Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)

d. Buster Keaton & Charles Reisner / USA / 71m.

It’s difficult to begin a discussion of Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. anywhere but the film’s famous shot, perhaps one of the most famous in all of cinema. The front facade of a house has broken free of its moorings during a cyclone on a Mississippi River port and falls onto Keaton, who’s saved only by the fact that he’s standing in the exact location of the second-story window’s course. It glides right over him, leaving him standing bewildered. The shot is brilliantly executed (more on that in a moment) and it never grows old to watch, but the reason to begin with it happens to be something else entirely. I like the shot in the larger context of Keaton scholarship because it symbolizes his approach to filmmaking: chaos and mayhem swirl around the stone-faced comedian, trying only to keep his footing in the world around him.

The idea behind Steamboat Bill, Jr. came from Charles Reisner, who had worked with Charles Chaplin on The Kid and The Gold Rush. (Producer Joseph Schenck hired Reisner as Keaton’s co-director.) It’s one of Keaton’s most domesticated plots, as it is not merely Willie’s pursuit for the girl and the approval of her family but also the pursuit for approval from his father, Bill Sr. (Ernest Torrence). It is the unseen mother’s idea that the two be reunited after Willie graduates from college, but with his striped-blazer, heavy suitcase, tiny mustache, and beret, Willie is nothing like his steamboat captain father. The mere sight of Willie sends the father into histrionics (implicitly suggesting the father do away with the preppy Willie, the first mate advises: “No jury would convict you”).

The father’s first order of business is to make Willie presentable, buying him a new hat and shaving the “barnacle on his lip,” and then teach him the ways of his steamboat, a rickety vessel named the Stonewall Jackson. Bill Sr. has been feuding with another steamboat entrepreneur, John James King (Tom McGuire, looking eerily similar to an elderly Robert Frost), who — because this is the world of silent movies — has a young and attractive daughter (Marion Byron) that the protagonist finds remarkably lovely.

The first part of the film runs on the standard Keatonian formulae: extracting humor from the moments when he can’t live up to society’s (or his father’s) expectations for masculinity; struggling to understand the complexities of riverboats; and his inability to shed the preppy air he’s acquired while away at university. There is nothing particularly barbarous about the humor here, and little requiring Keaton’s comic ingenuity. Instead, the appeal of the first half is subtle and what deserves closer inspection is Keaton’s directorial choices.

Keaton’s ability to successfully utilize spatial dimensions becomes apparent in the cyclone that closes the film, but he provides some sly reminders of spatial construction through his direction and framing. Willie arrives by train, promising he’d wear a white carnation in his lapel. What follows is some misdirection humor, where almost all the men aboard the train are wearing white carnations in their lapels, but the real reason the father cannot find Willie amongst the travelers is that Willie has gotten off at the wrong side of the depot, literally on the wrong side of the tracks for the whole scene. These unknown moments continue into the film, such as Willie’s visit to the barbershop, where we realize that the co-ed who he loves has been sitting the adjacent barber’s chair the entire time.

The spatial construction is nowhere near as nuanced as The General, which makes great use of small sets contrasted against larger environments, or The Navigator, where the boat must become a continually surprising and providing set. It might initially seem ironic that the steamboat plays such a minor role in the course of the film, but the decision is quite cunning. When Keaton does make use of the boat in this film, he occasionally retreads his previous work in The Navigator. By keeping the steamboat out of the film’s major plot points, he manages to avoid derivation, although the first half of the film is still plagued by a comparatively slow build-up.

The film takes a turn and improves above its ordinary beginnings following the arrest of Bill Sr. for attacking King in anger, and shortly after he’s put in jail, the cyclone arrives. Keaton wanted to end the film with a flood, but due to tragic floods in the United States shortly before and the prohibitive costs, Keaton substituted in the cyclone. It is the superior choice for numerous reasons, primarily because it reinforces what Roger Ebert calls “a universal stillness that comes of things functioning well, of having achieved occult harmony.” Keaton and his crew destroy an entire town. There are strong winds that prevent walking, creating a strange but metaphoric conflation of stillness and movement. There are flying boxes, collapsing walls, and swinging fence doors. He becomes caught in a bed that blows around the town. He latches onto a tree that is uprooted by the wind and blown into the river while he hangs onto the trunk. It is natural having its way with the short man who does everything he can to avoid being swept away.

The famous falling-wall shot wasn’t entirely new to Keaton, but it had never been attempted on that scale. He’d done a variation on it in his short film One Week, and the stunt actually repeats itself in different versions through the rest of the cyclone in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (More than once he opens a door and walks through while the entire wall collapses.) “The clearance of that window,” Keaton said later, “was exactly three inches over my head and past each shoulder. And the front of the building—I’m not kidding—weighed two tons. It had to be built heavy and rigid in order not to bend or twist in the wind.” Walter Kerr, in The Silent Clowns, notes that Keaton’s entire crew besought him not to go forward with the stunt. Reisner wouldn’t direct the scene and left the set. The story editor almost quit. The cameraman who eventually ran the film for the film ended up looking the other way in fear. Keaton, however, had it perfect in one take. Kerr:

It is stunning in a special way, Keaton’s way. It is not, for instance, frightening, as a similar shot of [Harold] Lloyd’s might have been frightening. When Lloyd stunted, he meant to terrify; and he increased the audience’s agitation by letting us see how agitated he was in the situation. Nothing of the sort here. Buster is placid. The wall falls impassively. When it has fallen, wall and Buster have arrived at an entirely equitable relationship. There is nothing to scream about.

At the end of it all, Willie encounters sort of the ultimate test of masculinity of a Keaton film, where not only the girl-in-distress requires rescuing but his own father and her father need saving as well. (And the ending, where a priest is saved from the river, is pure Keatonian magic.)

Synchronized sound came to Hollywood in 1927, but Keaton’s producer, Joseph Schenck, was not worried. “Talking pictures will never displace the silent drama from its supremacy. There will always be silent pictures,” he predicted, which we know now is certainly untrue. Steamboat Bill, Jr. was Keaton’s first film released after the popularization of sound, and fortunately it remained silent. (Sound would not have been available to Schenck’s independent studio, but nevertheless: sound would have distracted the spectacular cyclone sequence.) What would not remain for Keaton was independence. After the completion of Steamboat Bill, Jr., Schenck informed Keaton that he would close shop. Keaton, working as an independent auteur with Schenck’s financing for the last eight years, would have to find a new home and enter what would become a troubling stage in his career. Steamboat Bill, Jr. then marks the quasi-end to Keaton’s independence and filmmaking, and though not conceived to be such, it is a proper capstone. It’d be a masterpiece were it not for its slightly unoriginal first half, but the second half nudges it up in the ranks.

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College (1927)

d. James W. Horne & Buster Keaton / USA / 61m.

College, Buster Keaton’s ninth feature, is not exactly a bad film, but it demonstrates how wildly sporadic genius can be. It is, at its core, Keaton on auto-pilot — and by most historical accounts, consciously so. Biographer Marion Meade introduces the film in her book Cut to the Chase by noting Keaton set out to do a film that required as little ingenuity as possible, and on that standard you could say he fulfilled the small expectation he set for himself.

Released in the same year of The General — what many consider to be his, or perhaps the, high-water mark in silent comedy — College plays instead like a less mature offering from earlier in his career. The comparison might be unfair, because few films are counted among the caliber of The General, but College is not even among Keaton’s upper-tier work. It is minimally inventive and largely predictable, hindered in part an episodic gag structure reminiscent of his shorts or an awkwardly assembled film like Three Ages.

Now—yes, it is something akin to a cinematic truth that a Buster Keaton misfire still lands within a reasonable distance of the target. College isn’t a pain to sit through, but its treats and creative flourishes are few and far between. (As Walter Kerr says in his essential volume, The Silent Clowns: “College is weak Keaton because —for the most part—it could have been just as well done by Harold Lloyd.”) The film is hindered by a plot that is go-go-go-for-the-girl and not much else, not even a gargantuan gag that swoops in to save the film as there is at the end of Keaton’s Seven Chances. The story here is of bookworm Ronald (Keaton) who must take up athletics to impress a girl named Mary (Anne Cornwall) for whom book smarts isn’t nearly as appealing as the triumphalism of sports. Many of the jokes involve the trials and failures and ultimate successes as Ronald attempts to win Mary. A few, like a bit with a javelin, succeed. Most others, like an uncomfortable and unfortunate race-based humor with Keaton in blackface, don’t.

