“I’m not going to be narrow enough to claim these fellows can’t act,” wrote acidic industry columnist Hedda Hopper in 1964. “They’ve had plenty of practice. The weather’s so foul on that tiny isle that, to get in out of the rain, they gather themselves in theaters and practice ‘Hamlet’ on each other.”

“These fellows” were, of course, the British – who, much to the chagrin of Hollywood loyalists like Hopper, enjoyed a golden streak at the Academy Awards consistent with the all-purpose ‘British Invasion” of the mid-60s. When she wrote this, the UK had claimed back-to-back Best Picture wins with “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Tom Jones,” while victories for such British stars as Julie Christie, Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and Paul Scofield lay ahead.

It”s a love affair the Academy has maintained over the decades, in some periods more passionately than in others: Colin Welland”s cry of “The British are coming!” as underdog “Chariots of Fire” claimed the 1981 Best Picture Oscar signalled another mini-surge. More recently, after a lengthy stretch of American domination, triumphs for “Slumdog Millionaire” in the 2008 race, and “The King”s Speech” two years later, suggested another invasion might be afoot.

Last year, however, the brakes were slammed on that notion, despite what critics largely agreed had been a banner year for British film. Titles like “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “Shame,” “Tyrannosaur,” “Senna,” “Kill List” and “Weekend” pointed to an industry bristling with creativity and risk, expanding the notion of UK cinema beyond stately costume drama, feelgood comedy and safe hits like “The King”s Speech” and “An Education.”

It seemed the Academy, however, was more comfortable with the latter model, as that vintage 2011 slate made scarcely a dent in the Oscar race: “Tinker Tailor,” a joint nomination leader in the BAFTA race, scored just three Oscar nods, while Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton were pointedly snubbed for “Shame” and “Kevin,” respectively. For the first time since 2005, the Best Picture slate yielded not one British nominee, despite its swollen size. Even “Senna,” laden with honors across the pond, failed to crack the Academy”s documentary longlist. At the end of the day, the year”s only Britpic with an Oscar to its name (two of them, actually, and one for its American star) was the dismal Thatcher biopic “The Iron Lady” – not exactly a prime representative of the renaissance UK critics had been trumpeting.

Then again, even beyond the Oscar-fodder bracket, 2012 has thus far proven those trumpets premature. Whether 2011 was merely one anomalously good year, or whether we”re just now feeling the effects of the UK Film Council closure and budget restrictions implemented by David Cameron”s Tory government, it”s been a dismayingly limp year for British cinema – unless, of course, you choose to read the robust commercial performance of bland blue-rinser hit “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” on both sides of the Atlantic as any kind of progress.

Though the festival circuit has turned up some niche standouts in the vein of “Berberian Sound Studio,” “My Brother the Devil” and “Sightseers,” while the reliable documentary quarter pitched in with “The Imposter” and “Marley,” there”s nothing that has caught the indie-crossover buzz of a “Kevin” or a “Shame.” Moving into the more mainstream prestige sector, there”s still little to cling to: “Anna Karenina” was primed for a Best Picture spot, but with mixed reviews and disappointing box office returns at home, that looks increasingly unlikely. Once talked up as a potential “King”s Speech” redux, “Hyde Park on Hudson” bombed at the fall festivals. “Quartet” is more milquetoast fodder for the “Best Exotic Downton Abbey” crowd, but the best it can (or should) hope for is a token performance nod or two.

Fox Searchlight could yet parlay the popularity of “Best Exotic” into filler nominations for acting or even writing, while “Anna Karenina” is certainly good for a stack of technical citations – though Keira Knightley isn”t the secure Best Actress nominee some pundits once thought she was. With that in mind, British pride at the upcoming Academy Awards – the hopes of Daniel Day-Lewis, Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren for US productions notwithstanding – largely seems to rest on two very different juggernauts: “Skyfall” and ” Les Misérables.”

Though I think some critics got a bit over-excited after the film”s first screening last Friday, the effusive reception thus far for the 23rd entry in the Bond franchise has certainly been enough of a story to lend credence to our colleague Greg Ellwood”s theory that the film is a potential Oscar dark horse. If it”s a massive hit globally – and I think that”s more a “when” than an “if” at this point – many will inevitably argue for it as a worthy Best Picture nominee, representing popcorn artistry at the highest level. (It”s a hell of a lot better than “The Avengers” or “The Dark Knight Rises,” if you ask me.) I suspect the Academy will prove as indifferent to such arguments as they were with another acclaimed franchise sequel “The Dark Knight” four years ago, but it”ll be interesting to see how the story plays out. (If nothing else, I do believe the film could finally land Roger Deakins that elusive Best Cinematography Oscar.)

Last and the opposite of least, we get to “Les Mis,” the film many Oscar-watchers are declaring the frontrunner sight unseen. Until the veil is lifted, there”s no way of knowing whether they”re actually onto something or are merely blinded by the lights – though with the film only hitting screens in December, there”s every chance Oscar voters could be persuaded on hype alone. Win or lose, it”s set up to be the biggest British Oscar story since, well, the last film directed by Tom Hooper, though laymen could be forgiven for thinking the Working Title production, with its classic French source material and its quartet of American and Antipodean leads, isn”t very British at all. And even if it”s outstanding, another polished prestige period hit won”t allay concern about this year”s creative downturn in UK film.

The film”s French cultural aspect, meanwhile, might be of more interest to Academy voters who are being given a lot of reasons to go Gallic at the moment. After the triumph of “The Artist” last year (coincidentally alongside wins for French-set US films “Hugo” and “Midnight in Paris”), hopes are high that “Amour” could be the second largely French-made production to crack the Best Picture list in as many years. While the Weinsteins” crossover smash “The Intouchables” is lurking on the far fringes, there”s a strong chance Marion Cotillard and Emmanuelle Riva could make the Best Actress category 40% français this year. (A reader even pointed out to me the possibility of “Amour,” “Intouchables,” “Sister,” “War Witch” and “Our Children” making the Best Foreign Language Film race an all French-speaking affair.) Perhaps Hedda Hopper was fearing the wrong cultural invasion all along.

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.

Though he’s still revered as one of his generation’s finest, it’s been an awfully long time since Robert De Niro’s name came up in any kind of awards conversation. Over 20 years have passed since the actor’s last Oscar nomination — his sixth — for “Cape Fear,” and give or take some Golden Globe comedy attention, awards voters have shared in the general consensus that the great man has gone off the boil in his later years.

That dry spell, of course, looks to end this year, with probable Best Picture contender “Silver Linings Playbook” a likely bet to land De Niro his seventh nod — and his first in supporting since he entered the Oscar fray nearly forty years ago in “The Godfather Part II.” With the Weinsteins set to campaign hard for the Toronto fest favorite, De Niro’s campaign is already picking up steam: he’s getting the Supporting Actor honor at the Hollywood Film Awards (for whatever that’s worth, but it’s still a publicity opp), and is now set to receive the Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

The Santa Barbara honor may be a reward for his career rather than one specific performance, but it’s hardly coincidental: every award he accepts over the next few months will work towards drumming his supposed return to form into the minds of Academy members. (I say “supposed” only because I haven’t seen the performance myself; Kris, for his part, doesn’t see what’s so special about it.) It remains to be seen whether the more discerning critics’ awards will latch on to De Niro’s work, or whether it’ll be an easier play for SAG and Globe inclusion.

Following this fundraiser, the upcoming Santa Barbara fest is a prime site for individual tributes — which are due to be announced any time now — often en route to other awards attention. De Niro’s award will be presented by the man for whom it is named, 95 year-old screen legend Kirk Douglas, at a black-tie fundraising dinner on December 8, over a month before the festival itself begins. A statement from Douglas himself reads: “I am a great fan, not only for what he does on screen, but also for establishing the Tribeca Film Festival…it brought joy back to lower Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11.”

