2009 Honorees: Directors

The last category where I'll be profiling Bests from last year, either because I didn't fall in love with a lot (non-festival documentaries were generally weak, and Score comes down to Duplicity, The Informant!, and not a lot else), or I'm having a hard time remembering (if I don't do Sound right away, I turn forgetful), or else it's just the same films crowding all the categories (viz. Beeswax, Duplicity, In the Loop, Summer Hours, and Whip It in Best Ensemble, with The Hurt Locker, The Maid, and others following up).

These Best Director picks won't come as much of a shock given the Top Ten List I published lo these many months ago, but it's still worth applauding from our seats for...



Roy Andersson for You, the Living, for working from a palette of theater, painting, and still photography without just dabbling; the ambivalence and wit feel shaped by cinema;

Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, for conceiving a ruminative movie in long shot around Mackie, and a relentless one in close-up around Renner, and knowing how to mix them up;

Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne for Lorna's Silence, for equaling the elegance of L'Enfant but with richer, less abstract emotion; the finale's debatable, but all else clicks, and I like risks;

Jim Jarmusch for The Limits of Control, for taking a bold gamble on geometric, rhythmic, chromatic, and tonal abstraction; I was spellbound, and he rarely has that effect on me; and

Erick Zonca for Julia, for driving his film with the pedal-to-floor ferocity of an old sedan crashing across a policed border, yet every element is tightly managed.

Extremely honorable mentions to the warmth, spryness, and subtlety that Andrew Bujalski brings to Beeswax; to Sacha Gervasi's sensationally funny-sad shaping of material in Anvil! The Story of Anvil, which could have been played for jokes or banalities; to Olivier Assayas for the tenderness and finely edged toughness of Summer Hours, which implies a modern France while having the elegance and lovely remoteness of an object from the past; and to my constant muse and inspiration, the single reason I write about film today, Jane Campion, who showed again in Bright Star that there are many ways of exploring a period, communicating a love-bond, or evoking as fragile and internal an act as poetry on screen.

Further honorable mentions to Park Chan-wook for Thirst, Tony Gilroy for Duplicity, Drew Barrymore for Whip It!, Sebastián Silva for The Maid, Armando Iannucci for In the Loop, Cary Fukunaga for Sin Nombre, and Frederick Wiseman for La Danse. And speaking of established masters, I didn't love everything that Aleksandr Sokurov did with The Sun or Claire Denis did with 35 Shots of Rum, but no one else could or would have made those intriguing pictures, and at their best moments, who could match them?

2009 Honorees: Screenplays

As usual, one category is full of contenders, the other struggles to keep pace. Meanwhile, the writing remains the thing I most often wish I could fix in a movie. As well as the only filmmaking task that I think I could feasibly accomplish. Hmmmm...

For Original Screenplay...


Andrew Bujalski for Beeswax, for building such rich ties among the three principals, for unfolding their relations gradually, and for so many sharp, anecdotal scenes;

Tony Gilroy for Duplicity, whose inability to lure an audience to his clever, zesty, intricate, and deliciously rewatchable espionage comedy was a great shame of 2009;

Sebastián Silva and Pedro Peirano for The Maid, who make the maid's jealousy both funny and scary, her fainting spells alarming yet dubious, and the last half-hour moving but schmaltz-free;

Adam Elliot for Mary and Max, for writing such outlandish but endearing speeches and characters that a third-act sag doesn't matter, especially at the bittersweet finale; and

Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman for The Messenger, for filling an inevitably sad story with tentative warmth and concise human details, proving the viability of adult drama in Hollywood.

Extremely honorable mentions to four scripts that made strong plays for the Mary and Max and Messenger spots and on different days might appear in their places: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for the fraught and layered scenario of Lorna's Silence, with its risky swerve into dark fable; Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker, composing taut set-pieces but leaving room for rich characters and finely etched local details; Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck for Sugar, who evoke the experience of a perplexed immigrant to America with piquancy, compassion, and wonderfully specific context, and who snatch back a gutsy, honest ending from the encroachment of cliché in the second act; and Olivier Assayas for Summer Hours, whose "O baleful mortgage of the heritage of France!" premise could easily have rubbed me the wrong way, but for the light hand, the insights, and the push-pull sense of family that he brings to it.

Further honorable mentions to Greg Mottola for Adventureland, Jane Campion for Bright Star, Bahareh Azimi and Ramin Bahrani for Goodbye Solo, Nancy Meyers for making It's Complicated really funny, the quartet of Erick Zonca, Aude Py, Camilla Natta, and Michael Collins for Julia, and Quentin Tarantino for the delicious parts of Inglourious Basterds, which is to say, the parts that aren't sadistic, twitty, slow, or total cheats to attain an ending.

For Adapted Screenplay...


Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio, Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, and Roberto Saviani for Gomorrah, who distill the Mob in a new way, not as a scary pyramid of imposing figures, but as a viral contagion that has spread through everything;

Armando Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, and Tony Roche for In the Loop, who give a dozen characters their comic due, with ace plotting and dialogue ("anti-war shag"), but stay duly forlorn about the world stage;

Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious, who avoids a strict emphasis many would have drawn around Precious, Mary, and Blu, and keeps it a piece about the fortitude of young women;

Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze for Where the Wild Things Are, who start with a book you could transcribe on the back of a pasta box, imposing a workable plot and devising an array of distinct characters; and

Shauna Cross for Whip It, who works so adroitly with her clutch of old saws (rebelling girl, disapproving mom, dead-end town, lame boyfriend) and gets 'em all rolling.

