Yes, there is yet another film hitting theaters in wide release this week that we might as well chalk up for one of these posts: Aardman’s “Arthur Christmas.” I have been making my way through all the Best Animated Feature Film hopefuls the past week or two and still haven’t made it to a screening for this one, but I will, as it seems to be the best bet for competition with “Rango” in the category, from what I can surmise. So if you get a chance to take a look this weekend, come on back here and tell us what you thought.

There are two main categories that really have me scratching my head at times this year: Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress. The Jessica Chastain situation has become maddening for me. It should be a no-brainer: “The Help,” by miles. Yet there’s confusion. But whatever. We were probably the first to have Shailene Woodley in the mix, but I still find myself wondering if she’ll just be skipped over. And the frontrunner, which we’ve had at the top since day one thanks to Guy having had a look at Berlin in February, still sits on my stack of screeners. Maybe I should finally watch “Coriolanus” and get the perspective I need. (Talk about a no-brainer.) Anyway, Jeff Wells recently offered his thoughts on how he’d like it all to pan out. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

Pete Hammond catches up with prolific composer Alexandre Desplat. [Deadline]

Scott Bowles talks “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” with David Fincher. [USA Today]

Celebrating the makeup of “Super 8.” [Film Experience]

Listen to Howard Shore’s “Hugo” score. [ParamountGuilds.com]

David Poland sits down with the director’s writer, John Logan. [Hot Blog]

Greg Ellwood has the poster for “In the Land of Blood and Honey.” [Awards Campaign]

More on Fox Searchlight’s embracing of NC-17 for “Shame.” [Speakeasy]

Why the film could legitimize the rating. [Hollywood Reporter]

Steve Pond on gems and long shots in the foreign language film category. [The Odds]

I’ve never really understood why BAFTA makes such a song and dance of publicizing every stage of its voting process — the pre-nomination longlists they release for each award category every January are both suspense-draining and indicative of the overly small pool of films they consider, but I suppose when you’re not the Oscars, you have to drum up attention however you can.

Perhaps it makes slightly more sense to release a longlist of contenders for the one BAFTA category determined by a public vote — the Rising Star Award. With voting now open, the public is thus offered a say in the nominee list as well as the final outcome, though with only eight names to whittle down to five in January, it seems an odd half-measure. Clearly, BAFTA doesn’t trust the public to single out the worthiest names themselves — and given a number of the winners they’ve chosen, they have little reason to do so — so giving them the liberty of booting three names from the group is a bit of a token gesture.

Check out the full longlist, with more thoughts on the names includes, after the jump.

The longlist of eight names, as selected by a committee of journalists and industry luminaries, including Sienna Miller and “Harry Potter” director David Yates:  

Jessica Chastain
Adam Deacon
Chris Hemsworth
Tom Hiddleston
Felicity Jones
Jennifer Lawrence 
Chris O’Dowd
Eddie Redmayne 

My concern with handing it to the public at this stage is that some of the most deserving names here might well struggle to make the nominee list due to the comparatively low profile of their work. We may think of Jessica Chastain as this year’s most obvious breakout star, but with “The Tree of Life,” “The Debt” and even “The Help” having made little impact on British mainstream audiences, she’s possibly less likely to make the cut than Adam Deacon, a local actor and rapper with a less notable résumé, but substantially more youth appeal.

For similar reasons, Jennifer Lawrence will probably be relying more on her “X-Men” credentials than her recent Oscar nomination to make the list, while stage star and recent arthouse fixture Tom Hiddleston has his excellent work in “Thor” to help him along. Speaking of which, I wouldn’t be at all unhappy to see Chris Hemsworth on the final ballot: the award specifies “star,” after all, and he anchored “Thor” with more magnetism and charisma than any of this summer’s blockbuster headliners.

My hunch is that the winner might well turn out to be Chris O’Dowd, such a sparky and endearingly off-center foil for Kristen Wiig in “Bridesmaids” (he’s still on my personal Best Supporting Actor ballot), and blessed with the advantage of a built-in following from his work on British TV — a factor that helped Noel Clarke beat the Michaels Fassbender and Cera three years ago, prompting much head-scratching across the pond.

I’ll be casting my vote for Chastain, but I suspect the finalists will be Deacon, Hemsworth, Hiddleston, Lawrence and O’Dowd. You can have your say here.

The Palm Springs International Film Festival has announced the directorial and female acting honorees for this year’s Awards Gala. Michelle Williams will receive the Desert Palm Achievement Award for Acting and French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius the Sonny Bono Visionary Award for “The Artist.”

As Guy pointed out during last year’s awards season, though the festival is ostensibly meant to celebrate the unsung heroes of cinema, it (like so many other smaller festivals) in fact acts as a precursor to, and predictor of, the Academy Awards.

The male recipient of the Desert Palm Achievement Award has gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for the past four years. Palm Springs has had a more storied history with their female honorees, but showed remarkable foresight when they selected Natalie Portman rather than Annette Bening last year.

