So you see every day, every week, every month and every year of my life, my hero's always 10 years away.

Oscar Winners 2014

That the biggest event of this year’s Oscars ceremony is a selfie probably says it all (and that it’s already been parodied into the ground probably says even more). Until they get a presenter in with enough disrespect for the whole bloated behemoth that passes for evening’s entertainment, Oscar is consigned to being an annual damp squib/endurance test. As with last year I got the big one wrong, but a tally of 16 out of 24 isn’t at all bad. My random guesswork may be improving (only 11 right in 2013).

Best Picture

Winner: 12 Years a Slave

I called Gravity, partly on the grounds of Cuarón being a lock for director. Surprisingly (as in, it’s not that common) the Academy picked a movie that didn’t get Best Director, as per last year. The uber-rich, pampered elite soothed their troubled consciences by giving the gong to a worthy picture this time out, one that can join the ranks of Gandhi, Schindler’s List and er… Crash as really being about something important. It’s the sixth winner since 1990 not to also take Best Picture. Did it deserve the award? I don’t think it’s as remarkable as some attest, but aside from The Wolf of Wall Street it’s probably the closest to a good fit. Also of note, and perhaps a harbinger of things to come, it joins last year’s Argo was a Best Picture winner amassing only three Oscars in total. The only other Best Picture winner since 1976 to share so few is Crash.

Best Director

Winner: Alfonso Cuarón

As noted, a shoe-in. I think his work on Children of Men is more interesting (it helps that it’s a much better movie), but there’s no doubting the virtual virtuoso skill of Gravity’s director.

Best Actor

Winner: Matthew McConaughey

McConaughey’s on a high, and this was an easy call despite the sterling competition. His acceptance speech was quite a feat of self-promotion (along with God-promotion, creating nearly as many column inches), as wittily noted by The Colbert Report.

Best Actress

Winner: Cate Blanchett

The Woody worry didn’t end up losing Cate the title. With two awards she’s probably close to sealing the deal as the new Meryl. Not that the old Meryl’s gone anywhere.

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Jared Leto

This is one award I expect to do zero for the winner’s cachet. A bit like Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Lupita Nyongo’o

Lupita has already gone on to bigger and better things. Exhibit A: Non-Stop. Nice to see Jennifer Lawrence (ain’t she adorable?) having fun with losing too.

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Her

I was surprised by this (I called American Hustle, which didn’t really deserve it). There haven’t been a whole lot of really great winners in this category in the last decade (exceptions are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Midnight in Paris, both idiosyncratic tales like this). I should go and watch it I suppose, so I can actually give an informed opinion.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: 12 Years a Slave

Oohhh. Controversial. Not for winning, but for the evident ill feeling between John Ridley and Steve McQueen. Never incur a writer’s wrath. Although, unless you’re writer-director, it’s kind of inevitable.

Best Cinematography

Winner: Gravity

Lubezki’s sixth nomination, so a win is well overdue. I’d have given it to him for The Tree of Life or Children of Men (or both).

Best Costume Design

Winner; The Great Gatsby

Shiny pretty duds won out. Not a great shock.

Best Sound Mixing

Winner: Gravity

What’s to say? Space is a noisy place.

Best Film Editing

Winner: Gravity

Good editing here, even when there isn’t any (like one long, continuous take). I went with Captain Phillips. Big mistake.

Best Sound Editing

Winner: Gravity

For Gravity, see Sound Mixing above. For my pick, see Film Editing above.

Best Visual Effects

Winner: Gravity

But of course.

Best Make-up

Winner: Dallas Buyers Club

A reward for invention on a ridiculously low budget, which is always nice to see.

Best Production Design

Winner: The Great Gatsby

More shiny, shiny, pretty, pretty.

Best Original Song

Winner: Frozen

Apparently smart money was on Bono’s borefest (he looked nonplussed) I thought it would be Pharrel Williams. Instead they went for Disney by-numbers. It seems as if they always bag it, but the last example was Tarzan in ’99 (from baldy Collins no less). Prior to that it was just embarrassingly regular (’89, ’91, ’92, ’94, ’95).

Best Original Score

Winner: Gravity (Steven Price)

Price’s first nom and first win there.

Best Animated Short

Winner: Mr Hublot

Disney didn’t get it! Count me shocked, if I could muster such a response in the animated feature category.

Best Documentary Short

Winner: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

Always bet on the Holocaust.

