One Category at a Time: Actress

After the SAG Awards, the Best Actress race appears to have a frontrunner, but there's more nuance to it than that. A couple of the nominees weren't even in competition for the SAG or the Golden Globes, and even though I find myself predicting the obvious choice, it's a category that feels ripe for an upset.

My Award nominations: Sound Editing

Great work out there from the sound designers this year. I tell ya, some decisions were tough to make in narrowing it down to five for my Best Sound Editing nominees.

My Award nominations: Makeup and Hair

This is the only category this year in which none of my own nominees are up for the Oscar. Shame, shame, Makeup branch. Don't you understand that these three movies have the Best Makeup and Hair of the year?

Quick Review - The Impossible

Inspired by a true story, J.A. Bayon's The Impossible dramatizes the harrowing ordeal of the Bennett family, who were separated by the catastrophic tsunami that rocked southeast Asia on Boxing Day 2004. It's a fairly “Hollywoodized” version of the truth (although the production is predominantly Mexican), but there's no reason for that to be a dismissive description. Bayona heightens the visceral experience of this real life horror story by leaning on, naturally, horror movie tropes. The gripping sound design, cringe-inducing makeup, and waivering string music all contribute to Bayona's innovative real-life-as-horror approach.

Stars Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor, and Tom Holland also do excellent work at embodying the fear that Bayona is going for. While one can be justified in criticizing the film for narrowing its dramatic eye on the wealthy tourists while brushing the devastated Thai people under the rug, I wonder if rectifying that would really have benefited the focused script all that much.

*** out of ****

Visual Effects shortlist announced

It's bake-off time already! The Academy's visual effects branch has whittled the list of contenders down to ten, half of which will go on to a nomination. There are no real shockers among the ten advancing titles, and nothing that really falls under the "Hereafter" slot for films with less bountiful but still impressive effects (ironically, The Impossible, which would have been a very literal fit for that slot with its depiction of the very same tsunami that earned Hereafter its nomination, is one of the unfortunate snubees who won't be competing in this category). The lucky ten are:

The Amazing Spider-Man
The Avengers
Cloud Atlas
The Dark Knight Rises
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
John Carter
Life of Pi
Prometheus
Skyfall
Snow White and the Huntsman

Congrats to them all, but I'm not feeling as much suspense in this category as I was last year. I think everybody's just about ready to call this award for Life of Pi.