If I Picked the Winners: Best Picture 2010

     A few days before the 83rd annual Academy Awards, I thought it would be appropriate to rank the big kahuna of the Oscars: Best Picture. In the second year of the ten nominees experiment, I would still say it is a success, with a wide range of movies, although the diversity of films in this year's nominees isn't as great as last year. In this year's group, we have the expected dramatic fare ("The Social Network", "Black Swan", "127 Hours", "The Fighter") and period pieces ("The King's Speech", "True Grit"), but we also have an independent film ("Winter's Bone"), an animated film ("Toy Story 3"), a comedy ("The Kid's Are All Right"), and an action/fantasy film ("Inception").  It's a pretty good batch, without any obvious stinkers such as "The Blind Side" was last year, but there is also a lot of mediocrity on display. Many of the film's would be on my own personal ballot, but there were some key snubs that I would have liked to see on the list. First and foremost,  I would have loved to see the British "Another Year" make the cut. At the beginning of the Oscar season, it was commonly on the Best Picture list of many Oscar prognosticators, but as time went on, unfortunately the film was pushed aside for the buzz of bigger Hollywood fare. Had the film managed a more fully funded Oscar campaign, I wonder if it could have managed a nomination, but alas it was not to be. I would have also included the misunderstood and underappreciated "Shutter Island". It had an outside chance of getting in, but it just had too many critics to be a Best Picture nominee. Had it captured the nomination, it would have made Scorsese/DiCaprio 4 for 4 in terms of Best Picture nominations, but all good streaks must come to an end. Finally, if I had a ballot I would have also included "The American" and "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World", but they never really had a realistic shot at a nomination. It's time now to deal with the group we have, and rank this year's Best Picture nominees.

News: Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio Team Up Again

     I thought I would just pass on the news that both Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have officially signed on to turn Jordan Belfort's autobiographical book "The Wolf of Wall Street" into a film. The book apparently chronicles Belfort's highly illegal rise to the top of the financial business world during the 1980's and 1990's, as well as his lavish lifestyle, before it came to a halting crash when the con-man was discovered for who he was, becoming banned from the securities business. If the film is completed, it will be the fifth collaboration between the actor and director who have brought us some of the best film's of the last decade (although it would still be three films short of the eight collaborations between Scorsese and De Niro). It sounds like interesting enough subject matter, and with Scorsese and DiCaprio involved, it is a film that will definitely be on my radar.

If I Picked the Winners: Best Supporting Actor 2010

     Quite often the Best Supporting Actor category is the most competitive race in the Oscars. Not only between the nominees, but even just to get nominated, it takes a lot of talent and buzz, as the deserving list of possible nominees quite often goes into double digits. I'm not sure why this is, maybe it has something to do with the fact that protagonists are more often straight-and-narrow characters that the audience can sympathize, while the supporting characters are allowed to be more colorful and grandiose, but whatever the reason, quite often the most memorable performance of the year is given by a supporting actor. Just looking at the last three years anecdotally, the winners (Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men", Heath Ledger in "The Dark Knight", and Chistophe Waltz in "Inglorious Bastards") have all been some of the top performances of the decade. While maybe not quite as impressive as some of the previous years, this year's lineup is nothing to scoff at, featuring a fine field of wide-ranging characters and performances. Particularly, it was nice to see Christian Bale and Mark Ruffalo receive their overdue first Oscar nominations. There is one big absence though that should have made this category, performances from "The Social Network". In fact, I may have been inclined to include three different male performances from the film in the Best Supporting Actor category: Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker, and Armie Hammer as the Winklevoss twins. My personal favorite of the three performances is actually Justin Timberlake, who either by his own nature or acting talents perfectly captures the arrogant yet cowardly nature of the geek-chic Sean Parker. The one performance that had the best chance at getting nominated, but unfortunately slipped through the cracks was Andrew Garfield's wonderfully distraught performance as the betrayed friend of Mark Zuckerberg. And it was probably Armie Hammer's spectacular effects-assisted performance as not one, but two human beings, the Harvard gentlemen Winklevi (as Zuckerberg referred to them), that was actually generating the most buzz in the online community. I would have settled for anyone of them, but unfortunately as the  awards season tide began to turn against "The Social Network", these three fine performances were left in the dust. The one other performance that may have made my own personal ballot is Vincent Cassel as the Balanchine-inspired Thomas Leroy, head of protagonist Nina Sayers' ballet company. It's a captivating role and the pressure and tension he puts on Nina is the catalyst for her journey into the dark recesses of her mind. All in all, while I would have left out one or two of the nominees, it is a decent group that the Academy can hold it's head-up for. Now to the rankings.

