Sunday Top Ten: Pet Peeves and Highlights of the 2012/13 Awards Season

I decided for this last piece of Oscar coverage to split the difference between stuff that bugged me and stuff that made me happy. I could probably come up with ten highlights and ten pet peeves, but it feels cleaner to go with five of each. I will however acknowledge some things that just missed the peeves list (the Lincoln makeup snub and Global TV's SAG Awards snafu) and just missed the highlights list (Argo making history and Barbara Streisand).

And now, my top five pet peeves, and top five highlights of the 2012/13 awards season:

One Category at a Time: Picture

For this annual post I traditionally take a rigidly statistical approach to narrowing down the Best Picture nominees. I simply look for the contenders with the three key nominations of Director, Editing, and Screenplay, and consider them the only ones truly in the running. But in a year as off-kilter as this one, it has become apparent that my usual approach is not adequate.

One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

Best Original Screenplay is just another in a long line of categories this year that really has me scratching my head. With the absence of any film that has a remote chance of winning Best Picture, the doors are pretty much wide open. Sure, we can sort of (but not completely) eliminate the two contenders without a nomination in the top category, but among the three that do, it's very much anyone's game.

One Category at a Time: Film Editing

The contest for Best Film Editing is always closely associated with Best Picture. Since editors and directors work pretty much hand in hand, the editors branch of AMPAS tends to nominate based on quality of the films as much as quality of just the editing. On top of that, the film to win Best Film Editing is often well liked enough that it almost always wins multiple categories (last year's victory for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo being among the rare exceptions). And since editing can be such an invisible art at times, the winning film is usually required to have the “most” editing, rather than the “best”, to earn the Academy's attention.

Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Sugar Man win WGA

Argo continued its domination of the guild circuit with a victory tonight at the Writers Guild of America Awards. It seems more and more that Argo was always destined to be this year's Best Picture champ, even without a Best Director nod. It can probably add Best Adapted Screenplay to what might be a relatively modest trophy haul next Sunday night.

Another expected win came for Searching for Sugar Man in the Documentary category, continuing its unmolested march to the Oscar. I'm so over this movie. I hate to say this of a film that I liked, but it's definitely the most overrated film of the year.

The only smidgen of intrigue around the WGA Awards was which film they would choose for Best Original Screenplay. It ended up going to Zero Dark Thirty, the only Best Picture nominee cited by the WGA in this category, so it wasn't much of a surprise. This Oscar category has me pulling my hair out. Amour, Django Unchained, or Zero Dark Thirty? A reasonable case can be made for any of them.

One Category at a Time: Sound Editing

Not sure how Best Sound Editing will go this year (or any year, to be honest). While the Academy usually gives both Sound awards to the same film out of sheer ignorance and apathy, it's certainly looking like this is going to be one of those rare split years. With Les Miserables primed and ready to collect a well deserved win for Sound Mixing (not a sure thing, mind you), voters will have to exercise some critical thinking for once and decide which of five films that aren't Les Mis had the best sound editing.

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: Original Screenplay

Read about my favourite Original Screenplays after the cut.

Motion Picture Sound Editors nominate

The final guild to announce its nominees is the MPSE, and leading the way with three nods apiece are Best Sound Editing Oscar nominees Argo, Life of Pi, and Skyfall, joined by The Hobbit. Django Unchained has two, while the fifth Oscar nominee, Zero Dark Thirty (whose sound design is excellent), was shut out completely. Guess they didn't see it in time?

This category is tricky for me every year, but this year in particular because the supposed Sound Mixing frontrunner, Les Mis, is not up for Sound Editing. Who takes it then? I'm thinking Life of Pi, but then wouldn't it take Sound Mixing away from Les Mis as well? Or will we see our first split in these categories since Slumdog Millionaire and The Dark Knight shared them in 2009?

Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects and Foley in a Feature Film

Argo

The Avengers

The Dark Knight Rises

Django Unchained

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Life of Pi

Prometheus

Skyfall

Disappointing that Zero Dark Thirty is not here. At any rate, the guild love for Argo suggests that it is indeed still a force to be reckoned with at the Oscars, Director nod or no Director nod. I'd say Django Unchained is the best of this lot, but I'm guessing it'll go to Life of Pi.

My Award nominations: Film Editing

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

Review - Zero Dark Thirty

At 12:30 a.m. on May 2^nd 2011, Black Ops raided a compound in Pakistan and shot dead the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden. It was the culmination of a long, tiring search by the CIA which inspired Kathryn Bigelow's clinical new thriller Zero Dark Thirty.

As fictionalized by writer Mark Boal, the CIA men and women who worked for years to track down the reviled terrorist are amalgamated and personified by the character of Maya (Jessica Chastain), but that's about as fictional as his screenplay gets. The vast majority of it is a straight-laced, doggedly researched piece of cine-journalism, which condenses several firsthand accounts into a tightly-wound docudrama.

American Cinema Editors nominate...

ACE Eddie nominations have landed just one day following Oscar nominations. Oscar snubees Les Mis and Skyfall can take some consolation in their citations here. All five Oscar nominees for Film Editing are accounted for.

Best Editing - Drama
Argo
Life of Pi
Lincoln
Skyfall
Zero Dark Thirty

The decade long streak of an ACE winner going on to win Best Film Editing at the Oscars was broken last year when The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo won (no comment) over The Descendants and The Artist. Not sure what the case will be this year. Argo and Zero Dark Thirty have showier editing, but Lincoln and Life of Pi appear to be more popular with the Academy. I'd still look to the winner of this prize to be the Oscar favourite.

My Award nominations: Actress

My picks for Best Actress of the year:

Cinema Audio Society noms

The guild announcements continue as the CAS has dropped their five (*actually ten) best mixed films of the year. I had only recently removed The Hobbit from my own predictions, but its inclusion here forces me to re-reconsider. All three LOTR films got Best Sound Mixing nominations after all. Presumed nominees Les Mis and Skyfall (the former the likely winner) were also mentioned, while Best Picture heavyweights Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty round out the top five.

The biggest surprise for me is the society's decision to inaugurate a separate category for animated films -- further suppression of this increasingly ghettoized medium. I'd have thought that if there's any field in which animated films could, and should, be judged on an equal playing field with live-action, it's sound!

Anyway, the nominees, and some final pontifications, after the cut.

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.

New York Film Critics weigh in

New York is the first key critics group to announce awards for the 2012 film year, and the big winners were Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Kathryn Bigelow's late-breaking Zero Dark Thirty. Each took home three honours from the NYC crowd.

The big loser has to be Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. After inducing critical orgasms at all the fall festivals, the mesmerizing character study got shut out, along with more mainstream Oscar hopefuls Argo, Silver Linings Playbook, Life of Pi, and Les Miserables, although they aren't as dependent on the boost of critics awards as The Master is.

Best Picture: Zero Dark Thirty
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
Best Actress: Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea
Best Supporting Actor: Matthew McConaughey, Magic Mike and Bernie
Best Screenplay: Tony Kushner, Lincoln
Best Foreign Language Film: Amour
Best Animated Feature: Frankenweenie
Best Documentary: Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon, The Central Park Five
Best Cinematography: Greig Fraser, Zero Dark Thirty
Best First Feature: David France, How to Survive a Plague

One Category at a Time: Best Picture (part 2)

Completing last day's 2013 Oscar predictions kick-off, here are the remaining five films I can conceive being in the hunt for next year's Best Picture prize:

Much like the ultimately ill-fated War Horse was twelve months ago, the defacto “frontrunner” on most pundits' lists at this early stage is Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, which will star Daniel Day Lewis as the tall-hatted Civil War president. Based on cast, crew, and concept alone, it seems like a pretty solid contender for the nomination. Even if it tanks, the Speilberg faithful in the Academy can revive it.