The exhaustion levels are high and the confusion levels are even higher at Movieline's Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics, where the white-coated minions responsible for the Oscar Index have struggled to assay the state of the awards race through this week's persistent turbulence. Read on for their results.
[Click the graphs for full-size images.]
The Leading 10:
1. The Artist
2. The Descendants
3. Hugo
4. The Help
5. Midnight in Paris
6. War Horse
7. The Tree of Life
8. Moneyball
9. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
10. Drive
Outsiders: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2; Bridesmaids; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn; My Week With Marilyn; Margin Call
Remember the good old days when all the noise we had to parse was the faint, fuzzy signal coming from the National Board of Review and a handful of other awards bodies? Those days are over: Led by the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, something like 400 critics groups selected their annual award-winners this week. The relatively incidental AFI 10-best list overlapped with those, and all were followed this morning by the Screen Actors Guild Award nominations -- which, to be honest, felt like the equivalent of a bracket-busting day of upsets in the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
On the one hand, I love that we're facing an Oscar season of utterly unsure things. This is the awards culture we should have: more movies to see, more movies to discuss, and tough choices across the board. On the other hand, the only votes that matter are those cast by the Academy, and beyond a few irretrievably sunk also-rans (cough, J. Edgar, cough), what's to say they aren't just going to default to the historical groupthink that can prevent such wild variations like those in the SAG, BFCA and other critical showcases? Why shouldn't we think that, say, War Horse has the competition right where it wants it?
I can think of a few reasons, actually:
· SAG and the Academy share members. And the actors' branch is the largest in the Academy. Thus the natural inclination of studios, distributors and other awards campaigners to scan right past the individual categories to the Ensemble nominations -- which is to say, in admittedly generalizing terms, the film as a whole. Finding The Artist, The Descendants, The Help, Midnight in Paris and Bridesmaids (!) in that class doesn't necessarily guarantee anything come Oscar-nomination morning, and it certainly doesn't mean that War Horse or Moneyball are in grave danger with a flexible number of Best Picture nominations. But it does illustrate what an very influential voting bloc is thinking in mid-December, and it underscores what specific work campaigners have cut out for themselves in the month ahead.
· Heat rises. The Ides of March and J. Edgar fell off the pace not for lack of trying; in fact, neither Sony nor Warner Bros., respectively, have yet abandoned their sweeping awards campaigns for each. They fell off because neither film has even scratched the zeitgeist compared to films like The Artist, The Help, Midnight in Paris and -- I can't believe I'm about to write this -- Drive. I mean, we knew it had art-house appeal, but what we didn't know was the quality and volubility of its devotees. And I'm not even counting the BFCA's Critics Choice Awards, which bestowed eight nominations on Nicolas Winding Refn's violent, moody thriller; Oscar oracle Mark Harris also foresaw a comeback last week after an informal reader poll cited Drive -- "by a landslide" -- as the movie most deserving of a profile boost. SAG can snub Albert Brooks all it wants (and we'll get to that in a bit), but it only galvanizes the faithful. That said, RuPaul "really loved" The Descendants, so maybe everyone just kind of broke even.
· The variations aren't that wild. Among all the winners and nominees remain the same high-functioning heavy-hitters we've seen populating the Index and every other Oscar barometer known to man. The most that you could say is that for every awards group that warmly embraces Hugo, another ignores it entirely.
· We (still) look forward to the Daldry. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close remains under such an airtight embargo that even Scott Rudin can't talk about it. This one has Academy groupthink in its DNA -- Stephen Daldry has notoriously earned three Best Director nominations in three tries, screenwriter Eric Roth has hardware for Forrest Gump and remains as A-list as it gets, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock and Scott Rudin are... well, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock and Scott Rudin -- yet early word from critics and insiders sworn to secrecy is that it will be precisely as polarizing as it looks. Whatever. As far as I'm concerned, if you're still on the sideline this late in the game, you're either coaching or you're a back-up. We'll see which ELAIC is soon enough.
· The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is circling the drain. Steve Pond rounds up the awards-allergic consensus on David Fincher's adaptation of the Swedish blockbuster -- hardly a dismissal of the very, very good film so much as our reality check about a filmmaker who's otherwise a perennial awards-darling. Unless...
· Thursday's Golden Globe nominations will shake things up yet again. I cant believe I spent more than even five minutes breaking all this down just so a roving gang of swag goblins can upend the whole thing tomorrow. Moving on!
