My 2013 Oscar Ballot

Each Thursday until we're caught up, we will be doing a different Oscar ballot to compliment our Oscar Viewing Project, and this week we'll be starting in 2013 (links to all past Oscar contests are at the bottom of the article).  The Oscar Viewing Project focuses specifically on seeing & ranking all of the actual Oscar categories, but I will now be ending series with these articles, giving not only who I would have nominated (having now seen a large chunk of each year through the OVP), but also who I would've given the trophies to from a given year.  I suspect you get the gist-let's get into 2013!

Picture

12 Years a Slave

Before Midnight

The Bling Ring

Blue is the Warmest Color

Gravity

Her

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Inside Llewyn Davis

Short-Term 12

To the Wonder

Gold: Years after the fact, I still lean toward Short-Term 12 of this bunch.  Brie Larson's best performance, it features a bunch of then up-and-comers (Rami Malek, Kaitlyn Dever, & LaKeith Stanfield all show up), and just unfolds with a great story & look at human nature.

Silver: Some may scoff in retrospect, but they are fools to think that Gravity doesn't hold up years later.  Sandra Bullock uses her movie star prowess to make a film about one woman's journey for survival...and along the way self-discovery.

Bronze: The conclusion(?) of the Celine & Jesse trilogy gives us a look into happily ever after, and what truly comes after as we get a portrayal of a marriage & the loves (and hurts) that endure from giving your life to someone.

Director

Sofia Coppola (The Bling Ring)

Destin Daniel Crettin (Short-Term 12)

Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity)

Spike Jonze (Her)

Richard Linklater (Before Midnight)

Gold: I'm going to flip the script here a little bit & not go with my Best Picture winner.  Alfonso Cuaron has to manage not only a gigantic, almost alien green-screen that needs to look authentic, but also keep a compelling narrative going with basically just one main character.  That's a tricky, gargantuan task & he lives up to the order.

Silver: Again, it's hard not to go with Linklater creating an ending for his trilogy, one that cannot possibly sweep up in the sheer romance of the first two, but provides depth & reality to two characters we've loved for decades.

Bronze: Crettin gets the difficult task of directing a team of extremely talented but inexperienced actors to performances that must read as authentic & true to his film.  Naturalism is a hard task to undertake, and he does so gloriously here.

Actress

Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)

Sandra Bullock (Gravity)

Julie Delpy (Before Midnight)

Adele Exarchopolous (Blue is the Warmest Color)

Brie Larson (Short-Term 12)

Gold: You could make the argument that since her Oscar win for Room that Brie Larson's career has slightly disappointed.  You'd only make that argument, though, if Room was validation of her talent, as anyone who saw Short-Term 12 can attest she's the real deal as an actress.

Silver: Cate Blanchett has spent most of the past twenty years batting home run after home run, and so of course she gives one of the best performances Woody Allen has coaxed out of an actor this century as a desperate, washed-up socialite dealing with her own mental illness.

Bronze: Sandra Bullock will never be a Daniel Day-Lewis style performer, but the best movie stars know who they are and how to bring that character out in a perfect script.  The All-American starlet of the 1990's brings a quiet steadiness to her astronaut in peril in Gravity.

Actor

Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street)

Ethan Hawke (Before Midnight)

Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis)

Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station)

Joaquin Phoenix (Her)

Gold: Joaquin Phoenix, frequently so intense in his film work, finds a nerdy, altruistic charm to his everyman in Her, a movie that feels prescient in an era of us trapped in our homes.

Silver: Oscar Isaac came onto the national spotlight with Llewyn Davis for a reason.  His work here is worn, never inauthentic as he finds a realistic journey to self-discover while also remaining grounded in who his character is.

Bronze: Speaking of people who broke out cinematically in 2013, Michael B. Jordan's work in Fruitvale Station put him on the map, here with a care about bringing to life a man whose story we only know from an all-too-familiar news byline.

Supporting Actress

Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle)

Sarah Paulson (12 Years a Slave)

Lea Seydoux (Blue is the Warmest Color)

Octavia Spencer (Fruitvale Station)

Emma Watson (The Bling Ring)

Gold: Octavia Spencer has spent much of the past decade as one of the most indispensable character actresses, and as one of Oscar's favorites.  It seems odd to me that for potentially her best performance, playing a mother of a woman trying to hide her own fears (and their levels) that she virtually went unrecognized at awards ceremonies.

Silver: Jennifer Lawrence at this point in her career had proven that she was clearly a good actress, but had yet to have a movie that leaned into that charisma.  American Hustle she enters in and totally upends the movie with a kind of once-in-a-blue-moon star power.

