Well, this isn’t exactly a vote of confidence in France’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Eyebrows were raised when Gilles Bourdos’ attractive but not notably acclaimed period biopic “Renoir” was selected to represent the country at the Academy Awards, and those same skeptics will feel vindicated by today’s shortlist for the most prestigious individual award in French cinema, the Louis Delluc Prize: eight films have been nominated, and “Renoir” is not among them. 

Established in 1937, the Delluc is awarded to a single film every year, and boasts about the loftiest list of recipients you can imagine: Jean Cocteau, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnes Varda and, as it happens, Jean Renoir himself. The Césars may be France’s answer to the Academy Awards, but the Delluc carries more weight. 

Now, of course, the juries that select the Oscar submission and the Delluc nominees — both made up of leading critics and industry figures — are hardly the same. (This year’s Delluc jury includes Cannes president Gilles Jacob.) Still, the inconsistency makes for an amusingly mixed message: the film deemed most suitable for the Academy membership isn’t deemed one of the best films the country has to offer. (Hey, that’s the case more often than not.) Indeed, this the second straight year France’s Oscar hopeful hasn’t met the Delluc jury’s standards — though last year’s “The Intouchables” was, unlike “Renoir,” a plainly populist choice.

What films did make the cut, then? Naturally, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or winner “Blue is the Warmest Color” is seen as the frontrunner — though the Delluc voters have a habit of zigging where we expect them to zag. (Only last year, costume drama “Farewell My Queen” pulled an upset by defeating future Oscar winner “Amour.”) Kechiche has won this award before, for 2007’s “The Secret of the Grain”; only four directors, including Alain Resnais and Louis Malle, have won more than once.

One other former winner joins Kechiche on the nominee list, though it’d be an unwelcome surprise if Arnaud Desplechin (who took the prize for “Kings and Queen” in 2004) were to take the award for his dreary English-language effort “Jimmy P,” which was roundly panned in Cannes. While France’s Oscar submission didn’t make the grade, Iran’s did: Asghar Farhadi’s “The Past” is in the mix, and he’ll be looking to join Aki Kaurismaki and Andrzej Wajda on the short list of non-French Delluc winners.

If I were a betting man, however, I might take a punt on Bruno Dumont’s Juliette Binoche-starring “Camille Claudel 1915” — Dumont has never won before, and his excellent take on the artist biopic is the kind of austere, imposing auteur work the jurors tend to like. Or perhaps the year’s other sexually explicit Cannes hit about gay desire — Alain Guiraudie’s chilly thriller “Stranger by the Lake” — can surprise. We’ll find out on December 17.

The nominees are: 

“Blue is the Warmest Color,” Abdellatif Kechiche

“Camille Claudel 1915,” Bruno Dumont

“Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian,” Arnaud Desplechin 

“9 Month Stretch,” Albert Dupontel

“One of a Kind,” François Dupeyron

“On My Way,” Emmanuelle Bercot

“The Past,” Asghar Farhadi

“Stranger by the Lake,” Alain Guiraudie

 Why open on this purely circumstantial note? The situation is not of the film’s making, after all – Hood’s adaptation is even at pains to remove whatever evidence of the author’s dubious personal beliefs had seeped onto the page. (Sure, it’s just a coincidence that Card settled on the term “Buggers” for the alien race threatening to wipe out humanity.) Meanwhile, a boycott is the last thing “Ender’s Game,” a carefully constructed, serious-minded commercial entertainment that treats its young audience with an unusual degree of intelligence, deserves.

At the same time, however, there’s something inadvertently apt about a campaign this sincerely right-on against a film that could hardly be more righteous itself: “Ender’s Game” isn’t especially revolutionary in its one-against-the-system politics, but is distinguished – in the ranks of high-concept kid-lit adaptations, at any rate – by its sturdy, inquisitive moral compass.

Burdening children with the consequences of violence is increasingly commonplace in mainstream filmmaking these days – even the clean-scrubbed cherubs of “Harry Potter” were getting pretty tormented by the Deathly Hallows stages, while the extreme parable of “The Hunger Games” took its underage characters into a realm of post-”Lord of the Flies” bloodlust, albeit with PG-13 restrictions. “Ender’s Game” sets kids on each other, too, but only as proxies in preparation for very adult warfare.

Interstellar battle looms between humanity and the tactfully renamed, insect-like extraterrestrial Formics – who have already struck once, with severe consequences. For whatever reason, the military is counting on only the planet’s most precocious adolescents to defend our turf. The bulk of the film takes place at a kind of vacuum-sealed space-boot camp, where killing age is reached well before kissing age – Whitney Houston presumably had something else in mind when she implored us to teach the children well and let them lead the way.

Hood’s brisk script – its pared-down backstory an unusual asset within the genre – leaves pleasingly open the question of why children are being made to fight these battles in the first place. Perhaps it’s simply a natural evolution of present-day military practice: are these youngsters significantly less prepared for the worst than the teenagers sent to fight in the Middle East?

Perhaps the rationale of Harrison Ford’s crusty commanding officer Graff is that young, malleable minds may be more receptive to the art of war – a receptive twist on the very claim conservative-minded scolds have been making since the advent of video nasties and the Nintendo generation. If so, Graff meets unassuming but stubborn resistance in the shape of Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), the brightest and most strategically cunning of his recruits, and also – hardly coincidentally – the one least inclined to take his designated enemy at face value.

The narrative of “Ender’s Game” is thus spare in terms of narrative incident – no attempt is made to hide the fact that this a mere introduction to a more complicated physical and psychological universe – and rich in theoretical detail, as Ender slides through the multiple hoops of his training program while constantly considering just what he’s meant to be fighting for. Ideas come before the extravagant set pieces here; the reverse is all too often true of ostensibly similar films.

“Ender’s Game” even risks seeming too idea-driven, too preoccupied with hypotheticals. The bulk of the action places Ender and his cohorts in virtual-reality training setups, like a particularly high-tech update of 1990s shopping-mall Laser Quest; it’s merely preparation for combat, so where’s the peril? The answer, as Card’s readers will already know, lies in playing Ender’s growing awareness against the private dealings of his adult commanders – with Graff’s pragmatism pitted against the more empathetic approach of outnumbered female Major Anderson (Viola Davis, hardly challenged yet, as ever, conjuring nuance from thin air), and the skepticism of Ben Kingsley’s Rackham, a Maori-tattooed mentor with an accent pitched unaccountably between Johannesburg and Christchurch. Incrementally, the stakes are raised with each exercise, until an elegantly executed doozy of a final-act twist – one in which all the moral ramifications of video-game violence come home to roost.

