The Cinema Eye Honors, the premier documentary-only awards ceremony on the circuit, announced their 2011 nominations tonight in a new fashion that I think more such shindigs could follows — as the prelude to a party in a busy London bar, with free drinks and a Guilty Pleasures DJ on hand afterwards. It sure beats dragging yourself out of bed at 5am for the Oscars, no? Anyway, I was on hand to receive the news directly — cheering too loudly when my favorites popped up in the nominee list (as they did with pleasing frequency) and savoring the forgotten joys of Charles & Eddie singles. Nice work all round.

As for the nominees, they perhaps offer a few pointers as to the films you should be looking out for in the documentary Oscar race — though we all know how wilfully the Academy can sometimes ignore the obvious in this category. Four films are tied for the lead with four nominations apiece: no surprise that Asif Kapadia’s UK box-office smash “Senna” ( which I glowingly reviewed here) and “Hoop Dreams” director Steve James’s critics’ darling “The Interrupters” are among them.

Both are likelier to show up in the Oscar race than Clio Barnard’s unique hybrid doc “The Arbor” — I doubt the Academy will approve its daring dramatization technique of using actors to lip-synch to recorded testimony. Managing three nods, meanwhile, was another high-profile entry, Oscar-winner James Marsh’s human-chimp cautionary tale “Project Nim.”

Big-name docs that didn’t crack the top category, but found recognition elsewhere, include Wim Wenders’s “Pina” (I must say I’m surprised this one didn’t register for Best Cinematography), Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” and Errol Morris’s “Tabloid.” Oh, and “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” which nabbed a spot in the Audience Choice category, to the great amusement of the London crowd — and takes the record for the highest-grossing film ever to receive a Cinema Eye nod. On a more somber note, it’s nice to see the late photojournalist Tim Hetherington score a posthumous nod or his short “Diary,” six months after he was killed in action in Libya. 

Finally, the mention that most pleased me personally was the pair of nods — Best Debut Feature and Best Cinematography — for Alma Har’el, whose dreamy Salton Sea community portrait “Bombay Beach” I reviewed a few days ago, and remains one of my favorite films (let alone documentaries) of the year. I’ll be rooting for her and “Senna” when the Cinema Eye awards roll around, this time in New York,  on January 11. 

The full list of nominations:

Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking
“The Arbor”
“The Interrupters”
“Nostalgia for the Light”
“Position Among the Stars”
“Project Nim”
“Senna”

Outstanding Achievement in Direction
Clio Barnard, “The Arbor”
Danfung Dennis, “Hell and Back Again”
Steve James, “The Interrupters”
Patricio Guzmán, “Nostalgia for the Light”
Leonard Retel Helmrich, “Position Among the Stars”

Outstanding Achievement in Production
Erik Nelson and Adrienne Ciuffo, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”
Mike Lerner, “Hell and Back Again”
Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz, “The Interrupters”
Renate Sachse, “Nostalgia for the Light”
Gian-Piero Ringel and Wim Wenders, “Pina”

Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography
Alma Har”el, “Bombay Beach”
Eric Koretz, “Dragonslayer”
Danfung Dennis, “Hell and Back Again”
Katell Dijan, “Nostalgia for the Light”
Leonard Retel Helmrich and Ismail Fahmi Lubish, “Position Among the Stars”

Outstanding Achievement in Editing
Hanna Lejonqvist SFK and Göran Hugo Olsson, “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975”
Jennifer Tiexiera and Lizzy Calhoun, “Dragonslayer”
Joe Walker, “Life in a Day”
Jasper Naaijkens, “Position Among the Stars”
Gregers Sall and Chris King, “Senna”

Audience Choice Prize
“Bill Cunningham New York”
“The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975”
“Buck”
“Cave of Forgotten Dreams”
“Give Up Tomorrow”
“The Interrupters”
“Justin Bieber: Never Say Never”
“Project Nim”
“Senna”
“Tabloid”

Outstanding Achievement in a Debut Feature Film
Clio Barnard, “The Arbor”
Michal Marczak, “At the Edge of Russia”
Alma Har”el, “Bombay Beach”
Tristan Patterson, “Dragonslayer”
Danfung Dennis, “Hell and Back Again”

Outstanding Achievement in an Original Music Score
Harry Escott and Molly Nyman, “The Arbor”
Ernst Reijseger, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”
T. Griffin, “Dragonslayer”
Antonio Pinto, “Senna”
John Kusiak, “Tabloid”

Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Animation
Justin Barber and Ryland Jones, “Women Art Revolution”
Mike Nicholson and Allison Moore, “Better This World”
Brent Green, “Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then”
Kinda Akash, “Project Nim”
Raynor Pettge, “Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure”
Rob Feng and Jeremy Landman, “Tabloid”

Spotlight Award
“Family Instinct”
“Last Days Here”
“The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”
“Scenes of a Crime”
“The Tiniest Place”

Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Short Filmmaking
“Il Capo,” Yuri Ancarani
“Diary,” Tim Hetherington
“Minka,” Davina Pardo
“Out of Reach,” Jakub Sto?ek
“This Chair Is Not Me,” Andy Taylor Smith

The 63-title list of submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is something of a lucky dip – for every abundantly creamed-over festival hit in the running, there are at least two far less known quantities that have either worked their way along the fringe festival circuit or simply been plucked from a small, little-travelled pool of local offerings by the relevant committee. As nice as it would be to say that hidden gems abound, such films are just as often under the radar for a reason.

