2012 Oscar Picks

Before we start my predictions, I wanted to run down my rankings of the Best Picture Nominees.

1. Lincoln
2. Silver Linings Playbook
3. Django Unchained
4. Argo
5. Amour
6. Les Misèrables
7. Life of Pi
8. Zero Dark Thirty
9. Beasts of the Southern Wild

A few notes. Lincoln was far and away my favorite movie, not just of this list, but of the whole year. I liked it so much I read the 800 page book it was based on (which only devotes about 6 pages to the passage of the 13^th Amendment, oddly enough). I think that I appreciated the technical merits of Amour enough to boost it to number 2 or 3, but it’s so miserable it’s almost impossible to “enjoy.” Left with such a dilemma I stuck it square in the middle, but in some ways I think it’s the second best of the nominees. I have enormous guilt over not liking Argo as much as everyone else, but while I did enjoy it, it didn’t really move me like a lot of the other movies on this list did. The thing I remember most about ZD30 was how bored I was in the middle.

Anyway, to the predictions. Since I started making predictions way back in 1996, I have gotten progressively worse as these things. I think I hit 11/23 last year. Nevertheless, I am ready to display my complete lack of knowledge once more, this time for posterity in blog form. Because I hate when awards predictions predict a winner and then backtrack on themselves by saying something like “but then blanket blank could capture winner’s hearts and pull the upset” (Entertainment Weekly does this all the time!)I have put my predictions in bold, lest there be no confusion about my predictions.

1)      Best Picture: Argo seems to have all the momentum and won a bunch of precursor awards heading in. People freakin’ love this movie. My vote would be for Lincoln.

2)      Best Director: Steven Spielberg (Lincoln). My vote would be for Michael Haneke in Amour

3)      Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis (Lincoln). Doi.

4)      Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook). A very very tough race to call between rising star J-Law and last year’s breakout star Jessica Chastain. But Jennifer Lawrence feels to have more momentum now and there’s a backlash over ZD30 for the torture stuff. I would also vote for Lawrence.

5)      Best Supporting Actor: Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln). Another very difficult race to call, this time between all five nominees, all past winners, interestingly enough.  I think Jones’s character was the most memorable of the five and he has the surprise ending that gives his character more heart.  I would also vote for Jones

6)      Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway (Les Misèrables). Another easy one thanks to the “Dreamed a Dream” song.

7)      Best Original Screenplay:  Django Unchained – Another toughie. The journalistic research of Zero Dark Thirty was a really big deal when the movie came out, but now there’s a backlash against a lot of that narrative (like the torture scenes may not have happened). When your big selling point is that it’s all true, and then you’re like “well, maybe not all of it…” you are probably going to lose some votes. Of course, Django’s historic accuracy is also…questionable at best and the thing about Tarrantino is you either get it or you don’t.

8)      Best Adapted Screenplay: Lincoln – a lot was made out of Lincoln’s connection to Team of Rivals and the movie really does capture the essence of Lincoln presented in that book, even if the actual events of the movie take up but a small portion of said book.

9)      Best Animated Feature: Brave. I liked Wreck It Ralph better, but I think Brave has the more positive message, classic fairy tale style and Pixar pedigree voters will like instead of a video game movie.

10)   Best Foreign Language Film:  Amour – When the movie in the foreign language category is also up for Best Picture, it’s pretty close to a shoo-in (I don’t know what would happen if two foreign language films were nominated for Best Picture. The universe would implode, probably.)

11)   Best Documentary: Searching for Sugarman seems to be the consensus pick. Here’s an interesting tidbit for those who think Oscars are tied to an easy pattern. The Gatekeepers has many similar theme to Best Picture front runner Argo – it’s about spies, intrigue in the Middle East, casting Arabs as villains – but it is not the pick here.

12)   Best Documentary Short Subject: Open Heart – this is based solely on some film descriptions I’ve read, but this one’s about African children being flown to Europe for life saving surgeries so it sounds pretty winnable.

13)   Best Animated Short: Head Over Heels was so intricately made and had a surprisingly deep story.

14)   Best Live Action Short: Death of a Shadow also very intricately made and it has a very complex and unique story especially for a 20 minute movie. Henry feels like a contender but I think its subject matter is too close to Amour.