Bronze: Speaking of character actors who have proven themselves this decade, few actresses have earned the sterling reputation they now have more so than Sarah Paulson, who shows not only her command of the screen but a simmering hatred below the surface as Mistress Epps.

Supporting Actor

Colin Farrell (Saving Mr. Banks)

Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave)

John Gallagher, Jr. (Short-Term 12)

Tom Hanks (Saving Mr. Banks)

Ian McKellen (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug)

Gold: Michael Fassbender finally got his Oscar nomination after a long stretch of being one of the best reasons to go to the movies, and it couldn't have come for a better role.  Playing a vicious, domineering man with deep-seated insecurity, he creates a menacing, complex villain.

Silver: Tom Hanks is the nicest guy in Hollywood, and he brings that twinkle to his Walt Disney, an admittedly sugar-coated version of the filmmaker, but one that fits beautifully with the story of two PL Travers (young & old) admitting their spot in a crossroads.

Bronze: You couldn't have Tom Hanks excellent "father figure" role without a counterweight in Colin Farrell, a man with the same magic that an older Walt provides, but one whose issues with alcoholism prevent him from ever being the success young PL Travers wants him to be.

Original Screenplay

Blue Jasmine

Enough Said

Frances Ha

Her

Inside Llewyn Davis

Gold: Predicting the future should not win you Oscars, but if it did, the world where we are reliant upon our phones as our best friends & confidantes that Her inhabits surely would take the statue.  A better reason to give it this Oscar would be that it's a thoughtful, judgment-free look at love, loneliness, & our desire to make a connection (wherever it may lead).

Silver: The Coen Brothers know how to write...this is not a secret.  But here they meld their quirkier dark humor with a sense of adventure, as our Llewyn becomes an unconventional Jack Kerouac, ready to bring his music (bitterly) to the world.

Bronze: Few films have better captured the younger Millennial experience (optimistic, limited worldview, perpetually cash-strapped) better than Greta Gerwig's Frances Ha script.  Honestly this deserves this trophy for the weekend-in-Paris idea alone.

Adapted Screenplay

12 Years a Slave

Before Midnight

The Bling Ring

Blue is the Warmest Color

Short-Term 12

Gold: Linklater, Hawke, & Delpy create a concluding chapter worthy of the series by not just extending our complicated romance, but giving us a tough, fair, but rewarding final installment of the Celine & Jesse trilogy.

Silver: A movie with great quotes & authentic dialogue, Short-Term 12 gives us heart & true ensemble characters as different plot lines interweave seamlessly.

Bronze: While Greta Gerwig tried to find the best of the Millennials with Frances Ha, Sofia Coppola goes after their worst-a movie that shows the problem when everyone needs to be a star (no matter the cost).

Animated Feature Film

Ernest & Celestine

Frozen

The Wind Rises

Gold: This is honestly a race I wrestle with, as there are days where I reverse this because I don't think that the hype was quite what it was meant to be at the time (and the sequel didn't help matters).  That being said, I still think I'd pick Frozen for this trophy as it's such a wintry & well-planned animated feature.

Silver: So close behind it is The Wind Rises, which was meant to be Miyazaki's swan song but turns out to be just a movie before a long sabbatical (if rumors are to be believed), would've been a fitting & moving end to the director's complicated, challenging filmography.

Bronze: One of those gems that Oscar brings to your attention through a surprise nomination, Ernest & Celestine is such a charming movie, filled with impressionist-inspired animation & it occasionally feels like you've fallen into a storybook.

Sound Mixing

Gravity

Inside Llewyn Davis

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Lone Survivor

Man of Steel

Gold: Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity kind of stands apart as its own creation when it comes to the tech categories.  With its Sound Mixing, it finds most of its power in silence, giving us long stretches of deafened quiet to underscore the loneliness of space.

Silver: Musicals are always making a play in this category, but just cause the songs are catchy doesn't make the sound work stellar.  Llewyn Davis, though, finds a beautiful timbre for its thoughtful, melodic music-it almost feels like you can hear it bouncing off of the wood floors.

Bronze: Few war films this decade have had the kind of specificity with their work as Lone Survivor did in this movie-giving us as much tension in a cascade of bullet fire as it does the crinkling of a tree branch against the ground.

Sound Editing

Gravity

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Lone Survivor

Man of Steel

World War Z

Gold: The crashes in Gravity seem to burst from the silent air, a constant rush of adrenaline coming after a heartbreak-inducing lull of calm...it plays like a horror movie with petrifying aural jump scares.