Honorable mentions to Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach for the memorable family dynamics of Fantastic Mr. Fox, even if I still have a hard time living in Anderson's dollhouses; to Susannah Grant for the carefully composed characters and growing tensions of The Soloist; and to Henry Selick for the alternate universes and scrappy kid's point of view in Coraline.

I wish I were a bit more excited about these adaptations, or about what I suspect is the greater potential of the Woman in Berlin script, muffled by slightly pedestrian direction; or about the good bits in the District 9 scenario, despite some fuzziness in the whole premise and the utter, bizarre collapse of the dropped documentary conceit. (Do I keep harping on that?) It's tempting to consider 35 Shots of Rum and Julia as adaptations of Ozu and Cassavetes, which they sort of are, or Bright Star as an adaptation of Keats, which it sort of is, but even by the reduced standards of fantasy-baseball Oscar blogging, one aims for integrity.

2009 Honorees: Cinematography

In a perpetually competitive category, though this year wasn't as tough as some, my favorites of 2009 were...



Barry Ackroyd for The Hurt Locker, whose ace kineticism no longer surprises but still invigorates, especially when blending the furtive, the laser-sighted, and the panoramic;

Christopher Doyle for The Limits of Control, because even beyond his delectation in bright, unusual hues, there'd be no movie without his managing of visual tension and geometric motifs;

Adriano Goldman for Sin Nombre, because what he lacked in novelty he more than compensates in striking, dramatic, rich-toned lensing, distilling place as well as edgy mood;

Jeong Jeong-hun for Thirst, who can go anywhere Park wants to go, from epic grandeur to woozy delirium to febrile abstraction, even in a film where light is the enemy; and

Lance Acord for Where the Wild Things Are, who fuses generational reverbs by braiding 60s lens flares, 70s dolor, and modern ironies, and relishes the woolly materiality of the Things.

Extremely honorable mentions to Yorick Le Saux for the lurid dynamism of Julia's camera movement and its natural and artificial lighting and to Gustav Danielsson for finding just the right lenses, palettes, and frames for Roy Andersson's ingenious tableaux mordants in You, the Living.

Further honorable mentions to Greig Fraser for Bright Star, Alain Marcoen for Lorna's Silence, the unbelievably named Martin Gschlacht for Revanche, and Alexis Zabe for Silent Light.

2009 Honorees: Best Actor

You'd think I have very narrow tastes based on this roster, which brims with militarized men. The one character who isn't packing artillery nonetheless anchors a movie that's all about World War II. Maybe the Academy will have me after all? But of course the superficial impression of likeness belies five very different men, played splendidly by five commanding and prismatic actors, who jointly lead the charge of the year's most competitive acting category, by far.

SHARLTO COPLEY for District 9, who evolves so organically from doofus to terrorized victim to angry humanprawnthing, and whose work lingered mightily as the months passed;

BEN FOSTER for The Messenger, who projected a strapping maturity from a slight frame, who felt green but not naïve, who coiled in anger, shock, decency, and inadequacy;

ISSEY OGATA for The Sun, whose odd, fishlike tics and blank-faced diffidence made Hirohito a needfully enigmatic figure, edging toward a harsh metaphysical reckoning;

JEREMY RENNER for The Hurt Locker, whose reckless bravado and no-bullshit diligence feel bizarrely indivisible, even after a creepy mixup over a dead kid jars his equilibrium; and

CHRISTOPH WALTZ for Inglourious Basterds, who must be as tired of The Charismatic Nazi as we are, so he makes him jolly, urbane, Napoleonic, cobra-like, and a bit bonkers to boot.

Extremely honorable mentions to Anthony Mackie, whose watchfulness and ethical principles are almost as bracing in The Hurt Locker as Renner's struts and tremors; to Mark Duplass, whose comic timing and psychological dissection are so exquisite in Humpday that the movie's collapse almost doesn't matter; to Ben Whishaw for giving Bright Star an effete, sickly Keats who still registers strongly as a casual charmer and an object of mystery and passion; to Viggo Mortensen for taking fatherhood as seriously as survival in The Road, as a dirt-smeared Falconetti of haunted persistence; and to Robert Downey, Jr. for submerging his character's compassionate initiatives and his phobias about commitment amidst so much colorful, humanizing, offhanded detail in The Soloist that the movie never feels schematic or "inspirational" in the sticky way you expect.

Nearly as honorable are the truculent, focused pragmatism of In the Loop's Peter Capaldi; the mealy resentments and half-baked self-confidence of Patton Oswalt in Big Fan; the utter plausibility of Russell Crowe in State the Play, holding the screen even more surely than in more grandiose projects; the savvy, highwire balance of surface affectation and emotional truth that Jamie Foxx brings to his tricky part in The Soloist; the adolescent restlessness, combining comedic and dramatic instincts, of Jesse Eisenberg in Adventureland; and the noisome, big-bellied, aging-wolf magnetism of Oscar winner Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, full of deft details that battle valiantly against the haziness of the script and the film.

Even this wasn't all for the embarrassment of riches, given Tom Hardy's overdone but often electrifying turn in Bronson, Souleymane Sy Savané's gradually tested bonhomie in Goodbye, Solo, Gianfelice Imparato's controlled but anxious professional dispatch in Gomorrah, Paul Rudd's indefatigable charm as he faces new feelings in I Love You, Man, and Tom Hollander's space-cadet PM and Chris Addison's rationalizing wonk in In the Loop. Adam Sandler and Michael Stuhlbarg made smart choices and fostered memorable moments in the odd patchwork of Funny People and the off-putting, self-satisfied cynicism of A Serious Man, making them honorable honorable mentions, or something. But I have to start drawing the line somewhere.

