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:

Critics Choice Max out nominations (as usual), plus thoughts on Carol

Mad Max: Fury Road led with 11 nominations from the Broadcast Film Critics Movie Awards. We know that the BFCA is prone to merely following the buzz and trying to predict the Oscars based on the most current developments of the season, so I'm still unsure of the chances George Miller's nutso action opus really has with the Academy.

The Revenant, The Martian, and Carol (which I finally saw) were close behind with nine apiece.

Todd Haynes' romantic drama -- elegantly adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt by Phyllis Nagy -- is an exquisite work of art. Haynes is a master sensualist, using image, music and sound to stimulate all our senses (not just the aural/visual ones). Edward Lachman's compositions are gorgeous and narratively astute, while Carter Burwell's score speaks volumes for characters whose true thoughts and feelings are rarely spoken.

Indeed, the emotion of the piece is powerful but never overstated, thanks largely to a quartet of superb performances. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara forge a special chemistry as the two romantic leads, while Sarah Paulson and Kyle Chandler bring thoughtful, empathetic perspectives to two very different types of jilted lovers.

Much Academy attention is deserved (particularly for director and screenplay, the latter of which it inexplicably missed both with the Critics Choice and the Globes), but unless more people get to set eyes on it, it may lose much needed buzz. Harvey, I know you think you're clever trying to keep this concealed until Oscar nominations before whisking the curtain away (et voila!), but you need to get it on more screens, pronto.

But back to the Critics Choice. Check out the long, unsurprising list of nominees, with some additional comments.

BEST PICTURE
The Big Short
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Carol
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Martian
The Revenant
Room
Sicario
Spotlight
Happy for Sicario, which is slowly growing into the year's most underrated film with every critics group that passes it over. Sad for Inside Out, which seems to be falling by the wayside.

Review - Super 8

Art imitates art in Super 8, J.J. Abrams love letter to Steven Spielberg, but just like a carbon copy of a piece of paper, the imitation is of noticeably lower quality.

Joe Lamb, played with sincere effort by newcomer Joel Courtney, is mourning the tragic loss of his mother at picture's beginning, immediately establishing him as the sort of emotionally malnourished central character we often saw portrayed in Spielberg's vintage works. He spends his summer days helping a group a friends make an amateur zombie movie. The band of bike-riding filmmakers include a bossy director, an easily nauseated leading man, a pyromaniacal effects artist, and a new leading lady (the wonderful Elle Fanning) whose puppy love affair with sympathetic Joe ratchets the cute factor up to eleven. While filming a key scene by the railroad station, they witness the train wreck (so spectacular it screams “Hollywood fakery”) that unleashes a mysteriously threatening creature upon their unsuspecting middle American burg. It isn't long before Joe's father, the local deputy (Kyle Chandler), begins to catch wind of strange goings-on from paranoid townsfolk.