De Niro is the seventh recipient of the award, which has previously been presented to Harrison Ford, Quentin Tarantino, Ed Harris, John Travolta, Douglas himself and (who’d have guessed it?) Michael Douglas. What is it about lifetime achievement awards and their curious resistance to women?  

Meanwhile, the Santa Barbara fest itself has been expanded, running for 11 days from January 24 to February 3, and set to include over 200 features. More to come.

Variety’s Jon Weisman has fallen a little bit in love with “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” As have many people, including us here at In Contention. Yet the film isn’t even being mentioned as a dark-horse Oscar player in most circles. Why so? Because, Weisman, argues, it wasn’t tapped for awards glory sight-unseen. Referring to awards season as being run a bit like a high school clique: “[S]ome pics get a head start and others a hurdle based on little more than their loglines. This is true even though movies don’t need to please everyone to reach the Dolby Theater in February.” (He points to the recent Best Picture nomination for the poorly received “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” as an example of the latter.) What other gems are fighting to be considered awards material? [The Vote]

Leos Carax breaks down Kylie Minogue’s haunting musical number in his astonishing film “Holy Motors.” If you ask me, a Best Original Song Oscar is in order. [New York Times]

Jamie Foxx bigs up “Django Unchained,” promising audiences will “automatically go back to the time and way slaves were treated.” Read another way, that doesn’t sound like a compliment. [LA Times] 

Nathaniel Rogers and friends tackle “Life of Pi,”  “Hyde Park on Hudson” and the resurrection of Matthew McConaughey, among other topics, in a hugely entertaining podcast. [The Film Experience]

One of those friends, Nick Davis, offers a lovely report on a career tribute to Joan Allen, surely one of the best un-Oscared actresses at work today, at the Chicago Film Festival. [Nick’s Flick Picks]

Category by category, Tom O’Neil breaks down the Oscar chances of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” [Gold Derby]

The ever-diligent David Hudson does a thorough job of gathering critical responses to “Flight.” Approval with reservations is the dominant tone. [Fandor] 

Sasha Stone goes crazy for Denzel Washington’s work in the film, and re-handicaps the Best Actor race with the actor in the #2 position. [Awards Daily] 

Rifling through the pricey designer wardrobe of “Skyfall.” Meanwhile, if you have nearly $6000 going spare, you can get a bespoke replica of one of Bond’s suits. [Financial Times]

Following a recent statement to the contrary by Maggie Smith, Max Davidson argues that things have never been better for older moviegoers. [The Telegraph]

NEW YORK — The first time actor John Hawkes heard about Mark O’Brien, the polio-afflicted author, journalist and poet he portrays in the new film “The Sessions,” it was due to the Oscars. Documentary filmmaker Jessica Yu had just won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short for 1996’s “Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien.” Hawkes read a quote from her in the newspaper basically noting that the dress loaned to her for the evening cost more than the budget for her film, and he enjoyed a chuckle over that.

Hawkes knows a little something about low-budget filmmaking, too. After working consistently for years as a character actor on screen and TV, he’s become something of an indie darling. “The Sessions” in fact marked his third-straight trip to the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year (at which point the film was titled “The Surrogate”). And 16 years after the Oscars managed to put O’Brien on his radar, he looks entirely likely to pop up on Oscars’ radar for his performance of the man.

But going back to “Breathing Lessons,” it was a crucial tool for Hawkes when it came to inhabiting O’Brien. “I watched it probably 40 or 50 times,” he says. “There was Mark in all his glory. There was his twisted body and his voice and his attitude and his poetry, all prevalent. There are a lot of things I could mime from that film. It afforded me a chance to capture some of the real sound and feeling and vibe of Mark himself.”

But the performance needed to be about way more than mere physicality. O’Brien spent over four decades in an iron lung. But from that prison his spirit flew on the page. The wealth of writing available to Hawkes was equally beneficial, he says, and indicative of the undying light he most wanted to capture in his performance.

“I suppose a guy who lives 49 years and 43 of them in an iron lung and exceeds a lot of expectations, just by nature that person is going to be a battler,” he says of his way into playing the part from within. “A character who’s been dealt an unfortunate hand, I would want to avoid self-pity. You don’t want to watch a character wallow in their grief, but rather try to solve their problem, and that seemed to be a good part of Mark’s life. And humor was hugely important, to find humor wherever we could in the script. The situation is fraught from the outset.”

And indeed, there are light touches throughout that keep the film not only balanced, but realistic as a result. The story told by “The Sessions” is a specific one, though, that of the time O’Brien spent with sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen Greene (played by Helen Hunt in the film). Knowing he was nearing the end of his rope and had never been with a woman intimately due to his affliction, O’Brien enlisted Greene’s services for six sessions of sex therapy. But the bond depicted in the film crosses sterile therapist/patient boundaries and becomes something moving unto itself.

Adding a sense of realism to the dynamic is the fact that Hawkes and Hunt had never met prior to the film. So a lot of the spark of introductory awkwardness is alive in those scenes, Hawkes says, while the growth of the relationship was helped further by the fact that the sessions were filmed sequentially.

“You hear the word ‘brave’ thrown around about acting performances a little too freely, but I think in this case it actually applies,” he says of his co-star’s work. “It’s a really courageous performance on a lot of levels. And you also hear ‘the nudity was necessary’ for the movie or the story or whatever and in this case it’s not bullshit. It’s such an integral part of the movie and her character needs to handle it in such a specific way, and she does it so beautifully.”

Hawkes says the Sundance experience has been “phenomenal” and that he laments the fact that he won’t be at the fest with another film in 2013, but three years in a row have meant a lot. And it seems they’ve all been leading to this moment, when he finally assumes leading man status in a vehicle of his own.

“For me it’s been the first time I’ve seen each of those movies [‘Winter’s Bone,’ ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ and ‘The Sessions’],” he says. “It’s been a nervous thrill to watch those with a crowd and Sundance has been really great to me…It’s kind of an overwhelming festival but I really admire Mr. Redford. I mean you think of all the people who’ve been inspired and given chances to work there, from the labs to the festival itself, and it’s literally hundreds of filmmakers. That’s an honorable and rare and wonderful thing.”

The first of that string brought Hawkes his first-ever Oscar nomination, but he says that hasn’t really changed his life all that much. “I think part of that is how I’ve approached it,” he says. “Maybe I’ll be in a summer blockbuster, sequel eight of some film along the way, but so far I’ve been able to avoid that. I don’t need much money to live. I’ve saved money from the TV shows I’ve been on. I have a low overhead and I just prefer to do things that stir me. There are some really amazingly great, big movies out there, but I just haven’t really been asked to be a part of them, so I prefer to do the little ones at this point. I’m made nervous by higher visibility on many levels. Since I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have any children, it offers me freedom to kind of do what I want to do, which is low budget films that not that many people see, normally.”

Nevertheless, his work in “The Sessions” will bring him to a whole other level. And “two-time Oscar nominee” starts to have a much different ring to it. He’ll find himself in a race with formidable competitors like Daniel Day-Lewis, Anthony Hopkins and Denzel Washington — actors who have been well-rewarded by the Academy, in other words. Might his affable portrayal spark a desire to award new blood at the Dolby Theatre? Perhaps. But Hawkes isn’t likely to miss a beat if it does.

“There’s no goal beyond the life I already have,” he says.

“The Sessions” opens in limited release on Friday, October 19.

