Top 20 of 2015 continued (Top Ten)

And so I arrive at that time of year when I have to suck it up and commit to a top ten, although it's been a bit harder in the past than it was this year. That's not to comment on the relative quality of the class of 2015 to any other year. I think it was a very fine year indeed, just one with less position shifting than usual. Subsequent viewings of certain titles merely galvanized their place on this list, with little depreciation (or significant appreciation) in value. We'll see if the years allow any of them to rise to the top.

The only oscillating I ended up doing came down to my top two. Imperfect, arguable masterpieces both -- you could also say the same of #3 and #4 -- who each sat in my #1 spot for lengthy stretches throughout the year; A testament to their staying power. At the end of the day, I had to go with the one that moved me most at first blush. Even once multiple revisitations have softened its novelty, that intense initial response is a hard feeling to forget.

But all ten of these deserve gold stars. They have given voice to the voiceless, kept us on the edge of our seats in moments of silence and bombast alike, horrified us with brutal truths, and made human emotion beautifully tangible. Without further ado, my Top Ten Movies of 2015:

CDG honours Mad Max, Danish Girl, Beasts of No Nation

Best Costume Design is far and away the closest contest in this year's Academy Awards. A mere twelve days ago I was pontificating that Sandy Powell's stylistic abundance in Cinderella would just edge out her own subtle work in Carol, and now I have Jenny Beavan's iconic Mad Max: Fury Road designs (winner of the Costume Designers Guild Award for Fantasy) just leading the way ahead of Paco Delgado's opulent period wardrobe in The Danish Girl (winner for Period). Beasts of No Nation took the Contemporary prize, but of course was not Oscar nominated. Instead that slot went to the arguable Best Picture frontrunner The Revenant, for Jacqueline West's "trapper chic".

This feels like an honest-to-God five horse race, and thankfully, not one that I'm too personally invested in. If either Sandy or Jenny come out on top, great! Score one the best costumers of the year! And if they both lose, well, they've each won before so no loss. Paco and Jacqueline are terrific designers in their own right and either would make a welcome addition to the winners circle.

My Award Nominations: Director

My final official nominee announcement this year is Best Director. Rather than similarly highlighting just my five Best Picture nominees, I'll be publishing my top 20 pics of the year in two lists on Tuesday and Wednesday. But for now, the five helmers whose storytelling most impressed me in 2015:

One Category at a Time: Original Score

Another tricky call this year presents itself in Best Original Score. It's a category that almost always goes to a Best Picture nominee, of which there's only a single one in play. And yet... it doesn't really sound like a winner.

One Category at a Time: Adapted Screenplay

After a lean couple of years, 2015 saw the race for Best Adapted Screenplay return to high competitive form: Terrific adaptations like Steve Jobs and 45 Years couldn't find room in a field crowded mostly by Best Picture nominees: Critics prizes have been split every which way: And until the PGA pointed to our Best Picture frontrunner, it felt as though any of the five nominees had a legit shot at winning. It's a shame the contest has devolved into such an open-and-shut case.

My Award Nominations: Original Score

I'm checking off the music categories today, starting with Best Original Score. Read on to see (and hear) which soundtracks I dug the most from 2015's cinematic drop.

One Category at a Time: Costume Design

The design categories have me at a loss this year. Best Production Design and Costume Design (the latter the subject of today's shaky analysis) both feature the two craft giants going at it for the distinction of most Oscars, but I have a tough time envisioning them as winners. The Academy likes its costumes pretty and plentiful. So lets start with a look at the prettiest and most plentiful of the lot:

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actress

It's hard out here for a Supporting Actress. For a true supporting actress, anyway. Worthy would-be contenders like Elizabeth Banks, Julie Walters, Sarah Paulson, Tessa Thompson, Joan Allen and several others had to move aside for the campaign train of wicked uncle Harv, as The Weinstein Co. and Focus Features collectively managed to shoehorn not one, but two leading performances into this year's contest.