The London Film Festival, highlight package of other fests that it is, is a handy opportunity to catch up on one”s homework in this category: thanks to them, I”ve brought my tally of seen titles up to 20. That”s still less than a third of the field, but the season (and the screener influx) is young. Among them is the film I covered in my first review for Variety, India”s entry “Abu, Son of Adam”; sadly, I don”t think it will, or should, make much of a dent in the race.

One hopeful that”s been much on my mind since viewing it at Cannes in May, and further provoked on a recent second viewing, is Oliver Hermanus”s “Beauty” (B+) a quietly candid, formally tight study of a subject hitherto foreign to South African cinema – repressed homosexuality in the conservative white Afrikaner community.

The first mostly Afrikaans-language film to represent South Africa in the Oscar race since “Paljas” in 1997, it initially screened under its more evocative, if harder-to-pronounce title, “Skoonheid.” The translation is direct, and yet a certain intangible subtext is lost in the English word: “skoonheid” is an awfully hard-sounding word for something as seemingly soft as beauty, an appropriate disjuncture for a film in which sensual pleasures come encased in glass.

Hermanus”s impressive first film, 2009″s Cape Flats-set “Shirley Adams,” eschewed predictable gangland drama to focus on the functionally distraught mother of a gang violence victim; with greater thematic daring and technical acumen, his sophomore effort extends the young writer-director”s interest in those silent sufferers in the middle-aged margins of South African society. “Beauty” may explicitly address sexual and racial discrimination in the country”s still-segregated heartland, but it”s a long way from the clean-cut issue pictures that the country tends to export: not least because many of the social barriers that most crucially inform the narrative aren”t visible to all.

In a finely wrought performance that calls for both bullish, slightly impervious physical presence and subtler hairline fractures in mood and demeanour, Deon Lotz plays Francois, a placidly (if not entirely happily) married father of two whose beigely domestic lifestyle in the mild-mannered Afrikaner capital of Bloemfontein is sporadically disrupted by homosexual impulses. His long-held grip on these – aided by secret weekend parties with like-minded community fellows who congregate to drink beer, watch rugby and fuck each other – begins to loosen dangerously when he falls hard for a single man.

Specifically directed lust is a new and unwelcome sensation for Francois, particularly given the awkwardness of his target: Christian (model-turned-actor Charlie Keegan) is a young, beautiful and, against Christian”s worse instincts, straight fledgling lawyer, who happens to be the son of an old family friend. The tragic impossibility of Francois”s desire is negotiated with care and laudable lack of condescension by Hermanus and Lotz alike, though they play sharp, sore games with our expectations of this story: the latent violence in this aggressively male society comes into play in a third act as vicious as it is heartbreaking.

Crisply lensed in earthy olive tones that seem to single out the flesh in every shot, as if preying on Francois”s own carnal weaknesses, “Beauty” is a vivid and upsetting portrait of prejudices that prevail even in far older democracies than this one, but this universal resonance is countered by the more curious and specific ironies that come in a country that for so long was defined by its social oppression: in one particularly pointed scene, a participant at one of Francois”s secret sex parties is vilified by his peers for bringing along a black guest. In Hermanus”s astutely judged and commendably barbed film, no minority is merely a victim.

Less overtly provocative, but no less difficult or profoundly sad a story of interrupted intimacy, Iceland”s Oscar submission, “Volcano” (B) represents another instance of a young filmmaker reaching far beyond his own demographic bracket to reach hard human truths. Treading similar territory to Sarah Polley”s acclaimed “Away From Her” with a slightly messier emotional framework, Oscar-nominated short filmmaker Rúnar Rúnarsson”s debut feature is an elegiac, markedly unsentimental and only occasionally overmeasured reflection on the indignities of aging and the sometimes excessive patience of mortality.

Hulking sixty-ish actor Theodór Júlíusson plays Hannes, a newly retired school custodian facing the familiar old-age crisis of too much time on his hands. As he struggles to find a place in what was previously only a part-time household for him, brusquely tolerating his loving but beleaguered wife Anna (Margrét Helga Jóhannsdóttir), further digging trenches separating himself from his impatient children and bemused grandkids, and methodically repairing a weathered old fishing boat that, in Rúnarsson”s otherwise thoughtful and organic screenplay, likely sprang a leak due to the weight of its capital-M Metaphor status. When Anna suffers a severe stroke, however, a shellshocked Hannes is forced into the wholly unfamiliar position of placing someone else”s survival before his.

From here on, any moral points one might draw around this tricky (if hardly exceptional) scenario – ranging from old ‘got ’til it”s gone” adages to more heated euthanasia-based questions – sound more banal than anything this gentle but fearsomely precise film has to say. Exquisitely performed by Júlíusson, a forbidding but increasingly breakable screen presence, and constructed with calm old-soul authority by Rúnarsson, this is rare humanistic filmmaking with a clear grasp of both modest scale of its narrative, as well as the vast wells of feeling behind it.