You have to hand it to the Golden Globes. Barely had the chatter died down about the Academy’s surprising choice of Oscar host than the HFPA chimed in with their own… and grabbed bigger headlines than Seth Macfarlane ever did. While the “Ted” man’s appointment was welcomed in some quarters, others expressed concern that most viewers out in the real world don’t know who he is — a weak spot the Globes have cunningly zeroed in on by snapping up star comedy duo Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to continue the work done by Ricky Gervais in the last two years. With Fey a name many have suggested for the Oscar gig (she’s presented at the big show twice), this likely ratings coup must really smart for AMPAS. I know which show I’m looking forward to more now. You? [HitFix]

Judi Dench talks “Skyfall” and such with Tim Adams. Her best quote in on “J. Edgar”: “What’s it like? I suppose I should see it.” Don’t trouble yourself, ma’am. [The Guardian]

“Argo” is subjected to the grilling every potential Oscar frontrunner based on true events must go through: how accurate is it? Are the smear campaigns lying in wait? [Slate]

Speaking of “Argo,” Christopher Rosen and Michael Hogan discuss its frontrunner status, among other Oscar concerns, in an entertaining back-and-forth. [Gold Rush]

10 foreign-language Oscar hopefuls, “Amour,” “Barbara” and “A Royal Affair” among them, are in the World Cinema programme at next month’s AFI Fest, along with one of the year’s best films, “Berberian Sound Studio”. [AFI Fest]

Anne Thompson’s correspondent is blown away by Melisso Leo’s performance in microbudget indie “Francine.” And rightly so. [Thompson on Hollywood]

Could “Zero Dark Thirty” boost Obama’s campaign? Out in the real world, where people don’t fixate on movies months before their release date, I’d say no. [Wall Street Journal]

Why last weeks box office results reveal too many movies chasing the same young male demographic. [Vulture]

Brad Brevet thinks the Best Actress race is down to just nine names. I’m not so sure. [Rope of Silicon]

This weekend’s viewing at the London Film Festival brought me to a pleasingly round, if short-lived, statistic: I’ve now seen 20 of the 71 films entered for consideration in this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race. That’s a pretty small proportion still, yet even this sample pool feels thick with artistic virtue and contender potential alike. From this single score of films, I feel, it’d be quite easy to draw up five-nominee slate for the ages, with several worthy alternatives left over as change – and Australia’s entry, the lyrical-yet-bloodied “Lore” (A-) deserves to be near the top of the heap.

Whether for arthouse or Academy targeting purposes, “Lore” seems destined to be handed the ‘Holocaust film’ label – a tag that, however impartially descriptive, has lately called to mind a subgenre marked by earnest moral reinscription and grayscale suffering. Neither is a convention to which this crisp, cruel, often recklessly beautiful survival story, set against the dying breaths of Nazism, feels duty-bound. It’s as much a tale of an individual’s selfish spurts of guilt and rapture as one of any larger communal redemption or destruction, and as such feels very much of a piece with director Cate Shortland’s woozily desirous 2004 debut “Somersault” – to which “Lore” is a too-long-awaited follow-up.

Though the title is the diminutive form of the teenaged protagonist’s name, Hannelore, its parallel English meaning feels happily coincidental in a story where characters are confronted with new histories that point out the degree of fabrication in those they’ve previously accepted as gospel. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with the Third Reich in tatters and Allied-defeated Germany slowly awaking to the absurd horrors of what just happened, not everyone is immediately prepared to accept Nazi doctrines as defunct lore. 

Political specifics are kept to a minimum from the film’s instantly urgent opening, wherein well-to-do Lore (striking first-timer Saskia Rosendahl) finds her mother and father, a high-ranking SS officer, frantically hoarding jewelry and destroying evidence of their misdeeds. Shortly afterwards, they surrender to the Allies, dispassionately abandoning Lore to fend not just for herself, but her five younger siblings, a very young baby among them. Cue a gruelling 500-mile trek to the safety of their grandmother’s farm in Hamburg, an ordeal repeatedly roadblocked by adult figures treading a thin line between hospitality and hostility.

If I liked the film less, it’d be tempting to redub it “Winter’s Eisbein,” though Lore if matches Ree Dolly for stoic endeavor, there’s something fascinatingly resistible about Shortland and Rosendahl’s read on the character. That’s partly because of the slightly disingenuous defiance with which she sticks to her family’s principles and prejudices, even when granted an unsolicited but invaluable ally in Jewish-identifying runaway Thomas (Kai Malina) – their relationship soldered by collaborative sin and instinctive sexual curiosity.

It’s not hard to see why this story appealed to Shortland: “Somersault” also explored the hardscrabble survival and implacable erotic need of a young female protagonist, and did so with a similarly chilly commitment to the sensual world. At certain angles, Rosendahl even evokes the sullen fullness of the young Abbie Cornish, who broke through so remarkably in that film; at others, you sense she’ll be a gift to any casting agents searching for someone to play Cate Blanchett’s younger self. Either way, she’s very much her own actress, superbly in command of Lore’s pressure even as her eyes occasionally flare with aptly overwhelmed panic.

Rosendahl is certainly a discovery, but the fastest-rising star of “Lore” is the brilliant cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (“The Snowtown Murders,” “Animal Kingdom”), who paints open wounds and festering corpses in the same oil-pastel palette as Germany’s emerald forestland, his sometimes queasily handheld camera so wedded to the landscape you expect dew to manifest on the screen. WWII has been so keenly scrutinized by filmmakers that there can scarcely be any untried perspectives left, but that of the defeated, disoriented, not-quite-disillusioned Nazi faithful is still a bold and tricky one to take, particularly married to an aesthetic approach as iridescently in-bloom as Shortland’s. A Holocaust film not necessarily seen with new eyes but felt with fresh skin, “Lore” keeps natural beauty and human ugliness almost alarmingly co-dependent.

Though a distinctly separate animal tonally, the Australian film makes a thematically elegant double-feature with Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Oscar submission “Children of Sarajevo” (B), another highly sentient sophomore feature from a female director that details the social and domestic wars that continue to smolder long after the fire of a larger conflict has burnt out – in this case, the crippling Siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.

Though the English title sounds more worthily nutritious than Aida Begic’s bristling, often very funny film, it should be taken at face value: Rahima (the excellent Marija Pikic), our disenfranchised 20-something protagonist, is very much a child of the Siege, the experience of which has left her with a selectively silent resilience, but not much more. A restaurant worker who doubles as mother to her delinquent 14-year-old brother – who is beginning to act out in ways we gradually learn his now-reformed sister once did herself – she has sought refuge not in her ickily patriarchal community, but in the demure security of Islam. Few of her fellow survivors feel the same way: a symbol of comfort and protection to her, Rahima’s ever-present headscarf is a bothersome signal of rebellion to others.

Begic doesn’t impose much on a narrative on Rahima, preferring to rinse and repeat the gnawingly small battles in her daily routine, gradually amassing a claustrophobic sense of the walls Balkans – and Balkan women in particular – are still crashing against as they seek to rebuild their own with only rubble to hand. It’s plain, however, that she’s obstinately made things harder for herself with her more ascetic life choices: “Put on some makeup,” Rahima’s boss chides her. “Just because you’re covered, doesn’t mean you’re dead.”

Begic has a sharp ear, and though it’s handsomely shot in a mode of back-of-the-head Dardennism, “Children of Sarajevo” crackles chiefly with talk and sound. Set at New Year, the film is set to a near-constant soundtrack of celebratory fireworks that joltingly echo less jubilant past explosions for these orphans of the Siege.

Next from the London Film Festival, we’ll check in with some standout US documentaries, including Alex Gibney’s “Mea Maxima Culpa” and Ken Burns et al’s “Central Park Five.”

I haven’t started to look at the 2012 awards season in terms of “the year of” because it’s a fool’s errand. That kind of thing just bubbles up and hits you one day and it becomes clear that, however inadvertently, the season’s awards product hovers around similar ideas and notions, or at least that they can be molded around same.

However, after taking in Robert Zemeckis’s “Flight” for a second time last night as the 50th annual New York Film Festival drew to a close, I started to note some things. The spirituality of the film, which I was aware of initially but which really began to stand out a second time, remained intriguing. And it struck me as somewhat poignant that it served as a bookend to the fest with opening night presentation “Life of Pi,” a film very much about the search for faith and its power when it takes hold, whatever one might put one’s faith in.

