Oscar Nominations 2012 - Thoughts

The Oscar nominations are in and, in many ways, represent the nostalgic haze currently sweeping Hollywood. French sleeper hit The Artist, a dialogue-free, black-and-white film about the death of silent cinema and rise of talkies, gets ten nominations but is just pipped by Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a 3D celebration of the pioneering cinematic work of Georges Melies, which scooped eleven nominations in total.

As ever when the Oscar nominations are announced, there are notable omissions and inexplicable decisions. The winner in the Best Demonstration That The Academy Is Stark-Bollock Raving Mad category went to the revelation that sentimental drivel-fest Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close received a Best Picture nomination while Drive, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Shame, Young Adult, 50/50 and Melancholia got nothing. In addition, Steven Spielberg may well feel aggrieved that his work on War Horse hasn’t warranted a nomination for Best Director, while the Best Actor nomination for A Better Life’s Demián Bichir also comes as a surprise, especially considering the likes of Michael Fassbender, Michael Shannon and Ryan Gosling were snubbed for Shame, Take Shelter and Drive/The Ides of March respectively. 

The irritating trend this awards season has been the continued love-in for Woody Allen’s time-travelling, evocative blah-blah-blah Midnight in Paris. It’s inexplicable – not only is it yet another Allen film that fails to recapture the magic of his output in the 1970s, but there are also, as mentioned above, a number of arguably worthier candidates battling for nominations this year. Nevertheless, Midnight... gets four nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. Stupid Academy morons.

The full nominations for the six main awards are as follows:

BEST PICTURE
The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

BEST DIRECTOR
The Artist - Michel Hazanavicius
The Descendants - Alexander Payne
Hugo - Martin Scorsese
Midnight in Paris - Woody Allen
The Tree of Life - Terrence Malick

BEST ACTOR
Demián Bichir - A Better Life
George Clooney - The Descendants
Jean Dujardin - The Artist
Gary Oldman - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt - Moneyball

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Kenneth Branagh - My Week with Marilyn
Jonah Hill - Moneyball
Nick Nolte - Warrior
Christopher Plummer - Beginners
Max von Sydow - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

BEST ACTRESS
Glenn Close - Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis - The Help
Rooney Mara - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep - The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams - My Week with Marilyn

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Bérénice Bejo - The Artist
Jessica Chastain - The Help
Melissa McCarthy - Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer - Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer - The Help

My predictions:

Best Picture - It’s hard to see anything but The Artist tap-dancing off with the top prize. Aggressive marketing and promotion by the Weinsteins has led to widespread award success, and it will probably pay off here. However, the Academy does like to shake things up, so it would not be a particular shock to see of the nominees except Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close winning. I’m sticking with The Artist.

Best Director - Michel Hazanavicius deserves this for having the courage to make a film like The Artist in an increasingly unoriginal and creatively stagnant cinema. Although he may be challenged by Golden Globe-winning Martin Scorsese, it seems unlikely that the Academy would reward the director it has previously overlooked for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Aviator for a 3D children’s film. Payne, Allen and Malick haven’t won enough elsewhere to be considered serious contenders for the prize.

Best Actor - Although it would be perfect for Gary Oldman to win for his incredible reinterpretation of George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it looks like a straight fight between Jean Dujardin for The Artist and George Clooney for The Descendants. Dujardin is good, but Clooney’s one of the Academy’s darlings, and he’ll probably win here.

Best Supporting Actor - In a fairly weak category this year, Christopher Plummer looks set to win the Oscar because of his age more than anything else (though his role in Beginners, as an octogenarian homosexual, is the kind of risqué fare the Academy likes). Having been overlooked for the last 50-odd years and losing the same award to Christoph Waltz in 2009, he should easily beat his rivals this year.

Best Actress - No contest. Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady. It’s terrifying to think how bad that film might have been had it not had an actress of Streep’s calibre carrying it. Michelle Williams and Viola Davies should count themselves unlucky they’re up against Streep – in any other year, they would have been runaway favourites for the Oscar.

Best Supporting Actress - In another odd set of nominations, the smart money’s on Octavia Spencer for her role in The Help. Jessica Chastain is nominated for the same film but should have been in for The Tree of Life, her best performance in the year she broke into the mainstream. Bérénice Bejo arguably could have been nominated for Best Actress, though it’s unlikely she would have won anything in that category either. It’s also nice to see Janet McTeer get some recognition for Albert Nobbs. 

Right. I’m off to put a bet on.

Shame Review

Shame is a film that you do not want to see with your parents. This compulsive, often painful-to-watch film entirely puts paid to the idea that an addiction to sex is the best kind of addiction to have. Very few have attempted to tackle it as subject matter, for the simple reason that it must be nigh-on impossible to find an actor bold enough to play such a draining role. Fortunately, Michael Fassbender and director Steve McQueen seem to have a shared affinity for bringing difficult themes and topics to the screen, and to audiences who may not appreciate them. It is to their credit that they do.

Fassbender plays Brandon, a suave, thirtyish New Yorker who has a good job and a cool bachelor pad. He is also driven to orgasm several times a day with pick-ups, prostitutes, porn and masturbation in the worst kind of ways. As soon as he wakes, we hear ticking, as if Brandon is constantly counting down and dreading the point at which he has to find release. Pleasure is the last thing he feels now – a sequence towards the film’s end shows his face in close-up as he tries to come so he can move on with his life until next time. His feelings of anger, pain, frustration and despair all appear on his face at some point during that scene. It looks like the worst way to live. He is stuck in a hellish loop which he appears to have little chance of escaping, and comparisons can be made with American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, a similar character with a very different craving.

The film also stars Carey Mulligan, who does a thoroughly convincing job as Brandon’s sister Sissy, another damaged, self-harming and obsessive soul whose gig singing a stripped-down, self-indulgent version of New York, New York in a trendy jazz bar leads to her sleeping with Brandon’s sleazy, womanising-although-married boss Dave (James Badge Dale). We get hints of the experiences that have shaped the lives the siblings lead, but no more. With the BAFTA nominations newly released, it is a surprise to see Mulligan nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category not for the British-funded-and-produced Shame, but for the American-funded-and-produced Drive, in which she gave a solid but hardly earth-shattering performance. One wonders what goes through the heads of the voters at BAFTA and the Golden Globes sometimes.

This is the second collaboration between Fassbender and McQueen after 2008’s equally powerful Hunger about IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands. One of the stand-out scenes in that film was a single-take medium-shot of Sands and a priest talking for the better part of ten minutes, and McQueen utilises the technique again in Shame during an awkward dinner-date conversation between Brandon and his co-worker Marianne (Nicole Beharie). It looks briefly like he might have a real chance of a proper relationship with her, but once the distance he prefers to keep between him and his sexual partners is broken, he runs into problems once again. By the film’s end, his shame is agonizingly laid bare to the audience. 

The film’s greatest achievement is to help bring mainstream credibility to the notion of sex addiction – Brandon, brilliantly and bravely played by Fassbender, cannot change and lacks the mental strength to do so. There is no happy ending, nor is there likely to be. He can only continue to bear the scars of addiction, humiliation and shame.

4.5/5