as always, see how Guy Lodge, Greg Ellwood and I collectively think the season will turn out at THE CONTENDERS.

http://players.brightcove.net/4838167533001/BkZprOmV_default/index.html?videoId=4913282132001

And so it is that I’ve left it until the last day of the year to add my Top 10 list to the already teetering; I don’t think I’ve ever left it so late before, and it certainly wasn’t calculated on my part, though there’s something pleasingly tidy about using New Year’s Eve as an occasion to post a list that, in some ways, looks forward as much as it looks back. (Speaking of looking forward: in a break from tradition, the list is accompanied by a video countdown this year, so if you want my curious accent guiding you through, just press play.) 

This is the space where I’m supposed to say it’s been a good/bad/indifferent year for film, though I’m increasingly uncertain of how to answer that question. That’s partly because of the way I compile my list: given that I occupy the no-man’s-land territory of a European critic on an American site, release calendars are hard to keep up with and even harder to stick to, so I opt instead to include any new film I saw in 2012, whether as a theatrical release, on the festival circuit or somewhere in between.

Yes, that means there’ll be some films in my Top 10 you may not have had an opportunity to see yet — but I hope you’ll see that not as irritating exclusivity, but as planting a flag for films you’d be wise to look out for in 2013. As such, my cinematic year tilts differently from how it would if I were a ticket-buying film fan; my first impulse, as I compare the following list to last year’s edition, is to say this year’s hasn’t quite matched the standard of 2011. Then again, many of my favorites from last year’s ended up as highlights of the 2012 release calendar. (At the end of this Top 10, I’ve included an adjusted list of the year’s best US theatrical releases which is frankly better.) Take it as you will — the bottom line is, it’s all great stuff, in any year.

I further doubted my initial estimation of the year’s quality when I began whittling down the list to a scant 10 titles — well over 30 titles made the initial shortlist, and I’m as surprised as anyone about some of the titles I’ve omitted. I’m made a point of not using the word “best” in titling this list, and there’s a reason for that: I’m pretty sure some of the films that didn’t make the cut are more accomplished and complete than some of the films that did — yet somehow, when push came to shove, they didn’t prompt quite the same degree of attention or affection.

It was a heart-led process, yet it was still heartbreaking leaving out some titles: I’m suspicious of any professional critic who can’t find more than 10 films to love in 365 days. I fully intend to follow the example of some of my HitFix colleagues in following up this list with a second 10 — from “Holy Motors” to “Pitch Perfect,” I’m too devoted to the runners-up to let the year go without bidding them a formal farewell.

Still, here are the 10 left standing. They’re a rum bunch, and some of the survivors surprised me as much as they may surprise you — but as the more I consider them together, the more I see unexpected throughlines emerging: broken love stories, haphazard families, fragile power ladders. I could continue, but it’s time to let the film’s speak for themselves. You can count down with me in video format above, or scroll through it in more traditional form below. Either way, enjoy.  

#10

“MIRROR MIRROR”
Directed by Tarsem Singh

Fairytales are back in fashion in Hollywood, so we can safely expect a lot of humorlessly “dark” reimaginings and smartass revisionism – but hopefully some will follow the lead of Tarsem”s joyously silly spin on Snow White, the lightest and loveliest of three tellings of the same tale this year. Though its tongue is firmly in cheek (chiefly that of Julia Roberts, lending some contemporary diva snap to the Wicked Queen figure) its modern-day interjections don’t come at the expense of old-school romance and wonder — with jaw-dropping costumes by the late, great Eiko Ishioka providing much of the latter. As he proved with last year’s rapturously daft Hellenic spectacle “Immortals,” Tarsem remains one of the industry”s most extravagant fantasists, and he”s conjured genuine child”s-eye magic here. (Full review here.)

#9

“LORE”
Directed by Cate Shortland

The long-awaited second feature from “Somersault” director Cate Shortland was Australia”s submission for the foreign-language Oscar and that, combined with the all-too-unfairly dreaded words “Holocaust film,” may have led some to expect granola-flavoured awards bait. But this bracing, sensual coming-of-age story surprises and disconcerts us by adopting a different victim’s perspective: that of a brittle, brainwashed Nazi teenager, abandoned by all known authority figures and struggling to make sense of what remains in the dying days of WWII. Balancing the title’s character’s slow confrontation of her prejudices with her natural sexual awakening — drawn with the same crisp candor as in her debut — Shortland offers us no easy redemption or simple sympathies; if not seen with new eyes, this is history felt with fresh skin. (Longer review here.) 

#8

“TAKE THIS WALTZ”
Directed by Sarah Polley

Another sophomore feature from a vibrant female auteur, Sarah Polley”s messy, sexy, excitingly divisive “Take This Waltz” is a relationship drama as expressive and sweat-stained as “Away From Her” was subtle and snowbound. (If the mind-melting fug of summer has ever been more tangibly depicted on screening, I don’t recall the film.) Smartly dissecting the breakdown of a seemingly ideal marriage with even-handed warmth and an unexpectedly dayglo palette, Polley’s brazenly poetic script makes refreshingly adult admissions to the irrational, even unreasonable nature of human desire. Michelle Williams and a revelatory Seth Rogen are superb in what one might call an electric-blue valentine, and you”ll never hear “Video Killed the Radio Star?” quite the same way again. All that, and it’s not Polley’s only great film of 2012. (Longer review here.)

#7

 “OUR CHILDREN”
Directed by Joachim Lafosse

A far more sombre study of a household in crisis, Belgian auteur Joachim Lafosse”s devastating “Our Children” is still seeking a US distributor. Someone needs to fix that. Sadly inspired by a true-life case, this emotional body-blow of a film tells the story of a young wife and mother driven to the unthinkable by a combination of post-partum depression and less diagnosable domestic oppression; beginning at the unspeakable end, Lafosse patiently builds the unforgiving tension of a thriller as he traces a tragic family history from the flush of first love to far more smothering forms of intimacy; Émilie Dequenne, a richly deserving Cannes prizewinner this year, may deliver the performance of the year as a woman watching all psychological escape routes close before her eyes. It demands to be seen, but maybe not on a first date. (Longer review here.)

#6

“SISTER”
Directed by Ursula Meier

The third foreign-language Oscar submission on this list (and the one to crack the shortlist), Ursula Meier”s “Sister” has prompted understandable critical comparisons to the work of the Dardenne brothers — though I’d actually take The Kid With The Skis over “The Kid With a Bike.” Sharp, spry and sneakily moving, with a staying power that belies its modest form, this study of working-class survival on the moneyed ski slopes of Switzerland is impressive enough before it subtly morphs into a genuinely surprising family melodrama, making sense of that cryptic title. In a strong year for child performers, no newcomer struck a brighter spark than Kacey Mottet Klein as the modern-day Artful Dodger at the film’s center; master DP Agnes Godard’s camera is equally attuned to the finest contrasts in social standing and the white-on-white shifts of sun on snow. (Longer review here.)

#5

“MAGIC MIKE”
Directed by Steven Soderbergh

A number of the year”s best studio releases sounded pretty disposable on paper, and none more so than  Magic Mike.” Even with Steven Soderbergh”s name attached — this could have been “Full Frontal”-weight, after all — a male-stripper comedy starring Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer promises little more than highly caramelized man-candy. But that”s reckoning without the keen social and sexual politics of Reid Carolin”s loose, witty script, Soderbergh”s briskest, breeziest direction in ages, and one of the year”s most complete ensembles: the resurgent Matthew McConaughey’s has received some deserved awards notice, but it’s Tatum (in conjunction with his lightning turn in “21 Jump Street”) who cements his status as a real-deal movie star. Somehow bleak and bouncy in equal measure, the film may delve under the overbronzed skin of latter-day masculinity, but if the skin”s all you”re here for, you won”t be disappointed either. 

#4

“BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO”
Directed by Peter Strickland

Peter Strickland”s ingenious meta-horror film is something of a festival underdog: unaccountably turned down by certain European majors, it premiered quietly at Edinburgh only to amass a devoted cult of followers on the UK critical scene. (The US gets to join in next year.) I question some festival programmers’ savvy: giving the oft-sidelined art of sound design its richest, most inventive showcase since De Palma’s “Blow Out,” Strickland’s film immediately joins the canon of essential movies about the movies. Toby Jones, never better, is as a meek British sound engineer hired to work on a Z-grade Italian horror movie, only to find his mind swiftly consumed by the film – or possibly the other way round. It’s ostensibly an homage to the likes of Dario Argento, but everyone from Hitchcock to Coppola to Antonioni to Lynch can be glimpsed in this celluloid hall of mirrors. (Full review at Variety.)