“Flight” screenwriter John Gatins was quick to go into all of that at the Stone Rose Lounge closing night party overlooking Columbus Circle. He was working through a few things when he wrote the script and the notion of “there are no atheists in foxholes” led to “there are no atheists on crashing airplanes” and that took him on a whole other journey of reflecting his flawed protagonist’s faith through a variety of prisms throughout the script.

The film is also, of course, about addiction, and along with “Smashed” and “The Master” (which is its own can of worms as it pertains to “faith”), marks the year of the alcoholic in some ways. But what each film has done with that very general character trait is singularly impressive. And I suppose “Silver Linings Playbook,” for all its insistence on an appeal to Prozac Nation, fits nicely on that boat as well.

“Argo” depicts a nation in diplomatic crisis. “Lincoln,” in civil crisis. “Hitchcock” tells a story of an icon undertaking the Sisyphean task of going against the established grain with a soon-to-be horror classic. “Les Misérables” is in some ways about escaping the shadow of the past. Ditto “Anna Karenina,” while “Amour” details the deterioration of life. Conflict is the essence of drama and is to be expected in cinema, but that having been said, 2012 really does feel like the year of the struggle on celluloid.

How all this will play out with the Academy will be interesting, because in my opinion, there is a lot to appeal to the membership, a lot to chew on. It’s a diverse and solid slate of films members will be presented with in the next few months and the time capsule they choose in the form of five-to-10 nominees will be an intriguing reflection of the year, I have no doubt.

The New York Film Festival, meanwhile, enjoyed a healthy and momentous golden anniversary this year. I regret that I was unable to take in the amount of foreign language film contenders that I was hoping to, but I did play a little bit of catch-up. In addition to the highlights — “Life of Pi,” “Not Fade Away” and “Flight” (I missed secret screening “Lincoln,” which I’ll finally see this week) — I caught up with Michael Haneke’s aforementioned Palme d’Or-winning “Amour.” It is a moving experience featuring a pair of wonderful performances from Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, but it was Riva in particular who knocked me backwards. Hers is the best lead actress performance I’ve seen all year.

The fest also brought what is, to my mind, the best lead actor performance of the year, from Denis Lavant in Leos Carax’s vibrant and glorious “Holy Motors.” I called the film “a bunch of nonsense” on a recent podcast, and to an extent, I stand by that. But it nevertheless features a lot to unpack and is so brazen that it really can’t be considered anything less than one of the films of the year.

Exiting program director Richard Peña is leaving a wonderful 25-year legacy with the fest and, as he told the audience last night, he looks forward to sitting out in that audience and seeing what incoming director Kent Jones, as well as Rose Kuo, Robert Koehler and the rest of the team have in store going forward. I felt lucky indeed that this transitioning moment was my first real exposure to the festival.

With that, we move forward into the season. A handful of titles are still left to show their hand, the usual few late-bloomers idly waiting (though hurriedly finishing) as the others have their day. We’ll see what they have in store soon enough.

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.

With the greatest of respect to a beautiful country, Spain’s box office doesn’t usually rate much of a mention — but it seem worth mentioning when it addresses at least one question mark hovering over one of this year’s Oscar hopefuls. Juan Antonio Bayona’s tsunami drama “The Impossible” didn’t get quite the level of buzz some expected out of Toronto: many reviews were strong, but others took issue with the filmmakers’ decision to turn the true-life story of a Spanish family, the Belons, into one about a fictional British brood, allowing for more Hollywood-friendly casting. As it turns out, Spanish audiences couldn’t care less: the film has been a domestic smash, shattering local records with its opening four-day gross. Will it connect with audiences Stateside in a tough holiday release slot? [Variety] 

So, Glenn Kenny and Jeff Wells got together to record an Oscar podcast. Somehow, no fatalities occurred. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

Tom Shone on why “Life of Pi” is “one of the few films that has the potential to go all the way” at the Oscars. [These Violent Delights]

David Cox dislikes “Frankenweenie,” and uses this as a springboard for a piece on why computer animation is superior to stop-motion. What a pity we can’t have both, eh? [The Guardian]

“Seven Psychopaths?” That’s nothing. R. Kurt Osenlund rounds up 15 of the best crazies from the big screen. [The House Next Door]

Inspired by Ben Affleck’s success with “Argo,” Kyle Rupprecht takes a look at other major stars to have worked out the trick of directing themselves. [Moviemaker] 

It may have been sidelined at Cannes, but “Holy Motors” received its due at the Sitges Film Festival this weekend taking both the Best Film and Best Director prizes. [Screen] 

Nathaniel Rogers catches up with foreign Oscar hopefuls “No” and “Amour” at the NYFF, and thinks both deserve serious consideration. [The Film Experience] 

Scott Feinberg has another “exclusive” from the Hollywood Film Awards: Dustin Hoffman is their Breakthrough Director of the Year for “Quartet.” Surely there’s a difference between “breaking through” and “trying one’s hand at something?” [The Race]

David Poland sits down with Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis to discuss “Cloud Atlas.” [The Hot Blog]

In case the marketing spiel has somehow escaped you, James Bond is 50 years old this year. Well, maybe a bit older – he wasn”t exactly a newborn in “Dr. No” – or a bit younger, if you choose to take only 44-year-old Daniel Craig”s salt-and-pepper-stubbled visage into account. Either way, he”s not young anymore, and boy, does “Skyfall” ever want you to know that.

“Brave new world,” 007 mutters grumpily, after his first encounter with a whizzy new Q (Ben Whishaw) who scarcely needs to shave yet. “Old dog, new tricks,” twinkles Naomie Harris”s sexy MI6 underling, her tone vaguely patronizing, as if teaching an elderly uncle how to send an email. 

As such platitudes suggest, clever quippery is not one of the many strengths of Bond”s 23rd feature outing. They aren”t even accurate: the perma-dapper spy isn”t learning any new tricks, but rediscovering ones fallen into disuse, like scuffed Oxfords polished to a high shine. The same goes for “Skyfall,” which endearingly stresses fashionably analog traditionalism at every turn: Bond”s gadgets are restricted to a gun and a radio, the beloved, Connery-era Aston Martin makes a reappearance, while for the bulk of the action, far-flung locales are curbed in favour of the Land of Hope and Glory. (In Britain”s banner year of Jubilee and Olympic celebration, that can”t be an accident.) Another old-school touch, Adele”s Bassey-aping title ballad, is pretty splendid, but they may as well have gone with a big-band cover of “Everything Old Is New Again.”

Given a loving, even romantic, coat of varnish by Sam Mendes – arguably the most prestigious director ever to board this thanklessly producer-led franchise – “Skyfall” reads not so much as a reboot than a recantation. Critics and audiences loved the 21st-century terseness of “Casino Royale,” which introduced Daniel Craig as the most businesslike incarnation yet of the playboy agent, but they resisted when 2008 follow-up “Quantum of Solace” (a tellingly dour title) took that lean, mean modernism to further extremes.

The far longer, less disciplined “Skyfall” allows its hero and audience alike a little more playtime – campy villain, flirty banter and man-eating komodo dragons are all present and correct – while thanks to the lamplighter genius of Roger Deakins, it”s the most plushly gorgeous Bond adventure yet committed to celluloid. One tends to remember set pieces from Bond films more than actual images, but this should prove a happy exception: from the tangled neon flashes of Shanghai-set nighttime stalkings to the gauzy mist and flame-bursts of its Highlands finale, Deakins clearly feels obligated to honor the atmospheric promise of the film”s oblique title.

That title, incidentally, has a stately, domestic root, matching a narrative preoccupied with bringing it all back home. Surprisingly enough, this is the first Bond story both to fold stately boss figure M (a reliably snappy Judi Dench) into the center of the action and to dredge up 007″s touchily guarded backstory, innovations that reveal sore points and soft spots he”d rather we didn”t see. More than that you may already know, but I”m not going to reveal. Suffice it to say that the motivations all round are more personal than usual. 