For a story fundamentally about Doing The Right Thing – or, at least initially, the quest to find what that thing might be – this is unsentimental, even cruel stuff, lent grace and power by the unmistakable youth of its lead. Not for “Ender’s Game” the creepily preternatural young warriors so prevalent in this manner of material: even costume designer Christine Bieselin Clark’s uniforms seem designed to emphasize the protagonist’s immaturity, the fabric clinging to Butterfield’s matchstick limbs, accessorized with safety kneepads in playtime yellow.

Butterfield was a somewhat insipid presence in Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” two years ago, but his calm-eyed, unformed quality is put to far better use here: stern but thoughtful of brow, he’s softly sympathetic as a boy required to make major ethical leaps before he’s even determined who he is. (The other kids, ranging from Hailee Steinfeld’s bland ally to the reliably irritating Moises Arias as a rival leader, seem considerably less special, that’s at least partly the point.)

Though its zero-gravity showdowns exude a certain dreamy, balletic wonder, “Ender’s Game” is sci-fi that largely evades whizz-bang flash or spectacle – revelling in the pyrotechnics of destruction, after all, would run counter to its very philosophy. Its effects are, well, effective; Sean Haworth and Ben Procter’s angular, steel-and-teal production design both sleekly futuristic and starkly utilitarian.

Hood appears to have taken much on board from his botched steering of 2009’s grindingly vulgar “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” – he’s figured out a way to marry the stoic, even-handed human drama of his earliest South African work (already somewhat compromised in 2005’s Oscar-winning “Tsotsi”) to the right-here-right-now demands of contemporary Hollywood genre storytelling, and made by far his best film in the process. In Orson Scott Card’s novels, he’s happened upon appropriate outsider material: its firm anti-bullying stance and compassionate appreciation of otherness may not square with the author’s other beliefs, but it’d be a shame if that external inconsistency discouraged further investment in a franchise with so much on its mind.

You could hardly ask for a better illustration of the current equality in status between film and television that the fact that the arguable frontrunner for this year’s Best Director Oscar is already developing a new project at HBO. Following in the footsteps of Steven Soderbergh and Todd Haynes, among others, “12 Years a Slave” director Steve McQueen is collaborating with writer Matthew Michael Carnahan (“World War Z”) and producers Iain Canning and Emile Sherman (Oscar winners for “The King’s Speech,” they also worked on McQueen’s first two features) on a drama series about a young African-American man entering New York high society. Could the British artist-turned-filmmaker get an Emmy to go with his possible Oscar? [Deadline]

Tim Gray is worried the Oscar talk surrounding “The Wolf of Wall Street” will do the film a disservice, however good it is. [Variety]

With “12 Years a Slave” off to a solid start in the US, Michael Cieply wonders how it will perform internationally. [New York Times]

Peter Knegt lists 10 actresses who merit Oscar consideration, even if the odds are stacked against them. [Indiewire]

Alyssa Rosenberg stands up for the role of Twitter in criticism. [Think Progress]

Moroccan Oscar submission “Horses of God” has found a high-profile champion in Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme. [Screen Daily]

Susanne Bier, who was recently attached to “Mary Queen of Scots” with Saoirse Ronan, is apparently returning to Denmark for her next project. Still no sign of “Serena?” [Hollywood Reporter]

The production designers of “Rush” and “Labor Day,” among others, discuss their work in the ADG’s latest missive. [Perspective] 

Cannes selection “For Those in Peril” leads the nominations for the Scottish BAFTA Awards. [The Scotsman]

Finally, I’m late arrive to this, but no matter: this list of the 50 greatest final shots in cinema in wonderful. [Film.com]

This year’s Best Director race got thinned out a bit recently as such heavy hitters as Bennett Miller and George Clooney took their leave of the 2013 film awards season. But there’s still a healthy crop of hopefuls, from debut filmmakers to veteran craftsmen. How will the final line-up shake down?

What’s immediately notable about this year’s slate is how reflective of a hugely competitive year it is, just like virtually every other category. Last year the directors branch threw us for a major loops, snubbing the likes of Ben Affleck (“Argo”) and Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty”) while giving a huge boost to first-timer Benh Zeitlin (“Beasts of the Southern Wild”) and foreign film player Michael Haneke (“Amour”). Do they have more tricks up their sleeve this year?

Click through the gallery story below to read up on the 28 names we think are in contention this season and feel free to offer up your thoughts on the Best Director race in the comments section.

Were you fretting over the release date of Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street?” Well, you didn’t really have to do that. We told you on Sept. 23 it was going to move off its Nov. 15 release date but that the goal was to release on Christmas Day. I Tweeted on Oct. 15 that the film was going to make that date. And today, after a few weeks of other outlets tripping over themselves to “exclusively” report that very simple information, you can “officially” rest easy, as Paramount has gone ahead and confirmed the Christmas release.

The email blast from the studio states, with brevity, “‘The Wolf of Wall Street,’ a Red Granite Pictures production previously scheduled for November 15, 2013, is now scheduled on Wednesday, December 25, 2013 (wide).” So there you have it.

The film will reportedly be 165 minutes long. Various outlets have reported that it was cut down to that from 180 minutes, but I’m told it was really closer to 220 minutes not all that long ago. (There were also plenty of elements that basically made it an NC-17 film, which Scorsese was keen on releasing, a source told me, kind of like the X-rated “Midnight Cowboy” of 1969.)

This is all typical of Scorsese, by the way, which, again, we noted in our early report. He always starts with a massive cut and whittles down. But obviously at 165 minutes, it’ll be a robust piece of work, and overall, it’s a big win for everyone. Fans get the movie they’re dying to see sooner rather than later. Red Granite gets to make back its investment this year rather than next. And Paramount gets a new toy to play with in the Oscar season.

Recently we pushed “Wolf” up on a number of our charts, but that’s pure speculation for now, obviously. It’s going to be a dark comedy, which isn’t a genre that tends to go over well with the Academy. Paramount will be campaigning it in the comedy/musical category at the Golden Globes, which could help give it some spark there. (And the new trailer for the film certainly backs that up.) But what’s interesting is that “Nebraska,” one of the studio’s other awards season hopefuls (and the one with the most wind in its sails after hitting the festival circuit again in Telluride) is also a comedy for Globes consideration.

This would appear to be a bit of a conflict. It’s not like both couldn’t get into the comedy/musical Best Picture category at the Globes, but that field will likely be stacked this year, representative of an awards season on the whole that is hugely contentious. “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “August: Osage County,” “Before Midnight,” etc. will make for stiff competition. I must say, as much as I’m personally looking forward to seeing “Wolf” sooner rather than later, I can’t help but wonder if the smarter play would have been to get out of dodge, like “Foxcatcher” did, like “The Monuments Men” did. But into the season it goes.