Keaton can be an exhausting figure to watch on-screen. Thirty-two at the time and still in excellent physical condition, Keaton performed all his own runs, dives, leaps, and falls. However, for the first and only time in his silent career, for College Keaton used one stunt double — a U.S. Olympic pole vaulter who performed a gag Keaton chose to sit out. Later Keaton said, “I could not do the scene, because I am no pole vaulter and I didn’t want to spend months in training to do the stunt myself.” I certainly can’t, and won’t, blame him, but it is a historical fact that looms heavy over a film that embodies mediocrity. Keaton was in fact known to devote months to perfecting a desired sequence or action, and the failure to do so here speaks volumes about the actor-director’s lukewarm attitude toward the film.

If College is remembered for anything today, it may be its final moments. Not surprisingly, most critical scholarship on the film is devoted to what might be the era’s bleakest “happy ending”: after Keaton has spent the entire film attempting to woo the girl of the dreams, he wins and weds her. Immediately following this joyous occasion, however, is a series of quick fades, each showing the couple as they grow older and older and then: a tombstone. Kerr asks:

What is this abrupt slap in the face doing at the end of an otherwise unquestioning love story? It takes no more than eleven seconds of playing time to deliver its chill, and yet it undoes on the spot all the yearning, the struggle and the victory, of the narrative. The bitter candor—and it is bitter—is not prepared for; it not only takes us by surprise, it seems to take Keaton by surprise, as though a truth too long suppressed had turned to bile and erupted with volcanic force. It’s still funny, because there is truth in it; but it is bleak indeed.

Bleak, perhaps, to leave some sort of unique stamp on the film. Halfway through the 1920s, Keaton had begun to realize audiences would only tolerate so much ingenuity; when it strayed too far from the plot or become focused too exclusively on Keaton instead of both he and his love interest, it didn’t play well during screenings. And because the plots were always about a boy pursuing a girl (either to save her or win her), it imposed some restrictions on the personal touches Keaton could put onto a film. It was the first external force to mainstream Keaton, and a film like College suffers for it. The ending here is outside the box and shocking in its wit: if you want matrimony and ‘til death do us part, then part we shall by death.

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Recapping the Oscars

I went into the home stretch of the Academy Awards fully expecting to miss the show. I was out of the States, unplugged from the Internet and without access to network television. I believed this year’s show was to go down in my personal history alongside the show in early 2007, the only other Oscar telecast I’ve missed this decade, when a second-shift journalism job kept me from seeing Martin Scorsese snag his Best Director award and The Departed — my pick of the five nominated films, the only time it'd happened that decade — go home with Best Picture.

Ah, but I hadn’t counted on a cable channel carrying the feed. TNT, broadcasting the exquisite Spanish language, carried the show. After dinner and loitering near a craps table, I managed to catch the latter half from a crowded bar, sipping White Russians in tribute to the role that should have landed Jeff Bridges an Oscar.

It would have been fitting if I’d missed the whole show, considering how strongly I was gunning for The Hurt Locker to win. It is one of the best releases of 2009, and I’m absolutely thrilled it took home six Oscars, including Picture and Director. Its story is invigorating for a film critic who perpetually finds himself on the side of the loser, and refreshing that such a small but powerful film can topple an undeserving behemoth such as Avatar. It went home with three Oscars, all of them tech, and that feels just about right to me.

Let’s get to some run-down stats:

• I predicted 18-of-24 when you consider the entire ballot. I missed all three short films (ouch), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, and Sound Editing. If you take out the short films and go solely with the main categories, I was 18-of-21, which was just a tad better than the 17-of-21 I went last year. Meanwhile, my preferences lined up 9-of-24, which is fewer than I'd have liked but rewarding because I agreed with Picture and Director. (Other preferences that won: Supporting Actor, Animated Film, Editing, Score, Song, Sound Mixing, and Visual Effects.)

• Because I had so many correct predictions, there were few surprises. The three main categories I missed each provide an interesting angle for discussion. Perhaps it is a reflection of my film geekdom, but Sound Editing was the most surprising. I thought Avatar had it in the bag, but I was thrilled to see The Hurt Locker snag it. When I first heard Precious, a film I didn’t care for, won Adapted Screenplay away from Up in the Air, which I found to be among the year’s best, I was shocked. But the shock wore off, and the more I thought about it, the more I simply came to realize I undersold its popularity among the Academy. (That it turned up in Best Editing should have been a sign that Mo’Nique would not be the only victory the film received.) It is clear the Academy is okay, or at least confused enough, to embrace digital cinematography.

• There was a complete rout of my predictions and preferences in the short film categories. Few anticipated Music by Prudence or The New Tenants would win their respective categories, and most people believed Logorama was too crude for the Academy members who shuffle out into the theaters and screen all five shorts before they're allowed to cast a vote. But the voters still had a few surprises up their sleeves and proved once again that while they might be predictable in the Documentary and Foreign Language Film categories (which also require attendance), they're anything but predictable when it comes to the shorts.

• The show itself: an incomplete blah. The bar where I sat was rather loud and I was hardly able to hear much of what was said by the hosts, the presenters, or the winners. When I was able to hear what people were saying, it didn’t carry the gravitas I’d have hoped it would. The Best Actor/Actress presentation was laughably sycophantic, and I would have preferred Kate Winslet and Sean Penn just to grace the stage, read the nominees, and award the trophy. It was difficult to stomach that the show cut segments and ran long for five personalized introductions.

• One final note: watching the second half among people who don’t make awards-season twists a top priority and who hardly saw any of the films was a shocking experience. The Hurt Locker was never referred to by name; it was always “the bomb movie.” Avatar, George Clooney, and Sandra Bullock had tremendous support. One sexist jerk who walked in during Kathryn Bigelow’s wonderful acceptance speech shouted out, “Blah blah blah blah, I love being an actress, blah blah blah blah.” If you think the idea of her win making history is rather blase, just remember there are still people for whom the idea of a woman director is completely foreign.

I’m scrambling to finish watching missed films from the last year, and soon I’ll be ready to post my best films of 2009. Until then and the next awards season, however, it’s back to film criticism.

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If I Had an Oscar Ballot, 2010

A few months ago, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis summarized the Oscars with typical acerbity: “Let’s acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them.”

A pithier and truer verdict might not ever have been rendered. But, were it only so easy! When we say we hate the Oscars, what we mean is that they favor publicity to artistry, honor lesser achievements as stand-ins for someone’s entire body of work, and purport to reward the best in film while typically bestowing laurels upon mid-range selections. Yet how can you not get a kick out of it all? I like the Oscars in the same way I like federal elections or the AFC playoffs. It’s a race, with ups and downs, honoring the “best” in film.

Therefore, I like to play this game every year with the Oscars: who’s going to win, who should win, and who should have been nominated. First, a few disclaimers: My predictions are my best guess on this day. My preferences are the nominated films and individuals I’d like to see win, and I’ve chosen them because I think they’re the genuine best of their categories (none of this “he/she is due” yarn—that’s the real bullshit). Wherever possible, I’ve tried to limit my preference to one single choice, like I’d be faced with on a ballot, but sometimes it’s too nuanced for that. The “Should Be Here” selections include 2009 U.S. releases that didn’t make the cut for whatever reason — perhaps ruled ineligible by the academy’s rules and regulations, or passed over in lieu of some lesser film. I don’t claim to have seen every 2009 release, so these suggestions are based solely on my film knowledge as of today.

And the categories are:

Best Animated Short Film
• French Roast
• Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty
• The Lady and the Reaper

• Logorama

• Wallace & Gromit in “A Matter of Loaf and Death”

Nick Park has tremendous goodwill among the Academy. He’s 5-0 when it comes to the gold, and he’ll probably win again this year for his latest Wallace and Gromit short, A Matter of Loaf and Death — familiar territory, but at 29 minutes, the longest of the bunch (Oscar rewards length here) and with the most significant story development. Few of the other four probably stand a chance, but let’s consider them anyway. French Roast and Granny O’Grimm have issues for opposing reasons (the former is nicely animated, but terribly dull; the latter is lively, but poorly animated). Logorama, submitted by France, is a witty and vulgar short that skewers the prevalence of marketing and corporations, but runs far too long on concept alone. I’d suspect the one that has an outside chance of knocking off Park would be Spain’s The Lady and the Reaper, a well-executed if slightly flawed comic battle for a dying woman between the Grim Reaper and a cocky surgeon that recalls (and falls short of) the classic shorts of Chuck Jones. It’s hard to deny Park’s film is objectively the most accomplished of the five, even if its characters are starting to taste a bit like week-old bread. He’ll win, and he’ll deserve it, but I’ll be rooting for The Lady and the Reaper on fresh-blood grounds alone.