Silver: Lone Survivor may have a problematic, he-man storyline, but the Academy got it right when they found this picture for its sound awards.  The relentless attack, even during the more subdued scenes, gives us a sense of realism that you rarely get from a war film of this styling.

Bronze: While there are the fights at Mirkwood that make you take notice, it's really the entire sequence with Smaug & Bilbo that wins this nomination for me, a coin-clicking, fire-breathing achievement in sound design.

Original Score

12 Years a Slave

The Book Thief

Gravity

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Short-Term 12

Gold: Films like Short-Term 12 rarely need the kind of instantly iconic score to accompany them-they feel complete without something melodic soaring through the background.  But here the film gives us a sparse, piano-driven score that feels like an essential companion to our young stars.

Silver: A traditional score, but one with flowing, elegant dramatics that back up what the movie needs-a movie that will give us action motifs without ever stepping on the sound design that can make the film so terrifying.

Bronze: I am still mystified why Hans Zimmer didn't get nominated at the Oscars for this movie, his best work in at least a decade that gives us a thick, rich score that goes just off-the-beaten-track enough to give the film a depth of uniqueness.

Original Song

"Atlas," The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

"Best Song Ever," One Direction: This is Us

"Finding North," A Place at the Table

"I See Fire," The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

"Let It Go," Frozen

Gold: Eight years later, and it still has a place in both pop culture & in our collective Disney imagination-"Let It Go" is a great anthem within the movie & outside, totally defining a character in a few minutes.

Silver: Peter Jackson's sextet of songs throughout his Middle Earth journey are all winners, each giving an atypical summary of what we've just seen onscreen.  Ed Sheeran, during the early precipices of his fame, totally nails the climactic quest of Desolation of Smaug.

Bronze: Sometimes, what we love is not entirely logical.  I'm aware there are other "technically" more proficient songs both in this lineup & outside of it, but in terms of transporting me back to a movie & a place/time, I cannot deny the quick buzz of "Best Song Ever."

Art Direction

12 Years a Slave

The Conjuring

Gravity

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Saving Mr. Banks

Gold: Sometimes sequels that are nominated for the tech categories rely entirely too much on the worlds that they've already created.  That isn't the case with Desolation of Smaug, though, which gives us the gorgeous frozen city of Esgoroth, one of the most impressive spots in the entire 6-film series.

Silver: The genius of 12 Years a Slave's production design is in the way that it feels like this set has existed for decades.  The worn furniture in the Epps' manor, the way that the houses look like the wood is sweating from the heat...the attention to detail is magnificent.

Bronze: Gravity initially feels like an unusual movie to nominate here (it's in space-where is the design), but the hyper-realistic look to the space stations, the confining, emptiness of it all, compliment the movie itself beautifully.

Cinematography

12 Years a Slave

The Bling Ring

Gravity

Inside Llewyn Davis

To the Wonder

Gold: It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between cinematography & effects with a movie like Gravity, but Lubezki is clearly in the driver's seat during key moments in this film that require a world-class cinematographer, particularly in the 12-minute initial take of this movie (a precursor to his long shots in Birdman the following year).

Silver: Lubezki goes 1-2 in this category with To the Wonder, a film largely forgotten in the Malick pantheon, but one that finds beauty in everything from a herd of bison to a Sonic drive-in.

Bronze: Sometimes cinematography isn't about just making something beautiful-it's about instructing the audience in ways that don't give away the film's ending.  This is the case with the well-lit, but utterly vapid shots of closets & cookie-cutter mansions in The Bling Ring.

Costume Design

12 Years a Slave

The Bling Ring

Blue Jasmine

The Great Gatsby

The Invisible Woman

Gold: Like its production design, 12 Years a Slave gets its genius from the atmosphere of the movie, with you seeing the sweat & heat coming off of the clothes, and the wear-and-tear of not having quite enough money to make things look trim-and-tailored (this isn't Tara).

Silver: It's rare you come away from a period piece convinced that it was the menswear that was the best-in-show, but this was the case with The Great Gatsby, with brilliantly-lined clothing (and one knockout pale pink suit) becoming the star.

Bronze: Like 12 Years a Slave, The Invisible Woman knows how to get across the differentiations of class not through the script, but through the costuming.  The rigidity of what we're seeing Joanna Scanlan in (almost as if she's overwhelmed by the outfits, just like she is her marriage) is particularly well-constructed.

Film Editing

12 Years a Slave

The Bling Ring

Blue is the Warmest Color

Her

Gravity

Gold: All of these movies have strong editing.  Only one of them, though, lives or dies by that editing-Gravity doesn't work unless you feel like you're in the film, overwhelmed alongside Sandra Bullock.  That requires rapid-fire skill from the cutting room, and that's what we get here.

