Also opening in limited release this weekend is Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina.” I was personally quite taken with the film, which is boldly realized and a cinematic flourish that hopefully doesn’t get forgotten as the awards season forges on. Guy was a bit less impressed when the film opened in the UK a few months back, but found it “adventurous” all the same. But let’s hear what you have to say. Offer up your thoughts in the comments section below when/if you catch the film over the next few weeks. And as always, feel free to rate it above.

After dazzling in Toronto (where it won the audience award) and picking up steam at this fest and that, David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” finally hits theaters this weekend in limited release. It will continue to platform throughout the holiday and more and more of you will see it, I’m sure, so I’d love to gauge your reactions. I haven’t written much at all because I just don’t have much to say. It doesn’t inspire me like it does others. I found it to be slightly above the average of its genre, though Bradley Cooper’s performance is a pleasant surprise. But let’s hear what you think. Feel free to rate the film above as well.

From misplaced questions to accidental transcription errors, interview fumbles are obviously to be avoided under any circumstances, but you particularly want to be on your game when the subject is one of America’s preeminent documentarians – someone whose own profession is built on a level of journalistic expertise. So you can imagine my mortification when my iPhone recently took it upon itself to wipe its own memory clean – deleting, among other things, all aural evidence of my face-to-face conversation with Alex Gibney at last month’s London Film Festival. 

The prolific filmmaker, an Oscar-winner in 2007 for his devastating legalized-torture study “Taxi to the Dark Side,” was in town for the European premiere of his superb new film “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” which would win him the festival’s Best Documentary award the very next day. The film, which hits US theaters today, is not the first to examine the horrific history of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, but it is arguably the most penetrating, methodically tracing a dense network of crime and cover-up all the way from Milwaukee to the Vatican itself. It could well earn Gibney a deserved third Oscar nod. 

Speaking over the phone from his New York office earlier this week, Gibney casually waves off my apologies for having to restage the interview. “Trust me, I’ve been there,” he says with a light laugh, his crisp, deliberate voice sounding rather less exhausted than it did in the bar of London’s Mayfair Hotel a month ago. It’s hard to imagine interviews – or any information, for that matter – slipping through the director’s fingers, so keen and diligent is his filmmaking style across a broad range of subjects, from the fall of Enron to the fizz of Hunter S. Thompson. “Mea Maxima Culpa” is among his most perspicacious works: weaving a profoundly moving story of human heroism through a tough-minded analysis of a global scandal, he carves out new angles in a story he admits initially fearing had already been adequately exposed. 

“I was of two minds about it, to be honest,” he says, remembering when producer Todd Wider came to him with New York Times journalist Laurie Goodstein’s story about Father Lawrence Murphy, a priest revealed to have molested hundreds of boys at a school for the deaf in Milwaukee, and the four victims who labored for decades, in the face of clerical and governmental indifference, to bring Murphy to justice. “On the one hand, I felt an awful lot had already been done on the subject. At the same time, I’d been raised Catholic and thought that if there was something new I could contribute, I should do it.” 

Digging further into Goodstein’s story, Gibney found himself intrigued by the documented connection between crimes in Wisconsin and the Vatican, and the challenges of playing an intimate human tale against a larger international exposé. “It was a good opportunity to get a greater understanding of the Vatican’s role in the cover-up,” he explains. “And the third reason I decided to do it, though it took a little longer to understand, was the heroism of the survivors themselves – these four deaf men. In the midst of this very dark story, there was something there to celebrate.” 

Introducing the film at its first London screening, Gibney quipped, “I was raised Catholic, and this is the result.” He may have delivered the line flippantly, but the director insists that his Catholic upbringing – though he now regards himself as lapsed – had a significant bearing on the film. 

“It might kill you to say it, because the film really takes on the Catholic Church, but I do think there is a sort of affection for certain rituals, and an authenticity to the presentation of those rituals, in ‘Mea Maxima Culpa’,” he says. “It’s a kind of shorthand for the emotional identification that Catholics inevitably have with their church. I think the Catholic Church is quite consciously extreme in some ways, because that identifies its followers with a very peculiar kind of tradition. There’s not a lot of difference between a lot of forms of Protestantism, but if you’re a Roman Catholic – particularly of my generation, raised at a time when you could still go to the Latin Mass – there’s an intense emotional connection with that, even if you’re not still devout.” 

“It’s not ‘Religulous’,” he remarked on our first encounter in London, referring to Bill Maher’s unsupportably snide anti-religion tract released in 2008. “It’s not even about religion per se; it’s about the abuse of power, the abuse of faith. And I think it would be quite easy for other filmmakers, who weren’t raised with the religion, to be more mocking of the liturgy itself, and less understanding of the way that liturgy actually insinuates itself into your character.” 

As if to demonstrate that such horrors are hardly limited to the Church, the sexual abuse scandal currently rocking the BBC in the UK offers some timely parallels with the situation explored in Gibney’s film. “It’s disturbing, but at the same time kind of gratifying to see these stories breaking open. I think for a long time they were held in check, and the silence was the thing that was most pernicious. Victims were afraid to come forward, often against people who had these immense reputations – something you also see in the Lance Armstrong story. They were discredited. So you see how the reputations of powerful institutions act to silence people.” 

“My film may be about the Catholic Church, but you can see this same abuse of power, in other institutions, whether it’s Penn State or the BBC. And you see how predators can live in plain sight due to their outsized reputations – how Jimmy Savile got away with it is the same as how Father Murphy got away with it. So I think ‘Mea Maxima Culpa’ has a lot to say about how the mechanism of cover-up works, when institutions are more concerned with protecting power than protecting lives.” 

Though the making of the film saw Gibney taking on some daunting institutions – a terse intertitle mentions that no Vatican representative was unwilling to be interviewed, though the director tells me he pressed hard for one – the smaller story of the deaf men, whose attempted action against their abuser began with handmade protest flyers at school before ascending, in decades to come, to higher legal authorities, was no less challenging. 

“Initially I was terrified of telling this story in audio-visual terms, because all my key witnesses were deaf, and I’d never really penetrated that world before,” Gibney say, “but I think it ended up being one of the film’s most cinematic aspects.” He explains the unusual shooting setup devised for the interviews with the four subjects – Terry Kohut, Gary Smith, Pat Kuehn and Arthur Budzinski – which involved four cameras in a studio, while Gibney conducted the interviews from a separate room, with a translator. 

“By having me in a separate room, which I would otherwise never have done, we were able to mike them,” he explains. “And at first they thought we were absolutely crazy: ‘Why are you miking us? We don’t speak!’ But it was the sound of their struggle to communicate, at least to the hearing world, that I found so moving. So in terms of cinema, photographing and recording the deaf became a defining element of the film.” 

Voicing the deaf was another priority. After deliberating back and forth with an executive producer who felt subtitling the deaf men’s dialogue would be the better route, Gibney decided instead to have their testimonies narrated by actors – including such well-known names as John Slattery, Chris Cooper and Ethan Hawke. “I wanted the hearing viewers to focus intently on their signing, on their actions, rather than reading subtitles,” he says. “Their language is very expressive. I also thought it would be more emotional to do it with actors who can inhabit these characters: as a hearing viewer, you feel it more with a voice attached.” 

The casting process was intuitive, based on finding voices that matched the physical presence and manner of the men themselves – while Slattery, also raised Catholic, had his own emotional connection to the story. Gibney chose to shoot the subjects much as you would shoot actors: “We were originally advised that you can only shoot deaf people in a wide frame so you can see every aspect of their gestures. But I missed the power of seeing their eyes, their mouths, their hands up close. So rightly or wrongly, I went against that advice.” 