15)   Best Original Score: Lincoln – Always bet on John Williams

16)   Best Original Song: Skyfall (Skyfall by Adele): The academy seems to be trying to get hip to the music these days (remember Three Six Mafia?) and everybody loves Adele anyway.

17)   Best Sound Editing: Argo

18)   Best Sound Mixing: Les Misèrables – all that talk about the live singing seems like it would merit some recognition

19)   Best Production Design – Les Misèrables. In my day, this was called Art Direction. Nevertheless, I think Les Mis’s elaborate set pieces, like the big boat at the beginning and the funeral at the elephant statue, will prevail

20)   Best Cinematography – Life of Pi. Usually goes to the movie that feels the biggest. Even though a lot of Pi was CGI, it still had a lot of big stuff like the whale jumping over the boat or the scene where the ship sinks.

21)   Best Makeup and Hairstyling – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. It used to just be makeup. Anyway, all the dwarves in the Hobbit had those elaborate and unique beards and hairdos.

22)   Best Film Editing – Argo. The rule of thumb I always follow is editing and Best Picture go hand-in-hand.

23)     Best Costume Design – Anna Karenina

24)     Best Visual Effects – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. This one used to be a snap to pick but there are so many effects heavy films nowadays. Life of Pi had a lot of effects, used to good measure (could you tell when the tiger was real and when he was not?) but this is usually the category where it’s ok to vote for the sci-fi/fantasy movie

2012 Best Picture Nominee #9: Amour

The final nominee for the 2012 Best Picture is Amour, a two hour, seven minute slog through the bowels of hell. Endlessly heartbreaking and powerful, Amour is really more of a horror movie than a domestic drama, where the “killer” is not Jason Voorhees but the unstoppable onslaught of age.

Georges and Anne (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are elderly, well-to-do retired musicians in Paris. The morning after seeing one of Anne’s students give a brilliant piano concerto, Anne enters into an unshakable daze for several minutes while sitting at the breakfast table. When she finally comes out of it, she has no memory of the daze occurring. She has an operation that goes badly and is left partially paralyzed. Georges, her well-meaning if condescending and elitist husband, determines to care for her himself, especially after Anne makes him promise not to take her back to the hospital. At first, the couple enters into a new routine of life, punctuated by infrequent visits from their grown child, Eva (Isabelle Huppert). But Anne’s condition continues to deteriorate, leaving her increasingly depressed and unable to speak, but still seemingly aware of what’s going on. The couple suffers through increasing indignities like the well-meaning pity of a former student and Anne’s inability to bathe or even use the bathroom on her own. Everyone realizes she is dying and Georges settles into a painful routine of caring for his beloved wife and waiting for the inevitable end.

I thought the directing in Amour, more than in any other movie this year, was what really made the movie. The director, Michael Haneke, employs a deceptively simple style where he sets the camera up and doesn’t move it, doesn’t zoom in or out, doesn’t do anything for very long periods of time. In one of the film’s opening shots, he focuses on a concert being attended by Anne and Georges, just shooting the audience getting into their seats (he must use some kind of focusing trick, because even though it’s a very wide shot, the viewer’s eyes are immediately drawn to Georges and Anne). It’s a very strange convention, but after a while the viewer kind of gets used to the idea the camera isn’t going anywhere. WHICH ONLY MAKES IT WORSE when Anne’s condition starts to deteriorate and there are all these painful scenes of her trying to speak or Georges trying to feed her and you realize, as a viewer that the director won’t let you escape them. He’s not going to cut away to save us the horror. The camera’s gaze (if I may use an ivory tower term) is totally unflinching. It adds to the drama and horror of the movie.

I think it’s neat the movie put out two posters, showing the same scene from both main characters’ perspectives

The movie is not without its flaws. It seems to be missing a scene in the middle where Anne’s condition deteriorates. One scene she is moving around in her wheelchair, the next her daughter is babbling to her and Anne is struggling to get words out. Georges then explains to his daughter that Anne had a second stroke. A short scene (although, admittedly, there are no short scene in Amour) where Georges discovers Anne having the stroke would have fit in with the rest of the film’s step-by-step documentation of a human being falling apart. The film also descends into total French lunacy at the end, with a five minute scene where Georges chases a pigeon that has gotten into the apartment and then a bunch of other stuff happening that just feels extraneous. The translator of the movie also at times seems to go for literal translations instead of attempting to write the subtitles in less awkward American phrasing (the one that comes to mind is when Anne asks Georges why is “peering” at her, when the right word clearly should be “staring.)