#3

“IN THE HOUSE”
Directed by François Ozon 

I realize I haven”t discussed this one much on these pages. That’s partly because I caught it at the tail-end of a tiring London Film Festival (and there’s plenty of time to talk ahead of its 2013 release), and partly because I hadn”t realized until compiling this list just how far this dizzyingly clever comedy of manners had crept under my skin. It is, first and foremost, a story about storytelling, as a bored schoolteacher becomes intrigued by, and eventually complicit in, a precocious pupil”s voyeuristic homework essays; as the boy”s salacious tales, viewed through alternating eyes, gradually move to the center of this spider-web narrative, the psychosexual stakes increase and fictional boundaries blur. Ozon’s best films to date have engaged either in arch camp or whispery human study; equal parts Hitchcockian thriller, French bedroom farce and literary brainteaser, “In the House” combines those two modes, and may well be a career peak.

#2

“THE MASTER”
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson 

The latest opus from Paul Thomas Anderson entered 2012 as my (and many others’) most anticipated film of the year, and exits as my (and many others’) most debated – whether with friends, colleagues or even myself. At once abrasive and exquisitely elliptical, the film has been interpreted by some as a meditation on man”s animalistic nature, by others as the latest chapter in the filmmaker”s ongoing study of father-son power struggles. It may well be both those things — and much else besides — but from where I was sitting, “The Master” played out as the year”s most complex love story, with Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman performing a brilliant pas de deux as two men undone by mutual need and fascination. Which one is The Master? Is it someone else entirely? I look forward to changing my mind across multiple return visits. (Full review here.)

#1

“TABU”
Directed by Miguel Gomes

From a recondite love story to a rapturous one: if my runner-up arrived on a cloud of anticipation, my #1 dropped out of clear blue sky. 10 months after its Berlin premiere, Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes’s unclassifiable blend of contemporary absurdist comedy, swooning colonial-era romance and cinephile’s bingo game still feels like something of a mirage, too beautiful to be entirely real. In modern-day Lisbon, a dying elderly woman reflects on her steamy extra-marital affair in an unnamed African country half a century ago; but no description of the plot conveys the reach and resonance of Gomes”s vision, or the poetry of his verbal, visual and aural language, which incorporates everything from silent cinema to Phil Spector tunes; it”s a love letter to the movies, but also to love itself, and my favourite film of 2012. (Longer review here.)

And there we have it. To recap:

1. “Tabu”
2. “The Master”
3. “In the House”
4. “Berberian Sound Studio”
5. “Magic Mike”
6. “Sister”
7. “Our Children”
8. “Take This Waltz”
9. “Lore”
10. “Mirror Mirror”

Finally, for the purists who prefer their 2012 lists unsullied by unreleased festival fare, here are my top 10 U.S. theatrical releases of the year — featuring a number of returning favourites from last year’s list. It may well be a stronger collection of films.

1. “Tabu”
2. “The Master”
3. “Elena”
4. “Damsels in Distress”
5. “Alps”
6. “Post Mortem”
7. “Magic Mike”
8. “Wuthering Heights”
9. “Sister”
10. “The Snowtown Murders”

(Images: Relativity Media, Music Box Films, Magnolia Pictures, Peccadillo Pictures, Adopt Films, Warner Bros. Pictures, Artificial Eye, Cohen Media Group, The Weinstein Company)

As 2012 prepares to fade and the ball primes itself for another drop a few blocks away, it’s time to look back once more on the year that was. Well, not “once more.” The season is still pushing ahead and we won’t be finished with it until February 24, but as far as I’m concerned, this annual post is my bow on what the year had to offer.

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I thought 2012 was a very fine year for movies indeed. And across a wide spectrum, at that. Studio product, indie filmmaking, documentaries, animation, it was all vibrant and robust. And while boiling things down to “best” or “better” might seem reductive, it’s unavoidable. Everyone has their favorites. So, with that having been said, I’ve rounded up MY favorites throughout the Academy’s various categories and a couple I’ve added myself over the years.

You can of course revisit my thoughts on the year in the top 10 podcast and column, but these superlatives mark, for me, the cream of the crop and the richest elements of the year. I hope you enjoy. Feel free to offer up your own choices in the comments section, if you’re ready to do so, and have a happy and safe New Year.

Best Picture: “The Grey” (Runner-up: “Moonrise Kingdom”)
At this point I imagine my feelings are well on the record. No film made me feel as deeply as Joe Carnahan’s vision of man versus not only the elements, but himself…

Best Director: Joe Carnahan, “The Grey” (Runner-up: Wes Anderson, “Moonrise Kingdom”)
…and so I see no reason not to chalk up that vision here, as well. Carnahan filled out his cast brilliantly and tuned it finely. Most of all, he found real heft in the emotional elements of the story and brought it well above the ghetto of a genre film.

Best Actor: Denis Lavant, “Holy Motors” (Runner-up: Liam Neeson, “The Grey”)
No one really comes close to Denis Lavant’s mad, manic routine at the center of Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” this year. With his many faces, all of them brave and committed, he is has been truly slighted along the circuit.

Best Actress: Emmanuelle Riva, “Amour” (Runner-up: Quvenzhané Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”)
The greatest performance of the year was as brave as Lavant’s but all the more grounded in a stoic sort of authenticity. The physicality of Emmanuelle Riva’s work in Michael Haneke’s “Amour” is often overlooked, as well. It’s such a precise, complete portrayal.

Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Master” (Runner-up: Garret Hedlund, “On the Road”)
I side with the critics’ favorite in the supporting ranks this year, beginning here with the other side of a coin in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” Philip Seymour Hoffman is charming, mysterious, a bit dangerous, even, and consistently bewitching. Though speaking of alluring, kudos, too, to an underrated piece of work from Garrett Hedlund, capturing one of the most magnetic personalities in all of literature.

Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables” (Runner-up: Sally Field, “Lincoln”)
And again with the supporting ladies, though it’s been such a pathetically thin year for them. Anne Hathaway had precious little time to deliver in “Les Misérables,” but she more than makes it count.

Best Adapted Screenplay: “Lincoln” (Runner-up: “The Grey”)
Tony Kushner wrangled a chunk of a dense volume into a brilliantly realized throughline in “Lincoln,” filling it with an array of characters and offering plenty for them to chew on. His playwright sensibilities were tapped perfectly for a full, lush script that yielded one of the year’s best films.

Best Original Screenplay: “Looper” (Runner-up: “Moonrise Kingdom”)
Rian Johnson is one of the great screenwriters of his generation and he proved the old adage that character matters in genre as much as it ever did. In “Looper,” he weaves what ends up being a brilliant character study with plenty of high concept razzle dazzle to accompany it.

Best Cinematography: “Skyfall” (Runner-up: “The Master”)
Digital never looked so gorgeous as Roger Deakins shot the hell out of Sam Mendes’ “Skyfall.” From neon-streaked Shanghai (shot on a London set, no less) to lantern-lit Macau to foggy Scottish highlands, the film oozes rich imagery. High marks, too, to Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s dense 65mm work on “The Master.”

Best Costume Design: “Moonrise Kingdom” (Runner-up: “Anna Karenina”)
I found these two films standing out in the design arenas this year (flip-flopped in the production design field). But the wardrobe of “Moonrise Kingdom” couldn’t go unrewarded. It’s full of character and identity, the kind of work that, unfortunately, rarely gets its due in an awards season.

Best Film Editing: “Argo” (Runner-up: “Zero Dark Thirty”)
Suffice it to say, William Goldenberg has had a great year. His work on the two CIA thrillers of the season ratcheted up the tension and yielded two of the best assemblages of the year. He shared that work with Dylan Tichenor in “Zero Dark Thirty,” which wrangled a massive amount of footage, but I went with his solo work on “Argo” for its added briskness of pace.

Best Makeup: “Holy Motors” (Runner-up: “Men in Black 3”)
The makeup branch surely never saw “Holy Motors,” given that it failed to make the bake-off list. It is, after all, a film that virtually celebrates their contribution to the cinema, and expertly at that. Rick Baker also stepped it back up for the return of the “Men in Black” series with typically creative elements.

Best Music – Original Score: “The Master” (Runner-up: “Beasts of the Southern Wild”)
This might have gone to “The Grey” had the film’s most identifiable and affecting music not been a cue taken from Jamin Winans’s “Ink” (not to take anything away from Marc Streitenfeld’s otherwise effective original work). Alas, it’s been a great year for scores and any number could have filled out these two spots. I had to go with Johnny Greenwood’s robust, varied and absolutely singular work on “The Master,” though.

