The Academy has announced that it will present Douglas Trumbull with the Gordon E. Sawyer Award at the Scientific and Technical Awards presentation on Saturday, February 11, at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The award is meant to honor “an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.”

Trumbull has worked in a visual effects capacity on pioneering films such as “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “The Andromeda Strain,” “Silent Running” and, more recently, “The Tree of Life,” and received three Best Visual Effects Oscar nominations for “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” “Blade Runner” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Trumbull was granted a Scientific and Engineering Award in 1992 for his role in the design of the CP-65 Showscan Camera System for 65mm motion picture photography.

Trumbull founded Future General Corporation, a research and special effects house, in 1975 where he developed and/or advanced technologies such as slit-scan photography, process photography, miniature compositing, interpositive matte painting, large-format filming, high frame rate photography and projection, synchronized multiscale filming, motion control photography, virtual reality systems, interactive motion simulators and digital cinema. (Wow.)

It seems that the time has come to honor Trumbull”s contribution to his craft all round, the effects supervisor and producer was also honored by the Visual Effects Society earlier this week with the Georges Méliès Award. It is somewhat interesting to note that the recognition comes in a year that he is attached to an art house film (visually grand and stunning though it may be), rather than a large scale event offering as some of his earlier films were.

Trumbull”s talent may well be a result of his genetic makeup (as well as his upbringing). His father, Donald Trumbull, worked on the pioneering visual effects of “The Wizard of Oz” and then later “Star Wars.” One of Douglas Trumbull”s earliest projects was to create a film about spaceflight for the New York World’s Fair, a film which brought the ambitious young artist to the attention of Stanley Kubrick and the rest, as they say, is history. 

I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” on 70MM a few years ago, and while I must confess that the journey through the “stargate sequence” read somewhat like a massive screen saver in this day and age, the technology at work in the film truly is astonishing when you put it into the context of a 1968 release. I have a particular respect for those that innovate in the crafts fields as they provide storytellers with the tools for filmmakers to tell the stories that would otherwise be beyond the reach of suspension of disbelief.

Trumbull is the 23rd recipient of the Sawyer Award.

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“Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.” This statement of purpose, at once urgent and evasive of reality, by the late choreographer Pina Bausch has been appropriated as the chief marketing line of Wim Wenders’s “Pina,” a heartsore elegy for her work masquerading as a lithe 3D performance study. The creative restlessness endorsed by these words, however, could as easily describe Wenders own protracted journey to get the film made as any dancing caught by his camera.

The words “labor of love” have acquired a veneer of glib earnestness through overuse, but this is indeed a film born exclusively of its director’s devotion to his subject, and his lengthy search for an appropriate cinematic means of serving and preserving her art. The resulting film is something of a one-off, within both the rangy oeuvre of the veteran German filmmaker and the scattershot genre of the dance movie: Bausch’s stage pieces, aggressively heightened mini-studies of desperate human behavior, are singular viewing experiences even without the matchless 3D that Wenders has employed to make kinetic screen spectacle of them, even without the subtext of offscreen grief and joy underpinning each number.

“Pina” is a dance film inasmuch as, say, Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” is a sports movie: a ne plus ultra, perhaps, but also another beast entirely. What the Academy makes of it — it finds itself in the unusual position of contending for both Best Documentary Feature and Best Foreign Language Film honors — is anyone’s guess right now.

Whatever it may be, the film came perilously close to being nothing at all. For one thing, it was never conceived as a posthumous celebration of Bausch’s art: over the phone from Los Angeles, Wenders explains to me that he and Bausch collaborated on the project for 20 years, before her untimely death in 2009 seemingly put the whole endeavor on ice.

“Pina first suggested I film her work in the mid-80s, and I took to the idea straight away,” he says, his voice warmly scholarly, clipped German vowels slowed ever so slightly by traces of American English. “We never stopped discussing it, debating it really, while we kept working on other projects, and it’s clear we were really stalling for time. That it kept not happening wasn’t through lack of desire on my part, but rather through lack of knowledge — I just couldn’t think of a way to film dance that would do justice to the live qualities of her work.”

Bausch was patient, trusting her friend and collaborator to unlock the concept as his fiction filmmaking took ever more esoteric turns: “‘We’ll find a better way,’ she kept saying to me, every time I suggested a new angle,” he remembers, “as if she knew it would actually find us.”

Wenders’s ‘eureka’ moment finally came at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, when he attended the premiere of concert documentary “U2 3D” as a friend of, and former collaborator with, the Irish supergroup; he wasn’t terribly interested in the film going in, but was instantly dazzled by the 3D technology, and the fluid immediacy it lent to filmed live performance. “After a few minutes, I wasn’t even seeing the film,” he says. “I just saw on open door.”

Wenders knew then that he’d found the way to mount Bausch’s theater on screen, but was less convinced that he could actually do it. “It seemed more wishful thinking than anything else at that point,” he says. “The technology was so new and so specialized at that point, we couldn’t track it down. And even if we could, I didn’t know how to use it.”

Cue intensive research on the director’s part into handling the fast-evolving technology, as well as expanding its limitations: “I wanted a new 3D color process, one that could replicate natural light and not something so effects-driven. We spent 18 months perfecting the technology to capture the elegance, the airiness, of Pina’s dance. It was a challenge to bring that much more light to the stage without falsifying the interiors — the exterior dance scenes were actually far easier to film.”

For her part, Bausch was greatly taken with the idea of 3D, though she hadn’t seen it put to use herself. “From the way I described it to her, she trusted me that this was the way to go,” he says, “but she didn’t want to see any footage until it was ready. She didn’t want to spoil the finished effect.” Wenders waited until he’d completed a substantial section of the film in 3D; then, in June 2009, arranged to transport the completed footage to her. She never saw it: shortly before Wenders’s planned unveiling, Bausch died of cancer a mere five days after diagnosis.

“That was the end of the film, as far as I was concerned,” Wenders says, an audible tear in his voice. Having conceived the film as a collaboration rather than a tribute, he saw little point in continuing without Bausch’s creative direction. It was her own troupe of dancers, then, who persuaded the filmmaker to continue. “They persuaded me that if it couldn’t be a film made with her, it could be a film made for her. They had effectively lost their leader: they were grieving deeply, and had this enormous need to express themselves in response. The dancers needed the film more than anyone.”

It was at that point that Wenders decided to add the dancers’ own verbal tributes to Bausch to the film, alongside the extravagant dance sequences: “We were initially determined to make it a wordless film, but I feared that would be too cryptic. It had become a different project, and it needed the emotional directness of their testimonies.”

Though Wenders was aware of the relative novelty of using 3D for an arthouse documentary at a time when it is largely the preserve of Hollywood genre blockbusters, he wasn’t expecting it to stay that way until the film’s release. “‘Avatar’ was really the film that put 3D on the map as a cinematic tool, as something with a future, and it’s a masterpiece,” he says. “That set up such hope for a wave of creative films using this medium, across many genres, and I thought we’d be one of many. But the films have largely got worse since then, more cautious. And many of them are so ugly.”

Still, he professes excitement about the technology’s future, and is already planning two further 3D projects — an architecture-themed documentary and a fictional domestic drama. He’s particularly looking forward to proving on the latter that 3D can enhance even intimate, small-scale narrative cinema.

I ask if, while completing “Pina,” he was aware that his compatriot and contemporary, Werner Herzog, was also working on a elegiac 3D documentary, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”; the films premiered on the same day at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, making a joint statement that the technology was no longer for multiplexes alone. He laughs. “Yes, I thought it was funny that it came down to the two old German war horses battling it out! But it’s great. I feel certain that we’re on the cusp on a new stage of cinema right now — I’m grateful it’s not happening too late for guys like us.” 

