One Category at a Time: Leading Actor

After several years of stacked competition, we find ourselves in the rare situation of Best Actor being the most lackluster of the four acting categories. All the better for the current frontrunner, who's been hungering for an Oscar for some time, and now has virtually no competition to bar him from claiming it.

Best Performance by a Grunter in a Leading Role

Last quarter 'true story' Oscar bait underwhelms

I can be a tough critic to please sometimes, but I get especially grinchy during the holiday crunch when awards season group-think forces me to seek out prestige-courting biopics and true-to-life narratives for which I'd gladly have waited. In the ten days since I first set eyes upon Todd Hayne's exquisite Carol, I've struck out thrice with other Globe/BFCA heavies Trumbo, The Danish Girl, and The Big Short; All of them capitalizing on year-end kudos, whether or not they should.

Trumbo is especially unfortunate. True Hollywood stories are of inherent interest to me (and many a cinephile, I should imagine), so it really says something when I despair at how unengaged I was by Jay Roach's shapeless biopic of the legendary screenwriter, who was infamously blackballed by McCarthy-era witch hunt politics. The man himself (likely Oscar nominee Bryan Cranston) would have shuddered at the screenplay's lack of structure and payoff. The film's strong SAG haul, particularly the Best Ensemble nomination, is baffling. Sure, there are a handful of droll impersonations in there -- David James Elliott's John Wayne and Dean O'Gorman's Kirk Douglas are aces -- but everyone is play acting instead of screen acting. Yes, there is a difference. The lone exceptions are Elle Fanning and Diane Lane as the key female figures in Trumbo's life, his daughter Niki and his wife Cleo.

Early Oscar Predictions: The Actors

With a shooting script in hand and the stage set, principle photography begins. Directors work closely with their performers and cinematographers to bring the writer's words to life and capture it all on camera.

There's never a dearth of prospective performances that look like they could certainly turn some heads at this early stage of the game, especially in the perennially competitive Best Actor category.

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.

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 1: The Results

Happy New Year, everybody!

With the Oscars having come and gone (after three long hours at the end of three long months), it feels like 2014 is now officially over, and a new cinematic cycle has thankfully begun. But, since I, like most Oscar obsessives (or any kind of obsessive), have trouble letting go, it'll be about a week before I finally cease writing about 2014 in this space. Heed the lessons learned by Cheryl Strayed
(for whom they picked an awful Best Actress clip, btw); Closure takes time.
And so I must always allow myself several days to fully process the mad rush of euphoria and anguish that floods me before, during, and after this annual event.

My post-dated “live” blog of the Oscar telecast itself will arrive later this week, followed by my usual top ten of personal highs and lows of the 2014-15 awards season. But for today, its all about who won and who lost, and my immediate reactions to those, which I should document for posterity before my mind instinctively turns to 2015-16.

For starters, my own prediction results:

One Category at a Time: Actor

It seems every year that Best Actor is, if not the most competitive Oscar category, then certainly the cruelest. Every season we see at least a half dozen nomination-worthy performances unable to make the final five. The whole Selma and #OscarsSoWhite controversy may have unwittingly made a thespian martyr of David Oyelowo for his tragic snub, but he's in good company with the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, Ralph Fiennes, Timothy Spall, Channing Tatum, Oscar Isaac, Ben Affleck, Miles Teller, Matthew McConaughey, Andy Serkis, and the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman on the sidelines. There just isn't enough room.

It makes it particularly true that it's an honour just to be nominated for these five men, a couple of whom can relax and enjoy the show with the knowledge that they won't be winning. For those of us who follow this awards madness closely, however, it will be the one suspenseful acting award of the night, as we nervously wait to see if a beloved veteran can fend off the late advances of younger A-listers with more typical Oscar roles.

"Ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist, Oscar nominee."

Will DGA-BAFTA Weekend Clafiry Some Tight Races?

Final Oscar balloting started today, right on the cusp of a weekend that will unveil the winners of the Directors Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television. A number of the Oscar categories still feel maddeningly close a full three weeks after they were announced, so the pending results of this weekend's kudos could be the litmus test we need.

Or they could just be a bunch of red herrings.

Take the Best Actor race, for instance:

SAG Awards bolster 'Birdman' for Best Picture, but not Best Actor...