Can Leonardo DiCaprio, so often a bridesmaid in the Oscar race, crack a dense Best Actor slate? With nine Golden Globe nominations to date, you can at least expect the HFPA to show him some more love. Can Jonah Hill, said to be a dominant figure in the film, keep his stride with a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination in three years? Can the film find as much support as “Nebraska” has been able to find and nurture, but in a shorter amount of time? Will “Wolf” – and, for that matter, “American Hustle,” which is also said to lean comedy – prove to be too, well, fun for the Academy?

Or could these films be just what the doctor ordered for a season so far dominated by such sobering efforts as “12 Years a Slave” and “Captain Phillips?” Time will tell…

As you might recall from HitFix’s Telluride Film Festival coverage, Jonás Cuarón’s short film “Aningaaq” is a companion piece to Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity.” It depicts the other side of an SOS radio conversation between that film’s main character, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), and an Inuit fisherman named Aningaaq (Orto Ignatiussen) on the icy mass of Greenland. The short works both in tandem with the feature and separately as an emotional sliver of the greater work’s themes. It could also join “Gravity” in the Oscar discussion later this season as Warner Bros. has submitted it for consideration in the Best Live Action Short category.

The film originally grew out of some ideas the Cuaróns had for “Gravity” that were jettisoned early on in the process. “We arrived to this moment where we knew we wanted the character to connect to someone on Earth,” Jonás told HitFix in September. “‘Gravity’ is a movie about a character who is literally and metaphorically disconnected. She’s shut herself down as a person even before the action starts. We liked this idea that finally she gets in touch with someone on Earth and it’s this guy who not only does not speak a word of English but is drunk.”

Deeper than that, it reveals a forlorn Aningaaq preparing to sacrifice one of his sled dogs, which has taken ill. “Without knowing it,” the short’s official synopsis reads, Aningaaq and Ryan “share thoughts of life and death, love and loss, and choices that are as defining as they are inescapable.”

On separate occasions in the past, Jonás and his father have made trips to Greenland. It’s an enchanting place that speaks to both of them separately and, moreover, echoes some of the atmosphere of their space thriller collaboration. Alfonso came back from one of his trips with a story of a drunk Inuit fisherman sitting out on a massive expanse of ice with nothing but a two-way radio and it registered as applicable here because it was an interesting mirror, someone stranded as a speck in an equally disconnected and isolated environment.

There was even the briefest of moments when they thought of cutting from Ryan’s plight in space to this scene with Aningaaq, but that was instantly dismissed. The point of “Gravity” was to lock the viewer into a non-stop roller coaster and that smallest of reprieves would have derailed what they were trying to do. “We were adamant that we wanted to stay in the point of view of Ryan, never cut back to Earth or Houston, nothing,” Alfonso said in a separate interview. “We said, ‘We have to stick to the plan, but wouldn’t it be cool to do a short about Aningaaq?’ That was years ago. And then last year, Jonás went back to Greenland and he shot the short.”

Indeed, Jonás’ experience shooting the film was quite the adventure. After Warner Home Video agreed to finance the endeavor, he lit out for the territory with a headful of ideas for the production. “One of the ideas I had was to get everything there [in Greenland],” he said. “So it took me two weeks to go look for the wardrobe, the tent, the sled, the dogs, and to even do some research. So I was traveling with this sled for like two weeks through the region in Greenland, and during that trip, I noticed a very beautiful relationship that the Inuits have with the dogs. They’re traveling very far away from their villages to the ice to go fishing and in a way the only companions they have are the dogs. It’s almost a friendship but also about survival. They depend on these dogs to move around but also the truth is if one of these dogs gets injured or they start becoming too old to be able to make the trip, since it’s such a lengthy trip, they have to sacrifice it. I happened to run into a fisherman who had to sacrifice his dog and it’s really hard for them.”

The short was programmed at Telluride alongside John Curran’s “Tracks,” which tells the true story of Robyn Davidson. In 1977, Davidson set off from Alice Springs, Australia across half the continent for the west coast with four camels and her dog. Jonás stuck around after “Aningaaq” premiered at the fest to watch the film because he’s currently prepping his own desert-set project, the feature that sparked the idea for “Gravity,” in fact: “Desierto.” He was ultimately struck by how his short and Curran’s feature went hand-in-hand, but to explain further would be to spoil “Tracks.” Suffice it to say, Aningaaq and Davidson could share a few stories about loss and survival.

Could “Aningaaq” register with the Academy and become a live action short nominee? It’s certainly possible. It’s helpful that it’s not overly dependent on the feature. As Alfonso noted, “what is beautiful is it works together with ‘Gravity’ after you’ve seen the film, but it also works as a short on its own.” Said Bullock at a Los Angeles press conference, the short is “this absolutely beautiful piece of loneliness and emptiness on Earth…I get goosebumps thinking about it.”

Perhaps Academy voters will feel the same, and both “Aningaaq” and “Gravity” can make a bit of history at the Oscars in March. We’ll know for sure when AMPAS reveals its short list of Best Live Action Short contenders next month.

“Aningaaq” will be available on the DVD/Blu-ray release of “Gravity,” due out in stores next year.

When it comes to the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, there’s no particularly reliable precursor — that branch of the Academy has a history of doing things their own way, after all. But the Independent Documentary Association (IDA) Award is among the most prestigious documentary prizes on the trail. Last year, they (along with pretty much everyone else) foreshadowed the Oscar win for “Searching for Sugar Man,” and also pre-empted the Academy’s nomination for “The Invisible War”; the year before, the Academy nominated none of their five chosen features. “Independent” is the operative word, then.

Still, eyebrows will be raised if at least a couple of the Best Feature nominees announced today by the IDA don’t wind up on the Academy’s shortlist — this year, they’ve gone for some of the year’s most high-profile docs in the race. Among them are Sarah Polley’s highly personal, playful family memoir “Stories We Tell,” Joshua Oppenheimer’s daringly conceptual “The Act of Killing” and captive killer whale heart-tugger “Blackfish” — a Sundance hit that was recently broadcast on CNN.

They’re joined by two politically conscious docs: black liberation movement study “Let the Fire Burn” and “The Square,” a hot-button portrait of Egyptian activism that has been much discussed of late. Both films are also nominated for the Humanitas Award; “Let the Fire Burn” is additionally shortlisted for the Videosource Award, making it the leading nominee. Any of these five could easily find themselves in an Oscar race that, unlike last year, still has no clear frontrunner.

Further down, I’m delighted to see “Vultures of Tibet” — a short that greatly impressed me at this year’s Edinburgh fest — nominated in the Best Short category. I don’t see enough short to feel particularly qualified in assessing them, but that one really jumped out at me.