Silver: The Bling Ring might feel like an unusual choice here, but hear me out.  Name another movie of this style that both captures the onslaught of celebrity that happens to these characters (as if we are the paparazzi looking in), and plays with long & short scenes to give us a sense of danger at each heist.

Bronze: Editing a film like Her is tricky-you have Joaquin Phoenix onscreen without a visible scene partner for long periods of time, and you have to make it feel like he's not just talking to himself.  Her never makes it feel that our titular character isn't real (even if she's just a computer).

Visual Effects

Gravity

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

The Lone Ranger

Man of Steel

Pacific Rim

Gold: I mean, is there an option of going somewhere other than Gravity?  The film is arguably the most influential special effects film of the past ten years, focusing on hyper-realistic space travel that only adds to the movie's relentless action.

Silver: In virtually any other year the creature of Smaug would've been impossible to deny.  While there are countless effects throughout the movie that are worth our adulation, Smaug, terrifying, present, & shifty is an incredible achievement.

Bronze: No, Pacific Rim is not a good movie.  But its visual effects are splendid, taking where Transformers left off & giving us bursts of color & steel in every corner of the screen.

Makeup & Hairstyling

American Hustle

The Great Gatsby

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Lee Daniel's The Butler

The Lone Ranger

Gold: Bizarrely left out of the Oscar lineup, American Hustle is a solid look at how you can make hairstyling be a part of a character's personality without ever letting it overwhelm (or mock) the larger-than-life figures onscreen.

Silver: The Hobbit continually does strong work with its makeup, here having some of the standouts be Stephen Fry's Master-of-Laketown and the decaying Lee Pace's Thranduil.

Bronze: Spanning decades, The Butler not only has to adapt to period makeup & hair trends, but it also has to make sure that we never stray too far from the conventions of its characters.  In a movie that frequently feels "too much," its work here feels just about right for the tone Daniels is setting.

Also in 2013: Picture, Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score,  Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2013

OVP: Picture (2013)

OVP: Best Picture (2013)

The Nominees Were...

Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Steve McQueen, and Anthony Katagas, 12 Years a Slave

Charles Roven, Richard Suckle, Megan Ellison, and Jonathan Gordon, American Hustle

Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, and Michael de Luca, Captain Phillips

Robbie Brenner and Rachel Winter, Dallas Buyers Club

Alfonso Cuaron and David Heyman, Gravity

Megan Ellison, Spike Jonze, and Vincent Landay, Her

Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, Nebraska

Gabrielle Tana, Steve Coogan, and Tracey Seaward, Philomena

Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joey McFarland, and Emma Tillinger Koskoff, The Wolf of Wall Street

My Thoughts: I honestly don't know why I seem to have to drag these write-ups on-and-on-and-on (I now have a bit of sympathy for those people who keep showing up at these awards shows and losing), but here we are, finishing off our fifth OVP awards, with what will likely be the beginning of the sixth OVP near the beginning of February.  We've been through almost every aspect of all of these films (see the links below for the curious), but we will now go into a cohesive look at all of the pictures, starting with, for no reason in particular, Captain Phillips.

As I stated above, we've dissected most of these films to death, but when it comes to the overall picture, I cannot help but wonder why it was that this film couldn't find a way to maintain the momentum when it came to the final third that it picked up in its center.  The movie is SO riveting when we are showing a face-off between Captain Phillips and Abduwali Muse, a battle of wits between two men with complicated histories.  And yet, once it comes to the final third, it's entirely about good vs. evil, and it's hard not to see that the problem lies with the true story aspect of the film.  You can't go around making the guy who signed his life's story rights away look anything other than noble.  But as a result, this film never really delivers.  It has the action, the suspense, but never the true chutzpah to make the film compelling in a way that a Best Picture should be-a Best Picture should challenge the way you think or see a movie, not just merely be watchable for the bulk of it.

That's what makes something like Her so special.  Her is admittedly one of those films that would have gotten minimal nominations were it not for the expanded Best Picture field (five years in, I kind of get the appeal of the ten-wide field as Best Picture should tower a bit over the other categories, though I'm completely checked out when it comes to the "random" number of Best Pictures as it instantly puts a smell of putrid on a year if only five films get nominated as opposed to the ten eligible).  Her is compelling both because it's a beautiful, rich, and thoughtfully-acted film (there's not a bad performance in the mix, and this includes actors like Olivia Wilde who I am sometimes a bit unsure of), but also because it's meaningful.  Her is a film that ten years from now will likely look more correct than it does today-with advances like Cleverbot and an increasing number of people who have friends that they have never actually met (through epistolary methods, a weird throwback trend from the 19th century), the thought of having a relationship with a machine in a similar way to Theodore and Samantha hardly requires any sort of jump in reality.  Jonze knows this, and continues to put cold pricklies of "this is about to happen" alongside the warm fuzzy of a true cinematic romance for the modern age.

