Stephen didn't have to persuade me to play Lincoln but I had to persuade him that perhaps if I was going do it that Lincoln shouldn't be a musical.

Oscar Winners 2013

I didn’t watch the Oscars ceremony. By all accounts I was lucky, as it seems Seth McFarlane went down like a bag of cold sick (although, "I would argue that the actor who really got inside Lincoln's head was John Wilkes Booth" is quite a good line). Bring back Letterman.

By my reckoning I go 11 picks right out of 24. Pretty piss-poor, though I make no apologies for my randomness and lack of “professional” insight.

Argo seemed to gather up an unstoppable momentum over the last six weeks or so and the Affleck director nomination snub only appeared to spur its underdog status on. My bet on Lincoln was for the Hollywood love of prestige and importance, but I probably underestimated the extent to which many found it slightly dull. That, and Spielberg fatigue. And, Hollywood loves nothing more than films that validate Hollywood (Argo makes them heroes!)

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the evening was Christoph Waltz’s Best Supporting Actor victory for Django Unchained. I don’t think many thought a return visit to a showy, charismatic supporting part in a Tarantino film would yield further dividends and the actor seemed slightly taken aback too.

Best Picture

Winner: Argo

I called Lincoln. Clooney gets yet another Oscar in yet another category.

Best Director

Winner: Ang Lee

My guess for Spielberg proved significantly out (Lincoln went home with 2, not the 5 I suggested). Nikki Finke would have us believe the Academy hates Steven, although she’s never short of hyperbole. I’ll readily admit to not expecting Lee, mainly because he’s already bagged a statue. Although, looking at the other contenders, who’d have been next in line if Spielberg was ruled out. The other three were definitely outsiders.

Best Actor

Winner: Daniel Day-Lewis

As expected by all and sundry.

Best Actress

Winner: Jennifer Lawrence

Again, as expected. There was some talk of Emmanuelle Riva but giving it to someone because they are old is a fickle as the same decision because they are young. It’s the Jessica Tandy factor.

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Christoph Waltz

I’d settled on De Niro, although I didn’t think he really deserved it. This category desperately needs a few nominees who aren’t previous winders next time round.

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Anne Hathaway

Curiously, I’d blanked that I picked Field from this field. I think it was Hathaway saturation (which, in respect of Lincoln, is considered one of the reasons for Argo’s resurgence).

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Django Unchained

This, I didn’t expect. I went for Amour; I don’t think Flight and Moonrise Kingdom ever seriously had a shot and I ruled out Django for the same reason as Zero Dark Thirty; controversy. I guess Tarantino shut my butt down there.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: Argo

I had it as the runner-up to Lincoln; it’s been accused of the same fast and loose treatment of history as ZD30 but has the benefit of obscurity and comedy.

Best Editing

Winner: Argo

My sole ZD30 pick was this one; while I did have Argo in an editing category, it was for Sound Editing.

Best Cinematography

Winner: Life of Pi

No contention here, and my pick (although I prefer the work on Skyfall).

Best Art Direction

Winner: Lincoln

Wouldn’t you know it? Of all the areas I picked Lincoln, this wasn’t one.

Best Costume Design

Winner: Anna Karenina

A fizzling adaptation as this was, the costumes were very natty (but, then, so was the Art Direction).

Best Make-up

Winner: Les Miserables

Not a lot of debate necessary for this one.

Best Visual Effects

Winner: Life of Pi

Nor this. There’s added resonance to this win, with the issues surrounding Rhythm & Hues problems.

Best Sound

Winner: Les Miserables

Didn’t see that coming. I went for Argo.

Best Sound Editing

Winner: Skyfall & Zero Dark Thirty

TWO winner and I couldn’t get either right!!

Best Original Score

Winner: Life of Pi

I found this score derivative, but it repearted its Globes success. Shame Skyfall didn’t get recognition.

Best Original Song

Winner: Skyfall

It didn’t crumb-o at the last hurdle.

Best Animated Feature

Winner: Brave

I went for the safe choice and it proved correct; Wreck-It-Ralph would have been a bit too hip for the Academy.

Best Foreign Language Picture

Winner: Amour

A shoe-in.

Best Documentary Feature

Winner: Searching for Sugar Man

It did seem most likely; popular and uncontroversial.

Best Documentary Short

Winner: Inocente

I hadn’t a clue.

Best Animated Short

Winner: Paperman

The one that had Disney marketing behind it won. Surprise.

Best Live Action Short

Winner: Curfew

Who knew?

Lincoln – 2 (I predicted 5)

Silver Linings Playbook – 1 (predicted 2)

Life of Pi – 4 (predicted 2)

Amour – 1 (precited 2)

Argo -3 (predicted 2)

Anna Karenina – 1 (predicted 2)

Skyfall – 2 (predicted 2)

Zero Dark Thirty – 1 (predicted 1)

Les Miserables – 3 (predicted 1)

Django Unchained – 2 (predicted 0)

Comments

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You're not only wrong. You're wrong at the top of your voice.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
I’ve seen comments suggesting that John Sturges’ thriller hasn’t aged well, which I find rather mystifying. Sure, some of the characterisations border on the cardboard, but the director imbues the story with a taut, economical backbone.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

How do you like that – Cuddles knew all the time!

The Pleasure Garden (1925)
(SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s first credit as director, and his account of the production difficulties, as related to Francois Truffaut, is by and large more pleasurable than The Pleasure Garden itself. The Italian location shoot in involved the confiscation of undeclared film stock, having to recast a key role and borrowing money from the star when Hitch ran out of the stuff.

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s Jaws, there’s Star Wars, and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy, to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “mainly boring”.

Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the system when Burton did it (even…

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

The present will look after itself. But it’s our duty to realise the future with our imagination.

Until the End of the World (1991)
(SPOILERS) With the current order devolving into what looks inevitably like a passively endorsed dystopia, a brave new chipped and tracked vision variously in line with cinema’s warnings (or its predictive programming, depending on where your cynicism lands), I’ve been revisiting a few of these futuristic visions. That I picked the very Euro-pudding Until the End of the World is perhaps entirely antagonistic to such reasoning, seeing as how it is, at heart, a warm and fuzzy, upbeat, humanist musing on where we are all going.

Anything can happen in Little Storping. Anything at all.

The Avengers 2.22: Murdersville
Brian Clemens' witty take on village life gone bad is one of the highlights of the fifth season. Inspired by Bad Day at Black Rock, one wonders how much Murdersville's premise of unsettling impulses lurking beneath an idyllic surface were set to influence both Straw Dogs and The Wicker Mana few years later (one could also suggest it premeditates the brand of backwoods horrors soon to be found in American cinema from the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper).

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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