Best Music – Original Song: “Who Did That To You” from “Django Unchained” (Runner-up: “Skyfall” from “Skyfall”)
Quentin Tarantino commissioned four original songs for “Django Unchained” this year (five if you count the tossed-out Frank Ocean track), and any of them — well, maybe not the Rick Ross jam, as fun as it is — could have been chalked up here. But John Legend’s “Who Did That To You” has a certain vigor and swagger that made it too irresistible.

Best Production Design: “Anna Karenina” (Runner-up: “Moonrise Kingdom”)
It’s hard to give this recognition to anything other than “Anna Karenina.” Sarah Greenwood and her team were responsible for the overall cinematic conceit of the project and it came off without a hitch, beautifully integrated, stunningly achieved.

Best Sound Editing: “Django Unchained” (Runner-up: “The Raid: Redemption”)
It’s been an interesting year for sound and these fields were the toughest to sort out for me. But here I had to go with the work Wylie Stateman and company did for the “Django Unchained” track. Sound was an unexpected part of the overall experience of the film.

Best Sound Mixing: “Les Misérables” (Runner-up: “Skyfall”)
It’s a difficult choice between a number of things here, too, but I opted for some fairly impressive, somewhat innovative work on “Les Misérables.” It was a big feat of both production mixing and post-production work to wrangle the live-singing element of the film.

Best Visual Effects: “Life of Pi” (Runner-up: “Cloud Atlas”)
The visual splendor of “Life of Pi” comes right down to the work Rhythm & Hues put into its palette. It’s the film’s identity, often jaw-dropping and always beautiful. Add that to some brilliantly utilized 3D and, well, we have a winner.

Best Animated Feature Film: “Wreck-It Ralph” (Runner-up: “Frankenweenie”)
As I noted in the top 10 podcast and my best-of-the-year column, Disney’s one-two in-house punch this year was simply wonderful. And really, I could go with either “Wreck-It Ralph” or Tim Burton’s “Frankenweenie” here, but the undying heart of the former won out this round.

Best Documentary Feature: “The Queen of Versailles” (Runner-up: “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God”)
Lauren Greenfield’s “The Queen of Versailles” is a snap-shot of a country and its shifting values. It was part and parcel of another dynamic year for documentary filmmaking, and while Alex Gibney’s study of pedophilia in the Catholic Church claimed the runner-up spot this time, it could have easily been “West of Memphis” or “The Central Park Five” or “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” or “The House I Live In” or “The Invisible War,” etc.

Best Foreign Language Film: “Amour” (Runner-up: “Holy Motors”)
Really, you can’t argue with what Michael Haneke managed this year. For a filmmaker that never really resonated with me to lead me to these depths, it just couldn’t be ignored. And Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” almost joined him on my top 10 list this year.

Other Kudos:

Most Underrated Film of the Year: “The Grey”

Most Overrated Film of the Year: “Silver Linings Playbook”

Breakthrough Performance (Male): Logan Lerman, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”

Breakthrough Performance (Female): Quvenzhané Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Best Ensemble: “The Grey”

Best Cameo Performance: James Badge Dale, “Flight” (and “The Grey”)

Best Hero: Maya, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Villain: Calvin Candie and Stephen, “Django Unchained”

Best Poster: “The Master” (link)

Best Trailer (for a trailer released in 2011, not necessarily a film released in 2011): “Man of Steel”

Jor El:

Pa Kent:

Most Surprising Film of the Year: “Wreck-It Ralph”

Most Disappointing Film of the Year: “Prometheus”

Most Ambitious Film of the Year: “Cloud Atlas”

Most Intriguing Failure: “The Paperboy”

Best Action Sequence: “Zero Dark Thirty” (The raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.)

Entertainer of the Year: (TIE) Megan Ellison and Marvel Studios

Five Worst Films I Saw This Year (in order): “Battleship,” “Ice Age: Continental Drift,” “John Carter,” “The Amazing Spider-Man,” “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”

Top 10 Films of the Year (in order): “The Grey,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” “Looper,” “Django Unchained,” “Amour,” “Lincoln,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Argo,” “The Queen of Versailles,” “The Master”

I know, I know, more column inches on the “Zero Dark Thirty” torture debate. But I’m leading with Andrew O’Hehir’s piece because it’s the most thoughtful, level-headed response I’ve read on the matter so far. He’s a fan of the film — most flatteringly, he compares it to the “complex historical fiction” of Dickens or Tolstoy –, but doesn’t see that as any reason to assume it takes the morally “right” position. “Both interpretations can be simultaneously correct,” he writes, “partly because it”s an unusually complicated work, partly because there are so many things we don”t know about the Bush administration”s notorious “detainee program,” and partly because art is an inherently amoral and ruthless enterprise, however much we may want to believe otherwise.” Great stuff. [Salon] 

A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden post their annual ideal Oscar ballots. Among their points of agreement: “Amour” (plus its two leads) and “Zero Dark Thirty.” Props for including Matthias Schoenaerts, Ms. Dargis, but he is not supporting. [New York Times] 

Steve Pond crunches the numbers on the Academy’s various voting branches — reaching, among others, the conclusion that you only need 36 votes to nab a nomination from the cinematographers’ branch. In case 36 of them are reading: Robbie Ryan for “Wuthering Heights,” please. [The Wrap]

Anthony Breznican, who’s settling nicely into his role as EW’s chief Oscar columnist, wishes he’d championed “Compliance” hopeful Ann Dowd harder through the season. [Entertainment Weekly]

Jon Weisman considers the voters scrambling to see everything in time for the Academy’s January 3 deadline, and joins many in asking: why the rush, Oscar? [Variety] 

Anne Hathaway talks to Amy Kaufman about her career ambitions, and performing over 20 takes — at her insistence, not Tom Hooper’s — of “I Dreamed a Dream.” [LA Times]

Adrian Curry’s typically considered list of the year’s best movie posters has some picks you definitely won’t see coming. [MUBI]

Oscar-nominated costume designer Julie Weiss chats to Nathaniel Rogers about clothing the on- and offscreen worlds of “Hitchcock.” [The Film Experience]

Jackson Truax talks to Janusz Kaminski about his longstanding collaboration with Steven Spielberg and, more specifically, his work in “Lincoln.” [Awards Daily]

Ronald Bergan remembers Harry Carey Jr., the western-inclined character actor best known for his multiple collaborations with John Ford, who passed away recently aged 91. [The Guardian]

Even the most banal phrases have their uses, and when it came to Bart Layton’s documentary “The Imposter” earlier this year, it’s easy to understand why so many critics reached for that fusty standby: “The truth is stranger than fiction.” Then again, “The Imposter” – one of 15 shortlisted films vying for an Oscar nod in the Best Documentary Feature category – tells a story that is stranger even than most truths.

Centered on the charismatic, frightening figure of Frédéric Bourdin a shapeshifting con artist and serial identity thief who claim to have masqueraded as over 500 people in his lifetime, the film peels back the covers on the Frenchman’s most infamous and improbable stunt. In 1997, aged 23, he seemingly duped a Texan family into accepting him as their teenaged son who had gone missing three years previously – despite not sharing his accent, appearance or even eye color. Turning up in Spain and claiming to have been kidnapped by a military-run child prostitution ring, Bourdin sold his outlandish tale not only to the Barclay family but to the US authorities, and maintained the charade for five months before the FBI caught wise.

It’s irresistible material for any movie – non-fiction or otherwise – and it’s easy to see why Layton, a young, London-born documentarian previously best known for the UK television series “Banged Up Abroad,” was drawn to it for his first feature film. Layton first encountered the story by chance, while flipping through a magazine at a friend’s house in Spain; he knew he wanted to do something with it, but didn’t quite know what.

“I kind of made a note and didn’t find the note again for some time,” he says. “When I got back to it, I felt pretty sure it must have been made into a film – either as a documentary or as a fictionalized version – and was astonished to find that it hadn’t.”

He’s speaking over the phone from Los Angeles, where he’s been put to hard work on the Oscar campaign trail – not that he’s had much of a moment to breathe since the film’s buzz-making debut at the Sundance Film Festival 11 months ago. Even this interview is our second: in the summer, I hosted a Channel 4 Q&A with the director in our mutual hometown, and if he’s grown at all weary of discussing the film in the intervening months, he doesn’t sound it.

After reading up further on Bourdin’s story, notably via David Grann’s extensive 2008 profile in The New Yorker, Layton got in touch directly with the so-called Chameleon through his Bourdin’s YouTube account, and invited him to London to discuss a potential collaboration. “At that point,” Layton says, “I didn’t exactly know what the film would be about – whether it would just be about him, or use his story as a way into something bigger. Which is what we ended up doing.” The attention-grabbing result is an unusual hybrid documentary, remarkably securing the on-camera participation of both Bourdin and the Barclays, but blending their testimonies with stylized, suspenseful dramatizations that evoke film noir more than cinema vérité.