Prediction: A Matter of Loaf and Death
Preference: A Matter of Loaf and Death or The Lady and the Reaper
Should Be Here: The Cat Piano, Partly Cloudy

Best Live-Action Short Film

• The Door
• Instead of Abracadabra
• Kavi
• Miracle Fish

• The New Tenants

I want to give a brief shout-out to Miracle Fish, which I found captivating in its strangeness for almost the entire running length. Its final moment however, when it literally fades to nothing and avoids the tough implications of the “ending” it delivered, screws over almost everything that came before. I suspect it and two other films — Kavi, a.k.a. Slumdog redux; and The New Tenants, a bleak and trashy piece of hipster flare — can be written off. The crux of this race will come down to The Door and Instead of Abracadabra, which poses a significant problem.

The Door is a finely crafted short film with startling images and cinematography, deep emotional currents, and genuine suspense. It is the story of a family following the Chernobyl disaster (the straightforward identification of which it, better or worse, averts from the audience until the final credits) and a man’s quest to retrieve a piece of his past. But the ending leaves a sour note in its heavy-handed repetition. Instead of Abracadabra, meanwhile, puts forth a complete story arc of a struggling magician and his relationship with his family, but represents rather conventional comic filmmaking. Abracadabra’s levity was received well at screening I attended, due in no small part to the antidote it provided to the starker preceding films. Yet I’m going to give the edge to The Door, which might prevail merely because it’s “about” something larger than itself.

Prediction: The Door
Preference: The Door or Instead of Abracadabra 

Best Documentary Short Film
• China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province
• The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner

• The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant

• Music by Prudence

• Rabbit à la Berlin

Of the three short film categories, this year’s strongest is the documentary field. The live-action and animation fields suffer from a collective funk in which none of the five stand out as compelling selections, but the short documentaries offer diverse topics and styles. Ironically enough however, the category front-runner seems to be The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, which, while timely and relevant enough, doesn’t announce itself as powerfully as the competition. Rabbit à la Berlin is a surreal angle on the history of the Berlin Wall “through the eyes of rabbits,” so it can probably be disqualified from Oscar consideration but nevertheless is an absorbing and mesmerizing 45 minutes. I was also captivated by The Last Campaign, an even-handed piece exploring the subject of death-with-dignity laws through the campaign of Washington state’s former governor who has Parkinson’s. For me The Last Campaign is a close second to China’s Unnatural Disaster, a heart-wrenching portrait of grieving parents angry at their government after the devastating 2008 earthquake. These are three great shorts, each worthy, but one is too large to ignore.

Prediction: China’s Unnatural Disaster
Preference: China’s Unnatural Disaster
Should Be Here: Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak

Best Visual Effects

• Avatar

• District 9

• Star Trek

Let’s just say that if Avatar doesn’t win this award, there’ll be something seriously rotten in the valleys of southern California. I’m not a cheerleader for Avatar in any respect except its visuals, and if it deserves to win anywhere on the ballot, it’s here. District 9 made the most of its budget, but the results were a mixed bag (the spaceship hovering over Johannesburg was great, but the aliens failed to integrate fully). And although I like Star Trek as a film the best of the three, its effects haven’t quite earned a reputation like the other two. Particular shame on the Academy for failing to acknowledge Henson Co.’s skill in bringing the characters of Where the Wild Things Are to life.

Prediction: Avatar
Preference: Avatar
Should Be Here: Where The Wild Things Are

Best Sound Editing
• Avatar
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds

• Star Trek

• Up

Sound editing — the creation and recording of sound effects — seems to be a category that has Avatar’s name all over it. Nominees here are frequently action films (re: loud), films heavy on special effects (re: loud), or animated films (re: occasionally loud), and Avatar has all three. The sound editing crew was charged with the task of creating an entire aural world for an organic planet populated with fictitious creatures without straying too far outside of the familiar. They succeeded, and might have been my vote, if it hadn’t been for Star Trek. You could argue that the rules were looser for Mark Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin (with help from the legendary Ben Burtt) because they were free to invent sounds that required no root to reality, but I’d argue it required more creativity, balance, and selectivity. When it comes to space adventures in 2009 anyway, Star Trek proved more satisfying to the ears.

Prediction: Avatar
Preference: Star Trek

Best Sound Mixing
• Avatar

• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds
• Star Trek
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Nominees for sound mixing—the synthesis of all sound elements into a singular soundtrack—tend to be action films or films heavily influenced by music. I suspect the race here, like much of the ballot, will also come down to Avatar and The Hurt Locker. The argument for Avatar would include the company it keeps with other ground-breaking “big movie” winners from the last twenty years that picked up both sound editing and Mixing, films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Titanic, The Matrix, The Return of the King, and King Kong. These films tend to have liberal usage of special effects and gargantuan sequences, descriptors that fit Avatar nicely. The argument for The Hurt Locker would have to include the company it keeps with war-film mixing winners like Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, and Saving Private Ryan, and is complicated further by the fact that there is a 50/50 shot that this category will follow the Best Picture winner. History aside, a stronger argument for The Hurt Locker is its complete sonic integration of multiple sound elements to help mirror the chaos and confusion of dangerous situations and the skill to pull back and leave an eerie silence engulf the audience when needed. This has actually been one of the trickiest categories for me this year, and until a few days ago, I was solid with The Hurt Locker as my prediction. But now—I don’t know. I'm on the fence, doubting that the nuanced will be rewarded over the colossus, but crossing my fingers and going there anyway.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker
Preference: The Hurt Locker

Best Original Song

• “Almost There” from The Princess and the Frog

• “Down in New Orleans” from The Princess and the Frog

• “Loin de Paname” from Paris 36''
• “Take it All” from Nine

• “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart

The notoriously fickle original song category disqualified many wonderful songs this year as usual, but exceeded my expectations by somehow resisting the treacherously bad “I See You” from Avatar and the banal “Cinema Italiano” from Nine. That said, four of the songs here are still middling-to-poor, with the lone exception of Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett’s “The Weary Kind.” A country western song seemingly penned by an old and broken soul, it serves dual roles as a non-diegetic theme of Crazy Heart but also a powerful diegetic comeback ballad for Bad Blake. Plus, the song itself packs more of a punch than the film’s entire script.

Prediction: “The Weary Kind”
Preference: “The Weary Kind”
Should Be Here: “Help Yourself” from Up in the Air; “Hideaway” from Where the Wild Things Are; “You Got Me Wrapped Around Your Little Finger” from An Education


Best Original Score

• Marco Beltrami, The Hurt Locker

• Alexandre Desplat, Fantastic Mr. Fox

• Michael Giacchino, Up
• James Horner, Avatar
• Hans Zimmer, Sherlock Holmes

First, let’s get out of the way that no one is having a better run of film scores than Alexandre Desplat, who penned scores for five 2009 releases and should have picked up an Oscar for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last year. Outside of James Horner’s rather routine score for Avatar, I think there’s a lot to like about this year’s original score category: the offbeat work by Hans Zimmer in Sherlock Holmes, the subtle but effective score in The Hurt Locker by Marco Beltrami, and of course Desplat’s effective (if a little light) channeling of Wes Anderson’s eccentricities in Fantastic Mr. Fox. I’d have swapped out Horner for Abel Korzeniowski’s haunting score for A Single Man (which I’ve heard, though not seen) but even then I’d still want to the award to go to Michael Giacchino for his tender work on Up. Pixar prominently featured his work in the film (particularly the emotional montage in the beginning), and it is immediately recognizable and evocative.

Prediction: Up
Preference: Up
Should Be Here: Abel Korzeniowski, A Single Man

Best Makeup
• Il Divo
• Star Trek

• The Young Victoria

Not to be too reductive, but many of Oscar’s technical categories live and die by how noticeable they are: films with the most cuts take home editing honors, films with the most elaborate sets take home art direction, etc. I think there’s a tendency to appreciate that if a film has made it this far, it’s doing something right, so you should honor the one that has its “rightness” most visibly on display. If that follows through to this year’s make-up category, Star Trek should walk away with the statuette: the film brought the classic makeup of the series into the modern age, and voters will likely remember Spock’s ears or a Romulan’s face (never mind that more voters have probably seen the film than the other two combined). My choice is Il Divo because I was completely unaware just how much make-up went into transforming Toni Servillo into Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. It was convincing enough to be a hell of a surprise later on, and certainly utilizes its make-up in the most meaningful of ways.