The IDA Awards will take place in Los Angeles on December 6. The full list of nominees is as follows:

Best Documentary Feature
“The Act of Killing”
“Blackfish”
“Let the Fire Burn”
“The Square”
“Stories We Tell”

Best Documentary Short
“The Education of Muhammad Hussein”
“The Flogsta Roar”
“Nine to Ninety”
“Slomo”
“Vultures of Tibet”

Best Limited Series
“180 Days: A Year Inside An American High School”
“Inside Combat Rescue”
“Inside Man”
“Viewfinder: Latin America”
“Witness”

Best Continuing Series
“Curiosity”
“Independent Lens”
“POV”
“Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel”
“30 for 30”

David L. Wolper Student Documentary Award
“Between Land and Sea”
“Ome: Tales from a Vanishing Homeland”
“My Sister Sarah”
“Sodiq”
“Why We Race”

Humanitas Award
“Anton’s Right Here”
“Blood Brother”
“Let the Fire Burn”
“The Square”

Pare Lorentz Award
“A Place at the Table”

ABCNews Videosource Award
“All the President’s Men Revisited”
“Free Angela and All Political Prisoners”
“Let the Fire Burn”
“The Trials of Muhammad Ali”
“We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks”

Scott Foundas counters the rough critical reception for “The Counselor,” declaring it one of Ridley Scott’s best films. [Variety]

Meanwhile, Thomas Flynn gathers some of Cormac McCarthy’s best-written scenes from the screenplay, whether they made it to screen or not. [Daily Beast]

Four-time Oscar nominee Danny Elfman will present his collected compositions for Tim Burton this week in Los Angeles. [LA Times]

“I Am Love” director Luca Guadagnino is among the names joining president James Gray on the Rome Film Festival jury. [Roma Cinema Fest]

Finally, Bryan Singer recasts “The Usual Suspects” for 2013, with Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lawrence and Benedict Cumberbatch in Kevin Spacey’s Oscar-winning role. [/Film]

http://players.brightcove.net/4838167533001/BkZprOmV_default/index.html?videoId=4912087551001

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Matthew McConaughey doesn’t exactly make for a sound bite sort of interview. Well, particularly not when you walk into the room and inquire as to whether he happened to know that his Longhorns had just taken it to the Sooners on the gridiron. Everything after that is a conversation, full of all the tangents and tributaries toward other conversations equally bereft of easy bites and bits to be plugged into the usual interview format. If you’re from the south, too? The drawls kick in, feeding on one another. The parables take hold. Soon you find yourself wondering, “Wait, what were we talking about?”

On this particular afternoon, we’re talking about “Dallas Buyers Club,” the Jean-Marc Vallée indie production that provided McConaughey with more to chew on than perhaps any other role he’s taken in his two-decade career. So there”s plenty to discuss, beginning with the obvious: the 45 pounds the actor dropped to play a man diagnosed with HIV and given 30 days to live.

“Once I said, ‘I got to get to this weight – if I don’t I’d be embarrassed,’ the hard part was standing in front of the refrigerator 15 times a day and going, ‘What are you doing,’ and then walking away,” McConaughey says, fidgeting on the couch but still somehow constantly appearing at ease and relaxed. “And then I said, ‘I’m not gonna do that everyday for the next four months. So let’s make up our minds. I got to control my lifestyle here.'”

It was more difficult than he expected it to be, to the point that he had to change how he did business, even. McConaughey stopped taking meetings out at restaurants. The aroma of good food, he knew it would be too much. So he pretty much became a hermit, he says, taking meetings at home, cutting out all distractions. And there was a task at hand, of course: he had a ton of research to do on Ron Woodroof, the very real person he would be portraying in the film. Every step along the way was difficult, he concedes, but in a constructive sort of way that just fed the machine.

The character of Woodroof was so charismatic that the time McConaughey did have to investigate the man wasn’t nearly enough for as full a portrait he could have concocted. “I’ll say this – if I had another year, I could have easily filled my year still working on that guy,” McConaughey says. “Even through the shooting I was still, every Sunday, I would sit down, take over the room, spread everything out, grab old notes from eight months ago, bring ’em back. ‘Let’s get everything that could possibly pertain to tomorrow’s scenes and get ’em logged in there. Any idea, something we didn’t get the other day that could fit in this scene, do we bring that in?’ There was always something to mix and match and kind of get my quiver of variations.”

In a way, McConaughey was lifting as much nuance as he could glean from Woodroof’s life so that he could have different versions of the character, all of them true to the source, ready for director Vallée’s disposal. “I’ve got four variations on how this scene could go, where Ron would be, what he would do,” McConaughey would tell the director.

[For more on McConaughey’s process of becoming Woodroof, watch the actor’s video interview with HitFix from the Toronto Film Festival embedded at the top of this post.]

The obsession mirrored Woodroof’s own. Straight and homophobic, diagnosed with HIV in 1985 and stuck in a fight for his life with big pharmaceutical, the Dallas electrician was nothing if not driven. And in many ways, McConaughey observed from afar, it was like the death sentence was fuel for Woodroof’s tank.

“It’s basically when he really found some form and function in his life for the first time,” McConaughey says. “He found the first thing, from wake to sleep – and he didn’t sleep much – he could fight for. It was a new frontier, so he was pioneering, finding out all this sh*t. So that’s what I kind of found myself doing with the research, is I was like, ‘We’ll just keep pounding on it. Pounding on it.’ And I got more energy after I got down there. I needed three hours less sleep a night, which was odd. I didn’t expect that.”

But something else triggered for McConaughey that hadn’t quite bubbled to the surface for him in his pre-production preparation. It didn’t land for him until he was down on the New Orleans locations (which doubled for Dallas) and realized it as the narrative progressed in front of the cameras: Ron Woodroof’s story is one of forced isolation.

“It was fun to meter,” McConaughey says. “What does a guy like that – who honestly doesn’t believe that as a straight guy you can even get AIDS – how does it go from shock to, you know, basically, ‘F*ck you, man. I can’t get that,’ to, ‘Wait a minute, I’m gonna go study a little bit,’ to full-on fear, ‘Oh my God. I’ve got a ticking clock. I got 30 days?’ That was a fun transition to do in a few scenes. And then in between there you had his friends leaving him, people at his job saying, ‘Turn around, get out here.’ So [he was] slowly getting isolated like that, which was all true in a place and time like that in that area. I remember when AIDS first hit, no one knew where it came from. Could you get it from shaking someone’s hand? So everybody got fully alienated. And then our story begins. Who does he end up befriending? Rayon [Jared Leto]. The other outcast. The misfits. The odd couple, stuck together.”