Arousing more dissent than Gibney’s portrayal of his deaf subjects has been the film’s stylized reconstructions of their traumatic childhood experiences. Menacing but not explicit, these shots of red-lit corridors and encroaching footsteps have been questioned by otherwise admiring critics for an aesthetic that the director freely admits is inspired by Hammer Horror films. Such imagery, Gibney says, is fully in keeping with his subjects’ own experience. 

“With each film, you find a logic and a style that makes sense for that particular story,” he says. “In some films, dramatizations make no sense at all. In this one, I felt strongly that they did, because there’s a sense of almost collective memory that some of the kids had, and also a sense of ritual – both of which I felt the dramatizations respected. They all remembered the red glow of the exit sign, they all remembered being terrified in their beds because they couldn’t hear Murphy coming, and then suddenly seeing his feet. These details resonated very strongly with me, and I decided it was important to visualize them, so there wouldn’t be just an intellectual engagement with their memory.” 

Gibney also employed aestheticized reconstructions of Church rituals for effect. “There was a peculiar kind of communication going on that I felt was important to describe: the violation of the confessional. There are people who call that ‘soul murder.’ You’re so exposed when you’re confessing something to a priest – what could be worse than the priest abusing that trust to prey on you? The Church regards that as a crime in canon law, which has no statute of limitations. So to be able to film that as a ritual was terribly important to me.” 

“We actually found a church in Rome, of all places, which had a very peculiar setup with glass on the doors – so you could see the shadows of people inside the confession booth without being able to actually see who they were. That was powerful to me, so we duplicated that effect in a studio. And we also had a rig whereby we shot down vertically from above, almost as if from the perspective of heaven, on the confessional. That perspective had a kind of evidentiary quality to it, a crime film quality, that I also rather liked.” 

In addition to the still-controversial area of dramatization, Gibney is open to other modes of experimentation with the documentary form, and describes rigorous purists as “a bit of a bugbear.” “Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there’s a certain expectation of documentaries that they’re supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations,” he says. “I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether – well, perhaps. But in this case, I think not: I think the audience gets an emotional power from them that the survivors themselves have recognized. But then, I recently did a film about a hockey player – a tough guy, an enforcer – and used no narration and no recreations. It all depends on what that story seems to demand.” 

Gibney professes to be delighted by the growing number of recent films that are bending the so-called rules, blurring the line between documentary and drama in provocative but productive ways. From this year, he cites Bart Layton’s acclaimed debut “The Imposter” – “It plays like a feature, mingling real characters with actors, saying each other’s words in ways that are very powerful” – and Sarah Polley’s upcoming family memoir “Stories We Tell” as exciting examples of where the form can go. We spend a good few minutes jointly gushing about the latter film, which cleverly plays on our perception of Super-8 home movies to uncover surprising truths. 

“Polley’s not tricking the audience, she’s letting them in on the device in a way that I think is very important,” he says. “Who says documentary has to be a certain way? Who wrote that rulebook? I’d like to find them and kill them. Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don’t see that as the only option. And I think it’s fantastic that more films are resisting that idea now.” 

As an active member of the Academy’s documentary branch, Gibney hopes to see voters – many of whom are, at this point, wary of more radical creative innovations in the field – embracing a wider range of achievements. He’s as interested as the rest of us to see if this year’s overhaul of the voting system, which includes dissolving the voting committees and revising eligibility criteria with an emphasis on public theatrical releases, has a discernible effect on a category that has repeatedly bypassed works of great artistry and significance. 

“There’s a wide range of views in that branch of the Academy about what makes up a documentary and what doesn’t,” he says. “My view is quite fluid; others feel strongly that one should observe a more rigid definition. So we’ll see. I think the changes were intended to eliminate a certain kind of abuse, and they’ve caused other problems. But we should let the rules roll this year and see where we get in the end, and then review them.” 

Though he acknowledges that “you can game almost any system,” Gibney is pleased to see the back of the committee system, by which films were voted onto the shortlist by an assigned smaller group of voters within the branch. “If you were a member of a committee and a film came before you that was made someone you dislike – or you had a certain distaste for it because it didn’t fit your perception of a documentary – you could kill that film just by giving it a very bad score. And that was a shame, because it shut out a lot of very deserving films: ‘Senna’ was one, Steve James’s ‘The Interrupters’ was another. They didn’t get their shot with other voters, which was wrong.” 

He admits, however, that the alternative system does demand that voters watch an unrealistic amount of films. Even as a dedicated voter, he doubts he’ll get through the box of 70 screeners he’s been sent to consider. With projects about Fela Kuti and Lance Armstrong already in post-production – he tells me he likes to hop between lighter and weightier subjects – it’s easy to see why he doesn’t have much spare time on his hands. One hopes, however, that “Mea Maxima Culpa” catches the attention of his fellow voters.

LOS ANGELES – If LA film lovers are looking for something to do this holiday, look no further than the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A touring treasure trove of artifacts from the famed filmmaker’s career that has already made stops all over the world, from Frankfurt to Berlin, Melbourne to Ghent, Zurich to Rome, Paris to Amsterdam, it has set up shop in LA through June 30, 2013 and is well worth the $20 admission price.

As soon as you walk through the giant glass doors you’re met with a career spanning three shorts and 16 features, including the uncompleted “Napoleon” and “Aryan Papers,” as well as the Steven Spielberg-directed “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,” which Kubrick developed. A pair of video walls in a dark room greet you first, with clips from a number of films to get you in the right frame of mind. Then the journey really begins.

There is a separate room or wing dedicated to most of the features. A brief wall with elements from the shorts and “Killer’s Kiss,” as well as a glass case featuring “The Killing” soon gives way to the first considerable presentation: 1957’s brilliant “Paths of Glory.” Twisting and turning through the exhibit you’re met with costumes from “Spartacus,” miniature models from “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” bright white statues from the Korova Milk Bar of “A Clockwork Orange,” art department elements from “2001: A Space Odyssey” including a simian costume and the star child model, the giant, NASA-developed lens used to capture mere candle light for “Barry Lyndon” and much, much more.

Off in one alcove is a thoughtful presentation of Kubrick’s use of pre-existing music to sometimes eerie, often visceral effect in films like “The Shining” and “Eyes Wide Shut.” There you’ll hear the sounds of György Ligeti’s “Atmospheres” or Krzysytof Penderecki’s “De Natura Sonoris No. 1” and “No. 2.” Another detour offers pre-production imagery and an interview with a would-be star of “Aryan Papers.”

Screenplay drafts, notes, production boards, sketches and models litter the expansive collection. One case is dedicated to Kubrick’s many cameras and lenses, while another wall features numerous posters from his (relatively) small but potent portfolio of work.

Most arresting is a scale model of the bedroom suite from the finale of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” wonderfully lit and impeccably detailed. Though a major stand-out is the vast collection of “Napoleon” materials. It would be the most extensively researched film of Kubrick’s career, with a pre-production boasting so much that Taschen dedicated a coffee table book to it. Yet it would never be made, and Kubrick would use the natural light cinematography techniques he was developing for the film on “Barry Lyndon” instead.

Also intriguing are the many informative elements regarding production design. Whether it’s Anton Furst’s creation of a bombed-out Vietnamese town at a strategically detonated factory in England for “Full Metal Jacket” or the gimbal rig used for the space station sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Kubrick’s films were marvels of design, and that isn’t lost on the exhibit. You could spend countless minutes peering into the scale model of the hedge maze from “The Shining.” (The room for Kubrick’s Stephen King adaptation features Jack Torrance’s typewriter bearing one of the countless pages indicating his descent into insanity, as well as the framed photo of the Overlook Hotel’s July 4th ball that eerily closes the film.)

Further to all of that, there is an entire wall dedicated specifically to the director’s use of the color red throughout his career: the eye of HAL-900 in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the redcoats of “Barry Lyndon,” Gomer Pyle’s post-suicide blood splatter from “Full Metal Jacket,” it’s all thoroughly, fascinatingly analyzed.

As you walk through the final areas featuring elements from “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Aryan Papers,” past a wall of film markers from the set of a handful of films, you might heed the security guard’s warning: “If you go out here it’s exit only.” I humbly suggest turning around and going right back through the exhibit on your way out the entrance, because for Kubrick fans — indeed, for fans of cinema — once truly isn’t enough.

Check out a gallery of sights from the exhibit below.

The Stanley Kubrick exhibition at LACMA opened November 1 and runs through June 30, 2013.

Welcome to Oscar Talk.

In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

In the middle of a big lull here, so we’re scraping the barrel, but this week we discuss the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and what films are looking to take advantage of it.

“Anna Karenina” and “Silver Linings Playbook” open in limited release today, while “Lincoln” is expanding wide. We revisit all.

Moving along on category assessments, we dig in on Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

And finally, reader questions. Well, one. Regarding actors in danger of falling off the map after being perceived contenders early in the race.

Have a listen to the new podcast below. If the file cuts off for you at any time, try the back-up download link at the bottom of this post. You to subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here. And as always, if you have a question you’d like us to address on a future podcast, send it to OscarTalk@HitFix.com.

With Best Supporting Actress still the least defined of this year’s four acting races, Helen Hunt currently seems as likely a frontrunner as anyone for her work in “The Sessions”: partly because she’s excellent in a well-liked film, and partly because, as Jennifer Hudson can attest, it doesn’t hurt to be nominated in supporting for a lead role. Hunt’s trophy trail began yesterday with the announcement that she is to receive the Spotlight Award at January’s Palm Springs International Film Festival. It’s an honor that has previously alighted on Jessica Chastain and Amy Adams en route to an Oscar nod, and while seemingly small, it’s a well-timed opportunity for some California-based exposure and gladhanding as the race heats up. Everything counts. [Thompson on Hollywood] 

If you can’t see why Jacqueline West’s thread-perfect 1970s costumes for “Argo” are worthy of Oscar attention, Chris Laverty’s bang-on evaluation might help. [Clothes on Film]

A must-read for fans of “The Master” and/or its staggering cinematography: a lengthy, tech-specific interview with Mihai Malaimare Jr. [American Cinematographer]

Jennifer Aniston and Will Ferrell were among the stars toasting Ben Stiller last night, as the actor was presented with the American Cinematheque Award. [Deadline]

As part of a Variety special on the documentary Oscar race, Addie Morfoot wonders how this year’s Academy rule changes in the category will affect the process. [The Vote]

Ben Affleck is GQ’s Filmmaker of the Year. Well, Michael Haneke wouldn’t have looked quite as dashing on the cover. [GQ]

“Silver Linings Playbook” opens in limited release today, but the Weinsteins have decided on a slower roll-out to wide release than initially planned. A wise move for its Oscar strategy? [LA Times]

Ruth Jamieson on why, with the “Twilight” films, Hollywood has, for once, been a good boyfriend to the teen female demographic. [The Guardian] 

Chris Tucker is interested in starring in the Weinsteins’ US remake of “The Intouchables.” I have no sentimental attachment to the original, but Tucker is no Omar Sy. [Coming Soon]

Sasha Stone uses such films as “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Middle of Nowhere” as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the Academy’s relationship to race. [Awards Daily]

From “Irma Vep” to “Demonlover” to “Summer Hours,” Olivier Assayas has been one of the world’s most vital filmmakers for some time now, but it seems many only caught wise to his gifts two years ago with “Carlos,” his galvanizing five-hour biopic of infamous 1970s political terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Thanks to its unusual release both in cinemas and as a TV miniseries, the film managed to win Assayas a slew of US critics’ awards, a TV Golden Globe and even an Emmy nomination. (If that wasn’t surreal enough, he lost to “Downton Abbey.”)

It’ll be interesting to see if the Frenchman’s newly acquired admirers follow him to “Something in the Air,” a softer, woozier, faintly autobiographical reflection on an equivalent period of 1970s radicalism to “Carlos.” You may also know the film as “After May,” a literal translation of the French title being used in other territories. It’s also the one used in the first international trailer for the film, which we’re pleased to premiere below — by kind permission of Australian distributor Palace Films.

A shimmery ensemble piece casting its gaze upon a group of teenage activists variously finding their own place in the post-1968 countercultural war, it takes more cues from Assayas’ 1994 breakthrough feature “Cold Water.” IFC Films is releasing the film Stateside in 2013; Artificial Eye will be doing the honors in the UK.

Received enthusiastically in Venice, where Assayas wound up winning the Best Screenplay award from Michael Mann’s jury, this very European memory piece has since played both the Toronto and New York fests to warm applause, if not quite the critical hosannas inspired by “Carlos.” Meanwhile, it’s just been released in France to an vastly positive critical response. I’m looking forward to a revisit; having admired it on first acquaintance, I sense it could still be a grower. From my own review:

“Assayas’s film will put many in mind of Bertolucci’s ‘The Dreamers,’ compared to which it’s both springier and less insipid … Assayas might well believe that revolutionary cinema should be revolutionary in its construction … The more pertinent question he seems to be asking is whether the figures at the heart of his story, a version of himself among them, merit revolutionary cinema at all … As beautifully directed as you’d expect, “Something in the Air” is a film rich in such wry reversals.”

Check out the trailer below, and share your thoughts. Are you looking forward to Assayas’ latest? And who agrees with me that “After May” is a much better title than “Something in the Air?”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO64nXPJl-w&w=640&h=360]

A couple of weeks ago, I commented on how Best Production Design is a welcome name change for the category previously known as Best Art Direction. It is not the only such change this year, as the award for Best Makeup is now finally called Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

For years, I have said that the hairstyling portion of this award has been neglected. Whether the sorts of films that get nominated will change remains an open question. But at the very least, this should highlight for the public that the category isn’t all about prosthetics and foundation.

This remains a unique category in that there are only three nominees. Moreover, said nominees are chosen from a group of seven finalists that are announced in the weeks leading up to the nominations. Voters from the branch view bake-off reels on the work done in those seven films before choosing the nominees.

With the exception of Best Original Song (where rule changes may improve matters this year), this is, year after year, Oscar”s weirdest category. What would appear to be sure things either don’t make the bake-off stage or are ultimately snubbed on nominations morning. Seemingly obscure or forgotten titles, meanwhile, are frequently resurrected.

Some “types” of films are frequently nominated here. Creating monsters tends to work. Examples include “The Wolfman” and “Pan”s Labyrinth.” Then again, there have been high profile snubs of such films, like “Planet of the Apes” and “District 9.” Aging is another feat that tends to be cited here frequently, as seen in “The Iron Lady” and “Barney”s Version.” Then again, it is rare that there are multiple aging-heavy films on the final list; it tends to reflect a diversity of work.

The category also has an interesting affinity for foreign language films, which have comprised six of the last 24 nominees, including two winners. But that didn”t help “Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life” last year, even though it surprisingly made the bake-off.