And as an extra dash of salt to the proverbial wound, two of the three legit supporting ladies are in here for performances that are a far cry from awards-worthy (Okay, that's subject to taste, but that's why it's an independently owned blog, people!). Lest my pessimism over the category turn too many readers away, why don't we start with the positives:

One Category at a Time: Actress

For those of us who absorb movies and writing thereof on a year-round basis, one of the defining stories of 2015 has to be how many of the year's best pictures were female-centric stories. It's fitting then, that in a (sadly) uncharacteristic role reversal, the category of Best Actress is far more competitive than that of Best Actor, which is comparatively lackluster. But even with a wealth of quality (which mirrors my own personal ballot quite closely), there's one name that has emerged as the bona fide frontrunner.

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actor

There was a lot more to choose from in the supporting ranks than among the leading men this year. I could list my top twenty picks and still not have mentioned everyone worth mentioning. My picks for Best Supporting Actor:

My Award Nominations: Actress

No dearth of quality options to choose from, as the women's category was way more competitive than the men's for a change of pace. So competitive, in fact, that a couple of legit contenders saw their campaigns sneakily shuffled to the supporting category for lack of room in this one. You'll see no such fraudulence from me, but it forced me to make some heartbreaking omissions. My Best Actress selections are:

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actress

Another busy Saturday in awards land. The Annie awards will name their top achievements in animation (are we expecting anything other than Inside Out?), while the DGA may provide us with our strongest clue as to who's really leading this year's opaque Best Director race. If anyone other than Adam McKay wins, will we see a split on Oscar night? If it's George Miller, do we really think he can turn the same trick with AMPAS? Not to jinx it or anything, but that would be the single coolest Oscar win I've ever seen... Too cool to actually happen, I'm sure.

As for me, I'll be taking care of my acting categories this weekend. Let's get the ball rolling with Best Supporting Actress, which hasn't been this competitive in years (and that's without fraudulent leading ladies posing as supporting players).

My Award Nominations: Costume Design

Spanning from a post-apocalyptic future to as far back as "once upon a time", this year's best movie fashions defined their characters to a tee, whether going for sartorial subtext or eye-catching iconography. The category is Costume Design, and my five best dressed films are:

My Award Nominations: Cinematography

This category becomes tougher and tougher for me every year. As mentioned in yesterday's prediction (of Chivo's soon-to-be historic 3rd consecutive win), we are indeed in a golden age for the art of Cinematography. Shamefully, my top five are nearly identical to the consensus formed by the ASC, BAFTA, and Oscar, but I could swap them out for another five and still have a tremendously rich ballot. There's just too much good stuff out there:

One Category at a Time: Cinematography

Many a critic agree that cinematography is experiencing a new golden age, and this year's Oscar lineup is strangely both indicative, and yet not indicative of that truth. One the one hand, the enormous spectrum of tools and technologies lensers have these days to craft breathtaking images is well represented in the potpourri of formats nominated for Best Cinematography, ranging from 16mm to 70mm celluloid to digital and even thermal imaging.

But on the other hand, the equally wide array of fresh and invigorating voices behind the cameras (think Masanobu Takeyanagi, Maryse Alberti, Hoyte van Hoytema, etc.) remains steadfastly locked out of this branch's insular preferences. Perhaps that's why this was one of two categories I anticipated with perfect accuracy pre-nominations; They have their favourites. All five men have been nominated before, three of them have won before, two of those three have won multiple times, and one of them is on the verge of making Oscar history.

My Award Nominations: Adapted Screenplay

A far more competitive field than it was last year, with some truly heartbreaking decisions about who to leave off. But five is the ceiling, and these are the five Adapted Screenplays that I thought were tops:

Reacting to the 88th Oscar nominations

Oscar noms are here! Soon we can start the long, tire-spinning process of analyzing the Academy's picks for patterns and trends, reading possible portents into their eventual winners, believing we have it all figured out then talking ourselves out of it, and catching up on all the docs, songs, foreign films, and The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.

This process takes weeks, and by the time we reach the season's end we become numb to all the prognosticating, and resigned to the apparent winners. That's why I feel it important to document my first impressions for posterity while they're still fresh in my mind.

