The Envelope Please, January 2010

It’s the most wonderful time of year, the Super Bowl is on the horizon and film awards season is in full swing. We’ve gotten past the joke that is the Golden Globes.  The far more relevant Screen Actors Guild and the Producers Guild passed out their awards this past weekend.  The BAFTAs nominations were announced and the Academy Awards nominations are coming out on February 2nd.

My biggest problem with the Golden Globes is the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA).  Its a  group of elderly critics sitting around playing favorites, waiting to see who will throw them the best party and swag.  At last count the HFPA had fewer than 100 members.  I prefer the peer review that takes place with the larger guilds and academies.

In my countdown to the one awards show that still means anything, The Academy Awards, I’m trying to see the bulk of the movies that have been nominated and placed on various critics’ “Best Of” lists.  A lot of the tentpole commercial flicks I’ve seen already. I’m trying to get to the smaller films that didn’t have wide releases and big names stars.  We’re talking films like The Hurt Locker, Precious, and The Lovely Bones.  Actually, I’ve been dragging my feet  on those because I know they’ll be deep and disturbing.  I’m hoping to do a post on the actual Oscar nominees next month, but let’s dive in with the names that are already being bandied about for Best Picture and the Acting categories:

Best Picture

Avatar   (Won the Golden Globe, Nominated for BAFTA, SAG, & PG)

The story was better than I expected.  I saw the film in IMAX 3D, which was nice, but I wasn’t blown away by the visuals. If I was fifty years old and had never played a game on a Playstation 2 or an X-Box, I would be impressed.  For all the hype about the imagery, nothing in Avatar was better than a cut-scene from Final Fantasy VIII or X (those games came out in 1999 and 2001).  The 3D was mostly depth of field scenes that weren’t nearly annoying as I feared.  I did feel like I was looking at a giant GAF Viewmaster, only I didn’t have to mess with the little disks.  Is this the best film?  No.  Bottom line, James Cameron didn’t fall into the trap that George Lucas did with the last three Star Wars films– Cameron put the story ahead of the visuals and it worked out.

Up In The Air   (Nominated for BAFTA, SAG, & PGA)

We’ve got really good performances here, but its a little film.  It’s a character study of  a corporate hatchet man, a person we should hate, but we get to see what he does and how empty his life is.  While not as violent, the story is reminiscent of Million Dollar Baby.  Young woman upsets older man and he has to adjust to her.  Bottom line: This film will make a great time capsule piece.   It will help someone twenty or thirty years from now understand what it was like in Corporate America in the first years of the twenty-first century.  We had Wall Street in 1980s and Falling Down in the 1990s.

Inglorious Bastards (Won the PGA, Won SAG, and nominated for Golden Globe)

On the strength of the first sequence alone this is the best film of the year.  The other two-thirds of the film wallow in self indulgence and I say this as a big  Tarantino fan and a film school grad.   Bottom Line:  Its as if you took a pinch of Schindler’s List, a healthy dose of The Wild Bunch, a glaze of Where Eagles Dare, and generous helping of The Dirty Dozen and rolled into one movie.

Others contenders

With the Best Picture field being widened to ten films for the Oscars, we’re certain to get mix of commercial and arthouse with An Education, A Single Man, A Serious Man, and maybe In The Loop making the short list.  A long shot maybe The Hangover, since it won for best comedy at the Golden Globes.  I’m skeptical, since I didn’t think it lived up to all the hype.  In that bawdy guy humor genre I thought The Wedding Crashers from a few years back was much funnier.  The Hangover was clever, but nowhere near as funny as the marketing campaign promised.  It got a nomination for best original screenplay from the British Academy Film Awards, that’s probably about as far as it will get stateside.

And then there’s the best foreign film.  Why?  Because I don’t mind reading subtitles.  I thoroughly enjoyed Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces.  Two films that are getting a lot of critical buzz are The White Ribbon from Germany. And The Prophet from France which is being compared to The Godfather.  One surprise coming out of the BAFTA’s is my favorite vampire flick of 2009, Let The Right One In from Norway.

Acting

The Women

• Meryl Streep is up for Julie & Julia.  I only liked half the film, obviously the biopic part on Julia Child.  The half of the film with Amy Adams just seemed to get in the way.  At any rate, Streep is like George Clooney– she’ll be nominated every year.  She should have won last year for Doubt.

• Carey Mulligan should be considered for Best Actress in An Education.  As trite as female coming of age movies tend to be, this one succeeds thanks its hip Britain in 1960s setting and the luminance of its young star.

• Emily Blunt will probably be overlooked, but her performance in The Young Victoria was excellent.  Its the kind of thing I like, show me a character who undergoes a crisis or learns something and make it look natural.  Here Blunt beings as a naive sheltered princess, but through trial and error learns how to be a political force.

The Men

• George Clooney is in there for Up In The Air, even in a year when he does something as silly as The Men Who Stare At Goats.  He was in the same position last year, with a great performance in Michael Clayton, but he lost to Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.  Like Streep, last year’s performance was than this year’s.  So they both might get it because they lost out a year ago.

• Christoph Waltz has picked up numerous awards and nomination for his role as the vile yet charming Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds.  I haven’t seen Jermey Renner in The Hurt Locker yet or Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart; but I think Waltz could be a trendy favorite.

• I want to see Peter Capaldi get nominated for Best Supporting Actor for In The Loop.  He didn’t get any nods from BAFTA, but maybe he’ll turn up here.  Why?  Simply for the best use of incessant profanity since the cancellation of HBO’s Deadwood.

• Alfred Molina should be up for Best Supporting Actor for An Education.  You can see that he loves his daughter, played by Carey Mulligan, in his own bombastic way and that he’s a rather proud man.  Unfortunately, he’s blinded by the charms of Peter Sarsgaard and gets played like a fiddle.   Its just fun to watch.

I know that there are many more films out there and tons of performances, that I haven’t touched on.  But I hope to see to more and maybe Holly will help me out and see one of the heavier pics out there– maybe Lars von Trier’s Antichrist?  Who knows?  Tell us what you’ve seen and liked or hated.