Hairstyling, finally, has historically been relatively ignored. That said, every so often the hairstyling is presumably the primary reason the film is cited. I”m sure that was the case for “The Young Victoria.”

Does being a Best Picture contender help?  Well, it did in 2001, when all three nominees were cited in the big category (“The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” “Moulin Rouge!” and “A Beautiful Mind”). Just as frequently, however, none of the nominees cross over. Indeed, two years ago, “The Way Back,” “Barney”s Version” and “The Wolfman” were all the sole nominees from their films. Moreover, a truly atrocious film receiving a nomination is not an infrequent occurrence. I will never forget “Norbit” becoming an Oscar nominee a few years back.

I don”t object to this branch thinking for itself, though. While one can quibble with its choices, it is clear that they are considering what they are actually supposed to be considering – a film”s achievement in makeup.

Artists like Greg Cannom and Rick Baker have been cited frequently. But they also have been snubbed when they seem to be sure things. So unlike virtually every other crafts category (with the possible exception of Best Film Editing), I don”t consider the identity of the crafts artists to be *that* important in handicapping the race.

The only film that I am even remotely confident will be cited this year is “Cloud Atlas.” Divisive it may be, but to repeat, that doesn”t always matter in this category. Moreover, no one disputes the quality of the makeup, which showed action wounds, period makeup, fantastical creations and transformations of famous actors. The end credits are basically an advertisement of the film”s makeup work. Makeup supervisor Heike Merker has yet to earn Academy love to date. But I suspect that will change this year. Still, I would never dare call anything a “lock” in this category.

I”m not sure what to make of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” Two of the three “Lord of the Rings” movies won this category, though the third – “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” – was not even nominated. The idea of creating three movies out of this book strikes me as ridiculous. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that transformation of famous actors into residents of Middle Earth, to say nothing of the battle wounds and fantastical characters, will result in opportunities for the makeup team to shine. Peter King is back, having won this award for “The Return of the King.” I”d certainly rank it among the top tier of contenders.

The makeup crew of “Les Misérables” will have to age Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman across decades, also giving the latter a great deal of subtle disguises. This is in addition to recreating 19th Century France, including aspects of failed revolution. I must admit that I am somewhat nervous about how this film will be received overall. I don”t have the confidence that many others seem to have. That having been said, there is no question that it could become a crafts category behemoth, with this being prime among the places it could potentially score.

“Lincoln” transformed Daniel Day-Lewis into America”s greatest president. It also turned many other famous actors and Oscar nominees/winners into lesser known historical figures. Plus, there are a fair amount of Civil War battle wounds present.The film”s reception is stronger than any Spielberg film in quite some time and I expect nominations across the board. Leo Corey Castallano could end up with his first nomination alongside Lois Burwell (Oscar winner for “Braveheart,” nominated for “Saving Private Ryan”).

“Hitchcock” transforms famous stars into other famous Hollywood figures, most notably Anthony Hopkins into Alfred Hitchcock. I”m waiting to see what sort of consensus emerges around this work. But it will be among the most noticeable this year. Julie Hewitt has yet to be nominated, though Hair Department Head Martin Samuel has two nominations to date for the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, while Special Makeup Effects Artist Howard Berger won this award for “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

Those five titles strike me as the strongest contenders in this category. But, as mentioned, we get surprises year after year.

“Django Unchained” is still a wait-and-see thing. Tarantino films frequently feature extreme violence and blood. The brutality of the Southern world in the midst of slavery will require extensive work, in all likelihood. Camille Friend and Heba Thorrisdotir could end up with their first nominations.

“Looper” tried to make golden boy Joseph Gordon-Levitt look like a young Bruce Willis. This subtle work could tickle the branch”s fancy, especially given the weaknesses of various other contenders. I have a hunch this will end up with a nomination somewhere. Oscar nominee Mike Elizalde was a consultant.

“Men in Black 3” is also part of a franchise that previously won this category. Rick Baker”s triumph for the first entry in this series prevented “Titanic” from a dozen wins and the all-time record for wins. While the second entry in the series was not nominated, this was widely considered a step up. Moreover, Baker is back on the team, working with department head Bernadette Mazur.

Tomorrow, “Anna Karenina” begins its limited release. In addition to crafting late-19th Century Russian characters, it also should feature some exceptionally important hairstyling. As I said, I feel this is what likely propelled “The Young Victoria” to a nomination here three years ago. Ivana Primorac is a veteran of titles such as “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Cold Mountain” and “The Hours.” You”d think a nomination will have to come her way eventually.

I”ll end with another film that could get in on the strength of period makeup and hairstyling. “A Royal Affair” has been exceptionally well received and looks poised to make a dent in the packed category that is Best Foreign Language Film. As I said at the top, this branch tends to admire the work in foreign films more than many others. In the hunt for surprising nominations, maybe this could be one?

So there are the top 10 contenders that I reckon have a good chance in this category. At the same time, I have no doubt that I”ve missed at least one of the finalists and very possibly one of the eventual nominees. This branch is simply too unpredictable.

Was Abraham Lincoln secretly gay or bisexual? Playwright and “Lincoln” co-writer Tony Kushner believes there’s ample reason to speculate that he may have been, but you won’t find any such suggestions in Steven Spielberg’s recently-released film. Why? Because matters of sexuality have no place in this particular strand from Honest Abe’s political career, says Kushner. “I wanted to write about a very specific moment and I chose this moment and I don’t feel that there was any evidence at this particular moment that Lincoln was having sex with anybody,” he tells Tom O’Neil. “I don’t say in my movie whether the Lincoln character was gay or straight. You can ask Daniel (Day-Lewis) what he was playing, but it did not seem to me a thing to make a movie about now.” [Gold Derby]

With the screams from last night’s UK premiere of “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2” still ringing in my ears, yours truly weighs in on the film’s demented merits. [Time Out] 

While previous winner Kathryn Bigelow looks to be the only female director in the main Oscar hunt this year, Alissa Simon notes, more encouragingly, that 11 women are in the race for the foreign-language Oscar. [Variety] 

Nathaniel Rogers and friends talk Oscars, “Lincoln,” “Flight,” “Holy Motors” and even Jodie Foster. Love these podcasts. [The Film Experience]

R. Kurt Osenlund weighs up the Oscar prospects of “Lincoln,” concluding that the film is the clear Best Picture frontrunner. I can’t say I agree. [Slant]

Channing Tatum takes the honor of People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive 2012. I would rather he was in the Best Actor race for “Magic Mike” and/or “21 Jump Street,” but hey, it’s something. [People] 

Variety published a music-focused Eye on the Oscars special today, and it’s packed with interesting nuggets, from spotlights on individual composers in the awards race this year — including “The Master”‘s Jonny Greenwood, “Anna Karenina”‘s Dario Marianelli and everything’s Alexandre Desplat — to a piece on the recent reversal of rules in the Best Original Song category, hailed by many branch voters as a victory for common sense.

The headlining feature of the special, however — if only because the movie world is powerless to resist a Top 10 list — is a poll of 40 working composers on the greatest film scores of all time. Participants range from Oscar-winner Michael Giacchino (“Up”) to Coen Brothers favorite Carter Burwell to Cliff Martinez (“Drive”), with the list compiled by asking each one to name his/her three favorite scores. It’s too small a survey to qualify as anything more than a bit of fun, but the results are surprising and inevitable in equal measure.

