Okay I’m done now

And the winner is … NOT ME! lol 8/21 is my final score. Just 2 better than last year. I really thought I’d do at least a little better than that. It was still a far from disappointing night, though. I think back to last year’s Slumdog sweep and I don’t know how my love of Oscar even survived that. Baldwin/Martin gags were lame but made me laugh buckets … even Sandra Bullock earned her win with a beautifully engineered speech. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to regular Moët after sipping a Grand Vintage over 4 hours!

Best Picture: Up in the Air (that’s my final answer) I still really want Up in the Air, but feel like Inglourious Basterds is the one I’ll be most happy with in years to come. I’ll be fine with Avatar or The Hurt Locker
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) I’m fairly convinced this is hers.
Best Actor: Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) I don’t want Jeff Bridges to win this (if he does, I’ll pretend it’s for The Big Lebowski). I’d prefer Jeremy Renner of The Hurt Locker, and this is the first time I’ve ever really been happy with a Clooney nomination. I’ve still not seen A Single Man. Really, anyone but Bridges or Freeman (I didn’t think either were very good at all).
Best Actress: Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia) As with Bridges in the Actor category, I don’t want Bullock to win this (if she does, I’ll pretend it’s for 28 Days). Until I saw Julie & Julia the other day (review soon hopefully), I was Gabby Sidibe all the way on this – it just doesn’t seem they could give the Oscar to Mo’Nique and then not recognise her too, and she is fantastic in Precious (review of that soon too). Then I saw Julie & Julia and I haven’t seen a more joyous movie all year. It’s the first time in my lifetime that Meryl Streep has been nominated and I actually really wanted her to win. I haven’t seen The Last Station.
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) One of the few cases where I couldn’t be happier with the favourite.
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique (Precious) I’d love for one of the Up in the Air girls to win but even I can’t pick just one so I concede it must be Mo’Nique’s.
Best Original Screenplay: Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino) I wish this was a bigger no brainer than it seems…
Best Adapted Screenplay: Up in the Air (Jason Reitman) This seems to be the only one I can seriously hope for for my favourite movie of the year.
Best Editing: The Hurt Locker I thought I was as torn on this category as the other smaller tech categories, then what Roger Ebert wrote in his predix made me realise why my gut had chosen The Hurt Locker and now I’m certain. This is almost as deserving of a win as Thelma Schoonmaker’s work on The Departed was 3 years ago.
Best Cinematography: The Hurt Locker
Best Animated Feature: The Princess and the Frog This might be one of my “wasted predix” but I just found this one so much better than the other nominees.
Best Art Direction: Avatar One of the few you really can’t argue that this movie actually deserves.
Best Costume Design: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus Just ‘cos of the ones I’ve seen this was the movie I liked most, but not that much. Inglourious Basterds shoulda been in here.
Best Make-Up: Star Trek Another “meh” category. I simply haven’t seen the other nominees.
Best Visual Effects: Avatar No-brainer of the year.
Best Sound Effects Editing: Inglourious Basterds Shrugs lol. Another I might change before the show. None really stood out greatly to me as better than the others.
Best Sound Mixing: Avatar See above. Just, nothing for Transformers 2, please.
Best Score: The Hurt Locker I swapped this out of my nominations predix for the Public Enemies score at the last minute and was surprised when it came up. I watched the movie again a week or so ago and was reminded why I originally thought it should be nominated.
Best Original Song: “Almost There”, The Princess and the Frog I know, it’s probably “Crazy Heart”, but I just didn’t even like the song in that movie let alone Bridges. I’d much prefer my fave song from Princess get this, like Disney used to.
Best Documentary Feature: The Cove I’m sure this one’s between Food Inc. and The Cove (reviews to come soon hopefully), and I think Food Inc is a much more important movie, but The Cove packs an emotional punch you just can’t forget and with its closing line about “if we can’t stop this, than we can’t stop anything“ (words to that effect), arguably does make it more important too than the all-embracing Food Inc.
Best Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon has it, I think. Pretty sure this is between The White Ribbon and Un Prophete … I hope to see both in the next couple of days…

I also hope to watch 6 of the nominated shorts before Sunday, in which case I might include those categories for the first time. (thought there were some on Sky Anytime but they were old ones, grr). Anyway, that is all for now

---

Nominations Predictions from earlier

*Currently tallying*… doing this way too fast, alert me if I’ve made an error with any of my red/green right/wrong indicators

53/96 … almost exactly the same as last year!