“I never really considered making it as a narrative film,” he explains. “But that’s such a strange term in the first place: aren’t all documentaries narrative?” That’s just as well, since after Layton began work on “The Imposter,” a little-seen, faintly fictionalized film of the story, with a cast including Famke Janssen and Ellen Barkin, was released in 2010; it’s not much of a match for Layton’s take.

“I felt all along that it’s such an unusual and extraordinary story that if you fictionalized it at all, it would seem completely preposterous,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe it. Listening to the people involved telling their stories, it did feel at times like you were listening to the plot of a Coen Brothers film, and I wanted the film I made to have a foot in both camps. Clearly it’s a documentary, with real people, and we were journalistically rigorous about keeping to the details of the case as we understood them. But it was always my intention for the film to play to an audience that might not normally go to see a documentary in the cinema.”

Layton, therefore, has no issue with people describing his film as a thriller – a fragile sense of mystery was key to the filmmaking process. “While making it that I felt we were inside our own detective novel in some ways,” he laughs. “We ourselves experienced a lot of twists and turns along the way. You’d have a conversation one day with a member of the Barclay family and come away convinced of one conclusion, and the next day talk to the FBI, and come away equally convinced of the opposite. So while making the film, our sympathies were swinging to different extremes, and that was something that I really tried to reflect in the way the story was told.”

The audience, too, will feel torn between Bourdin’s cool, calm, vaguely amused-sounding retelling of events and the more stricken accounts of various members of the Barclay family as they struggle to explain just how they were so absurdly fooled. Between them, it’s all too easy to believe the more sinister theories that suggest the family played along with the deception to cover the nastier truth about their son’s disappearance, but this slippery even-handed film never takes sides. Getting the perspectives of all involved parties is essential in this regard, but it wasn’t easy to do.

“Frédéric ‘s not a retiring type, as you can see,” Layton says, “but for someone who’s pretty untrustworthy, he’s also very untrusting. He was very circumspect about the whole thing, but at the same time he was very attracted to the idea of telling his story to an audience. He himself has said that he gets confused between attention and affection.”

Similarly cagey were the Barclays, who hadn’t come out well in much of the media coverage of the story – including the aforementioned New Yorker piece – but wanted an opportunity to tell their side of things to a larger audience. “I think you could argue that they don’t come out of the documentary brilliantly either,” Layton admits. “But there were things they felt they’d never had the chance to express, and they got to do so here. I was nervous about their reaction to the film, but they said it was an honest account of what they experienced and that they were ultimately glad they’d taken part.”

Layton wound up with several versions of events, and found parsing them on screen without emphasising one over the other “a difficult line to tread.” It was important to him that the film not arrive at a theoretical conclusion: “That may be frustrating for some viewers, but life isn’t like a Hollywood narrative – things aren’t nicely tied up. Truth can be a subjective thing in some ways. We believe what we choose to believe. A story we think is about deception is equally about self-deception.

“I had done a lot of research into the case, but that was very different from the experience of sitting opposite a person and hearing the story directly from them. You can’t be prepared for that. It’s an emotional experience in a way that reading an article or file is not. Our natural tendency as human beings is to believe what we are confronted with, but they can’t all be correct.”

Layton found the film’s dramatized sections, slickly shot and infused with a range of Hollywood genre elements, crucial in maintaining the possibility of multiple truths; where most documentary filmmaking is at pains to stress authenticity above all else, “The Imposter” quite deliberately courts fabrication. For that reason, the director is keen to avoid the word “reconstruction,” preferring to think of these sequences as interpretive.

“It’s a pretty dirty word in TV, let alone in documentary cinema,” he says. “It implies forensically reconstructing a series of events that must have happened a certain way – and what we have here is a number of different subjective accounts of the events. For me, the way to depict that was to create a language for film that makes it clear that we’re not telling you what happened. We’re giving you interpretations, or illustrations, of the stories we’ve been told. The filmmaking is an extension of the storytelling: if a great storyteller tells you a great story, or even if you listen to a radio play, you’re going to have a visual impression of it, a movie playing in your head. That’s what I was trying to get at. It’s not supposed to look like fake archive material. It’s supposed to clearly convey that you’re inhabiting their version of a story.”

As such, Layton is one of a growing breed of documentary filmmakers who are willing to play with conventions of form and perspective to most effectively frame his subject and engage his audience. “Of course there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and where drama in documentary gets problematic is when the filmmaker is trying to convince the audience that they’re watching something they’re not: that it’s reality rather than recreation. At no point were we trying to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes, though” – he pauses a second, audibly smiling – “one could argue that Frédéric was.”

Layton sees the film’s box office success – it’s the highest-grossing documentary of the year in the UK – as indicative of wider acceptance of a new grammar in documentary filmmaking. The same goes for its shortlisting by the Academy’s often conservative documentary committee, which he wasn’t expecting. Noting the strength and diversity of the shortlist – he describes the competition as “daunting,” singling out “Searching for Sugar Man” as a “great crowdpleaser and a really well-made film” – he describes it as a testament to changed perceptions of what the documentary form can achieve.

“It can offer the same extraordinary, emotional experience that we demand from all cinema,” he insists. “There’s no reason why fiction should have exclusive rights to drama and suspense.”

I know I’m way behind the curve in reporting on these, but the weeks before Christmas kept us so busy with wall-to-wall US critics’ awards that certain things passed me by — particularly awards away from the Oscar trail. This afternoon, I suddenly remembered the Prix Louis-Delluc, arguably the most prestigious award in French cinema, and wondered if I’d missed their nominations. As it turned out, I’d missed the entire thing.

The Louis-Delluc, a single award handed to the year’s best French film — as determined by a jury headed by Cannes president Gilles Jacob — was first presented in 1937, and the list of previous winners is a veritable who’s who of classic French cinema: Renoir, Cocteau, Truffaut, Bresson, Malle, Chabrol, Rohmer, Godard, and so on.

The award has a reputation for discerning, sometimes offbeat choices. (Last year, for example, they failed to nominate French audience favorite and current Oscar hopeful “The Intouchables.”) They certainly followed their own path this year: while the nominees included such major auteur titles as “Amour,” “Holy Motors,” “Rust and Bone” and “Something in the Air,” Jacob’s jury opted for less of a consensus favorite: Benoit Jacquot’s spare, elegant costume drama “Farewell My Queen,” which opened the Berlinale in February. I rather liked it; many of my colleagues thought it unremarkable. Either way, it’s a surprising choice.

Jacquot’s film also did rather well in the nominations for France’s Lumiere Awards, which are effectively the Golden Globes to the Cesars’ Oscars. All five Best Film nominees were also mentioned on the Delluc list; “The Intouchables” doesn’t feature, having been nominated last year, where it lost to the all-consuming “The Artist.” Performances I’m happy to see mentioned include Matthias Schoenaerts in “Rust and Bone” (his first citation that I’m aware of) and young star Ernst Umhauer in Francois Ozon’s “In the House” (which deserves more attention all round).

The list reflects a strong year for French and French-language cinema — it really is a shame that only film can represent this bustling industry at the Academy Awards. More details below; you can catch up with the season’s other winners at The Circuit.

Prix Louis-Delluc (Best French Film of 2012)
Michael Haneke, “Amour”
Noemie Lvovsky, “Camille Rewinds”
Philippe Faucon, “La désintégration”
Benoit Jacquot, “Farewell My Queen” (WINNER)
Leos Carax, “Holy Motors”
Jacques Audiard, “Rust and Bone”
Olivier Assayas, “Something in the Air”
Lucas Belvaux, “38 Witnesses”

Prix Louis-Delluc (Best First Film)
Cyril Mennegun, “Louise Wimmer”

And the Lumiere Award nominations:

Best Film
“Amour”
“Camille Rewinds”
“Farewell My Queen”
“Holy Motors”
“Rust and Bone”

Best French-Language Film (from outside France)
“Laurence Anyways”
“Monsieur Lazhar”
“Our Children”
“La Pirogue”
“Sister”

Best Director
Michael Haneke, “Amour”
Noemie Lvovsky, “Camille Rewinds”
Leos Carax, “Holy Motors”
Cyril Mennegun, “Louise Wimmer”
Jacques Audiard, “Rust and Bone”

Best Actor
Guillaume Canet, “A Better Life”
Denis Lavant, “Holy Motors”
Jeremie Renier, “Cloclo”
Matthias Schoenaerts, “Rust and Bone”
Jean Louis Trintignant, “Amour”