Eddie Murphy and Brett Ratner have been making the press rounds lately talking up their latest film, “Tower Heist.” Which, by the way, well, let me address that real quick.

I quite enjoyed “Tower Heist.” It’s a diversion, and Murphy isn’t in it to the extent that you might think (he doesn’t really figure in until the second act rolls around — more of him would have been great, actually). But the final action sequence is fun and gripping. Michael Pena should be tapped for comic relief in, like, everything. And it’s worth noting that there is a zeitgeisty haves/have-nots article waiting to write itself in both the release of this film and “In Time.”

But I digress. Naturally, Ratner and Murphy have been fielding a ton of questions regarding the Oscar telecast they will produce and host respectively in February. It’s the usual light and fluffy chatter, nothing to really sink your teeth into. Murphy has been quipping all over the place that he’ll be “the worst Oscar host in history,” that kind of thing. Winks and nudges and “we don’t have anything to say so let’s give them something because they won’t stop asking.”

Then again, that’s kind of the point of taking the gig. It puts a lot of eyeballs on “Tower Heist” that might not have been there otherwise. Shrewd moves all around.

Anyway, last night Murphy stopped by “The Late Show with David Letterman” to talk about the film, and given that Letterman probably WAS one of the worst Oscar hosts in history (I imagine he’d admit as much), it was fun to watch them talk about the gig (which Letterman quipped “ain’t all it’s cracked up to be”).

I hope there’s a Jon Stewart stop planned as well. Hearing older hosts go back and forth with a prospective one is always more interesting to me than the empty press queries that lead up to the show.

Check out the full interview below. They start talking Oscar around the 7:15 mark. He also stopped by “The Today Show” this morning to discuss. “Tower Heist” hits theaters nationwide on November 4.

I saw Wim Wenders’s “Pina,” an intimately photographed celebration of the work of modern dancer Philippina “Pina” Bausch, at the Telluride Film Festival in September. It has been on the circuit since February and the Berlinale, where 3D came to the art house and Guy was transfixed.

I have enormous respect for the use of 3D in this endeavor, which was chosen as the official German entry in this year’s Best Foreign Language Film race, even if modern dance is something I can’t quite digest enough to be a true lover of the film. Certainly no one has filmed dance quite like this before, removing the audience from the role of spectator and putting them into the grace and movement of the form with skill and ease. It’ll certainly make you forget “Step Up 3D” ever happened, if you haven’t already. It was a bold pick by Germany and it could yet find its way into the nominated five in the category.

IFC Films has supplied us with the final trailer for the film, which isn’t really that different than what’s already out there, save a few bells and whistles and quotes and laurels, etc. Check it out below. The film will open in New York on Dec. 23rd to qualify, and will expand nationwide in January.

So. We all knew this was coming, right? “Shame,” Steve McQueen’s raunchy, penetrative (no pun intended), sexually charged, psychologically intense character study staring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan and their naughty bits has received an NC-17 rating. As we’ve already noted, Fox Searchlight has made the smart choice by getting out ahead of this and embracing it as a badge of honor. Take the MPAA to task if you must. Make the argument that we, as a society, are way too sensitive to images of sex while we are incredibly desensitized to images of violence. The fact of the matter is, the film won’t play in a great many theaters as a result of the ruling. But it is no less a masterful piece of cinema from one of the most promising filmmakers of our age. [Box OFfice Mojo]

Peter Knegt chats with the film’s screenwriter (who also penned “The Iron Lady”), Abi Morgan. [indieWIRE]

Steve Pond sits down with “Albert Nobbs” director Rodrigo Garcia. [The Odds]

Confirming what we already knew would happen (assuming the original made enough dough): Peter Jackson will direct “The Adventures of Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun.” [Hollywood Reporter]

Sasha Stone takes the temperature in the calm before the storm. [Awards Daily]

Steven Zeitchik gets around to the idea of a number of this year’s Oscar hopefuls being double-dippers. [The Envelope]

Jeff Wells comments on a challenge that could await Warner Bros. re: “J. Edgar”: younger audiences who have no idea who J. Edgar Hoover was. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

What the stars were really thinking at Monday’s Hollywood Film Awards. [HitFix]

Matt Zoller Seitz montages Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” [Moving Image Source]

Alec Baldwin launches a new podcast: “Here’s the Thing.” [WNYC]

Watching “Martha Marcy May Marlene” at Cannes back in May, I was stopped dead by a musical number for John Hawkes midway through the film: the eerie, melancholy acoustic track “Marcy’s Song,” in which his cult-leader character and Elizabeth Olsen’s fresh-faced inductee appear to forge a wary spiritual connection. It’s a song that, lovely in any context, distils the film’s mood so effectively that I remember thinking, “If this is an original track, the Best Original Song race is over.”

Of course, if I were more au fait with the American folk scene, I’d have known that the song was in fact originally written and performed by the late Jackson C. Frank; as the film’s director, Sean Durkin, explained to me in an interview last week, he stumbled upon the song while searching for suitable tracks featuring the titular names. Good spot: original or otherwise, it makes for one of the year’s most arresting musical moments, all the more effective for the fact that Oscar-nominated actor (and sometime musician) Hawkes performed it himself.

Anyway, Fox Searchlight has released a new video of this beautiful version. I recommend checking it out after the jump. 