2009 Honorees: Best Supporting Actor

Start here if you're wondering why I'm only now getting to this. Otherwise, my selections for the Best Supporting Actors of 2009 were, and still are:



JAMES GANDOLFINI for Where the Wild Things Are, because it takes prodigious vocal and physical work to broadcast that much temper, pain, and complexity from within a huge woolly body suit;

STEVE MARTIN for It's Complicated, because he makes the pot scenes such pure joy and seems genuinely wounded, but maturely responsive, when Meryl's character lets him down;

SAUL RUBINEK for Julia, because his enabling takes almost as many forms as Julia's mania: sensitive, appalled, faux-casual, furious, manipulative, speechless...;

DARYL SABARA for World's Greatest Dad, because he's very funny and blisteringly hateful, without just riffing or auditioning for your dorm-room wall the way Jonah Hill would have; and

STANLEY TUCCI for Julie & Julia, because even when you're besotted with a world-class companion, you still have to step carefully around their oddities and their bruises.

Extremely honorable mentions to the three men who, on and off since January, have rotated in and out of what is finally the Martin spot: Benoît Poelvoorde, who is such an imposing, charismatic lover-patron-frenemy to Tautou in Coco Before Chanel; Woody Harrelson, who combines swagger and decency with just a bit of smugness in The Messenger, as he starts to show his cracks; and Sergey Makovetsky for 12, who saves his character from the usual high-minded, tension-deflating nobility by broadcasting more doubts and hinting at more potential motives behind his contrarianism. Admittedly, that might be a lead part, but he mixes beautifully with that florid Russian ensemble.

My next rung of contenders were haunted Ciro Patrone, quietly trying to beat the mob in Gomorrah, Red West's cranky but cliché-free work as a virtual co-lead in Goodbye, Solo, Fabrizio Rongione's inscrutable agent in Lorna's Silence, Rupert Friend's brittly appealing and very affectionate Albert in The Young Victoria, and Clifton Collins, so lived-in and humane in Sunshine Cleaning, and just waiting for the movie to lean more heavily on his character.

2009 Honorees: Best Actress

Those of you who have pieced together that my Twitter account is the only reliable place to find me during this very busy summer and fall have already heard me acknowledge that I couldn't well move forward with my usual mid-year progress report of favorites without at least some quick tips of the hat to the cream of last year's movie crop. All of my End-of-Decade hoopla usurped all the time and energy I would have needed to single them out at the proper moment. But, in case you're still wondering where I wound up by year's end, I'm at last coughing up some very quick overviews.

It's cheating a little to start with Best Actress, since it's the one category where you may already know the names of my five champion causes from 2009. But nonetheless, at Twitter length, my late-arriving bouquets belong to...

ABBIE CORNISH for Bright Star, because she found a way to make Fanny potent and smart but not quite prodigious, a bit blunt around the edges but vibrant at her core;

TILLY and MAGGIE HATCHER for Beeswax, because they know every damn thing about these spunky, aching, complex but quotidian women, and they don't need Big Scenes to show it;

CATALINA SAAVEDRA for The Maid, because her ferocious agitation is sympathetic and unnerving, without any overplaying, and she still finds room for surprising vulnerability;

GABOUREY SIDIBE for Precious, because her spirit and voice are on full lockdown, but instead of fancying herself a butterfly, she plays an inchworm, slowly making her way; and

TILDA SWINTON for Julia, because she's a one-woman China syndrome, but she makes you feel the weird, graceless athleticism required to be this drunk, and this crazy.

Extremely honorable mention to Kim Ok-vin in Thirst, who bounded into a vampire-crazed moment in pop culture and acted so bold, bruised, wicked, and wronged that she felt utterly one-of-a-kind.

My next rung of contenders were quiet, tense Arta Dobroshi in Lorna's Silence, loose and insouciant Meryl Streep in It's Complicated, proud but humiliated Hiam Abbass in Lemon Tree, and two indelible teenagers: Ellen Page, who blossoms but not without paying some costs in the delectable Whip It, and the much-maligned but very affecting Kristen Stewart, who conjures a hideous self-contempt and a narcotized boredom in Adventureland while still projecting an attractive, low-frequency charisma that allows the story to work.

Killing It Back'Stage

I know we all love Sandra Bullock's speech, and I couldn't agree more. Beautifully played, Sandra. But I just want to say that I love this nearly as much. Mo'Nique just refuses to be endearing in any uncomplicated way, but I adore the shot-calling, especially when she explains why she's doing it. The final Q&A exchange is a sensational kicker. She has every right to say what she says, and I'm so glad she's able to say it from the position she's suddenly/finally in.

But I love it almost as much when she cracks herself up:

The Ten (Not That Ten)

No time like early March—indeed, no time like Oscar morning—to finally announce a Top Ten List for 2009. I can't possibly see how this will get lost in the shuffle of Oscar blogging, can you? But since I don't have time to write any fuller endorsement of these titles, and since the top half of the list has been evident in other ways for a couple of months, I figure it'll help me get through the evening to have this little photobook to look through. If that doesn't work, I'll have to pull out all the stops on those Na'Vi Martinis I'm supplying to the viewing party I'm attending. Never has Bombay Sapphire gin been put to such noble use. Hopefully I'll still be cognizant when Bigelow blasts that gold-plated glass ceiling off the Best Director Oscar. I'm really looking forward to that.