Best Actress
Marion Cotillard, “Rust and Bone”
Catherine Frot, “Haute Cuisine”
Noemie Lvovsky, “Camille Rewinds”
Corinne Masiero, “Louise Wimmer”
Emmanuelle Riva, “Amour”

Best Screenplay
“A Bottle in the Gaza Sea”
“Camille Rewinds”
“Farewell My Queen”
“Holy Motors”
“Rust and Bone”

Best Male Newcomer
Clement Metayer, “Something in the Air”
Stephane Soo Mongo, “Rengaine”
Pierre Niney, “Comme des freres”
Mahmoud Shalaby, “A Bottle in the Gaza Sea”
Ernst Umhauer, “In the House”

Best Female Newcomer
Agathe Bonitzer, “A Bottle in the Gaza Sea”
Judith Chemla, Julia Faure and India Hair, “Camille Rewinds”
Izia Hegelin, “Mauvaise fille”
Sofiia Manousha, “Le noir (te) vous va si bien”
Soko, “Augustine”

When the Oscar nominations are announced in exactly two weeks’ time (!), they’ll be a pioneering edition in two ways: not only will they land earlier in the season than ever before, but they’ll be the first to be partially drawn from electronic voting. It’s a brave new world and all, but after interviewing a cross-section of voters, Many of them aren’t happy with the changes — to the point that some of them, short of time to see the necessary films and/or befuddled by the security surrounding the online ballot — may not bother voting at all. Scott Feinberg quotes one member as saying, “There will probably be a large percentage of people who will just say, ‘Screw it,’ and not even vote this year,” and expresses concern that the changes could result in a record low in voter anticipation. Of course, we’ll never know. [The Race]

Roger Ebert unveils his Top 10, and names “Argo” the best film of 2012. Another feather in the cap for Ben Affleck’s steadfast crowdpleaser; I’m keeping my Best Picture money on it. [Chicago Sun-Times]

DGA president (and Oscar-nominated director) Taylor Hackford interviewed Quentin Tarantino about “Django Unchained” at the film’s Guild screening. [Thompson on Hollywood]

Manohla Dargis celebrates two contrasting love stories in the Oscar race: “Amour” and “Silver Linings Playbook.” [New York Times] 

With “Les Mis” currently burning up the box office, will its popular appeal override its mixed critical reception to triumph in the Oscar race? [Gold Derby]

From “Best Exotic” to “Beasts,” Pat Saperstein looks at the biggest stories in independent cinema this year. [Variety]

Wes Anderson chats to Glenn Whipp about the process of writing “Moonrise Kingdom” — and forthcoming follow-up “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” [LA Times] 

The Playlist staff construct an alternative ballot for Best Director — only one of the names on it, Paul Thomas Anderson, has a prayer at showing up on the Academy’s version. [The Playlist]

Jaime Esteve Bengoechea responds to those critics taking “The Impossible” to task for its Hollywood-tailored demographics: take the movie for what it is, not what it isn’t. [ICS]

The Guardian gears up for the New Year with a gallery of 100 films to look forward to in 2013. [The Guardian]

The Vancouver Film Critics Circle has announced nominees this year, and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” led the way with five nominations, for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay. “Cosmopolis,” “Rebelle” and “Stories We Tell” were chalked up in the Best Canadian Film category. Winners will be announced January 7. Check out the full list below and keep track of the season via The Circuit.

Best Film
“Lincoln”
“The Master”
“Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Director
Ang Lee, “Life of Pi”
Steven Spielberg, “Lincoln”
Kathryn Bigelow, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln”
John Hawkes, “The Sessions”
Joaquin Phoenix, “The Master”

Best Actress
Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”
Marion Cotillard, “Rust and Bone”
Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”

Best Supporting Actor
Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Master”
Tommy Lee Jones, “Lincoln”
Christoph Waltz, “Django Unchained”

Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, “The Master”
Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables”
Helen Hunt, “The Sessions”

Best Screenplay
“Django Unchained”
“Lincoln”
“Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Foreign Language Film
“Amour”
“Holy Motors”
“The Intouchables”

Best Documentary
“Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry”
“How to Survive a Plague”
“Searching for Sugar Man”

Best Canadian Film
“Cosmopolis”
“Rebelle”
“Stories We Tell”

Best Director of a Canadian Film
Panos Cosmatos, “Beyond the Black Rainbow”
David Cronenberg, “Cosmopolis”
Sarah Polley, “Stories We Tell”

Best Actor in a Canadian Film
Robert Pattinson, “Cosmopolis”
Melvil Poupaud, “Laurence Anyways”
Michael Rogers, “Beyond the Black Rainbow”

Best Actress in a Canadian Film
Suzanne Clément, “Laurence Anyways”
Stéphanie Lapointe, “Liverpool”
Rachel Mwanza, “Rebelle”

Best Supporting Actor in a Canadian Film
Jay Baruchel, “Goon”
Serge Kanyinda, “Rebelle”
Liev Schreiberg, “Goon”

Best Supporting Actress in a Canadian Film
Sarah Gordon, “Cosmopolis”
Samantha Morton, “Cosmpolis”
Alison Pill, “Goon”

Best Canadian Documentary
“The End of Time”
“Stories We Tell”
“The World Before Her”

Best British Columbia Film
“Becoming Redwood”
“Beyond the Black Rainbow”
“Camera Shy”
“Random Acts of Romance”

Ian Caddell Award for Achievement
Alan Franey (Director of the Vancouver International Film Festival)

The last time I spoke with director Tom Hooper feels like centuries ago. That’s because it came the afternoon after his film “The King’s Speech” screened for audiences at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival, before that film would go on to the Toronto festival and explode into the season as an unassuming heartwarmer destined for Oscar gold. It was the calm before the storm, and Hooper thinks back on it now with a hint of longing in his voice.

“I have very fond, special memories of that,” he says, calling from Australia following the premiere of his latest film, “Les Misérables,” in Sydney. “Telluride was amazing because it was such an intimate and relaxed place for that journey to start. Because I remember after that going to Toronto and I have never done that kind of junket process before. I mean, literally, sort of brought to tears from the madness of it, and Telluride was a really lovely place to start.”

As lovely as those modest beginnings might have been, “Les Misérables” was never going to enjoy such a soft start. Propped up at a major studio as its big holiday awards play, coming from a director whose last at-bat drew such considerable Oscar love, based on one of the most successful stage creations in history, the film had expectant eyes on it before it was anywhere near finished. And it was finally unleashed onto the world the day after Thanksgiving to a New York Academy and guild crowd eager to devour it (and boy did they eat it up).

Hooper told the crowd then that he was surprised when he saddled up to the project that no one had ever taken a crack at adapting the stage musical. He said he wanted to tap the same emotion one feels watching the production but in a cinematic realm, and his thoughts on that were focused on how to better capture the performances: with live singing and in most cases tight shots on faces. Nevertheless, he says he’s surprised the latter has received so much attention as of late.

“You can have people writing about the film where they talk about the close-ups and at the same time they talk about the fact that they’re surrounded by people who are crying continuously,” he says. “And it’s as if people don’t make the connection between why people are crying and the close-up. I do think the intimacy of the movie is the thing that you can never achieve when you watch it on stage. And it’s the intimacy that is unlocking these extraordinary levels of emotion.”

It’s an element he says he’s witnessed all over the world as he’s travelled with the film to its various premieres — England, Japan, Australia. But he won’t cop to it being a predetermined aesthetic. It was actually a process that led him to the choice to keep Anne Hathaway’s performance of the song “I Dreamed a Dream” in close-up for the majority of the track. As Hooper was hovering over the editing bay one day, star Eddie Redmayne walked in and asked why he was cutting through the coverage of the scene.

“He said, ‘Why aren’t you using that shot you’re using in the teaser trailer,'” Hooper recalls. “‘There’s that close-up of Anne where you see all the kind of musculature of her neck as she sings up towards the moon and it’s extraordinary and there’s a whole detail that you’re not getting on the shot you’re using.’ And I cannot tell you the difference to the emotional impact of the song. I’ve said to Anne, more than once, ‘You have to thank Eddie Redmayne for the way this song plays because of him questioning it and us going the bolder route of using that shot.’ The very next time we played the film, it made people cry in a way it never had done. And so in fact in the case of ‘I Dreamed a Dream,’ that close-up unlocked the song.”

Hathaway’s performance is great in any angle, Hooper says, but “if you start loose you’re kind of saying, ‘Well, the beginning of the song is not so important and the song gets more important as you progress.’ But the very first thing she says is ‘I dreamed a dream in times gone by,’ and when you’re close with her on that line, the beginning is as important as anything else. It’s impossible to make a hierarchy in that song where you say, you know, ‘The key moment’s at the end and the beginning is just sort of a preamble to it.'”

