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Oscar predictions for the films of 2012

This should be Affleck’s. Or maybe Kathyrn Bigelow’s for Zero Dark Thirty. Neither were even nominated.

This is what I thought before the Oscar nominations came out: Lincoln would win Best Picture and Ben Affleck would win Best Director. Then Affleck inexplicably wasn’t even nominated for Best Director, though he was for Best Actor; he subsequently won Best Director in the Golden Globes, and more importantly, the Directors’ Guild. Now I’ve pretty much switched the two places. The picks here are who I THINK will win, not who I WANT; sometimes, such as in the Best Actress category, I haven’t seen enough of the performances to have a rooting interest.

* means I saw that movie

Best Actor:

Bradley Cooper – Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis – Lincoln
*Hugh Jackman – Les Miserables
Joaquin Phoenix – The Master
Denzel Washington – Flight

If there is a mortal lock this year, it’s Day-Lewis, who BECOMES Lincoln, just as he has inhabited every other role he’s played.

Best Actress

Jessica Chastain – Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva – Amour
Quvenzhané Wallis – Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Naomi Watts -The Impossible

Riva is old, not that well known and in a depressing movie, though she’s quite good. Wallis was SIX when she made HER movie. Watts just isn’t getting as much buzz as I would expect. So it’s between Chastain, reportedly good in a controversial film, and Lawrence, who was a blockbuster star this past year in The Hunger Games. I pick Lawrence.

Best Supporting Actor

Alan Arkin – Argo
Robert De Niro -Silver Linings Playbook
Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Master
*Tommy Lee Jones – Lincoln
Christoph Waltz – Django Unchained

My personal favorite of the three I saw was Arkin. The smart money says Jones. I think the Academy will give Django something, and this may be the place. Yet it’s De Niro I’m going to pick because he’s DE NIRO.

Best Supporting Actress

Amy Adams -The Master
Sally Field – Lincoln
Anne Hathaway – Les Miserables
Helen Hunt – The Sessions
*Jacki Weaver – Silver Linings Playbook

Anne Hathaway, who emoted greatly, is another mortal lock. Wish I’d seen the Hunt role.

Best Director

Steven Spielberg – Lincoln
Ang Lee – Life Of Pi
Michael Haneke – Amour
*David O. Russell -Silver Linings Playbook
Benh Zeitlin – Beasts Of The Southern Wild

This should be Affleck’s. Or maybe Kathyrn Bigelow’s for Zero Dark Thirty. Neither were even nominated, nor was Tarantino for Django; I’m really surprised Haneke and Zeitlen were. The only person other than Spielberg who has a chance is Lee, and that only if people saw it in 3D, rather than the 2D screeners Academy voters likely got.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Argo
Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Life Of Pi
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook

Lincoln or Argo? My preference is Argo, but my guess is Lincoln.

Best Original Screenplay

Amour
Django Unchained
Flight
Moonrise Kingdom (my review)
Zero Dark Thirty

Does this go to the movie about torture (ZDT) or Tarentino’s movie about slavery (Django)? I’m pulling for Moonrise Kingdom myself, but I’m guessing Zero.

Other picks:

Best Animated Feature Film: *Wreck-It Ralph (my review) over Brave
Best Cinematography: *Life Of Pi, another near-lock
Best Documentary: Searching For Sugar Man. I’ve seen none of them, but this one I know the story about an obscure US musician who hits it big in South Africa without even knowing it.
Best Film Editing: *Argo over Zero Dark Thirty
Best Foreign Film: *Amour. Mortal lock. A Best Picture nominee.
Best Makeup: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey over *Les Miserables
Best Original Song: Skyfall, because it was, Adele.
Best Short Film (Animated): *Paperman, because Disney was smart to make it widely available online and as the tease to Wreck-It Ralph. *Adam and Dog is lovingly rendered in watercolor, but it left me cold. Could win, I suppose.
Best Visual Effects: *Life Of Pi, deservedly so
The rest of the categories: I have no idea.

Best Picture (links to my reviews), with box office (from Box Office Mojo), and release date

Amour $4,081,541 12/19/2012
Argo $127,654,188 10/12/2012
Beasts of the Southern Wild $12,306,988 6/27/2012
Django Unchained $157,656,712 12/25/2012
Les Misérables $145,963,845 12/25/2012
Life of Pi $111,745,023 11/21/2012
Lincoln $176,962,546 11/9/2012
Silver Linings Playbook $100,870,102 11/16/2012
Zero Dark Thirty $89,047,400 12/19/2012

Argo was taut, interesting, and not too long. Its campaign has been excellent.. I don’t remember so many good box office films up for Best Pic in a while.
***
Predictions by The Huffington Post and Roger Ebert.

MOVIE REVIEWS: Oscar-nominated short animated films

From France, Dripped is about an art thief who really loves his work.