M, threatened with forced retirement by desk man Mallory (Ralph Fiennes, judiciously underplaying) after a major security breach at MI6, nearly gets Bond killed before the ornate, Gothic-tinged opening titles unspool. In a rollicking introductory chase atop a moving train in Turkey, a mismanaged operation to retrieve a hard drive — one that could fatally reveal the identities of numerous undercover NATO agents — ends with 007 accidentally shot down by one of his own field agents (Harris), the coveted information escaping into dangerous terrorist hands.

From the outset, then, M and 007 – whose relationship to each other has never seemed more familial – are put in a position of unusual vulnerability, each required to prove their competence against growing inside skepticism. And that”s before MI6″s London headquarters are blown up by an enemy – Javier Bardem”s physically desaturated, unnervingly origin-less Silva – whose own endgame is rather more pointedly vindictive than the old standard of world domination. He”s after M herself, not what she”s protecting.

The intimacy of the setup may be novel, but if the very pettiness of Silva”s agenda risks lowering the stakes of the enterprise, that”s reckoning without the cool electricity of Bardem. Introduced in a remarkable slow march into close-up over a single shot – the most extravagant formal coup of Mendes”s typically systematic direction – the generally hulking actor is one of the series” few villains to conjure a genuine sense of threat, conversely by concentrating on Silva”s dry, droll daintiness. Winking camp has been par for the course for actors in this position since the days of Blofeld, but Bardem is the first actor to interpret a Bond villain as actively queer; his sly flirting games around 007 are riotous, but serve as a confident power maneuver rather than mere japery.

Equal parts Mugatu and Hannibal Lecter – the latter likeness frequently given an assist from Dennis Gassner”s production design – Bardem”s performance is a joy in itself, but also brings out the rare playful impulses in Craig”s steely construction of Bond. Three films in, I”m still wanting a little more give from Craig in the role: a veritable soldier in a Tom Ford suit, he”s a formidable physical performer, but tends to deliver one-liners like mail. 

You sense Craig may have been happier with the hard-line, no-frills direction “Quantum of Solace” was taking. If the gleaming surfaces and unexpected tender areas of this grandly entertaining new adventure are anything to go by, not many of his colleagues agree with him — though Mendes, generally stronger on polish than on pep, might have been harder on the script”s purpler speechifying. (He also leaves dangling at least one expensive and wholly extraneous set piece in the London Underground.) On balance, however, “Skyfall” represents a happy compromise between golden-anniversary nostalgia and post-Bourne streamlining. The action here may be rooted in a post-9/11 environment of terrorism and darting paranoia, but with its retro fittings and overriding spirit of British conservation, this venerable series is finally copping to its status as heritage cinema – and is no worse off for it.

NEW YORK — The modest similarities between Robert Zemeckis’s last live action film, 2000’s “Cast Away,” and his latest, “Flight,” are interesting. Both begin with a plane crash that changes a man’s life, a man who goes on a journey of finding himself and restarting his life anew. Both are films about rebirth. One chooses a tale of a company guy stranded on a desert island to convey the theme. The other chooses that of a pilot caught up in a malfeasance nightmare.

Each commits to film one of the most harrowing plane crashes ever seen*, but while Tom Hanks’s time-obsessed protagonist in “Cast Away” learns to take his time through life, Denzel Washington’s addiction-afflicted hero in “Flight” learns to admit his problem to the one person he’s still fooling: himself.

And that’s what the film is about. It may have elements of action filmmaking and courtroom drama, but it is, ultimately, a character study about the sickness of addiction. It captures the embarrassment, the denial, the rage and, crucially, the chronic fallibility that comes with it. The screenplay, from writer John Gatins, pulses with an authenticity that suggests personal experience, but married to a narrative that all but asks whether impairment might have sparked the inspiration to save a hundred lives in a bold way, it becomes something more complex.

At the story’s center, Washington delivers an equally complex performance. His Whip Whitaker is charismatic, embattled, defiant, broken and, ultimately, humbled. And the actor fires on all cylinders, running through a range that marks his most accomplished performance in some time, one certainly rating higher than the two that brought him Oscars in the past.

The film gets going in a hurry, Whitaker’s ear-to-ear grin, the bouncing song choices, a near-numbing crash sequence and the beginnings of the malfeasance drama. But once the plot-driven stuff moves aside it starts to settle in somewhere in the second act and, for some, the gear shift might not work. It just depends on if you’re invested in the character enough to follow that next path, and personally speaking, I was.

But one has to discuss the crash sequence separately. It is a stunning display, all elements of the production — design, photography, sound, editing, visual effects — combining to deliver a memorable cinematic moment. And it’s not just candy. It delivers on theme, too. For a film that so often concerns itself with the concept of an “act of God,” it’s no mistake that the wing of the plane clips a steeple in half upon impact (nor is it, I think, that the line “God help me” is delivered at a surprising moment in the film’s final moments).

Also worth mentioning in the supporting cast is Kelly Reilly as a recovering junkie who understands Whitaker’s ailment all too well, Bruce Greenwood as his union representative and biggest ally, Don Cheadle as his no-nonsense attorney and John Goodman as his flamboyant friend and dealer. It’s a top-notch assortment of performances making for a solid ensemble.

However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the powerful way James Badge Dale blows in and out of the movie in one of its most poignant and, for me, memorable scenes as a cancer patient bearing wisdom. The actor reportedly dropped 20 pounds to play the part after Zemeckis called him “too healthy” for the role and you can see why he wanted to take it on. Others might not be as touched by the moment as I was but it was a big takeaway for me and a real grace note.

Awards-wise, it’s a little tough to say at the moment. Washington faces a difficult Best Actor race but he’ll get the campaign of his life, surely: this is Paramount’s baby this year. The screenplay deserves some real consideration, but it could fall short of films with more overt gravitas and/or fare not perceived in such commercial territory. I really couldn’t say until more get a look and I can ask around, but I certainly think it’s a great counter-intuitive choice in a year packed with the usual bait and I hope it finds its audience.

With that — well, with tonight’s gala premiere of the film, I should say — the 50th annual New York Film Festival comes to a close. It was a success by all accounts and a real treat for a first-timer. I’ll put a bow on soon enough, but for now, chalk the closing night presentation up as a winner.

“Flight” opens everywhere November 2.

*It’s worth noting Joe Carnahan’s contribution to cinematic plane crashes this year, as his vision of one in “The Grey” was just as harrowing if not more so than the pair Zemeckis has given us.

LONDON – At no other festival I’ve attended is the faintly absurd bubble we film critics live in made more apparent than the BFI London Film Festival — a buffet far more concerned with serving the public the best world cinema has to offer, whether or not another festival got to it first, than with providing media outlets with grabby exclusives and world premieres.

For me and many of my colleagues, a Cannes-premiered film like “Rust and Bone” is already old news, despite not having officially opened yet; for London cineastes in the real world, tonight’s gala screening, with Marion Cotillard in attendance, is an eagerly anticipated event. That is as it should be: one of the things I love about my hometown festival is that it re-sparks thoughts and conversations about such films in a much more lively public context.

And that doesn’t only go for the starry drawcard titles: on Thursday evening, I attended a screening of Bosnian Oscar submission “Children of Sarajevo” (having missed it at Cannes, where it played in Un Certain Regard) at one of the festival’s off-course venues in South Kensington, and was both surprised and delighted to find an antsy crowd of Londoners queuing for standby tickets. Yes, this strong study of gender and religious prejudices in post-war Bosnia (more on the film later) was actually playing to a packed house, and then some.

