Awards Season 2016: Tez's Official Oscar Predictions 2016

Tonight, the great and good of Hollywood will convene to celebrate the best of film-making in 2015 at the 88th Annual Academy Awards, which will be hosted for the second time by Chris Rock. It has become a tradition for me to predict the nominations and the winners in the main six categories (the four acting categories, Best Director and Best Picture).  I've done this since 2003 with varying degrees of success. So, without further ado, here are my predictions for who will win.

Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl)

With no disrespect to any of the other nominees, this is a two horse race between Alicia Vikander and Kate Winslet. Both have previous wins behind them (Vikander got the SAG and Critics' Choice; Winslet the BAFTA and the Golden Globe). Both performances are strong, even if I found Winslet's more mannered and more actorly, less naturalistic than Vikander's. There would be a certain amount of pleasure in seeing Winslet win her second Oscar on the same night DiCaprio wins his first. However, because Vikander won the SAG Award- voted on by actors, many of whom make up the Academy voting list- I'm gonna put her ahead. However, I won't be at all surprised if Winslet nabs it. 


Best Supporting Actor: Sylvester Stallone (Creed)

Simply put, I found Stallone's performance in Creed to be exceptional and he actually does act as a supporting character to Donny. He's witty, wise and heartbreaking- he also has a lot of goodwill in Hollywood and a lot of people would love to see him take the main prize tonight (as Critics' Choice and Golden Globe wins have shown). Interestingly, he's won both awards he's been nominated for; I really hope he makes the perfect three tonight.


Best Actress: Brie Larson (Room)

Closest you can get to a cast-iron bet tonight. Larson's moving and emotive performance, having to convey such a difficult situation yet bearing it so bravely, has completely swept the awards season boards- SAG, Golden Globes, BAFTA, Independent Spirits- so any other name tonight would be a huge surprise. And I do mean huge. 


Best Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)

OK. Do I think Leo deserves to win? No, I don't. His performance in The Revenant is perfectly decent but he's done better performances. Do I think he will win? Without a shadow of a doubt. We're in the same situation as Scorsese and The Departed; it almost feels like 'his turn'. Similar to Larson, he's swept the boards where he's been nominated so it's a fairly foregone conclusion.


Best Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (The Revenant)

With BAFTA, Golden Globe and DGA wins, it does look like it'll be second time around for Inarritu tonight. Interesting fact: if he does win, Inarritu will be the first director since Joseph L. Mankiewicz to win back-to-back Best Director Oscars and the first in over sixty years.  His direction is solid enough and his partnership with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski is one of the strongest I've seen. I would be shocked to see another director win tonight.


Best Picture: Spotlight

This might come back to bite me, but I genuinely think Spotlight deserves to win the Best Picture Oscar over The Revenant. Whether it will, I don't know. Spotlight is an absolute masterclass in cinema: its script is superb (and will, with any justice, bag the Best Original Screenplay Oscar), the acting performances throughtout the ensemble are on point, the direction is solid, the themes of the film are topical without being polemical or heavy-handed. Were I a member of the Academy, this is where my vote would be going. However, it does look likely that The Revenant might get it. 


Last year, I got 4 out of 6 (all four acting awards) but fell foul of Inarritu and Birdman. I'm not making the same mistake on Best Director this year. However, I'm not sure on Best Picture or on Best Supporting Actress. I reckon another 4 out of 6. 

There'll be a full blog tomorrow discussing my thoughts on the ceremony and a list of all the winners.

Tez

Awards Season 2016: Directors' Guild Awards Winners

Just a quick awards season update as the Directors' Guild Awards (DGAs) were handed out yesterday (Saturday 6th February). The film winners are:

Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Films: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (The Revenant)

Outstanding Directorial Achievement of a First-Time Feature Film Director: Alex Garland (Ex Machina)

Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Movies for Television and Miniseries: Dee Rees (Bessie)

Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary: Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land)

With this win, it's looking good for Inarritu to claim a second Best Director Oscar at the end of the month. If he does, he'll be only the third director in Oscars history to claim back-to-back wins (the other two being John Ford and Joseph L. Mankiewicz) and he'd be the first director to do this in over sixty years (Mankiewicz was the last consecutive winner in 1950 and 1951). Cartel Land is on the Oscars shortlist for Best Documentary Feature, so that bodes well.

The next awards season update will come next weekend as the Writers' Guild Awards are announced on 13th February and the BAFTA Film Awards are handed out on 14th February.