Well, if you don't count Best Stunt Ensemble (which went to the solid work in Unbroken where I had guessed The Hobbit), I aced my SAG predictions...

... and I'm not entirely happy about that.

First of all, let's not dwell on the supporting races or on Best Actress. Those categories are all but sealed up with Patricia Arquette, J.K. Simmons, and Julianne Moore all coming out on top in their respective categories.

Let's also not dwell on Birdman's well deserved victory in Best Ensemble. It may not have been my absolute first choice but its cast was excellent and makes a fine winner. If you want to theorize about how "easy" it is for a movie about ACTING to win with the Screen Actors Guild, go ahead, but this is a merited honour for an outstanding collective performance.

What I think we do need to talk about is Best Actor. I had an unsettling feeling that tonight would be the night when frontrunner Michael Keaton would finally be unseated by Eddie Redmayne for his much more awards-typical performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. I don't want to give the impression that I begrudge Redmayne any accolades he receives for his impressive physical transformation, but this is not the outcome I wanted to see.

Awards Season Primed for Defining Weekend with 2 Key Guilds...

For many pundits, the Oscar race has already settled into a predictable groove, with many people picking Boyhood as the odds-on favourite.

I... am not convinced. Not yet, anyway.

Yes, Boyhood has been winning Best Picture prizes left, right and centre for the last two months, but let's put things into a bit of context: Every award it's collected all season has been from some critics or media group. It's the sort of ambitious, artistically inspired movie that was always going to appeal to them, but these people don't vote on Academy Awards.

There is an Oscar season from years past that immediately springs to mind when I consider the pattern of this season thus far: The 2010/2011 season, in which
The Social Network won every critics honour under the sun before its momentum was snatched away by The King's Speech. When was it that the eventual Best Picture winner made its move? --- At the Producers Guild of America Awards.

Golden Globes live blog

6:44
The stars are arriving. The show will start in an hour and a bit. Pumped up!!!

(You can read lots of fashion snark on Twitter, including from me, but I'll keep this space clear until the show starts)

Review - The Theory of Everything

"Cosmology," responds PhD candidate Stephen Hawking when asked about religion at a Cambridge mixer in 1963. "It's religion for scientific atheists."

This answer may seem like an odd way to pick up girls (especially proper Christian ones), but it strikes a chord for the young woman who's asking him – and who just so happens to be his future wife, Jane. Perhaps she too sees the beauty in his pursuit of a single universal equation that can explain all the mysteries of time and space; A 'theory of everything'.

It's not the equation, however, but the two lovers who become the subjects of The Theory of Everything, directed by successful documentary filmmaker James Marsh in his narrative feature debut. From that first cosmic spark of attraction to their gradual growing apart and everything in between (including the renowned physicist's long battle with disease and disability), the film chooses to deal more with humanistic romance than scientific philosophy, though packaged as a by-the-numbers biopic with Oscar aspirations for its stars Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne.

Review - Les Miserables

27 years after taking the world by storm, the international musical hit Les Miserables finally gets the Hollywood treatment its diehard fans have been waiting for, but not everyone will sing its praises as loudly as them. We've already heard the critics singing the song of angry men, while audience reactions seem to be as contentious as the student rebellion around which the melodrama unfolds. Detractors have trained their muskets squarely at the film's in-your-face emotive style, the very appeal of which defenders have made their barricade against such criticisms. It begs the question: Is Les Mis the sort of movie that makes necessary – or for that matter, even makes possible – an objective review? I know I struggle to extract my opinion of the film from my opinion of the source material. Where does my love of the show end and my love of the movie begin?

Despite a butt-punishing 2-hour and 38-minute run time, Les Mis is a fairly streamlined distillation of Victor Hugo's 19th century novel, in which ex-con Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) spends the better part of his life on the run from the law and in search of redemption. Across the years he eludes capture by the overly dedicated Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe), raises the daughter of the ill-fated Fantine (Anne Hathaway), fights in the Paris rebellion of 1832, and basically puts up with all kinds of crap (literally, in one instance!) to ensure the future happiness and security of his adopted daughter (Amanda Seyfried). Hugo spins an elaborate web of connections between these and many other characters – including the dashing Marius (Eddie Redmayne), the scheming Thenardiers (Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter), and their lovelorn daughter Eponine (Samantha Barks) – through a series of outlandish coincidences that would vex Dickens.