The narrative also sported intriguing ties to the modern health care climate. The film is about a man fighting for access to unapproved care and medication that could potentially prolong his life. Indeed, those 30 days were eventually stretched to seven years for Woodroof because of his diligence and globe-trotting, bringing in medicine from other countries and, with Rayon, setting up a buyers club for the afflicted in the Dallas area.

It’s not something McConaughey was focused on while shooting the film, but considering it now, he ponders “how much things changed by staying the same.” Nevertheless, there remains a concerted effort, whether the question is put to Vallée or McConaughey, to not vilify the FDA of the late-1980s here. “It wasn’t like the FDA didn’t want anyone to get the right thing,” McConaughey says. “They just had one thing and they said it worked, kind of, on some cancer patients. ‘Let’s give them that: AZT.’ And then there was a contract, you know, with the pharma company that had that, so they didn’t want a competing pill out there, obviously for some business reasons. Now, I mean, yeah, we still have a lot of questions. We’re still confronted all the time with ‘where does business precede common sense and good health?’ Ron was one of the people that said basically, ‘Here’s the thing. I’m gonna do it myself.'”

And there was no rousing victory for the man in the immediate. “But he made enough noise, shook the tree enough, made enough money on the black market that they came down and shut him down three times,” McConaughey says. “He was on the radar. So I would say that he had something to do with the government fast-tracking, finding out a better prescription than just AZT, to get to people, which you could say helped a lot of people and maintained a lot of people’s lives sooner. It got that fight from the bottom of the file to the top of the file.”

It also paints the film with thematic strokes regarding personal freedoms, perhaps, more so than a commentary on the modern health care situation and access to same, etc. Moreover, from a point of view of character, there was something about antagonism driving a man like Woodroof that McConaughey found appealing.

“He liked the opposition and to go, ‘Yeah? Watch this,'” McConaughey says. “He was drifting, wandering through life until he got HIV. Two-bit gambler, kind of half-ass electrician getting a little work here and there. What’s he gonna do? He’s going to do that for how long, party on the weekend until you can’t see? Aimless. He finally had somewhere to go, had something to fight for. He got a real identity when he found a goal.”

McConaughey will take a lot from the experience of immersing himself in this role, not least of all being a big token to his career renaissance as of late. But there are some good reminders he dug up throughout the process. “If you want something done right, do it yourself,” he offers, “which is a good one and does ring true a whole lot. And I’ve always had, I think, a healthy dose of questioning authority. But working on something like this – I mean, I’m 43, so I’m not delusional to a large extent of what really goes on and what injustices are out there – but working on something like this, I definitely started questioning authority more. It kind of made me look a little more soberly at things and give gut checks to people in authority.”

To put it more simply, “Just show me the receipt,” he says. “I gave you $100. You got the case of beer. You’re only bringing back $60. You gonna tell me it’s a $40 case? Just show me the receipt.”

“Dallas Buyers Club” arrives in theaters on Nov. 1.

Filmmaker Steve McQueen”s relationship with cinematographer Sean Bobbitt goes farther back than their 2008 collaboration on McQueen”s feature debut “Hunger.” For some six or seven years before transitioning to the cinema, the two worked together on a series of film and video installations designed for gallery-based presentation. These early works were silent, stark pieces, often with a focus on the body (frequently McQueen”s own body). That aesthetic has deepened through their work on the big screen.

Bobbitt “wasn”t someone for hire, he was someone I knew,” McQueen said in a recent interview, and in a way similar to his continued work with actor Michael Fassbender, the collaboration has grown organically across 13 years. It”s almost like the relationship is one of a band, McQueen described, coming together every now and then to make an album. This year”s release: the aesthetically rich drama “12 Years a Slave.”

“When we start to talk about a film, we have a history and a background to work from,” Bobbitt says. “We spend a lot of time together looking at stuff, talking about scenes and just talking in general. The overriding feel of “12 Years a Slave” was that it should be beautiful in a painterly way, but often simple, that there’s no – you have no staginess to it. It had to look real, but it would have been too easy and cliche for it to become a gritty, dirty, sort of militant world. And so we sort of came to this idea of simplicity and beauty and that’s what we stuck to.”

The look of the film is very much informed by the story itself, written by freeman-turned-freed-slave Solomon Northup in 1855. The Louisiana locations in this case were of the utmost importance to the atmosphere of the film. Bobbitt spent a lot of time early on with McQueen wandering around and snapping still photographs, trying to find what was “real” in that environment, even though, Bobbitt admits, it may be within the context of cinema, whereby everything is contrived in one way or the other.

“But it’s trying to find a truth in that contrivance,” he says. “Of course you’re conformed by the locations dramatically, as are the actors when they arrive on the locations. But I try and spend as much time as I can immersing myself in the location so I really get a sense of what’s there, so that once the actors arrive and the performing starts to develop, it’s a simple matter of really maximizing what exists, and also having a good idea of what you then need to create to make that scene work.”

The film was shot on 35mm at a time when digital continues its inevitable march across the industry, like an eclipse over the landscape of analog media. But Bobbitt, whose background is in digital photography, is of course not averse to the new tech. For him it”s simply about options, and that the choices a cinematographer makes – whether as finite as a specific frame or as far-reaching as what format to use for photography – are relevant to the film being made. Apart from Neil Jordan”s “Byzantium,” the last nine films Bobbitt has shot were on film simply because that was the medium that best fit those stories.

That said, Bobbitt is as romantic for the receding form as anyone else. “The grain is something that, when you take it away, you actually really do start to miss it, or at least I do,” he says. “And I think this is also a generational thing. I’ve grown up watching films the whole of my life on film, where there are two generations now who have grown up on computers, watching digital images. To them the perception of quality is very, very different to mine. To me, that grain and how you use that grain and the depth of the film image is a very powerful tool, particularly when it comes to period dramas. It’s the same for the 2.40 aspect ratio. That widescreen immediately says, ‘Look, this is a film. This isn’t television. This isn’t video. This is a feature film.””

Another technique Bobbitt and McQueen have employed from the start are long, extended takes. On such take in particular is perhaps the most discussed shot of “12 Years a Slave,” an extended sequence depicting the whipping of a slave as the camera moves in and around the characters, settling in different ways before moving on and capturing the horror in one fluid burst.

“Something Steve and I have learned over the years is that if you put a cut into a sequence you subconsciously remind the audience that it is a film,” Bobbitt says. “And particularly when you’re introducing elements of violence, it gives the audience an escape. If you don’t cut, then they’re drawn in to believing the reality of what is being presented to them, and it helps to build the tension and the horror so dramatically. It”s a very powerful tool, the single shot, in getting across that horror of violence and keeping your audience wrapped and glued to the screen.”

