We are going to step slightly out-of-chronology here & go back to 2005 rather than continuing counting backwards into 2012 (if I'm going to give a proper final ballot for 2012, there's a movie I want to rewatch first). We are only doing these for years I've seen every Oscar nominee, so 2005, our most recent completed ballot, felt like the perfect option. I won't preamble too much here, as you're getting familiar with the drill, but if you're not...I viewed every one of the Oscar nominees as part of our Oscar Viewing Project in every narrative, feature-length category (all of the previous contests are at the bottom of the page). Here I'm presenting who I would put on my ballot if I'd gotten to pick all of the nominees at the Oscars that year. Like with the Oscar Viewing Project, I'm picking my very favorite performances of the year without considering anything else (like if an actor or artist is overdue or over-honored). Enjoy!
Brokeback Mountain
Cache
The Constant Gardener
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Good Night, and Good Luck
King Kong
Match Point
The New World
Paradise Now
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
Gold: Probably my favorite film of the aughts, Brokeback Mountain is a complete, compelling movie from start-to-finish, establishing us in a once-in-a-lifetime love story, and then continually pulling us back, forcing us to embrace our remembrance of that union as society & time pull Ennis & Jack into directions that lead to the film's inevitable end.
Silver: Few films feel more prescient than Cache, a movie that is part mystery, part family drama, but as the movie ages, increasingly about how we put ourselves in the spotlight, constantly shining a camera on the things we don't always understand or acknowledge in our past & present.
Bronze: While Terrence Malick has gotten some harshness in the past few years for his increasingly abstract movies, in 2005 it was still a Brigadoon-level event whenever one of his movie showed up. A gorgeous, epic look at the beginning of Jamestown, told through a fresh lens.
George Clooney (Good Night, and Good Luck)
Michael Haneke (Cache)
Peter Jackson (King Kong)
Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain)
Terrence Malick (The New World)
Gold: Ang Lee's magnum opus is a tender film, one that needs to feel both old & modern. He achieves that through careful, selective direction, taking moments to go in on our lovers, and when to pull back & just let us appreciate the shifting landscape.
Silver: Haneke's genius as a director is knowing what to hold back. Here, we are left with more questions than answers as the movie keeps going, but that's because he's laying out the evidence just as our protagonist finds it-he knows everything we know, which makes it all the more frightening...
Bronze: Terrence Malick's movies are so beautiful, you'd be forgiven for thinking they just happen that way through the cinematographer. But it takes a director with a keen eye, sometimes one his own actors don't appreciate, to film something as introspective & majestic as The New World.
Joan Allen (The Upside of Anger)
Juliette Binoche (Cache)
Julia Jentsch (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days)
Naomi Watts (King Kong)
Reese Witherspoon (Walk the Line)
Gold: Star power is an underrated virtue in the movies these days, where the value seems to be more on transformations & mimicry. Reese Witherspoon doesn't just capture the look of June Carter in Walk the Line, but through her sheer magnetism she encapsulates the spirit of a frustrated, ambitious country singer in love with a man she thinks could be better than he is.
Silver: Juliette Binoche is probably our greatest working actress, and you see that here. Notice the way that she handles the men in her life (her husband & son), the similarities and the differences in her approach, and the way it compares to the other women in their lives.
Bronze: Naomi Watts adapts to the King Kong film with a sort of old-school glamour that I could not stop raving about at the time, and holds up just as well in hindsight. She instills a type of Silent Era stillness to her Ann that matches perfectly with a giant ape.
Daniel Auteil (Cache)
Ralph Fiennes (The Constant Gardener)
Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain)
Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain)
David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck)
Gold: My favorite performance of the 2000's, Heath Ledger gives us a character for the ages as Ennis, a man in love in the wrong time, never quite understanding himself, and finding his footing only in tragedy & loss, uncomfortable with what is in his heart.
Silver: Gyllenhaal has the trickier part of the two leads even if it's not the baitier one-he has to be louder, demanding things that he doesn't know how to articulate. "I wish I knew how to quit you" is spit out not just at Ennis, but in Gyllenhaal's hands he hurls it at the universe.
Bronze: Daniel Auteil, like Binoche's part, needs to be both inner & outer in Cache. He is a figure that is known for giving off himself (he's a TV show host), but always being in control. Auteil understands the inner-anger of a powerful man forced to play a game that's not on his own terms.
