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.

Comments

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…

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…

I am so sick of Scotland!

Outlaw/King (2018)
(SPOILERS) Proof that it isn't enough just to want to make a historical epic, you have to have some level of vision for it as well. Say what you like about Mel's Braveheart – and it isn't a very good film – it's got sensibility in spades. He knew what he was setting out to achieve, and the audience duly responded. What does David Mackenzie want from Outlaw/King (it's shown with a forward slash on the titles, so I'm going with it)? Ostensibly, and unsurprisingly, to restore the stature of Robert the Bruce after it was rather tarnished by Braveheart, but he has singularly failed to do so. More than that, it isn’t an "idea", something you can recognise or get behind even if you don’t care about the guy. You’ll never forget Mel's Wallace, for better or worse, but the most singular aspect of Chris Pine's Bruce hasn’t been his rousing speeches or heroic valour. No, it's been his kingly winky.

It was one of the most desolate looking places in the world.

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)
Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old, broadcast by the BBC on the centenary of Armistice Day, is "sold" on the attraction and curiosity value of restored, colourised and frame rate-enhanced footage. On that level, this World War I documentary, utilising a misquote from Laurence Binyon's poem for its title, is frequently an eye-opener, transforming the stuttering, blurry visuals that have hitherto informed subsequent generations' relationship with the War. However, that's only half the story; the other is the use of archive interviews with veterans to provide a narrative, exerting an effect often more impacting for what isn't said than for what is.

You look like an angry lizard!

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
(SPOILERS) I can quite see a Queen fan begrudging this latest musical biopic for failing to adhere to the facts of their illustrious career – but then, what biopic does steer a straight and true course? – making it ironic that they're the main fuel for Bohemian Rhapsody's box office success. Most other criticisms – and they're legitimate, on the whole – fall away in the face of a hugely charismatic star turn from Rami Malek as the band's frontman. He's the difference between a standard-issue, episodic, join-the-dots narrative and one that occasionally touches greatness, and most importantly, carries emotional heft.

There's something wrong with the sky.

Hold the Dark (2018)
(SPOILERS) Hold the Dark, an adaptation of William Giraldi's 2014 novel, is big on atmosphere, as you'd expect from director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room) and actor-now-director (I Don’t Want to Live in This World Anymore) pal Macon Blair (furnishing the screenplay and appearing in one scene), but contrastingly low on satisfying resolutions. Being wilfully oblique can be a winner if you’re entirely sure what you're trying to achieve, but the effect here is rather that it’s "for the sake of it" than purposeful.

You kind of look like a slutty Ebola virus.

Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
(SPOILERS) The phenomenal success of Crazy Rich Asians – in the US at any rate, thus far – might lead one to think it's some kind of startling original, but the truth is, whatever its core demographic appeal, this adaptation of Kevin Kwan's novel taps into universally accepted romantic comedy DNA and readily recognisable tropes of family and class, regardless of cultural background. It emerges a smoothly professional product, ticking the expected boxes in those areas – the heroine's highs, lows, rejections, proposals, accompanied by whacky scene-stealing best friend – even if the writing is sometimes a little on the clunky side.

It seemed as if I had missed something.

Room 237 (2012)
Stanley Kubrick’s meticulous, obsessive approach towards filmmaking was renowned, so perhaps it should be no surprise to find comparable traits reflected in a section of his worshippers. Legends about the director have taken root (some of them with a factual basis, others bunkum), while the air of secrecy that enshrouded his life and work has duly fostered a range of conspiracy theories. A few of these are aired in Rodney Ascher’s documentary, which indulges five variably coherent advocates of five variably tenuous theories relating to just what The Shining is really all about. Beyond Jack Nicholson turning the crazy up to 11, that is. Ascher has hit on a fascinating subject, one that exposes our capacity to interpret any given information wildly differently according to our disposition. But his execution, which both underlines and undermines the theses of these devotees, leaves something to be desired.

Part of the problem is simply one of production values. The audio tra…

Believe me, Mr Bond, I could shoot you from Stuttgart und still create ze proper effect.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
(SPOILERS) Some of the reactions to Spectre would have you believe it undoes all the “good” work cementing Daniel Craig’s incarnation of Bond in Skyfall. If you didn’t see that picture as the second coming of the franchise (I didn’t) your response to the latest may not be so harsh, despite its less successful choices (Blofeld among them). And it isn’t as if one step, forward two steps back are anything new in perceptions of the series (or indeed hugely divisive views on what even constitutes a decent Bond movie). After the raves greeting Goldeneye, Pierce Brosnan suffered a decidedly tepid response to his second outing, Tomorrow Never Dies, albeit it was less eviscerated than Craig’s sophomore Quantum of Solace. Tomorrow’s reputation disguises many strong points, although it has to be admitted that a Moore-era style finale and a floundering attempt to package in a halcyon villain aren’t among them.

The Bond series’ flirtations with contemporary relevance have a…

He mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.

Darkest Hour (2017)
(SPOILERS) Watching Joe Wright’s return to the rarefied plane of prestige – and heritage to boot – filmmaking following the execrable folly of the panned Pan, I was struck by the difference an engaged director, one who cares about his characters, makes to material. Only last week, Ridley Scott’s serviceable All the Money in the World made for a pointed illustration of strong material in the hands of someone with no such investment, unless they’re androids. Wright’s dedication to a relatable Winston Churchill ensures that, for the first hour-plus, Darkest Hour is a first-rate affair, a piece of myth-making that barely puts a foot wrong. It has that much in common with Wright’s earlier Word War II tale, Atonement. But then, like Atonement, it comes unstuck.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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