Nebraska, on the other hand, is less inclusive of the modern age, though it claims to be a part of it.  The reality is that this film gets a little close to home as I have relatives that resemble the Grant family in a number of ways.  Hell, if you put me in the middle of my next family reunion, I'd be able to point out at least a half dozen Woodys or Kates-people who have long since checked out on change in their lives, but have opinions on what is happening, no doubt.  However, the film doesn't get points for correctly identifying a specific aspect of life in the Midwest, and it's the rest of the film that suffers as a result.  The younger generation, that of Will Forte's, is what makes this film shift from reality to satire to stretched-beyond-reason-universe.  The biggest problem with Nebraska is that it isn't believable.  No one could spend more than a few minutes with Woody and not realize that his mind and grip on reality has disappeared, and as a result the entire uproar of Woody becoming a millionaire seems absolutely ludicrous.  The film, as I mentioned in the initial review, on rare occasions stumbles across something worthwhile (the scene where Kate has it out with her relatives about decades-old grudges feels like something that distant familial relations, relying more on a sense of duty than a sense of love to continue spending time together, would do in a tense situation), but those moments are so few-and-far-between and the rest of the film is too silly to be taken seriously, certainly when there are so many more worthwhile movies begging to be nominated.

The same could be said for Philomena, a slightly more accurate depiction of aging and the complexities that come along with it (it helps that this is based on a true story in that regard).  The film lives and dies with Judi Dench's performance, which is at times wonderful if occasionally it feels like this role was specifically written for Dench, who could do something like this in her sleep.  The problem with this is that there is a category to reward Judi Dench called Best Actress, which she already was nominated in and as a result we don't really need Philomena here.  This is particularly true because Steve Coogan doesn't quite know what kind of movie he's making, which is a major problem in a way I haven't seen in a major film in recent years.  Like Captain Phillips, it isn't willing to demonize its real-life main character, and while it isn't as necessary to make the film interesting, it also isn't interested in demonizing almost any character outside of the nuns.  I HATED the way that Dench's son's lover becomes such a crucial aspect of the story and then he barely budges when Dench shows up wanting answers, though he never gives us any explanation about why he fought off talking to them in the first place.  There are too many inconsistencies within the narrative, and too many jumps from comedy to drama (as if the film never really decided what it should be).  Frequently it feels like a meddling studio executive was breathing down Coogan's back, telling him to make the dramatic film funnier because it's easier to sell one of the three reigning British Dames (Dench, Smith, and Mirren) in a comedy.  This hurts the film badly, as it doesn't have the emotional resonance that a straight drama would have done.

The Wolf of Wall Street is not a film afraid to demonize its main character.  If you leave the film wanting to become Jordan Belfort, you clearly left halfway through or were so distracted by Margot Robbie's insanely shiny hair that you didn't really have room to care about anything else.  The movie, though it does glamorize the lifestyle of Belfort (sorry Marty, I love you, but there's no way around it), also makes the central character wholly unappealing, and you have to have a pretty rough moral compass to want to accomplish what he did in the same fashion.  The biggest problem with the movie, for me, was not whether the movie made this lifestyle appealing (again, Margot Robbie and a yacht is pretty high on most people's wish lists), but in the way that it doesn't know how to handle an ending we already know.  This is a true story-everyone knows what happens to Jordan Belfort in the end, and at three hours Scorsese's pacing doesn't indicate that to us-he gives us too much side story (the Jean DuJardin part seems written specifically to add a recent Oscar winner to your cast list) and not enough grounding in moving things along.  I feel for Thelma Schoonmaker, who purportedly had to cut hours of movie from the film just to get it down to the current time, but we needed to kill more of the darlings, to paraphrase Stephen King.  Still, though, the acting was very strong from the three leads, which keeps it a bit more afloat over something like Nebraska.