“In her latest work ‘My Week with Marilyn’ she perfectly captures the glamour and vulnerability of the iconic Marilyn Monroe who finds respite and solace during a week-long hiatus from Hollywood pressures,” PSIFF chairman Harold Matzner said via press release in a suitably glowing assessment of the performance.

As a side note, I find it befuddling that “My Week with Marilyn” is consistently described as a film that captures an idyllic moment in Monroe”s life where she is free from the pressures of stardom. That is not what the film is about. Quite the opposite in fact. But I digress.

Williams has been dancing with the Academy for several years now, and the time may have indeed come for her and Oscar to go home together. Though Meryl Streep very well could sweep in to grab the magical number three. Odds are on Viola Davis for the moment. The festival has not yet announced this year”s male acting beneficiary, but it will be interesting to see who that will be.

Matzner was bolder in the Sonny Bono Visionary Award release: “The film opened to rave reviews at its premiere in Cannes,” he said, “and will continue to be one of the films to watch throughout awards season as a leading Best Picture contender.” One could interpret that statement to mean that, far from shying away from it, Palm Springs is embracing its status as an Oscar diviner.

As Kris has noted, “The Artist” (and “Hugo,” for that matter) is the sort of offering that filmmakers love to love. It celebrates the art, the craft, it exemplifies and extols the passion that cinephiles share. It is “inside baseball” at its finest. The aesthetic merits and thematic appeal aside, there is something to the novelty of recognizing the first silent film to be a potential Best Picture contender in 83 years that likely tickles festival directors and critics.

Previous recipients of the Sonny Bono Visionary Award include Quentin Tarantino, Baz Luhrman, Gus Van Sant and Danny Boyle.

Additional honorees this year include George Clooney for the Chairman’s Award and Glenn Close the Career Achievement Award. Several other announcements (including the male acting awardee) are expected to be made shortly, while the competing Santa Barbara International Film Festival will begin its own roll-out of awards announcements soon enough.

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

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We seem to be posting a lot of these lately, but it’s a major week for releases and we’re keen to know what you make of it all. David Cronenberg’s measured Freud-Jung study “A Dangerous Method” opened in limited release earlier this week and is slowly rolling out to other areas — critical reaction to Cronenberg’s newly demure style, not to mention Keira Knightley’s bold performance, has been varied since it premiered in Venice, so I’m particularly interested to hear where you land on this one. I wasn’t entirely sold in my review, though Cronenberg’s explanation of his approach made for one of my favorite interviews I’ve done on this site. If you’ve managed to see it, share your thoughts below.

It’s not often (or indeed ever) that the Louis Delluc Prize overlaps with the Best Picture Oscar race, but here we are: Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist,” not content with being one of the leading candidates for US awards glory, has been shortlisted for what is arguably the most prestigious trophy in French cinema.

The Oscar-equivalent César Awards may receive more publicity, but the Delluc, awarded each year to a single French film, has a far longer and more illustrious history — the list of previous winners is a veritable checklist of Gallic cinema titans, beginning with Jean Renoir in 1937, and extending to Cocteau, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, Godard, Malle, Resnais, Rohmer, Chabrol… you get the idea. It’s a list you wouldn’t mind being on, and for Hazanavicius, I imagine that’s no less enticing an honor than an Academy Award. 

Not that he’ll have an easy time winning it. The Delluc, determined annually by a jury of lofty critics and cultural figures, is as famously unpredictable as it is highbrow: for every obvious champion in its history, there’s a left-field surprise. It wasn’t hard to call the win for “A Prophet” two years; less easily seen coming was last year’s victory for “Mysteries of Lisbon” (ahead of heavyweight competition including “Carlos,” “Of Gods and Men,” “The Ghost Writer” and “White Material”).

This year, “The Artist” faces some particularly academic pets of the French critical fraternity. Alain Cavalier’s “Pater,” Bertrand Bonello’s “House of Tolerance” (reviewed here) and Bruno Dumont’s “Hors Satan” may have split the critics at Cannes, but have devoted home champions: it’s easy to see the jury, in a severe mood, awarding any one of them the prize over Hazanavicius’s frothy cinematic valentine. If they do, I hope they at least have the guts to go for Bonello’s deranged provocation, with its Moody Blues interludes and semen-eyed prostitutes, over Dumont’s vacantly punishing bore. (If you’re wondering why the shortlist is so Cannes-heavy, it’s no coincidence that the jury president is Gilles Jacob — which makes the omission of this year’s Cannes Jury Prize winner, Maiwenn’s “Polisse” all the more surprising.)

The highest-profile nominee besides “The Artist,” Aki Kaurismäki’s whimsical immigration-themed comedy, could be a compromise choice if it isn’t also deemed too lightweight: co-productions from non-French directors have won before. The Finnish Oscar entry is one of two foreign-language Oscar entries in the list — the second being, surprisingly enough, the French submission, “Declaration of War.” (I have a screener of that one waiting atop my DVD player.)