The Leading 5:
1. Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
2. Alexander Payne, The Descendants
3. Martin Scorsese, Hugo
4. Steven Spielberg, War Horse
5. Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Outsiders: Stephen Daldry, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive; Tate Taylor, The Help; Bennett Miller, Moneyball; Tomas Alfredson, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Did I mention the Golden Globes? Literally any of the directors cited above are fair game for nominations. But as things specifically pertain to the Oscar race... Enh, it's pretty much the same. Scott Feinberg reminded us that despite zero membership overlap, the Best Picture nominations for both the Critics Choice and Academy Awards historically tend to coincide -- which, as Academy history would have us believe, means that the top eight or nine directors here (give or take Fincher) are pretty much the ones we'll see fighting for nominations of their own over the next five weeks. I know -- I'm really going out on a limb here. Kudos forensics will only get us so far! Your guess is as good mine.
The Leading 5:
1. Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
2. Viola Davis, The Help
3. Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
4. Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin
5. [tie] Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
5. [tie] Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Outsiders: Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene; Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Felicity Jones, Like Crazy; Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia
Streep just keeps winning -- as do Williams and Swinton (who had an impressive Time magazine spread this week to further lift her and Kevin's profile) -- while Davis holds the front-running momentum of both her film and her ceaseless, visible support of it. It's much muddier near the bottom: "Charlize Theron could have used a [critics' group] win to offset news of the slightly-softer-than-hoped opening of Young Adult this weekend," noted Mark Harris, "and after a burst of festival excitement, Glenn Close isn't getting the 'It's her moment' heat that she needs to stay in the mix for Albert Nobbs."
To Harris's latter point, what a difference a week makes. At the same site where Nathaniel Rogers was just keeping Close's flame alight ("[W]e still think she'll pull through by way of persistence for dream project congratulatory votes. [...] this Oscar angle has rich ancestry"), his colleague Michael C. augurs a slightly darker scenario:
[F]or all the importance placed on it I think it's fair to say "overdue" status is over-valued. It's a bump. A nudge. A tie-breaker. Did it help Alan Arkin eke out a win over Eddie Murphy? Probably. Will it be good enough for Glenn Close to beat this year's stiff Best Actress competition if Albert Nobbs' reception remains lukewarm? Doubtful. In the final tally, the greatest benefit of overdue status lies less in garnering votes and more in garnering buzz, bringing attention to performances that are worthy on their own merit.
Pretty much. It's too bad Mara can't be overdue: The 26-year-old is amazing in Dragon Tattoo, and yet she lags behind Olsen's distant head start heading into a crucial stretch of the Oscar marathon. Jeffrey Wells puts it best about Mara's precipitous tumble from the Best Actress derby after a few days of buzz and a general drought of awards-body recognition:
On the afternoon of Friday, 12.2 -- hours after seeing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo at Sony -- I posted a Best Actress evaluation piece that began with my enthusiastic response to Rooney Mara's performance as Lisbeth Salander. She was so fierce and penetrating, I figured, that she had to be a late-inning Best Actress contender. In my own book that's still true, but things have changed over the last 11 days, and now... who knows?
The tight embargo enforcement and the general feeling that Sony doesn't see Dragon Tattoo as an award-calibre film has created a feeling that the air is seeping out of the Tattoo tires, awards-wise, including Mara's own. It just goes to show how quickly things change in this racket. The wind shifts direction, the temperature cools down, the current loses strength.
Like I said, though: Heat rises. Wait and see how America responds to the film -- particularly if they're anything like Sasha Stone, whom Mara's performance moved to write one of the most insightful pieces of criticism I've read all year:
Even though we've long since known Lisbeth Salander in print, and she was put to screen beautifully by Noomi Rapace, there is something strangely exciting to Mara's performance that feels brand new. To be fully capable? To be the one you want to have your back? To never really need to be saved? To not have been sculpted to suit the unending envelopment of the male gaze? It never happens anymore. Not in American film. [...]
By the end of the film, the whole point of it comes to life. This is a movie about a girl, all right. Her hard shell finally cut through, as she encounters the one man who cares enough about her to bring her a sandwich for breakfast and stand ten feet back from her, never reaching out his hand so much as to shake hers. As Blomkvist, sweetly rendered irresistible by Daniel Craig, keeps his distance from Salander, so does the girl with the dragon tattoo want to move closer to him. To fall in love is to have the most important layer pulled back, and the softest of flesh exposed. It's a risk Salander has avoided for her own sake for most of her life. But to keep all surfaces protected means to repel everything that comes softly near. And that is an even bigger risk: to never have the sweetest thing.