At first blush, this year's slate comes down to a whole lot of glaring, disappointing omissions that are redeemed by the outstanding haul for Mad Max: Fury Road. I held out far longer than I should have on its Best Picture chances, superstitiously beholden to the belief that the Academy would never be cool enough to spring for this type of in-your-face action extravaganza. Happy to be wrong. Excluding the foreseeable snub of Junkie XL's manic score, AMPAS gave this movie absolutely every nomination it deserved. We should always remember this as a significant triumph over genre bias.

I do find myself, however, progressively more nettled with every passing hour at the dominance of The Revenant, a uber-masculin ego trip for which I did not care. Sure, it'll finally win Leo his Oscar (Best Grunter in a Leading Role), but seldom has a movie taken so long to say so little. Even The Hateful Eight was better in this respect. The Fox publicists will no doubt move heaven and earth to pitch it as an 'issue movie' about displaced indigenous peoples, but in truth it's a barren, simplistic revenge saga stretched over what feels like 3 hours of disturbing, unpleasant misery porn. While I certainly can't fault the nominations for Inarritu's sound, vfx and design crews (and of course Chivo), it troubles me to envision the Academy seriously considering this for the win.

Far behind those two craft hogs, The Martian was a distant second with seve, followed by Spotlight, Bridge of Spies and Carol with six nods apiece. And yet one of these things is tragically not like the others: Carol was left oft the Best Picture ballot, which only numbered eight for the second straight year. If something as subtle and refined as Spotlight can make it in (and possibly win), why not Todd Haynes' exquisite masterwork? (Some have proposed that the tired old #OscarsSoWhite hashtag should be replaced with #OscarsSoMale)

Check out more knee-jerk reactions -- and a few cursory predictions -- after the cut.

Time's Up

Oscar voting closed today, capping off a busy week of industry nominations. I won't parse through them all, but merely highlight that the critical favour of Carol has not converted the way its fans (yours truly among them) hoped that it would, while sleeper contenders Straight Outta Compton, Ex Machina, and especially Sicario have turned up the heat at the tail end of this fertile voting phase.

What it all means in the Best Picture race... Hard to tell with that maddening variable-number-of-nominees system. All I know is that in five of the last six years, at least two PGA nominees have missed the Academy's cutoff, and at least one PGA-snubbed contender always squeaks in.

The good news: Carol seems a likely candidate to be this year's squeaker. The bad news: It could just as easily be something like Trumbo. I'm keeping the former in my predicted lineup for now, but it may be wishful thinking -- I've long since given up on Inside Out, Steve Jobs, Son of Saul, Room and Creed (looks like minimal overlap between me and AMPAS this year).

BAFTA nominations

So the last major industry group to sound off before the Oscar ballot deadline has done so. Good news for Bridge of Spies and Carol, who lead nominations with nine apiece.

BEST FILM
“The Big Short” -- Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Brad Pitt
“Bridge of Spies” -- Kristie Macosko Krieger, Marc Platt, Steven Spielberg
“Carol” -- Elizabeth Karlsen, Christine Vachon, Stephen Woolley
“The Revenant” -- Steve Golin, Alejandro G. Inarritu, Arnon Milchan, Mary Parent, Keith Redmon
“Spotlight” -- Steve Golin, Blye Pagon Faust, Nicole Rocklin, Michael Sugar
Good day to be producer Steve Golin, but the absence of American blockbusters Mad Max and The Martian probably indicates that they're chances at actually winning the Oscar for Best Picture are limited.

Last minute FYCs, and thoughts on H8teful, Saul

Oscar nomination balloting closes this Friday, and even in a season as scattered as this, it feels like some highly deserving contenders are still getting the short end of the stick. Dig deep, Academy! Lack of consensus is only exciting if you get imaginative instead of voting in default mode. You could do a lot worse than giving this handful of long shots a good hard look:

Creed for Best Picture

I was actually saving this FYC for Sicario, but after a strong guild showing thus far, I figure I should send my wishes to a more needy but equally deserving contender. This is one of the most satisfying mainstream entertainments of the year, and for it to have been overlooked by the Globes, BFCA, and PGA (where I had harboured hope for it) is disappointing to say the least. But it's not too late for the Academy to do right!