The latest film is also very much in keeping with what has been something of a mission statement in Bobbitt and McQueen”s shared art work from day one. It has always been about bravery and truth, honest and respect, Bobbitt says. Indeed, McQueen”s reaction to reported squeamishness over the subject matter of “12 Years a Slave” reflects this very idea. And that fearlessness, Bobbit says, has been an incalculable gift.

“That gives you then the possibility to do things,” Bobbitt says, “to think of things that you normally wouldn’t do and to know that you have the honest support of someone in what you’re attempting to do…It’s a fantastic thing to have because it means that things are focused in the right direction all the time, that you’re always headed in the right direction. But even if something mad comes to mind, the other person is going to look into it, and if they see the merit in it, then you implement it.”

“12 Years a Slave” is now playing in select theaters as it continues to expand nationwide.

Nominations for the 26th annual European Film Awards — the Continent’s answer to the Oscars — will be announced on November 9, with the ceremony to follow on December 7 — but winners in six categories can already start rehearsing their acceptance speeches, as the EFA has changed the voting system for their technical awards. Instead of nominations and winners being announced and elected simultaneously with the top races, a specially appointed jury has instead chosen a single winner in each case.

Further more, two further categories — for Costume Design and Sound Design — have been added to the existing ones for Cinematography, Editing, Composer and Production Design. No reason has been given for the changes, though perhaps it was felt submitting it to a jury vote would yield a more discerning and diverse slate of winners. (Last year, “Shame” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” won all the technical categories between them.)

The biggest name among this year’s winners is Italy’s legendary Ennio Morricone, who takes the European Composer of the Year award for his work on Giuseppe Tornatore’s romantic thriller “The Best Offer.” It’s the 84-year-old’s first competitive EFA win — he was nominated for “Fateless” in 2005 — though he won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. (He has, of course, never won a competitive Oscar: a five-time nominee, he received an honorary one in 2007.)

In what is surely to be the only one of these wins to overlap with the Oscar race to any extent, Sarah Greenwood took the Production Designer of the Year award for her intricate, folding diorama-like work on Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina.” (Eligibility dates for the EFAs are highly variable.) Greenwood, you may remember, was Oscar-nominated earlier this year for her efforts, and won the Art Directors’ Guild period category, but ultimately lost to a surprise victor in “Lincoln.”

The EFA’s Cinematographer of the Year choice is inspired, as Asaf Sudry’s highly distinctive experimentation with shallow focus in Israeli marital drama “Fill the Void” — the country’s Oscar submission last year — proved crucial in defining and developing character perspective. Another of last year’s Oscar entries, Spain’s flamenco-inspired Snow White retelling “Blancanieves,” deservedly took the costume design category for Paco Delgado’s high-style black-and-white creations. (Delgado was Oscar-nominated earlier this year for more high-profile work on “Les Misérables” — where, as coincidence would have it, he competed alongside two Hollywood interpretations of Snow White.)

Paolo Sorrentino’s extravagant ode to Roman decadence and decay, “The Great Beauty” took the Editor of the Year award; the film is Italy’s Oscar submission this year. And while I can’t say I specifically recall the sound work in Ulrich Seidl’s “Paradise: Faith,” its citation in that category makes me all the more intrigued to check it out again.

This year’s jury members were: Finnish composer Tuomas Kantelinen (“Mongol”), French editor Hervé Schneid (“Amélie”), Italian director Francesco Ranieri Martinotti, Karlov Vary festival director Karel Och, Spanish producer Simón de Santiago Aréizaga (“Agora”), Swedish cinematographer Marek Wieser and Bosnian director Jasmila Zbanic (“On the Path”).

The winners:

European Cinematographer of the Year: Asaf Sudry, “Fill the Void”

European Editor of the Year: Cristiano Travaglioli, “The Great Beauty”

European Production Designer of the Year: Sarah Greenwood, “Anna Karenina”

European Costume Designer of the Year: Paco Delgado, “Blancanieves” 

European Composer of the Year: Ennio Morricone, “The Best Offer”

European Sound Designer of the Year: Matz Müller and Erik Mischijew, “Paradise: Faith”

As I said, nominations will be announced next week Saturday. Once again, I’ll be attending the EFA ceremony in December, so look out for further coverage.

In last week’s Best Supporting Actress contenders gallery, I mentioned how farcical it was that Felicity Jones was being campaigned in that category for her inarguable lead performance in the title role of Ralph Fiennes’ biographical romance “The Invisible Woman” — category fraud is a fixture of the race now, but some calls are still too dishonest to let stand. Evidently, enough people agreed for Sony Classics to let common sense prevail, as Scott Feinberg reports that the company has switched Jones’ campaign to a leading one. A small victory on principle, then — though Jones is unlikely to be nominated either way for her strong work in the film. (Now, how about an honest supporting campaign for Jones’ superb co-star Joanna Scanlan?) [Hollywood Reporter] 

The Academy claims the electronic voting process has been streamlined this year. [Variety]

Jared Leto discusses getting into character for his Oscar-tipped role as a transsexual in “Dallas Buyers Club.” [New York Times]

Kate Erbland on why many of the industry’s most promising screenwriters are turning to adaptations. [Film.com]

“The Lunchbox” star Irrfan Khan joins the chorus criticizing India’s submission of “The Good Road” for the Oscar. [Screen Daily]

I gather this is an interesting Michael Phillips piece about the role production design plays in “12 Years a Slave” … but it’s available only to US readers. Uh, okay. [Chicago Tribune]

“Philomena,” “Nebraska” and “12 Years a Slave” are among the titles selected for the AARP’s Movies For Grown-ups Festival. [LA Times] 

A great discussion about horror movies, and how they still work on us. [The Dissolve]

As you may have noticed, today’s Google doodle pays tribute to the most Academy-awarded woman of all time. [The Independent]

In a sad week for notable passings, that of “Priest” director Antonia Bird, 54, was particularly untimely. [The Guardian]

It’s getting to the time of year when early drafts of year-end Top 10 lists start forming in our heads — and bar a sudden windfall of previously unseen masterpieces between now and December, one film I’m reasonably confident will be on mine is James Gray’s extraordinary romantic melodrama “The Immigrant,” in which Marion Cotillard plays a wide-eyed Polish ingenue tussled over by showman brothers Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner.

I already waxed lyrical about the film at Cannes, where it found passionate devotees and yawning skeptics in equal measure — for me, it was all about the rapturous execution of its classical plot, with nods to the greats of silent cinema both in performance (this, I maintain, is easily Cotillard’s best work since her Oscar-winning turn in “La Vie en Rose”) and the exquisite, Oscar-worthy cinematography of Darius Khondji.

