We are at our final catchup Oscar Ballot. I've thoroughly enjoyed going back to all of the contests we've already done with this series, and officially adding this last little coda onto all of our Oscar Viewing Project retrospectives going forward. This upcoming week we'll finish 2004's Oscar contests off, and so we'll have one last My Ballot this week along with it, and then after that we'll kick off our new season on Sunday. All future seasons we'll have the My Oscar Ballot to cap off the festivities at the end, but these won't be weekly anymore (as I'm out of years, and also these take a lot of work to right on a weekly basis!). But in the meantime, enjoy, and I'll keep the Oscar festivities coming-if you want to see more past ballots or our other Oscar contests from 2012, look for links at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, here is who I would've picked in 2012:
Argo
The Cabin in the Woods
The Deep Blue Sea
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Killing Them Softly
Magic Mike
The Master
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Pitch Perfect
Zero Dark Thirty
Gold: Sentiment sometimes dominates, particularly in a year like 2012 which had a lot of fun films but no movie that totally catapulted to my all-time favorites lists. As a result, I'm going to go with the beautiful, wonderfully-rendered The Perks of Being a Wallflower as my favorite film of the year.
Silver: Behind it is Paul Thomas Anderson's peering look at a man brought into a cult...one of his most daring pictures (we all know who this is about), The Master houses great acting & cascading story.
Bronze: You can make all the jokes you want about its subject matter, but Magic Mike is a movie that shows you don't need to have a heavy topic sentence to give a slice-of-life moment to someone at a crossroads in their life & make it feel important and real.
Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master)
Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty)
Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly)
Steven Soderbergh (Magic Mike)
Gold: I'm switching over to Paul Thomas Anderson here. The movie could've indulged so many of the instincts I sometimes shy away from with him, but it doesn't. It instead gives us a more focused, downward slope for two men, intertwined (and doomed?) to be part of each other's lives.
Silver: Soderbergh feels like a casual observer in Magic Mike, but that's the trick-there's nothing casual about what's happening onscreen as a usurper comes aboard that might rock Mike's world, and give him a change for the future?
Bronze: I'm going to just give it to Andrew Dominik, mostly because of all of the films of 2012 that I revisit, few lend themselves so well to me as Killing Them Softly, a political commentary masquerading as a crime drama. Dominik's followup to Jesse James is everything I could've hoped for.
Philip Seymour Hoffman (The Master)
Logan Lerman (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
Joaquin Phoenix (The Master)
Brad Pitt (Killing Them Softly)
Channing Tatum (Magic Mike)
Gold: Joaquin Phoenix gives the performance of his career as Freddie Quell, a man of strange determination, easily brought in but impossible to control who meets the man who will change his life forever.
Silver: Logan Lerman announced himself as more than just Percy Jackson with Perks of Being a Wallflower, giving a sweet, earnest performance at a crossroads of his life between loneliness & friendship.
Bronze: Magic Mike might be inspired by Channing Tatum's real life, but it's all the actor himself that pours his dreams into Mike, the kind of man we never think past the surface on...an instinct Tatum's passion & zeal make us continually question.
Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty)
Ann Dowd (Compliance)
Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook)
Quvenzhane Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Rachel Weisz (The Deep Blue Sea)
Gold: Rachel Weisz plays her Hester as a woman possessed, finally willing to ask life for answers (and for more than she's been given) even if it means she'll be damned for it, or bring the ones she wants down with her. A seismic piece-of-work from a continually underestimated actress.
Silver: Playing a real person as an empty vessel is extraordinarily difficult-it's hard to not just make the character seem empty. Jessica Chastain achieves this symbiosis, though, making Maya a woman possessed, but with so much unknown by her we only realize as the film goes how little we understand her motivation.
Bronze: Ann Dowd graduated from "I recognize her" to "celebrated character actress" with Compliance, a film that was so uncomfortable for me to watch at times I had to literally stand in the back of the theater, and that's a testament to her work as a woman who desperately clings to authority to justify her actions.