Okay, I think I’m done. Nominations are tomorrow. As always, my final list is a complex combination of actual informed expectations, personal preferences, and the odd wild card, with the final deciding factor always being “does it sit well with me?” 2010 has been that rare year where I can truly say all of the following sit pretty darn well with me, and that happens to match up nicely with the prevailing trends on predicting sites. As I’ve said already, once I saw Up in the Air and loved it so darn much, I knew everything was gonna be okay.

Edit: lol and I already made a swap – Michael Gambon is the only thing I think Half-Blood Prince should be up for. It’s almost less likely even than Isabelle Fuhrman but I’ll probably get less WTFs for it

Best Picture

• Up in the Air [WIN]
• Inglourious Basterds
• Avatar
• The Hurt Locker
• An Education
• Up
• Precious
• District 9
• Star Trek
• The Lovely Bones

Best Director

• Jason Reitman, Up in the Air
• Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker [WIN]
• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
• James Cameron, Avatar
• Lee Daniels, Precious

Best Actor

• Sam Rockwell, Moon
• Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker
• George Clooney, Up in the Air
• Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
• Michael Sheen, The Damned United

Best Actress

• Zoe Saldana, Avatar
• Saoirse Ronan, The Lovely Bones
• Carey Mulligan, An Education
• Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia
• Gabby Sidibe, Precious

Best Supporting Actor

• Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds [WIN]
• Alfred Molina, An Education
• Christan McKay, Me and Orson Welles
• Michael Gambon, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Matt Damon, Invictus

Best Supporting Actress

• Isabelle Fuhrman, Orphan
• Sigourney Weaver, Avatar
• Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
• Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds
• Mo’Nique, Precious

Best Original Screenplay

• Moon, Nathan Parker
• The Hurt Locker, Mark Boal
• Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino
• Up
• (500) Days of Summer

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Up in the Air
• The Road
• An Education
• The Lovely Bones
• The Damned United

Best Editing

• Dana E. Glauberman, Up in the Air
• Chris Innis, Bob Murawski, The Hurt Locker
• Sally Menke, Inglourious Basterds
• Maryann Brandon & Mary Jo Markey, Star Trek
• Stephen Rivkin, John Refoua, James Cameron, Avatar

Best Cinematography

• Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds
• Mauro Fiore, Avatar
• Tom Stern, Invictus
• Roger Deakins, A Serious Man
• Barry Ackroyd, The Hurt Locker

Best Score

• Coraline – Bruno Coulais
• The Princess and the Frog – Randy Newman
• Up – Michael Giacchino
• Public Enemies – Eliot Goldenthal
• Up in the Air – Rolfe Kent

Best Original Song

• “Dreaming” – Bruno Coulais, Coraline
• “Butterfly Fly Away” – Alan Silvestri, Glen Ballard, Hannah Montana: the Movie
• “Almost There” – Randy Newman, The Princess and the Frog
• “I See You” – Avatar
• “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” – Crazy Heart

Best Sound Editing

• The Hurt Locker
• Star Trek
• Avatar
• Up
• Inglourious Basterds

Best Sound Mixing

• The Hurt Locker
• Avatar
• Star Trek
• Up
• Public Enemies

Best Animated Feature

• The Princess and the Frog
• Coraline
• Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea
• Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Up

Best Visual Effects

• Avatar
• 2012
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Best Art Direction

• Rick Carter, Robert Stromberg, Avatar
• Inglourious Basterds
• Hideki Arichi, Josh Fifarek, Moon
• Coraline
• Star Trek

Best Costume Design

• Coraline
• Inglourious Basterds
• Public Enemies
• Cheri
• The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Best Make-Up