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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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.

It’s been a busy week of announcements and awards shows leading into an even busier week of same as we barrel toward Sundance next week. Plus, ballots are due today (in a few hours, in fact). So let’s see what’s on the docket today…

Last night brought the first major televised awards show of the season in the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards. Both of us were on hand. We give our perspective from the show and our take on the winners.

The DGA announced nominees in both narrative feature and documentary filmmaking this week, including a surprise nomination for David Fincher in the former category.

Speaking of documentaries, there was some major news this week in how the Academy’s documentary branch will handle its nominating process. Anne has been dutifully reporting on it throughout the week so she breaks it down for us. The Cinema Eye Honors also happened, recognizing one of the films unfortunately eliminated by the branch’s old paradigm.

And finally, reader questions. We address queries regarding the best campaigns of the year, how sewn up the Best Foreign Language Film category is for perceived frontrunner “A Separation” and how critically reviled films get nominated by, um, critics at the Critics’ Choice Awards.

Have a listen to the new podcast below with Bob Dylan leading the way. If the file cuts off for you at any time, try the back-up download link at the bottom of this post. And as always, remember to subscribe to Oscar Talk via iTunes here.

“Blind Willie McTell” courtesy of Bob Dylan and VH1.
“Jump Into the Fire” courtesy of Harry Nilsson and RCA Victor.

Say, what are they drinking down in Georgia? Whatever it is — and I’ll bet it’s good — can we arrange for a few thousand crates of the stuff to be shipped over to Academy voters? The state’s film critics have put their heads together for what is surely the most singular US critics’ award slate of the season: from “We Need to Talk About Kevin” popping up in the Best Picture and Director categories to a Best Adapted Screenplay nod for “The Muppets” to “The Artist” failing to show up for Best Picture, Director or Actor, this is one group that clearly couldn’t care less about their record as Oscar predictors.

“The Tree of Life” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” lead the nominations with eight mentions apiece, with both films scoring a pleasingly unexpected acting nod: young Hunter McCracken makes the Best Actor list (with Brad Pitt in supporting), while the critics have singled Tom Hardy out of the latter film’s formidable supporting cast.

Indeed, the acting categories are full of happy surprises: major cool points to Georgia for being the first critics’ group to recognize the year’s most intricate leading performance, Juliette Binoche in “Certified Copy.” (Between that and Mia Wasikowska showing up for “Jane Eyre,” did they read my First-Half FYC column this week?) Pats on the back all round. Check out the full list of nominees below.

Best Picture
“The Adventures of Tintin”
“Another Earth”
“The Descendants”
“Drive”
“Moneyball”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
“The Tree of Life”
“War Horse”
“We Need to Talk About Kevin”
“Young Adult”

Best Director
Nicolas Winding Refn, “Drive”
Tomas Alfredson, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy”
Terrence Malick, “The Tree of Life”
Steven Spieberg, “War Horse”
Lynne Ramsay, “We Need to Talk About Kevin”

Best Actor
George Clooney, “The Descendants”
Hunter McCracken, “The Tree of Life”
Gary Oldman, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
Brad Pitt, “Moneyball”
Michael Shannon, “Take Shelter”

Best Actress
Juliette Binoche, “Certified Copy”
Viola Davis, “The Help”
Rooney Mara, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
Tilda Swinton, “We Need to Talk About Kevin”
Charlize Theron, “Young Adult”
Mia Wasikowska, “Jane Eyre”

Best Supporting Actor
Albert Brooks, “Drive”
Robert Forster, “The Descendants”
Tom Hardy, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
Brad Pitt, “The Tree of Life”
Max von Sydow, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”

Best Supporting Actress
Bérénice Bejo, “The Artist”
Sandra Bullock, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
Jessica Chastain, “The Tree of Life”
Kate Mara, “happythankyoumoreplease”
Shailene Woodley, “The Descendants”

Best Adapted Screenplay
“The Descendants”
“Moneyball”
“The Muppets”
“Submarine”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”

Best Original Screenplay
“The Artist”
“50/50”
“Midnight in Paris”
“The Tree of Life”
“Young Adult”

Best Art Direction
“The Artist”
“Hugo”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
“The Tree of Life”
“War Horse”

Best Cinematography
“Drive”
“Moneyball”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
“The Tree of Life”
“War Horse”

Best Original Score
“The Adventures of Tintin”
“Contagion”
“Hanna”
“Moneyball”
“War Horse”

Best Original Song
“Life’s a Happy Song” from “The Muppets”
“Man or Muppet” from “The Muppets”
“Pictures in my Head” from “The Muppets”
“So Long” from “Winnie the Pooh”
“Star Spangled Man” from “Captain America: The First Avenger”

Best Ensemble
“Contagion”
“The Ides of March”
“Midnight in Paris”
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”
“War Horse”

Best Foreign Film
“Certified Copy”
“The Human Resources Manager”
“In Darkness”
“Inuk”
“Sound of Noise”

Breakthrough Award
Richard Ayoade, “Submarine”
Jessica Chastain, “Coriolanus,” “The Debt,” “The Help,” “Take Shelter” and “The Tree of Life”
Tom Hiddleston, “Midnight in Paris,” “Thor” and “War Horse”
Hunter McCracken, “The Tree of Life”
Josh Radnor, “happythankyoumoreplease”

Best Animated Film: “The Adventures of Tintin”

Best Documentary: “Senna”

Oglethorpe Award for Excellence in Georgia Cinema: John Henry Summerour, “Sahkanaga”

Remember to keep track of the ups and downs of the 2011-2012 filma wards season via The Circuit.

I haven’t watched the telecast of last night’s Critics’ Choice Movie Awards on VH1 yet, but to hear it from cranky New York Post critic Lou Lumenick, it was the worst piece of produced television in the history of God and heaven and love and death and everything else.

From my spot on the floor, though, it seemed like a pretty good step forward for the show, which is aiming to compete with the Golden Globes as THE televised precursor film awards ceremony of the season (shoot for the stars, so to speak). The move to the Hollywood Palladium in 2009 was a smart branding play, taking it out of Santa Monica (which the Indie Spirits have long-called home) and into slightly more unique waters. And in its third year at the venue, the steady progression of ambition and creativity in how the show is put together on the floor is noticeable and exciting.

The winners of the awards themselves? Not so exciting. Guy has already given that rundown, but I’ll say that I was surprised at how well “The Help” did, kicking things off with a big win for Octavia Spencer.

Speaking of which, the “Help” table was right behind mine. And George Clooney wasn’t lying when he quipped about how great a time they were having. But all I could really think about was finding a moment to let Allison Janney know that I felt she gave the greatest fleeting cameo performance (in “Margaret”) that anyone will likely ever give.

Silly me, the moment I picked was right after Viola Davis had won the Best Actress prize, just as Janney was wiping tears out of her eyes due to the emotional wallop of Davis’ speech. She nevertheless gave me a heartfelt “thank you” and talked about how glad she is that Kenneth Lonergan’s film finally came around after waiting for its cue for six years.

Speaking of “Margaret,” I’m kicking myself this morning for not at least bringing that film up with Martin Scorsese (who was at my table, or I should say I was at his, along with producer Graham King and Leonardo DiCaprio, who presented the director with the Music+Film Award). You’ll recall Scorsese called an earlier cut of Longergan’s film a “masterpiece.” But I did enjoy spending a few choice moments talking to him purely about the use of Harry Nilsson in “Goodfellas.”

Scorsese was appreciative of the essay I wrote for the program, particularly of the many specific examples brought up throughout. But it was a pleasure to go revisit those titles and crank that out, I told him, because let’s face it: growing up with Scorsese movies means you grow up with a music education. They’re inseparable.