Amy Adams (Junebug)
Maria Bello (A History of Violence)
Anne Hathaway (Brokeback Mountain)
Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener)
Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain)
Gold: Michelle Williams' part, like many in Brokeback Mountain, requires her to give a sense of her understanding of a situation that she can't articulate outwardly to the audience. She does that so well by being caught between wifely obedience (something she was taught to understand) & a child's inability to comprehend why her husband seeks out another man.
Silver: Weisz has a difficult task of playing a woman so powerful, her memory can haunt over the rest of the picture. That's a lot to put on an actor, forcing them to make a strong enough impression she drives the back-half of her film, but the actress, graduating from B-movies into the big leagues, does so perfectly.
Bronze: The movie that brought Amy Adams onto our radar still remains one of her best performances. Her Ashley would be a joke in another actress's hands, using the character's "simplicity" and kindness as humor for the audience, but Adams makes her real, earnest but never false. That's a miracle to be able to play, and was the reason we all continue to hope Adams eventually gets that Oscar.
Maurice Benichou (Cache)
Matt Damon (Syriana)
Brendan Gleeson (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)
Christopher Plummer (The New World)
Andy Serkis (King Kong)
Gold: In an unusual field, I am going to tip my hat to Andy Serkis, whose work as an ape (and also in some scenes as a man) is captivating. Serkis' has become the go-to for motion-capture not just because he's a pioneer of the technology, but because he's a brilliant actor which we see in his tender Kong.
Silver: A more conventional performance comes from Matt Damon, a cynical man who must confront his own morality after he endures unspeakable tragedy. Damon plays his Bryan as someone who cannot change who he is, but who he is might have been a more honorable man than he (and we) initially suspected.
Bronze: The acting in the Harry Potter films usually got relegated to the backend, with us not appreciating the fine (genre) character work that the Royal Shakespeare Company that the directors assembled are doing in the faculty. In this film, Gleeson plays his Moody as a crazed, duplicitous, but intriguing individual, totally eating into the fun of the script.
Brokeback Mountain
The Constant Gardener
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
A History of Violence
King Kong
Gold: I have read the original story of Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx many times, and every time I marvel about how the writers of the film found such a full, complete story from such a sparse (beautiful) tale. A perfect example of succinctness & structure.
Silver: Movies with enigmatic characters at their center frequently suffer from revealing too much or not trusting the audience will catch on to the story. This isn't the case with A History of Violence, which is certain that you'll get to the finish line with these more-than-what-they-seem characters.
Bronze: Another thriller, The Constant Gardener is both taut & organized, the latter an unusual compliment for a script, but one that is so crucial to this film, which needs you to be vested in the tale of these characters every step of the story (which you are thanks to the writing & acting).
Cache
L'Enfant
Good Night, and Good Luck
Match Point
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
Gold: What Hitchcock might be making in the 2000's, if Hitchcock was willing to go beyond just titillating the audience, and instead was willing to absolutely ravage our sensibilities with near constant terror. A thought-provoking, challenging work, and Haneke's finest.
Silver: Biopics fall into such a rut that you'd be excused for thinking that the tale of Edward R. Murrow might just be another ode to impressions. But that's not the case with George Clooney's magnum opus, a beautiful, jazzy script that pays as much homage to the Red Scare as he does modern journalism (and its decline).
Bronze: Always a dangerous game to recognize Woody Allen these days, but you cannot deny Match Point is his best script from this century, a sharp look at money, class, & what we're willing to sacrifice as we move our way to the top of the pile.
Howl's Moving Castle
Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Gold: Finding a followup to Spirited Away was surely an arduous task for Hayao Miyazaki, but you'd barely be able to tell while encountering the gorgeous, fantastic work of Howl's Moving Castle, an epic & poetic look at witches, wizards, & curses.
Silver: Tim Burton was once ingenious in all of his work, but since the turn of the century he saves his most inventive work for the world of animation. Corpse Bride rises above (get it?) its conventional plot & predictable script with splendid visuals & fun vocal work.
Bronze: Though some of the humor is a bit dated, that doesn't mean that Aardman didn't bring charm as Wallace & Gromit get their first feature-length movie. Bonus points for the cheeky homage to the monster movie genre (ripe for parody).