A small part of me wants to ask the crowd if they know they can see such films in near-empty arthouses all year round; a larger part admires the festival’s clever marketing for making such commercially unviable works into hot tickets for a single week. This year the New York Film Festival, which once enjoyed a similarly low-key profile, entered a higher realm of publicity, grabbing flashy world premieres of such A-list titles as “Lincoln,” “Life of Pi” and “Flight” in addition to its playlist of greatest hits from other fests. Having briefly enjoyed the spotlight when it scored the first showing of “Frost/Nixon,” London would surely like whatever New York is having — but for the public that makes up the bulk of its audience, such distinctions are less important when, to appropriate the title of Alain Resnais’s latest (also in the fest), they haven’t seen anything yet.

The LFF has just wrapped its third full day of programming — having kicked off on Wednesday night with Tim Burton’s “Frankenweenie” and a large, loud opening party that I was lucky enough to attend. Even the fact that the party was moved this year from its regular home in Chelsea’s larney Saatchi Gallery to a quirkier warehouse space in the shabby-chic Docklands area seemed to me indicative of a festival keen to live a little closer to earth than usual. (Plus, it follows the meme that the Olympics announced to the world this summer: in London, east is the new west.)

I admit my coverage has been a little slow getting off the ground — partly because I’ve been stockpiling films to review in the coming week, and largely because many of the festival’s early highlights have already been reviewed on these pages. (For reference, LFF titles I caught elsewhere, with review links, include “Rust and Bone,” “No,” Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Ernest and Celestine,” and “Laurence Anyways,” from Cannes,“Our Children,” “Good Vibrations,”and “Made in Ash,” from Karlovy Vary, “Fill the Void,” and “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” from Venice, and “Sister,” “Francine,” “The Delay,” “Aujourd’hui,” and “I, Anna” from Berlin.)

Aside from “Frankenweenie,” which received mostly affectionate British responses as the festival’s curtain-raiser, the biggest festival talking points of the opening days have been (to my ear, at least) Tomas Alfredson’s Cannes hit “The Hunt,” which keeps accruing ecstatic admirers as I think it grows only more dubious with distance; “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which continues to slay international festival audiences months after its Stateside opening; “Ginger & Rosa,” which I haven’t seen yet, but seems to be rallying from its tepid Toronto debut, with much talk about Elle Fanning’s performance; and, of course, “Rust & Bone,” which also seems to be strengthening after a divided Cannes reception.

On a recent Oscar Talk podcast, Anne Thompson expressed her doubts that arthouse audiences would respond to Jacques Audiard’s dark melodrama; I, on the other hand, keep talking to people who have been moved to tears by the film, and the film’s UK marketers are capitalizing on the buzz with ubiquitous widescreen billboards around London. It’ll be interesting to see how it lands in the US. 

For my part, my favourite first encounter of the festival so far has been with Australian Oscar submission “Lore,” a superb portrait of the dying days of Nazism in war-ravished Germany that I’ll review in more detail soon, along with the aforementioned “Children of Sarajevo.” Indeed, one of the chief attractions of the festival for me is the opportunity to make further progress on that 71-title foreign Oscar longlist: Spain’s “Blancanieves,” Mexico’s “After Lucia,” Afghanistan’s “The Patience Stone” and The Netherlands’s “Kauwboy” are all films I hope to see and discuss here over the next week. 

Other titles likely to pop up in my coming coverage include “The Sessions,” documentaries “Mea Maxima Culpa,” “West of Memphis” and “Room 237,” as well as British highlights “Sightseers” and “Shell.” It should also be a good opportunity to revisit some films I saw but didn’t get to write about at earlier festivals: I know I’ve received a lot of requests for a review of “Amour,” for example, for which I never quite found the words at Cannes. Beyond that, it’ll be a matter of nosing through the lower-profile titles and seeing what truffles come up. On Saturday, meanwhile, I’ll be at the festival’s swanky black-tie awards dinner, and will follow up with a report: with both Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton due to receive presentations that night, it shouldn’t be dull. Stay tuned.

The Best Original Song race is starting to fill out. We’ve added a few more to our contenders page in recent days, including tracks from “Celeste & Jesse Forever” and “West of Memphis,” but today comes the news that DreamWorks Animation’s “Rise of the Guardians” will feature a tune from acclaimed soprano Renée Fleming

“Still Dream” — a closing credits song — was written and produced by the film’s composer, Alexandre Desplat, with lyrics from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. It will be included on the soundtrack when it releases on November 13.

Said Desplat, “There is much more music in ‘Rise of the Guardians’ than is found in the average live-action film. The goal with the score was to emphasize every moment of joy, sadness and soul so that audiences would be able to dive with the characters into their worlds. The main theme, conveying all the wonder of children’s dreams and their beliefs, became the melody on which I wrote the song.”

Desplat is a four-time Oscar nominee and is one of the most prolific composing talents of his generation. He is in the hunt for Best Original Score recognition as well for the film and also contributed the scores to “Argo,” “Moonrise Kingdom,” “Rust & Bone” and “Zero Dark Thirty” this year.

Fleming was named 2012 Female Singer of the Year by the German Echo awards and is a three-time Grammy winner. Lindsay-Abaire, meanwhile, won the Pulitzer for “Rabbit Hole,” which was adapted into a film in 2010 by John Cameron Mitchell with Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman. He wrote the screenplay for “Rise of the Guardians,” which was adapted from William Joyce’s book. (You may recall Joyce won the Best Animated Short Oscar last year for “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.”

There will be more on the animated feature race here in the coming weeks. For now, we’ll add another contender to the Best Original Song category.

“Rise of the Guardians” opens nationwide on November 21.

One of the things we’ve been looking to get confirmation on regarding Warner Bros. Pictures’ Oscar campaigns this year is just where Tom Hanks and Halle Berry would be pushed for Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis’ “Cloud Atlas.” Lead seemed to be the obvious call (both are the movie stars and have the most screen time across the various stories in which they appear and the characters they play), but it’s always possible something like this puts everyone up for supporting.

It turns out the two will indeed go lead for the film. I suppose you can consider them contenders in our Best Actor and Best Actress galleries, then. The real surprise from the studio, however, is the decision to place “The Dark Knight Rises” star Anne Hathaway in the lead actress category as opposed to supporting. Is that indicative of a serious rallying or simply a smart decision to get out of the way of another film?

The only lead push for Universal’s “Les Misérables” will be Hugh Jackman, as we confirmed some time ago. Everyone else, including Hathaway (who has a show-stopping if fleeting role in the film), will go supporting. Gunning for lead with Christopher Nolan’s Batman denouement keeps Hathaway from crashing with herself in the supporting actress competition.

But the studio has never laid off the notion of a major Oscar push for “The Dark Knight Rises,” even when reviews didn’t quite reach the level of “The Dark Knight.” The feeling is that Nolan has shown awards consistency and that there is a lot of goodwill for him to finally be recognized by the Academy. Many believe his 2008 blockbuster would have been a Best Picture nominee under the current system and it is generally seen as the film that sparked the movement to change things up in the category. “Rises” didn’t quite reach “Knight”‘s domestic box office gross, but it topped it worldwide with a $1.07 billion haul, second only to “The Avengers” this year.

In my opinion, Hathaway was best in show in the film, which I found largely disappointing in a minority assessment. Tom Hardy crafted an intriguing and magnetic character and in some ways seems like a likelier contender (not that anyone is really in the hunt), but Hathaway’s Selina Kyle was fully-fleshed out and extended past the shadow Michelle Pfeiffer cast 20 years ago in Tim Burton’s “Batman Returns.”

Christian Bale will also get a lead push, while Hardy, Michael Caine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Gary Oldman and Marion Cotillard will all go supporting.

“The Dark Knight Rises” arrives on DVD/Blu-ray on December 4. “Cloud Atlas” opens nationwide on October 26.