You needn’t be clairvoyant to guess that John Williams was the most-mentioned composer in the poll, but would you necessarily have guessed that the top-ranking individual score was Ennio Morricone’s alternately choral and ethnic-influenced effort for “The Mission?” I wouldn’t have, even if the soundtrack is more widely remembered today than the little-discussed (and, truthfully, drearily dated) 1986 Palme d’Or winner and Best Picture Oscar nominee.  

Meanwhile, while repeat appearances in the top 10 for Morricone and Williams (along with Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith) will hardly raise eyebrows, the more contemporary inclusion of Thomas Newman for “The Shawshank Redemption” in the upper reaches of the list is rather less expected — further evidence of modern cinema’s gradual canonization of the modest 1994 prison drama. Pretty as it is, it would never occur to me to list Newman’s score — not even his finest hour, for my money — among the all-time greats; TV composer Tyler Bates, on the other hand, deems it potentially “the most influential music in film since ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Jaws’.” Professional peers often hear these things differently.

The top 11 (thanks to ties) vote-getters in the poll are:

1. “The Mission” (Ennio Morricone, 1986)
2. “E.T.” (John Williams, 1982)
3. “Psycho” (Bernard Herrmann, 1960)
4. “The Shawshank Redemption” (Thomas Newman, 1994)
5. “Star Wars” (John Williams, 1977)
=6. “Lawrence of Arabia” (Maurice Jarre, 1962)
=6. “Once Upon a Time in the West” (Ennio Morricone, 1968)
8. “Chinatown” (Jerry Goldsmith, 1974)
=9. “The Empire Strikes Back” (John Williams, 1980)
=9. “Planet of the Apes” (Jerry Goldsmith, 1968)
=9. “Vertigo” (Bernard Herrmann, 1958)

Is it worth noting that only three of these scores — “E.T,” “Star Wars” and “Lawrence of Arabia” — won Oscars? Another three — Morricone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” and both legendary Herrmann/Hitchcock scores — weren’t nominated at all. Of the rest, “Planet of the Apes” lost to “The Lion in Winter”; “The Empire Strikes Back” to “Fame”; “Chinatown” to “The Godfather Part II”; “The Shawshank Redemption” to “The Lion King” (the right call, I say),

“The Mission,” meanwhile, may have scooped the cinematography Oscar, but Morricone’s elaborate orchestrations lost out to Herbie Hancock’s coolly arranged jazz on Bertrand Tavernier’s “‘Round Midnight” — a surprising win and a controversial one, given that much of the music in the film was pre-existing.

That was a pretty inspired choice on the Academy’s part, though it arguably cost Morricone his strongest ever shot at the win; the disgruntled Italian legend later described the outcome as “a theft.” Now 84, Morricone has struck out on all five of his nominations, though he was given an Honorary Oscar five years ago. (By contrast, he’s also been nominated five times at the BAFTAs — and won each time.) 

You can check out more details of Variety’s poll here. What do you make of it? And what essential scores would be in your top three?

I’m always slightly surprised when awards bodies choose to bestow a lifetime achievement honor upon a recipient already firmly in the running for a competitive prize that year. Something about it seems a tad gauche and redundant to me: why not single out a worthy candidate not already being feted throughout the season?

Still, it’s a route the Producers’ Guild of America has taken for the last few years with their highest career honor, the David O. Selznick Award Achievement Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures. Last year, Steven Spielberg was given the award on top of his Producer of the Year nomination for “War Horse,” and his equivalent citation in the animated field for “The Adventures of Tintin.” (He won the latter, to boot.) The year before, Scott Rudin received the Selznick Award, just as he was favored by many to take the PGA prize for “The Social Network.” (As it turned out, he didn’t.)

This year, the producers aiming for double glory with the Guild are Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan, the British-New Zealand duo who have jointly headed London-based production company Working Title Films since 1992. (Bevan co-founded Working Title nine years earlier.)

As the men who helped change the face of UK cinema in the 1990s and beyond with such crossover successes as “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Elizabeth” and “Billy Elliot” — and also guided a number of US indies to the screen, including several Coen Brothers titles — they’re as worthy as anyone of career recognition. But it comes in the very season they’re likely to share in a Producer of the Year nod for Working Title’s Oscar hopeful “Les Miserables.” Could they take both awards? Or is the Selznick a pre-emptive consolation prize?

Either way, it’ll be both men’s first ever award from the Guild: Fellner has been nominated once before, as one of the producers of “Frost/Nixon.” The Academy has been more generous, perhaps reflecting the larger proportion of Brits in their membership: both Bevan and Fellner received Best Picture nominations for “Elizabeth” and “Atonement.” (Ironically, they lost the latter bid to “No Country for Old Men,” one Coen Brothers project in which they didn’t have a hand.) Unsurprisingly, they’ve had the most luck at the BAFTAs, taking Best Film for “Atonement,” and Best British Film for both “Elizabeth” and last year’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”

Other titles on which they share a producer or executive producer credit, illustrating the range and reach of their influence, include “Dead Man Walking,” “Notting Hill,” “Fargo,” “Thirteen,” “Shaun of the Dead,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “United 93” and “Senna,” while Bevan is also credited on this year’s “Anna Karenina.” An honorary award could hardly be more deserved, even if it is oddly timed.

In response to the announcement, Bevan and Fellner offered this short statement: “We are delighted and honored to be receiving the David O. Selznick Award. When you look at the past recipients, it is very humbling to be in their company and we are very grateful for the recognition.” That company, in addition to the aforementioned Spielberg and Rudin, includes Clint Eastwood, Billy Wilder, Jerry Bruckheimer, Kathleen Kennedy and John Lasseter. 

They’ll be presented with the Selznick at the PGA’s awards ceremony on January 26.

GKIDS was scarcely a blip on the radar when, nearly three years ago, they scored a shock Best Animated Feature Oscar nod for the very first film they distributed, “The Secret of Kells.” Last year, they announced themselves as a force to be reckoned with when they pushed two of their foreign toons into the race, at the expense of, among others, blockbuster “The Adventures of Tintin.” This year, as they jostle with four exotic offerings in the Oscar hunt, Rebecca Keegan looks at the rapidly rising profile of a company determined to bring some independent spirit and cultural diversity to the US animation market. “We haven’t needed a $3-million Oscar campaign,” says chief Eric Beckman. “Animators in L.A. are following what’s happening outside the country. We show them the films and they either win people’s hearts or they don’t.” [LA Times]

Joaquin Phoenix softens a little in his anti-Academy stance: “I guess I sound like a dick,” he says, before acknowledging the positive impact that his two Oscar nods have had on his career. [Sydney Morning Herald]

Justin Chang and Peter Debruge have a great back-and-forth about the Best Actor race, noting that many names most deserving of awards attention won’t receive it. A big ‘hell yes’ to Chang’s championing of Denis Lavant. [Variety]

Ramin Setoodeh asks where this year’s Best Actress contenders are. He has a point about the Hollywood gender gap, but I keep saying it: if you can’t find outstanding female performances, you’re not looking hard enough. Come on, people. [Daily Beast]

A.O. Scott talks to Robert De Niro, and argues that, for all the talk of a return to form in “Silver Linings Playbook,” he’s been on top form all along. De Niro’s one of my favorite living actors, but… no. [New York Times]

Sasha Stone examines the political currency of films in the Oscar hunt this year, with America’s history of slavery a recurring theme. [Awards Daily]

The Golden Globes will nominate any old musical, right? Wrong! Glenn Dunks looks at the HFPA’s 10 most egregious oversights within the genre they’re usually so hot for. They seriously didn’t nominate “All That Jazz?” [The Film Experience]

Joe Wright talks to Katey Rich about conceptualizing and choreographing his stylized take on “Anna Karenina.” [Cinema Blend]

In a break from movie talk, Roger Ebert has some advice for Barack Obama. [Salon] 

And to end on a sad note: R.I.P. Richard Robbins, the composer best known for his work with the Merchant-Ivory team, who netted Oscar nominations for “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day.” [The Guardian]

In Contention readers are generally a hawk-eyed bunch, quick to leap in with corrections when Kris or I make an honest error or suffer an accidental brain-fade, particularly on matters of Oscar trivia — collectively, you can make for an intimidatingly officious subeditor. So it’s all the more surprising that, over the past week or so, I’ve been corrected by three separate readers on a point I had right in the first place: that with her allegedly fiery performance in “Lincoln,” Sally Field is seeking her first Oscar nomination in 28 years, and her third overall.