Amour is one of the very best movies of the year, but it is also a movie I don’t feel the need to ever watch again. It’s is brutally honest in its depiction of the ravages of old age, but not exploitative. There’s nothing here that seems out of the realm of possibilities, which makes Amour’s story all the more heartbreaking. There is absolutely no joy to be found by the end of this movie, and you need to understand that going in. But at the same time, it captures a realm of human experience – dying – in a way I don’t think ever has been before. Somethings in life are just sad and Amour captures the saddest of them all.

Oscar Trivia: At 85 years old, Emmanuelle Riva is the oldest Best Actress nominee ever (she will turn 86 on Oscar night). Her nomination comes the same year as Quvenzhanè Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild) became the youngest Best Actress nominee at age 9.

Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Haneke); Best Actress (Emmanuelle Riva); Best Original Screenplay; Best Foreign Language Film

2012 Best Picture Nominee #8: Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild fulfills this years “WTF?” quota for the Best Picture nominees. A bizarre, intentionally muddy story about a five year old dealing with her community’s destruction and her ailing father, the movie is one part fable, one part societal critique and one part hero’s journey. While Beasts is far from my favorite of this year’s Best Picture crop, much like last year’s “out there nomination” Tree of Life, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a rare movie that I continued to think about and better understand a few days after watching it. With a few days’ thought, I’ve garnered a better appreciation for the movie, although I still don’t think it’s all that great.

Five-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhanè Wallis) lives in abject poverty in a subsistence level community near New Orleans called the Bathtub. Hushpuppy is marginally cared for by her ailing father, Wink (Dwight Henry), who appears to have a mental illness and a variety of other ailments that she is ill-equipped to understand. (She may or may not live by herself in a building separate from her father. Like many things in this movie, the narrative is maddeningly unclear about this, although the ambiguity is intentional, which we’ll discuss in a minute.) One day, the Bathtub is decimated by a hurricane that floods the small village. The remaining residents attempt to build a floating community on the flooded town’s remains. When that doesn’t work, Wink and some fellow Bathtub residents blow up a dam to finally drain the water out of the Bathtub, but that only brings the attention of the US Government, who forces the residents into a refugee camp. Meanwhile, Wink continues to grow sicker.

The best part of Beasts of the Southern Wild is the movie’s total dedication to capturing things from Hushpuppy’s point of view. Things seem to happen magically or without explanation because that is the childish worldview possessed by Hushpuppy and related to the viewers. For example, we’re never really sure what’s wrong with Wink – is he mentally sick? Does he have a cancer? Both? Ambiguity in movies drives me absolutely nuts, but in this instance, I think it’s done for a good purpose and with a positive result.  The movie possesses a fantastical element that creates this sense that everything being experienced by Hushpuppy is part of an elaborate fairytale, even a flood or being evacuated by the US government. As Hushpuppy is an unreliable narrator, the viewer is left to ponder if the flood waters really were that high or that was just how a little girl would perceive them because of her own tiny stature.

The actual relationship between Hushpuppy and Wink, when allowed to play out in a few scenes, is also really well done. The two have a fight about 2/3 of the way through the movie that captures their love and compassion for each other. Wallis wasn’t just a gimmick nominee – she really deserved the nomination and I think Henry was gypped from an acting nomination as well. I also appreciated that while the movie deals with the very real topic of unimaginable poverty in the United States, the subject matter does not overwhelm the movie, and is instead a backdrop to the story of Hushpuppy’s coming-of-age and her relationship with Wink.

Yes, this is a real scene

These positives notwithstanding, Beasts of the Southern Wild is near the bottom of my personal preferences for nominees this year. The movie drug quite a bit, even at a lean 90 minutes. And then there are the damn Aurochs. The Aurochs, according to Hushpuppy’s teacher, were these ancient mammals who devoured cavemen who were unable to stand up for themselves. Instead of just being some tossed-off metaphor, the Aurochs are literally in the movie and we spend an inordinate amount of time watching them come closer to Hushpuppy and the Bathtub, until finally, in the middle of this domestic and socio-political drama she is forced to confront them. It’s just too over-the-top, although not quite as bad as the dinosaurs in last year’s nominated Tree of Life. But it’s still too much.