A few weeks back it was announced that “The Skin I Live In” director Pedro Almodóvar had been tapped by AFI Fest to serve as Guest Artistic Director. It’s been an eclectic couple of years for the position, as David Lynch served in the position’s inaugural year.

The festival just sent out a release announcing Almodóvar’s selected classic horror films and thrillers to be screened in a sidebar program. They include Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Cercle Rouge,” Georges Franju’s “Eyes without a Face,” Edmund Goulding’s “Nightmare Alley” and Robert Siodmak’s “The Killers.”

The quartet joins Almodovar’s own “Law of Desire,” which was previously announced as a Gala screening and “An Evening with Pedro Almodovar” set for November 7.

“‘Law of Desire’ is a fundamental title in my career,” Almodóvar said in the release. “Even though we made it on a very modest budget, I don’t think I’d change a single shot, and not because it’s perfect but because I recognize myself in all of them…It’s true that my palette has darkened and, in the case of the latest film, the humor has almost disappeared. Fortunately I’ve changed sufficiently so that no one can accuse me of repeating myself, but I’m still the same. ‘Law of Desire’ shows that.”

Meanwhile, he chose the selections “because in some way, albeit tangentially, they have a relationship with my present,” he said.

The 2011 AFI Fest (presented by AUDI — they consistently remind us to include that) will take place November 3 – November 10 at the historic Chinese Theatre, the Chinese 6 Theatres, the Egyptian Theatre and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” will be the opening night film. Other centerpiece galas include Luc Besson’s “The Lady,” Roman Polanski’s “Carnage,” Simon Curtis’s “My Week with Marilyn” and Steve McQueen’s “Shame.” Oh, and naturally, Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist” will be included. You can’t get away from that thing lately.

We’re a little under a week away from Halloween, an occasion for which it’s practically de rigueur for movie blogs like ours to assemble lists of the greatest horror films of all time. Except we’ve already done that, and there seems little point in going there again — though I do encourage you to check out our Top 20 if you’re shopping around for some classic scares.

Casting around for alternate Halloween-themed ideas for this week’s list, then, it occurred to me that several of the films that scared me most rigid as a child — surely the demographic for whom Pumpkin-and-Candy Day remains most relevant — are ones that wouldn’t crack most conventional horror-film lists, or in some cases, conventional definitions of what a horror film even is. Others that do, meanwhile, do so without many of the grim tools many classic horror films use to reach their audience, opting instead for less explicit routes of skin-crawling.

And so it is that I hit upon the theme of PG-rated scares: those rare films, not all of them genre-based, that succeed in genuinely frightening kids and adults alike with few enough graphic shocks and transgressive themes to persuade the MPAA that no one need be restricted from watching them — a tricky balance to strike, but one several classics, and a few smaller gems cherished by devoted cult audiences, have managed.

Of course, just because a film is permissible for family viewing, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s appropriate: some of the films gathered here are treasured childhood favorites, others are ones many would much enjoy or understand until later in life. The overwhelming dominance of 1970s and 1980s titles wasn’t planned — perhaps it’s a generational thing, though I did use the latter-day MPAA ratings system for guidance. All of them, however, are free for viewers of all ages to discover — and be haunted by — without breaking any rules.

Check out the list at our new gallery, and, as always, share your thoughts and favorites below.  Happy Halloween Week, everybody.

Sorry for the MIA. I’ve been back east all weekend and opted out of an Off the Carpet column this week because there’s just so little worth discussing. We’re in that pre-November lull of the season, after all. But one thing I wanted to address upon returning was a new, privately-designed one-sheet for “Drive” that absolutely nails the film.

The marketing for Nicolas Winding Refn’s film, which was distributed domestically by FilmDistrict, never seemed to wrap its head around the film’s atmosphere. Adopting the hot pink retro lettering of the film’s title sequence and slapping a hunky Ryan Gosling, shirt unbuttoned, staring into infinity, I guess they were looking to grab a female audience that wasn’t going to show up on their own. The film did well enough against its budget, but when you figure in marketing (a number that goes up and down depending on the source), it wasn’t a huge win. But they’ll tell you they’re happy with it.

Regardless, that’s not my point. The materials, from that one-sheet, to the out-of-context scene-grab outdoor campaign people in major metro areas saw, it just didn’t represent the cool of the film. Nor did it properly contextualize that cool, in my humble opinion.

One of the obvious touchstones for the film was Michael Mann’s “Thief.” When I asked Refn about the similarities between the two films at Comic-Con, he naturally backed off it by noting that the two stories are only comparable in that they belong to the genre of neo-noir, but it’s obvious there are more connections there. The way Refn films Los Angeles is unlike any other director’s vision since Mann, the story of a man and his work is very much at the center of all of Mann’s films but certainly a fixture of “Thief,” and the idea that that work defines the character even more than his dreams of breaking free of it.

“Drive” is a modern-day “Thief,” and Refn should own that. But hey, I get it.

In any case, this new poster reminded me of “Thief” very much, but more importantly, I think it captures the vibe, the loneliness, the retro-cool and the focused intensity of the film better than anything FilmDistrict managed.