Best Live Action Short

Winner: Helium

The Voorman Problem lost out to heartwarming. Heartwarming’s good, I guess.

Best Documentary Feature

Winner: 20 Feet from Stardom

Fuck knows what happened here. Perhaps the Academy thought they’d done their bit for worthy subject matter and wanted to celebrate something close to their entertainment marrow. Or perhaps they tried to make it through the director’s cut of The Act of Killing.

Best Foreign Language Film

Winner: The Great Beauty

I’ve seen this now, and it very much is the Academy’s idea of a European art movie; an easy choice to festoon with garlands. It is actually very good, though.

Best Animated Feature

Winner: Frozen

Perhaps shockingly, perhaps not (since the award has only existed since 2001) this is the first “straight” Disney winner (rather than Pixar). One in the eye (that would be Mike Wazowski’s cyclopean eye) for Lasseter land, since Monsters University (rightly) didn’t even get nominated.

I’m smarter than a beaver.

Prey (2022) (SPOILERS) If nothing else, I have to respect Dan Trachtenberg’s cynical pragmatism. How do I not only get a project off the ground, but fast-tracked as well? I know, a woke Predator movie! Woke Disney won’t be able to resist! And so, it comes to pass. Luckily for Prey , it gets to bypass cinemas and so the same sorry fate of Lightyear . Less fortunately, it’s a patience-testing snook cocking at historicity (or at least, assumed historicity), in which a young, pint-sized Comanche girl who wishes to hunt and fish – and doubtless shoot to boot – with the big boys gets to take on a Predator and make mincemeat of him. Well, of course , she does. She’s a girl, innit?

Everyone creates the thing they dread.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) (SPOILERS) Avengers: Age of Ultron ’s problem isn’t one of lack. It benefits from a solid central plot. It features a host of standout scenes and set pieces. It hands (most of) its characters strong defining moments. It doesn’t even suffer now the “wow” factor of seeing the team together for the first time has subsided. Its problem is that it’s too encumbered. Maybe its asking to much of a director to effectively martial the many different elements required by an ensemble superhero movie such as this, yet Joss Whedon’s predecessor feels positively lean in comparison. Part of this is simply down to the demands of the vaster Marvel franchise machine. Seeds are laid for Captain America: Civil War , Infinity Wars I & II , Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok . It feels like several spinning plates too many. Such activity occasionally became over-intrusive on previous occasions ( Iron Man II ), but there are points in Age of Ultron whe

I’m the famous comedian, Arnold Braunschweiger.

Last Action Hero (1993) (SPOILERS) Make no mistake, Last Action Hero is a mess. But even as a mess, it might be more interesting than any other movie Arnie made during that decade, perhaps even in his entire career. Hellzapoppin’ (after the 1941 picture, itself based on a Broadway revue) has virtually become an adjective to describe films that comment upon their own artifice, break the fourth wall, and generally disrespect the convention of suspending disbelief in the fictions we see parading across the screen. It was fairly audacious, some would say foolish, of Arnie to attempt something of that nature at this point in his career, which was at its peak, rather than playing it safe. That he stumbled profoundly, emphatically so since he went up against the behemoth that is Jurassic Park (slotted in after the fact to open first), should not blind one to the considerable merits of his ultimate, and final, really, attempt to experiment with the limits of his screen persona.

If you ride like lightning, you're going to crash like thunder.

The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) (SPOILERS) There’s something daringly perverse about the attempt to weave a serious-minded, generation-spanning saga from the hare-brained premise of The Place Beyond the Pines . When he learns he is a daddy, a fairground stunt biker turns bank robber in order to provide for his family. It’s the kind of “only-in-Hollywood” fantasy premise you might expect from a system that unleashed Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man and Point Break on the world. But this is an indie-minded movie from the director of the acclaimed Blue Valentine ; it demands respect and earnest appraisal. Unfortunately it never recovers from the abject silliness of the set-up. The picture is littered with piecemeal characters and scenarios. There’s a hope that maybe the big themes will even out the rocky terrain but in the end it’s because of this overreaching ambition that the film ends up so undernourished. The inspiration for the movie

Death to Bill and Ted!

