My Award nominations: Actress

What an outstanding year it's been for Best Actress. It killed me to leave some of the contenders off. Here's who made it:

KATIE JARVIS in Fish Tank:
Jarvis gives a searing portrayal of youthful anger, repression, longing, disillusionment, and self-liberation with furiously commanding yet completely authentic flare. She perfectly embodies what it means to feel trapped inside one's own life, and the pain that's involved in mustering up the willpower to simply leave it all in your rear view.

NICOLE KIDMAN in Rabbit Hole:
Kidman gives one of her finest performances to date as a grieving mother struggling to cope healthily with the death of her son. Her caustic wit serves as a defense mechanism from comforters, but we can see how desperately she needs comfort as her maternal urges begin to override her stubborn sensibilities.

CAREY MULLIGAN in Never Let Me Go:
Mulligan's performance is a devastating blend of unrequited love and graceful maturity. She is a moving centre for a film that is unfortunately not all that moving. She aptly communicates a girlish fear and shyness that evolves into gracious but heartbreaking resignation, all of it underlined with a quiet but immeasurably deep compassion.

NATALIE PORTMAN in Black Swan:
Portman's transformation from 'sweet girl' Nina Sayers into the confident but vicious Black Swan is one of the best descents into madness put on film. Another impressive feat is her dancing; That she is able to exude character and arc on the stage while maintaining complete discipline of technique is astonishing.

MICHELLE WILLIAMS in Blue Valentine:
Every bit as raw and unfiltered as her costar Ryan Gosling, Williams finds genuine pain, joy, love, and heartbreak somewhere inside of her and brings it out onto the screen. Not unlike her outstanding work in Wendy and Lucy (2007), the performance feels lived-in and uninhibited.


Just missed: Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right, Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right, Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit, Emma Stone in Easy A.

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 ****