Best wishes for that and other moments worth revisiting (or even visiting!) in tonight's Oscar show, but if they prove few and far between, that's okay, too. Once awards season is finally over, we can all settle down and study the movies we really love, and those that have the most to teach us. For me, they were these:

How the Grinch Quit the Oscars

Isn't The Hurt Locker spectacular? Aren't you elated that it exists, and that it's been heralded so loudly by so many of the year-end critics' groups? I notice it's been quietly re-booked into one downtown Chicago multiplex, and I cannot wait to see it again.

And I'm so pleased to have something nice to say in this post. Please don't forget that I started on a sunny note. Because it wasn't easy to find.

With about ten days left to go in 2009, I only have five planned theatrical rendezvous remaining with the year's commercially released features. I don't much care about seeing Sherlock Holmes, though I hear it's fun, and Screen Media Films, whoever that is, seems insuperably challenged at getting The Private Lives of Pippa Lee into Chicago. Which does not, from friends' accounts overseas, sound like a tremendous loss, though I'm still curious.

That leaves Crazy Heart, The Last Station, The Lovely Bones, Nine, and The White Ribbon. Formal elements and performances in all five films promise to make them worth seeing, though the middle group feels intensely dubious. Reports by people I trust and the films' own advertising campaigns give me trouble imagining any of them except The White Ribbon hanging in there as projects that, six or twelve months from now, I'll be remembering clearly and fondly. Go figure that Ribbon is also the title that faces the biggest uphill climb getting any attention from Oscar, much less the multiple nominations that most or all of the others seem able to expect.



But that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for a bigger problem. By my estimation, the newly expanded Best Picture derby has these 20 movies jockeying for a spot: Avatar, The Blind Side, Bright Star, District 9, An Education, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Invictus, Julie & Julia, The Last Station, The Lovely Bones, The Messenger, Nine, Precious, A Serious Man, A Single Man, Star Trek, Up, and Up in the Air.

I gave only five of those movies a grade higher than a C+, even though more than half the 2009 releases that I saw scored above that particular bar; and come on, I'm not even counting highbrow festival screenings, and it's hardly as though I stay out of the malls and multiplexes, monastically holing myself up in some Sharunas Bartas retrospective at the edge of town. The Hurt Locker, which I find to be unquestionably the best of these films, is an object of almost universal adulation, so bully for me, for you, for Summit, and for Kathryn Bigelow. Bright Star, my B+, has missed all the precursors so far by such a wide margin that it barely belongs in this list of persistent contenders. That leaves three B's, for The Messenger, aesthetically modest but full of integrity, against which the odds are stacked in any contest "higher" than Best Supporting Actor; Precious, whose many prepossessing virtues I found to be limned with reasons for social and aesthetic concern; and Up, which I barely think about, and consider firmly in the middle-to-low range of Pixar's accomplishments.

Screening out, temporarily, the three movies I haven't seen, this means that 60% of the pack was roundly underwhelming—and this, coming directly off a year where I liked one Best Picture nominee, my second-favorite was rather generously scored at a B–, one was thuddingly mediocre, and two were dementedly horrendous.



Apart from The Hurt Locker's precursor success and the high likelihood of seeing a woman (and Kathryn Bigelow specifically) winning Best Director, there are only two things that don't depress me about this year's award season. One is the expansion of the Best Picture field, which should have raised the likelihood of at least a few more decent movies getting the visibility and advertising boost of a top-shelf Oscar nod, but has at least made the sport of predicting more interesting up to this point (more on that later). The other is Mo'Nique's refusal to play the campaigning game, at least not in a straightforward way, which if/when she wins for Precious has the potential to set an inspiring precedent for letting quality of work, rather than vehemence of desire and scale of self-advertising, determine the eventual Oscar winner. This would entail a huge victory for actors, who ought to be able to prioritize their creative work over their own grossly expensive and almost inevitably canned gabbing about it, and also a victory for us, since the ubiquitous obsessions with horse-racing and self-perpetuating publicity are threatening to overwhelm what almost anyone has to say about the actual movies. And yet people have been giving her shit about it for months! For God's sake, why?

The way I see it, given all of the above, and since, in addition, from my perspective...

— Avatar is embarrassingly self-fetishizing of a world it forgets to fully explore or even make us curious about, is full of the same old alien-planet crap (jump off the waterfall just in time! big weepy death scene for the last person who deserves one! hide in the tree-roots just inches away from the beastie's teeth!), and, despite being by the director of Aliens, is remarkably blithe about concluding that the best way to cast the film's lot with the Na'Vi is to foist an increasing number of Paul Haggis lines into the mouths of Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi and to authorize all sorts of grisly close-up deaths for all the troops, because we're not supposed to care when they get pulverized and garroted, because we don't like the policies of the people they work for, even though the "heroes" also work for these people;

— The Blind Side has some charming work from Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw, and it's at least less self-serious than its more somber cousin The Green Mile, but is in most ways unspeakable;

— District 9 is excitingly eccentric and superbly acted by its lead, but makes a notably careless botch of a faux-documentary conceit that it doesn't even need, and has a vicious anti-black African streak a mile wide, despite styling itself as a critique of Apartheid;

— An Education, indifferently shot and gruesomely scored, has no inclination or ability whatsoever to imagine that its lead character should be complicated for us by her active role in her own fate, and prefers to make her an unfathomably winsome gamine, allowing her to lecture just about everyone around her at some point in the film, including that hambone Alfred Molina;