My favorite film on the list, however, is one with little festival or Oscar buzz behind it. Céline Sciamma’s “Tomboy,” a perfectly formed miniature detailing the gender confusion of a pre-teen girl with painstaking care and complexity, is a film I’ve been meaning to write up on the site, and this is a further reminder that I need to do so. It opened in limited release in New York last week in release and I implore anyone in the area to take a look while you can. Make my day, Delluc judges.

The shortlist:

“The Artist,” Michel Hazanavicius
“Declaration of War,” Valérie Donzelli
“Hors Satan” Bruno Dumont
“House of Tolerance,” Bertrand Bonello
“Le Havre,” Aki Kaurismäki
“The Minister,” Pierre Schoeller
“Pater,” Alain Cavalier
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Robert Guédiguian  
“Tomboy,” Céline Sciamma

Plus the finalists for their Best Debut Film award:

“17 Girls,” Muriel Coulin and Delphine Coulin
“Donoma,” Djinn Carrenard 
“Jimmy Rivière,” Teddy Lussi-Modeste
“Mafrouza,” Emmanuelle Demoris
“Nous, Princesse de Clèves,” Régis Sauder

The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Paris on December 16.

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

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We haven’t gotten around to posting many of the original song contenders this year as we have in year’s past. The list is accumulating as we build toward the official submission reveal in a few weeks. Meanwhile, a fresh new contender crossed my desk that’s worth pointing out, seeing as it’s in one of this week’s releases.

I don’t remember how Zaz’s “Coeur Volant” is used in “Hugo.” Maybe some of you who are fresh off seeing it can advise, but remember, that’s an important element. The way the voting proceeds, each song is viewed in the context of its usage in the film.

This is a delightful track of a piece with Howard Shore’s French-inspired score and themes. Indeed, Shore is listed in the music and lyrics credits for the film, along with Elizabeth Cotnoir and Isabelle Geffroy. I think he’s already a serious contender for recognition in the Best Original Score category, so maybe he could end up with two nods this year.

Listen to “Coeur Volant” by Zaz below. (Also, as Gerard teased earlier, I’ll be attempting to analyze the Best Original Song category via Tech Support next week. Check back for that.)

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

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I”ve had the honor of speaking to many film composers over the past few years, and my admiration for their profession and their art only continues to grow. Composers almost always come aboard a film when the shooting is over and only the editor, director and sound mixers are still working. From that starting point, with no control over the film”s content, they are assigned to write the music. It is lonely, painstaking work.

But when done well, a cinematic score can be a miraculous accomplishment. Not only have many film scores become iconic (ranging from “Chariots of Fire” to “Star Wars” to “Gone With the Wind”), but the atmosphere of the film can be built through music. We can come to inhabit the world of the characters and the plot can be told, through notes. John Williams”s chugging theme for “Jaws” remains probably my favorite example of a character – the shark – essentially being created through the score.

The Academy Award for Best Original Score is one of two categories under the watchful eye of the music branch. (The other, Best Original Song, will be analyzed by Kris next week.) The branch definitely tends to cite films where the music is prominent and showy, which means that films more epic in scope frequently find a home here. Scores that have foreign influence also do reasonably well. While being in a Best Picture contender certainly helps, there are usually a couple of nominees every year representing films with few, if any, other nominations. In fact, I think it”s difficult to come up with a picture of a “typical nominated film” in this category.

This is also one of the most insular branches in the Academy, with seldom more than one new nominee welcomed each year, and 2005 being the only time in the past dozen years (since the Drama and Musical/Comedy categories merged) where three newcomers found themselves among the final five. So if the prospective nominee hasn”t been cited before, analyze with caution.

Interestingly, one of this branch”s favorite composers, Hans Zimmer, has decided to sit this year out by not submitting his scores for “Rango” and “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.” But even with Zimmer out of the running, there are many veterans to choose from.

And leading that list is undoubtedly John Williams, who seems highly likely to move into sole possession of the record for most music nominations (and second most overall), by passing Alfred Newman. Williams has earned 45 nominations to date, the same number that Newman earned in his career. His works include “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” and “Schindler”s List.” Moreover, he has been nominated in all but a handful of the years in which he has even been in contention over the past few decades. Admittedly, one of those years was 2008 – the only year he has worked since 2005, meaning there has been a six year gap since he was last nominated, something that he has never experienced before in his career. Even so, I fully expect that to change this year due to his two collaborations with Steven Spielberg, the only director for whom he seems to still be working.

On “War Horse,” Williams will have an opportunity similar to those he had on many of the efforts that made him famous: there will be action scenes, sentimental scenes and numerous moments without dialogue where the music will be shoved into the spotlight. The samples seem to suggest he has lived up to his reputation for delivering memorable scores. If the film is the Best Picture contender we all assume, that will likely seal the deal.

“War Horse” is not Williams”s only contender as “The Adventures of Tintin” also has the combination of presumed December blockbuster, epic opportunities, good pieces (from what I”ve heard) and, of course, Williams”s name.

