My Award nominations: Original Screenplay

Read about my favourite Original Screenplays after the cut.

My Award nominations: Film Editing

Some good variety on display this year in the arena of Film Editing, and my top five are:

Writers Guild nominees

The WGA nominees need always be taken with a grain of salt. They're the most exclusively insular of the guilds, only qualifying guild signatories for their awards, so several Oscar-bound screenplays are deemed ineligible every year. So don't take the absence of Django Unchained, Amour, and Beasts of the Southern Wild as particularly bad omens for their chances with the Academy. They weren't in the running with this guild, along with several others.

For the ten screenplays that did make it, it's a solid crop all around.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Flight, Written by John Gatins
Looper, Written by Rian Johnson
The Master, Written by Paul Thomas Anderson
Moonrise Kingdom, Written by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
Zero Dark Thirty, Written by Mark Boal

With Amour and Django being ineligible, I'm thinking two of these will be left out of the Oscar race. I'm really crossing my fingers for Looper to eke it out, because despite a healthy showing of critics prizes so far, it just feels like an Oscar snubee in the making.

Seven Makeup finalists revealed

As usual, the Academy's makeup branch is one that defies prediction, snubbing high-profile work every year when it comes to their contestant-whittling bakeoff, and often including at least one fringe contender in their final three. The big shaftee this year in the bakeoff stage is Cloud Atlas, whose plethora of genre-spanning, gender-crossing, and race-warping transformations just wasn't enough to overcome the hit-and-miss nature of the actual makeup. And perhaps with good reason. Quantity shouldn't substitute for quality, and while the film's makeup team deserves a hearty pat on the back for being the hardest working members of the crew, a lot of the makeup was just plain bad.

Another snubbed movie which I thought might have a shot at being this year's fringe contender was Leos Carax's Holy Motors, whose shape-shifting star Denis Lavant dons many guises which are not only well executed, but spotlighted in the film itself as Lavant applies and removes the makeup himself. I guess it was too fringe for the makeup branch to even see it, which is probably why it didn't get a mention.

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.