— Fantastic Mr. Fox devises an engaging, ruddy, excitingly textured style of animation but only to convey the same kind of promising but quickly stalled narrative, featuring (as ever) too many characters, that Wes Anderson is always trying to pull over with increasingly dim results, and in this outing, he is not at all helped by the ever-urbane, paradigmatically ironical George Clooney, who apparently isn't clocking how hard the adapted script has asked us to accept that at heart Mr. Fox is a wild animal;

— Inglourious Basterds had me reeling out of the theater so furious about its patent unevenness as a formal and narrative construction, its naked bloodlust, and its arrogation of "Jewish vengeance" as some kind of ennobling closet for its own point-blank overkills that I never finished the long screed I was drafting against the movie... even though I have to concede that there's an excitement and a deep debatability to Tarantino's project and his imagination that I can't detect in almost any of these other films, and which is in some ways to be commended;

— Invictus is so literal-minded that it takes Mandela's plan at absolute face value, that this rugby game really is uniting a nation, and then lazily backseats the more interesting facets in Freeman's characterization as well as everything else that he might be witnessing at this unprecedented juncture in history—in fact backseats everything so that we can watch the damn rugby in what feels like real time, give or take the usual passel of amateur-hour supporting performances in an Eastwood film, plus some off-puttingly jerry-rigged suspense involving an airplane pilot;

— Julie & Julia is a fun night at the theater but hardly what you'd want to submit to even your most lenient filmmaking teacher for grading, and it pushes even the wonderful Meryl into some embarrassing semaphores, especially about all the children she wishes she could have but can't (oh, hold me!);



— A Serious Man zeroes in with relish on the odiousness of almost everyone in the protagonist's life, lights him as pitilessly as possible (which still can't compete with how the movie treats its women or its nonwhite characters), and tries to shape this bitty, sour, disjointed narrative into a coherent film by invoking shaky allusions to Job as well as three chapter-marked visits to three rabbis, each of them written at a level profoundly below what we should expect from the Coens, although they're at least frustrating and clichéd in three separate ways;

— A Single Man has the brilliant idea of so transparently flagging its infatuation with Wong Kar-wai, Pedro Almodóvar, Mad Men, etc., that we can't help but clock Tom Ford's gigantic failures to come anywhere near the formal strength and psychological penetration of the texts he emulates, and it not only rehashes a dated gay fable that would have smelled musty even 20 years ago in The Celluloid Closet, it pivots on a lame, doe-eyed, half-baked, risibly written teacher-student flirtation that absolutely everyone would deservedly be pouncing on, for political as well as dramatic and aesthetic reasons, if the participants were a man and a girl;

— Star Trek, even making exceptions for Zachary Quinto and Bruce Greenwood, has a wan and inconsistent cast, a terrible opening followed by a boy's-rebellion sequence that's even worse, a whole lot of gobbledygook in the script to "explain" a narrative that still doesn't make a whole lot of sense (and wouldn't need to, if people would just shut up about it), a bunch of gum about Simon Pegg getting stuck inside a pipe or something, and a 10- or 15-minute commitment toward revising Uhura into a "stronger" character for 2009 audiences, only to make sure she gets nothing to do through the rest of the movie except dress like a stewardess from View from the Top; and

— Up in the Air, beyond its unnecessarily cruddy cinematography and its garish overdirection of the bafflingly lauded Anna Kendrick, makes a smug show from the (extremely compacted) opening montage to the (sadly sketchy) closing song of being "relevant" to and "in touch" with the current recession, before bolting to get away from anything plausibly topical, or anything unseemly about the Clooney character and his rationalizations about firing people "with dignity," or anything specific to his ethics and self-consciousness as a white-collar hangman, so as to re-code him as a witty, typecasted bachelor who has to be convinced like 1,000 other movie protagonists that the only acceptable way to live is as a member of a romantic heterosexual couple... so that he can be saved from his insultingly emphatic White Soulless Apartment and, hopefully, cued to live a little bit more like the optimistic, sad-eyed, but irreproachably "real" people that you can only find in places like Wisconsin (and when it doesn't work out—oh, hold me!);

... then consequently I am officially signing off for the rest of this awards season from writing any Golden Globe predictions or recaps, any SAG-related features, or any Oscar nomination predictions or follow-ups, and also from contributing to any blogathon entries or any more podcast conversations or other enterprises about what's going on with all of these dispiriting movies and their jostlings for unearned position. I got in on Nathaniel's second podcast of the season last week, before Avatar brought me crashing down (and I get a big on-air rant about Up in the Air), and I definitely encourage you to listen to it. Nathaniel, Katey, and Joe are, as always, a joy to talk to when I detach myself from my feelings about the films in play, and if you like these movies so much more than I do that you're eager to keep tracing their fortunes, there's no better company in which to keep reading the tea leaves.

But from now on, I am boycotting. I will still watch the Oscars, no doubt with some eagerness, and if Bigelow or Sidibe or their films do pull out the win, I'll want to celebrate that. I'll still do the Best Actress write-up, since my ongoing and historical interest in that category remains exciting to me. But that's it.



Maybe the incredible bitterness that hit me after Up in the Air and Avatar will eventually relieve itself, and this will only be a one-year hiatus from publicly caring about Oscar. Maybe I'm just firing myself from this particular position, so that I can go build an empire or whatever bullshit Ryan Bingham would tell me—with dignity!—that I am now free to do, having renounced any coverage of this year's Academy Awards.