In each case, a reader either commented or tweeted to politely remind me that Field actually received her third Oscar nomination back in 1994, as a supporting actress in Best Picture shoo-in “Forrest Gump.” And in each case, as much as I appreciated the gesture, I had to reply that, not to put too fine a point on it, she wasn’t.

Yes, Sally Field’s Oscar record remains an unusual one. With two Best Actress wins from just two nominations — “Norma Rae” in 1979, for which she also won at Cannes and swept the critics’ prizes, and less popularly, “Places in the Heart” in 1984 — she has the exact same stats as a more recent Academy anomaly, Hilary Swank. (Moreover, both women’s wins came five years apart, with a distinct career slump in between.) On the one hand, Field boasts the enviable claim that she’s never lost an Oscar; on the other, she’s rather pointedly lost out on a nomination or two, and “Forrest Gump” is the most glaring of them.

I can hardly blame multiple readers for assuming that she was nominated in 1994 race; if her absence was a surprise then, it’s positively astonishing now. Not, I should add, because I think her performance as the feistily doting ma of America’s favorite idiot savant was worthy of such recognition — she’s as strenuously, artificially folksy as the whole ghastly film, which I suppose at least means she found the appropriate register.

But from an analyst’s perspective rather than a critic’s one, a nomination should have been an easy get. She gets to be righteously defiant! She gets a bottomless store of homespun aphorisms! She gets to age conspicuously but not too unattractively! She gets a moist-eyed deathbed scene! All in box office phenomenon the Academy loved so much they nominated it in 13 other categories! It should have been practically automatic. The result is a good example of what I like to call a phantom Oscar nomination: one that makes so much sense in theory that your memory can easy fool you into believing it happened.

Some might suggest that, in the years following her famous “You like me!” speech when accepting her second Best Actress statuette — a classic Oscar moment that remains either cute or cloying, according to taste — the Academy’s acting branch collectively decided, “Eh, not so much.” They’d also bypassed Field in 1989, when her tear-streaked work in “Steel Magnolias” earned her a Golden Globe nod, while the Academy chose to nominate only her onscreen daughter Julia Roberts, instead looking as far afield as Pauline Collins and Isabelle Adjani to fill out the Best Actress category.

In truth, Oscar voters probably liked Field no less in 1994 than they did in 1984. Rather, her campaign fell victim to a) a Best Supporting Actress race that was unusually splintered beyond one insurmountable frontrunner, and b) her own co-star, Robin Wright. If Field had the advantage of being the lovable Academy vet, Wright had the equally attractive ingenue narrative going for her, not to mention the more fine-tuned performance in the closest thing “Forrest Gump” has to a genuine character arc — which is to say, her Jenny resembles a woman of actual agency before the script sanctimoniously kills her off as a punishment for making risky, independent decisions. (Okay, I’ll save my laundry list of objections to “Forrest Gump” for another day.)

Both “Gump” women made a good case to the Academy, yet early warning bells rang in the Field camp when the Globes nominated only Wright. The Screen Actors’ Guild, in the inaugural year of their awards, found room for Wright and Field, though they weren’t yet the significant precursor they’ve since grown into — and were particularly parochial in their early years when it came to American contenders. (A month or so after the Oscars, meanwhile, BAFTA evened out the scales by nominating Field alone.) 

Beyond “Pulp Fiction” breakout Uma Thurman and “Bullets Over Broadway”‘s unbeatable Dianne Wiest, however, there were no consensus contenders: the Globes opted for Kirsten Dunst in “Interview With the Vampire” (good call) and Sophia Loren in “Pret-a-Porter” (er, not so much), while SAG favored Jamie Lee Curtis in “True Lies,” whom the Globes had honored as a lead. 

The general lack of evident commitment should have made it relatively easy for both Wright and Field to score with the Academy, which would have brought “Gump” — and here’s a sobering thought — a record-breaking haul of 15 nominations. Instead, whether their fanbases were split or simply not ardent enough in the first place, they cancelled each other out. Instead, the Academy surprised pretty much everyone with a trio of nominees who had scarcely shown up anywhere in the precursors.

Two of them, as if in reply to SAG’s list, were Brits: Cannes winner Helen Mirren notched up her first Oscar appearance for “The Madness of King George,” while veteran Rosemary Harris snuck in for the little-seen “Tom & Viv.” Rounding out the category was Jennifer Tilly, riding a bigger-than-expected wave of enthusiasm for “Bullets Over Broadway” — if only in that one category, Woody Allen’s period bauble handily trumped the Best Picture juggernaut. 

Most are expecting Field will belatedly pick up her first supporting nomination in January — but should she miss out for another baity role in a hefty Best Picture contender, it wouldn’t be the first time. Field’s missing nod for “Forrest Gump” is as clear a reminder as any that sometimes even the most cast-iron Oscar vehicles can get passed over in startlingly obvious places. Remember “The Return of the King” failing to score a Best Cinematography nod? (It would surely have won a record-breaking 12th Oscar had the lensers’ branch let it through.) Or when “Brokeback Mountain” was slapped with that tell-tale snub for Best Film Editing? Some phantom nominations have a more haunting effect than others.

What nominations do you always incorrectly remember? Share them in the comments.   

Kris inaugurated our Oscar Bait column, in which we muse on the awards potential of projects still in development or production, a few weeks ago with some thoughts on Tom Hanks’s upcoming turn as Walt Disney in “Saving Mr. Banks.” Unfortunately, we’ve neglected to revisit the feature since — as the season ramps up, after all, it’s a challenge to see as far ahead as February, let alone to films that haven’t even been made yet.

But when promising news dropped last week concerning the long-forestalled film adaptation of Lois Lowry’s “The Giver,” I pricked up my ears. Pre-production talk doesn’t tend to grab my attention, but in this case I was willing to make an exception — not least because I’d been talking with friends about my desire for “The Giver” to eventually reach the screen only two days before. (Sadly, this power to magick a project into being seems to be a one-time deal: I’ve casually been inserting Wong Kar-wai’s abandoned Nicole Kidman collaboration “The Lady from Shanghai” into conversations for a whole week, but no dice.)

My thoughts on “The Giver” were prompted by a discussion about the recent vogue for young-adult literary adaptations with a supernatural and/or futuristic tint — “The Hunger Games,” the later “Harry Potter” entries, the “Twilight” films, the forthcoming “Beautiful Creatures” — which variously juice the coming-of-age formula by thrusting parallel-universe adult responsibilities upon child protagonists.