Something else Hooper shows a clear interest in is an overall visual aesthetic that first stood out (and was derided in some snarky quarters) in “The King’s Speech.” He often frames his actors close to the edge of the frame. In his last film, it worked in a thematic sense because the main character was in some ways secluded and trapped by his speech impediment. In “Les Misérables,” it sticks out most in the aforementioned “I Dreamed a Dream” sequence.

“There’s moments where you feel like she’s going to drop out of shot because she gets so close to the right-hand edge of the frame,” he says. “And there’s also an out-of-focus pillar of the boat that she almost hides behind. And that sense of just staying within the frame and being on the edge of it gives the whole shot attention that is different if you just put her in the middle. And I wanted to find a way of having compositional drama in it; and of course, in that song, not dissimilarly from ‘The King’s Speech,’ she is trapped. She has just become a prostitute. So she has become trapped by this decision she’s made. There’s no going back. She can never take this moment away. And the idea of the frame trapping her is absolutely right for that moment because she’s talking about the end of something, the death of something, the death of her hopes and dreams.”

He continues: “A lot of filmmakers avoid the edges. And I understand why. But I like having actors have a strong relationship with the edge of the frame. As filmmakers we have to work with the box, you know? We have to work with this picture inside a black box, which is the edges of the cinema screen, and I often like invoking the finality of it rather than pretending it’s not there.”

Further to the film’s visual storytelling, Hooper says he was keen to constantly tread a line between gritty and heightened realism. He wanted it to be a visceral experience, which in part informed his decision to have the actors sing live during the production. “The singing really grounded it in something bodily and physical, but at the same time, the license allowed me to create a more expressionistic universe,” he says.

He also wanted to constantly conjure the power of the state, which is exemplified by the massive, damaged warship a group of slaves — through quite Biblical imagery — are hauling out of the sea at the beginning of the film. “It’s like a wounded animal being brought in and it shows the state is vulnerable, that it can be attacked, that it can be destroyed,” he says.

Similarly, there is also the film’s very first image, starting underwater, in the dark, before hitting on a tattered, drowned French flag and ascending from the depths. It’s an image of revolution, Hooper says. And that idea of ascension was also at play in his visual ideas throughout.

“There’s a theme of height in the film,” he says. “I mean, not only do we go from under the water to up in the sky, but you’ve got Valjean, released from prison underneath the great shadow of this huge boat and then he goes up the steps to freedom, leaving Javert in the depths. And then later, he goes up the mountain to a little mountain village where he finds God. So he ascends to find the light. Later, when he releases his parole document, the camera ascends further up into the air, up to the clouds, up to where we feel God exists, you know, behind a break, behind a tear in the cloud. And then these little bits of parole ticket fail to ascend all the way and get dragged back down in the rain, back down into the mud, back down to Russell Crowe, back down to his nemesis, back down to what’s stopping him. Fantine later descends down steps to become a whore and ends up inside the bowels of the boat, surrounded by water, when she’s forced to be a prostitute. And then when she’s saved by Valjean, she’s lifted up the steps to freedom. That was an intentional motif.”

While “Les Misérables” is a unique entry in the canon of musical cinema, Hooper nevertheless had his touchstones along the way. The first that comes to mind for him is Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” which he found particularly inspiring. “Sacha [Baron Cohen] suggested we watch it for the Thénardiers section,” he says. “I feel like some of ‘Master of the House’ is an homage to what Jewison did.”

Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” was another. “It’s one of the very few sung-through musicals ever made,” he says. “As far as I can tell, there’s ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,’ there’s ‘Tommy’ and ‘Evita’ are the only ones that have been done. And I loved in ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ the combination of singing with very mundane worlds. I mean, it begins with car mechanics, with a guy who’s changing for the end of the day’s shift to go out, and it’s sort of very ordinary. The combination of a very ordinary world with singing was really interesting. It really works and it’s delightful. I found that very inspiring.”

And speaking of “Evita,” Hooper has plenty of praise and appreciation for Alan Parker’s work. “‘Bugsy Malone,’ when I was kid, had a huge influence on me,” he says. “Whether it’s ‘The Commitments’ or ‘Fame,’ which is extraordinary looking back at it again, he was influential.”

“Les Misérables” is coming along at a particular time in the world. Things like the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street and 99% movements and just the overall socio-economical status quo are significant identifiers of the era. The depiction of the June Rebellion in “Les Misérables,” to say nothing of its overall study of social states, makes it a particularly rich piece of material for tapping into the zeitgeist in some way.

None of this was lost on Hooper when he set out to develop it for the screen. He was overwhelmed by how timely it was, in fact. “Not only do we have sort of widespread anger about rising economic inequality to an unacceptable degree,” he says, “but we’ve also got the real beginnings of very active student protests at St. Paul’s in London and obviously the Occupy Wall Street movement. And every day we have images of revolution on our front pages because of what’s happening in Syria and the shifts the Middle East.”

The thing that struck him the most, though, was how Victor Hugo’s original novel — which he went back and read before prepping the film — is so passionately motivated by real anger at the level of poverty Hugo saw around himself.

“And 150 years later, we’re still in a world with unacceptable levels of poverty,” Hooper says. “It’s sad to me that, unfortunately, his lament remains as true as ever. ‘Les Misérables’ is the great anthem of the dispossessed. It’s the great cry from the heart of those who suffer, and giving voice to that anger from the people is key.”

“Les Misérables” is now playing in a theater near you.

The live-sung approach of “Les Misérables” may have yielded glowing reviews for the likes of Anne Hathaway and Eddie Redmayne, but less vocally gifted stars — principally Russell Crowe — have taken some flak. Back in the golden age of the Hollywood musical, his musical numbers might well have been dubbed, as Audrey Hepburn’s were in “My Fair Lady” or Natalie Wood’s in “West Side Story.” Inkoo Kang wonders why we can’t go back to that system: “The tendency toward multi-hyphenation is also a treat for celebrity gawkers, who get a glimpse behind the curtain, or at least feel like they are doing so, by watching stars in a rawer, less accomplished form.” Personally, I don’t mind an imperfect vocal when it’s part and parcel of the performance and character: the very narrative of “Chicago,” for example, benefits from Renee Zellweger being a more awkward performer than legions of Broadway Roxie Harts. You? [Salon]

British composer and three-time Oscar nominee Richard Rodney Bennett has passed away aged 76. His score for “Far From the Madding Crowd” is a stunner — as is the film. Check it out. [Variety]

Natalie Portman has been named the most bankable actor in Hollywood by Forbes, followed by Kristen Stewart. [THR]

Anne Hathaway offers Seth MacFarlane some advice on hosting the Oscars. Strangely, “Don’t host with James Franco” isn’t one of her tips. [EW]

Nice idea for a series: screenwriters of prominent 2012 releases on the scenes they found hardest to write. Here, John Gatins discusses the stairwell conversation in “Flight.” [Vulture]

Steven Zeitchik calls Richard Linklater’s “Bernie” the year’s most underappreciated film. Still, the Indie Spirits and numerous critics get it. I confess I still don’t. [LA Times]

With any notion of “best” impossible to determine when comparing a diverse slate of strong performances, Jon Weisman suggests other criteria by which Academy members might cast their vote. [The Vote]

Nigel M. Smith rounds up 37 indie film breakouts from 2012. It’s a fine list, but how does “Les Mis” newbie Samantha Barks qualify as “indie?” [IndieWire]

From corrupted teen idols to the rise of Matthew McConaughey, Catherine Shoard examines some of 2012’s less expected movie trends. [The Guardian]

Sasha Stone wonders if “Life of Pi” has lost enough Oscar heat to take it out of the game altogether. [Awards Daily]

Over the past month, Ben Affleck”s “Argo” has firmly entrenched itself as a surefire Oscar contender. Since it opened to outstanding reviews and box office earlier in the year, numerous commentators have lauded it for its portrayal of how Canadian diplomats, American spies and Hollywood big shots worked together to rescue six Americans from Iran in 1980. It has also been praised for its gripping suspense and aesthetic.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto was responsible in significant part for that aesthetic – a look he is the first to admit was also the result of a team. I recently spoke to the Oscar nominee (“Brokeback Mountain”) about his part in creating the film.

“There was a lot of research material from Ben himself and Sarah Seymour [the production designer],” Prieto recalls. “We were trying to visualize the events and how they were seen by people at the time. A lot of the film is stories and the parallel between news and how we tell stories. To do this, understanding how people thought at the time was important.”

This attempt to create reality affected how the camera was used. “Not being there, we needed to figure out how to experience it through the movie,” he says. “The takeover of the embassy was filmed with technology such as Super 8 that was available at the time. This also affected the grain, to create a sense of urgency and a feeling of ‘anything can happen,” even leading to the use of a handheld camera.”