Alexandre Desplat”s emergence on the Hollywood scene has been one of the treats of the past decade for those of us who love film scores. With four nominations in the past five years, the Academy finally seems to have taken notice of his immense talents, something which did take a while longer than it should have. “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” remains an unknown commodity. Nevertheless, it will give Desplat the opportunity to play our heartstrings, something he does extremely well. I have considerable faith in him to pull this off.

Like Williams, Desplat also has multiple films in the hunt this year. On George Clooney”s “The Ides of March,” he was responsible for building the suspense that kept us gripped in the main character”s moral dilemma. I have the inclination that “Extremely Loud” will have more heart, better playing to Desplat”s strengths. Though he could end up a double nominee. And even if he is not nominated for Daldry”s film, the fact that this title is in contention as well leads me to believe Desplat will be back this year.

Desplat was also responsible for the original compositions on Terrence Malick”s “The Tree of Life,” but they were marginalized and overridden by the considerable amount of classical music in the film. (On a tangential note, compilation soundtrack, along with ensemble performance, is one of two areas that is not awarded in an Oscar category but I”ve long felt should be. I recognize there is a difficulty in deciding who should receive the award but effective use of preexisting material can elevate a film”s quality immeasurably.) Desplat also put out quality work on “A Better Life” and “Carnage” and saddled up to the “Harry Potter” franchise. Quite the prolific artist.

There”s a third contender this year who I also feel has multiple genuine contenders in the running, and that is Alberto Iglesias. Iglesias, cited before for “The Constant Gardener” and “The Kite Runner” (for which he was the film”s only nominee) has by all accounts done superb if subdued work on “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Like “The Constant Gardener,” this is an intelligent thriller and it appears to have earned immense critical respect. But will it inspire enough passion trying to build from a small release in December?

“The Skin I Live In,” on the other hand, reunites Iglesias with Pedro Almodóvar, with whom he has had a longstanding relationship. Iglesias did typically fine work. While I”m still doubtful that this film will play well with AMPAS, it is not as risqué as many Almódovar efforts (if it still is bizarre) and Iglesias”s score is as Oscar-friendly as any that he has done with the director. I wouldn”t rule him out.

Howard Shore has composed wonderfully fantastical music for Martin Scorsese”s well-received “Hugo.” Shore won three Oscars for his iconic work on “The Lord of the Rings,” so when all of that is considered, I”d say he”s a real contender. That said, I cannot help but wonder if Shore is properly beloved by his colleagues, with his commercial, television background. He had a LONG career before “Lord of the Rings” but was never cited, nor has he managed to return to the game since then. So despite my believing this is his best chance of the past eight years, I”m not sure I”d bet on him.

Dario Marianelli won a very deserved Oscar in this category for “Atonement,” having earned his first nomination here for “Pride & Prejudice.” With “Jane Eyre,” he returned to the period of early-19th Century England. The work was very solid so if the film is remembered, perhaps the music branch will be among those who cite it. Marianelli”s nomination for “Pride & Prejudice,” though very deserved, was fairly surprising.

A film that was not as respected critically as “Jane Eyre,” but managed to build a much larger fan base, was ”The Help.” To be totally frank, I thought Thomas Newman”s work was pretty forgettable. But Newman is immensely respected by his colleagues, having earned 10 nominations over the past 17 years. (Alas, he has yet to win.)  So if the film finds a significant fan base in the Academy, which it might, I”d be very hesitant to not give Newman great consideration.

And then we come to the films trying to make first-time nominees out of their composers.

Mychael Danna has never been nominated in this category, despite having composed the scores for many notable Canadian titles. This year, he turned his talents to the most American of all sports, baseball, with “Moneyball.” While I thought the score was effective, and the film is clearly well-liked, it doesn”t seem to be the sort of film or attention-drawing work that would lead to a first nomination. Though one never knows.

A far more likely first-timer in my mind is Ludovic Bource for Michel Hazanavicius”s “The Artist.” As a silent film, the music will be particularly important in building the mood and engaging the audience. Bource, a veteran French composer, is also likely to benefit from a massive nomination tally for the film. So I think he is the most likely first-time nominee for this year. His biggest obstacle, in my opinion, is the fact that he may be disqualified as the film uses significant pre-existing music. I doubt this will happen but I”ve been surprised by rulings on this issue in the past.

I”ll end by considering a collaborating duo who managed to turn their first nomination last year into their first win. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross took very innovative work on “The Social Network” all the way to statuettes on Oscar night. With “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” they will have another chance to bring the world of David Fincher to fuller fruition through their music. The beloved nature of the books will bring utmost attention to the screen version, and suspenseful thrillers call for integral music. Maybe they can become repeat nominees?

Remarkably, we”ve now finished taking a first look through all but one of the crafts categories. As stated above, Kris will be handling the last category, Best Original Song, so I”ll be taking next week off. In the meantime, feel free to discuss the Best Original Score category below!

