If I Picked the Winners: Best Director 2010

     It might not be as fun or sexy as counting down my 100 favorite films, but to replace the countdown weekly column, I am bringing back the "If I Picked the Winners" weekly column. If you didn't read any of the previous installments in these articles, the idea behind them is that I pick one of the "big 8" Oscar categories (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay) in a year where I have seen all the nominees in that category, and rank them, from my least favorite to my favorite. The fun thing about this as a writer (and hopefully for you readers too) is that, given that the Academy's batting average is below 1.000 in my book I get to write about both films I really love, and films I can't stand. Now since we are currently in the middle of an Oscar season, I thought I would start off this reboot by covering all the "big 8" categories of this year's nominees. Admittedly, I still need to see a few films that are nominated in these categories (4 to be precise: "Animal Kingdom", "Another Year", "Blue Valentine", and "Buitiful"), but I am definitely planning to catch these films within the next eight weeks, so I think we should be set.

     For the first week back, and seeing how this blog is called auteurfan, I figured I would start with this year's Best Director race (which you can vote on at the poll to the left). Frankly, this year's Best Director race is just as much about who is not there as who is. In particular, for the second time in three years, the director's branch of the Academy somehow managed to leave out one of the leading auteurs in the business today, Mr. Christopher Nolan. Now I am not totally in love with Nolan's "Inception" like some are, I found it to rely too heavily on it's concept to do the heavy lifting, but even though it did not quite live up to my lofty expectations, it is still one of the better films of the year and Nolan deserved to be part of this group. You would think that, after the travesty of leaving him out of the Best Director's race in 2008 for the masterpiece that was "The Dark Knight" (which along with a Best Picture snub, caused the Academy to change it's nominating process and the amount of nominees in the Best Picture category), they might throw Nolan a bone and give him a nomination this time. Apparently not though, as the members of the director's branch of the Academy clearly have something about Nolan or his films that they can't embrace. I don't know if Nolan's films are too populace and not artistic enough for this crowd (they did manage to leave out Steven Spielberg of the Best Director's race in 1975 when he broke on to the scene with the all-time classic "Jaws"), but whatever it is, I sure don't understand it. At least Nolan is in good company this year though. Danny Boyle, who just received an Oscar for his last effort, "Slumdog Millionaire" (an overrated film in my opinion), was left out for his excellent work in one of my favorite films of the year, "127 Hours". Meanwhile, one of the all-time greats, Martin Scorsese, is also absent from this year's list for his under-appreciated "Shutter Island". Of course, there were many deserving nominated directors as well though, as this year's nominees read as a playlist of some of the most influential auteurs working in the business today. The question is then, out of all the big names, who is the most deserving of the award?

Notes: A Few Changes

     I just thought I would make everyone aware that, since the countdown of my 100 favorite films seemed to be really popular, I made a separate archive just for those articles. This way, if you ever felt like reading a write-up of one of the films again, or maybe if you wanted to rent one of the films but couldn't remember it's name, it will be easier to find and scan these articles. Also, I have added a poll to the left that I am planning to change about every week. This week's poll is on who you think should (not will) win this year's Oscar for Best Director, so go ahead and pick your favorite out of the five nominees.

News: The Guilds Put "The King's Speech" in the Driver's Seat

     You have probably heard this by now, but just in case you haven't, both the Director's Guild of America (DGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) gave their top prizes to Tom Hooper's "The King's Speech". This all but assures it of winning Best Picture come Oscar night, and it looks more and more like Tim Hooper will win Best Director too. As I said before, I think this is a real shame. It's not that "The King's Speech" is a terrible film, I would say it is a moderate to slightly good film, but "The Social Network" is a terrific film (it made #86 on my all-time list) that is leaps and bounds ahead of the stereo-typical, most agreeable to everyone, "The King's Speech". I can't help but feel that this is somewhat of a reactionary move due to the overwhelming praise "The Social Network" has received from critics, and that seems to be the paradigm of modern media and it's audience: Build something up, and then when you tire of it, tear it down. I'm sure there are many Academy members who simply like "The King's Speech" better than "The Social Network", but I do wonder if you could take all the members out of the media bubble and let them view each movie on their own terms, if "The Social Network" would not still win. In the end, obviously the Academy is an arbitrary organization whose opinions don't mean anymore than the opinions of anyone else, and this definitely wouldn't be the first time the Academy has awarded mediocrity over excellence, but I can't help but be a little disappointed if "The King's Speech" beats "The Social Network" come Oscar night.

