One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

With the writing on the wall for Birdman as Best Picture and with all four acting races more or less calcified, the screenplay contests are now the biggest question marks of the major categories, and Best Original Screenplay may be the most perplexing of them.

Most years, with prestigious adaptations duking it out in their own ring, this award serves as a nifty consolation prize for a film that stands out for its uniqueness of premise or snazziness of dialogue, but is just slightly too left-of-centre to win in the top category. Even Best Picture winners Million Dollar Baby and The Artist were trumped in this arena by decidedly more imaginative efforts.

WGA Corroborates Pundits' Favs for Writing Oscars

The Writers Guild of America may not be the most reliable Oscar bellwether due to the their annual heap of ineligible screenplays, but when their winners coincide with the perceived frontrunners anyway, it still reassures any doubtful pundits.

This year, my predictions for both writing Oscars were mirrored by the WGA; Graham Moore's script for The Imitations Game in adapted and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel in original (more on that race on Monday).

The documentary field, for a refreshing change of pace, went to something other than CitizenFour, which wasn't nominated. Instead, it went to Brian Knappenberger's The Internet's Own Boy. I actually caught up with this doc just the other day, and quite liked it. It's often hard to assess how well a non-fiction film is "written", but I tend to think about how well it illuminates or explains its subject matter. That's one arena where Knappenberger's extensive, comprehensive study of free info on the Internet clearly has Laura Poitras' film beat.

One Category at a Time: Director

Most years, the Oscar for Best Director goes hand-in-hand with the Oscar for Best Picture. It stands to reason that if you really love a movie, you love the way it's directed, but sometimes a tight race between two films can result in enough of a discrepancy for the categories to split. What we have this season is not simply a tight race between two films, but between four or five films, meaning dozens of winner permutations are possible.

Point is, we could see a Picture/Director split for the third consecutive year, and even though the critics have made it clear who their preference is, that frontrunner is not necessarily as safe in the hands of the Academy.

The Die is Cast: Inarritu wins DGA

The Directors Guild of America has spoken, naming Alejandro G. Innaritu's Birdman the best directed film of 2014, echoing the preference of both the Producers and Screen Actors Guilds.

That's the game, right? The only movie to collect that triumvirate of awards and not win Best Picture was Apollo 13. I suppose some could argue that with Oscar voting having just opened and with well over a week before the polls close, there's enough time for a backlash to take effect. However, backlash is always more of a media reaction to the awards race, and doesn't really reflect any shifting opinions within the industry. If Birdman somehow loses Best Picture, and it might, it'll be because some other option was always more popular within the Academy the whole time, not because voters suddenly decide they dislike it on account of its awards success thus far.

I, for one, can't complain about this. Birdman is one of the year's best, and what a refreshing change of pace it'll be to see a comedy win the Academy's top honour.

But that still doesn't quite settle things in Best Director...

My Award Nominations: Best Original Screenplay

The Oscars are little more than five weeks away, so it's time to start compiling my own superlatives for the year, starting with Best Original Screenplay. Man, is this category stacked! Any of the five following films would have won in any other year. They're all available for downloading online, and I highly recommend giving them a look. They're all great reads.

You can keep track of my gradually growing list of nominees by clicking the Awards tab in the page header.

Let's dive in, shall we:

DGA reaffirms Boyhood/Imitation Game as Oscar front-runners

The Directors Guild of America has named its five Best director nominees for 2014, and they are:

Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Clint Eastwood, American Sniper
Alejandro G. Inarritu, Birdman
Richard Linklater, Boyhood
Morten Tyldum, The Imitation Game

This has to be a good sign for the Weinstein Co. and The Imitation Game, who needed this nomination in a competitive field to still vie for the Best Picture title. I'm more confident now than ever that it will be the movie to win the whole thing in the end.

But will Tyldum himself pull a Tom Hooper and triumph in Best Director, or is there no way anyone takes this away from Richard Linklater?

As for the Oscar nominations (less than 48 hours away!), will this group repeat? I can't help but think that the smaller, more discerning directors branch of the Academy might pass over Wes Anderson's idiosyncratic comic stylings on favour of  a fringe contender. The other four, however, feel solid to me.

[UPDATE:]

And now the documentary nominees, all of which made the Oscar shortlist have been unveiled:

Dan Krauss, The Kill Team
John Maloof, Charlie Siskel, Finding Vivian Maier
Jesse Moss, The Overnighters
Laura Poitras, Citizenfour
Orlando von Einsiedel, Virunga

For all the talk of Citizenfour being the frontrunner (which it is), it's interesting to note that Finding Vivian Maier has now scored more guild mentions than any other doc this year.

Review - The Grand Budapest Hotel

“There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity,” waxes Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson's pastry-lite eulogy for a golden pre-war age of chivalrous romanticism, classy refinement, and gaudy luxury.

Though now a desolate and scarcely frequented relic of a bygone era, the Grand Budapest was once the most lavishly appointed palace of 1930s Zubrowka – a fictional European nation on the brink of an unnamed war – where it was run by the fey and fastidious concierge Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his faithful lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori). We hear Gustave and Zero's story as recounted by a much older Zero (F. Murray Abraham) to a curious author (Jude Law), whose subsequent writings of the interview are being read decades later by an anonymous student...

… But back to the story within the story within the story:

M. Gustave's suave gold-digging ways have won him the bequeathal of a priceless painting – the hilariously mundane “Boy With Apple” – from a recently deceased old dame (Tilda Swinton); Just one of Gustave's many wooed blondes. Intent on rescuing the art from the conniving hands of the old lady's son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) and the brass-armoured knuckles of his hit man Joplin (Wilem Dafoe), Gustave and Zero make off with the McGuffin in the name of historical preservation... until, that is, they decide a few seconds later to screw preservation and cash in on the painting.

One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

Best Original Screenplay is just another in a long line of categories this year that really has me scratching my head. With the absence of any film that has a remote chance of winning Best Picture, the doors are pretty much wide open. Sure, we can sort of (but not completely) eliminate the two contenders without a nomination in the top category, but among the three that do, it's very much anyone's game.

My Award nominations: Picture/Director

Well, here they are. My five faves of the year (actually six including my lone director nominee). It's been a strong year, with lots of singular artistic achievements.

There are only 24 days left until the Oscars, which gives me just enough time to start running down predictions one category at a time. The first of those will land later today.

For now, check out my top films after the cut:

My Award nominations: Original Screenplay

Read about my favourite Original Screenplays after the cut.

Review - Moonrise Kingdom

An AWOL Khaki Scout and his sweetheart commit probably the most adorable elopement ever put on screen in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, the latest in the auteur's ever-growing portfolio of exacting comedies, wherein subdued youthful angst and emotional exploration manifest themselves in a case of love on the run, sending shock waves through the cozily contained island community of New Penzance.

The two absconders in question are 12-year-olds Sam and Suzy, exquisitely played by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward with a precocious, self-aware deadpan intended to serve Anderson and cowriter Roman Coppola's deliberately eccentric dialogue. He, an orphan who can't seem to make friends even among his fellow Khaki Scouts as they're so called (not to be confused with Baden-Powell's boys), and she, frustrated and smothered by a family composed of three banal brothers and lawyer parents who parley in legal jargon without a trace of irony or affection, have in common that they're both social outsiders, and both may be, as others perceive them to be, “emotionally disturbed” – but really, who wasn't at that age? Perhaps emotionally curious is a better way of summing it up, after a chance meeting at a church pageant followed by an intimate pen pal correspondence prompts them one summer to runaway together, certain that whatever existence they forge for themselves in the coastal wilderness of their island home will be happier than the ones they currently lead.