I look around this year at the films that are headed for Best Picture and I'm seeing mostly movies about men. Even if Dragon Tattoo wanted to be about about a man it has been overtaken by a girl.
If Sony and Team Tattoo could bottle even a couple drops of that passion on Mara's behalf when the film opens next week, they would have all the awards juice they need heading into January. We'll see.
The Leading 5:
1. Jean Dujardin, The Artist
2. George Clooney, The Descendants
3. Brad Pitt, Moneyball
4. Michael Fassbender, Shame
5. Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar
Outsiders: Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Demián Bichir, A Better Life; Michael Shannon, Take Shelter; Woody Harrelson, Rampart; Ralph Fiennes, Coriolanus
Basically three things happened here, and they're all pretty straightforward:
1. Clooney, Pitt and Fassbender confirmed over the course of the critics' awards whirlwind that they're pretty much in, while Dujardin continued to come up short of a win while remaining firmly entrenched in virtually every pundit's top two or three for the Oscars. There's a grain of salt in there somewhere; I am too tired to look for it right now.
2. SAG -- again, the only awards body to date whose membership overlaps in part with the Academy's -- blew everything up by snubbing Fassbender and Oldman in exchange for DiCaprio and... Bichir? Which is to say: Not Michael Shannon, who'd been dancing on the bubble since October or so. Ask any of the Oscar cognoscenti before today the odds of who'd fill in on a SAG ballot for Fassbender, Oldman and Shannon, not one would have said Bichir. Nothing against Bichir, either, who's excellent in A Better Life, has been out pounding the awards pavement, and whom Summit has aggressively campaigned since sending the first awards-season screeners in September. It's just... wow. You can totally stop reading now!
3. Speaking of screeners, cheapskate crapola maestro Avi Lerner's hilarious dip into the prestige end of the distribution pool -- on behalf of Harrelson -- derailed when whatever refurbished HP laptop he's using to burn Rampart screeners apparently bugged out. The resulting letter from Millennium Entertainment to Academy voters explained: "They were compressed and replicated incorrectly which caused digital noise, artifacting, solarization, and horizontal banding lines to appear on the screener. These technical problems do not exist on the original film." For your consideration, indeed.
The Leading 5:
1. Octavia Spencer, The Help
2. Bérénice Bejo, The Artist
3. Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
4. Jessica Chastain, The Help
5. Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Outsiders: Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids; Vanessa Redgrave, Coriolanus; Sandra Bullock, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Jessica Chastain, Take Shelter; Jessica Chastain, The Tree of Life; Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method; Judy Greer, The Descendants
What a turn for McCarthy, who may very well ride the Bridesmaids wave all the way to the Kodak Theater and thus become the first ever actress to earn an Academy Award nomination for a performance in which she violently shits into a sink. It's a new era, you know? We can't have the likes of Redgrave muttering 400-year-old dialogue like some septuagenarian Oscar-night shoo-in, yammering so dynamically and movingly on such subjects as power and pride and mortality and vengeance and whatever else Shakespeare was on about. Please! I'm not bitter!
The Leading 5:
1. Christopher Plummer, Beginners
2. Albert Brooks, Drive
3. Jonah Hill, Moneyball
4. Nick Nolte, Warrior
5. Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Outsiders: Max von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Ben Kingsley, Hugo; Corey Stoll, Midnight in Paris; Patton Oswalt, Young Adult; Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes; Kevin Spacey, Margin Call
We can talk all day about if and/or how Von Sydow's continued snubs reflect poorly on his Oscar chances, or Nolte and Branagh storming back into contention via critics and SAG, or Serkis's incrementally increasing foothold in the Supporting Actor conversation, or -- of course -- the seemingly monumental oversight of Albert Brooks in today's SAG Award nominations. (I mean, Armie Hammer?) But rather than waste all that breath, I'd rather just invoke the last word as stated by Drive's awesome, awesome awards consultant, who urged us all to just calm the fuck down: "Thank you for all of your shout-outs to Albert Brooks on Twitter and in your analyses of the SAG nominations in regards to his not being recognized today, but we remain confident that the Supporting Actor race still boils down to a two-man showdown between Albert and Christopher Plummer." Anything you say! Just don't hurt me.
Read all of this year's Oscar Index columns here.
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