Top Five Highlights of 2014-15 Oscar Season

Yesterday I unloaded most irksome bugaboos of the 2014-15 awards season in a flurry of list-ified rage. Venting is healthy, right? But if there's one thing healthier, it's accentuating the positive. So as my final word (I swear!) on the Oscar derby that ended almost a week ago, here are my five favourite treasures of the season:

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 4: Telecast Highlights

I always record the Oscars so I can go back and rewatch it later the same week.

It's practically a necessity since I'm often so distracted with my prediction lists and my agony and ecstasy over the winners and losers and whatnot, that I miss some of the little moments that make this whole meat parade worthwhile!

There are still glimmers of fun left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as awards season. So allow me to parse through the 3+hour telecast and highlight the diamonds in the rough. And believe me, it was rough.

Things didn't start off so bad, though. Rather than force host Neil Patrick Harris to struggle through an opening monologue, they fed him one solid joke and then he was off to the races with his song-and-dance routine, "Moving Pictures".

This show got 99 problems, but graphic design ain't one!

Lovely sets and animated title cards.

One Category at a Time: Supporting Actor

I've already opined on how boring the Best Supporting Actor Oscar race is this year. The exact same five names have been almost unanimously nominated across the board, and fringe contenders didn't even bother to campaign. Perhaps they figured that it wasn't even worth gunning for a nomination when the eventual winner has been cut and dry for months.

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actor

Onward we march in my drawn-out unveiling of 2014's best cinematic achievements. Today the focus is on Best Supporting Actor.

Unlike in my recently unveiled Best Original Screenplay ballot, I find there is a dearth of quality in this category. I'm sure you'll immediately notice that my top five are nearly identical to the SAG, Globes, BAFTA, and Oscar slate (save for one obvious non-contender who should've received more consideration anyway). It's not that I particularly enjoy lining up with the everybody else, but I couldn't find a whole lot of alternatives that I felt okay nominating myself. When different groups are in this much agreement at the nomination stage, it's often an indicator of a weak year.

But enough griping, because these five performances are still excellent -- whether or not they had any competition:

Review - Boyhood

2002 was, as I recall, a pretty decent year for the movies; Old masters like Roman Polanski and Martin Scorsese were churning out vital and lovingly crafted historical dramas; Rising stars like Spike Jonze, Charlie Kauffman, and Rob Marshall made a big splash with conceptually daring genre experiments; Steven Spielberg was having a ton of fun with a one-two punch of smart and entertaining popcorn pics; The ever-opinionated Michael Moore gave the documentary industry an urgent shot in the arm; American audiences got to set eyes on a number of foreign treasures from Hayao Miyazaki, Alfonso Cuaron, and many more... And that's just scratching the surface.

But perhaps the most unique and singular cinematic undertaking of that year is one that wouldn't see the light of day until 2014, for 2002 is when Richard Linklater began filming his magnum opus Boyhood, which he shot in sequence over the course of a dozen years and has finally unveiled for us this summer.

This patient process (also evidenced in Linklater's decade-spanning Before trilogy) might be dismissed by some as a conceptual gimmick, and in the hands of a lesser director it very well could be. But Linklater's vision takes the fragmented instants of a childhood – the agony, the ecstasy, and the mundane – and elevates it to high art. Boyhood is in fact a masterpiece of objective observation, with a soft-spoken but profound epiphany about the ethereal constancy of life hidden amongst the minutia.

My Award nominations: Actor

What a year for this category. I easily could shuffle out all five of my own Best Actor nominees for the five that just missed and the lineup would still be incredible.

One Category at a Time: Adapted Screenplay

Best Adapted Screenplay was the only category I guessed 100% correctly for nominations this year, but given the how thin the field of contenders was, that's hardly worth bragging about. That being said, I think the final five are a perfectly respectable lineup; Naturally I would think that, having myself nominated all of them for my awards for writing. Still, it would have been nice to see the writing branch look outside the box at contenders like Short Term 12, The Spectacular Now, or Blue is the Warmest Color (The latter two of which I haven't seen yet, but have heard good things).

Anyway, on to the actual nominees, from whom the eventual winner looks to be fairly obvious.

My Award nominations: Original Screenplay

The adaptations may have been a bit sparsely populated this year, but the Original Screenplay race was dense with quality. Check out my five finalists after the cut.

Review - Before Midnight

Love is not perfect for Jesse and Celine. It lacks the romance that first sparked it when the pair met in 1995's Before Sunrise, and it lacks the instinct that reignited it during their not-so-random reunion in 2004's Before Sunset. And in Before Midnight, the third of Richard Linklater's exquisite trilogy, they're forced to question whether or not it can survive the erosive power of time. No, love is not perfect for Jesse and Celine. But it is real. And as in the two films that preceded it, that realism is what makes Before Midnight such an insightful and compelling drama.

For newcomers to this infrequently updated series, viewing the first two movies isn't necessarily required to appreciate the authentic conversation and naturalistic performance which the trilogy has built as its defining characteristic, but it does provide important context. The lovebirds first spent a romantic night in Vienna after a chance encounter on a train in 1994, but then fell out touch. They rendezvoused nine years later in Paris, where Jesse gladly let a plane ticket back to America burn a hole in his pocket, ultimately leaving behind an unhappy marriage but beloved son so he could stay with his “soul mate”.