“This award has a very special significance to me, so I’d like to begin with a special ‘thank you’ to Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli and the Hot Club of France,” Scorsese said upon accepting the award. “That was the music I used to hear when I was growing up in my apartment in New York, even before we had a TV, in the mid-to-late 40s. Before anything for me, there was music and conversation, and for me they were both the same thing.”

On that score, I was adamant with BFCA President Joey Berlin at the after-party that there are three people on the top tier when it comes to an honor like the Music+Film Award, and they’ve knocked out two of them already (Scorsese and last year’s recipient, Quentin Tarantino). Next year simply has to be Cameron Crowe (who was in the running this year), but we’ll see what happens. There are other names in the mix, too, but I don’t think there’s a question here. And I really dig that award, too.

Bob Dylan, by the way, spent more time honing and rehearsing that one-song tribute than just about anything else he’s done, including the Grammys, where he changed up the key at the last minute and was just all around more loose about it. It meant a lot to him, to honor Scorsese in this way, and you could tell the living legend was having a great time on stage as he rambled through “Blind Willie McTell.”

And one more note about my table: DiCaprio called “Bridesmaids” for Best Comedy before Patton Oswalt even read the name off the card! OMG! See? Anyone can do it. Dude should TOTALLY be an awards blogger if this whole acting thing doesn’t work out.

Anyway, at the pre-show reception I had a nice long chat with “War Horse” cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who truly is fine whether his films win awards or don’t — trust me, after interviewing the guy a few times over the years, he really doesn’t care). He did, however, win an award last night in the evening’s only tie, with “The Tree of Life” cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who Kaminski expects to win both the ASC award and the Oscar). Mainly he’s focused on his next film as a director, “American Dream.”

I didn’t really get up and meet and greet like usual, though. It’s kind of hard to wiggle out of your chair during commercial breaks when rubberneckers are swarming with their cell phone cameras out to snap a photo of DiCaprio and Scorsese. Shameless. (And, one can only hope, not BFCA members — but I wouldn’t be surprised.)

So that was the 17th annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards. The winners were predictable for the most part, but I’m personally hoping this makes it two years in a row the BFCA’s choice for the year’s best doesn’t turn the trick for Oscar. It’s looking more and more like that’s a futile crossing of the fingers, though.

Check out the full list of BFCA nominees here and the winners here. And before ducking out, here’s Dylan’s musical tribute to Scorsese, in case you missed it:

For year-round entertainment news and awards season commentary follow @kristapley on Twitter.

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Ah, the old “worst Oscar winners” topic — it never fails to get a righteous movie-geek conversation going. We all have our personal bugbears, both within and beyond the list of consensus groaners that repeatedly get hauled out for another retrospective whipping. Tom Huddleston’s fun list of the Academy’s 20 worst decisions pulls from both piles: everyone loves to rag on “Driving Miss Daisy,” but Anthony Hopkins’s Best Actor win for “The Silence of the Lambs” is a more singular pick. For my part, I’m cheering on his selection of “Forrest Gump,” Renee Zellweger and Stevie Wonder, feeling a little protective of “Gone With the Wind” and “The Sound of Music,” and itching to add “Braveheart” to the list. Browse and rant at your leisure. [Time Out]  

Sasha Stone, somehow shocked by Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer’s Critics’ Choice wins last night, believes they are “carrying the burden of our own shameful past.” What if we just like their work? [Awards Daily]

Steve Pond asks: “Shouldn’t ‘Harry Potter’ be part of the Best Picture conversation?” (I answer: “No.”) [The Odds]

The Sundance Film Festival is facing a lawsuit over a single programme blurb. See, words can hurt you. [Vanity Fair]

“Bridesmaids” star (and soon-to-be Academty Award nominee?) Kristen Wiig on writing a comedy about a fundamentally sad character. [The Carpetbagger]

You knew it was coming: an interview with Uggie the Dog. [The Guardian]

Why the ensemble pieces in this year’s Golden Globe race are giving ceremony organizers seating nightmares. [Vulture]

Speaking the Globes, Alyssa Rosenberg is desperately counting on Ricky Gervais to liven up a staid awards season. [Salon] 

On why “Margin Call,” which rather ran out of steam after a robust start to the awards season, is this decade’s “Wall Street.” [The Telegraph]

At last, something wholly positive I can say about “The Iron Lady”: this new set of protest-inspired posters for the film is incredible. [IMP Awards]

Forgive the delay in posting last night’s BFCA Critics’ Choice Awards results: Kris was on the scene and doubtless living it up, while I was catching some shut-eye. I’m sure Kris will fill you in later on how things went down from the inside — I haven’t even seen the ceremony myself — but the chief news to take away here is that “The Artist” inevitably sealed its status as the film to beat this Oscar season with four wins, including Best Picture and Best Director for Michel Hazanavicius. (Among its other wins is one for Best Original Score — someone go and check Kim Novak’s pulse.)

It appears to have been an evening short on surprises — but then, when have we ever counted on the BFCA to shake things up? It is worth noting, however, that “The Help” star Viola Davis scored her first big win of the season here, after having been largely shut out of the critics’ awards. (After tying for the win in the 2008 and 2009 ceremonies, Meryl Streep remained in her seat this time.) Sandra Bullock started her streak of Best Actress wins here two years ago, and I sense it’ll be the same for Davis, whose vehicle, like Bullock’s, is more beloved by the industry and the public than by the critical majority.

The mistake many observers make is to think of the Critics’ Choice Awards as, well, critics’ choice awards. Despite their rather presumptuous name, they aren’t exactly critics’ awards in the vein of, say, the New York Film Critics’ Circle — they’re openly proud of their record of “predicting” Oscar winners, for starters, and their choices invariably skew a little more middlebrow.

That’s particularly evident when “The Help” takes three awards, including Best Ensemble and Best Supporting Actress for Octavia Spencer, and when “War Horse” rather ludicrously ties with “The Tree of Life” in the Best Cinematography category. (That might cheer Janusz Kaminski up a little after the ASC left him off their nominee list.) The BFCA also gave the critically battered “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” its first prize of the season, as Thomas Horn beat Supporting Actress nominee Shailene Woodley to the Best Young Actor award.

Indeed, it was a night of mixed fortunes for “The Descendants.” George Clooney triumphed in the Best Actor category, just as I began to think Brad Pitt might be taking the lead in that race — but lest you think that’s indicative of his film having more sway over voters than Pitt’s, look further down the list. In perhaps the most interesting result of the night, “Moneyball” beat “The Descendants” to the Best Adapted Screenplay award. This was a race I’d already ceded to Alexander Payne and his team in my head: could Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian put up a fight for the Oscar? (Over in the Original Screenplay field, meanwhile, Woody Allen managed to stem the “Artist” tide.)

The biggest loser of the night, however, was “Hugo”: after sharing the lead with “The Artist” in the nominee list, Martin Scorsese’s family film managed to convert only one of its 11 nominations to gold: Best Art Direction, obviously enough. Consolation for Scorsese arrived in the shape of the Best Documentary prize for his mammoth music doc “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” — a slightly less expected win than the wholly deserving foreign-language and animated victors, “Rango” and “A Separation.”

It’ll be interesting to see if tonight’s big winners consolidate their frontrunner status at the Golden Globes on Sunday: I suspect they will, but there’s still a pleasing amount of wiggle room in a number of top categories. Until then.

