One Category at a Time: Actress

Can we call a moratorium on Best Actress always being called a "weak" category? More often than not this kind of talk stems from people who are too lazy to search for talented leading ladies flying well below the mainstream radar, and who balk at the notion of an awards-caliber performance coming from a less-than-awards-caliber film.

Yet nearly every year the Academy comes up with five terrific nominees, and if it seems like the pre-nomination field is thinner than that of the leading men on the other side of the gender divide, it certainly speaks more to the systemic male dominance of the film industry than to the quality of the lesser seen -- though not necessarily fewer -- Oscar-worthy female performances.

In fact, having a category in which the multi-nominated Oscar heavyweights don't figure in as prominently as they would in, say, Best Actor, can be a blessing, as it forces audiences and Academy members alike to seek out titles that could use the exposure. If this crop of nominees can encourage a few more people to go see Wild or Two Days, One Night, then it aught to be celebrated rather than dismissed as "weak".

My Award Nominations: Best Adapted Screenplay

No offense to any of the hardworking screenwriters who slaved away adapting some previous work into a movie that came out last year, but this category is just so... desolate. By far the weakest field I've seen since I started writing about this stuff. I looked up more Adapted Screenplay FYC posts on various Oscar blogs than ever before, because the Oscar frontrunners just weren't doing it for me.

I suppose that's a blessing in disguise, though, as it forced me hunt down some true gems that I probably would have missed otherwise. So for what they are, here are my five Best Adapted Screenplay nominees for 2014. Here's hoping 2015 has more to choose from.

My Award Nominations: Best Original Score

Happy Superbowl Sunday, everyone! Today's updates to my own personal awards ballot are all about the music.

It was a remarkably rich and diverse year for film scoring, and I had a tough time narrowing my preferences down to just the five Best Original Scores. It was a bit tougher find suitable candidates for the adapted scores, but I'll get to those this afternoon.

Here are the originals. Have a listen!

My Award Nominations: Best Acting Ensemble

The nominations keep chugging, and today's category is for Best Acting Ensemble. A couple of these films have already had plenty of recognition on the circuit for the group acting, a couple others deserved much more, and the fifth never stood much a chance of getting any sort of awards outside of foreign language prizes.

Review - Gone Girl

“You don't know what you've got 'til it's...” the tagline for Gone Girl ominously forebodes. That common phrase takes on twisted new meaning in this hotly-awaited thriller from David Fincher, which opens with the voiceover of a man confessing how he wishes he could know what his wife's thinking; pick her brain; see what's on her mind – all worded with a queasy skull-cracking metaphor designed to unsettle us right off the bat. He truly won't know what he's got until she's gone, and when he finds out, he'll wish he never asked.

Like the vanished woman to whom the title refers, Gone Girl has quite a lot – too much, in fact – on its mind. Based on the best-selling pulp novel by Gillian Flynn (who also adapted it for the screen), it's a movie that aspires to be many movies at once, but does not fully succeed at being any of them.

Early Best Picture Predictions

I've been slower than usual this year at pulling myself out of March's Oscar withdrawal and gearing up for next year's awards, so my apologies to all two of you who have been impatiently itching to see my early predictions. Rest assured they'll be posted on the sidebar by the first of May (my normal deadline for early guesses), but I'll only bother doing a write-up for one category; Best Picture. And here it is: