My Award nominations: Original Screenplay

Read about my favourite Original Screenplays after the cut.

Sunday Top Ten: Oscar noms that'll make me smile

Poles officially closed on Friday for Academy Award nominations. While the accountants at Price Waterhouse Coopers crunch the numbers, we're left to ponder and anticipate. My predictions are likely to shift and slide during the next few days. What will stay consistent are my personal rooting interests. There are certain contenders in several categories who feel like they're on the cusp of a nomination -- contenders who I'd love to see make good on that possibility -- but who could just as easily miss the cut. Here you go, Academy; you have ten chances to make me smile on Thursday morning.

NBR crowns Zero Dark Thirty

Mirroring the NYFCC's decision, the National Board of Review named Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty the best of the year, including honours for Bigelow herself and star Jessica Chastain. The film, which we mortals won't get to see almost until Oscar nominations are upon us, is shaping up to be the critics' favourite throughout the month of December, much to the chagrin of Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master I'm sure, which was perceived to have filled that slot up until just last week when Bigelow's film finally screened for press. Anderson's beguiling opus was shut out here as it was by the New York critics, failing to even make the top ten films list. It had better hope the L.A. critics stump for it in a big way, or it could vanish from the conversation entirely.

Another big winner is David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook, for which Russell won Best Adapted Screenplay and star Bradley Cooper won Best Actor against a wealth of Oscar-luring competition. This is a big boost for him. Costar Jennifer Lawrence is already a likely nominee for Best Actress, but Cooper is on the bubble in a crowded field. His win here is good springboard for his campaign.

Review - Looper

If you want to be thrown for a loop, Looper should be just the ticket; a cleverly imagined time-travel thriller which blends science fiction and action with dashes of horror and dark comedy as present and future selves collide with violent results.

Joseph-Gordon Levitt (made up to resemble a younger Bruce Willis) stars as Joe, a man with a peculiar occupation. He's a “looper”; an assassin employed by mob bosses from the future, who cleanly dispose of their targets by blasting them back to the past for Joe to shoot (with a crude blunderbuss) and incinerate. Paid in silver bars neatly affixed to their victims from the future, loopers are to carry on this way until one day being sent their own future selves to eliminate – “closing the loop”, as the film's rhetoric puts it. But when Joe finally comes face to face with his future self (Bruce Willis himself), a split second's hesitation allows old Joe to escape, hellbent on taking down a future criminal overlord as a child.