Review: The Revenant (UK Cert 15)

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Birdman puts him squarely back into awards territory with Western thriller drama The Revenant.

It's 1820s America. Frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his half-Native American son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) are working on a fur trapping expedition under the command of Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson). When Glass is savagely mauled by a bear, Henry asks for two men to stay behind to tend to him. John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) stay with him, but Fitzgerald betrays them, killing Hawk and burying the severely injured Glass alive. Glass hauls himself out of the shallow grave and sets on a trek to find the man who betrayed him and killed his son.

The film is 'inspired by true events' and 'based in part' on a book by Michael Punke- the 'in part' bit no doubt being that a) there once lived a fur trapper called Hugh Glass, b) Glass did get mauled by a bear and was left for dead and c) Glass then went to find the men who left him for dead. Everything else- the son, the revenge plot- seems to be completely fabricated. For information on the historical accuracy (or otherwise), this is a good article to start with.

I'll be honest, when I saw the first trailer, I was kinda underwhelmed and thought 'looks alright-ish, might give it a punt if there's nothing else on'. And then the awards praise started coming which sealed the deal. So I sat through it. Whilst I thought it was better than The Hateful Eight (which isn't saying much), it shares a lot of the same problems. Lots of shots that take too long. Script issues. A preponderence of overindulgent extraneous bilge that detracts from what is, at heart, a strong and intriguing narrative which a damn good edit could bring to the fore.

A lot of column inches has been devoted to the relentless masculinity and brutality of the film, being severally described as 'gut-churningly brutal' and 'meaningless pain porn', which led one American critic to ham-fistedly and narrow-mindedly suggest that this was not a film for the ladies. Is it brutal? Yes, in places, but- in my opinion- not relentlessly so (this is no Saw or Hostel). There are several main 'action' sequences- the opening attack, the bear attack, the final fight- which are apt to induce winces as flesh is shredded, fingers are lopped off and skulls are caved in. The bear attack is not massively prolonged but is tough to watch (even though you can tell the bear is CGI). 

There's a lot of metaphor about the strength of trees and breath ('while you breathe, you fight') which is fine but Inarritu overeggs it with constant shots of both- DiCaprio's breath even misting the camera lens at a few points just in case you really haven't got it- and there are constant references back to both. It's heavy-handed and unnecessary. Give your audience some credit. And, whilst we're on the subject of unnecessary, the final shot of DiCaprio giving a thousand-yard stare right into the camera? Give me a break!

Much of the awards hype has been focusing on DiCaprio's performance and the fact that he's likely to finally win his Oscar; he's got the Golden Globe and Critics' Choice awards already. His performance as Glass is decent enough, hardly groundbreaking or revolutionary though. In my opinion, he's given better performances (and even been nominated for an Oscar for those performances; Howard Hughes in The Aviator, for instance). Being completely honest, of the Best Actor nominated performances I've seen so far this year, I was more impressed with the performances of Michael Fassbender and Eddie Redmayne than DiCaprio's. 

I think my main issue is less to do with his performance- which, as I said, is decent- and more to do with the fact that there isn't much of a character to start with (a direct fault of the script). Glass is a good trapper; he loves his son and loved his wife. That's it. There's not much to get behind there. There's also only so much crawling and grunting he can do before it really starts to test your patience. You also have the issue that, no matter what peril Glass is placed in on his trek for vengeance, you know he's not actually in any real danger because the final pay-off has to be a confrontation between Glass and Fitzgerald. So you can have him fall over a waterfall, have to hide from rampaging Native Americans or chuck him off a cliff and have him shelter in the gutted out remains of a horse, he's always going to survive (despite severe and almost life-ending injuries from the bear attack). 

Tom Hardy is Fitzgerald, the primary human antagonist, but confuses wide eyes and a mangled and wandering Texas accent for menace. Plus, he's written so paper thinly as an out-and-out bad guy from the very get-go that there's no nuance, no shade. He's a racist, self-centred bully. You're just waiting for him to strike. Plus he gets to deliver the most trite and platitudinous message at the end: revenge won't bring your son back. Well, no shit, Sherlock. Once again, the script lets the actors down. 

So, what's good? Well, once again, Emmanuel Lubezski's sublime cinematography serves the grandeur of the great outdoors to good effect. The supporting performances by Domhnall Gleeson and Will Poulter are strong, both good men stuck in a bad situation. The opening battle- where the trapper party is attacked by a band of maurauding Native Americans- is slickly handled and well choreographed. 