The full list of winners:  

Best Picture: “The Artist”

Best Director: Michel Hazanavicius, “The Artist”

Best Actor: George Clooney, “The Descendants”

Best Actress: Viola Davis, “The Help”

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, “Beginners”

Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, “The Help”

Best Original Screenplay: Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris”

Best Adapted Screenplay: Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, “Moneyball”

Best Foreign Language Film: “A Separation”

Best Animated Feature: “Rango”

Best Documentary: “George Harrison: Living in the Material World”

Best Cinematography: (tie) “The Tree of Life” and “War Horse”

Best Art Direction: “Hugo”

Best Costume Design: “The Artist”

Best Film Editing: “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

Best Makeup: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”

Best Original Score: “The Artist”

Best Original Song: “Life’s a Happy Song” from “The Muppets”

Best Sound: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”

Best Visual Effects: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Best Ensemble: “The Help”

Best Young Actor/Actress: Thomas Horn, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Best Comedy: “Bridesmaids”

Best Action Film: “Drive”

Joel Siegel Award: Sean Penn

Music and Film Award: Martin Scorsese

The BFCA’s Critics’ Choice Movie Awards are going down in roughly two-and-a-half hours and I need to go put on my face. The show will be broadcast on VH1 at 8pm ET. (It is tape-delayed for the west coast, unfortunately). I’m not sure if there is an online stream anywhere but I’m sure industrious readers can point you to one if there is. In any case, feel free to use this space to discuss the show and winners as it happens. The nominees are here. I’ll be back tonight for post-ceremony commentary.

Martin Scorsese sure is covering all his bases with the Directors’ Guild of America. One year after winning his first television trophy from the Guild (for the pilot of “Boardwalk Empire”), he racked up his eight nomination in the feature film category for “Hugo” on Monday. Not content with that, meanwhile, he has just received his first ever DGA mention in the documentary department, as his mammoth “George Harrison: Living in the Material World” was among the five non-fiction naminees tapped by the Guild this morning. They like him, they really like him.

I don’t think the Harrison film quite masures up to “No Direction Home” or “The Last Waltz” in Scorsese’s rock-doc portfolio, but it’s nice to see this sub-heading in his oeuvre getting some official recognition; for my money, it’s the more successful of his two 2011 titles. 

Scorsese is the highest-profile nominee in a pretty formidable slate. I’m particularly pleased to see that, on the heels of its triumph at last night’s Cinema Eye Honors, “The Interrupters” scored a nomination here for director Steve James — that’s another sharp slap on the wrist to the Academy for leaving the film off their Best Documentary longlist. (It’s not the first time the DGA has come to James’s defense in this manner: the infamously Oscar-snubbed “Hoop Dreams” won their top prize in 1994.)

The list is rounded out by three films that are in the running for the Oscar: prohibitive frontrunner James Marsh for “Project Nim,” Richard Press for “Bill Cunningham New York” and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sninofsky for “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory.”

Take that only as a guardedly good omen for their Oscar chances: the last two DGA documentary winners, Louis Psihoyos and Charles Ferguson, may have gone on to triumph with the Academy, but that came after 18 consecutive years of the DGA Award and the Oscar going to different films. The overlap isn’t nearly as extensive as it is the feature film category, and hurrah for that — the DGA should be an award in its own right, not a mere placeholder. 

To recap, the DGA nominees in the documentary category are:

Richard Press, “Bill Cunningham New York”

Martin Scorsese, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World”

Steve James, “The Interrupters”

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sninofsky, “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory”

James Marsh, “Project Nim”

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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Some years back a young Kenneth Lonergan visited Italy, his first trip to a country where English wasn’t the predominant language. He experienced a powerful bit of self-awareness. “My God,” he thought. “These people have been here the whole time I’ve been alive.”

It’s one of those moments that is more striking than it sounds, particularly for a writer curious about the world and how people respond to it, are affected by it and, most importantly, are ignorant to it. Having always been interested in other people’s points of view, the size of the world and the limitations of his own experiences with it, it was a seminal moment for the writer/director, one that tucked itself away in the recesses of his mind until it was called upon to flavor his latest effort, “Margaret.”

The film, which has seen an embattled legal and post-production history, tells the story of a young woman’s own watershed moment of epiphany, when suddenly the world seemed to expand beyond the borders of her privileged Manhattan life.

“This is someone who grows up in the Upper West Side, which is a very centrally located, parochial neighborhood,” Lonergan says, calling from New York, of the film’s main character, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin). “You don’t know, when you grow up on the Upper West Side, that you’re not in the center of the world. You grow up in Kansas and you know there’s a big world out there. When you grow up where I grew up, you think, ‘That’s it.’ And so you step out and you realize there’s a lot more going on. So it was really important to me that she’s never been to a bus driver’s house before, she’s never been in a police station, she’s never been in a lawyer’s office, she’s never seen anyone die.”

For a long time the film was just labeled “Bus Film” in Lonergan’s computer, so called for the story’s inciting incident. The narrative flow seems simple enough: Lisa has a hand in a tragic bus accident that takes a pedestrian’s life. The blame is shared with the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), who was distracted by Lisa and ran a red light. Burdened by guilt and a naive yet touching desire for justice, Lisa becomes close with one of the victim’s friends, explores legal options to have the bus driver fired at the very least, approaches him in order to purge their guilt with a not-so-simple admission and basically bends over backwards to understand why something so horrible and random had to happen in the first place.

The themes Lonergan wanted to explore stemmed from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, “Spring and Fall,” that tells of a young girl — Margaret — mourning the change of seasons. But ultimately the lyrics are about the shift from adolescence to adulthood, the reality check that comes when suddenly the world isn’t so mysterious, at least not for the romantic and exciting reasons it is when seen through the eyes of youth.

“Little kids grow up discovering the world that’s shown to them,” Lonergan says, “and then when you become a teenager, it kind of shrinks a little bit. I think when you get past that point, one of the important things is that you see there is more to the world than yourself. Elaine May had seen an early cut of the film and she said to me, ‘Only a teenager could think that she could have that much affect on the world,’ which I thought was very interesting and apt and kind of touching and sad.” May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin, plays the victim’s friend, Emily, in the film and has received some recognition this awards season.

Lonergan was also interested in keeping the full breadth of Lisa’s experience in the eye of the camera. It was important to him that the character’s life continued in all of its elements, rather than follow along the central narrative thread. And so the film therefore resembles a bit of a willfully messy construction, characters played by major actors (Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick) coming and going in brief exchanges, while other key moments in a young adolescent girl’s life (such as losing her virginity) play out in poignant, mundane strokes.

“In many movies,” Lonergan says, “someone’s involved in the pursuit of a criminal or a story or a trial, you see them in their life and then you see the story start. And then all you ever see is them getting out of work and going to meet with the policemen or whatever it is. I always wondered, ‘What do they do all day long while this is going on?’ So I was very interested in keeping her entire life alive as the story goes on. She may be pursuing this agenda and she may be trying to work out all the difficulty she’s going through, but she still has to go to class and she still has to deal with her mother and she still has to deal with everything we have to deal with all day long. I’d never seen that done before. It may have been done and I just didn’t see it but I thought that was an interesting thing to do and that suggested a movie right away.”

Indeed, Lonergan always saw “Margaret,” which has been noted as a “novelistic” piece of filmmaking, as cinematic material. Even when he allowed himself a 375-page first draft, he wanted it on the screen. He toyed for a time with the idea of a mini-series, but eventually he honed it down to the essence he wanted, never really envisioning it for literature or the stage (where he has established himself quite authoritatively as a Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright).

“The rest of the city going about its business in these different neighborhoods is really, really important to the story and is something I was interested in incorporating,” he says. “So that suggested a film rather than a play. Outdoor atmosphere is not something the theater does very well.”

“Margaret,” which was filmed in 2005, was Lonergan’s sophomore effort following 2000’s “You Can Count on Me.” He says his learning curve on his debut was “perpendicular” and that he was very much learning on the job, developing visual ideas during discussions with his cinematographer, etc. This time around, though, he developed those ideas early on, including that notion of a vast metropolis going on about its business as a central character fights against the grain to see justice served.