Now, a divided critical reception isn’t the only way in which this delicate film has had rather a rough go of it: previously known as “Nightingale” and “Lowlife,” the film had been finished for quite some time before its Cannes premiere, while The Weinstein Company still seems in no hurry to release it. (Rumor has it Harvey himself isn’t much of a fan.) Moved to the company’s more specialized Radius-TWC label, it has also been moved out of this year’s awards frame to an unconfirmed spring date next year — with a strong likelihood of a multi-platform release.

Whenever, whatever, wherever — just as long as it gets seen eventually. It is, however, out in France next month; hence this French-subtitled trailer which, while not exactly artful, gives a good, substantial impression of the film’s richly old-school virtues. Check it out below and tell us what you think — here’s hoping we won’t have to wait forever for some US marketing materials to appear for this gem. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaYh0G1N-NU?rel=0&w=640&h=360]

The advance buzz on Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor” could hardly have been less encouraging. For a film from a major director — written by Cormac McCarthy, no less — with a dream cast including Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, Penélope Cruz and Brad Pitt, the fact that it was only shown to critics days before its release seemed to spell disaster. As it is, it seems Fox really wanted to prevent word of the thriller’s supposedly nihilistic bleakness from spreading too far; the one thing the critics do agree on is that it’s not a crowdpleaser.

Other than that, reviews are all over the map: many have excoriated it, but Manohla Dargis is chief among its vocal champions. Drew McWeeny is somewhere in the middle; I haven’t had an opportunity to see it yet. So, over to you: it’s pretty obvious this is no awards contender, but is the movie itself a misfire or not? Vote in the poll below, and share your thoughts in the comments.  

Welcome to Oscar Talk.

In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is broadcast in special installments 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.

On the docket today…

– NEW YORK ADDS TO THE STEW: The 2013 New York Film Festival has come and gone and added a few titles to the awards conversation. How did they land and how will they figure in throughout the season?

– GETTING OUT OF DODGE: A number of films have taken their leave of the 2013 season. Who benefits from their exit, if anyone?

– FIRST NODS OF THE YEAR: The Gotham Awards kicked off the (legitimate) season with a list of nominees Wednesday. How many of these indie titles can hold strong and become Oscar nominees?

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.

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival”s Kirk Douglas Award for Excellence in Film has been presented every fall since 2006. The honor frequently goes to a filmmaker or actor in the early awards conversation with a sizable body of work primed for toasting. Previous recipients include Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Quentin Tarantino, Ed Harris, John Travolta, as well as Douglas himself at the first annual ceremony. The 2013 edition of the award will go to Forest Whitaker, star of “Lee Daniels” The Butler,” at a black-tie Gala dinner in Santa Barbara on Sunday, Dec. 15.

This is the second year in a row The Weinstein Company has sewn and reaped the benefits of this particular early awards season exposure following a 2012 honor for “Silver Linings Playbook” star De Niro. And it couldn”t come at a more crucial time for both the film and its star. The Best Actor Oscar race remains hugely competitive this season, and each new piece of the puzzle, whether the festival debuts of “12 Years a Slave” and “Saving Mr. Banks” or the marketplace success of “Gravity” and “Captain Phillips,” edges out the August hit starring Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey just that much more.

“Forest Whitaker is an exceptional man and actor,” Douglas said. “His commitment to human causes, his passion for what is right and his dedication to his craft are inspirational, and at my age, inspiration is rare.”

A $30 million indie picture with a laundry list of producers, “Lee Daniels” The Butler” has grossed over $114,000,000 in the US since its Aug. 16 release. It remained #1 on the box office chart for three straight weeks, though the conversation on box office success in this Oscar race has been focused on “Gravity,” which will be shooting for four weeks at the top this weekend. It”s also part of a loaded Weinstein stable this season that hasn”t revealed a frontrunner within its own ranks quite yet.

Whitaker will also be seen in Scott Cooper”s “Out of the Furnace” this year, which will see its world premiere at AFI Fest on Nov. 9, as well as the Kasi Lemmons musical “Black Nativity,” opening Nov. 27. Meanwhile, he served as a producer on Sundance sensation (and Weinstein acquisition) “Fruitvale Station” through his LA-based Significant Productions shingle.

Outside of the film world, Whitaker is the founder of Peace Earth Foundation and co-founder and chair of the International Institute for Peace, as well as the UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace and Reconciliation.

The December event serves as a fundraiser for the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, the 29th edition of which will run Jan. 30 – Feb. 9, 2014. In the coming weeks tribute and award recipients will be announced, sprinkled through a program which annually lands right in the middle of Oscar season.

When yesterday’s Gotham Award nominations were announced, many noted with some surprise that the very good, very independent and very Gotham-centric “Frances Ha” was left off the list entirely. One of those was Nathaniel Rogers, who wound up accidentally breaking the news to the film’s star and co-writer Greta Gerwig. Unsurprisingly, she’s not that bothered — about this, or awards in general. “I think if you’re in the film business long enough they eventually get around to you somehow. Or at least when you die a picture of you goes up onscreen … I also think filmmakers who I love — sometimes the movies they get recognized for aren’t as good as some of their other movies. ‘Oh, we sat on it when it was fascinating in the 80s or something, so now we’re going to do it!'” [The Film Experience]

Jen Chaney on why those following the Oscar race needn’t take sides between “Gravity” and “12 Years a Slave” — which have more in common than meets the eye. [The Dissolve]

Tim Gray says the recent release-date shuffles among certain prestige titles haven’t made too much impact on the race. [Variety]

Steve Pond picks apart the spate of “Blue is the Warmest Color” controversies one by one, and asks that we let the film do the talking from now on. [The Wrap]

Putting the focus back on the movie, Abdellatif Kechiche narrates a key scene from the film. [New York Times]

Wesley Morris writes possibly my favorite piece so far on “12 Years a Slave.” Even if you think you’ve read enough, read this one. [Grantland]

Andrew Romano talks to Jehane Noujaim about “the year’s most dangerous doc,” the increasingly Oscar-buzzed “The Square.” [Daily Beast]

17 rising talents, including “The Impossible” star Tom Holland, were celebrated at BAFTA’s Breakthrough Brits night. [Screen Daily]

David Poland says we still have no Best Picture frontrunner. I think a few people might challenge him on that one. [Movie City News]

A tale of two 23-year-old stars: why Jennifer Lawrence is getting it right, and Kristen Stewart is not. (Bit harsh, I think.) [Vulture]

Last February”s Academy Awards ceremony produced a nice handful of surprises, but none was more jaw-dropping than the wacky turn of events than when “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Skyfall” tied for the Best Sound Editing Oscar. I found the moment quite appropriate, actually, as not only were they both deserving victors (in different ways) but they demonstrated different sorts of films that tend to be honored in this category.