Youth-oriented literature and film has rarely seemed more earnestly fixated on levelling the social and moral playing field between children and adults via extreme story worlds, and it’s a movement that makes “The Giver,” a 1993 novel by Lois Lowry that is arguably more complex in its environment and weightier in its ethics than any of these currently hot franchises, seem several years ahead of its time. The commercial waters for a film version couldn’t be warmer right now.

I first read “The Giver” at the age of 10, right after its publication. By then, I was already a fan of Lowry’s candid, unsentimental children’s writing, but remember still being surprised by the impressive bleakness and terror of this dystopian fantasy, set in a world of prescribed Sameness, in which human suffering has been eliminated by the collective erasure of memory. All past consciousness is retained by an individual selected as the Receiver of Memory; when 12 year-old Jonas is chosen for the position, and embarks on the process of receiving memories from his predecessor (the Giver of the title), he begins to question the validity of his society’s unblemished existence. 

Though challenged in some quarters by parental associations who argue that it’s subversively anti-authoritarian or even provocative religious allegory, the book — the first in a rough quartet of novels by Lowry — has apparently become something of a North American middle-school standard since its publication. It seems all the more surprising, then, that a film has never come to fruition — though it’s been under option ever since it was published. Lowry, however, offered an answer in a recent New York Times interview:  

“[I]t seems, Lowry pointed out, that every young-adult book published is a dystopian thriller packed with action sequences. ‘And that”s why they”re getting made into movies and mine has been out in Hollywood for 16 years – they can”t figure out where the action is.'”

It looks, however, like Hollywood might finally have located the action. Over the years, assorted names have been temporarily attached to the project: Bill Cosby’s production company took the reins in 1994, while around the turn of the century, the film was dusted off as a potential vehicle for Oscar-nominated boy wonder Haley Joel Osment. A few years later, “House of Sand and Fog” director Vadim Perelman was engaged. Nothing stuck.

What I wasn’t aware of, however, was that Jeff Bridges bought the rights to the novel early in the process, having been turn onto it by his then-teenage daughter. Back then, the actor planned for his father, Lloyd, to take the title role. He passed away in 1998, while the project languished long enough for Bridges eventually to assume the role himself.

Talk resurfaced this year, with “Harry Potter” helmer David Yates vaguely linked to the project. Last week’s news, however, suggested things are firming up a little, even if no official announcement has been made yet: Bridges is still attached, but now it’s classy Australian genre-hopper Philip Noyce in line to direct, with prestige merchants The Weinstein Company potentially backing the whole endeavor.

Even assuming it still aims squarely at the young adult demographic, that combination of talent could make for a more prestigious item than, say, “The Hunger Games.” As could the entrenched literary credibility of Lowry’s novel: as her quote above suggests, it’s an exciting but somewhat cerebral work that wouldn’t really fit a gung-ho action approach. Noyce’s CV, meanwhile, makes it hard to anticipate just what approach he’d go for. Most recently, he’s dabbled in high-concept populism with the Angelina Jolie actioner “Salt” and TV’s superb nighttime soap “Revenge,” but he’s aimed for noble respectability, too: 2006’s “Catch a Fire” didn’t, well, ignite, but 2002’s double-shot of “The Quiet American” and “Rabbit-Proof Fence” was more well-received, and even got him a modicum of awards traction. “The Giver” would probably be best served by this side of his brain.

Bridges, meanwhile, is an actor who has recently hit the Academy sweet spot, as evidenced by a recent afterglow nomination for “True Grit” following his long-awaited Best Actor win for “Crazy Heart”; his presence in the grave and substantial role of The Giver could ensure that adults — perhaps even those within the Academy — don’t merely see the film as kid’s stuff. 

What else is on the horizon that deserves the albatross of an Oscar Bait column? Give us some recommendations below.

The cults surrounding “Twilight” and “Star Wars” may not look very similar, but what they do share is a near-evangelical belief in the cultural significance of their respective franchises. I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with either of them — let alone between them — yet that’s what UK critic Mark Kermode has done… and he’s on the side of the Twi-hards. With “Breaking Dawn: Part 2” hitting screens this week, he isn’t afraid to admit that he’s excited. Claiming that most critics’ dismissal of the series marks them as “out of touch,” he adds: “I’ve had a lot more fun watching and arguing about the Twilight movies than I ever had with the Star Wars saga, that lumbering, narratively hobbled space opera which, we now learn, is to return to our screens for yet more boring instalments in the not too distant future.”  Hey, I’m just the messenger. [The Guardian]

Remember “Populaire,” the French romcom that briefly caught the attention of awards pundits when the Weinsteins snapped it up earlier this year? Sounds like it’s one to watch for 2013. [Screen]

Just in case we weren’t already sufficiently excited about “Zero Dark Thirty,” composer Alexandre Desplat liken it to a Kurosawa film. [Collider]

Amir Soltani talks to Steve James — the Academy-slighted director of “Hoop Dreams” and “The Interrupters” — about his new film “Head Games” and, yes, the Oscars. [The Film Experience]

Daniel Day-Lewis talks about finding Abraham Lincoln’s voice, among other challenges. [NPR]

“Les Mis” will hit the campaign trail hard with half a dozen screenings for assorted Academy and awards folk on November 24. [New York Times]

Sasha Stone looks at the scarcity of female-centred projects in Hollywood, and how that’s reflected in the Best Picture race. [Awards Daily]

Last month, the AV Club counted down the best films of the 90s — now, the Slant guys have got in on the act. Crowning their top Top 100: the film that should have won the 1998 Best Picture Oscar. [Slant]

When you stack up the Oscar records of cinematographer Roger Deakins, composer Thomas Newman and sound mixer Greg P. Russell, an amazing stat hits you in the face: 0-34. Three guys have gone to the Oscars 34 times and not once have they walked away with a trophy. And this year, each of them feature on one of the biggest critical and commercial hits of the year: Sam Mendes’ “Skyfall.”

Whether any of them manage to earn a prize for their work on the film is still to be seen, but just that such dramatically unrewarded but clearly peer-respected below-the-line talent can be found on one film this season is pretty sensational. Russell attributes that to the vision of Mendes, a filmmaker who has, after all, put together award-worthy crew after award-worthy crew over his 15-year feature filmmaking career.

“These are his players,” Russell says humbly. “I”m new to this deal because Roger has been doing work for Sam, and Thomas has done, I think, all of Sam”s films. So there”s that history and I was privileged to be a part of it.”

Russell, who has been nominated 15 times over his career for such films as “The Rock” and “Armageddon,” as well as franchises like “Spider-Man” and “Transformers,” actually met Deakins two years ago during the Academy’s class photo event at the annual nominees luncheon. Russell was nominated for Philip Noyce’s “Salt” while Deakins was up for the Coen brothers’ “True Grit.” In fact they can be seen standing next to one another in the photo.

“We were standing side-by-side and I said, ‘I”ve been a huge fan of your work, and consider you the very best,'” Russell recalls. ” I mean, I think he is probably one of the greatest cinematographers that”s ever lived. And we’re sitting there going, ‘We”ve been to this thing however many times between the two of us, and we”ve never won this thing.'”

But the peer recognition never gets old, Russell says. And Newman agrees.  “It’s very exciting but it can be a crazy kind of carousel ride, those things,” Newman says of the Academy Awards. He has beenin the Oscar mix 10 times, for films as “The Shawshank Redemption” (for which Deakins was also nominated — the first nod for each of them, in fact), “Finding Nemo” and “The Good German,” as well as “American Beauty” and “Road to Perdition” for Mendes. “I think the beginnings of the shows always start off a little nicer than the middle and the endings, as a buddy of mine said, because there’s just more and more losers in the room the more the night goes on. But it’s still exciting.”

