Best of 2011: Visual Effects

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (RUSSELL EARL, ET AL.)
... because hokey or sleek, quick or sustained, every effect is plausible and each one has genuine personality, like elements of a zippy score;

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (JOE LETTERI, ET AL.)
... because I admire the prodigious technical achievement, staged across a variety of settings, even if I felt a little colder than I expected;

The Tree of Life (DAN GLASS, BRADLEY J. FRIEDMAN, ET AL.)
... because all the mitoses and mitochondria, the cosmos and the corpuscles, feel staggeringly true, thematically vital, and gorgeously abstract.

Runners-Up: I didn't see a lot of the movies that make the strongest plays for this category, so I'm cutting my list off at three, which also feels like the right interval between my top picks and my also-rans. Still, my single favorite effect of the year, in hilarious timing as well as spooky execution, is the sudden evaporation of a key character in Fright Night, which continues to be a fun effect in its later reprisals. The work in X-Men: First Class was sometimes very impressive, but I admit it bugs me that the films in that franchise always seem stuck in awkward cadences: "Are you ready, we're going to show you an effect now! Here, it's happening! That was an effect!" Some of the CGI in Immortals feels oppressively heavy-handed, as it does in the very different world of a cinematic immortal in Hugo, but the peaks in both movies are aesthetically impressive, and probably very difficult at the technical level. The booms, chases, explosions, crashes, stunt coordination, and (I assume) the CGI enhancement of all of this in Fast Five are traditional enough to seem almost unremarkable, but there's no way this is just point-your-camera filmmaking, so to everyone who made such a ridiculous story so engaging, in ways that involved a matte or a mouse-pointer or a digital overlay, congrats for making me believe almost everything you did. As low-fi as they are, the creepy alterations of reality and the impending planet of Melancholia really got to me.

Films I Hated to Skip Before Posting: Attack the Block, Bellflower, Captain America: The First Avenger, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Paranormal Activity 3, Super 8, TrollHunter

Films I "Hated" to Skip Before Posting: Real Steel, Thor, Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Best of 2011: Makeup

No thoughts on Stockard Channing? None? C'mon, people...



BEST MAKEUP
Contagion (KATE BISCOE & FRIĐA ARADÓTTIR)
... for nailing gradations of disease and of bureaucratic fatigue, defamiliarizing stars, and making early, horrifying close-ups count for a lot;

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (DEBORAH LA MIA DENAVER & PETER TOTHPAL)
... for acing the lost art of making stars look casually fabulous but also making nuances of grooming pay off as key story and character beats;

A Dangerous Method (STEPHAN DUPUIS & ULRICH RITTER)
... for Jung's piano-wire primness and his wife's pallor, Freud's avuncular semi-elegance, Otto's hirsute salaciousness, Sabine's ruddy darkness;

Jane Eyre (DANIEL PHILLIPS & TAPIO SALMI)
... for the way the women, in particular, vacillate between unremarkable looks and Diane Arbus uncanniness, and for Jane's well-managed severity;

The Last Circus (BARBARA ALONSO, CARLOS ARENAS, ET AL.)
... for responding with gusto to the film's Guignol trappings, managing to make sad, bloodthirsty clowns as alien as anything in Pan's Labyrinth.

Runners-Up: Lots to recognize this year. Shortly after these five came Midnight in Paris, which found delicious and character-appropriate guises for the characters who clicked the best in other ways (Wilson, Stoll, Hiddleston DALÍ!) but also those that the movie otherwise struggled with (Sheen, McAdams, Seydoux); The Artist, with its dapper resuscitations of late-20s and early-30s cosmetic regimes in Hollywood, which probably would have been a finalist if they could have gone a little easier on Penelope Ann Miller and figured things out a little better with Beth Grant; The Iron Lady, which excels at rendering Meryl Streep as a plausibly old and broken woman, even though the work captured Margaret Thatcher at some times more than others (and the work on Carol and all the advisors and Parliamentarians was also very good); Coriolanus, which smears soldiers with clots of blood and dirt just like the best of 'em, but also finds the right looks for the Cox and Redgrave characters; Margaret, which found ingenious ways to make Paquin, Damon, Ruffalo, Broderick, and Culkin look exactly as they did in 2005 (calm down, I'm kidding...); Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which hits a lot more targets than it misses in terms of taking its actors back to the 1970s and aging some of them subtly forward; Higher Ground, which did aging on a budget better than a lot of deep-coffered studio pictures do, and which settled into a semi-rural community (in period, no less) without the usual Hollywood overlay of "Pity these poor people and their hair, oh my god their hair"; and The Ides of March, which has a great feel for the snipped, buffed, and manicured look of top-line politicians, the harried and tired look of top-line campaign managers, and the oddly glammy aspects of characters like Gosling's, Wood's, and even Minghella's, which made me wonder if they're in this game for the ideals or for the eyeballs. Rounding out the runners-up are Sleeping Beauty, which extended its aesthetic of creepily meticulous refinement to Emily Browning's bone-china whitness and Rachael Blake's intimidating chignon; and Hanna, whose weird look for the title character I eventually got used to, and which had a lot of fun with Blanchett and Hollander.

