Oscar Predictions Round 2: Acting Categories

You can see the index of all predicted categories here.

Best Actress

1. Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook)

2. Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild)

3. Marion Cotillard (Rust & Bone)

4. Naomi Watts (The Impossible)

5. Helen Mirren (Hitchcock)

Alternative: Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Smashed)

Jennifer Lawrence is the biggest addition to this category after the Toronto festival gave her film a major boost. Some pundits have already chalked her up as the winner, which sounds a bit premature to me, but hey, it’s not like anybody else here looks like they can take the gold man home. Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s film was well-received at Sundance but she didn’t exactly look like a nominee until it became clear that the fall festival trifecta was not going to give us any new contenders other than Lawrence, so now she’s back in the race. I wonder if Smashed is going to be big enough to get her major notices though. She’ll surely be the film’s only nomination, so having not seen the film yet, I wonder if her performance is strong enough to make that happen. On the other hand, I don’t see the Academy nominating two French-speaking performances in the same year either, so Emmanuelle Riva’s going to have a really tough battle. Is she going to campaign for it? If not her or Winstead, then who? Keira Knightley (Anna Karenina) is the most obvious answer, but for now, I’m guessing the divisive reaction to her film will leave her out, which will leave us with Helen Mirren, who’s just recently been added to the race with Hitchcock.

Self-explanatory

Iran will not defend its Oscar statue

I had the first episode of my new series on Iranian cinema all edited and ready to post, but it feels strange to write about Iranian cinema and yet ignore the biggest news of the day. The Iranian government has decided to boycott the Oscars in protest to the release of Innocence of Muslims. 

It’s a painful moment, to be honest, particularly because it was announced that Reza Mirkarimi’s A Cube of Sugar was going to be Iran’s representative in the category this year. It’s a gentle but thoughtful light comedy by one of the greatest directors of Iran’s new generation. I’ve always rooted for his success since his exquisite first feature, Under the Moonlight, and I’d have loved to see him take another stab at this. (Iran’s 2005 submission was Mirkarimi’s best work to date, So Close, So Far, which is criminally overlooked on the international scene.) This of course comes on the back of Iran’s first win for Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, so Iran becomes one of only a handful of countries to not attempt to defend its statue. (Film Actually’s Shane pointed me to South Africa and Bosnia who didn’t submit films after Tsotsi and No Man’s Land, respectively. If you know of more examples let me know in the comments.) 

Reza Kianian in A Cube of Sugar

Mirkarimi and his film aside, I just can’t see how the decision to boycott the Oscars helps anyone. Why deprive the Iranian film community of the chance to show its best work on the world’s greatest stage? It doesn’t seem like a trade off, just a lose-lose situation. If the reason for this boycott is that Iranians feel insulted by Innocence of Muslims, wouldn’t a worthy film in response send a better message to the world than simply boycotting the Oscars and leaving the scene altogether? And in any case, Innocent of Muslims is absolutely asinine but responding to it at all, whether in the form of a boycott or more aggressively, with riots and violence and shooting and killing, is even more stupid. If you don’t like the film, don’t watch it and move on. This type of reactionary approach only validates the film. 

As for A Cube of Sugar – which, by the way, stars my favourite Iranian actor of all time, Reza Kianian - well, it was not A Separation, but it had a decent shot, believe it or not. It’s exactly the type of film that older voters in this category welcome with open arms and it’s a heck of lot of better than some of the recent winners. But alas, I’ll have to wait another year.

Oscar Predictions Round 2: Best Picture

Check the full index of my predictions in all categories here.

Best Picture

1. Argo (dir. Affleck)

2. Lincoln (dir. Spielberg)

3. Les Misérables (dir. Hooper)

4. The Master (dir. P.T. Anderson)

5. Silver Linings Playbook (dir. Russell)

6. Beasts of the Southern Wild (dir. Zeitlin)

If there are more than six nominees...

7. Life of Pi (dir. Lee)
 8. Zero Dark Thirty (dir. Bigelow)

9. Flight (dir. Zemeckis)

10. The Sessions (dir. Lewin)

Denzel Washington in Flight

The official start of the awards season is the triple festival punch of Venice, Telluride and Toronto. Having now passed that phase, the picture has become much clearer, though there remain quite a large number of films still unseen. Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Robert Zemeckis’s Flight, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, Katherine Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained are the big ones that might have a shot at a nomination in the top category. I’m almost certain we have already seen all other potential nominees at one place or another. So what was the impact of the fall festivals on the season?