Like I said Beasts of the Southern Wild is a real thinker of a film. It’s sort of a hero journey about Hushpuppy coming to an early adulthood as she comes to grip with her father’s illness. But I don’t think the movie pulled off the message as well as it could, nor is it the most entertaining of this year’s Oscar crop.

Nominations: Best Picture Best Director (Benh Zeitlin); Best Actress (Quvenzhanè Wallis); Best Adapted Screenplay

Oscar Trivia: At nine-years-old, the spellcheck-breaking Quvenzhanè Wallis is the youngest person ever nominated for an Academy Award!

2012 Best Animated Shorts

The five nominees for Best Animated Short are even more different than their counterparts in the Best Live Action Short category. Ranging in length from a mere 2 minutes up to 16, the five entries cover a variety of subjects and styles, from a popular television cartoon to one that eschews narrative altogether for the sake of artistic endeavors. None of the entries had any spoken dialogue interestingly enough. I think four of the five came from the U.S., although, as they were all silent, they could all be played pretty much anywhere.

Adam and Dog is a reimagining of the story of Adam and Eve from the perspective of the very first dog. Lonely at first in the wild Garden of Eden, Dog soon finds companionship and safety with Adam, only to feel isolated when Adam meets Eve.  Dog’s loyalties are tested but he decides to stick with his master, even when Adam is cast out of the Garden of Eden. This movie had a surprising amount of hardcore cartoon nudity. It was the slowest paced of the movies, also the saddest and my least favorite of the five.

Fresh Guacamole is a very clever two minute short with no real story. It’s just a set of hands making guacamole. But the “ingredients” are all non-food items – the onion is a baseball, for example. When it gets diced, it turns into tiny gaming dice. The avocado is a hand grenade. It goes on and on. I can’t really explain it better, but it was exceedingly clever. My second favorite of the bunch.

Head Over Heels uses stop-motion puppetry in a very bizarre story of a married couple trying to reconnect. A man and a wife live in opposite parts of the house and the world: one lives on the floor of the house, the other on the ceiling and they barely interact because of it. Finally, the husband’s simple gesture – repairing his wife’s wedding shoes – leads to her solution – nailing shoes to the ceiling so that she can be on the same plane as him. This was a wonderful short. Frist off, the stop motion elements had all these wonderful inventions – like the husbands chair that can lift up to the ceiling in an effort to see his wife. Second, for a 10 minute movie, this was surprisingly deep as the ceiling/floor lifestyle is a metaphor for their alienation from one another. My favorite of the bunch.

The Longest Daycare stars Maggie Simpson of The Simpsons fame. Dropped off at a daycare, Maggie must protect a caterpillar, later a butterfly, from her arch-nemesis, the baby with one eyebrow, who smashes butterflies. The escape leads to a lot of funny sight gags, such as Maggie trying to maneuver a maze of children in bumperoos. This was very fun and silly, although lacked some of the emotional heft of other entries. I’d put it as probably third overall.

Paperman, a Disney entry that was initially shown in front of Wreck-It Ralph (which is nominated for Best Animated Feature) is a love story. A bored office worker makes a chance encounter with a beautiful woman on the subway and then spots her again in an office across the street from his. The man begins building and flying paper airplanes, trying to get her attention. When it seems he has failed, the airplanes themselves rise up to bring the two together. This was very cute and sweet and I don’t know that my description has done its cleverness justice. I’d probably place it fourth, but I still liked it a lot.

2012 Best Live Action Short

Long the bane of the office Oscar pool, the short film nominations are among the biggest head scratchers of any Oscar night. The most commonly asked question when confronting the three short film categories – animated, live action and documentary – are “Where do they show these films?” And honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question. Some sort of art house or film festival, most likely, in LA or New York, I guess (for the most part, the long-form documentary also falls into the category to make the unholy quartet of Oscar guessing). Interestingly, short movies used to be a BIG DEAL with starts like Laurel and Hardy and cartoons with Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, long before they were banished to cartoon compilations on Saturday mornings and cable networks, driving business to the theaters and thus their awards used to mean a lot more to the masses.