Here is the poster, courtesy of Signalnoise. I’ve put it alongside the “Thief” one-sheet (one of the all-time greats) for a bit of comparison.

I’m not quite sure I get this. Maybe it could be considered savvy by the marketing standards like those overly praised for another film further down in this week’s round-up, but the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is protesting “Anonymous” by striking through the actor’s name on signs all over Warwickshire. Here’s hoping it has the effect they’re aiming for, and not the opposite. But boy is it getting nasty out there for this film. People have their claws out. There’s something so sacred about Shakespeare that the gall of a project like this is irking a great many. Just take a look at the op-ed sections this week. “Dogs and cats, living together. Mass hysteria!” [BBC]

The film’s star, Rhys Ifans, meanwhile, discusses his work therein and naturally gets hit up for some tid-bits on “The Amazing Spider-Man.” [Movieline]

Among other things, Brett Ratner talks the Oscars and his emcee for the show, Eddie Murphy. [Collider]

Andrew Niccol discusses his new film, a distant cousin to “Gattaca,” “In Time.” [Film School Rejects]

Once upon a time Steve Jobs tried to get Aaron Sorkin to write a Pixar film. Now Sorkin is front and center on a list of possible writers for the Apple honcho’s biopic. [24 Frames]

Sasha Stone unsurprisingly goes head-first into the tank for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” marketing. [Awards Daily]

Hobbits assemble! Ten years on, the stars of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” hold a reunion. [Empire]

The audience award at the Chicago Film Festival went to, yep, you guessed it, “The Artist.” [The Race]

One guy told Steve Pond that “The Help” could win Best Picture. So that got him thinking (on that and the possibility of “Midnight in Paris” winning). [The Odds]

George Clooney: Movie multi-tasker. [Speakeasy]

And one final note. Congrats to Guy for landing a stringer critic position at Variety. His first offering: a review of Salim Ahamed’s “Abu, Son of Adam.” [Variety]

The Hollywood Film awards were held tonight, marking the first awards ceremony of the season. All honorees were previously announced. George Clooney and Michelle Williams won top acting honors while the public-voted Hollywood Movie Award went to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.” Check out the full list of winners below.

Hollywood Movie Award: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”

Hollywood Producer Award: Letty Aronson, “Midnight in Paris”

Hollywood Director Award: Bennett Miller, “Moneyball”

Hollywood Actor Award: George Clooney, “The Descendants”

Hollywood Actress Award: Michelle Williams, “My Week with Marilyn”

Hollywood Supporting Actor Award: Christopher Plummer, “Beginners”

Hollywood Supporting Actress Award: Carey Mulligan, “Shame”

Hollywood Screenwriter Award: Diablo Cody, “Young Adult”

Hollywood Cinematographer Award: Emmanuel Lubezki, “The Tree of Life”

Hollywood Editor Award: Stephen Mirrione, “The Ides of March”

Hollywood Film Composer Award: Alberto Iglesias, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”

Hollywood Production Designer Award: James J. Murakami, “J. Edgar”

Hollywood Visual Effects Award: Scott Farrar, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”

Hollywood Animation Award: “Rango”

Hollywood Ensemble Cast Award: “The Help”

Hollywood Breakthrough Actor Award: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, “50/50”

Hollywood Breakthrough Director Award: Michel Hazanavicius, “The Artist”

New Hollywood Award: Felicity Jones, “Like Crazy”

Hollywood Spotlight Award: Shailene Woodley, “The Descendants”

Hollywood Career Achievement Award: Glenn Close

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

Today’s must-read piece comes from that most reliable source of must-read pieces, Mark Harris, who this time digs deep into the whats, hows and whys of Oscar’s screenplay awards. As he so snappily puts it, the Academy’s writers’ branch has “much the same taste as Academy members overall — only better.” It’s certainly the area where challenging indie and foreign-language films stand the greatest chance of recognition, and where sweeping juggernauts like “Avatar” (and to go further back in time, “The Sound of Music”) are most likely to come a cropper. As the high-gloss prestige films fight for their attention, will the writers once more stick up for the likes of “Take Shelter” and “A Separation?”  [Grantland]

Nathaniel Rogers gives me premature Christmas panic by predicting the Golden Globe musical/comedy nods. [The Film Experience]

Anne Thompson rounds up the scattered early reactions to the long-delayed “The Rum Diary.” [Thompson on Hollywood]

Tim Robey on our exciting, if curiously scrambled, introduction this year to Jessica Chastain. [The Telegraph]

The Playlist’s Gabe Toro tells Jeff Wells that “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” isn’t half bad. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

You know what deserves awards recognition in the sound categories? “We Need To Talk About Kevin.” Here’s why. [Framescourer]

Because I know Potter-heads appreciate every bit of recognition, the “Deathly Hallows” twins are going head-to-head at the BAFTA Children’s Awards. [BAFTA]

In a neat bit of thematic circularity, 1998 Best Picture champ “Shakespeare in Love” is heading to the London stage. [The Guardian]

The Academy won’t reveal the number of Best Picture nominees before announcing them. Well, why would they? [Awards Daily]

Will Ferrell wins the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. I’ve always thought of Twain and Ferrell as spiritual cousins. [New York Times]

Here’s some news to create a bit of breathing room in an already stacked Oscar race for Best Original Score: whatever happens, nine-time nominee Hans Zimmer will not be in it. The Hollywood Reporter reveals that the German-born composer, nominated the last two years running for “Sherlock Holmes” and “Inception,” has opted to sit out this year’s derby by refusing to personally enter any of his 2011 scores for consideration — as Academy rules require hopefuls in the category to do.