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) (SPOILERS) The game of how few sequels are actually better than the original is so well worn, it was old when Scream 2 made a major meta thing out of it (and it wasn’t). Bill & Ted Go to Hell , as Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey was originally called, is one such, not that Excellent Adventure is anything to be sneezed at, but this one’s more confident, even more playful, more assured and more smartly stupid. And in Peter Hewitt it has a director with a much more overt and fittingly cartoonish style than the amiably pedestrian Stephen Herrick. Evil Bill : First, we totally kill Bill and Ted. Evil Ted : Then we take over their lives. My recollection of the picture’s general consensus was that it surpassed the sleeper hit original, but Rotten Tomatoes’ review aggregator suggests a less universal response. And, while it didn’t rock any oceans at the box office, Bogus Journey and Point Break did quite nicely for Keanu Reev

I think it’s pretty clear whose side the Lord’s on, Barrington.

Monte Carlo or Bust aka Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (1969) (SPOILERS) Ken Annakin’s semi-sequel to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines tends to be rather maligned, usually compared negatively to its more famous predecessor. Which makes me rather wonder if those expressing said opinion have ever taken the time to scrutinise them side by side. Or watch them back to back (which would be more sensible). Because Monte Carlo or Bust is by far the superior movie. Indeed, for all its imperfections and foibles (not least a performance from Tony Curtis requiring a taste for comic ham), I adore it. It’s probably the best wacky race movie there is, simply because each set of competitors, shamelessly exemplifying a different national stereotype (albeit there are two pairs of Brits, and a damsel in distress), are vibrant and cartoonish in the best sense. Albeit, it has to be admitted that, as far as said stereotypes go, Annakin’s home side win

This entire edifice you see around you, built on jute.

Jeeves and Wooster 3.3: Cyril and the Broadway Musical (aka Introduction on Broadway) Well, that’s a relief. After a couple of middling episodes, the third season bounces right back, and that's despite Bertie continuing his transatlantic trip. Clive Exton once again plunders Carry On, Jeeves but this time blends it with a tale from The Inimitable Jeeves for the brightest spots, as Cyril Basington-Basington (a sublimely drippy Nicholas Hewetson) pursues his stage career against Aunt Agatha's wishes.

Poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on.

Paterson (2016) (SPOILERS) Spoiling a movie where nothing much happens is difficult, but I tend to put the tag on in a cautionary sense much of the time. Paterson is Jim Jarmusch at his most inert and ambient but also his most rewardingly meditative. Paterson (Adam Driver), a bus driver and modest poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, is a stoic in a fundamental sense, and if he has a character arc of any description, which he doesn’t really, it’s the realisation that is what he is. Jarmusch’s picture is absent major conflict or drama; the most significant episodes feature Paterson’s bus breaking down, the English bull terrier Marvin – whom Paterson doesn’t care for but girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) dotes on – destroying his book of poetry, and an altercation at the local bar involving a gun that turns out to be a water pistol. And Paterson takes it all in his stride, genial to the last, even the ruination of his most earnest, devoted work (the only disappoint

Just because you are a character doesn't mean that you have character.

Pulp Fiction (1994) (SPOILERS) From a UK perspective, Pulp Fiction ’s success seemed like a fait accompli; Reservoir Dogs had gone beyond the mere cult item it was Stateside and impacted mainstream culture itself (hard to believe now that it was once banned on home video); it was a case of Tarantino filling a gap in the market no one knew was there until he drew attention to it (and which quickly became over-saturated with pale imitators subsequently). Where his debut was a grower, Pulp Fiction hit the ground running, an instant critical and commercial success (it won the Palme d’Or four months before its release), only made cooler by being robbed of the Best Picture Oscar by Forrest Gump . And unlike some famously-cited should-have-beens, Tarantino’s masterpiece really did deserve it.

Piece by piece, the camel enters the couscous.

The Forgiven (2021) (SPOILERS) By this point, the differences between filmmaker John Michael McDonagh and his younger brother, filmmaker and playwright Martin McDonagh, are fairly clearly established. Both wear badges of irreverence and provocation in their writing, and a willingness to tackle – or take pot-shots – at bigger issues, ones that may find them dangling their toes in hot water. But Martin receives the lion’s share of the critical attention, while John is generally recognised as the slightly lesser light. Sure, some might mistake Seven Psychopaths for a John movie, and Calvary for a Martin one, but there’s a more flagrant sense of attention seeking in John’s work, and concomitantly less substance. The Forgiven is clearly aiming more in the expressly substantial vein of John’s earlier Calvary, but it ultimately bears the same kind of issues in delivery.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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