Prediction: Star Trek
Preference: Il Divo
Should Be Here: District 9

Best Film Editing
• John Refoua and Stephen E. Rivkin, Avatar

• Julian Clarke, District 9

• Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, The Hurt Locker
• Sally Menke, Inglourious Basterds

• Joe Klotz, Precious

This year’s editing field should be a no-brainer: of the five, no film benefited as much from precision editing as The Hurt Locker. The cutting by Chris Innis and Bob Murawski created a spatial atmosphere on screen that was at once claustrophobic and paradoxically all-encompassing while sacrificing none of the tension. The result is an embedded sensation during the film’s taut action sequences, where the viewer is thrown into a bomb-difusing squad as concerned with the explosive on the ground as they are from the peering eyes positioned on top of neighboring buildings, all of which we experience. The other nominees did not put forward as impressive work as Innis and Murawski, nor as impressive as Dana E. Glauberman’s clean and efficient work on Up in the Air or the Coen Brothers (as Roderick Jaynes) in A Serious Man. A surprise nomination should have been in order for Sugar, an underrated baseball drama by directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Boden’s editing, coupled with Andrij Parekh’s cinematography, presented as realistic a portrait of what it’s like to be in the middle of a baseball game as I’ve seen in a film.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker
Preference: The Hurt Locker
Should Be Here: A Serious Man, Sugar, Up in the Air

Best Costume Design
• Colleen Atwood, Nine
• Catherine Leterrier, Coco Before Chanel
• Janet Patterson, Bright Star
• Sandy Powell, The Young Victoria
• Monique Prudhomme, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

I usually find myself aboard the “stop-rewarding-fancy-period-dramas” train when it comes to the Academy’s costume design category, so it’s with an expansive recognition of irony that my vote is for Janet Patterson’s lovely and subtle costumes in Bright Star (sadly the film’s only nomination), a film that actually engages its costumes on a cumulative level. But subtlety has never been the strong suit of the Oscars, which elevates the chances of eye-poppers like Sandy Powell, with strong but routine work in The Young Victoria, and Monique Prudhomme, behind the trippy costumes of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Because the category has a tendency to reward anything older the McKinley Administration, it appears Powell will pick up her third Oscar.

Prediction: The Young Victoria
Preference: Bright Star
Should Be Here: Colleen Atwood, Public Enemies

Best Cinematography

• Barry Ackroyd, The Hurt Locker
• Christian Berger, The White Ribbon
• Bruno Delbonnel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Mauro Fiore, Avatar

• Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds

Beside the obvious question of how the preferential ballot and 10 Best Picture candidates will pan out, Sunday should resolve another lingering question of the Academy’s tastes: will it embrace the all-digital (and special-effects-driven) cinematography of Avatar? All signs point to a deep and understandable hesitation. That’s not to deny the complexity of Mauro Fiore’s task as cinematographer on the film, but it is to suggest that the overlap between visual effects and cinematography creates a Vinn diagram with a bit too much space for some voters. Personally, I’d be among them: I have a greater respect for Barry Ackroyd’s embedded lens in The Hurt Locker and Robert Richardson’s lean and mean reincarnation of classical Hollywood cinema in Inglourious Basterds. Christian Berger’s work on The White Ribbon also gains my respect (lit for black-and-white, shot in color, and desaturated), and it is always a pleasure to see foreign-language films land nominations in categories outside Best Foreign Language Film, but the work comes in below Ackroyd and Richardson, who already has two Oscars to his name. Although Avatar poses a great risk across the technical field, this will go to The Hurt Locker.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker
Preference: Inglourious Basterds
Should Be Here: Lance Acord, Where the Wild Things Are; Greig Fraser, Bright Star

Best Art Direction 
• Avatar

• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
• Nine
• Sherlock Holmes
• The Young Victoria

What were Academy voters smoking when they nominated the five films for this category? This is a rather pathetic slate of nominees for what is usually a lively and competitive category, although these films bear the hallmarks of Oscar’s fingerprints: flamboyant period pieces, stylish musicals, and fantasies. A more original and deserving slate of possible nominees is available by me below, but considering what my options are from the official category, my preference would have to go to Sherlock Holmes, which delivers the eye for period detail and the creativity of the detective himself. The likelier winner will be Avatar, which boasts a threat in almost every tech category, even if its art direction and set decoration were more the result of skilled computer technicians and illustrators. With the word “art” in the category title, you have to give the advantage to Avatar, I guess.

Prediction: Avatar
Preference: Sherlock Holmes
Should Be Here: Any or all of the following with vastly superior art direction: Bright Star, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Inglourious Basterds, Public Enemies, The Road, A Serious Man, Where the Wild Things Are

Best Foreign Language Film
• Ajami

• La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow)
• 
Un Prophète (A Prophet)

• El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes)
• Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon)

“Film X will never win Best Foreign Language Film, and that’s a high compliment” has become the punch-line to what’s become a rather sad joke of a category. That’s not to say the films themselves are jokes, but the process of selecting the nominees for film not in the English language is chuckle-worthy at best and cringe-worthy at worst. Fold the exclusive selection process with the edict that voters must prove they’ve watched all five, which undoubtedly skews the demographic audience, and the result as been some interesting, if not surprising, selections come Oscar night. (Note: The watch-’em-all is not a bad rule; hell, the results often suggest they ought to implement it for every other category.) The year boasts two well-known entries, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, and three lesser known entries from Israel, Peru, and Argentina round out the category. I wasn’t floored by any of the five, to be perfectly honest, but I found A Prophet — which has garnered much love among critics — to be the most compelling of the group. Its violence and slower narration will probably exclude it from many ballots, and odds are better that the Academy will go with something a bit more conventional. In the end, I like how Slant Magazine spun this category: If this were the 1950s/1960s, the auteur work of The White Ribbon would prevail; if this were the 1980s/1990s, brutal reality of A Prophet would end in victory; but this is the 2000s/2010s, so the winner will probably be Westernized traditional fare like The Secret in Their Eyes.

Prediction: The Secret in Their Eyes
Preference: A Prophet

Best Documentary Film
• Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
• 
The Cove
• 
Food, Inc.

• The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

• Which Way Home

What an activist field this year. The front-runner is The Cove, an investigation into the slaughter of dolphins by Japanese fishermen that has sparked the ire of many. There is no denying the force of what The Cove attempts to accomplish as a piece of politics; you’d have to be one cold soul not to flinch, grimace, or tear at the awful sight of the self-aware panic in the dolphins and the subsequent blood-filled waters, but as a formal text, I’ve long though The Cove became too preoccupied with the actions of its crew as opposed to the heart of their mission. For most of the awards season, my vote was loyally in the camp of Food Inc., an exposé into the food production industry that difficult to sit through on a content level but which was crafted with commercial ease in mind. Robert Kenner’s documentary sat on my alphabetical year’s-best list until late December, when it was slowly pushed out by other films, one of which is Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. It is a shattering documentary that examines life in junta-controlled Burma through footage shot illegally and exported out of the country. All three of the nominees I’ve seen speak to my inner liberal, but of the three, Burma VJ is the most formally ambitious and successful.