In an era of filmmaking where producers and moneymen seem shyer than ever of original screenplays, hungry for the built-in audience of a known quantity, “This again?” is a question we seem to find ourselves asking on a weekly basis. That may most frequently be in response to high-concept Hollywood franchises and superhero movies, but it’s no less applicable to the classic literary adaptation. This autumn alone has brought us new versions of oft-filmed chestnuts in “Anna Karenina” and “Great Expectations,” with Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” narrowly scuttling out of the fray; each one invites a fresh round of comparisons, with varying assertions of redundancy or reinvention. 

It’s all the more impressive, then, that British director Andrea Arnold’s pared-back, wind-whipped and wholly remarkable adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” – which itself premiered only months after Cary Fukunaga’s fresh take on another standard from the Brontë family canon, “Jane Eyre” – feels both very new and very necessary indeed. If Arnold’s film, already on release in New York and opening today in Los Angeles, feels to some extent like the first true version of this dog-eared Yorkshire romance, that could be because it’s the first film to realize that the story of farmgirl Cathy and founding Heathcliff’s unfettered, ultimately damaging passion isn’t really a romance at all. 

That was a discovery Arnold – whose stylized approach to British social realism earned her an Oscar for her short film “Wasp” and Cannes prizes for her first two features, “Red Road” and “Fish Tank” – made when she read the book for the first time as a teenager. “I’d seen the Laurence Olivier-William Wyler film as a kid, and it really got under my skin,” she remembers. “But there’s this widespread idea that it’s a traditional, passionate love story, which that film supports. So when I read the book, that’s what I was expecting. But it’s a different beast altogether: raw, difficult, troubling, brutal, cruel – sadomasochistic, even. It’s an unsettling read, and I think part of its enduring attraction is that it’s so hard to get a handle on it, to fathom exactly what’s going on.” 

So when, over thirty years later, she was approached to direct a fresh adaptation, Arnold was immediately eager to put the novel, as she’d encountered it then, on screen. “What I tried was not necessarily to do a faithful adaptation of the story,” she explains, “but to capture the essence of what Emily wrote, to honor that rawness. People ask why I left the second half of the story out, but that’s not really the point to me: when you’re adapting such a long, dense work, of course you have to make some tough decisions. I was more concerned with preserving feeling.” 

To some degree, however separated by era, “Wuthering Heights” feels like a natural follow-up for Arnold from “Fish Tank,” which was also sensually preoccupied with the unruly impulses of a strong-willed teenage girl, with the tower blocks of Essex doubling for the muddy Yorkshire moors. Arnold, who admits to having felt “jealous” of previous directors attached to the project before her, certainly felt the connection was an obvious one, and doesn’t quite agree with those who call her latest either a departure for her, or radical in itself. 

“I wasn’t attempting to do something reactive, or to be radical,” she admits. “I was just attempting to make it my own way, the way I normally make films. When I came on board, I didn’t know exactly what it meant or what I was getting into, but I just had this very instinctive reaction to it – I’d always had this thing about the book and wanted to have a go, even though in some ways I knew it was a bonkers thing to do.” 

Indeed, Arnold – whose previous films have all been from her own original screenplays – believes literary adaptation in general is a foolhardy enterprise: “The whole point of books is that everyone who has read it has already effectively filmed it in their mind. Presenting your own vision against all that is a bit mad.” Also unfamiliar for her was boarding a project that had been in development for some time: “There was already history there, and I really needed to start it from scratch, to make it mine – but I had to do it fast! I believe in speed, to some extent: in film, everyone can be so deliberate and cautious, and that can kind of kill things creatively. Instinct is a very true way of making decisions. I both love and don’t love having to rely on it. But you learn the most from the trickiest experiences.” 

Arnold famously takes a similarly gut-led approach to casting, having drawn startling performances in the past from young and/or non-professional actors. She didn’t waver in this preference on “Wuthering Heights”: three of the four actors cast as the younger and older versions of Heathcliff and Cathy had never acted before. The fourth, feline-eyed up-and-comer Kaya Scodelario, was best known for a regular in UK teen TV drama “Skins.” Arnold was determined that her ensemble reflect a youthful recklessness in the story that previous adaptations, often cast with established thesps, hadn’t. At one point, inspired by a chance sighting of a hoodie-clad “modern Heathcliff” on the moors, she even considered setting the story in the present, but instead accepted the challenge of making a generationally transferrable period piece. 

“I wanted them to be as young as they are in the book, as I think that youth was integral to what Emily was writing,” she says. “I think she was responding to so many of her peers being married off as young women and losing that independence. It’s a coming-of-age story, really, about the hangups and ties and responsibilities that come with being an adult. So I enjoyed exploring their childhood and their adolescence, which I imagined in universal terms. One of the things people keep mentioning is the scene where Cathy licks Heathcliff’s back: that’s me imagining what I’d be getting up to in that situation. It’s the most ‘me’ moment in the film, I think.” 

Proving more of a talking point than the youth of the actors, however, was Arnold’s decision to cast two black actors as Heathcliff – again, a move that some called radical, but actually honors Brontë’s text, which explicitly refers to the character’s dark skin. “I was surprised no one had done it before,” she says, admitting that she knew it would prompt unwarranted discussion. “People might be more influenced by what they’ve seen in films than what’s on the page in this matter. To me it seemed the natural thing to do: isn’t it better than putting boot polish on Laurence Olivier? And the irony is that Merle Oberon, who played Cathy opposite Olivier, was actually of Asian origin!” 

As for Scodelario, Arnold had never seen an episode of “Skins,” but knew immediately upon meeting her that she had found her Cathy. “It’s funny,” she says. “You don’t really know why you make these decisions at the time, but later, as you get to know them, you work out why you did it. I felt very strongly about Kaya and Shannon [Beer, who plays the young Cathy] – even though they don’t look strongly alike, they have the same wild spirit, and that’s Cathy’s spirit. It’s very interesting how you can read that in someone without really knowing them. I did the same on ‘Fish Tank’: it took me exactly one second to cast Michael Fassbender in that.” 

That intuitive approach, she says, doesn’t change much whether she’s looking at professional or amateur actors. “Obviously it’s a bit more difficult with non-pros, since you don’t know if they’ll actually be able to meet your demands. But I have this faith in a face. When I see someone like James [Howson], or like Katie [Jarvis, the star of ‘Fish Tank’], I just see this vulnerability, this hidden anger. It’s in their DNA. And I believe that if you’re going to make cinema, which is so often about great faces, you have to believe in the face first of all. 

“Acting is about pretending at some level, and I don’t really want people pretending in my films. But you have to look after them very carefully: they may be quite vulnerable and you’re asking them to enter this very strange experience. And you just don’t know how it’s going to work out, for them or for you. It’s a massive risk. But I like risks. As money gets more scarce in the industry, people are getting more nervous, but I can’t feel safe when I make films.” 

Arnold doesn’t mind admitting, however, that the landscape is as significant a character as any in her take on the story: “I think we have this very benign view of nature as this pretty pastoral thing we can go walking in and it’s all lovely. But nature can be really brutal and selfish: in that way, it’s more like us than we realize. So I thought it would be interesting to make a film where, visually, the relationship between the characters and their environment reflects that likeness.” 

Enter Robbie Ryan, Arnold’s loyal director of photography for almost a decade. The woozy fluidity and light-play of his lensing has been invaluable to all her films, but it reaches new levels of mastery in “Wuthering Heights,” in which his exquisite rendering of Yorkshire’s heavy pearl-colored skies and dew-glittered grass deservedly earned him the Technical Grand Prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival. Arnold has adored him since the first day of shooting on “Wasp,” when he greeted her absurdly difficult shot concept that required him to run backwards down a stairwell with a handheld camera – “I don’t think these things through very practically” – with a casual nod. 

“I just knew then and there that he was my man,” she laughs. “Just from the way he holds the camera, he’s got such respectful way of framing people – he looks at them with such love and care. We have our moments when we fight about things: I’m always pushing for more reality, and he’s always wanting to make things more beautiful. And I don’t want things to be too pretty all the time. So we push and pull in a happy way.” 