“I wanted her to be just one person in the whole city,” he says, “no matter what was going on with her. Where I’m standing now, there must be 50,000 people within a five-minute walk, and I was interested in the idea of, with a camera, trying to convey that whatever you’re doing, you’re surrounded by people doing things that are either much more important or much less important.

“Like, we’re having this conversation, and I’m sure someone nearby is dying of something and I’m sure someone nearby is having a very good time doing something else. That goes on all day long, all over the world, and I just thought that was something that would be very interesting to convey visually. Also, that’s what she’s up against. It’s not the details of the lawsuit or the fact that the bus driver is one kind of a person or another, but just that the world is so big. And this is a very good city for demonstrating that visually.”

He also says he wanted the exteriors to be geographically accurate. “I didn’t want to have someone step out of a building on 72nd Street and walk into a restaurant in Greenwich Village,” he says. “I wanted to be as truthful to the neighborhoods and the locations as possible, and for the most part we were successful in being able to do that.”

Lonergan had cast actress Anna Paquin in the London production of his play “This is Our Youth” and was about a third of the way through writing “Margaret” when he decided she was perfect for the role of Lisa. What really struck him as being unique about her, he says, was a balance of sensitivity with energy and vitality.

“My wife, J. Smith-Cameron [who plays Lisa’s mother in the film], refers to some actors as ‘front foot actors’ and some actors as ‘back foot actors,'” he says, “meaning they’re sort of moving forward or they’re waiting and reacting. And Anna is so driven. There are many sensitive and delicate performers out there, but she had the sensitivity and the burning drive, which the character had to have. Lisa is really trying very, very hard to do this very difficult thing and she gets quite far with it. So I think there is something to be said for her, despite the fact that she has trouble seeing past her own horizon.”

That idea of not seeing past one’s own horizon begins to take on an even deeper meaning when considering “Margaret” as a film about a city coming to grips with itself in the wake of its own tragedy. It’s not that Lonergan felt any strong desire as a New Yorker to offer up thematic commentary about 9/11 when he set out to write the film (which is full of student arguments and debate sessions relating to the event, still very fresh all those years ago). But they started to work themselves in nevertheless.

“I wrote it around 2001 to 2002,” he says, “and I remember at the time, almost within days after the attacks, everyone was asking, ‘How has this changed your view of America and your view of New York and how has this changed your view of life?’ And my thought at the time was, ‘My God, I don’t know. It’s so immense. How are you supposed to know what you think of anything this size, that fast?’ Whatever I was thinking and feeling about it came out in what I was writing at the time, which was ‘Margaret.'”

Around Paquin, Lonergan built a cast of talented performers. He wrote the part of the mother for Smith-Cameron and had Paquin in mind for the lead, but with a wealth of stellar actors committing, he wasn’t sure where they’d go immediately. He didn’t know if Mark Ruffalo would play the bus driver or one of the teachers, for instance, but things eventually started clicking into place.

“What’s funny is you’re looking for what you imagined, and sometimes you get it,” he says. “And then when you don’t, you branch out your idea of what the character should be.”

In particular he notes Jean Reno’s brief portrayal of a gentleman seeing Lisa’s mother, who eventually walks the delicate thematic line of political correctness that Lonergan threads throughout.

“That was a very difficult part to cast, because it’s such an elusive character,” he says. “But I think he’s just wonderful. He has a very elusive quality but a very menschy quality.”

Getting back to the film’s inciting incident, that harrowing bus accident, Lonergan says if that scene didn’t work, there would be no movie; it happens in the film’s first 10 minutes and in every scene that follows, there’s not one moment when Lisa is not affected, when what she does isn’t driven in some way by what happened to her. But while it was originally just a scene between Paquin and Allison Janney (who is pitch-perfect in virtually 2% of the film as the dying victim), something Berlin happened to witness added further thematic heft.

“Jeannie had told me while we were shooting that she had seen a terrible accident on Broadway, just by coincidence,” Lonergan says. “What was really bizarre about it was that a crowd gathered, just a wall of people stood around and watched this truck driver, whose truck had blown up in the middle of Broadway and he was very badly burned. She said all these bicycle messengers just pulled up and these people just stood there like an audience watching this guy die, basically.”

It led Lonergan to include a circle of extras around Paquin as she acted out the scene with Janney. “Every time they finished a take,” he says, “everybody was just sort of in shock, because Anna and Allison were so real. And this is all day long. You hold up the traffic. You have people honking. Everybody’s mad at you. The crew is working really, really hard to keep the street clear. It’s very difficult shooting in the middle of the city in the middle of the day.”

When coming around to the issue of “Team ‘Margaret,'” a grassroots campaign started by critic and journalist advocates of the film demanding more exposure, Lonergan understandably finds it all incredibly heartening. Along with being considered one of the year’s best films by a host of critics, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert and CNN’s Tom Charity among them (in addition to being an obvious favorite around these parts and picking up major nominations from the Chicago Film Critics Association and the London Film Critics Circle), “Margaret” has a lot of supporters in its corner. Lonergan noted his appreciation in a previously released statement as the movement built to a fever pitch.

“I couldn’t be more touched by the outpouring of support from critics and twitterers, as well as the petition campaign on behalf of ‘Margaret’ for the released cut,” it reads. “I support this cut wholeheartedly and want people to see and like it, and the actors deserve to be seen and appreciated for their amazing work. It would mean everything to me if the film could at least have a fair chance at a life of its own.

“Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people. They don’t have to like it, but connecting your inner life, your view of life, to the inner life and views of others is really and truly what it’s all about, and I desperately want ‘Margaret’ to have that chance to reach people, regardless of its ultimate merits.”

With New York’s Cinema Village in the midst of an on-going booking for the film and Los Angeles’s Cinefamily planning a similar engagement starting on January 27, at least “Margaret” is beginning to reach a wider audience than it did during it’s limited official release in September (which netted it a paltry $46,000 in box office receipts). Time will tell if a home video release will help bring it to an even broader spectrum of viewers, but Lonergan is regardless humbled by the rally cry of its supporters.

“It’s a miracle,” he says. “I don’t even know what to say about it. I still can’t quite take it in. You want to communicate with people when you write something, and the fact that people care about the work the actors and I did to champion it this way, I don’t know what else to say about it except that it’s a miracle. I don’t actually believe in miracles, per se, but I believe in this one.”

For year-round entertainment news and awards season commentary follow @kristapley on Twitter.

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Earlier this week, I singled out Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O’Connor’s artful adapted screenplay for “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” as one of the 10 on-the-bubble contenders we’d most like to see show up in the Oscar race. The week before, I sang the praises of Moira Buffini’s subtly innovative adaptation of “Jane Eyre” in my screenplay-themed First-Half FYC column.

So you can imagine that I’m pretty chuffed to see both these outstanding efforts show up in the list of nominees for the USC Scripter Award, a prize for literary adaptations that honors both the screenwriter and the author of the source material.

The Scripter’s literary focus means it can’t be compared directly to the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, which obviously considers adaptations from other media, but there’s often a significant overlap between their nominees.

So this is a helpful nudge for both these under-rewarded contenders — as well as Christopher Hampton’s largely sidelined “A Dangerous Method” screenplay, eligible by virtue of the fact that it’s based both on Hampton’s own play “The Talking Cure” and John Kerr’s book on the same subject, “A Most Dangerous Method.”

Those three dark horses join two surefire Oscar nominees on the USC Scripter list: Alexander Payne, Jim Rash and Nat Faxon for “The Descendants,” as well as Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin for “Moneyball.” It’s Sorkin’s second consecutive nomination here: he won last year’s Scripter en route to his eventual Oscar.