Prediction: The Cove
Preference: Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
Should Be Here: The Beaches of Agnes

Best Animated Film

• Coraline
• 
Fantastic Mr. Fox
• 
The Princess and the Frog
• The Secret of Kells
• 
Up

Expanding the animated film category from three nominees to five couldn’t have come at a better time. The year was one of the best for animation in recent memory. Up and Fantastic Mr. Fox are on my list of the year’s best films. A surprise nod for The Secret of Kells, a beautiful Irish film about the Viking invasion in the sixth-century, renewed my belief that the Oscars can launch good and obscure films from mere abandon into instant publicity. They should have done for Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max, one of the best films of the year. Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo would have nicely rounded out the category. (Coraline and The Princess and the Frog are the weak links.) The Pixar powerhouse legacy will continue with Up, its five nominations (including Best Picture) making it an unstoppable force, but my own heart is torn between Up and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Prediction: Up
Preference: Up or Fantastic Mr. Fox
Should Be Here: Mary and Max, Ponyo

Best Adapted Screenplay
• Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, District 9
• 
Nick Hornby, An Education

• Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, and Tony Roche, In the Loop

• Geoffrey Fletcher, Precious
• 
Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air

I judge an adapted screenplay on three qualities: 1) its success as a screenplay; 2) how meaningfully it transforms the source work; and 3) how it differentiates itself from the source work to become a film. By those standards, there aren’t many screenplays on an annual basis that I think become worthy of this award. This year’s category is certainly stronger than last year’s (where, out of sheer necessity, I voted for Doubt). District 9 has numerous problems, the screenplay most prominent among them; Precious proudly displays its adaptation in its full title, and should be commended from adapting Sapphire’s voice-driven stream-of-consciousness P.O.V. into a mainstream film. I’m thrilled Nick Hornby received a nomination for An Education, although the script’s tendons and threads sometimes show through. The team behind In the Loop provided some of the year’s greatest laughs, and if the Oscars offered a most inventive adaptation of the work fuck, this would win in a heartbeat. As it stands, however, I was never convinced the film took its satire to the next level and it ended as a good, though no great, screenplay. The Oscar will, and should, go to Up in the Air, which took Walter Kirn's first-person novel and grew it into a wonderful character study that is relevant and smart.

Prediction: Up in the Air
Preference: Up in the Air
Should Be Here: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Where the Wild Things Are, and because the Academy corralled it into the “adapted” category, Bright Star

Best Original Screenplay

• Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker

• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
• 
Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman, The Messenger

• Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man
• 
Bob Peterson and Pete Docter, Up

Of Oscar’s twenty-four categories, this year the strongest is Best Original Screenplay. But that’s not surprising for two reasons: first, I’ve long believed the original screenplay category holds a truer, though no precise, lens to the world of mainstream film in a particular year than the Best Picture category. Consider some of the previous winners: Milk, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lost in Translation, Fargo, etc. Second, the original scripts are typically better fare. This category isn’t perfect, mind you, but I can’t patently object to any of the above titles, four of which are on my year’s-best list. Up is another gem from Pixar, A Serious Man is a bleak and crackling existential comedy from the Brothers Coen, and The Messenger (written by two non-Americans) nails the American process of grief and suffering during wartime.

I suspect the race is between The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds, but it’s difficult to say which will prevail. A screenplay award could be a way of guaranteeing Tarantino an award for Basterds. I’ve long considered Basterds to be a misread text; it speaks to me not as a vengeance fantasy, but a film about the morally suspect ways we as moviegoers root for vengeance and as a war film that upends our traditional notions of language, how we talk about movies and how we define heroes and villains. I’m not entirely sure that’s how Tarantino wanted it to be read, but as it is, I personally found its screenplay more rewarding than The Hurt Locker’s, which is peppered with vivid details and psychological analysis. Still, none of the others come as close to capturing the image of an ideal original screenplay than the offbeat existentialism of A Serious Man.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker

Preference: A Serious Man
Should Be Here: Olivier Assays, Summer Hours; Adam Elliot, Mary and Max

Best Supporting Actress
• Penélope Cruz, Nine

• Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

• Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart
• 
Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
• 
Mo’Nique, Precious

Earlier this season, when Mo’Nique suggested doing P.R. rounds for Precious was essentially pointless because everything voters needed to know about her performance was on the screen, I nearly leapt from my chair and tracked her down to deliver the largest hug a critic could muster. I adore that sentiment, and it’d be nice if more actors took that approach. After winning practically every supporting actress award all year, she’s the favorite to win, and I’ll be thrilled watching her take the stage and walk away with gold. The supporting acting categories have begun a slow drift into the fields of villainy, and Mo’Nique’s turn as the abusive mother in Precious couples nicely with Christoph Waltz’s baleful scourer in Inglourious Basterds. The role even contains an awards staple: the show-stopping, heart-pounding monologue. It is not, however, the performance that struck me the most of the five. For that I’ll have to commend Vera Farmiga as the cool and calculated travel companion that holds her own against George Clooney in every shared scene of Up in the Air. It’s an impressive performance in the opposite of every way that Mo’Nique’s is impressive: Farmiga is restrained, balanced, a master of false impressions and steely sexuality who is able to compartmentalize her life in even a way that shocks Clooney’s character. Never mind that a win by Farmiga would keep with the villain theme.

Prediction: Mo’Nique
Preference: Farmiga
Should Be Here: Marion Cotillard, Public Enemies

Best Supporting Actor

• Matt Damon, Invictus

• Woody Harrelson, The Messenger

• Christopher Plummer, The Last Station
• 
Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones

• Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Let’s dispense with a few formalities: Matt Damon was nominated for the wrong movie (he’s better in The Informant!), Stanley Tucci was nominated for the wrong movie (he’s better in Julie & Julia), and thank god that Christopher Plummer was nominated at all (his first!?). Now let’s talk about the heavy-hitters. Few performances were as arresting this year than Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. It’s equal parts “who-the-hell-is-this-guy” and “holy-hell-what-a-performance.” I cringe at the suggestion of Bob Mondello from NPR that we should shuffle all the acting categories together regardless of gender for a Best Performance and Best Supporting Performance, but if we did, Waltz would have been vote in whichever category he’d received a nomination. Tarantino has suggested he couldn’t make the film until he found the right Hans Landa, and I think on that mark the typically self-aggrandizing director is humbly correct. My runner-up selection for would easily be Woody Harrelson, as an experienced and emotionally wounded bearer of bad news in The Messenger.

Prediction: Waltz
Preference: Waltz
Should Be Here: Peter Capaldi, In the Loop; James Gandolfini, Where the Wild Things Are; Anthony Mackie, The Hurt Locker

Best Actress
• Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

• Helen Mirren, The Last Station

• Carey Mulligan, An Education
• 
Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

• Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia

Last year I called Costume Design for The Duchess while officially predicting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would take home of the gold. My call was correct and my prediction fell through, but any Oscar watcher has to make one or two from-the-gut picks in hopes of an upset. This year, the Best Actress category is almost atomically unstable in comparison to the other acting fields, and thus the likeliest for an upset. (Just mentioning the category in some circles also brings out those who are atomically unstable, too.) Personally, I was more impressed by the performances of Carey Mulligan in An Education and Gabourey Sidibe in Precious than I was by Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side or Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia. I’m holding out hope that a vote split among the two leading contenders will deliver either Mulligan or Sidibe to the stage come Oscar night. Right now, most signs point to Bullock winning in this category for her work. It’s not a performance for the ages, but it works inside its (awful) film. However, merely because I want to be a bit contrarian and am looking for a serious Oscar pool upset, let me give you five reasons why I think Meryl Streep will win:

1) The Screen Actors Guild and the Academy Awards do not go hand-in-hand. Only twice in SAG’s 16-year history has its awards and the Oscars synched 4/4. The last time it happened was 2004, so you might think that we’re set for it to happen again. But statistically speaking, someone who won a SAG Award this year will not go home with an Oscar. Bullock won at SAG, and Actress is this year’s most contentious and this year’s least locked category.
2) If Kate Winslet hadn’t been placed in the lead actress category last year for The Reader, there’s a good chance Streep would have won her third Oscar for Doubt — and the Oscars love to correct their errors and oversights.
3) Never bet against the establishment candidate, and always remember the Oscars don’t like to be told what to do. This is Bullock’s first nomination, and she’s a populist figure to win, a once-in-a-lifetime-shot, but ask Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke how that turned out.
4) The biopic factor. Julie & Julia has a lot going against it (including only one nomination), but one of its awards-season strengths is the portrayal of a famous person. Every Oscar ceremony since 1998 has had a winner who played a real person; while this year’s actress category features four portrayals of real people (Bullock, Mirren, Mulligan, and Streep), Julia Child is certainly the most famous and recognizable among them. And note that frontrunners Waltz, Mo’Nique, and Jeff Bridges all play fictional characters.
5) Streep hasn’t won gold since 1983. Since then, she’s been nominated 12 times. I suspect many voters are thinking she’s overdue.

Naturally those in support of Bullock can cite other indicators as to why she’ll win, and they’re certainly convincing enough. She has the support of many Hollywood figures, both before and after her nomination. This may be her only shot at an Oscar, so why not give it to her? She’s charming, she’s self-effacing, she's been generous with the P.R., and she has the wind behind her back, and...

Okay—look—I’m a nervous gambler. If I were putting money on the line, I’d mark Bullock a hundred times out of a hundred. So, it’s Bullock. But if Streep wins, you’ll at least have to give me the benefit of my math.