The category recognizes the manifestation and recording of film sound effects, which leads to frequent rewarding of action films and blockbusters. Best Picture contenders like “Zero Dark Thirty” with elements of war and action frequently do well here, while blockbusters – particularly of the more prestigious variety, like “Skyfall” – are also regularly rewarded.  It”s also not unusual to have films with a one-off nomination only in this category as the sound branch has two shots at nominating (between this and Best Sound Mixing) and can spread the love a bit more. Recent examples include “TRON: Legacy,” “Drive” and “Unstoppable.”

In the 2000s, animated features (particularly those from Pixar) could seemingly do no wrong here. Given the need to artificially create all the sounds in these films, it”s understandable they would resonate with the branch. We”ll see if any animated title can turn the trick this year.

Like most crafts category branches, the sound branch has its favorite contenders who regularly return. But it is neither particularly insular nor particularly averse to newcomers. In sum, being a veteran is an advantage. Having not been nominated before is not a serious disadvantage, however.

Like many crafts categories, “Gravity” is already way out in front here. Alfonso Cuarón”s latest feature has captivated critics and audiences, but moreover, sound is absolutely key to building the film”s story and mood. But the film doesn”t take inaccurate advantage of things like a runaway orbital debris storm whooshing through space, making as much of an impact with its absence of sound as its particular handling of how audio reverberates in certain sequences, to say nothing of a well-integrated score that is more about aural atmospherics than melody. The film could not have worked without its sound editorial. Glenn Freemantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) seems poised for nomination #2 and, likely, win #1.

“All is Lost” is also a film with sparse dialogue (even more so than “Gravity”) and is enormously reliant on its sound effects. In my humble opinion, the film featured some of the best sound work in recent memory. Many of those sounds were artificially created and nicely integrated. The title looks likely to carry Robert Redford to his first acting nomination in four decades, but I”d be surprised if Richard Hymns (who has eight nominations and three wins to date) and Steve Boedekker are not among the final five in this category. Films with integral use of water also tend to do well in the sound categories.

Of course, “All is Lost” is not the only film with integral water-based sounds set on the Indian Ocean. “Captain Phillips” did the same in a tense, smart thriller – the sort of film that usually finds a home here. Box office success and a likely Best Picture nomination only help matters. Oliver Tarney would seem to have an outstanding shot at a first nomination.

Ron Howard”s “Rush” may have been a box office disappointment at the box office, but that doesn”t take away from the fact that it had very good reviews. I expect a strong Oscar push for, at the very least, Daniel Brühl and much of the below-the-line crew. The sounds of cars racing and crashing seems precisely the sort of action this branch would eat up. Frank Kruse has never been nominated before and he is hardly a sure thing this time around, but I nonetheless think he”s reasonably well placed.

One of the reasons “All is Lost,” “Captain Philips” and, to a lesser extent, “Rush” strike me as good bets for nominations (“Gravity being so far ahead it”s difficult to describe) is the very open state of the race beyond them. On the next tier, “Pacific Rim” seems the best placed of the summer blockbusters given its originality and this category”s natural inclination to robot-themed movies (to say nothing of yet more water). But why do I have a hunch that this film is heading to a nomination only in the Best Visual Effects category? Scott Martin Gershin is seeking his first nomination here.

On the note of summer blockbusters and robots (sort of), “Iron Man 3” jumps to mind. The first entry in this franchise scored here, but the sequel came up short, as did “The Avengers” last year. This time, three-time nominee Mark P. Stoeckinger takes over supervising sound editing duties. He has earned surprising nominations before for both “Face/Off” and “Unstoppable,” representing those films” sole nominations. We”ll see if that track record is built upon this year.

Stoeckinger”s other nomination came for “Star Trek,” the sequel of which, “Star Trek Into Darkness,” rolled into theaters this summer. This franchise has had a mixed record with Oscar and the title, though fine, was underwhelming compared to its predecessor. But the film was still respectable, and the sound editing was just as accomplished as the nominated work on “Star Trek.” Supervising sound editors were Matthew Wood (nominated for “WALL-E” and “There Will Be Blood”) and the legendary Ben Burtt. I”m not writing them off.

“Man of Steel” was another summer film that was supposed to light up the world. Again, it did just fine, but perhaps not quite as well as many were hoping/expecting. The work throughout, particularly on Krypton and in the action-packed finale, is filled with the sorts of effects that this category loves. So it has a real chance

Zombie movies may not be AMPAS” normal cup of tea, but “World War Z” got good reviews and respectable box office. Moreover, there is significant action noise (plus zombie noise!) that allows sound editors to show their talent. Ethan Van der Ryn is a five-time nominee/two-time winner. We”ll see if he can return again.

Gwendolyn Yates Whittle has been nominated in recent years for “Avatar” and “TRON: Legacy.” In “Oblivion,” she once again enters in the future with some impressive and unique work. I”m doubtful that this post-apocalyptic film will survive in many places, but one never knows.

While a blockbuster released pre-Fall is usually nominated, that is not invariably the case. So it”s also wise to look ahead to what we”re waiting for. “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” would seem to be leading the way in this respect, with the typical artificially created sounds of Middle Earth – this time joined by a dragon. Only “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” has managed to grab a nomination here among Peter Jackson”s journeys to Middle Earth, but last year”s “An Unexpected Journey” clearly had fans in the sound community given its Cinema Audio Society nomination.

An intriguing possibility among upcoming titles would be Mark Wahlberg-starrer “Lone Survivor.” With a military-based story not that dissimilar to “Zero Dark Thirty,” this could be a film where sound editors could really demonstrate their talent. An extended gun battle in the film could become a talking point in this regard. I”ll be watching with curiosity.

Sometimes titles which score across the board find a home here when they are simply racking up the nominations. Steve McQueen”s “12 Years a Slave” is unique in the fray of aural experiences in cinemas this year, but it makes effects connect when it conjures them. This may not seem a likely category for recognition, but I wouldn”t rule out Ryan Collins and Robert Jackson just yet.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention some animated titles. “Monsters, Inc.” began a 10-year period when Pixar films could seemingly do no wrong in this category. It also gave Michael Silvers the first of his six Oscar nominations. Will “Monsters University” follow suit, bringing Silver nomination #7 and Tom Myers nomination #3? It doesn”t have the novelty of its predecessor but who knows? I also must say I”m intrigued by Disney”s “Frozen.” I can”t even explain why but the sounds of a winter wonderland could tickle the branch”s fancy.

Well, those are the leading contenders as I see them. Who do you see in the heart of the race?