Top 100: 10-1

     Well, it's come down to the best of the best. My Top Ten greatest movies of all-time (and if you have missed any of the previous weeks leading up to this conclusion, check out what you missed by using the following weeks: 100-91, 90-81, 80-71, 70-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-31, 30-21, 20-11). I am kind of sad to be finishing my countdown, as I have really enjoyed writing about my favorite films, and I hope you have enjoyed reading about them (and hopefully seeing some of them you hadn't seen) just as much (although that might depend on whether your favorite film ending up making my list). At some point, when I feel I have seen enough new movies that would make my list, or if my opinion has changed enough, I will probably update the list. In fact, while writing this list, I have already seen one film that would have definitely made my Top 100, Robert Altman's 1970 classic, "M*A*S*H", but it will likely be some time before I have seen enough great new films to merit updating my list.

     This week's films are mostly straight-up dramas, although there are three-ish comedies. I use the suffix "ish" because with the exception of one full fledged comedy starring my favorite comedian, there are two other films that are probably comedies, but both have dramatic undertones to them. For auteurs, there is a third appearance from one of the original greats, and the fifth appearance from my all-time favorite director. One director also makes two appearances on this week's list (his only two overall), but I won't say his name to keep things interesting a little bit longer. Finally, in terms of decades, my Top 10 is big on films from the 1960's and 1970's, with four out of the ten films from the 60's and three out of the ten films from the 70's.

     Before I begin talking about the movies, I want to make to quick a few quick notes. First, I realize that unless you have an account with google, it is very difficult to leave a message in the comments section. It is something I want to fix when I get a little more free time, but in the meantime, here is how you can leave a message if you don't have a google account.

     If you have an email address at say Yahoo for example, what you can do is type whatever you want in the comments section, and then where it says select profile, use the bottom option of OpenID. A pop up window will come up, and in the example where your email address is with Yahoo, you would simple type www.yahoo.com in the window. Then hit post comment, and it will ask you to do one of those stupid security things where you have to match some weird looking word. After that, your comment will be posted. I really want to hear some of your favorite films that didn't make my list, so if you have enjoyed these articles, I would really appreciate hearing from you.

     Finally, for anyone wanting to take a look of the complete list in its entirety, at the bottom of the article will be the complete list, one to one-hundred. Also, starting next week I will be replacing this weekly article with the "If I Picked the Winners" weekly article I was writing before. The idea behind this article is a pick one of the "big 8" Oscar categories from some year and rank the nominees from my least favorite to my favorite. I am going to restart this article by ranking all of this years "big 8" categories, although there is still a film or two I need to see for some categories. Enough with the preliminaries, is time to finish this. On with the countdown!

News: The 2010 Oscar Nominees

     The day has finally come, and we have our 2010 Oscar nominees (check out the full list of nominees here). In terms of most nominations, "The King's Speech" leads the way with 12 nominations, while "True Grit" came in second with 10 nominations, and "The Social Network" and "Inception" coming in tied for third with 8 nominations. So what are the big stories of the day?

