One Category at a Time: Best Original Score

Oscar watchers rejoiced this year when we saw a Best Original Score lineup populated almost entirely with first-time nominees. Usually the music branch has proved the most insular one in the Academy, only reserving one or two slots for fresh talent every year. Perhaps recent diversification initiatives are starting to take effect, though the branch clearly still has its favourites.

My Award Nominations: Original Score

As always, the evolving state of movie music continues to yield distinctive, unique work every single year. Which five Original Scores from 2016 did I decide on? Have a listen after the cut...

Top Five Highlights of the 2015-16 Oscar Season

Twelve days removed from the Oscars, and I'm more than ready to leave it in the rear view. The overall season felt a bit fatiguing and lacklustre this year, which I can owe that to my own pessimistic misreading of the Best Picture race. But the big night itself had a few positively thrilling outcomes, and the preceding months were not completely without their pleasures. Herewith are my top 5 highlights.

5. Leo's Red Carpet Rampage and other fun stuff
Leo winning what many would call his overdue Oscar for such an uninteresting performance (Hoo-Ah!) would normally bother me a lot more, but a couple of things allowed me to enjoy it. A) I don't weep for his competition. B) There was just so much glee to be had on the Internet! The Red Carpet Rampage video game is an obvious highlight, but there were plenty of other good guffaws.

@ladygaga verdade pic.twitter.com/mvmi2RJFb6

— luscas (@luscas) February 28, 2016

One Category at a Time: Original Score

Another tricky call this year presents itself in Best Original Score. It's a category that almost always goes to a Best Picture nominee, of which there's only a single one in play. And yet... it doesn't really sound like a winner.

My Award Nominations: Original Score

I'm checking off the music categories today, starting with Best Original Score. Read on to see (and hear) which soundtracks I dug the most from 2015's cinematic drop.

Review - Sicario

Cops and cartels, midnight raids and public shootouts, blood vendettas and hidden agendas, and a whole lot of dead bodies literally walled up in a house of horrors. If you told me all of this sounds like it belongs in a trashy detective novel, I'd probably agree. If told me it all sounds like it belongs in a trashy movie I'd say, “Hold the phone! Who says the movie has to be trashy?”

And of course, it isn't. French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve insinuates and executes all of these familiar genre tropes with hitman-like precision in Sicario, delivering one of the most cringe-inducing, butt-clenching, excruciating films of the year... And I mean every one of those in the best possible way.

Working from a twisty screenplay by actor-turned-writer Taylor Sheridan (Sons of Anarchy), Villeneuve has crafted an excellent thriller that's every bit as refined (if not more so) as the glossy biopics and period pieces that angle for adult dollars at the multiplex every fall. Along with 2012's Prisoners and last year's Enemy, Sicario further embosses his reputation as a filmmaker capable of elevating even the pulpiest story material with his surgical attention to form and construct.

Review - Black Mass

After the better part of a decade squandered on commercially shiny yet artistically hollow multiplex vehicles, Johnny Depp has reemerged from the abyss and has his steely blue, contact-lensed eyes on awards validation in Black Mass. Though hardly a one-man show, all eyes are on Depp as the strictly criminal South Boston gang lord James 'Whitey' Bulger.

A wily machinist of the Irish mob with purported psychopathic tendencies, who manipulated a dubious informant alliance with the FBI to expand his own bloody empire throughout the 70s and 80s, Bulger provides the 52-year-old actor's juiciest opportunity in years. Resembling a grim spectre of death – capped with prosthetic fivehead and darkened eye sockets – he commands his scenes with quiet malice, hissing a sinister Southie brogue through blackened teeth.

Longtime devotees of Depp and his famously eccentric characters may hope that the inevitable "comeback" narrative set to unfold around his awards campaign takes. But they'd also be the first to admit that such an angle is sheer media-generated poppycock. Even when prestigious material eluded him, he's never stopped being one of the most ubiquitous and bankable stars in the industry.

Whether or not the quality of his performances have been as consistent as his mere presence is subjective of course, but Black Mass is at least a return to the sort of movies that serious film-lovers can get behind.

Review - Inside Out

Leave it to Pixar – the animation haven that made us believe a rat could cook, and a house could fly, and a robot could fall in love – to make their latest brainchild... well, the brain of a child. Or more specifically, the feelings that make it tick.
As such, Inside Out is the studio's most ambitious concept to date, and also one of its greatest triumphs. This wonderful invention of cinema does more than make you laugh and cry (and it will make you do both); It blithely examines the human condition and what it finds is deceptively profound.