A film like Dallas Buyers Club (yet another true story in a Best Picture field full of them) uses its real-life origins more as a crutch than as an inspiration.  The reality is that this film could never have been made if it wasn't a true story.  The ire of watching a bigoted, homophobic man transform into an ally for HIV-victims would have gotten too many protests.  Yes, HIV and AIDS affected straight people (and continues to affect straight people), but the reality is that in the early days it affected the gay community far more heavily, and the cold hard fact is that the first significant theatrical film about the epidemic in twenty years shouldn't have been about a man who wouldn't have given a damn about AIDS victims if he wasn't one of them.  In this way, the film feels too Hallmark, too cloying to really be taken seriously.  It ignores too many aspects of the early AIDS pandemic (particularly that people associated it too freely with gay people, and that President Reagan largely ignored the outbreak because it affected a population that many of his most fervent supporters thought "deserved it"), and it never really succeeds in making Ron anything more than someone who looks out for Number One, and maybe eventually Number Two in Rayon.  The performances seem too reliant on tics and weight loss and assumptions, and the movie itself suffers in that regard.  This is a bad film about an important subject with actors who can be truly great if they want to be, and it feels like the sort of film that will age pretty poorly five years from now when we look back on this race.

Though it's a bit by coincidence, we'll end this write-up with the three films that actually competed for the Best Picture prize rather than just were nominated for it: American Hustle, Gravity, and 12 Years a Slave.  One of these two is not like the other thing, and American Hustle, which amassed a staggering ten nominations without a win (this isn't a record, but it's one short of it), is easily my least favorite of the three.  The film suffers partially due to what I usually refer to as a balance problem.  This is when an ensemble has characters that aren't at relatively similar interest levels.  You find that the humdrum performance of Christian Bale in the lead (and to a slightly lesser extent, Amy Adams) hurts the rest of the movie because you're far more interested in what is happening with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, who are not evil enough to be villains but clearly aren't good enough to be victors.  Overall, though, I felt like Bale's lack of charisma/gusto in the lead role, combined with a film that frequently doesn't know what flight-of-fancy to pursue next (what the hell is up with Sydney's motivations-someone must know!) left the movie with a bitter taste in my mouth that even subdued expectations couldn't meet, much less ten Oscar nominations.

Gravity, on the other hand, lives up to its task at hand.  Yes, the film occasionally has character development problems with George Clooney, and occasionally the dialogue could probably use a pickup, but by-and-large, this is a pretty hard-to-top sort of motion picture.  I love the way that it reaches literal and figurative heights with the effects.  This is about something that we have seen hundreds of times in movies and television: space, that final frontier, and yet it makes that world come alive again.  It also makes space feel big, unexplored, and sort of inspires everyone that goes home from it to wish that we'd move a little bit faster on getting out into the atmosphere.  I also think that when it comes to a movie, while subject matter isn't what should be the driving force (a great film can be about ANYTHING), I do love when a film commits to that subject matter.  There's no need to push aliens or anything resembling craziness into this movie-it's a roller coaster thrill ride all on its own.  Cuaron uses a story about one person, one individual, and the way that they fight back in the face of staggering odds, and not only doesn't make it cliche, he makes it feel fresh.

If we were handing out prizes for treatment of subject, it'd be hard not to give the award to Steve McQueen's blistering biopic 12 Years a Slave.  The film comes the closest of any movie that I've ever seen at trying to depict the atrocities of slavery in a real, true way.  The movie has in its supporting corners some marvelous performances from the likes of Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o, and Sarah Paulson, and Chiwetel Ejiofor does the best he can with the lead character (like all biopics, his Solomon suffers from too much "saintliness"-even the best of men have flaws, and we don't get that in 12 Years, which makes him as a protagonist someone we can sympathize with, but not necessarily someone that feels real, instead making him too anonymous in his own movie).  At least he's better than the cavalcade of overacting from Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, and Benedict Cumberbatch that show up for their paychecks but add little other than Snidely Whiplash-style acting.  Still, these are pretty small complaints about a film that generally succeeds in almost all of its pursuits.  The movie finds ways to seem incredibly claustrophobic-there's few if any scenes (save for the one with Brad Pitt toward the very end) that gives us indications of what is happening in the world (most films would have had newspapers or overheard conversations to give our main characters hope), and there are moments in the film like Solomon's wandering through the woods or with Mistress Shaw that feel so complete you almost expect there to be another movie about these characters (but there isn't, giving us a sense of how widespread and how MANY stories vanished during this time period).  The movie is at its best when it finds this almost gothic, harsh reality giving the viewers little reprieve from the devastation on the screen.