Michael Fassbender (Prometheus)
Garrett Hedlund (On the Road)
Matthew McConaughey (Magic Mike)
Ezra Miller (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
Andy Serkis (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)
Gold: Garrett Hedlund's sexual livewire in On the Road is a complete triumph, the sort of performance that can totally elevate & upend an otherwise okay film. He's never been so good, so inhabited, as he is here as Dean Moriarty.
Silver: Matthew McConaughey, though he won an Oscar for a different film, is the same here-this is the role that he was born to play as a man possessed by his own ambition & ensuring he will stay the crown prince of his tiny little kingdom.
Bronze: Andy Serkis has been here before, but I love the modulation he does to his work in The Hobbit-there's more anger than redemption, you get to see the raw greed that was the inspiration behind Gollum before he chanced upon Frodo of the Shire.
Amy Adams (The Master)
Jennifer Ehle (Zero Dark Thirty)
Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables)
Emma Watson (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
Rebel Wilson (Pitch Perfect)
Gold: Hathaway gets the best part in the movie, sure. But she also plays her forgotten prostitute to the hilt, understanding not only that musicals need a little indulgence in order to work, but also that they need something real to ground the character-she finds that balancing act (and that voice!). Hathahaters be damned.
Silver: Amy Adams needs to find a way in The Master to be both the dutiful wife and to be a threat to the titular crown, someone who knows she is not on the sidelines but must present as such-she does that beautifully.
Bronze: Emma Watson brings the confidence of a beautiful young woman to this role, and then turns it on it's head, showing how that confidence allows people to project a world upon her that she can't live up to, and buckles under those pressures.
Argo
The Deep Blue Sea
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Killing Them Softly
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Gold: Chbosky had the good sense to hire himself as his screenwriter. Another writer might have faltered with Perks of Being a Wallflower, focusing too much on the overhead narration, but Chbosky knows that the open characters onscreen will give us the feel of a diary without it feeling expositional.
Silver: Films like Killing Them Softly are so good you almost take for granted at the end that you saw it all coming, but...you didn't. The way that Dominik gives you touches of the robbery that the government is perpetrating on the people in the movie (while indicting those pulling something similar) is tough, biting political condemnation.
Bronze: I liked Argo, which I know is not always a popular sentiment, but I think it's strong, and I think one of the best ways that comes together is the script. It's difficult to give a story you know the ending to a thriller feel, but the script, bouncy & alternating between comedy and tension, keeps the film moving (and is why this was a hit).
The Cabin in the Woods
Magic Mike
The Master
ParaNorman
Zero Dark Thirty
Gold: One of the great mysteries of the past ten years at the Oscars is how Paul Thomas Anderson somehow got a goose egg for The Master, one of his most sophisticated tales & a movie that envelopes the audience with a moody, languid shot through two men's battle for one soul.
Silver: Horror films don't get enough credit for having a good concept. That's definitely the case for The Cabin in the Woods, which takes a cliche & turns it upside down, subverting our expectations and indicting both the Boomer & Millennial generation's baser instincts in one full swoop.
Bronze: Sometimes chokingly funny (and surprisingly tender), Magic Mike proves that, yes, you can make an intellectual, challenging movie about male stripping which is still sex positive & spry.
Brave
ParaNorman
Wreck-It Ralph
Gold: ParaNorman is not quite the best thing that Laika has done (I still haven't gotten beyond Coraline as their piece de resistance), but it's the movie that feels like it has the most at-stake. The best part about the movie is that it has just enough darkness mixed in with the light that you become convinced (even as an adult) that things could go south for Norman.
Silver: The surprise Oscar winner (this was before it was always just going to go to Pixar), Brave sometimes feels like an afterthought from the studio, which it shouldn't. Beautifully animated (all of that green!), the side detours might not always work but Kelly MacDonald's Princess Merida shows how you can have the whimsy of Pixar & still wander into Disney's Princess territory.
Bronze: Wonderfully cast (and from a pretty ubiquitous slate of actors, that's surprising), Wreck-It Ralph gives us a universe that both skewers & creates from our arcade-obsessed childhoods. Yes, it's borrowing pretty heavily from Toy Story, but that doesn't mean that it isn't treading some new territory (the sequel was unnecessary though).
The Cabin in the Woods
Killing Them Softly
Lincoln
The Master
Zero Dark Thirty
Gold: Kathryn Bigelow's films oftentimes have good sound design, but none come close to Zero Dark Thirty. The commanding switches between quiet & loud are so perfectly executed, particularly in the raid scene, that you are literally clawing into your armrest even if you know how it's going to end.
Silver: Jonny Greenwood's score is used judiciously throughout the movie, a perfect backdrop to the hardwood floors & clicking cameras that intermingle throughout The Master's period sound work.
Bronze: I mean, obviously the shootout scene is a mixing wonder, but it's the entire score, worked so well in the film, and the way that we hear the voices of Presidents Bush & Obama in the background, misdirecting narrators to what's really happening in the movie.
Brave
The Dark Knight Rises
Skyfall
Wreck-It Ralph
Zero Dark Thirty
Gold: The explosion scenes in Zero Dark Thirty are so smartly executed-the symmetry of them (both including Jennifer Ehle), with one seen coming through the sound work, the other totally upending our expectations-this is the kind of detail that makes this picture standout.
Silver: Sound editing frequently comes down to a scene or two with me-what is the moment in the movie that is so dependent on the sound being just right that we need it to go flawlessly. In The Dark Knight Rises, that's the football field collapse...the way it just falls apart is a slow shock for both the eyes...and the ears.
Bronze: The technical proficiency of Skyfall is extraordinary. While I liked the rough edges of Casino Royale better, it's hard to argue that from certain technical standpoints that they stepped their game up here, giving us a rich series of gadgetry and action sequences to listen to.
Anna Karenina
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Lincoln
The Master
Prometheus
Gold: I mean, how do you argue with what Jonny Greenwood is doing with The Master? Greenwood subverts our expectations, giving us a twinkling score with a thunderous, lurking undertone, much like the world promised by Lancaster Dodd.
Silver: The alien forces of Prometheus are a great companion for the music Marc Streitenfeld brings to the movie. There's something a little off, something a little too programmed, about the music, adding to the film's "question everything" mentality as the picture gives us the true heroes & villains.
Bronze: Dario Marianelli plays with the ideas in Anna Karenina in a way that feels almost like you're in a circus. The score never forgets that this is meant to have some theatricality, with all of these players lives lived on a stage, and adds to the ersatz feeling of the central romance (in Joe Wright's eyes).
"Before My Time," (Chasing Ice)
"Freedom," (Django Unchained)
"Skyfall," (Skyfall)
"Song of the Lonely Mountain," (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)
"Who Did That to You?" (Django Unchained)
Gold: Adele's "Skyfall" is so good they gave it two Oscars (let's be real, that's how Sam Smith got that "first gay man" statue). A total badass combination of Adele's dulcet melodies & the richest, "big notes" appeal of the best Bond anthems.
Silver: Scarlett Johansson's raspy voice gives a melancholic sadness to the end of Chasing Ice, the rare end credits song that genuinely adds to the actual movie because as the end credits show these disappearing wonders, you get the underlined sense of the movie's message.
Bronze: A rousing song, feeling as if it's plucked off of a 1970's soul album, "Freedom" is the best of Django's music, and the rare time that Tarantino gives us an original song that he can utilize just as well as his jukebox full of underutilized rock songs.
Anna Karenina
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Lincoln
Prometheus
Skyfall
Gold: You can practically smell the wood of the furniture, the aged papers on the desks...Lincoln gives us something rare in period films, a world that has clutter & feels lived-in, not just a series of historic, meticulous recreations for the screen.
Silver: Yes, The Hobbit borrows in some part from previous recreations, but I love the ways that Stuart Craig takes an iconic look and refreshes it, adding touches of a younger Bilbo (notice how the furniture is slightly less worn, the paint brighter), and better melds the real with the CGI.
Bronze: The ship design in Prometheus is brilliant, and the alien catacombs desolate without ever feeling cheap-these are instantly recognizable while never feeling like they have to be too indulgent to get the "ALIEN!" feel across.