Winners

The biggest winner is undeniably Silver Linings Playbook. David O. Russell’s follow-up to the Oscar nominated The Fighter won the People’s Choice Award at TIFF and was a major hit with critics and the audiences alike. Its stars have been the centre of every discussion about the film and we know the actors’ branch is the biggest one in the Academy. Though TIFF's top award is often a red herring, in the case of Playbook, I think it's safe to assume it will at least be nominated, since Russell has already been welcomed to the club, Lawrence and Cooper are major stars, and most importantly, English-language winners of TIFF are very often serious awards season contenders.

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook

Argo was another big hit both at Telluride and Toronto, where it came second in the People’s Choice voting. Despite being a period piece, it has now miraculously become the most politically relevant film of the year, with the protests across the Muslim world and attacks on U.S. embassies in a couple of countries. It’s sad that such unfortunate circumstances should come into play here, but the campaign will be focusing on that angle quite a lot and this type of "hitting on the zeitgeist" is a real hook. Affleck’s last film, The Town, presumably missed out on a best picture nomination very narrowly but this time he shouldn’t have a problem cracking the top category. 

Festival Wrap-up and Post-TIFF Oscar Predictions

My final piece of TIFF coverage was posted on The Film Experience a couple of days ago, where I talk abuot my favourites including Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing and also bring up some Oscar-related observations. Be sure to check it out!

I've also updated my Oscar predictions, which has many new contenders in all categories following the Venice-Telluride-Toronto trifecta. As always, individual category analysis will be posted on the weekend, starting with Best Picture this Saturday.
In one final piece of shameless self-advertisement, next Monday will be the start of my new weekly series on Iranian cinema. I'll try my best to find (mostly) legal ways to find the films for you so you can watch them along with me.

TIFF Diary, Part 3: Four Short Takes

Over at The Film Experience, I've written four short reviews on At Any Price, The Place beyond the Pines, Foxfire and Beyond the Hills. Make sure to check them out!

TIFF Diary, Part 2: Interviewing William H. Macy

One of the highlights of this year's festival for me was The Sessions, not just the film itself, which is heartwarming and funny, but the fact that I got to interview its director Ben Lewin and one of its cast members, William H. Macy. Macy's one of my favourite charcter actors so it was quite an experience getting to meet him in person. I also attended the film's reception at Soho House, met some amazing people and had a banging time.
Over at The Film Experience, I've posted my review of the film and my interview with Mr. Macy, which covers everything from priesthood to sex to Paul Thomas Anderson. Have a read and chime in with your thoughts.

TIFF Diary, Part I: Meeting Ewan McGregor

I feel like I might have overbooked myself a little bit for this year's festival. I literally have no breaks. Not that I'm complaining, you see. I've got to meet some of my favourite celebrities and quite staggeringly, not one of the films I've seen so far has underwhelmed me. That streak is bound to be broken at some point but for now, all is good.

The first part of my diary is posted at The Film Experience, including the story of how I happened to take this picture with my favourite actor working today and a mini review of Noah Baumbach's extremely charming Frances Ha. Head over there and have a read. There's much more to come in the next few days, including an interview with William H. Macy who's in town for the premiere of The Sessions.

Final TIFF Line-up

After weeks of anticipation, TIFF finally kicks off tomorrow. You can really feel the excitement if you walk around the entertainment district in downtown Toronto, or even if you check #TIFF12 on twitter. I’m expecting one of my best festival experiences to be honest. There are a few films I wish I could fit into my schedule (Ernest & Celestine, Like Someone in Love, Fill the Void, The Impossible) but overlapping schedules happen for everyone at festivals and missing a few films isn’t gonna stop me from enjoying the much larger number than I will get to see. Especially because, animated films aside, my line-up covers a wide range of stuff: big premieres, small Indies, documentaries, Venice hot shots, European films, Asian films, American ones. Everything’s thrown in the mix. Plus, there are a couple of events planned that I will not talk about until they actually materialize. But I couldn’t be more excited about them and you’ll know why when you eventually read my coverage.

Joss Whedon's Much Ado about Nothing

For me the festival doesn’t start until Friday afternoon, when I get to watch the buzzy Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers but it will finish on the last day, or the last hour rather, with a late night screening of Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder. Last year’s festival went out with a bang (and tears) as I finished on a high with Oslo, August 31^st, my favourite film of the year. Here’s hoping the Malick will follow suit.