For now, I am throwing (almost) everything Oscar-related out of the backpack that is my life. I have other things to do, even on this blog. For instance, all through this month, I have loved shining a light on so many other movies and personal memories of the cinema, and I want to keep doing that. From my own perspective, there's no way I would relinquish any of that joy so as to deduce more energetically how AMPAS will or will not make a further cock-up out of the limited, dispiriting mound of studio-, publicist-, and advertiser-selected options that they now have in front of them. It's not quite Christmas, but consider that my New Year's Resolution.

So anyway. Back to the movies.

Mid-Autumn Oscar Nom Predix

You already know where to go for more regular and more informed speculation about the nomination fields. In fact, here is a direct link to Nathaniel's best guesses and savvy reasoning, and here is an index of postings by my favorite In Contention writer, including his Long Shot pieces which have the nice effect of dialing back from the sporting, "tea leaves" aspect of the season and asking bigger questions. (My criteria for linking to Oscar bloggers: it needs to be clear that they care about the movies even more than they care about the Oscars, and they need to be just as interesting when they're talking about totally non-Oscary movies or – gasp! – subjects other than movies. In my experience, even/especially among the most famous names, this is a smaller group than one wishes.)

As ever, I'm certainly wrong in what follows, but it's all about finding out how wrong I am... I'm sure you'll be happy to let me know! For the record, I think Avatar is going to bomb, I'm not convinced The Tree of Life is going to open on time, I think Bright Star is going to have trouble higher up than the so-called "technicals," I think The Road stands a shot at Best Picture but tougher prospects almost everywhere else, I think Clooney could get a shockeroo snub in that Paul Giamatti way, and I find Inglourious Basterds unusually hard to anticipate in terms of Oscar's reaction.

Also, if Best Director looks like this, or even close to this, I have a hunch that Bigelow will win. Which would be phenomenal. Bigelow and other early picks to win marked with a ★.

BEST PICTURE
MY GUESSES: An Education, The Hurt Locker, Invictus, The Lovely Bones, Nine, Precious, The Road, Star Trek, Up, ★ Up in the Air
BUT MAYBE: Inglourious Basterds, Bright Star
OR EVEN: A Serious Man, The Tree of Life, Public Enemies

BEST DIRECTOR
MY GUESSES: ★ Kathryn Bigelow, Lee Daniels, Jason Reitman, Lone Scherfig, Quentin Tarantino
BUT MAYBE: Peter Jackson, Clint Eastwood, Rob Marshall, Terrence Malick
OR EVEN: Joel and Ethan Coen, John Hillcoat

BEST ACTRESS
MY GUESSES: Abbie Cornish, Helen Mirren, ★ Carey Mulligan, Gabourey Sidibe, Meryl Streep
BUT MAYBE: Robin Wright Penn, Penélope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Hilary Swank, Audrey Tautou
OR EVEN: Saoirse Ronan, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tilda Swinton, Natalie Portman
OR IF THEIR FILMS GET RELEASED: Annette Bening, Ellen Burstyn, Naomi Watts

BEST ACTOR
MY GUESSES: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Colin Firth, Morgan Freeman, ★ Christopher Plummer
BUT MAYBE: Jeremy Renner
OR EVEN: Viggo Mortensen, Daniel Day-Lewis, Hal Holbrook, Robert De Niro, Michael Stuhlbarg, Nicolas Cage, Paul Bettany, Clive Owen
OR IF THE FILM GETS RELEASED: Martin Landau

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
MY GUESSES: Penélope Cruz, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, ★ Mo'Nique, Julianne Moore
BUT MAYBE: Marion Cotillard, Rosamund Pike
OR EVEN: Mariah Carey, Susan Sarandon, Judi Dench, Mélanie Laurent

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
MY GUESSES: Anthony Mackie, Christian McKay, Alfred Molina, Stanley Tucci, ★ Christoph Waltz
BUT MAYBE: Alec Baldwin, Robert Duvall, James McAvoy
OR EVEN: Jeff Bridges, Steve Martin, Paul Schneider, Matt Damon
OR IF THE FILM GETS RELEASED: Samuel L. Jackson

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
MY GUESSES: (500) Days of Summer, ★ The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man, Up
BUT MAYBE: Duplicity
OR EVEN: Bright Star, The White Ribbon, Broken Embraces, The Tree of Life

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
MY GUESSES: An Education, In the Loop, Invictus, Precious, ★ Up in the Air
BUT MAYBE: The Road, The Lovely Bones, Nine, The Informant!
OR EVEN: Julie & Julia, Bright Star, Public Enemies, The Men Who Stare at Goats

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
MY GUESSES: Bright Star, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, ★ Nine, The Tree of Life
BUT MAYBE: The Road, The White Ribbon, A Single Man, A Serious Man
OR EVEN: The Lovely Bones, Amelia

BEST FILM EDITING
MY GUESSES: ★ The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Nine, Precious, Star Trek
BUT MAYBE: Public Enemies, The Road, Up in the Air, The Lovely Bones
OR EVEN: The Tree of Life

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM
MY GUESSES: Ajami, Letters to Father Jacob, Max Manus, ★ Samson & Delilah, White Wedding
BUT MAYBE: About Elly, A Prophet, The White Ribbon, Backyard
OR EVEN: Police, Adjective, I Killed My Mother, No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti, The Milk of Sorrow

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
MY GUESSES: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Coraline, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Ponyo, ★ Up
BUT MAYBE: Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, 9
OR EVEN: Monsters vs. Aliens