Prediction: Bullock
Preference: Mulligan or Sidibe
Should Be Here: Abbie Cornish, Bright Star; Mélanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds; Tilda Swinton, Julia

Best Actor
• Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

• George Clooney, Up in the Air

• Colin Firth, A Single Man
• 
Morgan Freeman, Invictus
• 
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

I’m at a bit of a disadvantage here, as I most regrettably haven’t seen A Single Man. So take what I have to say with a grain of salt, and I might go back and edit this entry after I have.

Jeff Bridges, here with his four nomination, has never won an Oscar and his turn as an alcoholic country singer who turns himself around in Crazy Heart will serve as a lifetime career award. Unfortunately, the screenplay for Crazy Heart doesn’t give Bridges enough to do to infuse true power into the character and the performance is not as brilliant as others by Bridges, whom I love dearly as an actor. In any event, his late entry into the Oscar race (Fox Searchlight distributed the film just in time) certainly knocked off any chance Morgan Freeman had for portraying Nelson Mandela in a bad film and any chance George Clooney had playing an axe-man in Up in the Air. Clooney’s nomination has been derided as him “playing himself,” which is a bit unfair; he’s terrific in his film, plays off of everyone nicely without stealing the spotlight, and would be second place of the four performances I’ve seen. As it stands, without having seen A Single Man, my vote would go toward Jeremy Renner, in a stunning debut role of depth and determination that shoulders the weight of The Hurt Locker.

Prediction: Bridges
Preference: Renner
Blind Spot: Firth
Should Be Here: Nicolas Cage, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans; Soulévmane Sy Savané, Goodbye Solo; Michael Sheen, The Damned United; Michael Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man

Best Director
• Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
• 
James Cameron, Avatar
• 
Lee Daniels, Precious

• Jason Reitman, Up in the Air
• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

This category may not be a “lock” per se, but I don’t know a single person willing to bet against Kathryn Bigelow. So let’s take her out of the equation for just a moment.

Last year I cast my imaginary vote for David Fincher, director of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was not among my favorite films of 2008 and would not have received my vote for Best Picture (although it did well in my imaginary tech categories), but I responded to and respected Fincher’s overall vision for the film and what he accomplished outside of the screenplay concerns. It was similar to the reaction I had with Avatar, which is also a flawed film from start to finish, but I don’t think you can downplay the scope and accomplishment James Cameron brought to it. I will never be able to wrap my mind around the idea of Avatar for Best Picture, but if Cameron were to pull off some miraculous upset, I could at least seen the justification in it. Ditto for Quentin Tarantino and Jason Reitman. (I didn’t like Precious, so Lee Daniels earns my congratulations on his nomination.) Inglourious Basterds and Up in the Air are the best films yet from their directors, but they couldn’t be further apart: the former is messy and slaphappy homage to cinema, while the latter is a clean, measured, and controlled character study.

That said, the discussion is utterly moot because of Bigelow. She crafted one of the finest war films in recent memory, and the first truly great fictional feature film to handle the Iraq War. Her vision on The Hurt Locker is in many ways a wild amalgam of the best decisions from Cameron, Tarantino, and Reitman. She utilizes the raw power of cinema to create an immersive experience in a war zone, and because the rest of the crew — from the actors to the editors, from the writing to the cinematography, from the sound mixers to composers — are also firing on all cylinders, it highlights her achievement even more.

Prediction: Bigelow
Preference: Bigelow
Should Be Here: Jane Campion, Bright Star; Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man; Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are

Best Picture
• Avatar

• The Blind Side
• 
District 9
• 
An Education
• 
The Hurt Locker
• 
Inglourious Basterds

• Precious
• 
A Serious Man

• Up
• 
Up in the Air

Most Oscar nominations are foregone conclusions (as Meryl Streep once noted, “the best acting all year is when the winners act surprised”), but for the 2009 Academy Awards, there was still the hint of genuine curiosity. Would opening the Best Picture category to ten let in more popcorn-friendly films of a lesser quality or smaller films of higher quality?

The answer, we’ve discovered, is a bit of a mixed bag. Had the category stayed at five, most likely the Best Picture nominees would have been Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, and Up in the Air. (We can deduce this from the Producers and Directors Guild Awards and from this year’s Best Director category.) As I see it then, the rest of the five slots were a +2/0/-2. A Serious Man and Up making the cut are positives. I’m indifferent toward An Education as a total package, and while I would have preferred something else, I don’t find its inclusion particularly cringe-worthy. District 9 and The Blind Side come in as negatives. It turns out that when you let the academy nominate five extra films, what happens is a mirror of when they nominate five films total: a few deserving, one middle-of-the-row, and a few undeserving. If I could go back in time, I’d suggest they just stick with five.

Now the new question will be how the Academy’s preferential voting system will affect the results. I’d call it a three-way race between Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Inglourious Basterds. The first has practically made more money than the other nine nominees combined, but suffered a typically fatal blow of not securing a writing nomination or a single acting nomination; the second has hit nearly every precursor in its path to victory (PGA, DGA, WGA, ACE, and variations guilds and critics’ associations); and the third has a passionate, if limited, following as well as possible high-rankings on voters’ preferential ballots.

If I could vote, I’d go with The Hurt Locker, although I admire four other films here — Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man, Up, and Up in the Air, all of which hold a spot on my year’s-best list. Any of them winning would be fine, and any of the other five winning would be frustrating. I predict the Academy will follow suit, given the precursors Locker has scored. But we simply don’t know how it’ll play it out; the Academy’s taste is at times mercurial (cf. Gladiator, Crash). Avatar winning would absolutely unprecedented but wholly logical on a few levels.

It feels strange to make The Hurt Locker as my official projection, considering I’ve been on the side of the film that won Best Picture only once this decade (in 2006, with The Departed). I’m holding my breath and crossing my fingers I will be again.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker
Preference: The Hurt Locker
Should Be Here: Bright Star, Mary and Max, Sugar, Summer Hours, Where the Wild Things Are
_________

Here are my predictions and preferences one more time:

Best Picture
Will and Should Win: The Hurt Locker

Best Director
Will and Should Win: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Best Actor
Will Win: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Should Win: Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Best Actress
Will Win: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
Should Win: Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Best Supporting Actor
Will and Should Win: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress
Will Win: Mo’Nique, Precious
Should Win: Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

Best Adapted Screenplay
Will and Should Win: Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air

Best Original Screenplay
Will Win: Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker
Should Win: Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man

Best Animated Film
Will Win: Up
Should Win: Up

Best Documentary Film
Will Win: The Cove
Should Win: Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country

Best Foreign Language Film
Will Win: The Secret in Their Eyes
Should Win: A Prophet

Art Direction
Will Win: Avatar
Should Win: Sherlock Holmes

Cinematography
Will Win: Barry Ackroyd, The Hurt Locker
Should Win: Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds

Costume Design
Will Win: The Young Victoria
Should Win: Bright Star

Editing
Will and Should Win: The Hurt Locker

Makeup
Will Win: Star Trek
Should Win: Il Divo

Original Score
Will and Should Win: Michael Giacchino, Up

Original Song
Will and Should Win: “The Weary Kind,” by T Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham, from Crazy Heart

Sound Editing
Will Win: Avatar
Should Win: Star Trek

Sound Mixing
Will and Should Win: The Hurt Locker

Visual Effects
Will and Should Win: Avatar


Animated Short
Will and Should Win: A Matter of Loaf and Death
(However, I Hope Will Win: The Lady and the Reaper)

Documentary Short
Will and Should Win: China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of the Sichuan Province

Live-Action Short
Will and Should Win: The Door

As a frame of reference, last year I correctly predicted 17 of 21 categories (I missed Actor, Foreign Language Film, Costume Design, and Sound Editing, and didn’t predict the short films). My preferences, however, lined up only 7 times out of the 21 — Actor, Supporting Actor, Animated Film, Documentary, Art Direction, Make-Up, and Visual Effects.

We won’t know until Sunday how good these predictions are, but if they go this way exactly as I foresee it, my new nomination preference overlap is more than 50%—13 of 24. That’s a hell of an improvement, but still a long way from reflecting the state of cinema as I see it.

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Golden Globe Reactions

Everything I think about the ceremony last night is best summed up in my @ScreenSavour Twitter feed from the broadcast: lots of pith and sarcasm. If you think awards shows are trivial, then the Golden Globes are Trivial-with-a-capital-T. Yet it’s too much fun for me to resist pulling out a needle and popping an over-produced balloon, so I had my fun.