Brokeback Mountain
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
King Kong
Munich
The New World
Gold: Sparse scores sometimes falter in their execution. While cinematic music is supposed to be a background character, it feels dismissible if it's not done well. Gustavo Santaolalla's work in Brokeback Mountain, though, uses every inch of its canvas, giving us a rich, iconic melody to cling to in the film's tender moments.
Silver: Music is subjective, and I get that. But I love a big score, one that invites itself in & shows off that it can have personality, flavor, and live up to what we're expecting from the filmmakers. That's exactly what we get from James Newton Howard in King Kong, a set list worthy of its gigantic title character.
Bronze: John Williams' Munich is the better of the composer's many 2005 scores (the last year he seemed to truly be everywhere), with the action set-pieces elevated by a full-bodied orchestra & a smart reliance on string instruments.
"In the Deep," (Crash)
"A Love That Will Never Grow Old," (Brokeback Mountain)
"The Maker Makes," (Brokeback Mountain)
"The Remains of the Day," (Tim Burton's Corpse Bride)
"Travellin Thru," (Transamerica)
Gold: 2005 was the rare respite for screen songs, as the 2000's were arguably the worst decade for this category (even if you pick your own lineup) without musicals to guide us through. Part of that is the perfectly-felt soundtrack of Brokeback Mountain, and its haunting Emmylou Harris ballad "A Love That Will Never Grow Old."
Silver: It says something about how good of a song this is that I'm willing to put Crash not only on this list, but to have it beat one of the the Brokeback numbers AND Dolly Parton. But that's what "In the Deep" does-it's a melancholy dirge that sums up its exact moment in Crash exactly.
Bronze: Dolly isn't far behind, though. Transamerica has a lot of problems (in many ways, it has aged just as poorly as Crash), but Dolly brings her gifts as America's best living songwriter with this bouncy, charming ode to the road.
Brokeback Mountain
Good Night, and Good Luck
King Kong
The New World
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
Gold: The best trick that Terrence Malick plays in The New World is how he seems to, in the film's opening chapters, genuinely transport you so completely that you feel you're actually visiting Jamestown in the 16th Century. Much of that is unlocked in the naturalism of his sound work.
Silver: Brokeback Mountain does a similar sort of transformation, though to a much more modern era of the 1960's, steeped in realism & accompanied by a barely-there (but still memorable) soundtrack melding into the background.
Bronze: I'm not always about the smaller sounds, though, and can acknowledge that King Kong turns things up to eleven with care. One of the better aspects about Kong is that it doesn't cover the dialogue-we hear what the actors are saying, and it does a smart job of mixing in James Newton Howard's score.
Batman Begins
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
King Kong
The New World
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
Gold: It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the Mixing & Editing when it comes to King Kong, but that's kind of the point. The movie does a stellar job of giving us distinction as it unfolds, particularly when it comes to the animal sounds & the siege of the boat.
Silver: The whirling gadgetry of Batman Begins is oftentimes forgotten in the shadow of its more successful followups, but the sounds (especially of the car & anything involving Scarecrow) in the movie click with the darkened world Christopher Nolan is inviting us into.
Bronze: Like Kong, The New World does a strong job of making its sound work blend so much that it's hard to distinguish which boats & gunshots are real & which are melding into the background. But like I said above, the sound work is doing a lot of the time travel heavy-lifting, as we'd be able to distinguish an inauthentic achievement.
Good Night, and Good Luck
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
King Kong
Memoirs of a Geisha
Pride & Prejudice
Gold: The worlds of Kong are distinct and invite you in-Skull Island is properly expansive, a place out of space-and-time, while the shots of modern day New York City give a snow-covered glimmer to a Manhattan of old.
Silver: Even judging on the curve of "only honor what's new to the picture," we are in for a treat with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, with the decadent Yule Ball being arguably the single most beautiful set design of the entire series to date.
Bronze: Memoirs of a Geisha has the easiest in of these five films (beautiful, flower-coated worlds for the audience to explore), but the overuse of red-and-brown give us a sense of the cloistered beauty in this world-not everything is as it seems.