That’ll come as a surprise to the many pundits who were predicting a nomination for his playful, genre-referencing work on surefire Best Animated Feature nominee “Rango.” It also rules out the chance of further recognition for his jangly, gypsy-influenced sounds for the “Sherlock Holmes” franchise. (Ditto “Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Pirates of the Caribbean 4” and “The Dilemma,” but I don’t think the Oscar race is drastically altered for their absence.)

So, why is Zimmer choosing to pass on a potential tenth trip to the ball (and second Oscar statuette)? Well, as he tells the Reporter, he simply doesn’t feel up to it:

As soon as you get nominated, and I don”t care who you are – there are certainly people of better character than me – it all goes crazy… You get the phone call at five o”clock and after that you have to do the interviews and then do the parties and meet all these people and do all these things. It”s disruptive, and I think it would be more interesting to observe it for a year. It does worry me that we have to stay relevant. Times are changing, very rapidly. Usually what I do when things are changing rapidly is stand still and observe.

Fair enough, though his stance suggests awards are for individuals, not films — I’m sure the team behind “Rango,” for example, would be glad of any recognition the film can get, so Zimmer’s decision seems slightly hard on them. It would, of course, be quite possible to enter one’s work in the race and then not campaign at all. (Mo’Nique recently proved that you needn’t play the game to reap the rewards.)

Zimmer, in particular, is the kind of esteemed name in the branch who could get away with a silent campaign, though perhaps he doesn’t wish to risk being seen as a default nominee either. Anyway, here’s hoping he regains his taste for the race by the time “The Dark Knight Rises” (for which, he teases THR, he has composed much new material) rolls around.

“Haunting” is one of those go-to critical terms – handily covering all manner of atmospheric tangibles in one poster-friendly epithet – that I nonetheless avoid using whenever possible, particularly when reviewing films I”ve just seen. How can a film be declared “haunting” before it”s had time to haunt a person? To immediately provoke or upset is one thing; to haunt is to play a far longer game.

Which is to say that it”s not without due consideration that I describe Israeli-American video artist Alma Har”el debut feature “Bombay Beach,” a gloriously freeform documentary following a scattering of defiantly damaged souls around California”s Salton Sea, as, well, haunting.

It”s been over four months since I first saw Har”el”s bracing, taffeta-textured film, currently on release in New York and Los Angeles, and still I find isolated sounds and images from its rich scrapbook straying, of their own accord, into my memory: two teenagers staring impassively into the middle distance in dime-store carnival masks, a crew-cut tyke in a leotard rowing a beached boat to nowhere, the rosy-bleak shadows of the sunset on this none-more-desolate settlement.

Insistent though they are in my head, describing such individual snapshots doesn”t really do justice to the whole: it casts “Bombay Beach” as a shabby-chic coffee-table photo essay, a perception some will hang on Har”el”s own proficient background as a photographer and music-video director, when the film is, in its own warm-breeze manner, something far more penetrating and eccentric than that. It”s comparatively easy to gild the suffering of working-class misfits in this accidental American desert with Serious vérité technique, and it”d make for an eminently worthy film. A harder and more compelling task, however, is to coax out the joy in this compromised community – and that, with a mixture of human perceptiveness, resourceful intervention and a killer ear for music, is the road Har”el has taken.

Though her spry camera bobs and weaves around enough surrounding figures to qualify the film as a wider population portrait, Har”el structures her film at its base as a kind of revolving tri-character study, singling out three of the area”s generous living album of storied faces, all at different stages of long-term trouble, for particular scrutiny. The youngest is Benny, a sparky, hyperactive seven-year-old already on a bewildering cocktail of behavior-modifying drugs; the oldest is Red, a grizzled trailer-park geezer whose all-American lone-wolf image doesn”t much romanticize his grotesque bigotry. In between is CJ, a black teenage refugee from the L.A. ganglands whose dreams of a football scholarship mark him out as the film”s totem of hope.

So far, so bleak, but for all the despair (and occasional stabs of justified anger) the film conjures over these casualties of the interrupted American Dream, it rarely feels oppressive: partly because the Salton Sea itself, that bleached-out inland coast created a century ago by burst canal gates, is a location so mystically eerie it lends even the most mundane domestic action a gauze of magical realism, and partly because Har”el is more concerned with the emotional survival of her subjects than merely their hard-scrabble existence. Benny”s family may be broken-down in many practical ways, but it doesn”t want for connective tissue; Red may be a miserable old coot, but he”s made his peace with that long ago with surprisingly good humor.