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I’ll say no more on my feelings about “The Artist” for now. I think I’m well on the record. But many of you will be getting your own opportunity to judge as the film opens in limited release this week. Guy will be celebrating the occasion with a list of the 10 best films about the movie business next week, and he’ll also have a big interview piece with the principals of the film up tomorrow some time. Be sure to check back for that, but for now, if you’ve already gotten around to the film, let us know what you thought. And if you happen to get around to it later this weekend or when it makes its way to you via wider release, head on back here and join the conversation.

The New York Film Critics Circle will be voting for its annual superlatives on Tuesday. It won’t exactly be definitive, though, seeing as the group was so anxious to be heard first that it won’t even see all of the films in play this year (bravo, Warner Bros., for doing the right thing). So I guess it’s time to start asking for predictions on who’ll take it. I really couldn’t care less at this point, but I do ultimately see “The Descendants” pulling it out. Maybe “The Tree of Life” could surprise, but I don’t think that kind of film can survive in their voting paradigm, so chalk me up for Alexander Payne’s film. Another possibility is “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” which will be the last film they see. But I think “The Descendants” sets itself up as the critics darling with a win there. Tom O’Neil recently polled pundits (including Guy) for predictions. [Gold Derby]

Jordan Raup lists 10 classic films you must watch before seeing Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo.” [Film Stage]

Meredith Woerner, meanwhile, notes what Scorsese’s film taught us about the grandfather of science fiction cinema. [io9]

Scorsese, by the way, gave homework to his cast. [Entertainment Weekly]

Michael Phillips is actually right, I think, to consider “Raiders of the Lost Ark” incredibly overrated, but obviously wrong to stretch that to “Indiana Jones – let”s be honest – never was a memorable movie character.” [Hero Complex]

Terrence Rafferty on “A Dangerous Method” and mental illness in movies. [New York Times]

Kenneth Branagh on dealing with divas, Shakespearean conspiracy theories… oh, and “My Week with Marilyn.” [Vulture]

Walter the Muppet talks “The Muppets,” doing his own stunts and his hero Kermit the Frog. [Film School Rejects]

Sasha Stone calls it a wide open Best Picture landscape. Maybe it feels that way because “War Horse” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” — the likely heavies — haven’t screened widely… yet. [Awards Daily]

Anne Thompson talks “J. Edgar” with screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. [Thompson on Hollywood]

And one more thing, for those on these shores: HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

One more wide release solicitation for opinions before getting to the limited films tomorrow. Really packed holiday weekend at the theaters, and much as I love elements of “Hugo” and Michelle Williams’s performance in “My Week with Marilyn,” if you’re asking for a recommendation from the stuff that went wide this week, I’d say spring for “The Muppets.” It’s not some perfectly crafted work of art, but it was the best time I’ve had in a theater, perhaps all season. Too bad the Oscars missed the boat. But in any case, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the film when/if you see it, so chalk up your take in the comments section below.

Bar an offhand tweet-review that I”d now downgrade about two notches, I”ve been quiet on Alexander Payne”s “The Descendants” since seeing it at the London Film Festival last month, and remained so when it hit US screens last week to an inevitable shower of critical applause – with many returning the film to its pre-Toronto position as the film to beat for the Oscar.

I”m not sure why I”ve felt so disinclined to write about it, besides the fact that-contrary to what many may believe about film critics-it”s not a lot of fun to pick away at films beloved by the majority. At first I thought “The Descendants,” a glibly engineered dramedy of Grief and Reconciliation and other capital-letter emotional states, simply wasn”t interesting enough to discuss at any great length, its virtues and offenses both too minor to get worked up about: competent films this bland and condescending get a free pass all the time from critics and audiences, so why single this one out for censure just because it has a bit of Oscar buzz?

Yet the longer I thought about Payne”s latest-and think about it I did, which is a credit either to the film itself or the mind-narrowing properties of awards season-the deeper my problems with it ran. The Oscar buzz, meanwhile, grew to seem less like an irrelevant symptom of its success, and more like an unhappy consequence of the highly selective emotional manipulation that calculatedly humanistic filmmaking like “The Descendants” uses to court mainstream respectability.

On the face of things, I want to be excited that a contemporary, character-based domestic drama featuring no Important Historical Figures or Big Issues Of Our Time writ large is among the leading contenders for Oscar glory: the everyday is a period that tends to get regrettably short shrift from Academy voters. And yet I feel cheated that the film potentially carrying this modest torch all the way to the podium is not just self-defeatingly self-congratulatory about its laughter-through-the-tears strength of feeling, but one that preaches empathy more than it practices the same.

That”s a harsh charge, I realize, and one that could be made rather absently in retrospect, but there”s a curiously judgmental streak in the film”s delineation of a family in crisis that nagged at me from the opening beats, even as I was admiring smaller details of its construction. “The Descendants” is the story of a quietly severed marriage that doesn”t just omit one partner”s perspective via the time-honored narrative standby of a terminal coma, but actively uses that silence against them: we”re invited to share in the sense of numb betrayal felt by a passive husband (George Clooney) upon learning of his wife”s infidelities, without having any access to her experience, any honest sense of why she chose to stray.