     For me personally, I was most excited about two things. First, I was extremely happy to see John Hawkes get nominated for Best Supporting Actor for "Winter's Bone". Hawkes gives the best performance out of anyone I have seen in the category (and outside of Jessie Eisenberg in "The Social Network", he gave the best performance of any actor in any category in my opinion). The second thing, which is a little stupid and prideful (but what the hey), is how well I did on my predictions (click here to take a look and compare them to the actual nominees). In the "big 8" categories, I was 41 for 45 (only if I had went with my gut and picked Javier Bardem and John Hawkes), including nailing Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay, and got 85 0f 105 overall, including correctly guessing Best Film Editing and Best Cinematography.

     The biggest news you are going to hear on the web though, is about Christopher Nolan's absence in the Best Director category, who was likely replaced by the Coens who received their third Best Director nomination. Most people had Nolan in, and were predicting David O. Russell to be kicked out by the someone if there was going to be a surprise, but I correctly picked Nolan's absence because for some stupid reason, the directors branch of the Academy seems to have something against him. If they weren't going to nominate him for "The Dark Knight", one of the greatest films of all-time (it made #25 on my list), I didn't think they would nominate him for the lesser "Inception", which is too bad, because out of the directors who had a realistic shot at a nomination, he definitely deserved to be on there.

     The biggest news after that is probably the 11th competing Best Picture film that did not get in, "The Town". If you read my review (and if you haven't click here), you'll know I wasn't a very big fan of the stereo-typical action/drama pic, so I was happy to see it not get in. Especially at the cost of "127 Hours" (check out my review), which, after "The Social Network", was my favorite film this year.

     To sum up my feelings on the nominations, click the read more button below and see my bullet point dissection of the nominees into "Good" and "Bad".

Predicting the Nominees: Everything in its Right Place

     Back in late October when I first started this blog, I took a stab at predicting this year's Oscar nominations (click here to check them out). Now that the nominations are finally going to be upon us tomorrow, I thought I would give a more informed (but not necessarily more accurate) guess at what the Academy will deem award worthy this year. Last time I only predicted the "big 8" (Picture, Director, the four acting awards, and the two writing awards), but this time, despite my utter lack of expertise in some categories, I will be attempting to predict every single category. First, I will give brief analysis on the bigger categories and then, if your just interested in taking a quick look through the predictions, at the bottom of the article I will list my complete 2010 Academy Award predictions. Also note, the film or person ranked number one on my predictions will be the person that I am expecting to win the category as of now, but after the nominations come out and before Oscar night, I will make official winner predictions. Here goes nothing!

News: And We Have a Race. The Producers Guild of America Names "The King's Speech" Best Picture

     At this point, it seemed like an inevitability. "The Social Network" has won almost every single solitary "Best Picture" award given out this year, but last night, the Producers Guild of America (PGA) put the brakes on the unstoppable train that was "The Social Network" by giving "The King's Speech" its Best Picture award. The reason why the PGA awards are so important as an Oscar precursor is for two reasons. First, the producers branch of the Academy is fairly large and the cross-over between the two branches is significant. Secondly, and more importantly, when the Oscars switched over their Best Picture award to ten nominees where the winner is decided by a confusing preferential ballot system (click here to read the details if you're interested), the PGA followed and adopted the same process. This means the more bland, milquetoasty "The King's Speech" may upset "The Social Network" because, even though "The Social Network" has a more passionate fanbase, "The King's Speech" may be more generally agreeable to everyone. I'm guessing especially for the Academy's older voters, who may be turned off by the fast-paced dialogue, and younger characters and subject matter (that new fangled Facebook), the great achievement that is "The Social Network" may pass them by (and if this happens, yet another reason the Academy should consider an upper age-limit in my half-joking opinion). Let me go on record now, if "The King's Speech" beats "The Social Network" come Oscar night, in the years to come, it will be another "the Oscars did what?!" moment that will only help to reinforce the view of the Oscars as a stuffy awards body with the inability to award influential films over generic prestige films. Until that time though, there will sure be a lot of heated discussion about what will win, and for anyone who puts money down on Oscar ballots, filling out your ballot just got that more stressful.