Though she’s pleased at the accolades his work has received, she jokes: “I said to him, he’s not getting any bloody awards on the next film – I don’t want the cinematography standing out so much! I do genuinely believe that if one discipline stands out in a film, you’ve failed on some level. The film should be what you notice, not the cinematography, not the direction. Still, the thing about ‘Wuthering Heights’ is it has virtually no dialogue and no music, so I think the images do take precedence. I was pushing myself to see how far you could rely on imagery to tell a story and create emotion, without assistance from music or characters telling you what they’re feeling.” 

When I mention that the constant presence of howling Yorkshire wind in the film is something of a score in itself, she agrees vigorously. “Exactly! When you’re up there you hear it through the door or the chimney, rattling the windows, whistling through trees – sometimes it’s gentle, sometimes it’s violent, sometimes it gets caught in the beams and makes this haunting noise. That to me is music. Why add violins to that? It’d be treachery.” 

Arnold broke her own resolution, however, with another creative decision that has caused disagreement among critics: the use of a mournful ballad by folky chart-toppers Mumford & Sons, specially composed for the film, over the final shots and closing credits. “It’s controversial, that!” she says, slightly gleefully. “But here’s the thing: for me, when the credits come up, it’s like the world you’ve created is over, and now you have to look at a bunch of names. Most people are leaving the cinema anyway: they don’t care who the grip was. So I tend to feel the credits are like another land, and you can do what you like there. I could put music there. So I thought I’d give the audience a song as a present: they’ve sat through this, and it’s been difficult.” 

Arnold tried out a few existing songs – and nearly settled on Morrissey’s ‘Unlovable’ – before a colleague suggested an original composition, whereupon a contact at Universal got the band to attend a screening of the film and write a bespoke song. “I thought they were quite a good fit, since they’ve got this country thing going on, and ‘Wuthering Heights’ is, in a funny way, a bit like a Western. 

“I hemmed and hawed about bringing it in over the closing images instead of just over the credits, and that was a bit of an invasion. But after the sound mixer put it there, I just started crying and crying, because it had been such a hard experience and we were finally at the end of it. So I just thought, ‘I don’t know what it is, but I like it, and I’m just going to keep it here’” I knew some people would hate it because it’s not pure. But I can do what I like. We deserve a bit of a kiss after enduring all that brutality.” 

Arnold’s other reward for enduring “Wuthering Heights” is a return to original screenplays: she’s guardedly writing one at the moment, and proud as she is of the film, she doesn’t think she’ll ever return to the adaptation well again. “Writing original stuff is hard, and books make it easier because there’s a world already conjured up,” she admits. “But if we’re talking about proper cinema surviving, we should be conjuring those worlds ourselves. Actually, let’s make a rule. No more adaptations ever.”

I’ve been high on Ben Affleck’s “Argo” since way back at Telluride over a month ago. It is, I feel, the current Best Picture frontrunner. We’ve sussed out its zeitgeist potential, talked to Affleck, Alan Arkin and Bryan Cranston and pretty much covered all bases on the way to release, which is finally here. So if you make it out to see the film this weekend (and you should), hustle on back here and tell us what you thought. It’s time for a wider audience to chime in. And feel free to rate the film via the tool above.

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.

Leading things off this week is discussion of the New York Film Festival’s Centerpiece selection, “Not Fade Away,” from “Sopranos” creator David Chase.

Next up is a look at some of the smaller films, from “Arbitrage” to “Smashed” that are looking to get a foothold on the race this year amid the usual big marquee titles.

Continuing our survey of various categories this week we move on to Best Supporting Actor and try to widen the net of hopefuls while also handicapping the category’s likely standing at the end of the year.

And finally, reader questions. Well, one anyway, regarding biopics. IF YOU HAVE A QUESTION FOR US, please write in to OscarTalk@HitFix.com.

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.

“Here I Come” courtesy of Stuart Park.

With a stacked — and rather rewarding — slate of films on my plate yesterday, I didn’t get to see Harvey Weinstein’s keynote speech at the London Film Festival. But no matter: Screen helpfully provides a transcript. It would appear that preservation and piracy were the two chief issues on his mind: he laid into Hollywood film execs for their limited knowledge of their film heritage (“I began to wonder if any of them had even heard of John Ford”) and celebrated the French for their hard line on illegal content-sharing, which he claims has bolstered the local film industry, allowing them to finance such grown-up hits as — and here come two wholly impartial examples — “The Artist” and “The Intouchables.” [Screen Daily]

Michael Cieply on the Academy allowing members to “recommend” — not campaign for — films to other members, particularly in the documentary branch. [New York Times]

The Playlist guys offer up a lovely retrospective of the late Harris Savides’ work. Still reeling from this. [The Playlist]

Jennifer Lawrence is joining Natalie Portman as one of the faces of Miss Dior. So nice to see her getting some exposure. [The Telegraph]

Oscar hopeful “Argo” has opened to robust box office, but looks likely to be pipped to the post by Oscar hopeful “Taken 2.” [Variety]

R. Kurt Osenland’s ponders “Argo”‘s Oscar prospects — and would rather see Scoot McNairy with a Best Supporting Actor nod than Alan Arkin. [Slant]

Tom O’Neil claims that Daniel Day-Lewis “can’t lose” his third Oscar for “Lincoln.” Unless, you know, he does. [Gold Derby]

Meanwhile, “Lincoln” is Steven Spielberg’s best film since “War Horse.” Ha. [The Envelope]

Matt Spaiser detects a kinship between “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” and “Skyfall”: it’s all in the cut of Bond’s suit. [Clothes on Film]

David Denby’s mourning the demise of movies for adults again, this time at the New Yorker. I liked his New Republic essay, but this is surely overkill. [New Yorker]

Talk about having a ton of bricks dropped on your head. I hadn’t heard that cinematographer Harris Savides had been ill, certainly hadn’t known that he was on the ropes, but he has apparently passed away at the far-too-young age of 55. I don’t know the cause of death but I know this one’s a big blow to the industry.

Savides most often collaborated with filmmaker Gus Van Sant. He shot films like “Finding Forrester,” “Gerry,” “Elephant,” “Last Days” and “Milk” for the director. But he also worked with David Fincher from time to time (“The Game,” “Zodiac”), as well as Noah Baumbach (“Margot at the Wedding,” “Greenberg”). His final work will be seen in Sofia Coppola’s “The Bling Ring,” which releases next year.

Savides always brought a delicate touch to his work. There was no blatant thumbprint because that wasn’t his style. Yet the work was by no means anonymous. Quite the opposite, in fact, and the aesthetic Van Sant developed in his “Death Trilogy” (“Elephant,” “Gerry” and “Last Days”) is very much owed to Savides’s work.

Somehow Savides never received an Oscar nomination. He was certainly in the conversation for films like “American Gangster” and “Zodiac,” and he racked up five Independent Spirit Award nods along the way. But that pretty much just goes to show the irrelevance of accolades, because his was one of the brightest talents behind the camera. Indeed, the only prize he ever took home was a New York Film Critics Circle award for his work on “Elephant” and “Gerry.”

My favorite from his filmography was probably Jonathan Glazer’s “Birth.” The imagery in that film is just so lush and striking. When I think of it, I often think of Savides before I do Glazer or Nicole Kidman.

A pity this happened on the very same day we launched our “Tech Support” season of craft category coverage with analysis of the Best Cinematography category. As we forecast a new crop of awards hopefuls in the field, one of the art form’s best passes on.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Savides once upon a time, very briefly. His work had popped up two years in a row on our annual “top 10 shots of the year” column and we were discussing a frame from “Milk.” He was gentle, thoughtful, just a joy to speak with. And now, somehow, he’s gone.

The film industry is worse for it.