Other Precursor Contenders: As we've mentioned a couple of times (if you're brand new to this blog, there's a heap of links below to both past 2013 and past Best Picture races that I'd encourage you to start reading, as they'll be well worth your time, I promise!) the Globes sort of threw genre to the wind, so most of these films made the cut even if their placement is questionable: Drama went to 12 Years a Slave over Captain Phillips, Gravity, Philomena, and the Oscar-snubbed Rush while American Hustle topped Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, and The Wolf of Wall Street in Comedy.  The PGA Awards actually had a tie(!) between 12 Years and Gravity (this was, headed into Oscar night, one of the closer Best Picture races in a while), taking out American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, Nebraska, Saving Mr. Banks, and The Wolf of Wall Street.  Finally we have the BAFTA which went with all Best Picture nominees (they're one of the few races that's still five-wide), as American Hustle, Gravity, Captain Phillips, and Philomena all lost to 12 Years.  It's actually quite hard to tell which film would have made the cut in a ten-wide field: Saving Mr. Banks and Inside Llewyn both under-performed with Oscar (and Rush didn't register at all), while Blue Jasmine and August Osage seemed more like acting triumphs.  At the time I was predicting Blue Jasmine a bit higher than others were, and Sally Hawkins' inclusion over Oprah Winfrey probably indicated a bit wider support than anticipated, so I'll guess that.

Films I Would Have Nominated: Whew-there's a lot of movies here, but it was a pretty strong year for Hollywood in 2013.  In a field this wide, I would have surely found room for the gem-like Short-Term 12, the wonderful regret of Before Midnight, the magically-felt To the Wonder, the nastily shallow The Bling Ring, and the epic Blue is the Warmest Color to go alongside a few of my favorites that Oscar selected.

Oscar’s Choice: While the race appeared pretty wide by this category's standards, 12 Years seemed to gain small victories over Gravity and American Hustle in every precursor, which is what happened with AMPAS.

My Choice: Gravity.  While it might not be the most "important" film, occasionally ground-breaking effects and truly compelling filmmaking deserve the Best Picture trophy, and so I'm going with Cuaron's epic.  I'll follow it with Her, 12 Years, Wolf of Wall Street, Captain Phillips, Philomena, American Hustle, Nebraska, and finally Dallas Buyers Club.

And we are officially done with 2013, just as 2015 has now rolled around!  Like always, what are your thoughts on this race-are you with the consensus that 12 Years was the year's best film, or are you (like me) championing one of the also-rans?  Anyone want to get out and defend Nebraska or Dallas Buyers Club?  And since this is the end of 2013, get all of your last thoughts out on last year, as we're well on our way to a new slate of nominees for 2014!

Also in 2013: Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score,  Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2013

Past Best Picture Contests: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

OVP: Director (2013)

OVP: Best Director (2013)

The Nominees Were...

Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity

Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave

Alexander Payne, Nebraska

David O. Russell, American Hustle

Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

My Thoughts: Frequently, you have to wonder what drives someone to split their ballot between Picture and Director in the Academy.  In so many people’s minds, these are essentially the same thing.  The director helms the picture, is involved (and many times, responsible) for where it heads and almost every aspect of the film’s ultimate product.  It seems smart that they are synonymous in the minds of voters.  And yet, on occasion, even when they have the option not to, they end up splitting the vote, which was the case with 2013, when the Best Picture winner beat the Best Director winner and vice versa.

It’s hard to argue with the results, at least when it comes to Best Director, however.  Gravity is clearly a director’s achievement.  It takes a visionary to conceive of something so vast and yet so clearly rendered.  It isn’t that we haven’t gone into space before as a cinematic audience: Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas have ensured that we have ventured there countless times before.  But Alfonso Cuaron managed to do something we haven’t felt in a long-time: he made it real and within our reach.  Though of course Sandra Bullock is floating around in some earthbound feat of technology, you can feel the sheer grandeur of the heavens, the enormity of the earth, and even more daunting and petrifying, the stunning infinity of what goes beyond our atmosphere.  Cuaron’s direction uses that pressure, the way that we cling to the world we know, as vast and expansive and insanely large as it may be to an effect I’ve never seen before in a movie.

Steve McQueen also knows how to play a bit with the world beyond our own, though he does it in a far more controlled environment.  Set in the American South, 12 Years a Slave, the best choices that McQueen makes as a director aren’t the wide expanses of the humid South, but instead by showing us the moments just beyond our hero Solomon’s reach-McQueen gives us just enough side moments, with hints of future atrocities that are taking place on neighboring farms or indications of the thousands of other men and women put into slavery.  The actual central story occasionally veers too closely to a traditional narrative (mostly because it’s based on a true story), and I wasn’t wild about the framing of the ending, but there are so many distinct touches in this film that you can easily forgive the occasional tangent into the expected.