It’s rare that The Daughter has gone to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany; in fact, I’m not sure she’d EVER been there. While it is the preferred film venue for the Wife and me, it often has films not suitable for sensitive eight-year-olds. But the ads said that the films nominated for Academy Awards in the animated shorts category were “family-friendly.” This is useful to know because we saw last year’s entries, and A Morning Stroll most certainly NOT Daughter-friendly, to say the least.

On Washington’s Birthday – which was when the Wife and I went last year; a holiday tradition? – the three of us sojourned to the cinema. In previous years, they just showed the movies, but this year, there were interspersed conversations with William Joyce and Brandon Oldenberg, who created last year’s well-deserved winner, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore [watch it]. In fact, one of these guys looked a bit like Lessmore. They talked about the struggle to get their film made and the surreality of Oscar night.

Maggie Simpson in The Longest Daycare

The youngest character in the long-running show I used to watch for the first eight or nine seasons, but seldom since then. It was interesting enough for the Wife and me, though the Daughter missed out on the significance of the Ayn Rand School for Toddlers; she liked the ending, though. The piece was OK, not distinct enough to be Oscar-worthy, though; my wife’s third favorite film of the bunch.

Adam and Dog

This retelling of the Creation is beautifully rendered as lovely watercolors. The sound of walking on the grass was terrific. There’s a guy whose opinion I value who said it was the best picture of the bunch, and he may be right. Yet the latter part of the story left me cold.

Fresh Guacomole [watch it]

Two minutes of stop motion zaniness is fun. My wife’s second-favorite of the films; third for the Daughter and me.

Head Over Heels

This is my second-favorite, and the Daughter’s. It’s from the UK, and uses quality Claymation to show a middle-aged couple whose relationship is in trouble because of the husband’s difficulties with gravity. Will they find a way to save the relationship?

Paperman [watch it]

Yet the Daughter and I still liked this seven-minute Disney offering the best, though we had seen it before; it was my wife’s favorite, and it was new to her. It looks old-fashioned in that it is hand-drawn, and in black and white (except for red lipstick); it is quite romantic.

(Another set of opinions.)

To fill out the program, there were three shorts that were “highly commended”:

Abiogenesis

From New Zealand, it’s another Creation story. But this art is computer-generated, and the story is futuristic. I wasn’t engaged until the very end.

Dripped

From France, it’s about an art thief who really loves his work. It’s surreal and manages to work several art styles – impressionism, cubism, abstract – into the storyline. “Dedicated to the memory of Jackson Pollock,” one has to think Pollock would have approved. This piece should have been a contender for the prize instead of Maggie Simpson.

The Gruffalo’s Child

The only piece with dialogue, and by far the longest short at 27 minutes, it is a CGI piece. It’s a follow-up, I understand, to a 2009 BBC Christmas special The Gruffalo. It’s nicely rendered and shares a message about the power of legends. It made my daughter a little nervous, though no cartoon animals were really harmed. Here’s a review.

One other point: both Adam and Dog, and, to a much lesser extent, Dripped, had men with full-frontal male nudity, and their members were obliquely rendered; it was actually distracting.

MOVIE REVIEW: Amour

Georges becomes Eva’s primary caretaker for a time, trying to hide the degree of her deteriorating condition.

My wife asked after we saw Amour at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany Sunday, whether I thought Emmanuelle Riva was embarrassed being partially nude when she played Anne, a woman in need of being cleaned by others in the movie Amour. I quipped “Nah, she’s French!” In fact, and I did not know this at the time, she had appeared in the erotic 1959 art house film Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

Still, I was wondering how awful Anne, the character, must have felt at the indignity. Anne was a proud woman, an accomplished piano teacher. In an early scene, we see Anne beaming as she and her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an older couple, sit in an audience watching her former student Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud) perform.

Soon, though, Anne suffers a stroke that paralyzes her on one side. She is adamant; no hospital for her! So Georges becomes her primary caretaker for a time, trying to hide the degree of her deteriorating condition from their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), not to mention their annoying British son-in-law. Ultimately, though, Georges is forced to get some outside help, which is difficult for them both.

More than the story itself, which is well-acted, but ultimately depressing as hell, I started thinking about how one does deal with being the caretaker of an aging and ailing parent or spouse, or how one would feel being the one cared for. This movie may be a how-to NOT do so. One of the POSITIVE reviews in Rotten Tomatoes, by Tom Long, says: “In many ways, it’s the best horror film I’ve ever seen. At the same time, it’s hard to recommend; I believe I will be struggling to forget this film as long as I live. I doubt I’ll succeed.” Other comments read along similar paths.

Amour is nominated for Best Picture and Best Foreign Film -it’s in French with subtitles. It’s worth seeing, I reckon, but I shan’t watch it again.

Love, Actually

When I deigned to come up with Songs That Move Me a few years back, God Only Knows was #1.

Yeah, yeah, we should always tell people we love them, and we shouldn’t need to a day to do so. Blah, blah, blah. Just like Thanksgiving should be the only day we should give thanks. Except we DON’T always give thanks or show love. We get too busy or take each other for granted.