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
MY GUESSES: The Informant!, Nine, Public Enemies, A Single Man, ★ Up
BUT MAYBE: The Lovely Bones, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Chéri, The Tree of Life, The Princess and the Frog
OR EVEN: A Serious Man, Bright Star

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
MY GUESSES: Bright Star, Chéri, Coco Avant Chanel, Inglourious Basterds, ★ Nine
BUT MAYBE: Amelia, The Young Victoria, Public Enemies, An Education, Taking Woodstock
OR EVEN: Julie & Julia, Where the Wild Things Are, The Last Station, The Brothers Bloom

The Fifties: A 2009 Progress Report

You loved them in 2006, you loved them in 2007, you loved them in 2008, and suddenly, here we are again. Two films earlier than I thought we'd be, however. When I saw, and loved, Roy Andersson's mordantly hysterical and brilliantly staged You, the Living tonight with Goatdog, I figured that after this splendid experience, I would make a point of catching the inevitably discussion-worthy Inglourious Basterds, and the completely untitillating but compulsory Taking Woodstock, and then I'd be good 'n' ready to take this annual stroll through the best of what I've seen so far—which, if you're joining for the first time, is published every year after I've caught my 50th U.S. commercial release. But then, I noticed that two films I saw at last April's Nashville Film Festival, Giancarlo Esposito's disappointingly clunky directing debut Gospel Hill and Ondi Timoner's intriguingly "edgy" but finally off-putting documentary We Live in Public, had suddenly opened in New York City. So we've got our customary tally of 50, without a basterd or a hippie in sight.

I admit that I'm not that sad to be skipping forward: I will enjoy playing my exact responses to Basterds and Woodstock a little closer to the vest once I've actually seen them, so that my thoughts are fresher at year's end... and my reason for selecting and archiving "The Fifties" every year is to underscore some great filmmaking from the months of the year that are mercifully light on huge headline-grabbers and awards-PR campaigns, though this also means that many of my anointees are likely to be crowded out of the spotlight, even my own spotlight, once "Best Of" lists and ballots actually do start circulating in January December the morning after Veteran's Day.

Can we all repeat in unison? It is a lazy, Hollywood-centric, studio-driven myth that all the good movies open in the fall and at the holidays. If you're tempted to believe this—and you hold a job and inhabit a city that affords you wider options—you aren't making enough time for the foreign films, past festival winners, and documentaries that are distributed herky-jerky all over the calendar, and you might not be giving due credit to what you have seen and enjoyed in the winter, spring, and summer, while somehow locking into the presumption that everything good is still to come. When I personally look at the fall, I don't get the sense of a huge mountain of treats in the offing, so all the more reason to celebrate what we've got so far... and if you missed 'em, look for 'em! And if I pass on what you thought were some shoo-ins, I'm not trying to be a jerk. I just don't get the fuss.

(P.S. I love my commenters! Even more than usual, the ideas and suggestions in every part of this post have been tested for the better and made more interesting by the contributions of the commenters. Make sure to read them!)

(P.P.S. For a U.K. take on the best of the year up till now, taking a different slate of releases and dates into account, check out Tim's new list.)

BEST PICTURE
The Hurt Locker - The studio serves gourmet, and you chow down on Spam? Buy a ticket!
Julia - Erick Zonca takes huge risks in writing and direction, with stunning payoffs
The Limits of Control - An uneven auteur yields rich, weird, fascinating minimalism
Lorna's Silence - A taut, nuanced story rendered with typical Dardenne eloquence
You, the Living - Like an uproarious trompe-l'oeil exhibit in a Nordic purgatory
(Count the B+'s, and you can see that my Top 10 would so far be filled out with the sprawling but austere Gomorrah, the ingeniously acted and scripted In the Loop, the boldly heightened Sin Nombre, the ruefully elegant Summer Hours, and the vibrantly schizoid Thirst. Though if Prodigal Sons eventually scores a theatrical release, it will enter near the top. What's going on with this movie?)

BEST DIRECTOR
Roy Andersson, You, the Living
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Lorna's Silence
Jim Jarmusch, The Limits of Control
Erick Zonca, Julia
(No cutesy exceptions: the five best films derive from the five most singular, mature, and risk-taking exercises in direction. For more on "cutesy," see the Comments.)

BEST ACTRESS
Amy Adams, Sunshine Cleaning - Connects with multiple sides, peppy and grim, of her character
Arta Dobroshi, Lorna's Silence - An admirable feat of "being, not acting" acting
Mimi Kennedy, In the Loop - One of the deftest and smartest of multiple, delicious leads
Kim Ok-vin, Thirst - Works overtime to make Thirst hang together; does so with fire and cool
Tilda Swinton, Julia - If anyone touches her in '09, I'll be floored
(Fête Meryl all you want, and yep, she's fun; but I didn't really buy this as more than a broad, loving romp in a simple role. This category changed after the first comment; see below.)