• Star Trek
• District 9
• The Road

I have some reviews from the past month to fill in before this one but I want to jump ahead and write this one while it’s fresh in my mind the very day I watched it. This is another movie that has been on my “to watch” list far too long. The initial reason was that I only had a dull VHS copy of the movie with no subtitles on it, and I decided to wait either until I found time to learn a little Swedish (something I still want and plan to do for a variety of other reasons) or some subtitles showed up on the net. Then, I waited so long that I decided perhaps I should read the book and then watch the movie with no subtitles, which is what I eventually did. I read the (translated) book over the past few weeks, and it instantly became one of my alltime faves. The simplicity of language and degree to which I related to the emotions conveyed, the likes of which are rarely, if ever, conveyed, just blew me away. I had a hard time thinking how it could make a movie, let alone one that clocks in at a mere 75 minutes.

By the time I got to watching the movie, then, I had the book as a background and I had also acquired subtitles, so I was set. The irony is – and this serves as encouragement to anybody reading this and having the same hesitations about watching – the smattering of dialogue in this movie is really nothing to worry about, should you either have no subtitles, or even if you have them and just don’t like reading them. This is a visual interpretation all the way, and frankly, it’s the only way you could even hope to attack the complexity of the inner world of these characters in the novel: by practically ignoring it, and letting the viewer fill in the gaps, which is as pure as cinema gets if you ask me.

The story is almost embarrassingly simple and does nothing towards selling you the experience of either reading or watching (but if you need this kind of movie “selling” to you then you’re frankly on the wrong site, lol): two young girls, Siss and Unn, meet and immediately connect on a level they can neither understand nor communicate. Unn is new to Siss’ school and distant from the other kids. Siss goes to Unn’s house and they share an intimate moment in Unn’s bedroom, after which Unn says she has a secret she wants to tell Siss. Siss gets uncomfortable and leaves, and the next day, Unn mysteriously disappears. I won’t go further than that, except to say that what follows not only continues a much-needed exploration of unspoken feelings but also the grief process, growing up, and moving on (I feel like I should at least acknowledge the lesbian aspect of the story but I honestly did not even think of this while reading the book, reading the girls’ attraction to each other on a much deeper spiritual level, with all that follows stemming merely from Unn’s secret that Siss, and us, never learn*… the book is just that minimal, not to mention so averse to such easy descriptors as the ‘L’ word…).

I would recommend the book much more enthusiastically than the movie because there is just so much more there, including a heartwrenching “second ending” which is understandably excised here (I was overjoyed, if that’s the right word, by the portrayal of the ice palace’s collapse, however). But considering this was made in the late 80s for what can’t have been an enormous budget, I was seriously impressed by how well the film simply visualises the book (this does, by the way, entail some underage nudity, for those who need to know these things). I really didn’t expect the scenes of the ice palace itself to be so overpoweringly visceral. I almost didn’t expect to see the ice palace at all, assuming a film of such paltry length would somehow take the story on a more metaphorical and talky level. This is a film that takes a minimal novel and strips it down even further. It’s all about the images, the faces, and a haunting (if a little synthy) score. It actually interests me how a person who hadn’t read the novel first would take it. It didn’t blow me away nearly as much as the book, which left me teary-eyed and speechless, but I really can’t imagine a better way it could have been filmed.

* This secret, now I’ve had time to process both book and movie, seems simply to be that Unn is afraid she won’t go to heaven, and it follows perhaps that this is because of the attitude towards homosexuality at the time the story is set, in the 30s – but again, the way it read to me in the book, it seemed to me that Unn was afraid of not going to heaven, but equally afraid of elaborating on why, which is what unsettles Siss, who leaves before such a thing can ever happen…

This has been on my “to watch” list for probably nearly a decade now, since I first came across Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz and Lenny, both of which instantly added him to my list of favourite directors despite his very short resume (in addition to these, there’s only Sweet Charity and Cabaret). It’s amazing in all that time of procrastinating that I never came across any plot info about the movie, and I’m glad… I came to this movie knowing very little about the real life story it’s based on – only that it had something to do with a Playboy model – and as such I got as much out of its shocking turns as it’s possible to get, so I recommend you do likewise and stop reading if you plan on seeing it any time soon, though I won’t get into too much detail (but don’t look at the tags).

