Well, we at SEE may not have the resources to stage an elaborate awards ceremony or convince George Clooney and Nicole Kidman to hand out statuettes or hire Jon Stewart to host or even pay Bruce Vilanch to write our jokes for us.
What we can do better than just about anyone, however, is second-guess the nominations in the five major categories and offer our suggestions as to personal favourites and under-the-Academy-radar obscurities that, in a perfect world, we would have liked to have seen nominated instead. Remember: these are not predictions as to who will win, but rather our choices of films and actors who probably never stood a hope in Hell of even showing up on the shortlist.
SEE film editor Paul Matwychuk sat down with “Freedom of Choice” columnist G.H. Lewmer last week to hash the whole thing out. Here’s their conversation.
BEST PICTURE
Paul Matwychuk: The conventional wisdom you see among critics is that this year, for a change, the two leading contenders for Best Picture—No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood—are also the year’s two biggest critics’ darlings. And that almost never happens. Then you’ve got Michael Clayton, which I probably wouldn’t have nominated myself, but which is a solid, grown-up thriller that will probably age very well 20 years from now.
And then Juno and Atonement, which I thought were pretty bad movies. Atonement is like Out of Africa or The Mission—one of those “prestigious” Oscar nominees that a year later no one even remembers. And for my money, Juno is the worst film of the year.
GHL: Well, that’s interesting, because the two films I liked the most were the two films you hated. And I was appalled that There Will Be Blood was even nominated. That’s a terrible, terrible film—I’m shocked and saddened that people actually consider this a great work of art. The first part of the film is made with a lot of artistry, but then at a certain point, it’s as though Johnny LaRue gets into the director’s chair. By the time you get to that final scene in the bowling alley, it’s become so dramatically ludicrous that I was cringing in my seat—one guy is channeling Al Pacino and the other guy is channeling Jerry Lewis.
I had a similar reaction to No Country for Old Men: the whole narrative falls apart after the first five minutes. But I find that whole serial-killer metaphor fairly tiresome. Juno, on the other hand, surprised me: it’s very much a working-class film, which is very, very rare in Hollywood. It reminded me of a Leo McCarey film—it’s very well-cast, with likable people in all the roles...
PM: Very likable people, but oh my God, that dialogue drove me up the goddamned wall. It’s so precious, so overwritten... I wasn’t convinced by a moment of it.
GHL: Well, it has a very unsettling subtext in the way it makes a baby seem like a pretty disposable thing—after it’s born, you sit around with the father and write really bad songs and sing off-key.
But again, what I think resonates for audiences with that film, what makes it seem like such an “underdog” movie, is that there are so few movies with strong working-class characters and so few films that deal with genuine human emotions. Give Jason Reitman credit: the sets and locations have a wonderful, non-manufactured quality to them, which is very rare nowadays.
PM: I’m reluctant to give Juno credit for doing anything well, but I’ll give it that. But is there a film you think was even more deserving of a Best Picture nomination than Juno?
GHL: Well, I came up with three, and they’re sort of replacement picks for three of the actual nominees. Instead of Atonement, for instance, I think they could have nominated a film like Paul Verhoeven’s WWII thriller Black Book, which is a much better-made film, and much more disturbing and unsettling.
Instead of Juno, I think another small film that really resonated with people was the Sean Penn film Into the Wild. And instead of Michael Clayton, I would have preferred to see a nomination for Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, which I think really had its finger on the pulse of the economic meltdown going on right now in America and their decline as a world superpower. I think 20 years from now, it will be remembered much more favourably—but of course, the Academy isn’t exactly known for its vision.
PM: I have two picks here. One is a title that a lot of other critics have singled out as this year’s biggest Oscar snub, and that’s Zodiac. I’m not a big David Fincher fan, but I think here he really does something amazing. You get those bravura visual coups he’s famous for—the Transamerica Building sequence, that “impossible” overhead shot of the taxicab—but what lingers in your memory is the way all the tedious minutiae of this case add up
to something larger, into this profound statement about the nature of obsession, the irresistible attraction of immersing yourself in an unsolvable riddle.
And my other pick is a title that only I seem to love, and that’s William Friedkin’s Bug. It’s the kind of small, completely nutty movie that has no chance of getting Oscar nominations, but I’ll tell you: no other movie from last year got under my skin the way this one did. No other movie was scarier—not even Zodiac—and no other movie was more romantic.
BEST ACTOR
PM: I’ve got a few people on my shortlist in this category: I was thinking of Chris Cooper, who does a fascinating character study in Breach;
I was thinking of Gordon Pinsent, who’s been kind of overshadowed
by the praise for Julie Christie in Away From Her; and I was also thinking of Glen Hansard, who’s so natural and likable as the street musician in Once.
But I finally settled on Thomas Turgoose, who plays the kid who falls in with a skinhead gang in This Is England. I love this kid. I’m often ambivalent about child performances; so often the memorable ones are almost like a kind of freakish stunt where you’re really just marveling at their ability, their poise in front of the camera more than the quality of their characterization.
But this performance doesn’t feel studied in that way; to me, it’s like the kind of performance Marlon Brando might have given if he were 12. It’s a complicated part, and I love the way Turgoose takes you all the way through this kid’s moral development, less through dialogue than by the look on his face.
