Nomination Nation

Here we go again. This time it's 10 best picture nominations so presumably there will be more suspense until we confirm that indeed The King's Speech won.
Here are my agreements and disagreements. The lists are in order of personal preference. The color type -- the inexplicable snubs. Asterisk connotes actual prediction.
For the first time in years, the Best Picture category is a toss off and there are at least 5 good movies in it. Most probably it will be The King's Speech, today's Chariots of Fire, and a huge crowd pleaser. But it would be way cool if it was a bona fide American Western. Or an American movie. We finally got some great contenders. Fuck the Brits! I'm also rooting for Black Swan, for sheer cojones.

Best Picture
True Grit GO ROOSTER!
Black Swan
The Social Network
*The King's Speech
The Fighter 
Blue Valentine: I find it a travesty that this movie was ignored in most important categories. It is one of the best American movies of the year.
Inception 
The Kids Are All Right 
127 Hours 
Winter's Bone Overrated. Indy has become a formula and they are always freezing their asses off. 
Toy Story 3 Haven't seen it yet...

Best Actor
James Franco, 127 Hours  As much as I love Firth, I'm rooting for Franco. Also since I believe that everything is already preordained, he may win only because he is the emcee.  
*Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Jeff Bridges, True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Javier Bardem, Biutiful  Haven't seen him but he is always amazing. Or is he the token ethnic?

Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine

 
Best Actress
*Natalie Portman, Black Swan I usually hate her, but she went to bat for this one. Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone
Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole I have not seen her. But contrary to what many of you think, she is a good actress.

Best Supporting Actor
*Christian Bale, The Fighter
Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech
John Hawkes, Winter's Bone

Frank Langella Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. 

Tommy Lee Jones The Company Men 
Ewan McGregor I Love you, Phillip Morris

Jeremy Renner, The Town
Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right  Charming, but no great shakes.

Best Supporting Actress
Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom 
*Amy Adams, The Fighter 

Melissa Leo, The Fighter 
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit. I'm the only person in the world who didn't love this girl. She's impressive but not great. 
Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech She's great but she can do this in her sleep.

Best Director
This one is tough to predict. I'm really bad at predictions because I predict with my heart, and not with algorithmic calculation. 
Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit GO COENS! 
Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan GO DARREN!
*David Fincher, The Social Network
Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
David O. Russell, The Fighter

Derek Cianfrance Blue Valentine

Best Original Screenplay

Blue Valentine This script will be studied for generations to come. Egregious mistake not to nominate it. 

Black Swan Why is it not here?

*The King's Speech
The Fighter 
Another Year 
Inception You've got to be kidding me.
The Kids Are All Right  This movie worked my last nerve.

Best Adapted Screenplay
True Grit
*The Social Network
127 Hours
Toy Story 3
Winter's Bone

Best Cinematography
True Grit GO ROGER DEAKINS!
Black Swan
*Inception (Consolation prize)
The King’s Speech
The Social Network Everything is yellow, as in every David Fincher movie.

Best Foreign Film 
*Biutiful (Mexico) They tend to pick tearjerkers.
Dogtooth (Greece)  I'm rooting for this one. I'm amazed it made the cut. A very original, disturbing film.
Hors la Loi (Outside the Law) (Algeria)
Incendies (Canada)
In a Better World (Denmark)

Documentary (Feature)

Exit through the Gift Shop YAY! Banksy sells out!
Gasland
* Inside Job
Restrepo
Waste Land  I found this doc irritatingly self-serving. 

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work  An honest look at a hardworking, desperate, hilarious woman.

Best Animated Film
How to Train Your Dragon
The Illusionist
*Toy Story 3

Art Direction
The King's Speech
True Grit
*Inception Consolation prize 
Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
 

Costume Design
The Tempest GO SANDY POWELL!
Alice in Wonderland
I Am Love
*The King's Speech
True Grit

Music (Original Score)

*The Social Network GO TRENT REZNOR!

True Grit Carter Burwell

How to Train Your Dragon (?)
Inception
The King's Speech I love Desplat but who gets the Oscar, Beethoven?
127 Hours I hate the A.H Rahman disco adventure. All that was missing was a mirror ball.


Film Editing
*Black Swan
The Fighter
The King's Speech
127 Hours
The Social Network

Sound Editing
Inception
Toy Story 3
Tron: Legacy
True Grit
*Unstoppable 


Sound Mixing
Inception
*The King's Speech
Salt
The Social Network
True Grit


Makeup
Barney's Version
The Way Back
The Wolfman


Music (Original Song) WHO CARES?