The Dark Knight Rises
Killing Them Softly
The Master
Skyfall
Zero Dark Thirty
Gold: Greig Fraser was still in "Oscar doesn't see him" jail for some reason in 2012, which is criminal considering the cloud-soaked expressiveness of Killing Them Softly, a movie that finds the looks of a recovering New Orleans & paints a picture of a drowned city.
Silver: Fraser would have been equally as worthy for his work in Zero Dark Thirty, here trading in the clouds for the heat of the desert, the sand-swept world Maya floats through-gorgeous cinematography from a master who owned the movies in 2012.
Bronze: The Master is maybe the best at some of the traditional tricks employed by cinematographers to give us mood, particularly in the way it floats between closeup, medium, & wide shots to give us a sense of the contracting/expanding scope of Lancaster Dodd's realm.
Anna Karenina
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Mirror Mirror
Snow White and the Huntsman
Gold: Genuinely one of the best Oscar lineups I can remember for this category (and they didn't have to go so all-in), I'm mirroring the Academy's choice of Anna Karenina, which is not just grand costume period porn, but it also winks at the one-upsmanship of the cast, everyone trying to increasingly outshine their moneyed rivals at court.
Silver: Mirror Mirror is not a good movie. It is, however, a movie that knows how to look good. The late Eiko Ishioka's designs are covered in crimson & salmon, and filled with such good-natured fun...it's like everyone's wearing a birthday cake (in the best way possible).
Bronze: There's something so marvelous in the way that Sharen Davis not only modernizes the wear in Django Unchained, but also finds a way to pay homage to the looks of the Blaxploitation films of the 1970's that Tarantino is clearly trying to emulate (less successfully than Davis) in his filmmaking style.
Argo
The Cabin in the Woods
Killing Them Softly
The Master
Zero Dark Thirty
Gold: Frequently, you could accuse a long film of not being edited enough. That's not really the case for The Master, whose story relies not just on pacing but also misdirects to keep the audience guessing as to each character's intentions. You get that in the cutting room, not just from the actors.
Silver: Zero Dark Thirty is also a film that occasionally will test your patience, but it does that with a purpose. It wants you to feel the descent that Maya is feeling onscreen, as her humanity strips while she tries to find a way to complete her mission-that's the editors (plus, that raid scene justifies this nomination alone).
Bronze: I've talked a lot today about how Killing Them Softly feels like it's two stories, one action sequence & other a political documentary, merging on top of each other. That happens in the editing room, trying to intersect two narratives to ensure that you feel the effects of both as the movie ends.
Anna Karenina
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Lincoln
Looper
Snow White and the Huntsman
Gold: The Hobbit totally builds off of the previous films, but here there's not as much to start with & perhaps the prequels even outdo the originals. In rapid succession we're given a dozen dwarves that have to have distinctive looks & feels, and the makeup team is given the heavy-lifting in distinguishing these adventurers.
Silver: I did not enjoy the movie Looper at all, but I'm not blind, and the work done to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's face to make him realistically feel like an earlier version of Bruce Willis is some of the best transformation work I've seen in a while.
Bronze: It's hard to understand how Lincoln (which was on the shortlist) missed with the Oscars considering the period detailing on display in this movie, not just transforming the titular character, but everyone feels like they've been transported from the 1860's in terms of hair & hygiene.
The Dark Knight Rises
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Life of Pi
Prometheus
Snow White and the Huntsman
Gold: Life of Pi is a hard film to love (it doesn't lay as well in the memory the further you get from it), but its visual effects are majestic to behold. Richard Parker feels like an authentic, real-life tiger...you don't doubt the whole film that you are looking at a flesh-and-blood animal, which is an achievement.
Silver: As I've said already, The Hobbit is indebted to its three predecessor films to get to where it is (though pretty much all films at this point are indebted to LOTR in terms of their effects), but the VFX artists play with the movie's lighter tone, particularly with the cartoonish Goblin King & the bright lights of a young Rivendell.
Bronze: Prometheus is the kind of movie that is brimming with gorgeous effects, but honestly, this medal is happening because of that out-in-cloudy-daylight scene of Charlize Theron running from a circular spaceship-such a great action set-piece & visual trick.
Also in 2012: Picture, Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Animated Short, Live Action Short, Previously in 2012
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