This refreshing slate of nominees is all the more noteworthy considering the major possibilities that were left out, in particular three WGA-nominated adaptations of hit novels: John Logan for “Hugo,” Tate Taylor for “The Help” and Zaillian for “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Less surprisingly, “War Horse” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” both miss yet another precursor opportunity here. (Other options the USC committee passed on: “Drive,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” “My Week With Marilyn,” “The Adventures of Tintin” and the “Harry Potter” finale.)

Nice to see them not following the crowd here, and prioritizing the adroitness of the actual screenplay ahead of the overall pull of the film. Good work all round. 

To recap, the nominees are:

“A Dangerous Method” (screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on his play “The Talking Cure” and the book “A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein” by John Kerr) 

“The Descendants” (screenplay by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings)

“Jane Eyre” (screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on the novel by Charlotte Brontë)

“Moneyball” (screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, based on the book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis)

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (screenplay by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, based on the novel by John le Carré)

Remember to keep track of the ups and downs of the 2011-2012 film awards season via The Circuit.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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When it comes to the Best Picture race, it’s fair to say that below-the-line support from the crafts branches can be a bit of a deal-breaker: you have to go all the way back to “Ordinary People” in 1980 to find a film that won the top prize after receiving no technical nominations whatsoever. Fox Searchlight is aware of that, as well as the fact that nobody’s really singing the praises of “The Descendants” in any technical capacity. Their plan of action: a featurette focusing specifically on the film’s cinematography and editing, exclusively debuted on Scott Feinberg’s site. (The score — thankfully, if you ask me — is ineligible.) It’s a clever attempt to cover a blind spot, but they’ll likely have a tough time convincing branch voters in either category. [THR]

Emma Stone, Johnny Depp and “Harry Potter” were the big winners at the People’s Choice Awards, but the real news, I’m sure you’ll agree, is that R.Pattz got a buzzcut. [MTV]

You read Mark Harris’s Oscar column every week, don’t you? If not, why not? Here here is on the “known unknowns” in the wake of some surprising Guild trends. [Grantland]

Steven Spielberg talks to Tom Huddleston about “War Horse,” his 2013 project “Robocalypse” and paying his kids to watch black-and-white films. [Time Out]

Peter Bradshaw says what needs to be said about Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans for the UK film industry: basically, back the hell off. [The Guardian]

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” director Stephen Daldry tries not to think about awards. Which, this year, is just as well. [Variety]

Nathaniel Rogers celebrates the 102nd birthday Luise Rainer with a countdown of the oldest living Oscar nominees. Proud to say I met #2 only a few weeks ago. [The Film Experience]

Between some other off-consensus predictions, Nick Davis puts forth a compelling case for Kristen Wiig nabbing a surprise Best Actress nod. [Nick’s Flick Picks]

This was posted last month, but seems appropriate now: a profile of yesterday’s deserving surprise ASC nominee, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” DP Hoyte van Hoytema. [Below the Line]

It’s amazing how fleetingly causes can come and go in the awards race. Upon its release in the summer, “The Interrupters” — a complex, clear-eyed study of inner-city violence in Chicago, from “Hoop Dreams” director Steve James — was lavished with critical praise, hailed as one of the year’s best films, and a cinch to snag the Oscar nod owed James by the Academy, if not the outright frontrunner. (17 years on, the unaccountable non-nomination of “Hoop Dreams” still smarts.)

With predictably frustrating perversity — and an apparent impulse to torment James — the Academy promptly left it off their 15-title longlist for the documentary Oscar, prompting widespread critical outrage that a film this strong could be carelessly slighted. Yet in the two months since that uproar, the critics haven’t exactly come through for the film, either: the only win it’s clocked up has been, in a show of hometown pride, from the Chicago critics’ circle. Most nominee lists acros the circuit have left it off altogether, as lesser works like “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” and “Project Nim” rack up the precursors. (Even the International Documentary Association blanked the film entirely.)

So it’s been left to the good folks of the Cinema Eye Honors to pay some respect: “The Interrupters” took both the Best Documentary and Best Director prizes at last night’s ceremony. It wasn’t the only acclaimed film prominently left off the Academy’s list to receive some compensation: Clio Barnard’s tough-to-categorize performed documentary “The Arbor” took Best Debut Feature honors, while “Senna” and Errol Morris’s “Tabloid” both scooped technical honors.

Three Oscar-eligible films also took home some hardware: Wim Wenders’s “Pina” (also a Best Foreign Language Film contender) was recognized for its achievement in production, Afghanistan war doc “Hell and Back Again” for its cinematography and real-life horse whisperer study “Buck” won the Audience Choice prize. (It beat, among others, “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never”: one imagines they were rather selective in which audiences they polled.) All seem to me to be in the top tier of contenders for an Oscar nod — supposed frontrunner “Project Nim,” meanwhile, went home empty-handed.

The full list of winners:

Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking: “The Interrupters”

Outstanding Achievement in Direction: Steve James, “The Interrupters”

Outstanding Achievement in Production: Gian-Piero Ringel and Wim Wenders, “Pina”

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography: Danfung Dennis, “Hell and Back Again”

Outstanding Achievement in Editing: Gregers Sall and Chris King, “Senna”

Outstanding Achievement in a Debut Feature: Clio Barnard, “The Arbor”

Outstanding Achievement in an Original Music Score: John Kusiak, “Tabloid”

Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Animation: Rob Feng and Jeremy Landman, “Tabloid”

Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Short Filmmaking: “Diary,” Tim Hetherington

Spotlight Award: “The Tiniest Place”

Audience Choice Prize: “Buck”

Heterodox Award: “Beginners”

Remember to keep track of the ups and downs of the 2011-2012 film awards season via The Circuit.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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If you want a job done properly… well, don’t get the public to do it for you. That’s the lesson, at least, that BAFTA has learned today: in handing the public the task of electing their five Rising Star Award nominees, instead of leaving it to an industry jury as in years past, they’ve wound up with a slate that rivals last week’s awards longlists in the embarrassment stakes.

That’s not to rag on the nominees themselves — a bright, promising bunch of young actors, most of whom fit the ‘rising star’ profile rather neatly. I’ve already sung the praises of Chris Hemsworth and Chris O’Dowd, two of 2011’s most appealing breakthrough performers, in my First-Half FYC columns — the latter’s performance in “Bridesmaids” still ranks in my personal Best Supporting Actor ballot for 2011. Tom Hiddleston, meanwhile, has amply proven his worth in an exciting range of mainstream and arthouse projects, from “Thor” to “Midnight in Paris” to “The Deep Blue Sea.” Kudos all round.

It’s when you consider the names that have been left out — and, to be more blunt about it, their gender — that the picture becomes slightly more worrying. Eight names were on the jury-compiled longlist put forth to the public last month: of those eight, five were men, and it’s those five that have all been promoted to the nominee list after the public vote. With dispiriting predictability, the ladies left on the sidelines are Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence and Felicity Jones.

Due respect to Eddie Redmayne and British actor-filmmaker-rapper Adam Deacon, both of whom cracked the nominee list, but few would agree that their career highs stack up against those of Oscar nominee Lawrence and (one supposes) soon-to-be Oscar nominee Chastain. Even if they did, however, excluding any female performers from an award dedicated to the future of cinema sends out a pretty queasy message.

Put it down to coincidence, or UK voters siding with non-American names (three nominees are Brits, one Irish, one Australian), but when three of the most celebrated new actresses of the past two years in film can’t make the grade in a public vote (despite appearances in such high-profile films as “X-Men: First Class” and “The Help”), it could be read as a depressing signal of what women are up against in the industry.