*“Coming Home” from Country Strong
“I See the Light” from Tangled
“If I Rise” from 127 Hours
“We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3


Documentary (Short Subject)
Killing in the Name
Poster Girl
Strangers No More
Sun Come Up
The Warriors of Qiugang


Short Film (Animated)
Day & Night
The Gruffalo
Let's Pollute
The Lost Thing
Madagascar, carnet de voyage (Madagascar, a Journey Diary)


Short Film (Live Action)
The Confession
The Crush
God of Love
Na Wewe
Wish 143

My Golden Globs of Snot

After a prolonged absence in which we went up and down temples in the set of Apocalypse Now, Cambodia, and The King and I, Thailand, and I came back with a terrible sinus infection I ascribe to accidentally snorting beer, here are the people who I consider should be rewarded for their acting and directing in movies this year:
(I'm missing some important movies like Blue Valentine, but I have been sick and unable to hit the screens, which is driving me to despair. This post will be updated as I watch more films).

Best Actor
James Franco 127 Hours
Colin Firth The King's Speech
Jeff Bridges True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg The Social Network
Ryan Gosling Blue Valentine

Best Supporting Actor
Frank Langella Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and All Good Things  HE ROCKS. Christian Bale The Fighter 
Geoffrey Rush The King's Speech
Jack McGee The Fighter
Ewan McGregor I Love You Phillip Morris
John Hawkes Winter's Bone
All the lawyers except Rashida Jones in The Social Network. I adore the lawyers in this movie.
Best Actress
Natalie Portman Black Swan
Annette Benning The Kids Are All Right
Giovanna Mezzogiorno Vincere
Michelle Williams Blue Valentine
Jennifer Lawrence Winter's Bone

Best Supporting Actress
Jacki Weaver Animal Kingdom
Barbara Hershey Black Swan
Melissa Leo The Fighter
Amy Adams The Fighter
If it was up to me, they would all get it.

Best director
Olivier Assayas Carlos
Joon-Ho Bong Mother
Chang Dong Lee Poetry
The Coen Brothers True Grit
Benjamin Heisenberg The Robber
Radu Muntean Tuesday After Christmas
Darren Aronofsky Black Swan

Best American Film
True Grit The Coen Brothers
Blue Valentine Derek Cianfrance
Black Swan Darren Aronofsky
The Fighter David O. Russell 
The Social Network David Fincher

Best Foreign Film
Carlos  France
Mother Korea
Poetry  Korea 
The Robber Austria (Dumbed down American version coming soon)
Vincere  Italy
Tuesday After Christmas Romania
Dogtooth Greece