Har”el”s filmmaking is disinclined to judge. Audaciously, however, it has fewer reservations about interacting: in its riskiest gambit, “Bombay Beach” blurs the line between documentary and performance art in rapturously choreographed scenes where townsfolk dance in the streets, with the film”s handpicked playlist including fresh tracks from Bob Dylan, as well as Beirut frontman Zach Condon (for whom Har”el has previously directed videos). This stylized segue into musical territory has displeased certain documentary purists, but there”s a spiritual authenticity, not to mention a collaborative spirit, to such sequences that make them a loyal counterpart to the film”s realities. “A doc can dance,” runs the slogan to the hardworking “Bombay Beach” Twitter feed; in this strange, moral and very special study of outcast America, behavior is defined by how we break it.

Once again, welcome to Cinejabber, your weekend soapbox space to discuss whatever’s on your mind, cinematically speaking, at the moment. I can’t say there’s much on mine: I took in my 40th film of the London Film Festival this morning (in addition to the 30-odd titles in the LFF programme I’ve seen elsewhere), and the cumulative effect is rather hazy. Say, are there any good plays on at the moment?

As you’ve may have noticed, the festival routine has caused me to fall way behind on my reviewing duties, so expect more reports (and an interview or two) even after the fest draws its curtains on Thursday. Among other festival treats, I enjoyed Alexander Payne’s witty, wide-ranging Screen Talk last night (even if I’m not that crazy about his latest — more on that another time), while tomorrow’s Surprise Film gets harder to pin down the closer I get to it. Possibilities vary in size and scale from “Hugo” to “Le Havre,” with “Tintin,” “My Week With Marilyn” and “Damsels in Distress” all seemingly in play; having just scored a ticket today, I’ll be happy with something I haven’t seen. (Selfish, I know.)   

As it stands, festival talk seems needlessly far-sighted when US moviegoers (okay, those in certain privileged areas) have access to two of the year’s very best films right now. Chances are you haven’t been hanging around our site very long if you aren’t yet aware of our feelings about “Martha Marcy May Marlene”: Sean Durkin’s superb art-horror debut bewitched me at Cannes in the spring (review here), and pleasingly, only got more slippery and ambiguous on a recent revisit. Kris, meanwhile, was no less impressed at Telluride. (Kris spoke to stars Elizabeth Olsen and John Hawkes earlier this week; my interview with Durkin will go up in the coming week.)

With the film having finally hit theaters yesterday, many of you can now share in (or perhaps question) our enthusiasm. I’m also curious to know how many of you have caught “Weekend,” a pitch-perfect British indie that’s been doing the rounds Stateside for a while now, but oddly, only made its home debut at the LFF last week. I plan eventually to write in more detail about Andrew Haigh’s wise, funny, exquisitely judged brief-encounter romance between two gay blokes in the East Midlands — perhaps my favorite discovery of the LFF so far — but feel free to start the conversation about it.

Or, indeed, about anything else. Over to you.

Film music composers are so often the most expendable element of a given project, it seems. They come, they go, and typically, someone is brought on very late in the game when we thought another composer was on the case.

That seems to be what’s up with Stephen Daldry’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” which has until now been noted as another collaboration with composer Nico Muhly (“The Reader”) for Daldry. As it turns out, Alexandre Desplat – perhaps the most prolific composer in the game — has been quietly working on the project. And his intrepid publicist just sent out a release reminding the media of this.

And it’s most certainly noteworthy. Earlier in the year Desplat put out quality work in Chris Weitz’s “A Better Life,” a score I really think deserves some attention. Meanwhile, I’ve been expecting him to get a much-deserved nomination for his work in George Clooney’s “The Ides of March,” one of the best scores of the year.

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” though we haven’t heard it yet, could figure in, too. He worked on Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” earlier this year, but his original compositions were largely overshadowed by the classical music used in the film. Meanwhile, he saddled back up to the Harry Potter franchise with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” but I remain confused from film to film what is original to each new installment. He also offered frothy music for Roman Polanski’s “Carnage,” though it didn’t stand out all that much.

I imagine Desplat was pretty close to a win last year for “The King’s Speech,” after racking up four nominations in five years. Perhaps he’ll be in the thick of it once again? I certainly hope so. The list of accomplishments since he burst onto the American film scene is massive: “Birth,” “The Queen,” “The Painted Veil,” “Lust, Caution,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Ghost Writer,” etc. Always unique, always quality, always worthy of being in the discussion.

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is still in post-production but is set for a limited release on Christmas Day.

“Oscar prospects, before anyone asks: probably nil. And yay for that.”

So I commented immediately after posting my review of Steve McQueen’s “Shame” following its unveiling at the Venice Film Festival, hoping to pre-emptively defuse a natural line of questioning on this site, without suggesting the film in any way fell short. Regular readers will know that I can be a bit snippy when quizzed about the future awards outlook for festival films, partly because I’m loath to think like a pundit at a world-cinema carnival, and partly because there are often too many unknowns for such speculation to be at all meaningful: critical approval only counts for so much with films with no distributor and no proven real-world audience.

For every festival sensation whose Oscar potential is immediately apparent (think Mo’Nique, whose recent Best Supporting Actress win seemed sewn up at Sundance a year before she even netted the nomination), there’s another that has to feel its way into the season. Certainly, nobody screamed “Best Picture!” when “The Hurt Locker” premiered at Venice a full 18 months before its Oscar-night triumph.