This movie reminded me a lot of two other movies I’ve seen in the past couple of years: Lipstick (which shared actress Mariel Hemingway) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, with a small (less rollercoaster-ish) dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. I wouldn’t say it’s quite as good as any of these, nor at least three of Fosse’s other works (I’ve not yet seen Sweet Charity, though I hear it’s a pretty straight 60s musical so I doubt it’ll wow me), it’s a particularly slow, procedural build to an electrifying finale that left me emotionally drained. It’s certainly worth a look if you’re into such raw Seventies/Early-80s grit.

What to say of this movie on a first viewing? It seems redundant to defend it against the negative reviews it received in light of Roger Ebert naming it the best movie of the last decade, but I still can’t imagine how anybody could flat out dismiss this. I would see why a person wouldn’t like Synecdoche, New York – like all of Charlie Kaufman’s work since Being John Malkovich, it’s knowingly complex, bordering pretentious, and arguably overreaching – but for the same reasons, you kinda have to give it some credit while it remains relatively unknown alongside so many more shamelessly mainstream releases of the last few years.

It’ll take me at least a second viewing and probably many more to really settle on an opinion myself. This really is the kind of movie that makes me think so hard my brain feels physically stretched by the end. It’s packed with ideas, and those ideas packed within ideas, like a Russian doll of philosophy. It’s full of great actors, of actors playing actors… and it’s the first Charlie Kaufman movie to have some seriously impressive set design too. And you have to remember all the while that all this comes as Kaufman’s directorial debut. Anybody with half a brain would’ve expected so much less than this (look what happened with the reverse, when Kaufman’s two-time director Michel Gondry wrote and directed Be Kind Rewind), so the mere achievement of simply putting it on film so coherently as he has (yes, it’s confusing; but in that way in which you trust it all makes sense somehow) is almost as mindblowing as the script.

I forget when I did this last year but I’m pretty sure I usually make it somewhere between nominations and ceremony day so that I can pick up the increased hits I get on these pages in this time in the hope of keeping the old Google rank up (it’s slid in the past few years but always worth doing my best lol). So, of course, this page will be nonsense for at least a few months, and even then it’s just a bit of fun. But for now I will crawl the net for as much info about upcoming releases that catch my eye (hint: this is a good place to start), and the comments are open for you to spew titles at me too (last year someone posted a fabulous comment full of titles).

Best Picture

• Miral
• The Tree of Life
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
• The Ghost Writer
• Shutter Island

Best Director

• Julian Schnabel, Miral
• Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
• Jodie Foster The Beaver
• Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer
• Martin Scorsese, Shutter Island

Best Actor

• Willem Dafoe, Miral
• Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life
• Johnny Depp, The Rum Diary
• Sean Penn, Fair Game
• Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine

Best Actress

• Freida Pinto, Miral
• Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole
• Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
• Naomi Watts, Fair Game

Best Supporting Actor

Best Supporting Actress

• Jodie Foster, The Beaver
• Elle Fanning, Somewhere

Best Original Screenplay

• Somewhere, Sofia Coppola
• The Beaver, Kyle Kinnen

Best Adapted Screenplay

• The Green Zone, Brian Helgeland
• The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson
• The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin
• Miral, Rula Jebreal

Best Editing

Best Cinematography

• Stuart Dryburgh, The Tempest
• Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree of Life

