Oscar Predictions: December

With a majority of the precursor nominations now behind us, we have a clearer image of how the Oscar race will pan out. There are some potential nominees whom I’d assumed had faded but are back in the race. Then there are films and individuals who just cemented their status. And, of course, there are some who just failed to make any impact.

Nominees?

Best Picture

1. The Artist

2. Hugo

3. The Descendants

4. The Help

5. War Horse

6. Midnight in Paris

7. Moneyball

8. Tree of Life

Potential Additions

9. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Alternate

Drive

I’ve predicted eight nominees though Tree of Life missed on both Globe and SAG nominations. I have a hunch that the film’s fervent supporters will help it slide in probably even ahead of Midnight in Paris or Moneyball but I don’t know how many of them there is in the academy. Furthermore, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has received an extremely quiet and incredibly tepid reaction response from the critics. That didn’t stop The Reader from getting a nomination but holocaust and 9/11 are incomparable properties when it comes to the Oscar race. Finally, Drive has done well with the critics, which makes me wonder if more people will put it at their number one spot ahead of the likes Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Best Director

1. Martin Scorsese (Hugo)

2. Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist)

3. Alexander Payne (The Descendants)

4. Terrence Malick (Tree of Life)

5. Steven Spielberg (War Horse)

Alternate

Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris)

The top three are set. The directors’ branch will get behind Malick’s grand vision, leading me to think that the fifth spot will a battle between the other two veteran American masters. Refn has been embraced by the critics but I don’t think academy members will put him on their ballots ahead of his more well-known competitors. Daldry, who has been nominated for a 100% of his films so far, will probably have to suffer a blow to his perfect record this year.

Acting, technical and foreign categories after the jump:

Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn. She won the lion's share of the critics' awards.

Jessica Chastain: The New Julianne Moore?

This week, I finally got around to watching The Help. All the talk about the film taking "the populist spot on the best picture list" reminded me too much of films I don't like so I didn't give it a shot when it was released. Having seen the film now, I'm ready to say I'd made a mistake. Yes, its politics is, to put it mildly, simplified and reductive; the dialogue is at times really corny and the look of the film is too glossy and always ersatz. If you go in thinking this is gonna be a high-minded piece on racial issues, you'll be disappointed but I assume not many people go in thinking that. It's really heartwarming and funny, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me tear up a couple of times. But the real story of the film is the cast. 

Top to bottom: The Tree of Life, The Help, Take Shelter

That SAG nomination for best ensemble is so well-deserved. All these actresses are brilliant individually and have chemistry in their scenes together. Viola Davis has perfected the art of finding the right balance between strength and vulnerability. Octavia Spencer is fiery but subtle at all the right moments. Bryce Dallas Howard understands the caricature that her character is but brings a human, though unsympathetic, side to her. Then there's Jessica Chastain. Her character is so broadly written that her presence could have become an irritating joke, yet Chastain's sassy, naive and kind-hearted Celia is the ensemble's greatest player. She's so at ease with the accent and those high heels, one wonders if she is really the same actress who played the mother in The Tree of Life. 

In my review of that film I wrote "Jessica Chastain completely immerses herself in Mrs. O’Brien and ... avoids the pitfalls of the “supportive mother” role while capturing the angelic beauty of her character." The range she's covered between these two performances is unbelievable. Both characters manage to transcend the screen but one does it with an ethereal other-worldly presence and the other with open-hearted emotional expressivity. And then there's her outstanding performance in Take Shelter, where she escapes archetypal conventions of the wife's role yet again and builds a character entirely her own. 

This has been a fantastic year for an actress who was virtually unknown twelve months ago. At 30, she's a little older than Hollywood's typical new 'it' girls, which reminds me of another redhead beauty who started her career a little late, only to become one of cinema's legendary actresses. Julianne Moore was 33 when Short Cuts came out but she followed it immediately with Vanya on the 42nd Street and Safe. Moore is one of my favourite thespians of all time and not that many people, before or after her, have been as good, but for some reason I feel like there's more in common between the two than red hair and a late start. 

Julianne Moore in Boogie Nights

I'm curious to see what Chastain has up her sleeve next but it looks like we're in for a fruitful and exciting career. Her next release will be Coriolanus (February in Toronto) and she's also working on Wettest Country with John Hilcoat (The Road) and another film with Terrence Malick.

Tree of Life

Grade: A-

Where to begin with a film like this? Terrence Malick’s fifth feature requires much more contemplation than a screening allows. Malick has been the subject of more discourse than any other director with such a sparse career. He is hailed, correctly, as a visionary and visually innovative storyteller. Tree of Life is, in many ways, his most Malickian film to date, whatever that means, and as a film that is already being deemed his magnum opus, it will surely remain in the cinephile conversation for years to come. 