GHL: I only came up with two choices here, and one of them is arguably a supporting performance. That would be Vincent Cassel in Eastern Promises. I thought he did a fine job in a difficult role—he has to be very showy, but he also has to be complementary to Viggo Mortenson. He really became that character.
My other choice would be Christian Bale, for... well, for a collection of performances he gave last year. If I had to, I would single out Rescue Dawn, but he’s great in 3:10 to Yuma as well. He’s a movie star in the way that Gary Cooper or John Garfield was—he’s a good actor who also knows how to take on larger-than-life characters, and seeing actors do that is one of the reasons we go to the movies.
Oh—I nearly forgot: I also loved Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.
BEST ACTRESS
GHL: I have two women who I thought would be worthwhile nominees. One is Carice van Houten from Black Book. She is amazing in that film. She’s in every single scene, I think, and Verhoeven really puts her through the wringer.
PM: That’s a great choice. If that movie were in English, she would be a huge star by now.
GHL: Absolutely. She’d probably have won this category hands-down too. The other person I thought about was a French actress named Déborah François, who was in a movie called The Page Turner. This was a very creepy, very well-modulated, very on performance that I know really resonates with the handful of people who’ve seen it. She carries that film, and she does so in a way that never lessens the mystery at the centre of it.
PM: I was thinking of people like Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog—don’t roll your eyes at me!—and also Amber Tamblyn in a little movie called Stephanie Daley, which is a much more perceptive and provocative movie about teen pregnancy than Juno. It’s a crime Ellen Page from Juno is getting all this hype and Amber Tamblyn isn’t getting any.
But for me, the performance of the year was Ashley Judd in Bug, in which she is so fierce, so fearless, so committed, it’s stunning. To me, it seems like evidence of a sort of institutional sexism in the critical community that Daniel Day-Lewis gets all this unanimous praise for his over-the-top performance in There Will Be Blood but when an actress like Ashley Judd really digs deep and goes big in a similar way in Bug, people laugh at her or get embarrassed or feel compelled to denigrate her work.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
PM: Okay, are you ready for my obligatory countdown of people I considered and rejected? In this category, I’ve got Kurt Russell, who gives pretty much a career-best performance in Death Proof, the Quentin Tarantino half of Grindhouse; I’ve got Brian Dierker, who is so unaffected and true as that middle-aged hippie who Emile Hirsch befriends in Into the Wild; and I’ve got Vlad Ivanov, who plays the villainous abortionist Mr. Bebe in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.
But my vote is going out to Gene Jones, who plays the gas station attendant in the coin-toss/“Friendo” scene in No Country for Old Men. He’s only in that one scene, but I think Jones makes as strong an impression as anyone else in that cast. His physicality is so specific—the skeptical, not-quite-fearful look in his eyes, the uncertain way his mouth hangs. And I think he creates a character who you believe has a life offscreen—you can imagine him working at this gas station in the middle of nowhere for years before this scene, and after it’s over, you wonder what happens to him, what he does with that coin Javier Bardem gives to him.
GHL: It’s a really well-cast movie. For me, the only supporting performance I could think of that really affected me was a guy named Joe Anderson from Across the Universe. He played Evan Rachel Wood’s brother who goes off to Vietnam. It’s a very problematic movie—
PM: To say the least!
GHL: —but I think he really does have starpower. I was really surprised at how drawn I was to him. He has a magnetism that I haven’t seen in a lot of actors in a long time. There’s a charm and exuberance to him that’s almost like James Cagney, and I have a feeling he’ll go on to a lot of bigger and better things.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
GHL: The person I’d have to say here is Maggie Cheung from Lust, Caution. It’s a minor role, but one that’s very important to the plot, and she completely disappears into the role. You would be surprised, knowing how glamourous Maggie Cheung is, how deeply she immerses herself into the role. You’d never recognize her.
PM: You know, I haven’t seen Lust, Caution. I knew it was long and kind of slow and so, despite some generally positive reviews, I just never quite felt up to watching it.
GHL: Yeah, it got kind of critically lambasted, which was pretty unfair—and I thought quite childish. It was as though people were punishing Ang Lee for the success of Brokeback Mountain. It deserved better.
PM: Some of the women I was thinking of as possibilities here were Kate Winslet, who’s cast wildly against type in Romance and Cigarettes, and Anjelica Huston, who has this lovely, mysterious power in The Darjeeling Limited.
But my pick is Sigourney Weaver in a little Hollywood satire called The TV Set. She plays a TV executive named Lenny, who’s sort of the nemesis of this writer who’s trying to get a pilot he’s written on the air—and she’s the one who keeps urging him to dumb it down and take out all of the darker elements that make it interesting in the first place.
I love that Weaver doesn’t play her as a villain—she’s one of those friendly, smiling corporate suits who’s always there to “help” you, who’s “on your side,” who’s urging you to “be practical.” It’s such a sharp, funny, recognizable characterization—very few of us ever meet guys like Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood in our lives, but I think all of us have encountered plenty of Lennys.
GHL: Show business breeds them.
