Alejandro G. Innaritu wins DGA for second straight year

When was the last time we had a season as disparate and fractured as this one?

The Big Short wins the PGA, Spotlight takes the SAG, and then last night
The Revenant's Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu swiped the Directors Guild of America's top prize for the second consecutive year. It seems as though we've arrived at the point where all bets are off for Predicting the Best Picture Oscar. Which of these three will prevail?

One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

With only a handful of weeks before the Oscars, now is the time for me to start formulating some predictions, and I'll start with what may be the surest lock of the year, Best Original Screenplay.

It's hard to imagine the prize going to anything but the former Best Picture frontrunner Spotlight. Though it's no longer favoured to win the top award after The Big Short's momentum shifting PGA win, Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer's dense journalistic procedural will surely be given its due here.

The nearest challenger -- a distant second despite being a perfectly respectable option -- is probably Matt Charman and the Coens' austere political quasi-thriller Bridge of Spies, being the only other Best Picture nominee in the field.

Catching up with Bond, Shaun, and Ava

If distributors are going to playing coy all November long with their hottest Oscar prospects, I'm going to play catch-up during the lull.

Back in the Spring, Alex Garland's dulcet sci-fi Ex Machina was making the rounds on the arthouse circuit, earning strong notices for its heady ruminations on consciousness and artificial intelligence, and especially for Alicia Vikander's enigmatic robotic performance.

It's a thoughtful, chilling, lingering chamber piece -- and what perfectly designed, minimalist chambers they are too -- that takes a refreshingly intimate approach to subject matter that would tempt most filmmakers to go big. We already knew Garland had a penchant for subtle speculative fiction based on his adapted screenplay of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go from 2010, and his authorial voice remains intact in this directorial debut.

My Award nominations: Adapted Screenplay

Best Adapted Screenplay:

The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski, Robert Harris):
The script, cowritten by Polanski and novelist Robert Harris, is smart and ironic. Their style is simple and unfettered by needless genre tropes. The characters are written consistently with economical and effective dialogue. All around, a chilling and intelligent exercise in constructing tension.

Never Let Me Go (Alex Garland):
The film as a whole may have gone down as an admirable miss, but Garland's adaptation of Kuzuo Ishiguro's book is an elegant study of character and theme; themes about mortality, the intangibility of love, and how in the grand scheme of things, the amount of time we spend on this earth cannot quantify the lives we lead.

Rabbit Hole (David Lindsay-Abaire):
Lindsay-Abaire opens up his Pulitzer-winning play for the screen so effectively that you never would have guessed that it was based on a play. Understated grief and tactful humour mix to form an interesting emotional flavour. A fine study of not only coping with loss, but coping with other people's coping.

The Social Network (Aaron Sorkin):
If the movie has to belong to anyone, it's Aaron Sorkin. His loose adaptation of
Ben Mezrick's book slices through the perceived glory of the Internet with a cynical but perspicacious edge, extrapolating from a small group of characters to make comment on broader societal virtues and faults. The dialogue is deliciously verbose.

True Grit (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen):
Despite the conspicuous absence of their usually idiosyncratic personality, the Coens' faithful retelling of Charles Portis' novel provides a rip-roaring adventure tale with smooth character arcs, well-appointed comic relief, and delighfuly antiquated dialogue. Impeccably paced to boot.

Just missed: The American, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, The Town, The Way Back

Review - Never Let Me Go

As based on the acclaimed novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go tells the story of three young people who grew up together at an English boarding school with a “special” purpose, and the strained love/hate triangle that form between them.

Taking place in an alternate reality between 1978 and 1994, the film (adapted from Ishiguro's text by Alex Garland) is technically a science-fiction, whose details I won't explain here although they've been made pretty apparent by the film's trailer. Romanek is wise to not dwell on any genre trappings, but instead to focus solely on the three central characters; Kathy (Carey Mulligan), a sensitive and compassionate girl who harbours feelings for Tommy (Andrew Garfield), an awkward but soulful misfit, and Ruth (Kiera Knightley), the jealous one who snatches him from under Kathy's nose. As they grow older, the relationships between these three people shift and evolve, leading them to reconciliations and revelations.

I found myself more admiring of Garland's script than the movie as a whole. It somehow failed to really move me. Perhaps it has something to do with the literally chilly atmosphere Romanek paints, or that Rachel Portman's score (which is quite lovely, in and of itself) is mixed in too often and blatantly. Nevertheless, I could certainly detect – even if I couldn't feel it – that the passion was there on the page and in the performances, especially Mulligan's, who is the film's greatest trump card and one of the best female leads I've seen this year. Garland's script works in themes about the intangibility of love, and how, in the grand scheme of things, the amount of time we spend on this earth cannot quantify the lives we lead.

In a thick Best Actress field, I don't expect Mulligan's campaign to gain much traction, as the movie has been largely forgotten. Portman's score could find room, though. It's the delicate, elegant kind of music we've seen the Academy honour countless times before.

*** out of ****