This year, I was lucky enough that the Neon, Dayton’s art-house cinema, showed compilations of the best live action and animated shorts on consecutive days. The five films for Best Live Action short clocked in at around 20-25 minutes apiece and each came from a different country, although many were co-financed by US companies (I don’t believe it’s a requisite that all the movies have to come from a different country, like in the foreign film category). Also, whereas I was expecting mostly film school theses made on an 8mm for $80, these films had pretty extravagant production values, elaborate special effects and all the other trappings of a “real” movie, albeit one that is less than 1/3 of the length we’re used to. Here then is a run-down of this year’s Best Live Action shorts, with animated to follow in the next couple of days.

 Asad is a South African production made mostly by Somali refugees. It is the most light-hearted movie about Somali pirates, child soldiers and famine that you will ever find. Young Asad lives in a coastal Somali village, idolizing the pirates who rob boats. Despite his knowledge of the seas, he is gently rebuffed by the pirates from joining the crew because he is too young (this part seemed a little far-fetched). When not dodging the angry rebel soldiers who invade his village, he befriends an old fisherman who encourages him that soon he will make a big catch as a fisherman himself. When Asad takes the fisherman’s boat out alone, he finds the ruined remains of the one of the boats the pirates attempted to take over, with many of his pirate friends killed. He adopts a cat left on board, which he considers his “big catch.” Despite how it reads on paper, Asad is actually fairly light hearted and has a lot of gentle humor. This was my second favorite of the five.

Buzkashi Boys is an uber-depressing Afghani film about two boys, Rafi and Ahmad, coming to grips with a bleak future. Orphan street beggar Ahmad and blacksmith son Rafi share a sad life in Kabul, Afghanistan. Both idolize the men who compete in Buzkashi, a sort of football game played on horses. Ahmad, who answers to no one, is fearless and persistent in his dreams of becoming a Buzkashi competitor, while Rafi is torn between loyalties to his friend and his father, who wants Rafi to train to become a blacksmith. When Ahmad is killed in a horsing accident, Rafi ultimately gives up the dreams of his friend and commits to blacksmithing, earning the respect of his father. This movie was very bleak, to say the least. I also found it the slowest moving of the five and it was my least favorite.

Curfew, the only English language entry of the bunch, was a lot like Asad in taking a seemingly sad topic and finding a lot of humor in it. In the middle of his suicide, Richie is interrupted by a phone call from his sister, who, despite being estranged from Richie, begs him to watch his niece for the evening. Richie agrees and soon forms a bond with the fast talking girl who is forever badgering him with questions. The relationship that develops causes Richie to finally tell his sister to stand up for herself (she is in an abusive relationship) and the two each find a new reason to go on. This movie was very funny and sweet, definitely my favorite of the five.

Death of a Shadow, a French and Belgium film, is the strangest of the five. Nathan Rijckx, a ghost walking the Earth, has a special camera that lets him travel through time and space to capture the shadows of the dying. Once he has captured 10,000 shadows, the devilish collector who “employs” him will let him live once again. Nathan’s desire is to return to the time of his own death (apparently in World War I) to reunite with a nurse who was kind to him just before he was shot by the enemy. His goal completed, Nathan learns the nurse was in love with another soldier whose shadow Nathan had taken. Nathan trades places with the dead man in order for his true love to be happy. The plot is nowhere near as straight forward as I just described it. You really have to pay attention to understand what’s going on and even then, some things are left to conjecture. This movie had awesome special effects, with moving shadows dancing around. I would rank this third, although I think it has a strong shot at the Oscar.

Henry, a French Canadian movie about Alzheimer’s, is also pretty depressing and I think has a good shot at the Oscar. The story starts as a sort of thriller, with Henry, an aging concert pianist, arriving home to find his wife missing. He is kidnapped by unknown men, seemingly led by an otherwise kindly woman. As Henry moves through memories about how he met his wife during World War II, we realize Henry’s narrative isn’t quite right. He forgets important things, like that he has a daughter. Over time, it becomes apparent that Henry has Alzheimer’s, his wife is dead and the kindly woman is actually his daughter. This was a very sad but well done movie with a unique perspective into the deteriorating mind of an Alzheimer’s patient. This was my fourth favorite movie.