Of course, the most interesting parts of the ceremony — Up winning Best Original Score, Jeff Bridges winning Best Actor — are eclipsed in the Monday morning discussion by James Cameron, who won Best Director for Avatar, which also won for Silliest Best Drama. (It’s the best “drama” of the year like The Hangover is the best “comedy.”)

I’ll be the first to say I don’t know what Avatar’s fortunes last night mean in regard to anything awards-related down the road. All night, awards-watchers I respect were calling out that someone’s nice acceptance speech at the Globes all but cemented an Oscar in a few weeks, but then, when something they didn’t like won, they cautioned everyone to relax because it’s “just the Golden Globes.” This seems like double-dealing spin at best. The Golden Globes are either worth something (no matter how small) or they aren’t. If Christoph Waltz and Mo’Nique win in the supporting actor categories at the Oscars, it’s not because of their genuine and sincere Golden Globe speeches; it’s because they’ve been cleaning up at almost every award show since December.

In any event: I'll be interested to see just how many people tuned in to the Golden Globes and whether there will be an Avatar effect from the audience. The producers spent the whole broadcast essentially pumping the audience for its victory at the end of the show, and no doubt a lot of people were rooting for the film to win. The Oscars will be mindful of that, I believe, if for no other reason than they're quite sensitive over The Dark Knight fiasco last year. (Incidentally, as far as quality blockbusters go, The Dark Knight runs circles around Avatar.)

I’ll have more awards season chatter when the Oscar nominations are announced. Now back to some legitimate criticism.

Continue reading »

Rewinding 2009: Part II

Reviews of Avatar, Away We Go, Bad Lieutenant, and The Cove, plus 10 one-line reviews.

Please join me while I play catch-up on the year in film.
_______

If I understand the PR and punditry correctly, the goal of James Cameron’s science fiction epic Avatar is immersion — a chrysalis of cinematic completeness, wrapped in the beautiful visuals of a computer-generated world and whisked away on a dreamlike adventure. Using this as a benchmark, Avatar is a mixed bag. For every moment it draws you into its world (and there are many, this is a gorgeous and gigantic technical achievement), there is another moment where its clunky and ham-fisted screenplay pushes you out.

Yes, Avatar is a dizzying spectacle of performance-capture technology and computer-generated imagery that envelopes the audience and brings everyone sitting in the theater into its world, the alien planet Pandora, where a U.S. Marine (Sam Worthington), occupying an avatar of the alien species, is sent on a reconnaissance mission to displace the species. (His loyalties shift as his knowledge grows.) It’s not difficult to admire the ambition and hubris on Cameron’s part that went into imagining this film, which cost in the $300-million range and relies on technology that’s been in the works for something like the better part of two decades. Only time will tell how influential this film’s style and special effects will be, but as you’re positioned in your theater seat, it feels like the door has been opened to a world of new cinematic possibilities.

However, even if its pioneering use of technology makes it the movie-going event of the year, Avatar in its totality is far from the year’s best offerings. While narrative subtlety has never been among Cameron’s strengths, the fundamental failings of the storytelling here — wooden dialogue, bloodless characters, a cliched script that makes no attempt to conceal the scaffolding of its rather sophomoric “Big Ideas” — are particularly egregious. What baffles me is that if you’re going to invest this much time and money into the possibility of cinematic history, why wouldn’t you spend a few more weeks at the drafting table or the writers’ room, tweaking (or radically changing) the script and turning Avatar, which already promises visual uniqueness, into a fresh work of sci-fi? (Even Star Wars, a film that borrows generously from archetypal characters and heroic mythos, found its own breath and pulse.)

The blame and praise fall equally onto the shoulders of Cameron, who serves the film as director, writer, and producer (and in various other capacities, I’m sure). You can tell where his allegiances lie, how he’s stacked the deck, and how he’s buying off the moviegoer. All that is a bit unfair, and even though the film is ultimately effective, it’s only minimally so. Cameron created an addictive new world without bothering to move the one we currently occupy.

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I’m not sure director Sam Mendes could have helmed a more different film after his 2008 drama Revolutionary Road than 2009’s Away We Go. The former, a beautifully daring yet flawed adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel, peered into the tortured and destructive marriage of a couple where the 1950s bled into the early 1960s. The latter, from an original screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, peers into the life of — surprise! — a couple genuinely in love. This is perhaps not traditional fare for art, but it works with ease and pleasantry in Away We Go. Burt and Verona (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) are in their thirties, happily together and deeply in love, but a little lost as they struggle to discover where “home” is before the birth of their first child. The film is a bit of a road comedy, where they take off and try our new locations and visit kooky friends and family. Krasinski and Rudolph are comfortable and likable, and the film is sweet and warm, with well-written touches of humanity. Though by no means perfect, it is a small, affecting love story that is a welcome respite from Hollywood’s bankrupt romantic comedy machine. 

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I can imagine a few circumstances under which Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, starring Nicolas Cage, would not be a success — for example, if it hadn’t been directed by Werner Herzog or starred Nicolas Cage. As simplistic as that response may be, it does seem to encapsulate this film’s strengths and the bizarre, twisted pleasure taken in seeing post-Katrina New Orleans through Herzog’s lens and watching Cage play an unstable, corrupt police officer who spirals further out of control than you can potentially imagine. Terence McDonagh, Cage’s character, steals drugs from criminals and the confiscated stash in police headquarters, pays regular visits to an escort girlfriend, uses violence and intimidation, and routinely breaks police protocol. It is a shocking and unhinged performance, the sort of role Cage will do out of the blue when he isn’t wallowing in blockbuster trash, and his character’s (I think it’s only his character’s) mania is riveting: he snorts, he shakes, he hunches, he snaps, he smokes, he twitches, he cackles, he pistol-whips, he blocks a person's assisted breathing machine, he randomly pulls out an electric razor and shaves during an interrogation. It is at once a parody every police procedural in existence but also an over-the-top performance that raises the stakes. The screenplay, adapted by William Finkelstein from the 1992 film Bad Lieutenant by Abel Ferrara, offers little beyond the limitations of the genre, but Herzog’s lens captures an array of strange scenery and capitalizes on the bizarre. I have no doubt that this Bad Lieutenant could have been played entirely straight, but the way Herzog and Cage duck and twist into darkly comic realms allows the film to stay one step ahead of the audience. If you don’t end up laughing and asking yourself what the hell is going on, you’re not paying attention.

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The Cove commits the cardinal sin of the activist documentary: it conflates the subject with the self when the two are decidedly unequal. Insofar as its subject is concerned, the film is a heart-breaking and horrifying look into the Japanese dolphin industry, the corrupt practices of Japan’s participation in the International Whaling Commission, and the spread of toxic mercury that follows the consumption of dolphin meat. The discussions that emerge through these parts of the film feel essential, although the way it builds its thesis is often hindered by a series of unfinished threads. But when the film becomes less about the dolphins and more about the brave antics and espionage-like tactics required of the filmmakers to capture their footage, The Cove loses its soul. The director, Louie Psihoyos, is the co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society, a non-profit organization that produced the film. The essayistic bend to this slice of agitprop is not the problem; it’s the distance and perspective. Under the direction of someone less interested in glorifying the filmmakers and activists, the film would have been tighter and more focused on

I won’t deny the power of the final images captured by the hidden cameras — men killing dolphins; dolphins struggling for life; the cruel handling of dead dolphin bodies; the bloody water that seems straight out of a horror film. They are unsettling and haunting. They sent chills down my spine and brought tears to my eyes. Yet, when I finally classified the feeling of discomfort that lingered after the end of the movie, it was as a combination of sadness at the images and frustration at cheapness of the filmmakers’ self-aggrandizing. Am I glad a film like this exists? Yes, for the reason that it brings attention to this issue. But am I glad that film is The Cove? The answer to that question is more complicated.

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• Earth, a re-cut and family-friendly version of BBC’s groundbreaking documentary Planet Earth, captures a lot that miniseries’ beautiful images, but suffers from an annoying voiceover that dumbs down the quality; certainly not recommended for anyone who can watch the miniseries instead.

• I found The Hangover to be one of the funnier films of the year, an unexpected and full-front assault of vulgarity, but now that 2009 is complete, I can only remember laughing but not what it was exactly that earned that laughter except a bizarre performance by Zach Galifianakis and a surprise cameo by a tiger.