Riley Anderson (voiced by Kaitlyn Diaz) is a perfectly normal, perfectly happy 11-year-old girl. Her early life growing up in Minnesota may seem a bit ordinary on the outside, but her gray matter is anything but gray. Pixar represents it as a bubblegum-tinted world of pure imagination, overseen by the five core emotions – Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger – that literally push her buttons from a command booth in her frontal lobe.

Giving voice to these tiny balls of neurological energy are a quintet of TV comedians who would seem almost too perfectly typecast in a lesser film. It's to their (and the animators') enormous credit that we never get distracted trying to picture the actor behind the caricature.

Early Oscar Predictions: Music

Obviously, it's impossible to judge a film's soundtrack before it's released, or even recorded which may be the case with many of this year's upcoming prospects. Thankfully for us obsessive prognosticators, the music branch has some old habits that can lay the foundation for early guesswork. For starters, they are notoriously insular, usually only choosing one or two first-time nominees per year in the Best Original Score category.

So who are some branch favourites with multiple irons in the fire this year?

One Category at a Time: Original Score

There's nothing more frustrating for an awards pundit than being able to narrow a category down to two realistic outcomes, but then being forced to flip a coin between them. So it is this year with Best Original Score, which is, for me, an even more hair-pulling exercise in prediction waffling than the tightly contested Best Director and Picture races.

But first, let's whittle things down with some process of elimination.

BAFTA Clarifies Some Races, Obscures Others

So the EE British Academy of Film and Television Awards just wrapped up not long ago, but you won't get to watch the ceremony until later tonight because for all their fine cinematic tastes, the organization still hasn't evolved past their daft custom of broadcasting the show after all the winners are all public knowledge. Get with the times, BAFTA!

Anyway, I'm not really interested in the program so much as the results. Boyhood shrugged off last night's possibly crippling DGA loss to keep its Oscar hopes afloat. Also winning for the film were Patty Arquette (lock) and director Richard Linklater (not so much a lock).

Other big winners include The Grand Budapest Hotel with five, and The Theory of Everything and Whiplash with three. Oscar frontrunner Birdman took home only a single honour for Emmanuel Lubezki's virtuoso cinematography.

But what I was hoping this last major precursor of the season could really do is help illuminate some of the Academy's more unpredictable races. The British Academy is, after all, similar in membership size to AMPAS, and can therefore offer some clues on what sort of films will appeal to a large group in certain categories.

My Award Nominations: Best Original Score

Happy Superbowl Sunday, everyone! Today's updates to my own personal awards ballot are all about the music.

It was a remarkably rich and diverse year for film scoring, and I had a tough time narrowing my preferences down to just the five Best Original Scores. It was a bit tougher find suitable candidates for the adapted scores, but I'll get to those this afternoon.

Here are the originals. Have a listen!

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 - Interstellar

Shoot for the moon, and if you miss, you'll land among the stars. That ancient adage serves to remind us that dreaming big and daring to achieve the impossible is often its own reward, even if it does turn out to be, y'know, impossible. Christopher Nolan sets his sights well beyond our puny moon in Interstellar. He's not even aiming for the same galaxy! So if he launches a misfire, it sure as hell is an intriguing misfire, and probably the most essential science-fiction of the year.

His space opera begins on Earth sometime in the future (Nathan Crowley's weathered production design suggests a future that's distant in technological advancement but aesthetically not unlike our present), when violent dust storms are a routine bother and most of the planet's crops have gone extinct due to blight. There's plenty of corn though, both in the fields and on the page in Nolan's typically creaky expository dialogue.

One of the cultivators of this vital food source, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), bemoans that his education and training as a pilot/engineer are going to waste in a vain attempt to sustain a global population that won't last past his kids' generation. He doesn't merely want his children to survive. He wants them to grow up with the same awe and wonder of the universe that he has.

Review - Fury

It is April, 1945. The second world war draws to an agonizingly bloody close on German soil. Materializing out of a haze of sunlight and gun smoke, a German officer atop a weathered white horse trudges through a scorched battlefield, floating in silence like a ghost amongst the dead bodies and burning debris. There's a sad beauty to this image that greets us at the onset of Fury, steeped in an eerie serenity that the film's title does not suggest.

Naturally, this moment ends in an abrupt and brutal fashion more typical to the rest of this rockem' sockem' war story. Written and directed by David Ayer, many of whose previous films and screenplays (End of Watch, Harsh Times, Training Day) have been gritty studies in rock-hard masculinity, Fury follows the perilous travails of a tank unit as it pushes the Allied advance deeper into enemy territory in the dying days of WWII.