That”s acceptable if you choose to accept the film as a one-character psychological study-how many people do respond to cuckolding with even-handed diplomacy, after all?-even if an uncomfortable climactic scene of Clooney hurling verbal abuse at his wife”s inactive body built more emotional walls for me than it broke down. Things gets more problematic, however, when the couples” older daughter (Shailene Woodley) is repeatedly likened to her mother in her flaws, rather censoriously regarded by the film even if they seemingly amount to little more than college-age recklessness and self-assertion: the definition of a character purely by others” perceptions of her can be a fascinating dramatic device, but less so when all said perceptions are on the disapproving side.

If, at this point, “The Descendants” appears to be sliding dangerously into misogyny, that”s tempered only by its equally dismissive treatment of Hawaiian locals, real estate agents (an ever-reliable punching-bag) and Clooney”s oafish, less educated extended family – the hub of a protracted and wholly predictable land-ownership subplot that serves little purpose but the further ennobling of an otherwise less-than-commendable Ordinary Joe protagonist. (Family history is more important than family money, which is easier to say when you”re as evidently well-off as this one guy.) For all its sunsplashed optimism and gestures of ethnic solidarity, I”m not convinced this is a film that likes people very much at all.

I didn”t mean for this column to turn into a laundry list of complaints against an ostensible frontrunner, but rather to hold it up as merely one example of the simplified, often neatly redemptive, patterns of behavior the Academy sometimes likes supposedly gentle human drama to fall into: films that massage our social blind spots rather than challenging them.

That applies to good Oscar winners as well as bad: “American Beauty” is excitingly current formal cinema that felt like something of a breakthrough when it scooped the top prizes in the 1999 race after a decade dominated by stately period fare, but it did so via some rigidly diagrammatic misanthropy, Alan Ball”s script drawing thick, unforgiving chalk lines of prejudice and materialism between its heightened characters. 

Similarly unsubtle but vastly less rewarding, “Crash” assembled a mosaic of contemporary American racial relations only by blocking vast swathes of minority perspective from its narrative flow; the result was neat enough to tickle voters” consciences without requiring a major reassessment of values. That the Academy can jive with “American Beauty” and not “Magnolia,” “Crash” and not “Do the Right Thing” suggests they”re fondest of the ‘small” films that bite off less than they can chew.

It was the year of “American Beauty,” of course, that Alexander Payne first entered the Academy”s radar: he deservedly received a lone writing nomination for “Election,” a scabrously witty but unexpectedly democratic satire of high politics that remains the high-water mark of his career: from where I”m standing, each Payne film since then (a bleak, bristly old-age ennui study in “About Schmidt”; a pleasingly woozy but insular ode to the pleasures of drinking and companionship in “Sideways,” now “The Descendants”) has been a little less provocative than the last, a little more pat in its packaging of human emotion and, one presumes not coincidentally, a little more successful through awards season, a pattern his latest looks certain to continue.

My updated predictions for this week are here. In case you missed the announcement on Monday, however, I am also now managing half the categories on the official sidebar predictions — check out The Contenders for more details.

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

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I always love it when Variety gets a bunch of actors to wax on about their colleagues’ work this time of year. There are a bunch of these: Diane Keaton on Sarah Paulson in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” Robert Duvall on Christoph Waltz in “Carnage,” etc.

I was mostly stoked, though, to see that my two favorite performers of the year were featured in one of these capsule assessments, as “Take Shelter” star Michael Shannon was given space to praise Woody Harrelson, whose performance in “Rampart” is easily one of the year’s best.

I actually sat down with Harrelson for about an hour earlier today on the set of his new film, Martin McDonagh’s “Seven Psychopaths.” He ran through a few takes of a scene with Christopher Walken (which he said blew his mind) and then we headed over his trailer for the sit-down.

It’s funny, though, because I actually mentioned Shannon’s performance as particularly amazing this season. Harrelson said he’s been eager to see the film and keeps hearing that kind of praise. I don’t think he was aware of this little item at the time, though.

Anyway, more on all of that when I write the interview up in the near future. For now, here’s Shannon’s take on Harrelson’s latest work:

“Woody just works from the ground up. You get the feeling that every molecule in his body is focused on the task at hand. I’ve never seen somebody be so focused. And obviously going through every single conundrum and contortion that his character is going through and feeling it all very deeply is a beautiful thing to watch. There’s a scene towards the end of the film where his daughters come to visit him after he’s been kicked out of the house, and that’s pretty unforgettable.”

There’s more at Variety, if you want to read through them all. Lots of cool ones to peruse.

If you happen to live in Los Angeles, “Rampart” began its one-week qualifying run today at the Sunset 5 Theater. Do yourself a favor and check it out, because it won’t roll back around until next year.