Deakins has been nominated nine times, for such films as “Kundun,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” “No Country for Old Men” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” at the Oscars. Somehow he’s never won, though he has be awarded by the American Society of Cinematographers twice (for “The Man Who Wasn’t There” and the aforementioned “The Shawshank Redemption”).

But he doesn’t have much to offer on the subject of losing. He is, like his colleagues, happy to get the recognition and keep doing the work. And on a film like “Skyfall,” he’s pleased to be a part of such a robust below-the-line mixture.

“I think the whole thing is so rich as a piece,” he says. “A lot of Bond movies, they’re quite simple, aren’t they, visually and sound-wise? They’re quite clinical and simple. And not to say that’s bad, but that’s the sort of tradition of it, really. Whereas this is really kind of rich and complex. There’s a lot of things in it that probably are quite new to the franchise. So the soundtrack is just one of them. It’s like this rich blend of things. I thought that was one of the great successes of it.”

Russell says he was happy to be along for the ride via Mendes’s long-time mixer Scott Millan (who handled score and dialogue, while Russell handled effects). But when he sat down to do the temp mix and first got a load of Deakins’s work, he was floored.

“Everything that raises the bar, raises the bar,” he says. “Period. And when you look at visuals that are just outstanding, and clearly you find yourself mesmerized, you want to do your best to sonically deliver the goods. It”s a ballet of visuals. And you just go, ‘Wow.'”

Russell says Mendes wanted the score to rule in the film. Dialogue clarity was of course number one, but the director was consistently conscious about Newman’s work being propulsive.

“We were going to find all of our opportunities in and within that,” Russell says, “but not obscuring that. Any time we are overloading the track to where we”ve lost the thread of music, it”s a no-no. We want the tone and theme and signature lines to never be obscured. There”s certainly tons of opportunities within the movie for effects to be thriving. But we really wanted to stay clear of the music and let that be the prominent driving force within the film.”

Deakins says the entire enterprise had an added element of difficulty because everyone had to stick within a certain sort of genre, to a degree. That of the Bond genre, not to put too fine a point on it. “Because if you stretch too far out of it the audience is going to go, ‘Hey, wait a minute. I came to watch a Bond movie,'” he says. “I think Tom felt, in a way, that was a restriction. But I thought it was brilliant the way he wove in the new music with the original kind of themes and with Adele’s song and stuff. It’s so rich and varied.”

Newman was equally floored by Deakins’s work when he got a look at the film and began turning over ideas in his head of how to work within that genre — which of course has a long history of music — but still offer something fresh.

“It was just out of the gate gorgeousness, you know,” he says. “Just in terms of the geometry of the design and the sense of how light was used. I’m a huge fan of Deakins. We’ve kind of run into each other along the way. He’s such an approachably nice guy and an interesting guy just to have a conversation with. I love his work.”

And when he saw the fully completed mixture at the London premiere of the film at Royal Albert Hall, he was delighted at how sound and image worked together. “Of course it was a huge, huge boomy room,” Newman says, “but I was very impressed by how it all sounded. It was very exciting moment-to-moment and very, very believable. I was really very much in the spaces and locales that I was in.”

We’ll see if Russell, Newman and Deakins can make it to their 16th, 11th and 10th nominations, respectively, for “Skyfall.” But whether they do or not is plainly beside the point. The film is awash in craft, and it doesn’t stop with this oft-recognized trio.

From the production design of four-time nominee (and winner for “Bugsy”) Dennis Gassner — along with his twice-nominated set decorator Anna Pinnock, to the film editing of two-time nominee Stuart Baird, to the sound editing of three-time nominee (and winner for “Braveheart” and “The Bourne Ultimatum”) Per Hallberg, it’s a crew that knows its stuff. And that’s to say nothing of those on the team who probably ought to have received some Academy recognition by now, like costume designer Jany Temime. They’ve all come together to deliver what is already seen by many as the best installment of a 50-year-old franchise.

“There”s a lot to be proud of,” Russell says. “And I think everyone resonates that same sentiment, that we all have a lot to be proud of to be part of this movie.”

“Skyfall” is now playing at a theater near you.

The Oscars may seem some way off still, but the short film categories are already getting down to business. A couple of weeks ago, we got the official, er, shortlist for Best Documentary Short; now, Best Animated Short is the next category to whittle down the playing field.

Ten titles have advanced to the second voting stage, selected by the Academy’s Short Film and Feature Animation Reviewing Committee from a pool of 56 entries. Interestingly, the press release states that three to five of the 10 will be nominated, though there haven’t been fewer than five nominees in the category since 2000.

I must confess to being completely blind in this category, not having seen any of the 10 shortlisted films. However, Disney’s “Paperman,” whose praises Kris was singing just last week, did make the cut; the film is currently in theaters as an appetizer for Disney’s box-office slayer “Wreck-It Ralph.” With Pixar out of the race for a change this year — the short “La Luna,” which preceded “Brave” in theaters, was nominated in last year’s field — that makes Disney the giant in this field.

However, as Kris pointed out, voters routinely prefer David to Goliath in this category — indeed, Disney hasn’t won this award since “It’s Tough to Be a Bird” way back in 1969. So the odds suggest one of the lesser-known candidates will take it.

There’s a lot of love out there for British stop-motion effort “The Eagleman Stag,” which actually won last year’s BAFTA in this category. Evidently one of the artsier contenders in the bunch — it hails from Britain’s esteemed Royal College of Art, after all — It’s probably a better place to put your money than “Maggie Simpson in ‘The Longest Daycare’.” “The Simpsons Movie” couldn’t nab a feature nod in 2007, so could this mini-spinoff do any better?   

“Adam and Dog” could be one to watch — not only do I thoroughly approve of its production company, but it won the Annie Award earlier this year. (It’s worth noting, however, that the Annie and the Oscar haven’t overlapped in this category since Pixar’s “For the Birds” in 2001.)

The only previous nominee in the hunt, meanwhile, is Czech animator Michaela Pavlátová, director of “Tram” — her film “Reci, reci, reci…” was nominated for this award back in 1993. 

The full list of 10 is below. Which ones have you seen?

“Adam and Dog,” Minkyu Lee, director (Lodge Films)

“Combustible,” Katsuhiro Otomo, director (Sunrise Inc.)

“Dripped,” Léo Verrier, director (ChezEddy)

“The Eagleman Stag,” Mikey Please, director; Benedict Please, music and sound design (Royal College of Art)

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Raul Garcia, director; Stephan Roelants, producer (Melusine Productions, R&R Communications Inc., Les Armateurs, The Big Farm)

“Fresh Guacamole,” PES, director (PES)

“Head over Heels,” Timothy Reckart, director; Fodhla Cronin O”Reilly, producer (National Film and Television School)

“Maggie Simpson in ‘The Longest Daycare’,” David Silverman, director (Gracie Films)

“Paperman,” John Kahrs, director (Disney Animation Studios)

“Tram,” Michaela Pavlátová, director; Ron Dyens, producer (Sacrebleu Productions)

One of the most buzzed films of the Oscar season hits theaters today after having its “official” bow at AFI Fest last night. The film comes into the season with huge expectations and, by most accounts — including, most definitely, my own — it rises to them. But I don’t expect the film will land so well with everyone, so I’ll be curious to hear what others think. When you get around to it, do let us know your take in the comments section below. And as always, feel free to rate it above.