That bias in itself can’t be blamed on BAFTA, but they should know better than to hand the reins to the public at this stage: in a sense, a Rising Star Award is the least appropriate award to put to a popular vote, dependent as it is on apprentice work that most mainstream cinemagoers aren’t aware of. BAFTA’s eagerness to involve viewers directly in their awards process is commendable, but following their pandering, middlebrow longlists, their eagerness to please is interfering with their nobler artistic obligations.

Anyway, I feel my quota of BAFTA complaining this year is close to being used up, so I’ll stop now. The award will be presented at the awards ceremony on February 12 — my hunch is that O’Dowd’s television profile in the UK will carry him to the win (as was the case for past winners James McAvoy and Noel Clarke), and from this lot of nominees, I’d be quite okay with that.

The BAFTA Rising Star nominees are:

Adam Deacon

Chris Hemsworth

Tom Hiddleston

Chris O’Dowd

Eddie Redmayne 

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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Alright, you know the drill. Rifle off your need-to-knows and we’ll try to address a few in the podcast. We’ll surely be previewing the Golden Globes and talking about DGA, ASC, the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards and other news items from the week as it is, so steer away from that and give us something fresh to chew on.

As the door closes on phase one of the Oscar season and nomination ballots are finalized, Kenneth Lonergan”s “Margaret” takes the stage in the final moments. Screeners of the film were finally sent out to all voting members of the Academy recently, and now, supporters of the film wait to see if said members may have responded to the material.

The actress at the center of the story, Anna Paquin, delivered her performance six years ago, when she was 23. And yet the experience still seems fresh and vivid in her mind, as if she were leaving the set after a day of emotional Olympics on “Margaret” rather than an evening of stunt-heavy work on Alan Ball”s southern-fried vamp camp phenomenon “True Blood.”

What the intermittent years have done is give her a sense of perspective akin to the kind of enriched self-understanding only attained with the passage of time. But then the actress already had the benefit of chronological distance from her character, Lisa Cohen, when production began, providing the space necessary for her to find what was lovable in a girl who she concedes is so often eristic in the film.

“When you”re a little bit older than the character that you”re playing, it”s easier to be compassionate towards their less likable qualities,” she says. “She”s gone through this horrible trauma and she takes it out on everyone around her in that way that people do. And she”s trying to make sense of what”s happened to her. And, of course, she”s only 17.”

In her innocent, yet rigidly determined quest to find a cowboy hat for a trip to New Mexico that will take her outside of her isolated Upper West Side of Manhattan life, Lisa distracts a bus driver long enough for him to hit and kill a woman. The scene, so beautifully, wrenchingly realized, shocks the audience within the first 10 minutes of the film. The remaining 140 minutes depicts Lisa”s reconciliation with the girl she was before she felt the life leave a woman she helped to kill and her journey toward accepting a world filled with senseless atrocity.

“It”s about the pain of having to realize that the world around her is not perfect, and that”s kind of okay,” Paquin says. “She”s trying to do the right thing, and do the right thing, and do the right thing and it doesn”t get her anywhere. Eventually she has to, not give up, but let go of the idea that there”s a good outcome if everyone just sort of behaves by a predetermined moral code. Because that is ultimately a very naïve, young point of view. It”s the passage of childhood into adulthood.”

Lisa spends the large bulk of the story in an enraged, mercurial, confused state looking for some way to restructure the moral disorder the fates have crafted for her. She, in fits and starts, looks for an outlet upon which to vent her sense of dissatisfaction and (genuinely felt) angst: a simple solution to a complex equation. She eventually, almost gleefully, lands on the bus driver as the valve for her poison.

“I find that to be a very realistic depiction of that age,” Paquin says. “You”re frantically looking for something to hang onto that makes sense and then you find the thing that seems to make the most sense and that”s it. She”s kind of projecting all of that guilt and that need for someone to be punished onto the one person she can hang it on, because he was physically driving the bus.”

It’s oddly fitting that the space between the production and release of the film (held up due to a web of legal entanglement between the film’s director, financier and distributor) exists because the essence of “Margaret” is the unfolding of a universally relatable reckoning and maturation process. Lisa follows a uniquely condensed trajectory of that process because the extreme nature of the accident forces her to confront aspects of her life and relationship to the world in one sweeping movement.

The Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that lends the film its namesake, “Spring and Fall,” speaks to the idea that age — in the sense of wisdom earned and gained — comes with a requisite fading of the stark clarity and sense of abject rejection with which the young experience perceived injustice. It’s about a girl named Margaret crying over leaves falling from the trees, but Manley depicts this as a hardening. “As the heart grows older, it will come to such sights colder,” Hopkins cautions in his verse, concluding with verbiage reflective of that most timeless of themes, innocence lost: “It is the blight man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.”

The likening to the poem seems to indicate that flawed and chaotic as Lisa”s “moral gymnasium” is, perhaps there is some heartbreak in the loss of it, in both the surrender to and the embrace of the horror that is so inevitably part of life. Yet Lonergan paints a more nuanced portrait. There is a beauty in the acquiescence and a liberty born of Lisa”s final admission of her own culpability (intentional or not) in the tragedy.

“She”s running around trying to accept responsibility, but she”s never actually able to say it until the final moment when nothing else she”s tried is working,” Paquin says of Lisa”s ultimate gateway to adulthood. “‘It”s my fault, I did something stupid and somebody died.” That”s a huge part of who she is. Even though she”s wildly disillusioned by everyone around her, she finally accepts her part of it and she is somehow freed by the admission.”

A large portion of the film’s power comes from its strength as a very subtle, but alarmingly accurate, metaphor for the inner workings of a nation following the events of 9/11. “It was much more timely and relevant when we shot it six years ago, because it had only been a couple of years,” Paquin muses. “That was a big part of what it meant to live in New York at that time.”

Interestingly enough, the divide between the time the film takes place and the present serves to illustrate how precise a reflection it is of the struggle the people of New York and the United States were in with themselves to comprehend and contextualize the meaning of those attacks. We now have (some of) the clarity that detachment provides.

In addition to the scope of the thematic core, the film presents a gorgeously rendered and grounded vision of life in New York. Paquin occasionally slips into Lisa”s cadence, “per se” and “necessarily” and “particularly” flavoring and characterizing her speech. In an experience she refers to as “a great love affair,” the actress spent her late teen years in New York interacting with the members of the community that “Margaret” so vibrantly brings to life on screen. “Learning the rhythms of the voices is easier if it”s something that you were really infatuated with anyway,” she says of the film”s spot-on rendering of the intonations of real New Yorkers.

Lonergan is precise in his use of language and yet it does not tread into realm of the distinctive patterning that elicits an “otherworldly” sense  that some playwrights enforce (David Mamet, for example). The performances in “Margaret” feel as spontaneous, fresh and truthful as any on screen this year. Lisa reads like an exposed nerve. The relationships are layered and rich, whether they are brief, elliptical or established over time. Indeed, it is the performances that many hope will receive some last-minute Oscar attention.

“I think that if that sort of thing is a goal then you”re in it for the wrong reasons,” Paquin says of the awards game. “I go to work to do good work, to make me feel good for reasons that have nothing to do with the end result. Maybe that”s from the luxury of having hit some so-called ‘high points’ in my career very young that I don”t think about it like that. But I don”t. There”s nothing better than coming home from work and feeling absolutely exhausted because you gave it everything that you had, that feeling of calmness, of having done great and exhausting work. Which ‘Margaret’ was every day.

“Of course, ultimately you make movies for audiences, and especially with a movie like this one, that your incredibly passionate about (and everyone who was involved in this film was passionate about it), you just want people to see it and, even if they don”t like it, to understand what you were doing. The amazing thing about this era of entertainment, though, is that between the online media and the Netflix and the iTunes people end up seeing more things than they may have otherwise.”