Review: Blue Valentine

     Relationships can be a tough battle. As much as one person may truly love another, it's impossible to get around the fact that we are all ultimately just using each other. When one human being begins to count on and derive pleasure from another human being, it becomes impossible not to build expectations for one another, as we begin to see the other person as who we think and want them to be instead of who they truly are. I think Nirvana's "Come As You Are" sums it up best in the opening lines of the song: "Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be". As crude and cold as that may sound to some, I think it is the unavoidable truth, and for the most part, it works to everyone's benefit. Enjoying the presence of the ones you love is one of things that make life great, but when an individual becomes too dependent on another for their happiness, not able to enjoy life on its own terms, many serious problems can result, including pushing away the one you love the most. This unfortunate circumstance is what is painfully chronicled in Derek Cianfrance's "Blue Valentine".

News: Christopher Nolan's Post-Batman Project

     We're still about a year and a half outside of the last Batman film in the Nolan trilogy, but even before "The Dark Knight Rises" begins shooting, speculation about Nolan's next project is all over the world wide web. This weekend, rumors began to surface that Nolan might return to his script about Howard Hughes. Sometime in the early 2000's, before "Batman Begins", Christopher Nolan had written a script based on the life of the eccentric mogul, but when the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio Howard Hughs bio-pic "The Aviator" made its way into movie theaters, Nolan shelved the idea. Nolan has called the script the best work he has ever done, and now that some years have passed since the Scorsese/DiCaprio collaboration, apparently Nolan wants to go back to it. From what is known, the two films will actually be quite different, for while "The Aviator" covered the early years of Hughes life and ended as he was losing his marbles, Nolan's film apparently will be almost exclusively covering Hughes later years when he was a shut-in at some Vegas hotel, paranoid that the FBI was after him. Back when Nolan was originally planning to shoot the film, he was planning to have Jim Carrey star in the role, but there is no word if that is still the case. Whoever he gets to star as Hughes, I glad he has decided to go back to the project. By the time the film is released, it will likely have been over a decade since "The Aviator", and if the two films really do cover different periods of the man's life, it wouldn't matter anyway. Nolan has proven himself to be a great shaman when it comes to dealing with aspects of the mind, and his perspective on the insanity of Howard Hughes is almost certain to be another classic in his already great filmography.

Review: Another Year

     I have come out as a pretty strong anti-realist in terms of cinema in many an article on this blog. I have explained my view that films are an unique art form where the use of controlling moving images along with combinations of other influences (music as one example) give an artist an unlimited tool bag to express their emotions and ideas, and by trying to capture some non-existent "real" of the everyday, the artist not only limits the potential of the medium, but fails to capture the overarching theme of life itself: emotions. The thing is though, while I steadfastly hold on to these beliefs, there is no genre that is in and of itself, by definition, bad. In general, one genre may have its weakness and I am okay with characterizing the genre as such, but a good artist is a good artist, and their are always ways to overcome any artistic challenge (such as amazing insight). My preferences though led me be somewhere quite significantly less than excited to see Mike Leigh's "Another Year", which from the trailers look to be a heavy-handed exercise in realist cinema, but to my pleasant surprise what I saw instead was an insightful character study of a certain type of lonely older-middle-age personality that is all too common in life.

If I Picked the Winners: Best Adapted Screenplay 2010

     The Adapted Screenplay tends to be where the heavy hitters are every year in the writing awards. If you look throughout the history of the Oscars, the Best Picture winner, and a fair share of the nominees as well, tend to come from the Adapted category, not the Original category. I'm not sure why this is. It just may be that coming up with a great original story is so much significantly harder than repurposing one already told for the sake of cinema, but whatever the cause, the Adapted race is usually where it is at in terms of predicting the Best Picture (not that they are necessarily better than the Original Screenplays though). This year's nominees is a fairly good slate, with some big names (including three past winners in the category), as well as a duet of newcomers. All of the scripts are from films I generally liked, although I was a bit disappointed with one of the screenplays. Even though I was not surprised it failed to receive a nomination, it was disappointing that the Academy did not make room for Laeta Kalogridis' adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel "Shutter Island". Lehane has served as one of the leading literary inspirations for filmmakers of the last decade along with J.K Rowling and that lady who writes the Twilight series (sorry, I don't care enough to look up her name, something Meyer I think), as his novels-turned-into-films such as "Mystic River" and "Gone Baby Gone" helped set off the 2000's Boston Cinema Renaissance. Kalogridis' adaptation of "Shutter Island" may be the best adaptation of Lehane's work so for. In particular, the film's closing line, "Which would be worst, to live as a monster or die as a good man?", which was not in the book, puts a whole new interesting spin on the story. In my own personal ballot, I would have also included Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall for their wonderful adaptation of the comic book, "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World", but since I don't have a say, I guess it's all a moot point. This is a good slate of nominees though, so let's get to the ranking.