Close But Misses the Cutoff: Albert Nobbs does an ample and impressively subtle job with Close, but the iffy rendering of Hubert is a demerit, and I never really bought either character as people who'd be universally believed as men; and Meek's Cutoff, which gets the right amount of sun, dust, and grit into everyone's hair and skin and nails but way overdoes it on the Greenwood character, I think.

Films I Hated to Skip Before Posting: 13 Assassins, Anonymous, City of Life and Death, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, House of Pleasures, In the Land of Blood and Honey, Mysteries of Lisbon, Potiche

Best of 2011: Adapted Screenplay

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Higher Ground (CAROLYN BRIGGS & TIM METCALFE)
... for taking so many perspectives seriously, and framing a woman's relation to faith in a manageable structure without tidying it up too much;

Jane Eyre (MOIRA BUFFINI)
... for seeming neither cowed by a classic novel nor headstrong about unnecessary changes, managing a deft balance of creativity and due respect;

Moneyball (STEVEN ZAILLIAN & AARON SORKIN)
... for sliding nimbly between scenes the way a dealer shuffles cards, without sacrificing momentum or vivid characterization or emotional hooks;

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BRIDGET O'CONNOR & PETER STRAUGHAN)
... for wrestling a mazelike novel into an inevitably semi-opaque film, graced with piquant, peculiar notes that make the shadows more intriguing;

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL)
... for appropriating the odd, fanciful memoir of a Buddhist monk, infusing it with his own concerns, and leading us places no one else would go.

In the Land of Ambiguous Categorization: I'm never a fan of Adapted Screenplay nominations going to filmmakers who fertilized their own short films and cultivated them to feature length, so I'm glad that Dee Rees and Focus Features stuck to their guns and campaigned for Pariah as an original script. Still, rightly or wrongly, folks have won Oscars in the Adapted derby for succeeding less well than Rees does in this regard. If you don't know the original short, I'll just say that once upon a time, Pariah built to a central conflict over a prop that Alike literally tosses in the trash in this new version. The full-length movie is not a superficial padding of the initial scenario but a genuine expansion and, in graceful ways, a deepening and a transformation. Parental dynamics have shifted and new characters amplify the humor, the romance, and the tension. Being able to gauge and revise her material this deftly makes Rees not just a director to watch (which she is) but a writer worth keeping an eye on.

Runners-Up: Another short-ish list in a year where the heat favored the original scripts, I have to hand it to George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon for giving Willimon's play the extra oomph and narrative it needed to hold the screen in The Ides of March; Richard Curtis and Lee Hall for re-proportioning War Horse to make optimal room for Spielberg's contributions, and for limiting the bathos to much less than it might have been; to Christopher Hampton for moving some scenes around and trimming some others so that A Dangerous Method mostly feels tighter and less obvious than it did as a play; to Pedro Almodóvar for serving himself a finale that weeps and sings in The Skin I Live In, even if every subplot and temporal swerve doesn't serve the whole as well as it could; to Hossein Amini for seeing a movie in the thin narrative of Drive and writing the sleek, racing-striped, intermittently flavorful script that invited Refn's exercise in style; and to Denis Villeneuve for translating Wajdi Mouawad's Incendies in ways that don't efface the fussy unevenness of the source but aptly crystallize its strongest passages, making a fair, ambitious, sporadically effective stab at Socratic grandeur.

Best of 2011: Supporting Actor

If you're one of the folks who's clicking through for Honorees but then dashing away—can I interest you in a real review? I'm kind of proud of this one. No? Okay.



BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method
... for being smug but also astute, a rich conduit of humor but not a hammy one, and a careful articulator of the veiled theme of anti-Semitism;

Chris O'Dowd, Bridesmaids
... for being raffishly un-typecast as the flawed prince we root for, helping us to balance our attraction to and exasperation with Wiig's Annie;

Gustavo Sánchez Parra, Leap Year
... for arriving subtly into the film, uncomfortably pushing the lead around, and signaling so many motives for and feelings about what they do;

Christopher Plummer, Beginners
... for showing us a good time and seeing fully and generously into his character, without selling him into cutesy comedy or milking the sadness;

Shea Whigham, Take Shelter
... for the subtlest, steadiest gaze by which we observe the hero, expressing friendship as guys do, even as tacit sympathy tilts into distrust.

Runners-Up: Brían F. O'Byrne as the patience-tested but unexpectedly loyal ex-husband in HBO's Mildred Pierce; Corey Stoll as a beacon of wit and a rough-patch of welcome texture in Midnight in Paris; Brad Pitt, playing a man aware of his shortcomings and expressive deficiencies but nonetheless mired within them in The Tree of Life; Niels Arestrup, so elegantly warm and so eloquently aggrieved in War Horse; Sergei Puskepalis, who passes from intimidating colleague to dangerous enemy in How I Ended This Summer; and Shima Ohnishi as the physically demanding, ethically unsalvageable husband in Caterpillar, bravely submitting himself to Wakamatsu's aesthetic of florid overstatement without losing the character inside the hyperbole.

For Distinguished Group Efforts: The colorful trio of henchmen that Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot, and Mark Strong bring hilariously to life in The Guard; the vivid conclave of misguided but sympathetic managers, scouts, and board members in Moneyball, extending as well to Philip Seymour Hoffman's banked flame of inextinguishable animosity; and Peter Carroll, Chris Haywood, and Hugh Keays-Byrne as the unsettled and unsettling clients in Sleeping Beauty.

Additional Runners-Up: Marton Csokas for his believable spin on what is more or less the O'Dowd role in Julie Bertuccelli's The Tree; Kenneth Lonergan for nailing the desire for camaraderie but the helplessness at real intimacy as the cross-country dad in Margaret; Bryan Cranston, who's been limping around the borderlands of petty crime for so long in Drive that he's almost forgotten how quickly it can all end; Brian Cox for his fatigue, his knack for conciliation, and his weariness with a tone-deaf leader in Coriolanus; Patton Oswalt for bringing so much color and personality to Young Adult that you almost stop begrudging what a crutch his character is; Burt Young for blurring the line between a mental fog and a shocked reaction to shabby treatment in Win Win; Shahab Hosseini, for making us wonder and worry throughout A Separation just how unstable his character is; Guy Pearce for both his flaunted and his wounded vanity in Mildred Pierce; Markus Schleinzer for an unforgettable face and a failure to play his hunches correctly in The Robber; Kiefer Sutherland for half-tolerating and half-loathing Melancholia's effulgent wedding, perking up when something truly interests him, refusing to believe that his only source of pleasure might destroy him; Ezra Miller, giving his most plausible and well-shaded spin on his troubled-youth typecasting in the Sundance drama Another Happy Day; Nick Nolte for being so moving on the lawn and in the diner and in the dark of Warrior, despite some overshooting towards the end; Jamie Bell, for so concisely forcing us to ask whether St. John is a worthy partner or a hovering trap for the heroine of Jane Eyre; Goran Visnjic for his odd, impish boyfriend in Beginners, tempting us to question his sincerity before certifying his love past all doubt; Kevin Spacey for finally showing up to play ball again in Margin Call, after what feels like years; and Charles Parnell for taking a bemused interest in his daughter's rebel streak in Pariah until, suddenly, he doesn't—though even then, he keeps re-drawing the line between empathy and aloofness.

Maybe one day I'll regret that I'm leaving out Albert Brooks and the whole Tinker Tailor crew, but as glad as I am to applaud their solid work, none of them truly interested me as much as all of these guys did.