Brokeback Mountain
Cache
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Good Night, and Good Luck
The New World
Gold: Possibly the most beautiful film of the 2000's (give or take...maybe scratch that "possibly"), The New World is a rich, immersive landscape, lush with green & promise in a way that makes it feel like it's all CGI, even though it's real. Lubezki is a genius.
Silver: In almost any other year Rodrigo Prieto's intimate, almost claustrophobic camera angles in Brokeback Mountain would take the gold. Alas it will settle for second, though the way the camera almost guides the story along makes me itch for an upset.
Bronze: Unlike the Academy, I don't automatically crush on anything shot in black-and-white. That being said, there's something about the nightclub motif of Good Night that moves beyond mere black-and-white and gives the film an elegant aura, as if we're watching a film actually from the 1950's.
Brokeback Mountain
Memoirs of a Geisha
The New World
Pride & Prejudice
The White Countess
Gold: Memoirs of a Geisha probably would've gotten this nomination under literally any circumstance (it's that kind of movie), but it demands first place through the way that it gives its character's more depth. The floral kimono that Zhang Ziyi wears to contrast the garden or the dangerous elegance of Gong Li's fur stole-this is why Colleen Atwood remains an icon in her field.
Silver: We've seen so many iterations of the Bennets & Mr. Darcy that Jacqueline Durran would be forgiven for having no new ideas over Pride & Prejudice. She doesn't though, by giving us simple designs & enough similarity between the five sisters' gowns so that we notice the differences, accentuating the characters themselves.
Bronze: The best parts of Brokeback Mountain's costuming are when we see the clothes as extensions of the people onscreen. The clothes feel legitimately worn, like they were pulled out of the back of a closet or drawer, and have enough distinct color similarities that you notice them when the ending of the film relies so heavily on you recalling a specific pair of shirts.
Brokeback Mountain
Cache
King Kong
The New World
Paradise Now
Gold: Clean lines, elegant cutting, & brevity are what define Brokeback Mountain. A strong editor brings that out in the movie, and gives us a love story that always feels like it's slipping away, even when it's just starting.
Silver: Cache risks boring the audience into a stupor with the multiple stationery camera scenes, where you're meant to be seeing absolutely nothing (or is there more?), but the film's editors strike just the right balance between "long enough that it's jarring" and not risking you glancing at your watch. In a thriller, that's an equilibrium you must achieve.
Bronze: The bigger action sequences of King Kong happen without any hiccups, and are constant adrenaline rushes. Think of the showdown between Kong and the T-Rex, or Kong fighting Adrien Brody on a jagged cliffside...these are succinct & edge-of-your-seat.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Good Night, and Good Luck
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The New World
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
Gold: In a year brimming with franchise installments & reimagining of classic characters, an otherwise unmentioned film takes our top prize here, with Tilda Swinton's White Witch & James McAvoy's Mr. Tumnus being the standouts in a film brimming with quality iconography.
Silver: I don't always value realism this much (we go to the movies to escape), but damn if The New World doesn't totally get me on this front. The almost virtual reality quality of stepping back in time means that the movie needs to be just right to get us signed up, and that's what the hair & makeup team bring to this picture.
Bronze: Makeup isn't always about prosthetics & aging & the unusual...sometimes it's just about making everyone look good. This is what happens with the elegance of Good Night, and Good Luck, which clearly not only brought some sharpness to its cast, but likely was an inspiration for Mad Men.
Batman Begins
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
King Kong
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
War of the Worlds
Gold: At a time when Peter Jackson's inventiveness was kind of the benchmark for the visual effects world (he eventually would "fall into shadow" with his next, horrible film), there was really no beating Kong. Obviously the boat, island, & plane attacks would rate a spot on this list, but the gold goes to the way the VFX artists enhanced Andy Serkis' terrific performance.
Silver: For all that people can say about the prequels (and at this point they've said it all), they did usher in a new era of visual effects wizardry, and I cannot ignore that even when the movie surrounding them is of questionable quality.
Bronze: A very tight race here (made tighter by a recent viewing of HP4), but Batman Begins does some truly ingenious work with its practical effects & early, scrappier chase sequences (particularly the new Batmobile) that feels like it just exceeds the gigantic dragons of Goblet of Fire (but it's close).
Also in 2005: Picture, Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Original Score, Original Song, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2005
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