True Grit

I never saw the John Wayne film, as I am not a John Wayne fan, but as far as I'm concerned, Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn has to be a major improvement over The Duke. Nobody does weary and weathered better than Jeff Bridges. He is an expert on  moral dissipation but not of the totally depraved kind. His Rooster Cogburn is a man who tends to state the obvious, who sounds like his saliva is 90 proof and he's happily chewing on burning coals, and who despite the laziness, the love of drink, and the moral ambivalence, harbors a ruthlessness that he conveys with an icy glare of his one visible blue eye.
The Coen Brothers' True Grit is not one of their usual genre mashups, but a bona fide Western, based not on the previous film but on the novel by Charles Portis, and they approach the genre without reverence, but with lovely symbolic weight (volumes can and probably will be written about this aspect of the film. It is very literary). True Grit is fun and action packed, but it is also a fable about death and revenge, and it is, like all Westerns worth their salt, a very enlightening take on the character of this country, which has always been held by the tension between violent anarchy and the law; between the law and actual morality; between self-righteously quoting the Bible and actually behaving according to it.
The Coens lately seem to be preoccupied with the Bible (see A Serious Man). The movie starts with a very relevant quote from Proverbs: "The wicked flee when no one pursues...", which as far as I'm concerned, relates not only to Tom Cheney (Josh Brolin), the villain of this story, but to a more recent Cheney and other contemporary evildoers who are not being pursued for their crimes. But True Grit does not advocate revenge as much as it questions it. Revenge biblical style, it turns out, is complicated. There are no easy answers.
In the true spirit of a Christmas Scrooge, I am not as wild about the talented Hailee Steinfeld as everyone is going to be. Mattie Ross is a hard role to play, a headstrong, supremely articulate 14-year old who is looking to revenge her father's murder. This girl witnesses pretty traumatic violence (a la Coen brothers' style, to boot), yet she barely breaks a sweat. True, she thinks she is going on a big adventure, she is innocent about the implications of her simplistic revenge scheme, but it would have been more convincing to see more fear or vulnerability underneath her bluster throughout the movie and not only in individual scenes. She is a fascinating character, a precociously smart girl who has had to take the reins of her family, who has an obsession with the law and thinks she can bluff her way all over the Wild West by merely mentioning it (and this place is so wild that nobody seems to even notice that she's tooling around all by herself). She instinctively knows that with no strength of her own, except for her brilliance, the threat of the law is the only big stick she can carry.
Mattie is accompanied by Bridges, who is enormously entertaining, and by Matt Damon, playing LeBoeuf, a Texas Ranger, with his usual understated panache. He gets to twirl around what sounds to me like a very convincing Texas accent, with and without a speech impediment. Westerns are usually teeming with brooding, silent men. Not this one. This may be the most garrulous (and comical) serious Western ever written. Everybody here talks a blue streak, each character not only with a different accent but with different vocabularies, as befits a Coen Brothers production. As I was watching, I wanted to get my hands on the script just to read their amazing turns of phrase (and also to elucidate some of what Cogburn was saying, because Bridges mumbles). Bless their souls, they insist on unfurling language with as much flourish as possible at a time when it is becoming more and more impoverished. And while in some of their movies this linguistic excess sometimes feels too clever by half, in True Grit it works really well, because it shows how people came together from different backgrounds to try to coalesce into a functioning society, and that they lived at a time when their speech was influenced by a strong oral tradition and by reading, not by watching TV, texting or twittering. The only people who are not allowed to speak and are silenced quite literally in the film are Native Americans and Blacks. So that nobody confuses this movie (and by extension, this nation) with Little House on the Prairie, they are treated horribly: with disturbing funny horrible slapstick, as is the Coen Brothers way.
The bulk of the story takes the pursuit of Cheney by Cogburn, Mattie, and LeBoeuf: a rite of passage into a wilderness of murder and lawlessness. A lot happens, none of it predictable, sentimental or clichéd. The cinematography by Roger Deakins is gorgeous, and so is the music by Carter Burwell. All the character actors are perfect.
But the movie jelled for me until the final act, a beautiful, meaningful turn about the consequences of believing that revenge is simple. Mattie pays dearly, and hopefully learns a lesson, for thinking so gingerly about killing.
From its origins, this country has been under the grip of the same mentality: trigger happy, too revenge oriented, shortsighted about far-reaching consequences. An eye for an eye is an ancient law that begs for evolution. An evolved law is what civilized countries should have.

Best and Worst of 2010

What is it with the proliferation of Ten Best Lists? It is impossible for me to think of only ten movies in the course of a year. Reality is much richer than that. So let's cut to the chase:

Excellent

Carlos -- Olivier Assayas
Mother -- Joon-Ho Bong
A Prophet -- Jacques Audiard
Secret Sunshine (2007) -- Chang Dong Lee. 
Poetry -- Chang Dong Lee
The Robber -- Benjamin Heisenberg
Vincere -- Marco Bellocchio
True Grit -- Joel and Ethan Coen
Old Cats -- Sebastian Silva/Pedro Peirano
Tuesday After Christmas -- Radu Muntean
Aurora (especially when they release the shorter version) -- Cristi Puiu
Dogtooth -- Giorgios Lanthimos
Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work -- Ricki Stern/Anne Sundberg
Lebanon -- Samuel Maoz

Great

Black Swan -- Darren Aronofsky
The Fighter -- David O. Russell
Another Year -- Mike Leigh
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives -- Apitchapong Weeraseethakul
The Social Network -- David Fincher
I Love You, Phillip Morris -- Glenn Ficarra and John Requa
Four Lions -- Chris Morris
Fish Tank -- Andrea Arnold
Everyone Else -- Maren Ade
Exit Through the Gift Shop -- Banksy