A script is a blueprint and without a strong blueprint, the house is not fit to stand. Despite some strong performances and arresting visuals, the fundamentally flawed script (lacking in any kind of nuanced characterisation) renders this bland and the overextended, overindulgent run time renders it boring. Despite this, I'm sure that it will be lauded with awards (and, in all seriousness, it should win the Oscar for Best Cinematography) and DiCaprio will almost certainly get his Oscar, thus rendering an entire raft of Internet memes completely obsolete. 

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Tez

Awards Season 2016: Directors' Guild Awards Nominees

Quick one today, as the Directors' Guild Awards announced its shortlist for their Feature Film category (to be handed out on February 6th)

The nominees are:

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (The Revenant)

Tom McCarthy (Spotlight)

Adam McKay (The Big Short)

George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Ridley Scott (The Martian)

Last year, the DGA nominees named four of the five eventual Oscar Best Director nominees (with Bennett Miller as the curveball). Inarritu, McCarthy, Miller and Scott have been the names most mentioned this year, but interestingly it's Todd Haynes who usually makes up the quintet for Carol. 

Tomorrow, there's going to be a bit of fun when the Razzie Award nominations are out. What's the bets that Pixels and Fantastic Four will be all over it?

Awards Season 2015: The 87th Annual Academy Awards

The 87th Annual Academy Awards were held last night at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. They came up with one or two surprises and more than a few talking points.

Neil Patrick Harris was on good form as host. He's got awards show form, hosting the Primetime Emmys twice and the Tony Awards four times and I would be more than happy to see him host the Oscars again. OK, there was no Twitter-crashing selfie moment and there's been a lot of complaint online about his performance but I found him charming, funny and inoffensive, and any man who has the chutzpah to appear in an Oscars telecast in a pair of tighty-whities has to be admired. 

There was a lot of politics in the speeches, with issues such as freedom of expression, racial and gender equality, the awareness of mental and physical illnesses and immigration brought up.

The acceptance speech by Brits Mat Kirkby and James Lucas for winning Best Live Action Short was kind of funny (I kind of want to try and find that doughnut shop) and Pawel Pawlikowski must be the only person in Oscar history to get two sets of wrap-up music when he effusively ran over when accepting Best Foreign Language Film. I found the Idina Menzel/John Travolta bit quite funny (even if the joke was overlaboured a little). 

There was a really fun performance of 'Everything Is Awesome' from The Lego Movie (complete with Lego Oscars handed out to the crowd) and the performance of 'Glory' from Selma was stirring (as was the acceptance speech by John Legend and Common when it won Best Original Song). Lady Gaga's tribute to The Sound Of Music was great (and I'm not even a fan of that film) and Meryl Streep gave a touching and emotional speech prior to the In Memoriam section. I also found myself moved by Graham Moore's speech when he accepted the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Imitation Game, advising people to 'stay weird'. 

Onto the awards themselves:

No surprises in the acting categories with all four winners giving heartfelt and genuine acceptance speeches; J.K. Simmons advising us to call our parents, Patricia Arquette's eloquent and firey speech calling for gender and wage equality, Eddie Redmayne adorably geeking out midway through and Julianne Moore advocating more openness about Alzheimer's. 

The big surprise was Birdman winning Best Picture. Inarritu's win for Best Director wasn't a surprise and- as I have previously stated- the direction of Birdman is extraordinary (incidentally, I was also pleased at Emmanuel Lubezski's win for Best Cinematography).  Is it the Best Picture of those eight films? I don't think so, but then I'm not a member of the Academy. That was their decision. There's already rumblings online that it wasn't the right choice but you have to consider that the Academy's track record of what consitutues a Best Picture winner has had a few bumps in the road (Crash winning over Brokeback Mountain, for instance).

Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel both won four Oscars apiece, with Whiplash winning three. All eight Best Picture nominees won at least one Oscar each. Into The Woods, Foxcatcher, Mr. Turner and Unbroken didn't win anything.

Below is the full list of winners at the 87th Annual Academy Awards:

Best Motion Picture of the Year: Birdman

Best Actor: Eddie Redmayne (The Theory Of Everything)

Best Actress: Julianne Moore (Still Alice)

Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons (Whiplash)

Best Supporting Actress:  Patricia Arquette (Boyhood)

Best Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Birdman)

Best Original Screenplay: Birdman

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Imitation Game

Best Animated Feature Film of the Year: Big Hero 6

Best Foreign Language Film of the Year: Ida

Best Cinematography: Birdman

Best Editing: Whiplash

Best Production Design: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Costume Design: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Makeup and Hairstyling: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Original Score: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Best Original Song: 'Glory' (Selma)

Best Sound Mixing: Whiplash

Best Sound Editing: American Sniper

Best Visual Effects: Interstellar

Best Documentary (Feature): Citizenfour

Best Documentary (Short Subject): Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1

Best Animated Short Film: Feast

Best Live Action Short Film: The Phone Call


Congratulations to all winners!