Yet one thing Oscar nominations and buzz can do is shine a light on which films are deserving of attention. “Margaret” has yielded one of the finest performances of Paquin”s career. But it also represents an ensemble piece that is as fascinating and finely tuned as it is raw. There is also a quality to Paquin’s portrayal that is strangely reminiscent of her screen debut in Jane Campion’s “The Piano.” She became the second-youngest Oscar winner ever, taking home the Best Supporting Actress award for the film.

“The work that I was able to do with Kenny was possibly the most uninhibited work that I think I”ve done since I was really little and didn”t know you were supposed to be inhibited,” Paquin says of the two depictions. “And there”s a sort of confidence and individuality and lack of giving a shit about other people”s opinions of you that I think both of those characters share. That”s from having watched the film over time, because as a 9-year-old, I had no understanding of the concept of a character. I didn”t really know what I was doing. There”s a sort of reacting to things on a purely visceral emotional level, which I think they do share.”

And yet that very intuitive, primal quality emerges as a result of the disciplined work ethic that playwright and theatre director Lonergan employs. “That”s his background and those are the kind of actors that he hires,” Paquin says. “We spent two or three weeks sitting around a table and rehearsing and really just dissecting every single last piece of punctuation and utterance that comes out of all these people”s mouths. Because one of the things about working with a writer that”s as gifted as Kenny is that every single word is there for a reason. He has thought about it all. There”s no accidents on the page and when you get it and you get the rhythm of it and it”s working, it”s incredibly gratifying. He”s the kind of writer that makes an actor sound really good.”

The actress had worked with the director on a play when she was 19 and had a respect and understanding for his approach. Indeed, Lonergan had Paquin specifically in mind when he was writing the role of Lisa Cohen as a result of that collaboration.

“I know a lot of actors that are not particularly into the rehearsal process because they feel that it stifles the spontaneity,” Paquin says. “I couldn”t possibly be more in the other camp. I think that if you work out every single technical detail and beat and moments that you want to achieve, then you then have freedom once you walk on set to do your job without having to think about anything nuts-and-bolts-wise.”

She uses the film”s crucial and painfully intimate moment between her character and the woman she (in her blithely unaware state) helped kill (Allison Janney, in a stunning if brief performance) as an example of the fruit of Lonergan”s co-creation with his cast.

“There was something kind of incredibly intense about actually shooting that in the middle of oncoming traffic in the middle of 34th and Broadway for four days straight,” she says. “We were all covered in blood. It was gruesome and it was one of those moments it felt horrible. It felt really upsetting, and that can help. But we had rehearsed and rehearsed and for me, I can go to those places when I”ve thought about all the details first.

“I also think I was just so absorbed in who she was. It was one of those scripts that, when it first surfaced, was (and is still) one of the greatest things I”ve ever read just as a piece of material. And the characters are written in such a way that you want to immerse yourself in it. And Kenny is so incredibly supportive to his performers. He pushes you when you need to be pushed and he”s kind when you need that and he”s really just one of the most extraordinary writer/directors that I have ever worked with.”

For year-round entertainment news and commentary follow @JRothC on Twitter.

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The American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) has announced nominees for excellence in the field this year, and missing from the nominees was Janusz Kaminski’s work on “War Horse,” which marks yet another key snub for the film in the precursor season.

I’ve been critical of the lensing of Steven Spielberg’s World War I epic, which was commendable in intent more so than practice and felt a bit uneven throughout. Nevertheless, it’s a surprise to see Kaminski miss here, and further indication that the industry has not responded well to the film.

The happy surprise, though not all that surprising still, is Hoyte van Hoytema getting in for “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” a moody, atmospheric piece of work with photography as observational and patient as the directorial vision. It’s the second guild nod for the film, following an Art Directors Guild citation, showing that the film has support through the craft branches even if it’s not registering with groups like the PGA and DGA.

Also nominated, maintaining a consistent guild showing, was Jeff Cronenweth’s icy, smooth digital hues on “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (work that felt as uninspired as the overall enterprise but I won’t complain too much because he’s a massive talent who has worked wonders in the digital realm). Things are just adding up for that film.

Naturally, the black and white work from Guillaume Shiffman on “The Artist,” the 3D lensing of “Hugo” by Robert Richardson and the season’s dominant force in the category, Emmanuel Lubezki and “The Tree of Life,” rounded out the list.

So, who’s the favorite? Lubezki, as mentioned, has lit up the circuit so far. In fact, he’s only lost a cinematography award twice: once to Manuel Alberto Claro, who would have been a deserving nominee here for his work on “Melancholia,” and again to Kaminski. So most consider him a sure bet to continue through the Oscars.

While I think he has a really good chance to win here from his peers, I think things could be a lot different when the Academy at large gets its hands on the ballot next month. I’m still placing my chps on “The Artist” to win the Oscar.

Once again, the 2011 ASC nominees are:

“The Artist” (Guillaume Shiffman)

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (Jeff Cronenweth)

“Hugo” (Robert Richardson)

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (Hoyte van Hoytema)

“The Tree of Life” (Emmanuel Lubezki)

That’s the last guild announcement of the week, so take a breath and relax. But not for long, as the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards tomorrow and the Golden Globes on Sunday will give us plenty to chew on before the American Cinema Editors (ACE) give another clue to Oscar on Monday.

Remember to keep track of the ups and downs of the 2011-2012 film awards season via The Circuit.

For year-round entertainment news and awards season commentary follow @kristapley on Twitter.

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Hey, remember “Blackthorn?” It wouldn’t surprise me if you don’t. Mateo Gil’s western, starring Sam Shepard as Butch Cassidy, came and went in the fall with nary a sound, and certainly hasn’t been part of any awards conversation. But every dog has its day, and the film just scooped 11 nominations for the Goya Awards, otherwise known as the Spanish Oscars. The film may not seem terribly Spanish to you, but it qualifies thanks to the beauty of international funding — which is also why that noted Basque auteur Woody Allen nabbed a screenplay nomination (though nothing else) for “Midnight in Madrid Paris.” Curiouser and curiouser. More predictably, Pedro Almodóvar’s emphatically Spanish “The Skin I Live In” leads the field with 16 nominations. [THR]

Mike Goodridge on why Meryl Streep deserves the Oscar for “giving — categorically — the best performance of the year.” Categorically or otherwise, I don’t quite agree. [Screen Daily]

UK Prime Minister and noted aesthete David Cameron urges the country’s filmmakers to make more mainstream films. Come back, Maggie, all is forgiven. [The Guardian]

Stephanie Zacharek sticks up for “War Horse,” particularly its lensing and score: it’s not corn or kitsch, but “pure movieness.” [Slate] 

Jeff Wells, meanwhile, could scarcely be more delighted about the tumble the film has taken in the Oscar race if he threw a ticker-tape parade, and puts its demise down to one (misquoted) line in the script. [Hollywood Elsewhere] 

To coincide with (presumably) as ASC nomination today — what happened yesterday? — an interview with “The Artist” cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman. [Blow the Line]

On the abundance of highly-strung female characters in this year’s Best Actress race, from Keira Knightley’s Sabina Spielrein to Elizabeth Olsen’s Martha/Marcy May/Marlene. [LA Times]

Andrew O’Hehir offers an excellent explanation of why the Academy’s new documentary rules are a move in the right direction. [Salon]

David Poland talks to the man to beat for the Best Original Song Oscar, “The Muppets” music man Bret McKenzie. [Hot Blog] 

Finally, a delicious round-up by Glenn Dunks of the best and worst in 2011’s movie posters. That “Shame” newspaper ad is a stroke of genius. [Stale Popcorn]