Tree of Life tells the story of Jack, the eldest son of Mr. And Mrs. O’Brien (played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) from his birth to his early adolescence and then with a huge leap, his middle aged life (played by Sean Penn). That’s actually quite an understatement. Malick tells Jack’s story not from his own birth, but from the birth of the universe. In an already iconic and widely discussed sequence -- quite an indulgently long one, at that -- Malick uses the wizardry of the craftsmen behind the camera to bring his vision to the screen in the most elaborate, awe-inspiring manner. Partly to the credit of Emmanuel Lubezki and partly to that of the visual effects supervisors, the sequence plays like a majestic beginning to the film’s main narrative, which is essentially about Jack’s personal and emotional complications with his family.

He is a lost soul, confused about his past, his family, his wife, and the world around him. In his adolescence, he manifests his anger against his father in different ways. He drifts apart from his family when we see him accompany his friends on their tirade on an abandoned house in the neighbourhood. We see this in his eyes when he looks at his father fixing the car or when he runs along the river with his mother’s clothes in hand. And in these eyes and their expressiveness lies one of the film’s greatest strengths; that dialogue or conventional exposition has been rendered unnecessary with Malick’s expressionist direction and his actors’ immersive performances.

Tree of Life is the modern embodiment of what critics often -- generously in other films' cases -- call visual poetry. The lyricism in Malick's narration of this story conveys sensations that eliminate the need for traditional plot developments. Explanations are only offered sporadically and in passing. We are told early on that Jack’s brother died when he was nineteen and, although this particular twist matters greatly in the story, Malick doesn’t concern himself with it too much as a plot point. Instead, the focus is turned on to the reaction of the family to this tragedy. It’s the collective heartbreak the audience experiences from watching the O’Brien's in their grief that matter most. WInstinctively, we understand Mrs. O'Brien's need for solitude in grief. The agitation she feels with her relatives comes through in the subtlety of the motion of her body. We don’t need to be told explicitly that Mr. O’Brien always thought he could be a great musician; looking at him play the instrument with such spirit and passion in evident in his gestures, through the fluid movements of Malick’s camera, we feel the sensations he does.

Aiding Malick in materializing his ambitious vision are his actors who all deliver praiseworthy work. Brad Pitt, who is slowly working his way up my list of favourite actors, creates the perfect balance between the harsh demeanour of a stern 50s Texan father and his love for his family. Jessica Chastain, whom I admit I had not seen before, completely immerses herself in Mrs. O’Brien and despite having less material to work with than Pitt, avoids the pitfalls of the “supportive mother” role while capturing the angelic beauty of her character. No less impressive is newcomer Hunter McCracken whose career now seems to have the dreamiest start any actor could wish for. Having the task of portraying the internal dilemmas of his awkward age, McCracken lives up to the expectations of the role and becomes a pitch perfect picture of the angst of preadolescent boys and the transition from childhood innocence to a more mature compassion.

Whether Jack or the family as a whole has any connection to Malick’s own history is unknown to me, but if setting the film in his hometown of Waco, Texas is any indication, then the answer might be a yes. Despite Tree of Life’s massive scale and the grandiosity of some of its elements, particularly the aforementioned “creation of the universe sequence”, this is Malick’s most personal film to date. The picture he paints on the screen is the result of his philosophical questions and his long search for the meaning behind the universe and its creator; Concerns that he’s mulled over for so many years and finally brings to the screen now; Questions that he doesn’t answer so much as he proposes. And there lies another one of the film’s strong points. That Malick never force feeds his ideas. He asks us to think differently. He makes us look at simple quotidian things differently, but never makes emphatic assertions. Even the ubiquitous religious motifs don’t seem aggressive at all. The film might be a personal one, but anyone who’s willing to delve into Malick’s dazzling vision can connect with it.

Ultimately, if anything stops me from hailing Tree of Life as a true masterpiece, it’s the scar left on the face of the film by its very long editing process. Not exactly noticeable during the film’s exploration of Jack’s earlier years – mostly due to the free-spirited and arc-free storytelling – these editing inconsistencies and Malick’s obsession with finessing his work to perfection almost fail the film in the surreal beach sequence at the end. I don’t dislike that sequence per se. I think it does work thematically, but it feels more rumpled than nuanced stylistically and unfortunately ends the film on a less than perfect note.

My Top Dozen Most Anticipated Films of 2011

12. Tintin
If Steve Spielberg's doing two movies in a year, one of them has to show up on this list. Between Tintin and War Horse, I'd pick this one because: 1- Tintin is a childhood obsession; Those are the only comic books I've read in my life. 2- The promotional material looked interesting. 3- His chapter is probably going to be better than Peter Jackson's, given Jackson's post Rings career so I'm putting my hope in this part of the series.