OK, that's awards season finished for another year. It'll start up again at the end of November. Bring on the blockbusters!

Tez

Review: Birdman (UK Cert 15)

Riggan Thomson used to be in pictures. He used to be big. He used to be Birdman. Wanting to reinvent himself, Riggan writes, directs and stars in a Broadway show based on the Raymond Carver story 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love'. However, he has to deal with volatile actors, ex- and current lovers and his fractious relationship with his daughter as the clock counts down to opening night.

I've been divided over Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's previous films. Despite the rather heavy philosophical air of the piece, 21 Grams had some brilliant performances, but I found Babel an indulgent and utterly pretentious mess. I wasn't sure what to expect from Birdman, but luckily Inarritu has mostly reined in the indulgence (a few bizarre moments of whimsy notwithstanding) and has crafted a hyper-real character piece which is absorbing to watch.

Michael Keaton gives a career-best performance as Riggan. Struggling with his various crises, whilst being pursued by the inner voice of Birdman deriding his current choices, Keaton is excellent. Riggan could have been an overindulged child, a pretentious auteur whose neuroses run puddle-deep, but Keaton gives the character gravitas and a certain amount of dignity (even when running through Times Square in just his underwear at one point). 

Edward Norton is great as temperamental method actor Mike Shiner, who comes into Riggan's play as a last-minute replacement and shakes things up. He's an insufferable asshole on occasions, but Norton riffs on it (along with his own reputation of being 'difficult') to great effect. Emma Stone is similarly great as Riggan's daughter Sam, a recovering addict who acts as her father's assistant. She gets some lovely scenes with Norton as a nascent relationship between Mike and Sam forms, and gets a brilliant moment when, in a rage, she tells Riggan he doesn't matter. Stone really sells the anger and the pent-up fury of that moment and it doesn't feel fake.

Amy Ryan adds a dose of calm reality to proceedings as Riggan's ex-wife Sylvia, appearing in a couple of key scenes (most notably when she reminds him he's 'not Farrah Fawcett'). Naomi Watts' performance is great as an actress ready to make her Broadway debut yet nervous of it at the same time. She has a particularly great scene with Andrea Riseborough (who plays Riggan's current girlfriend) in which one of the funnies lines of the film is given. Lindsay Duncan gives a nice supporting turn as influential theatre critic Tabitha Dickinson, who threatens to bury Riggan's play with a bad review. There's a surprisingly dramatic turn by Zach Galifianakis, proving he can do so much more than his Hangover persona, as Riggan's lawyer Jake, desperately trying to keep everything from falling to pieces.

The way the film is shot is particularly good and credit must go to Inarritu and his cinematographer, the brilliant Emmanuel Lubezki, for that. The play is mostly set within the labyrinthine corridors of the St James Theatre (with occasional excursions outside the theatre and onto the street) and there's some very clever camera trickery at work to make it look as if the film was shot in one continuous take. The camera follows characters into dressing rooms then follows another one out of it. It looks good and really maintains the flow of the piece.

The script takes potshots at the current vogue for superhero movies which is a bit of an easy target, but there's something quite satisfying about having an actor who did comicbook movies before they were de rigeur criticising it. The casting of Keaton, Norton and Stone (aka Bruce Wayne/Batman, Bruce Banner/The Incredible Hulk and Gwen Stacy) adds an extra level. It does make it all a bit meta, but it's enjoyable enough.

It's got a strong script, great performances to a man and cleverly shot. So why am I not shouting from the rafters? My main problem with the film is the ending. It's difficult to discuss without spoiling things, so all I'll say is this. The ending is ambiguous but it just seems done for the sake of it. No doubt there will be people ready to queue up and say I've either missed the entire point of the film or that I've wilfully misunderstood the director's intentions... if that's the case, so be it, but I judge what I see on the screen and how it makes me feel and the ending of Birdman left me cold and disconnected.

If the film had stopped just a few minutes earlier, it would have got a 5-star review. But the very end of the film just feels ambiguous for ambiguity's sake and undermined the sterling work of the previous two hours. Still very much worth seeing, though, but a disappointment.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Tez