I have a very small family. My parents are deceased. My wife and each of my two sisters have but one daughter each. I feel as though it is necessary to tell them all, as well as my friends, how much I care for them.

I don’t know if I mentioned how much I like the website Pantheon Songs, which is attempting to create “a fictional Pantheon in which only the best songs will be included.” And only one song per band! Sometimes I agree, sometimes not.

His choice for the Beach Boys was spot on: God Only Knows. When I deigned to come up with Songs That Move Me a few years back, God Only Knows was #1. Of course, it’s my favorite Beach Boys song.

Those of you who have seen the movie Love Actually – here’s the trailer – will recall that God Only Knows plays at a pivotal late scene. The quality of this video is not great, but I still find it quite moving, still.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Parade magazine had a list of Americans’ All-Time Favorite Love Songs:
1. “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston
2. “Unchained Melody” by The Righteous Brothers
3. “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge
4. “You Are So Beautiful” by Joe Cocker
5. “How Deep Is Your Love” by The Bee Gees
6. “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith
7. “Crazy” by Patsy Cline
8. “I Want To Know What Love Is” by Foreigner
9. “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” by Bryan Adams
10. “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye
For the most part, meh.

Some local column asked about the Valentine’s Day proposal – romantic or cliche? I voted “nay – diminishes every subsequent v-day and if it doesn’t work out, sucks the joy out of the day altogether.” What dost thou think?
***
Bought Valentine’s Day cards a couple of days ago for my daughter’s class. It’s been a while since I shopped for these, but I was surprised that SO many of the items were licensed products, representing, e.g., the Disney princesses, Pixar’s Cars, and the animated Madagascar movies; disappointing.

Film and race: Song of the South, Holiday Inn, Django Unchained

I had, in a bad way, a jaw-dropping reaction to the Lincoln’s Birthday segment of the 1942 movie Holiday Inn.

I had heard for a long time how awful and offensively racist D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, was. It’s good that I saw it, but I’m glad it was as an adult so that I could appreciate it in the historic context in which it was made. I’m not much on banning movies, but there is something to be said about seeing it at the right point.

A couple of blog posts I’ve seen recently reminded me of this point. Ann from Tin and Sparkle used Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah for her ABC Wednesday post. I have never actually seen the 1946 Disney film Song of the South, and it has been quite difficult, at least for me, to get a chance to view it. The website dedicated to the movie describes the controversy. I think I’d be interested in seeing it. Incidentally, the very first version of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah I ever owned, or maybe it was my sister’s album, was by the Jackson Five [LISTEN] from their 1969 debut, a swipe of a Phil Spector arrangement for Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans in 1963.

Conversely, about 15 years ago, I got to see the 1942 film Holiday Inn for the first time, which stars Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. I had, in a bad way, a jaw-dropping reaction to the Lincoln’s Birthday segment. SamuraiFrog had seen it recently and described the song “Abraham” as “the most bizarre outpouring of disturbing blackface [by Crosby, Marjorie Reynolds, and others] I’ve ever seen. Surprised to see that. I mean, I know it’s of the time and all that, but I just found it deeply, deeply unsettling.” Yeah, that was MY reaction, too, plus historically inaccurate portrayal of the 16th President, to boot. I’m just not ready to let my daughter see it. But if YOU want to see it, click HERE, and go to the 44:50 mark; better still, go to the 42:30 mark to get a little context.

Roger Ebert wrote about the recent death of Jeni le Gon: The first black woman signed by Hollywood was livin’ and dancin’ in a great big way. I have seen her work but never knew her name. A telling anecdote about Ronald Reagan is included.

ColorOfChange notes Sundance winner “Fruitvale” examines the last days of Oscar Grant.

I was contemplating whether to go see the controversial current movie Django Unchained. It’s gotten some pretty good reviews, and Oscar-nominated for best picture, among other categories. I’m thinking that I probably won’t, at least for a while. It’s not that it’s too long. It’s not the apparently frequent use of the N-word. It’s my, and my wife’s, aversion to lots of cinematic violence. We saw both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown by Quentin Tarantino, but this sounds like a new level, and we are just not ready for it.

From Roger Ebert’s review: (This is a spoiler, I suppose, so you can use your cursor to highlight the text if you want) …we visit a Southern Plantation run by a genteel monster named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who for his after-dinner entertainment is having two slaves fight each other to the death. It’s a brutal fight, covered with the blood that flows unusually copiously in the film. The losing slave screams without stopping, and I reflected that throughout the film there is much more screaming in a violent scene than you usually hear. Finally, the fight is over, and there’s a shot of the defeated slave’s head as a hammer is dropped on the floor next to it by Mr. Candie. The hammer, (off-screen but barely) is used by the fight’s winner to finish off his opponent.

That’s the kind of scene after which I might want to get up from the screen for a while and take a time out.

Incidentally, the movie is mentioned in this article about the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, being ratified to preserve slavery.