11. On the Road
I'm a big fan of the original novel by Jack Kerouac and Walter Salles has proven himself with road films before, but the actors worry me. None of the three leads in this film are in the calibre that the characters deserve, in my opinion. To be honest, I'm not as excited for this particular film as much as I am for On the Road getting a cinematic treatment, I just hope it turns out fine. Regardless of that, the purpose of the list is to talk about the films I'm most definitely going to watch. On the Road is one of them.

10. Winnie the Pooh
I know, I know. "How does anyone rank this film so high on a most anticipated list?" I hear you ask with your eyebrow raised. Well, first of all, films that open on my brithday weekend are always important to me. (Last year's Inception was such a treat.) More importantly, like Tintin, Winnie is something of a childhood obsession and the trailer made me oh so nostalgic. Not to mention that Craig Ferguson, one of my most favourite people will lend his voice to Owl, and his last voice work in How to Train your Dragon was funtastic.

9. Crazy, Stupid, Love
As funny and cheerful as I Love You Phillip Morris was, I'm not familiar enough with the work of this pair of directors to consider them the biggest factor for my interest in this film, but they certainly showed chops at making comedy. Crazy, Stupid, Love gives them the opportunity to work with the funniest TV actor of our times (Steve Carrel), the promising starlet of Easy A (Emma Stone), and two of the finest actors of their respective generations and my personal favourites (Julianne Moore and Ryan Gosling). Carrel and Moore cast as a couple may be quite an awkward match, but the story sounds intriguing and I especially want to see what Gosling can do with comedy after his exceptional work in Lars and the Real Girl.

8. Hugo Cabret
My feelings about the Scorsese films that I've watched range somewhere between "enjoyed", "liked", "loved" and "can't get over how amazing it was, I don't think it can be any better". His last film Shutter Island wasn't his best, but it was an enjoyable venture into genre filmmaking. Hugo Cabret's story is the type of fantasy I usually like and the cast is terrific (Moretz notwithstanding). It also brings Michael Stuhlbarg back to the screen after his incredibly underrated work in A Serious Man. I'm not sure how big the role is but it's nice to see him in a Scorsese film nonetheless.

7. Take This Waltz
My fascination with Sarah Polley will lead me to the theatre to see ANYTHING she does, let alone her second directorial feature with a pairing of Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen.
The premise sounds like something she'll do well with, and the title of the film is taken from one of Leonard Cohen's best songs (cause you know, that's usually an indicator of how good the film is!) I really don't see this one going wrong, so I'll be first in line.

6. A Dangerous Method
Honestly, everything about this film screams perfection. It was about damn time for a top-notch director to take over a project about Freud, or Jung, or better yet, Freud AND Jung. Cronenberg's recent run of films have been brilliant and he's teaming up with his two-time collaborator Viggo Mortensen here. If that's not enough, add Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley to the equation. If this film doesn't excite you, I'm really not sure what will.

5. The Grandmasters
I'm a sucker for visually rich cinema and of today's working auteurs, no one does that better than Wong Kar Wai. In The Grandmasters, he returns to Martial Arts cinema, from which he's been away for almost 17 years now. On top of that, he's reuniting with Tony Leung and we all know how that collaboration turned out before. (In the Mood for Love is in my top 5 favourites of the last decade.) Let's hope for an early North American release.

4. The Skin that I Inhabit
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Bad Education, Volver.
Case Closed!

3. Nader and Simin, A Separation
The Iranian film community and I seem to agree that Farhadi is getting better film by film. This Iranian auteur was largely unknown outside of his native country until his last feature, About Elly won best director at Berlinale and best picture at Tribeca. Separation will also premiere in Berlin this month. Aside from Farhadi himself, there are other factors at play that make me all the more excited for this. The film's production was stopped halfway through by the government, which is Iranian code for "this film is gonna be great." Also, some of Iran's biggest stars are in this film, including three actors from the stellar cast of his previous feature. Whether I'll get to see this film in 2011 depends on how much the TIFF programmers love me, but here's hoping.

2. Shame
Steve McQueen's second effort behind the camera would top my list had it been scheduled for release in any other year. Hunger is one of the most powerful films I've seen in my life and Michael Fassbender gives his best performance there. (That's no small compliment given how great he is on a regular basis.) Here they are reuniting and teaming up with Carey Mulligan for a modern day story set in NYC about a man who has to deal with his sister in the middle of his sexcapades. Interesting premise, amazing cast, promising director and already strong promotional material.

1. Tree of Life
If you remember my list from last year, you probably saw this one coming. Back then, I wrote that the name Terrence Malick alone guarantees a number one spot on a list of this sort for me. As if that wasn't enough, a whole other year of anticipation and a trailer that promises another epic of the scope of Malick's last features have only made me more impatient. June 10th really can't come soon enough.