That said, there was obviously a danger of a feeling of discontinuity with different styles being used from Iran to Washington to Hollywood. These are the three worlds the film inhabits that have been discussed at length on the press tour, particularly by screenwriter Chris Terrio, who used it as a bit of a thematic structure.

“We wanted to differentiate each type of film,” Prieto says. “But we had to figure out to how to do that without being distracting.” This originally led to a plan to use 16mm film for Iran and 35mm for Washington and Hollywood. But that was too striking a difference, Prieto says. Instead, the decision was made to use a 2-perf negative pulldown process (which has seen a resurgence with the advent of higher quality, lower grain film stocks and digital intermediate post-production techniques that eliminate the need for optical labwork. It gave a subtle shift in visual quality, noticeable, but not severe.

As for the Hollywood and Washington sections of the film, there were ideas to differentiate those as well. “We decided, in the Hollywood sections, to emulate the way some of the movies from the late-1970s/early-1980s looked,” Prieto says. “I particularly remember Ben was keen on some of them with a particular camera style that had a high concept and high color section. We added saturation/context beyond what the negative would normally give.” This differed from the fast-paced world of Washington where in the CIA the Affleck and Prieto used very crisp camera movements that were very precise.

Even in the small section of the film set in Turkey, they sought a unique look, deciding to shoot with a very low light. Turkey also subbed in for Iran in the film, but this decision distinguished the looks of the “two” on-screen locations.

Prieto describes managing all the different formats from a technical standpoint as the biggest challenge he faced on the film. This was complicated by Affleck”s desire to shoot everything from at least two vantage points with at least two cameras.

“Maintaining lighting atmosphere is really challenging,” he says. “Besides, we have many actors and a big ensemble, so that was also challenging, to keep a sense of claustrophobia, low lights. This would especially be an issue when, for example, shooting a bazaar in Istanbul.”

In Prieto”s words, changes in technology have “not exactly changed what I”m doing but have expanded possibilities.” He says he still prefers film as he feels digital doesn”t capture all the depth and range on certain characteristics such as skin-tone. But he admits digital opens new possibilities as well, and he”s been playing with them on Martin Scorsese”s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” currently shooting in New York. “I”m excited about the possibilities,” he says.

Prieto also singles out much of the teamwork that went into “Argo,” as he relied on his camera crew to keep track of everything when the film and processes changed. He found Affleck “very hands on…it”s amazing how he could switch hats and be acting, producing and directing this film simultaneously,” he says. “From a photographic standpoint, he”s very savvy.”

Of course, the collaboration with other artists on the film did not end with the director, as Prieto also has high praise for production designer Sharon Seymour and costume designer Jacqueline West. With respect to Seymour, Prieto notes that the film “didn”t have a huge budget, so we were constantly trying to incorporate things such as a lightbulb into the set so the lighting would feel authentic.” As for West, “Costumes affect where you point your eyes and what you see,” he says. “For the Hollywood section, for instance, a red blouse would really stick out and black clothes would look jet black. We had to be selective with what we wanted to draw attention to.”

That team effort in creating the look of “Argo” is among the many things Prieto fondly looks back upon when considering the experience of the film. And indeed, it’s interesting to note that it’s very much of a piece with the film’s thematic ideas.

What are the worst Best Picture winners of all time? Though the answers may overlap, it’s a question that’s not entirely the same as, “What are the worst films ever to win Best Picture?” Several titles on the Academy’s ultimate honor roll are artistically lacking, though that doesn’t necessarily make them terrible winners. Accepting as most of us do that the Academy is rarely, if ever, going to agree with us on the year’s single greatest film, we begin to value alternative virtues in Oscar champs: durability, universality, pop-cultural standing, provocation, reach.

I will always think the Academy made a mistake crowning “Crash” over “Brokeback Mountain,” while appreciating that they could have made far less interesting ones: by choosing the clumsier, thornier political conversation piece, they kept alive the idea of prestige cinema as a source of discussion and debate, whether within or between individual films. If mediocrity must triumph, in other words, let it be mediocrity that speaks to people, or makes them speak back. If a genuinely strong film wins that manages the same thing — and once in a blue moon, it happens — so much the better.

The worst Best Picture winners, then, are perhaps not the ones that get you really inflamed; rather, they’re the ones you don’t remember at all, and wouldn’t have much to say about if you did. Got any strong feelings about “Gigi?” There you go.

This year’s unusually competitive Best Picture race sees a refreshing amount of contenders vying to ensure 2012’s eventual winner doesn’t fall into the trap of instant irrelevance. You can already feel the friction building around such hopefuls as “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Django Unchained,” “Argo,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and even “Lincoln,” as debate around their various historical and sociocultural reflections and representations continues to bubble far outside the routinely argumentative circle of Oscar pundits. 

Though its shedload of critics’ awards is a great help, “Zero  Dark Thirty”‘s campaign now seems at least partly fuelled by the ongoing back-and-forth among film critics and politicos alike about its depiction and (depending on whom you speak to) arguable validation of U.S. military torture techniques. The arguments against it are unflattering in the extreme, but the more vocal moral panic Kathryn Bigelow’s film arouses in certain sectors of the media, the likelier voters are to check out  their screeners so as to stake their own position in the discussion. Some Academy members will surely join the prosecution, but they’ll at least have watched the movie; right now, a little outside sensationalism, coupled with critical cred, is the best friend this lengthy, chilly, exhaustive procedural could have.

Will the discussion last? Of course not, but even when the smoke clears, the pointedly journalistic “Zero Dark Thirty” will stand as a daring artefact, preserving not only a fractious period in recent American (and indeed global) history, but arousing a snap poll of political reactions that may well shift towards or away from the film’s version of events as our understanding of them deepens, or perhaps diminishes, with time. It’s a formidable film in itself, but a substantial 21st-century document regardless, and about as exciting a Best Picture choice as the Academy could make this year. 

Or perhaps that’d be “Django Unchained,” a period piece looking to generate at least as many righteously politicized column inches this season as the contemporary issue-mongering of “Zero Dark Thirty,” and not just in Spike Lee’s Twitter feed. Lee’s rant against purported racism in Quentin Tarantino’s slavery-themed quasi-blaxploitation Western — not really a subgenre that has its own section in the video store — is uninformed, as he admits he has no intention of seeing the film, but it’s the media-baiting tip of the iceberg: there are more profound discussions to be had of the film’s casually tongue-in-cheek appropriation of African-American stereotypes as coined in both black and white cultures, all perspectives colliding in Samuel L. Jackson’s deliberately grotesque Uncle Tom parody.

Tavis Smiley recently joined Lee’s bench by labelling the film “a spoof on slavery: Hollywood’s gift to Negroes”; should such resentful reactions continue to emerge from vocal sources, Tarantino’s film could become a critical sounding board in the ongoing discussion of racial representation in Hollywood, while an entirely separate argument about the ethics of its onscreen violence — a Tarantino standby reignited by the proximity of the film’s release to the Newtown tragedy — simmers on the sidelines. “Django Unchained” is, I would venture, unruly, uncharacteristically male-skewed and rather short on subtext, but it’s also gratifyingly spiky and alive — proof of its director’s enduring ability to test his audience in ways he may not even intend. Just a nomination would be a lasting asset to the race.

Against “Django”‘s deranged hellfire, fellow slavery study “Lincoln” looks a comparatively staid option, but Steven Spielberg’s film — among his more academic, austere works — has aroused its own share of civilized debate in historian circles, as learned voices discuss whether the film’s dramatization of the political motives behind Abolition is strictly accurate or colored by more contemporary ideals, and whether it much matters either way.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild,” with its unspecified mythical reimagining of post-Katrina social decay, must still fend off accusations of underclass romanticization as it forces advocates and detractors alike to consider our understanding of the disenfranchised. Even “Argo,” seemingly the most agreeable film in the race, seems a noteworthy, if potentially fast-dating, bookmark in Hollywood’s ongoing renegotiation of its relationship to the Middle East, absorbing post-9/11 neuroses into the polyester fabric of its 30 year-old history. There’s nothing provocative about “Les Miserables,” admittedly, which could well see it surge through the middle in a close race. But with even that juggernaut looking to touch as more hearts than the others do nerves, the Academy would, paradoxical as this sounds, have to dig very deep to find a contender that doesn’t mean too much to anyone at all. “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” anyone?

Check out my updated predictions HERE and, as always, see how Kris Tapley, Greg Ellwood and I collectively think the season will turn out at THE CONTENDERS.

(I had scheduled this review to go up yesterday, but held back in the interests of not being a total Christmas Day Scrooge. Keep sharing your reactions.)