My instant ruling-out of “Shame” from the awards discussion wasn’t unconsidered: the film seemed at once too explicit and too internalized to speak to middlebrow awards voters, with McQueen’s rigid fine-art formalism the kind of reach even the Academy’s more adventurous directors’ branch hadn’t been making lately. (Hey, remember all that Oscar attention for McQueen and Fassbender’s even better first collaboration, “Hunger?” No?)

Then, of course, there was the question of the film’s NC-17 rating: what season-practised distributor was going to take a chance on a severe auteur piece with that marketing millstone around his neck? As a fellow critic and I spotted Harvey Weinstein hurriedly exiting the screening hall, we both puzzled over the notion that the film could even be within spitting distance of a deal with the mogul’s outfit.

Of course, we’ll never know how close it came. Days later came the news that the film had been courageously picked up by Fox Searchlight: an acquisition that, together with the studio’s purchase of Terrence Malick’s divisive tone poem “The Tree of Life” and chilly Sundance art-horror “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” suggested a conscious move away from the heart-led, crowdpleasing fare on which they built their reputation. (That said, Searchlight also have Alexander Payne’s cosy laughing-through-the-tears dramedy “The Descendants,” so perhaps they’re just smartly covering their bases.) 

Searchlight’s adoption of “Shame” didn’t quite prompt me to reverse my diagnosis: the studio has enough arrows in its quiver that it can afford to take on a few hard-sell prestige items for the principal purpose of classing up their brand, not necessarily earning awards attention. (I’m aware, of course, of a certain previous risky Searchlight purchase out of Venice, whose Oscar chances I also shrugged off initially — but given the impossibility of “Shame” matching “Black Swan”‘s astonishing box-office tally of $107 million, you’ll forgive me if I don’t draw a parallel just yet.) 

But this intriguing Hollywood Reporter piece on the studio’s planned campaign for the film — in which they bullishly announce that they’re going not only for a Best Actor nod for current It-guy Michael Fassbender, but Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actress and Cinematography too — has given me some pause.

Obviously, scoring all those nominations must be regarded as something of a pipe dream — I’ll believe in the Academy’s across-the-board enthusiasm for NC-17-rated erotic character studies when I see it — but the seriousness with which the studio is taking this challenge does make me wonder if Fassbender could be the beneficiary of the film’s growing upscale buzz, particularly in a year when he could hardly have been more ubiquitous. (Michael Shannon has held the passion-vote indie spot in my predicted Best Actor list for months now; he may well cede his spot to another Michael next week.)

Whether or not Searchlight’s gutsy campaign pays off, the most exciting thing about it is the unusual way they’re embracing the film’s NC-17 rating — using it as a springboard to generate audience curiosity about the film and its tricky subject matter. Says Searchlight president Steve Gilula to the Reporter:

“I think NC-17 is a badge of honor, not a scarlet letter. We believe it is time for the rating to become usable in a serious manner. The sheer talent of the actors and the vision of the filmmaker are extraordinary. It’s not a film that everyone will take easily, but it certainly breaks through the clutter and is distinctive and original. It’s a game changer… I think Shame’s profile will pique people’s curiosity. I’m optimistic this will be a significant film and change the attitude of people toward this kind of subject matter.”

This, of course, is the mature approach that more in the industry — and indeed, the public — need to take toward this rating. The commercial stigma attached to the NC-17 rating speaks to a curiously antiquated prudishness in the US market: it’s hardly a social or moral transgression to suggest that certain sights and subjects are unsuitable for children, accompanied or otherwise. The UK’s equivalent 18 rating (which “Shame” will surely get, denying access to all minors with or without a guardian) is handed out with relative frequency to mainstream and arthouse films without anyone raising an eyebrow. 

It’ll be a long road to that level of acceptance for the blighted NC-17 rating, but a Best Picture Oscar nominee that wears it proudly would go some way towards bringing it into the light. I remain sceptical that Searchlight will clear that particular hurdle this year, but it’s good to see them making a run at it.

Welcome to Oscar Talk.

In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, your one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty of things change en route to Oscar’s stage and we’re here to address it all as it unfolds.

Today Anne and I are joined by In Contention’s own Guy Lodge who is knee-deep in the London Film Festival these days, catching up on a number of titles he missed along the festival circuit. And, of course, he caught a certain highly anticipated film that’s opening in the UK next week. Let’s see what’s on the docket today…

We start off today with the awards news of the week: the Gotham Award nominees, which were announced yesterday. We go back and forth on the relevance of the awards in the season, the meaning of “indie” and the surprising snubs throughout.

The Gotham Awards will take place on November 28, which is the date the New York Film Critics Circle has decided this week to stake out as their date for voting, which puts them out front of the National Board of Review and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. We discuss the implications and the motivations of the move.

Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” is set for release in the UK next week and Guy has plenty to say on that. He caught the film last weekend and was surprised how taken he was by it.

Speaking of which, Guy has caught up with a number of films at the London Film Festival that he’s missed along the festival circuit, particularly a number of the foreign language film contenders. He waxes on about those for a bit.

And finally, reader questions. We address queries concerning the foreign films aiming for other nominations, the animated feature category and its contenders as well as the idea of a “line” on a film coming to identify it early on.

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

“London’s Burning” courtesy of The Clash and CBS Records.
“The Adventure Continues” courtesy of John Williams and Sony Classical (UK).