Brad Pitt headlines as Sgt. Don 'Wardaddy' Collier, commander of a 30-ton M4 Sherman tank (the eponymous Fury, whose moniker is scrawled across the cannon barrel as if the bow of a ship) and its testosterone-oozing crew. This includes Shia LaBeouf as its devout trigger man, Michael Peña as its empathetic driver, and Jon Bernthal as its certifiable mechanic. No, not “certified”, “certifiable”.

Review - Gone Girl

“You don't know what you've got 'til it's...” the tagline for Gone Girl ominously forebodes. That common phrase takes on twisted new meaning in this hotly-awaited thriller from David Fincher, which opens with the voiceover of a man confessing how he wishes he could know what his wife's thinking; pick her brain; see what's on her mind – all worded with a queasy skull-cracking metaphor designed to unsettle us right off the bat. He truly won't know what he's got until she's gone, and when he finds out, he'll wish he never asked.

Like the vanished woman to whom the title refers, Gone Girl has quite a lot – too much, in fact – on its mind. Based on the best-selling pulp novel by Gillian Flynn (who also adapted it for the screen), it's a movie that aspires to be many movies at once, but does not fully succeed at being any of them.

Review - Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes – the surprisingly good 2011 reboot of the classic sci-fi franchise – we met Caesar, a super smart lab chimp contemplating his place in a human world that would keep him caged up. In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – the excellent new sequel which delivers high blockbuster thrills in a story with the dramatic scope of a Shakespearean tragedy – Caesar is older and a bit wiser, but still has a lot to learn about the cruel subtleties of trust and leadership.

Picking up ten years after the events of Rise, Dawn finds humankind all but extinct due to a pandemic outbreak of the same man-made virus that blessed Caesar (Andy Serkis) with heightened intelligence in the first place. Conversely, he and his posse of escaped simian brethren have since flourished into a thriving ape community in the temperate rainforest of northern California, with any humans happily out of sight and out of mind.

Review - How to Train Your Dragon 2

It's usually hard to get excited about the film franchises of DreamWorks Animation. In order to cling to the pop culture zeitgeist on which so many of them depend, the studio churns out sequels and spinoffs with a rapidity and middling quality that might be better suited to television! One could therefore be forgiven for being pessimistic on the prospects of a sequel to How to Train Your Dragon, a critically acclaimed box office hit that spun the quaint morality tale of how an oddball viking named Hiccup (Jay Burachel) managed to capture and bond with the most unlikely of pets: a wild dragon he named Toothless.

I quite enjoyed that film when it was released back in 2010, and my affection for it has only grown since then. Obviously, my hopes weren't too high for its inevitable follow-up, but this is one sequel for which DreamWorks deserved the benefit of the doubt. How to Train Your Dragon 2 truly delivers, and with fiery confidence to boot. Not only is it the studio's most thrilling adventure to date, but also its most thematically robust and elegantly handled as well.

The story picks up five years after the events of the first Dragon, in which time the once dragon-fearing highland village of Berk has become a more harmonious place where Vikings and dragons happily coexist. Hiccup's father Stoick (Gerard Butler) is intent on preparing his son to eventually succeed him as clan chieftain, but the soul-searching Hiccup naturally has his doubts. He'd rather devote his time to flying around on Toothless, mapping out new lands, outfitted with a tricked-out steampunk wing-suit that allows him to literally glide alongside his winged companion.

Last minute question marks and wishlist

Ballots have been in for two days now, and there's nothing left to do but wait for the final results to be unveiled on Sunday night. Most pundits have settled on their predictions after weeks of deliberation, but for me, these dwindling days are often when my initially settled predictions suddenly become unsettled! There are some huge question marks that'll have me waffling on this category or that from now until their envelopes are opened. Here are some lingering uncertainties I have heading into the big show, accompanied by a small wishlist that would be oh so satisfying to see happen:

IFMCA winners

The International Film Music Critics Association has unveiled their winners for 2013. If you assume they're the sort of group that always attempts to align themselves with the Academy's tastes, then you may be surprised by their selections. But if you are more familiar with this organization's modus operandi, then you'll find them expectedly bemusing. Not a single one of their winners was recognized by AMPAS' music branch this year, not even Oscar favourite Steven Price who had reaped four nominations for his Gravity score. Instead, the big winner was Abel Korzeniowski, who took home three honours including Film Score of the Year for Romeo and Juliet, a film which has otherwise been completely off the awards radar.

Peruse the film category winners after the cut.