In Contention

Tag: year-in-review

  • Watching and waiting: Guy’s best and worst of 2010

    What kind of year was 2010 at the movies? You tell me. It’s virtually impossible to find one yardstick to measure 365 days of cinema for a collective audience whose interests seem ever more segregated.

    If your film interests are covered largely by the multiplex, chances are 2010 was an unusually unrewarding year for you, challenging even Hollywood’s standard quota of déjà vu — unless, of course, you’re an animation fiend, in which case there was a broad enough range of carefully crafted work to keep you happy.

    If you tend to bypass the mall on your way to the arthouse, however, there was any amount of adventurous indie and world cinema, both newly unveiled and backlogged from previous years, to chew on — if, of course, you’re privileged enough to live in a regrettably narrow radius. And if you’re an Academy voter sifting through the crop of generously campaigned prestige fare, 2010 looks rather like the usual, only a little more so.

    For me, 2010 was both immeasurably improved and somewhat complicated by the festival circuit — access to which is a luxury I shall never take for granted, but also one that inevitably skews my sense of how the film yearbook reads in the real world. When you’ve had access to most of the big-ticket winter warmers by early autumn, and when the likes of Cannes afford you a head start of many months or even years on certain international art films, things rather lose their shape.

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  • Still mixing it up

    We’ve featured a couple of these 2010 video summaries already, but reader Lesley Lui submitted this one so modestly that I figured another one couldn’t do any harm. Bonus points for featuring “Fish Tank” right upfront.

  • WEEKLY WRAP: ‘Network’ sweep, Globes outrage, best of 2010

    • Kris listed his 10 favorite films of 2010 in black-and-white, later adding his dream Oscar ballot and winners list.

    • The critics’ award beat turned into a “Social Network” landslide, as New York, Los Angeles, Boston and many, many other groups lined up behind the film.

    • Away from the critics’ circuit, Team Fincher didn’t have it all their own way, as “The King’s Speech” led a widely derided list of Golden Globe nominees.

    • When it was the Screen Actors’ Guild’s turn to announce their nominees, however, the royal biopic had to settle for sharing the lead with “The Fighter.”

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  • 2010: At the Movies

    This time last year, we featured a nifty video summation of 2009 in film by one Zack Young, and today, he’s been good enough to hook us up with the 2010 edition. Nice work, Zack.

  • Best in show: the year in superlatives

    Cate Blanchett in The Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonThe year is slowly coming to a close, and after this week’s year-in-review pieces, I’m happy to see so much healthy and spirited discussion on my humble picks for the year’s best films.  Today I’m wrapping all of that up with a list of superlatives, some of them in your usual categories, the staples, some of them in a couple of, oh, let’s call it “fun” arenas that I like to mix in year in and year out.

    I should note, however, that Nathaniel Rogers at The Film Experience is the king at this stuff.  His annual “Film Bitch Awards” are a must-read.  Here’s last year’s set.

    So with that, let’s get into the awards.  I used to call these the “In Contention Awards,” but I don’t think that’s fair anymore now that we have a slew of contributors.  So I’ll let them speak to their favorites at their leisure.  These reflect my views of the season and mine only.  You know the Best Picture champ, of course, but beyond that, I hope you enjoy the rundown.  Just keep the (inevitable) disagreement friendly:

    Best Picture
    “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures)

    Best Director
    Danny Boyle, “Slumdog Millionaire”

    Best Actor
    Mickey Rourke, “The Wrestler”

    Best Actress
    Cate Blanchett, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

    Best Supporting Actor
    Heath Ledger, “The Dark Knight”

    Best Supporting Actress
    Samantha Morton, “Synecdoche, New York”

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  • If I had a ballot

    Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche New York(Note: Because I’ve been getting some correspondence of confusion, let it be known that categories such as Best Foreign Language Film and Best Documentary contain films released in the U.S. in 2008 that I consider the best of those fields, regardless of Academy rules and regulations regarding country submissions and peripheral qualifications.  This is more of an AMPAS/critics ballot hybrid.  Hopefully that clears it up.)

    As the year continues to wind down, I’ve come to an annual post here at In Contention that proves to be a lot of fun, no matter the quality of the year’s product. If I were a member of the 6,000-strong, what would my Oscar ballot look like?

    Of course, I’m cheating a bit here.  The way AMPAS balloting works is each branch votes for nominees in their representative categories, while everyone gets a crack at nominating the Best Picture field.  I’m acting as lord of all, super-duper Academy member extraordinaire with nominations in each of the categories we’ll see contended on February 22.  I subtract the short film fields, because I just can’t comment with any expertise, and as always, I add the category I annually plead for acceptance in the Academy’s proceedings: Best Ensemble.

    So with that, I give you my list of the year’s best in an array of categories.   The first five you know.  More after the jump.  (Check back Friday for a year-end list of superlatives.  And in case you missed it, my top 10 and “best of the year” column here).

    Best Picture
    “Bolt” (Walt Disney Pictures)
    “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros. Pictures)
    “Pineapple Express” (Columbia Pictures)
    “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
    “Synecdoche, New York” (Sony Pictures Classics)

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  • Runnin’ on empty: the best films of 2008

    Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina BarcelonaJust to say it once more, because I’ve certainly brought it up enough, 2008 was not a good year for film-goers.

    That’s an incredibly subjective quip, of course, but I certainly found myself struggling with the level of quality on display with each and every screening, the oasis of the Oscar season ultimately proving to be a trickster mirage on the horizon as contenders ultimately fell flat or disappointed in various ways. And suddenly, we’re two weeks away from 2009.

    Who let the goods out?

    But a year lacking broad quality can be a fun “Where’s Waldo” for the impassioned film lover, and so it is that I found some truly wonderful, praise-worthy work from a number of driven and creative filmmakers this year. But a peculiarity began to arise as I sifted through the year’s offerings: What a load of downer cinema.

    I first noticed it in the documentary offerings, heavier on morose subject matter than any other year I can remember. Depictions of the horrors of Katrina, the passionate life and tragic death of a Neil Diamond impersonator, the work of a journalist obsessed with his own inevitable suicide, the nation’s stance on the death penalty, the life and times of a child molester, a heart-breaking family drama in St. John’s, Newfoundland, a national economy on life support, despicable soldier etiquette at our global detention facilities -– it is hardly surprising that the most well-received documentary of the year is a celebration of an “artistic crime” in James Marsh’s “Man on Wire.” But how odd that the genre’s resident cynic, Werner Herzog, was responsible for one of the few other positive doc titles that made the rounds this year?

    Moving into the realm of fiction, even the usually jubilant folks at Pixar couldn’t help but crank out their most sobering film to date, a cautionary tale wrapped in the guise of a love story that conveyed a creepy sense of inevitability despite a hopeful denouement.

    I bring these observations up for a reason, and that is to add some perspective to the list you’ll find below. 2008 was a bellwether for me personally as I began to let the idea of “best” as a definitive slip away and become something more akin to a solid if flexible representation of the times, and how those times affect the viewer.

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