BEST ACTOR
Peter Capaldi, In the Loop - Showy lines, yes, but he grounds them in a sharp, shifting character
Russell Crowe, State of Play - That rarest of breeds, a plausible Hollywood journalist
Robert Downey, Jr., The Soloist - Blends his rascally tics into a lively, believable portrait of emotional aloofness
Mark Duplass, Humpday - Sells a moribund premise with his razor precision on each line and look
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker - A fully integrated, deep, arrogant, no-fat picture of a 21st-century antihero
(How surprising that there are twice as many strong candidates, including almost-as-good costars Anthony Mackie in Locker, Jamie Foxx in Soloist, and Tom Hollander and Chris Addison in Loop, plus spry Paul Rudd in I Love You, Man, beleaguered Sharlto Copley in District 9, and haunted Ciro Patrone in Gomorrah)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Hurt Locker - "Gets" every aesthetic and POV that every other Iraq movie tried for, and gets them all
Julia - A restless symphony of unease and frightening, blood-pumping, reckless catharsis
The Limits of Control - Intense seductions of color, geometry, and depth, with witty allusions
Sin Nombre - A rich chromatic experience that never abandons the characters or their worldview
Thirst - A plethora of tricks, color schemes, rapid movements, and ostentatious frames, in a good way

BEST FILM EDITING
Drag Me to Hell - With minor caveats, a flawless hold on pace and tone
The Hurt Locker - Exquisite action and suspense, with character notes and a refusal of clichéd cutaways
Julia - Careful balance of dreadful accumulation and right-off-the-bat lunacy; engrossing
The Limits of Control - It's all in the title: dilates scenes to just the right extreme, whether of dry absurdism, or real menace, or environmental immersion
Lorna's Silence - Balances an unusually plotty, talking-pointish script with needful intervals of social atmosphere and long, well-calibrated takes

BEST SCREENPLAY
Gomorrah - A wealth of details, with just enough connecting threads
In the Loop - Ingenious construction outshines even memorable invective
Lorna's Silence - Judicious pacing of revelations, plausible pile-up of conflicts
The Soloist - Refuses the tempting studio clean-up on several messy points
Summer Hours - Ideal, miniaturist moments with artfully ambiguous gaps

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Anna Chlumsky, In the Loop - An unlikely but certain bid for smart roles by a onetime child star; tastily comic yet totally true
Marion Cotillard, Public Enemies - Makes everything one could out of a stunted part and plotline
Alycia Delmore, Humpday - A tart, likable read on the girlfriend everyone over- and under-estimates
Gina McKee, In the Loop - Devoted but disdainful; enjoys the wreck everyone makes when they drop her
Naturi Naughton, Notorious - A fierce, fully committed take on L'il Kim, pulling a great "f*** you" diva moment hurling "Get Money" at B.I.G.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Jason Clarke, Public Enemies - Self-assured reticence and charisma, as Dillinger's most trusted pal
Steve Coogan, In the Loop - Works perfect, angry, funny, righteous magic at the sidelines
Fabrizio Rongione, Lorna's Silence - Implies an entrancing spin-off beyond this movie, and downplays the "villain" notes
Saul Rubinek, Julia - Hard to imagine a surer spin on the infatuated but exasperated enabler
Stanley Tucci, Julie & Julia - Warm and generous, but also knows how even the most loving, candid couples subtly maneuver with each other

BEST MOVIES I DIDN'T MENTION
Sugar and Revanche

SORRY, BUT I'M NOT A BELIEVER
The Brothers Bloom, Moon, Of Time and the City, Ponyo, Star Trek, and Up

Cannes Winner Predictions

I'll be proven wrong in just a matter of hours, but why not take a stab? Especially after blowing my calls in almost every category last year.

PALME D'OR Vincere, dir. Marco Bellocchio
(alt. The Time that Remains, dir. Elia Suleiman)
I'm guessing that The White Ribbon would look too obviously like Huppert/Haneke nepotism and that A Prophet could have that Gomorrah problem of being too obviously the "front-runner." Other possibilities for the Palme or the Grand Jury or Jury prizes: Fish Tank, Wild Grass, Kinatay, Enter the Void, and that delicious cherry-bomb Antichrist.

BEST DIRECTOR Alain Resnais, Wild Grass
(alt. Jacques Audiard, A Prophet)
Often a hideout for the filmmaker people expected to get the Palme, so Bellocchio could get in here if Vincere isn't the choice for the top prize; odds go a bit out on Haneke, who's won this before, and on Suleiman

BEST ACTRESS Katie Jarvis, Fish Tank
(alt. Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Vincere)

BEST ACTOR François Cluzet, À l'origine
(alt. Tahar Rahim or Niels Arestrup, A Prophet)
Dussolier for the Resnais film or Suleiman starring for himself aren't bad options, especially if the films' chances are scuppered elsewhere

BEST SCREENPLAY À l'origine
(alt. The White Ribbon)
It seems insane to predict two prizes for a barely heralded film, but much weirder things have happened at Cannes; the Almodóvar, Suleiman, Campion, and Bellocchio could easily figure here.

TECHNICAL GRAND PRIZE Bright Star, Greig Fisher

SOME KIND OF SPECIAL JURY PRIZE FOR MAD AUDACITY Antichrist

Meanwhile, here are the Main Competition films in roughly the order in which I'm eager to see them, with links to the IFC blog entries about reactions to each film: Bright Star, Antichrist, Enter the Void, Fish Tank, A Prophet, Wild Grass, The White Ribbon, Face/Visage, Kinatay, Vincere, Broken Embraces, Spring Fever, Inglourious Basterds, The Time that Remains, In the Beginning/À l'origine, Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, Thirst, Looking for Eric, Taking Woodstock, and Vengeance... although non-Competition screenings like Police, Adjective, Polytechnique, Hierro, My Neighbor, My Killer, Tales from the Golden Age, A Brand New Life, I Killed My Mother, and especially Dogtooth, Precious, and To Die Like a Man apparently outclass most of the Palme contenders.