As with last year, I have the pleasure of covering the festival for Nathaniel Rogers and his amazing readers over at The Film Experience, and as always, you can follow me on twitter (@amiresque) for instant reactions and such.

Italian Actress Monica Bellucci in Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi's Rhino Season

My final line-up, in order of screening date, looks like this as of now (though there are always films added as the festival moves along):

The Gatekeepers (Dror Moreh)

Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)

The Place beyond the Pines ( Derek Cianfrance)

Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas)

The Sessions (Ben Lewin) 
The Patience Stone (Atiq Rahimi)

At Any Price (Ramin Bahrani)

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)

The Iceman (Ariel Vromen)

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (Laurent Cantet)

Lore (Cate Shortland)

Beyond the Hills (Crisitan Mungiu)

Barbara (Christian Petzold)

The Central Park Five (Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon)

Much Ado about Nothing (Joss Whedon)

Dormant Beauty (Marco Bellocchio)

All that Matters is Past (Sara Johnsen)

Rhino Season (Bahman Ghobadi)

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (Alex Gibney)

What Maisie Knew (Scott McGehee, David Siegel)

To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)

Announcing the Blog's New Weekly Series

As you guys are all no doubt aware, a few weeks ago Sight & Sound magazine published its decennial list of the greatest films of all time. Many conversations ensued among cinephiles about Hitch dethroning Welles, about the individual lists of all voters, about the futile nature of list making, etc. I shared my two cents at The Film Experience right after the list came out but I’ve been meaning to write more about it ever since and take a specific angle. I never really got around to it until now.

When I started the blog two years ago, one of my goals was to shine a light on little seen Iranian films for the English speaking audience.  Clicking on the ‘Iranian Cinema’ tab on the blog’s header tells me that I’ve failed miserably, having posted less than 10 times about Iranian films in total.  When the Sight & Sound poll was released, I noticed that Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (Namaye Nazdik) was the highest ranking Iranian film on the list and it actually made the top 50. Though I personally love the film to no end, I was surprised that it ranked so highly given that it isn’t revered nearly as much in its home country.

Guess who? A Separation's Leila Hatami as a young boy in Kamalolmolk (1984) directed by her late father Ali Hatami

Looking further down the list, there are quite a few films by Kiarostami and others like Makhmalbaf, Mehrjui and Farrokhzad that I’m quite happy to see have found a foothold, strong or weak, among the critical community outside Iran. Initially, I wanted to seize the opportunity and write about all the Iranian films that appear on the list as a way to compensate for my inactivity in that area. But that sort of defeats the purpose. Those films already have their supporters, after all. So I cast my net wider.

Starting on Monday, September 24^th, after TIFF craziness and my coverage at The Film Experience is over, I will be writing about an Iranian film every Monday. I will cover all the titles that appear on the Sight & Sound list but I won’t stop there. Many of my favourites – in fact, most of my personal top ten, which are mostly available in North America, by the way – understandably don’t show up on their list, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth your time. So be sure to check back in three weeks!

Is Best Actress Really a Weak Field? (And Oscar Updates!)

One of my pet peeves about the Oscar season is the chorus of “Best Actress is a weak field” that is heard at one point or another every year. It starts as early as March when everybody starts to look at the film year ahead and suddenly, it's discovered that there aren’t many performances that stand out as potential Oscar nominees. There are exceptions along the way of course. Meryl Streep’s nomination for The Iron Lady, for example, was as widely and quickly presumed inevitability as Daniel Day-Lewis’s has been this year.

Meryl Streep in Hope Springs

Upon first glance at this year’s potential best actress – and supporting actress, for that matter, but that’s a story for another day – nominees, I couldn’t shake the feeling that for the first time, I agreed with that sentiment a little bit. I started to feel that way when chatter began on the blogosphere that Meryl Streep could be in the race again for Hope Springs, which is a surprisingly moving film with strong performances by Streep and her screen partner Tommy Lee Jones, but in a competitive field, there’s no way that the recently crowned Oscar queen with 17 nominations under her belt could enter the race again for something she could do in her sleep. Jones’s performance is, if not better, at least as commendable as Streep’s but at this point in the season, if I considered him a threat for a nomination, chances are you’d all laugh at me and move on. It’s a similar case with Judi Dench in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I love Dame Dench as much as anyone and there’s nothing wrong with her performance, but the fact that it stands out is mostly because of the dreadful film around her, not the performance itself.