• I Love You, Man: a funny but forgettable film.

• Extract: A not-so-funny but forgettable film.

• The Girlfriend Experience = Steven Soderbergh at his experimental worst.

• The first hour of Notorious is an above-average biopic of the early years in the life of rapper Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, but once the character hits it big, the film’s ambitions narrow rapidly.

• Rumor has it that Christian Bale fought to have the entire focus of Terminator: Salvation shifted from the Marcus Wright, a prototype cyborg character played by Sam Worthington in a a good performance, to vapid resistance hero John Connor, which might easily qualify as one of the worst screenplay decisions of 2009.

• Woody Allen’s Whatever Works doesn’t work.

• Although the goal of Lars Von Trier's Antichrist seems to be conscientious audience repulsion, in reality the most offensive quality to the film is how frighteningly dull, sloppy, and self-absorbed it is (not to mention its  heavy-handed aspirations of portraying depression, mania, grief, and humankind’s connection with religion and the natural world).

• Monsters vs. Aliens may not be the worst film of 2009 (many contenders left to go), but it’s among the least enjoyable experiences I’ve had with a movie in quite some time; at every turn this DreamWorks film misfires in its attempt to satirize and honor the science fiction b-movies of the 1950s, and it’s safe to say that the talented writers and dreamers at Pixar have no legitimate threat against them for title of greatest contemporary American animation studio.

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Rewinding 2009: Part I

Reviews of Invictus, Funny People, In the Loop, Julie & Julia, and District 9.


Please join me while I play catch-up on the year in film. Following last year’s example, I’ll be reviewing movies from across the like-dislike spectrum over the next few months, culminating in a (relatively complete) best-of list by the Oscars.

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Morgan Freeman plays a really good Nelson Mandela in Invictus, a really bad movie about Nelson Mandela. Actually, Invictus approaches Mandela from an oblique angle, focusing on the first year of his presidency in South Africa through the lens of the 1995 World Cup rugby match, where the S.A. team brought together blacks and whites in the shaky years after the defeat of apartheid. There are some biopics that need a narrative device such as this, but I’m not sure the story of Mandela is one of them; had it not been for Freeman and director Clint Eastwood, it’s difficult to see how this script — which rather clumsily engages the themes of reunion and race relations — would have ever be taken seriously.

There are few men like Mandela, after all: a brilliant and canny leader who valued forgiveness and reconciliation, who managed to put aside all the indignities he suffered and lead a nation out of its moral chaos. Mandela's presidency was an act of intranational diplomacy, with the precision of a laser and the subtlety of a master-class politician, and his life is one of the most poignant stories of the twentieth century. Invictus does a disservice to him and his legacy by clomping around, vanquishing subtlety, and announcing its intentions at every turn. Eastwood, functioning on autopilot, is lazy with visual cues, and the tone-deaf script is in competition with the cinematography to keep everything superficial and convenient. Moments like the 1995 World Cup exist; they are crucial moments of community, sometimes calculated and sometimes not, that can bring together feuding factions and resonate louder than any spoken apology. Invictus makes no attempt to capture that sensation as anything close to organic. The result is deeply shameful, particularly when you consider just how powerful Freeman is. Great men do not deserve films this derisory.

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With a name like Funny People, you might expect Judd Apatow’s third directorial effort (after The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up) to be, you know, funny; instead, it turns out to be about people. Not to be mistaken, let me say that the film is humorous, certainly good for a few laughs; but in this look into the lives of comedians—the famous, the fortunate, the flailing—the adjective “funny” is defined less by its connection to the humorous than it is to the strange, the unusual, and the offbeat, embodied in George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a sophomoric actor diagnosed with a rare blood disease; side effects include realizing where his life was misspent and a friendship with a young comedian, Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), who George takes under his wing with a mixture of selfishness and desperation. The strength of Apataow’s films is finding the humanity within unlikely characters, and at least as far as his directorial efforts are concerned, he’s turned it into a profitable enterprise by splicing such psychological analysis into the raunchy comedy genre. After a rather stellar first-hour, Funny People struggles through an overlong midsection (total running time is close to a two-and-a-half hours). In the end it emerges ultimately as a rewarding demonstration of Apataow’s ambition and a realistic portrait of everyday struggles and the means we use to conceal them. It’s not a great film, and it doesn’t nail funny-haha, but in its own way it nails funny-sad and proves the unlikeliest characters are capable of redemption.

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Let’s get this out of the way: the British political satire In the Loop is clever and quick, a film that delivers some good laughs and, heaven knows, owns the political allegiances of my heart. But let’s also acknowledge from the outset that it never really arrives in terms of sheer ferocity. The film concerns two diplomatic corps, American and British, jockeying for power (and when that doesn’t work, the mere illusion of power) as the two countries accelerate a potential war in the Middle East. The appeal here is in the language; writer-director Armando Iannucci’s screenplay is an icy sidewalk of barbs, jabs, and every conceivable conjugation of the word fuck (“Fuckity-bye” as a sign-off is among my favorite). But it’s a sort of witty slipperiness that masks itself as something sharper than it is. I spent the entire running time waiting for In the Loop to pull out the big knife and finally stab its victim, to make its definitive statement, but instead the film ends on a series of a thousand paper-cuts. Hey, if the object is to make them bleed to death, that’s one way to go. It just sure isn’t as efficient as it could be.

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Like Invictus, Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia delivers a partial biopic that is not an out-and-out success. It is the story of a contemporary blogger named Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who finds strength and assurance as she works her way through the cookbook of Julia Child, played in a coming-of-age story of her own by the impeccable Meryl Streep. The two stories feed (and feed off) each other, although the clear winners by the end are Streep, who sublimely channels Child, and Stanley Tucci, who plays Julia’s devoted husband Paul. The film has a heaping dose of charm and sweetness, which can’t be undersold, and there is a good deal of pleasure to be had through its humor, cuteness, and warmth. But there is never any escaping the fact that Julie & Julia this is one half of a potentially great movie married to one half of a rather standard movie. What’s worse is now Streep has already played Julia Child, and a full-length look into her life, her career, and her personality will probably not happen any time soon. Oh well: I’ll settle for what I can get.

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District 9, a sci-fi parable from debut director Neill Blomkamp (and producer Peter Jackson) that’s part apartheid allegory and part video game, is all the evidence necessary that the situation and the story are complementary yet profoundly discrete narrative elements. Aliens, having parked their spaceship above Johannesburg, become abused on earth at the hands of humans, who force them into a ghetto and attempt to profit from their intergalactic weaponry. The film begins as a faux documentary, clearly evincing the themes of prejudice, racism, and social justice. It’s easy to swept away in the potential — at least until the story begins, and the missed opportunities, the hopscotch plot, and Swiss cheese logic quickly sour the experience. This alternate universe Blomkamp constructs leaves too many essential questions unanswered and too many threads untied; much like the themes it initially puts on display, the film fronts an attitude and an angle that isn’t backed up with heavy thinking, and its attempts to go for the heart are often scattershot. I can admire the trajectory Blomkamp gives the film, but it is unwise to aim high if you have no intention of following through. And if I feel too let down, it’s only because I believe it could have been possible.

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Awards Season, 2009 Edition.

Leading the pack as usual, today the National Board of Review has unveiled its list of the year's best (American) films. Awards Season is now in full swing — cue up the critics in the gallery.

I have split feelings on this time of year. I tend to view awards cynically but I am an unabashed fan of film lists for a number of reasons, primarily because they're just so much damn fun to make as a critic and very helpful to read as a viewer. You can read my take on film awards and best-of lists from a column of mine on the subject from around this time last year; my opinion hasn't changed much.

So, yes, I'm looking forward to the best-of-the-decade lists as well as the year's best-ofs that will appear in the next few months, and will do my best to link to some of the more intriguing and provoking collections. My own lists, regarding 2009 specifically and the decade at large, will no doubt be delayed. I've been consumed with teaching and my thesis work and haven't had much of a chance to view too films this autumn and winter. My favorites from the year so far would include Goodbye Solo, The Hurt Locker, Public Enemies, Summer Hours, Up, and Where the Wild Things Are, but there are still dozens more films that I have to see and there's no guarantee any of the preceding titles will show up on that final list. There's not even a point in listing everything I haven't seen; it'll be tedious for you and embarrassing for me.

I do hope that this means I'm back to blogging, at least for a few months. It'll still be sporadic, but the hope is there will be a short story collection on the other end that all of you will have the chance to read in print one day.

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