Meanwhile, check out the recently released trailer for the film below. “Rampart” opens wide on January 27, 2012.

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

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Lots of stuff opening this week! Another wide release is the Michelle Williams-starrer “My Week with Marilyn,” which didn’t really float my boat (even if I did find the performance commendable) when I saw it last month. Still, Roth’s recent interview with director Simon Curtis almost has me thinking I like the film more than I really do. Regardless, it’s opening wide today and you’ll all have your say soon enough (if you haven’t already). So when/if you get around to the film this week, head on back here and give us your perspective.

A rather landmark date seemed to come and go less than a month ago with hardly a whisper of its significance: October 26, 2011 marked the 100th anniversary of the first motion picture ever filmed in Hollywood.

The production took place in the orchards covering the estate of H.J. Whitely, the real estate developer who helped create Hollywood and fashion it with an industry of its own in the early part of the 20th Century. He landed the moniker “the Father of Hollywood” for his efforts. Whitely had convinced David Horsley — an English-born pioneer of the cinema who, along with his brother, William, had essentially been run out of New Jersey by Thomas Edison and his Motion Picture Patents Company trust — to run the film test on his property and to lease the Blondeau Tavern at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street in the heart of what is now Hollywood to develop it.

The town’s first film laboratory was born the next day in that very space, one soon enough acquired by Universal Studios. And today, maybe fifty paces from those earliest beginnings of the Southern California film industry, Technicolor’s shiny new offices occupy prime real estate with a mind to saving the history of cinema for posterity.

The company is hard at work on a number of exciting projects as of late, one of them being a pristine restoration of the first-ever Best Picture winner, 1927’s “Wings.” One high profile project, however, gets its time in the spotlight this week as a fleeting but integral element of Martin Scorsese’s ode to cinema and film preservation, “Hugo.”

The intense process of restoring an unearthed, hand-colorized version of Georges Méliès’s “Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon)” was covered by In Contention at a Telluride Film Festival exhibition in September. But while Lobster Films honcho and film geek Serge Bromberg’s presentation was thorough and enough for the layman to digest, one doesn’t really grasp the scale and intensity of the project until you hear Technicolor’s Director of Restoration Services, Tom Burton, explain it with visual aids.

“It was like assembling a puzzle without having the box picture,” he says, sporting quite the Méliès-like curled mustache. “You’re holding a chunk of a frame and going, ‘Where does that go?’ Much less what shot it is, in the frame sequence from that shot, where does it go?”

What had happened was this. Bromberg acquired the severely deteriorated roll of film from a Barcelona archive. It was, essentially, a hockey puck, decades of crystallization having hardened it to the point where it couldn’t even be unspooled. Bromberg and his team placed the film in a humidor for a number of years to soften it up and every day would slide a card in between sections of it and try to pull it apart. In order to preserve the film, it had to be destroyed, because once it was removed from those vapors, it would crystallize once again.

“What they were ultimately able to do was put it on a light box and, sort of like animation, they did a down-shooter and they went to capture each frame of the material just so they had a document of the frame,” Burton says. “The focus is questionable because these are warped frames and they can’t really flatten them or they’ll break them. But they really did an amazing job of taking these 13,345 frames and turning them into digital files.”

That’s where Technicolor came in. With this “bucket of digital shards,” as Burton affectionately puts it, the restoration process was underway. And Burton’s comparison to a puzzle without much of a visual cue comes into play.

“At the end of the day, what we received was the result of five years of shooting this material on a variety of hard drives,” he says. “So there was no numerical sequence relevant to any of this. It all kind of came in, literally, as a bucket of images. We had to take all of these files and sort of symbolically hold them up to the light and go, ‘What is that a picture of or a part of a picture of and where might that go in the timeline?'”

Bromberg happened to have an HD transfer of Méliès’s film that was as complete a version as any that had existed. So they were ultimately able to use that as a “reference backbone” to piece the film together. But it was nevertheless a process that took a lot of time, a lot of passion and a lot of heart. (You can check out a sample of the finished product here.)

Naturally, then, it was a perfect fit for Scorsese’s film, which features an aged Méliès when he was a toy salesman (portrayed by Ben Kingsley), struggling to forget and move on from his life’s work as a filmmaker. “A Trip to the Moon” makes an appearance in the film at a key moment in the third act, but it’s not just any version of the film. It’s the colorized Technicolor restoration that Scorsese used, truly bringing the themes of his film full circle.

Méliès was a magician before he became a filmmaker. He brought that touch to his work behind the camera, and when you talk to people who have been inspired by that work, the word “magic” just seems to effortlessly come forth.

“Motion and emotion. They were, and are, at the core of cinema,” Scorsese writes in “The Hugo Movie Companion,” a handsome behind-the-scenes hardbound book that has been published in conjunction with the film. “And it was Georges Méliès who provided the final key: magic…He saw moving pictures as a way to enrich and enlarge his stage presentations. In so doing, he took the movies another giant step forward. The Lumières [who invented motion picture photography] gave us the world as we knew it, and Méliès gave it to us as we imagined and extended it, with imaginary voyages, disappearances, and transformations.”