Good

The King's Speech -- Tom Hooper
I Am Love -- Luca Guadagnino
Agora -- Alejandro Amenabar
Iron Man 2 -- Jon Favreau
Restrepo -- Tim Heatherington/Sebastian Junger
Inside Job -- Charles Ferguson
Fair Game -- Doug Liman
Client 9 -- Alex Gibney
Get Low -- Aaron Schneider
Brooklyn's Finest -- Antoine Fuqua
The Town -- Ben Affleck
City Island -- Raymond De Felitta
The Square -- Nash Edgerton
Shrek The Third -- Chris Miller/Raman Hui
White Material -- Claire Denis
127 Hours -- Danny Boyle

Meh

Revolución -- 10 Mexican directors
All Good Things -- Andrew Jarecki
Casino Jack -- George Hickenlooper
Please Give -- Nicole Holofcener
Shutter Island -- Martin Scorsese
Wasteland -- Lucy Walker
Splice -- Vincenzo Natali
The Ghost Writer -- Roman Polanski

Way Overrated

Winter's Bone -- Debra Granik
Life During Wartime -- Todd Solondz
Somewhere -- Sophia Coppola
The Kids Are All Right --Lisa Cholodenko
Certified Copy -- Abbas Kiarostami
Greenberg -- Noah Baumbach
Animal Kingdom -- David Michod

Super Bad

Love And Other Drugs -- Ed Zwick
Inception -- Christopher Nolan
The Tempest -- Julie Taymor
You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger -- Woody Allen
Black Venus -- Abdellatif Kechiche
Entre Nos -- Gloria La Morte/Paola Mendoza
We Are What We Are/Somos lo que hay -- Jorge Michel Grau
Salt -- Phillip Noyce


Haven't Seen Yet

Toy Story 3

Did Not See

Eat Pray Love
Sex and The City 2
Hereafter

The Man I Love

Photos courtesy of The New York Times Magazine. 

2009 Thespians and Directors

Best Actor
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker
Matt Damon, The Informant!
Christoph Waltz, Inglorious Basterds
Colin Firth, A Single Man

Great Job
Ben Foster, The Messenger
Tobey Maguire, Brothers
Woody Harrelson, The Messenger
Alan Arkin, The private lives of Pippa Lee

Best Actress
Kim Hye Ja, Mother
Catalina Saavedra, The Maid
Carey Mulligan, An Education
Abby Cornish, Bright Star
I'm tired of saying this, but Meryl Streep, Julie and Julia. 
I didn't see Mo'nique but I'm sure she rocks. 

Great Job
Julianne Moore, A Single Man
Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

Best Director
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon
Joon Ho-Bong, Mother
Spike Jonze, Where The Wild Things Are
Sebastián Silva, The Maid

The Best Movies of 2009...

...and everything in between according to moi, coming soon.

I still need to see several that are playing at my local multiplex.
In the meantime, let me tell you: the prospect of seeing certain films gives me colic like when I had junior high school math at 8 am on Monday mornings and did not want to go to school. 

1. There is always a new pompously virtuous Clint Eastwood movie that I refuse to see.  I don't think that I can bear the stoic selfrighteousness of the entire enterprise, despite the presence of Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, both of whom I like intensely. I love to hate Clint Eastwood movies. For those of you who have not been in these pages before, I believe he is the most unfairly overrated director in America.

2. Precious sounds like very hard to swallow medicine. I'm quite curious about Mo'nique and Mariah and that new girl with the fantastic name, but the movie not only sounds like it's hard going, but like it is schmaltzy hard going, in which case I may not go at all.

3. The Road. Another barrel of laughs. Even the presence of scrumptious Viggo Mortensen does not make me want to run into the theater and fret about apocalyptic cannibals in the bleak near future.

4. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. I would not ordinarily miss anything with Alan Arkin in it, but this movie, like every other Rebecca Miller movie, sounds like a pill.

5. The Last Station. Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer chewing the scenery as Mr and Mrs. Leo Tolstoy. I love her, never liked him. So sue me.
A.O hated it, Denby loved it. Sounds painful.

6. Gigante. Another bleak Uruguayan film. For the record, I am not a fan of Whiskey.
I know I should love Gigante in advance, but I don't. It will go to my Netflix list.

Where's that movie with Jeff Bridges for which he will finally get his Oscar? Is that playing somewhere already? I want to see that. Jeff Bridges I adore, love and worship.

Meanwhile, I'm doing my homework to bring you (not that you asked for it) the list of the bestest, best better, bland, and bad movies of this dismal year.

Stay tuned.