“Do you hear the people sing?” blusters the famous closing chorus of stage blockbuster “Les Misérables,” and rarely in musical theater has a question been more rhetorical. The line is an imperative, a war cry, sounding not only the purposeful social discontent firing the 1832 June Rebellion, but a proactive admonishment to the show’s critics.

“Les Mis,” to use the widespread, alternately affectionate and sneering abbreviation, may be enduringly popular, but it has never, even at its pop-cultural zenith, been fashionable: first staged in France in 1980 and hitting Broadway, via the West End, seven years later, it may predate the musical form”s postmodern embrace of irony and pastiche toward the 21st century, but its earnest emotional gesticulation and stoic romanticism perhaps seemed quaint in 1987, after the darting reflexivity of Sondheim”s prime and even against the flashier, emptier spectacle of 80s-era Lloyd Webber. Its dense book (filleted from Victor Hugo”s far denser novel) and grandiose, not-especially-clever lyrics aim to bludgeon the audience with genuine, undiluted feeling.

Many theater critics curdled in the face of all that sincerity, but it won over the punters, this one included – it was the first West End show I ever saw, as a 16 year-old tourist in London, and I left the Palace Theatre on my own castle-topped cloud, tingling with the sense of having been satisfyingly manipulated. Do you hear the people sing? How can you fail to?

I heard – and saw, in unforgiving closeup – plenty of people sing in Tom Hooper”s long-anticipated screen adaptation of this seemingly indestructible warhorse. But it”s with no small amount of dismay that I say I hardly ever felt them, so all-consuming is the directorial conception of Hooper”s waxy, unchecked, frankly appalling film.

This “Les Mis” pays quite literal lip service to the musical: the bumptious orchestrations and melodic figure-eights of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil”s score are preserved in the film”s over-cranked sound design and much-ballyhooed (if finally spotty) live-singing approach. Any lingering emotional undertow, however – either from Hugo”s sternly weighted moral tableaux or Boublil and Schönberg”s heightened repackaging thereof – seems present by accident more than design, as stray, affecting details of verbal and facial expression survive Hooper”s strangulating redesign of the material as some manner of proggy auteur piece.

Aesthetic tics recognizable from “The King”s Speech” – extravagantly canted camera angles, extreme compositional shifts in scale, studied asymmetry – are back with reinforcements here, but where they aimed to invigorate chamber-play material in Hooper”s previous film, they work to curb the epic impulses of “Les Misérables.” The show veritably spills off the stage with outsized scope and sentiment; the film, by comparison, turns positively claustrophobic as it seeks a visual intimacy the theater cannot afford, amping up individual blood, sweat and tears at the expense of the story”s communal gusto.

It”s a bold enough gambit, but Hooper”s mise-en-scène is oddly indiscriminate in its emphases, applying equivalent close-ups to a panoply of figures in varying states of emotional intensity, bobbing and weaving his camera through revolution and romance alike, never yielding to the narrative as the spatial relationships between characters are kept rigidly solo-minded.

When this cold, fussy contraption comes alive for two or three minutes – during Anne Hathaway”s bluntly impassioned, justly celebrated rendition of the show”s signature song, “I Dreamed a Dream” – even the camera”s generous fixation on her face seems more besotted with its own restraint than with the young star before it, who seems far more tuned in to her character”s tragedy than her director. Hooper, for his part, lets her tremulous closing note rest a scarce split-second before cutting, rattling off to the next set-up. This is “Les Mis” made small, not intimate; by the time even the aching three-party devotion ballad “A Heart Full of Love” is chopped up into a rotating series of sterile close-ups, you begin to wonder if Hooper himself is among the show”s unbelievers.

If it”s taken me this long to get to the core narrative of Jean Valjean, that”s because it passes almost incidentally beneath the sound and fury and garish cinematic language of this particular telling. The peasant-turned-gentleman”s quest for domestic peace and psychological redemption against the social upheavals of post-Revolution Paris is a hero”s quest of quasi-Biblical proportions in Hugo”s novel. Necessarily streamlined for the stage, Valjean”s arc is further compressed in William Nicholson”s screenplay, the moral and historical spurs of his flip-flopping fortunes glossed over to a degree that favors musical economy over coherence – not much aided by the distracted performance of Hugh Jackman, an able musical performer of modest charisma and timbre.

Watching Jackman wrestle with his stunted character, I couldn”t help wondering how much more magnetism Russell Crowe might have lent this confused enterprise in the role a decade ago. Stuffed instead into the tight, bright-buttoned uniform of Valjean”s driven antagonist, Inspector Javert, Crowe”s a little less vocally adept than his fellow Antipodean, but more fragile and resourceful in dramatizing his numbers; a shame, then, that Javert is similarly ill-defined by the script, while Hooper”s isolating visual and structural architecture barely lets the two stars share a shot, much less build a dramatic rapport.

This problem is hardly restricted to the leads. From the Thénardiers” Dickensian comic relief to the damp fart of a new tune composed, with glaring lack of narrative purpose, for Valjean, musical sequence after musical sequence hangs in a vacuum, correlating scantly and amassing little atmospheric momentum between them. (Occasional shuffles in sequencing – such as the hellish hedonism of “Lovely Ladies” now segueing into the purgatorial despair of “I Dreamed a Dream,” rather than the reverse – seem equally random.)

The final effect is that of a commemorative revue rather than the fleshy, fully-felt pop-opera of the stage, its very occasional pleasures – the durable, propulsive bombast of its best songs, the unexpectedly lovely emotive tremor of an underserved Eddie Redmayne”s voice – as disconnected as its many missteps. Hooper was correct to opt against subtlety in translating this robust battering-ram of a musical to the screen, but there”s no grace or grandeur in his chosen vulgarity; in this ugly, unmoving “Les Misérables,” the Paris Uprising takes place on a single street corner, its dreams as yet unrealized.

What do “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Lincoln” have in common? Beyond both being American Oscar hopefuls that happen to be his two favorite films of the year, A.O. Scott thinks they share something else: a “Spielbergian” quality: “Both films have been accused of painting some of the calamities of American life, past and present – poverty, slavery, racism, environmental disaster – in unduly optimistic colors.”Lincoln” and “Beasts” are radically, fundamentally and in complementary ways, about freedom… They are also examples of what, for an American filmmaker, freedom looks like.” Good points all round, and also indicative of why, in my opinion, “Beasts” has a cleaner shot at a Best Picture nod than many believe it does right now. [New York Times]

Tom Shone examines a tighter-than-usual Best Picture race and comes to the conclusion that, after all this time, “Argo” may still be The One. [The Guardian] 

Veteran character actor Charles Durning, Oscar-nominated 30 years ago for “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” passed away on Christmas Eve at the age of 89. [HitFix]

Andrew O’Hehir weighs in with his top 10 films of the year, and Andrea Arnold’s “Wuthering Heights” (which cracked my 2011 Top 10) tops the list. A great read. [Salon]

Oscar-winning cinematographer Andrew Lesnie talks about revisiting Middle Earth, this time with very different technology, for “The Hobbit.” [Below the Line] 

Sasha Stone adds her voice to the debate over the depiction of torture in “Zero Dark Thirty,” concluding that it should be viewed as nothing more — or less — than a thoughtful Hollywood take on a dangerous subject. [Awards Daily]

How “Les Mis,” according to Frank Shyong, answers the apprehensions of skeptical theater geeks. [LA Times]

Chris Laverty, meanwhile, reviews the film with a specific eye on its costume symbolism. [Clothes on Film]

R. Kurt Osenlund considers the diminished Oscar possibilities of “Anna Karenina.” [The House Next Door]

Nathaniel Rogers gets some melancholy reflections from Nicole Kidman on her Oscar win 10 years ago: “I really remember going back and the next morning waking up and I didn’t have anybody, really, to call or celebrate with.” [The Film Experience]

If you listened to the top 10 podcast or read through the subsequent column, you know very well what I think of Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” It is perhaps for me his best work since “Jackie Brown” and easily one of the year’s best films. And it’s hitting screens this holiday with a lot of anticipation built-up and ready to pop. So here’s your space to tell us what you thought of the film, so rifle off your take here when/if you get a chance to see it, and feel free to rate it above.

The wait is over for those heavily anticipating the transition of “Les Misérables” from stage to screen as the film hits theaters this holiday season. I’ll be very interested to know how it plays for our readers. It’s been a funny thing, watching such split reactions. Critics are mostly lukewarm but Academy members eat it up. I’m somewhere in the middle there. I cried a bit, cringed a bit, and mostly enjoyed the enterprise. But do tell us what you thought. And feel free to rate it above.