How vital an element to the mixture we all take for granted when we settle into a theater and watch the latest release. And that was precisely the kind of thing on the minds of directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris when they were conceiving a music video for the Smashing Pumpkins track “Tonight, Tonight” in early 1996. The video, you may recall, is one giant homage to Méliès and specifically “A Trip to the Moon,” largely inspired by the cover art for the album, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” which harkens back to Méliès’s design elements.

“It feels like I’ve known about ‘A Trip to the Moon’ forever,” Dayton says by telephone of the film and its classic imagery. “When we went to make the video, it allowed us to really focus on Méliès and his technique and look at other films of his and really study them. That’s the beauty of music videos. You can take a concept and have it be your entry point into a world of filmmaking. Georges had pioneered so much and he had such a strong aesthetic. It was fun to build on that and frankly to bring it to an audience that, chances are, hadn’t seen anything like that.”

Adds Faris, “Early film still seems to be more experimental in some ways than commercial film today. It’s always a good place to start for inspiration. So much of it is made in camera. And that’s always the most exciting to us, working that way. In that moment, everybody’s working toward the same goal and you’re trying to make something that feels like magic. And when it comes back, it’s this incredible surprise. That element of filmmaking is lost a little bit nowadays because you have so much control over everything. I miss it.”

And the inspiration transferred over to Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, better known as French electronica duo Air. The group was commissioned to provide an original score to the restoration of “A Trip to the Moon,” which premiered before audiences on opening night of the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. They have expanded those compositions and beefed them up for an upcoming album release named after the famed short.

“‘A Trip to the Moon’ is undoubtedly more organic than most of our past projects,” Godin said in a press release announcing the album. “We wanted it to sound handmade, knocked together, a bit like Méliès’ special effects. Everything is played live. Like Méliès’s film, our soundtrack is nourished by living art.”

The legacy of Méliès is in some sense subconscious. Some would have you believe its imagery, not least of all its most famous image, makes for the most classic frames in cinema history. Indeed, Brian Selznick — author of the graphic novel upon which “Hugo” is based and himself a relative of famed film producer David O. Selznick — notes, “The rocket that flew into the eye of the man in the moon lodged itself firmly in my imagination.” That spirit paved the way for a volume that has allowed Scorsese to pour his passion and heart into a new film that, in many ways, is the most organic of his career to who he is as an artist (even if it bears little resemblance to his classic work as a filmmaker).

“Méliès’s films have an exuberance, joy, and excitement I associate with the actual creation of this new art form and I wanted to capture that,” he writes. “As a moviemaker, I feel we owe everything to Georges Méliès. And when I go back and look at his original films, I feel inspired, because they carry the thrill of discovery over one hundred years after they were made; and because they are among the first, powerful expressions of an art form that I’ve loved, and to which I’ve devoted myself for the better part of my life.”

“Hugo” opens nationwide today, so don’t forget to tell us what you thought. “A Trip to the Moon,” meanwhile, continues to be a showcase on the festival circuit and will hopefully see some kind of home video release in the near future…perhaps as a supplement to Scorsese’s film?

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

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It’s been a while since I linked a SoundWorks Collection profile. That needs to be remedied.

It’s a pretty varied and fun week at the theaters this holiday weekend, with “Hugo” and “The Artist” making their way to theaters. But if you were to ask me what’s worth seeing, I’d double down on “The Muppets” in a heartbeat.

The film is a nostalgia fest built into a massive musical with plenty of tunes in the mix. Naturally, then, it’s worth considering the sound elements on the film. Gerard was smart to mention it in a recent Tech Support column dedicated to the Best Sound Mixing category. And I’m happy to see that the SoundWorks Collection has dedicated a profile to that work on the film, featuring interviews with mixer Kevin O’Connell and supervising sound editors Kami Asgar and Sean McCormack, among others. Have a look (and listen) below.

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

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[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/32188511 w=640&h=360]

The more I spin away from Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” the more I want to see it again. I still think, as I did when I first wrote about it, that the first half is structured in a way that doesn’t embellish the mystery so much as stagnate the narrative, but I’m in love with Ben Kingsley’s performance and the final half hour, which is dedicated to Scorsese’s passion for the cinema. Meanwhile Guy has posted a new list dedicated to the crafts of the director’s films (though I’m shocked the art direction of “Hugo” missed). The film opens today and all this hot air can finally give way to your thoughts on it, so head on back here and offer them when you get around to seeing it. (And check back later today for a big interview piece pegged to the film that will hopefully delight the cinema geek in everyone.)

Alright, you know the drill. Rifle off your need-to-knows and we’ll address as many as we can in Friday’s podcast (which, remember, will be later in the day on Friday). I imagine we’ll be talking about “The Iron Lady,” the doc short list, things of that nature.