Best Original Score

• Alexandre Desplat, The Tree of Life

Best Original Song

Best Animated Feature

• Rapunzel
• Toy Story 3
• The Illusionist

Best Art Direction

• Robin Hood
• The Tempest

Best Costume Design

• Robin Hood
• Colleen Atwood, Alice in Wonderland
• Sandy Powell, The Tempest

Best Make Up

• Alice in Wonderland
• The Tempest
• Robin Hood

Best Sound Mixing

Best Sound Effects Editing

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

Best Visual Effects

• Alice in Wonderland
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

Best Documentary Feature

• Oceans

I was going to start the entry with “I don’t bother predicting the nominations for these awards but…” but, eep, well it seems I didn’t even bother with this last year lol. Anyway, this is like an Oscars preview, I guess, and I’ve decided that since the awards are so predictable this year (you can find predictions all over elsewhere that will be 100% right, and I could easily transcribe if I wanted), I’m going to root for the underdogs, the ones that I love, unless those happen to coincide particularly well with the “locks”. So, yeh, again the “predictions” moniker isn’t entirely correct, but y’know, it’s the internet, and you gotta use the keywords.

In short, you could say that this year I’m going for a score of zero, lol. (actually, having completed the list, I reckon it might just be my usual 50/50 again with the lesser categories working in my favour…)

… 8/21!

Best Film: Up in the Air
Outstanding British Film: Moon
Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer: Duncan Jones, Moon
Director: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Original Screenplay: Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino
Adapted Screenplay: Up in the Air, Jason Reitman
Film not in the English Language: Let the Right One In
Animated Film: Coraline
Leading Actor: George Clooney, Up in the Air
Leading Actress: Saoirse Ronan, The Lovely Bones
Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Supporting Actress: Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
Music: Crazy Heart
Cinematography: The Hurt Locker
Editing: The Hurt Locker
Production Design: Avatar
Costume Design: A Single Man
Sound: Avatar
Special Visual Effects: Avatar
Make Up & Hair: Nine
Rising Star: Carey Mulligan

I had a gut feeling I wouldn’t be as crazy for this as I was for Paris, je t’aime as I simply don’t feel the same connection to this city (which I haven’t visited) as I do for Paris (which I have, multiple times). In addition to this, the directors list for this one – Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Shunji Iwai, Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin and Joshua Marston – does not really wow as much as the list for “Paris…” – which included segments by the Coens, Wes Craven, Gus Van Sant, Alfonso Cuarón, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Payne and Isabel Coixet.

Overall I was surprised how tonally it felt so similar to the Paris movie – which certainly makes a case for an argument of producer as author, they being the only solid connection between the two movies – and some of the shorts work really well. I made something of a point of not looking up the credits of this movie before watching so I can assure you when I tell you that, it has nothing to do with names when I say my favourite of all was easily the one directed by Shekhar Kapur and written by the late Anthony Minghella. It’s a poetic musing with the stunning Julie Christie, John Hurt and Shia LeBeouf that’s hard to describe as anything but beautiful and worth watching the whole movie for on its lonesome.

The problem with the movie – and I guess I have to admit I can’t really qualify this since, like I said, I haven’t been to NYC yet – is that it really doesn’t ever feel like it’s necessarily about New York at all, as much as the Paris movie felt it was about Paris. It could be about multicultural Anywhere. Maybe that was partly the point, but it seems a kind of senseless waste of the location and title to me.

You might have spotted from my last review that I tend to not really like when sweeping statements like “return to form!” are embraced on a massive scale. I’d heard from many quarters that this was Guy Ritchie’s best film, if not “ever!” than at least in a long long time. I was one of the few who actually thought “his worst”, Revolver, was actually slightly fascinating and I still look forward to seeing that one again, in addition to his other universally despised effort, Swept Away.

All I can say is, if this is one of Guy Ritchie’s best, then it’s only because people have grown or been conditioned to detest his true style (which I believe shows best in Revolver) so much, and that this is as far from a true Guy Ritchie movie as it’s possible to get. It’s a studio production all the way, sacrificing risk and innovation for nuts and bolts tech specs and star power. Yes, the movie is slick and gorgeous, the action sequences first rate, and Downey Jr. / Law / McAdams all have their moments. At best I had hoped from this something approaching the joy of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie had; unfortunately, storywise it’s closer to the later installments of that franchise – so if you were okay with those, you’ll probably be okay with this too. I was just bored witless by the movie’s last half hour, and the chance of me even thinking of watching it again are approximately zero.