Films I Hated to Skip Before Posting: Cold Weather, Of Gods and Men

Best of 2011: Original Score

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Drive (CLIFF MARTINEZ)
... for yet another score that slinks its way fully inside a shadowy, scintillating sound design, while sustaining the film's slick 80s-pop bent;

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (ALEXANDRE DESPLAT)
... for a typically melodic, large-orchestra composition that balances the city's dynamic breadth with the jangling solitude of the protagonist;;

Hanna (THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS)
... for gale forces of electronica, infusing action set-pieces with humor and excitement but alert, too, to Hanna's confusions and introspection;

Rango (HANS ZIMMER)
... for calling up Zimmer's often-mislaid sense of humor, in zesty cahoots with the film's crooked shapes, loopy dialogue, and goofball oddities;

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (ALBERTO IGLESIAS)
... for exploiting Iglesias' gifts for beauty and menace, using un-British musical idioms that cast global shadows inside this English labyrinth;

Runners-Up: In a weak year for this category, especially since I couldn't muster full enthusiasm for Ludovic Bource's peppy melodies for The Artist, Dario Marianelli sounding a shade too much like he's "doing Dario Marianelli" in Jane Eyre, and Howard Shore's low broods beneath A Dangerous Method, I'm cutting off the runners-up at three: one more hat-tip to Alberto Iglesias, paired again with frequent collaborator Pedro Almodóvar on his spindly, sidewinding, darkly translucent mystery-thriller The Skin I Live In; a salute to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who do not equal their triumph with The Social Network in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but are certainly crucial to the film's rough, sleek, if slightly uneven textures; and a round of applause to Michael Giacchino for proving himself once again as a key participant in the Bad Robot repertory, giving Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol vim, vigor, humor, and bounce, without seeming intimidated at all by Lalo Schifrin.

Films I Hated to Skip Before Posting: Cold Weather

Best of 2011: Art Direction

You know how this is often one of the first awards Oscar doles out on the telecast? If it's good enough for him...



BEST ART DIRECTION

Jane Eyre (WILL HUGHES-JONES)
... for avoiding temptations to modernize but still maintaining an eerie, defamiliarizing pall, and making us feel all temperatures and textures;

Rango (MARK "CRASH" McCREERY)
... for sticking to its pop-guns, flaunting an everyone's-a-freak flag for kids and adults alike, and finding images to suit a rococo script;

The Skin I Live In (ANTXÓN GÓMEZ)
... for using color, texture, and lines brilliantly to evoke psychological atmospheres and then pouring more meanings into them than we guessed;

Sleeping Beauty (ANNIE BEAUCHAMP)
... for keying up the world's ritual and antiseptic qualities, yielding uncanny yet oddly plausible environs that buoy protagonist's alienation; and

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (MARIA DJURKOVIC)
... for what I've called a "Cinecittà of mildewed bureaucracy," a sad, post-Mod spin on Zodiac, entrancing to peer at but soul-sapping to inhabit.

Runners-Up: 3, for balancing palette, geometries, styles of décor, and evocative Berlin locations to suit its thesis on people as free-radical molecules; Albert Nobbs, for being so unpretentiously convincing in its period idiom, and specifically as a mid-grade hotel; The Artist, for duplicating some early-Hollywood touchstones and elevating others to the stature of dreams; Hugo, for being a colossal technical achievement, even if it could have stood to feel less heavy and cluttered; and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, for marshaling locations better than any franchise movie out there, and handling everything from sandstorms to gadgets to skyscrapers just right.

For Distinguished Work with No Dinero: Beginners, for the great illustrations, and a world that passes back and forth from looking like one of Ewan's cartoons; Leap Year, for that indelible and character-revealing apartment; Like Crazy, for believable dorms and workplaces, and good indicators of when the relationship has energy and when it doesn't; Weekend, for saving lines and screentime by showing us just who these guys are, via what they own and how they live; and Win Win, not just for credible suburban living but for a vaguely pop-inflected palette that places the movie nicely between realism and fable.

For Distinguished Work with Prehistoric Technology: The proto-humans of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, whose efforts with a hunk of charcoal, some variable lines, and the curve of a cave wall led to some pretty fabulous mo-cap, and plenty of incredible trompe-l'oeil and forced perspective, putting a lot of film crews with $100 million budgets to shame. Way to go, Ayla and Og!

Films I'd Have Mentioned If I'd Seen Them in Time: War Horse

Films I Hated to Skip Before Posting: City of Life and Death, House of Pleasures, Mysteries of Lisbon