The Wolf of Wall Street was Marty’s eighth nomination for Best Director (and his twelfth overall-the man will be discussed quite a bit in our OVP write-ups).  Therefore, it’s not unexpected for Marty to be in this lineup.  What is unexpected is the way that Marty can continue to create controversy.  I know that one of the conversation pieces about Wolf of Wall Street was regarding Marty’s alleged glamorization of Jordan Belfort’s life, but let’s take a step back and wonder what this actually meant.  Unlike, say, Nebraska (oh, we’re getting there), Wolf is a film that can pull multiple different angles and viewpoints into its web.  Certain people defended Scorsese’s opulent, oftentimes garish look into the world of wealth-at-all-costs, others lambasted him for turning Belfort into a humane victim-of-circumstance.  Personally, I was in the middle, but the fact that Scorsese can still create a movie that is epic in scope and be the most rightfully controversial of the bunch is a testament to his continued care toward his filmography.  The Wolf of Wall Street is occasionally overlong, but it’s always fascinating to watch, and Scorsese continues to have something fascinating to say to the audience.

That’s less than I can say for Alexander Payne in Nebraska (see, we got there).  Payne’s lack of a directorial vision is clear, or at least it’s clear and far too convoluted to be celebrated.  The movie is essentially supposed to be about the debilitating way that Alzheimer’s rips apart the moments we expected to have as we got older, and the way that only a few family members know you through your life and get to be there for the good, and more so, the bad.  However, through Payne’s lens these interesting thoughts that the script occasionally has are bounded down by trying for too many “let’s-show-how-simple-the-flyover-states-are” comic moments and too little unearned payoff, particularly with the two sons and their journey.  Payne rarely has anything interesting to say with where his camera is pointing, frequently just catching reaction shots and not lingering in a way that made Election far more interesting than expected.  If his filmography is going to continue to be a downward slide, my hope is that the Academy at least realizes this so I don’t have to continue to watch his increasingly tepid and boring pictures.

The final nominee is another director who has traded the more interesting for the conventional.  There’s more to like in American Hustle than Nebraska, mainly thanks to the occasionally interesting performances and the outlandish but fairly accurate makeup work (I think this will probably be my last gripe in this direction, but what was AMPAS thinking skipping American Hustle for that trophy?).  However, Russell’s work itself is a total letdown.  This film is too all-over-the-place in where it takes its characters and frequently takes tangents (like the entire Robert de Niro extended-cameo thing) that go nowhere and has the characters so constantly second guess themselves that you leave not knowing who they were, and not in a good way (the only way that the ending pays off is if we care enough about Bale and Adams’ characters to actually feel that the wool has been pulled over our eyes, and we don’t know them as their true selves enough for that to payoff).  All-in-all, a step down from the interesting places he took The Fighter a few years back, and like Payne, a continual lack of payoff in his work.

Other Precursor Contenders: Best Director is one of those rare fields where the Globes, Guilds, and BAFTA awards all have the same number of nominees (aside from the supporting actor races, this is the only OVP category where this is the case).  Therefore, we should expect uniformity, and for the most part that's what we received.  The Globes gave their top trophy to Cuaron, but skipped Scorsese in favor of Paul Greengrass for Captain Phillips.  The DGA Awards also honored Cuaron, and also found room for Greengrass, but in this case it was at the expense of Alexander Payne.  The BAFTA Awards also honored Cuaron (sensing a trend here?), also honored Greengrass, and once again we saw a miss for Mr. Payne.  All-in-all, Greengrass was clearly the sixth place and one of the odder misses considering that Payne's picture is even if you throw out your opinions of the film, less of a director's achievement on paper.

Directors I Would Have Nominated: I certainly would have found room for Sofia Coppola, who created something mesmerizing and a uniquely true vision in The Bling Ring (her films, unlike Payne's, continue to get more interesting and add to her overall filmography, even if less people and critics are seeing them).  I also would have found room for Spike Jonze's Her, a monumental look at the ways we learn to love and use technology to replace humanity in our lives.  And I'd finally like some sort of recognition for Richard Linklater's continued brilliance with the Jesse-and-Celine trilogy, all three of which were wonderful, with Before Midnight being the most bitter and perhaps the most "directorial" of the films.

Oscar’s Choice: Oscar continued the trend of honoring Cuaron, with McQueen and Russell falling behind.

My Choice: I'm going to go with the consensus here-Cuaron's work in creating a unique filmic achievement in Gravity is too difficult to ignore, and why would you want to?  McQueen follows, with Marty, Russell, and Payne coming behind.

Those were my thoughts-how about yours?  Did you also find Cuaron to be the perfect choice for the winner, or were you hoping for McQueen?  Does anyone else feel that Payne and Russell continue to have less interesting things to say the more celebrated they become?  And why is Marty immune from this trend?  Share your thoughts, as well as your choice for Best Director of 2013, in the comments!

Also in 2013: Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score,  Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2013

Past Best Director Contests: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012