A reasonable number of pretty good movies came out in 2011, but not too many really good ones. Here are links to my reviews in Taki's Magazine of Oscar nominated films in chronological order.
Rango -- Best Animated Feature. Gore Verbinski's reptilian Western is ugly but amazing.
Bridesmaids: Best Original Screenplay for Kristen Wiig and Best Supporting Actress for Melissa McCarthy, who is very funny. It's good to see a non-Woody Allen comedy recognized in the overly serious Oscar nomination.
Midnight in Paris: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. For the first time in a long time, Woody Allen deserves his nominations for this slight but delightful comedy.
The Tree of Life: Best Picture, Best Director (Terrence Malick), Best Cinematographer (Emmanuel Lubezki from Mexico who would be a deserving winner) -- I managed to miss the first 15 minutes due to traffic, so I enjoyed it a lot more than everybody else did. There's a beautiful 90 minute movie about growing up in Waco surrounded by a dull 45 IMAX film about the Big Bang. In my view, the Tree of Life glass is 90/135ths full, but others have been known to differ.
Jane Eyre -- Costume Design. Michael Fassbender, who was good in this as Mr. Rotchester and three other movies (X-Men, A Dangerous Method as Carl Jung, and Shame), didn't get any nominations this year.
Transformers -- Three technical nominations for a better than expected fighting robot movie. I had a good time at this film.
Harry Potter -- Three technical nominations for what was a disappointing end to an admirable franchise.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes -- Just a Visual Effects nomination, with Andy "Gollum" Serkis once again denied a Best Supporting Actor nod. What's the over-under year for when Serkis will get his Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy: 2035?
Drive -- Just a sound editing nomination for a kind of cool movie. I think if they'd made the heroine into a femme fatale, it would have kicked it up the last notch, but hardly anybody makes femme fatale movies anymore. The dominant male audience disapproves of them.
Moneyball -- Best Picture (but not Best Director, so it won't win BP), Brad Pitt (I would have picked his performance in Tree of Life), Jonah Hill (who was excellent as the stat nerd), and, of course, a Best Adapted screenplay nomination for Sorkin and Zallian. Ranked on a degree of difficulty scale -- it's a baseball statistics movie -- this might be the most remarkable accomplishment of the year. On the other hand, it's a baseball statistics movie ...
The Ides of March -- An Adapted Screenplay nomination for the Democratic primary campaign movie, but kind of forgettable.
Margin Call -- J.C. Chandor's Wall Street movie got a Best Original Screenplay nomination: "Speak to me as if I were a young child or a Golden Retriever. It weren’t brains that got me here, you know that.”
The Descendants -- A potential Best Picture winner, although it's not really that good. But it would be a decent placeholder Best Picture winner like last year's The King's Speech. In 2020, everybody will go around saying that the Academy was nuts to give the Oscar to The King's Speech because we all realize now that the most important movie of 2010 turned out to be ... But the problem is that we don't know what movie from 2010 will look like the real landmark in 2020. (And something else will seem better in 2030, and so forth.) In the mean time, though, while we're waiting, The King's Speech was a perfectly okay Best Picture winner. Similarly, Alexander Payne's The Descendants is a very nice movie, and would be a respectable Best Picture winner until everybody figures out what really should have won.
Hugo -- Led the pack with 11 nominations.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- A lot of technical nominations, but no Best Picture or Best Director nod for David Fincher, which seems about right. Maybe it will send Fincher the message not to waste his skills on junk like this.
The Iron Lady -- Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher
The iSteveier movies of 2011 -- Bad Teacher, X-Men: First Class, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and The Guard -- didn't garner much Oscar love. It's clearly some kind of conspiracy.
In other news, the great Gary Oldman finally got himself an Oscar nomination.
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Michael Fassbender, who was good in this as Mr. Rothschild...
Emergency typo siren on this one Steve - like Jack Benny's employee and the city formerly home to Kodak, it's Mr. Rochester.
In other news, the great Gary Oldman finally got himself an Oscar nomination.
oldman was terrific as george smiley, but "tinker, tailor" was too short to tell the whole story properly. i spent 15 minutes explaining what happened to some lady in the movie theater bathroom after the movie, and then another half an hour for my mother over dinner afterwards -- and i only understood it 'cause i read the book/saw the alec guinness version. that was a seven part (seven hour?) series, and that's about what was needed to tell the story right. (^_^)
A lot of times though, the 'placeholder' really is pretty sad fair.
Moreover, in some cases the Academy is determined *not* to reward the 'important' film.
"Apocalypse Now" may have a hard-to-figure message where Kurtz is concerned, but few today would deny that ending movement is fascinating, as is the rest of the film. "Kramer vs. Kramer" is a ridiculous champion, but Oscar felt Coppola had been given enough (even if he was robbed for Director on GF Part I.).
Barry Lyndon and Nashville are both surely better than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Barry Lyndon in particular would've made a fine point to award Kubrick. But *then* what if fanboys who fall asleep because not enough ultra-violence decided it's soporific instead of the blazing art film epic it really is? So perhaps it's just as well . . . .
Otoh, Milos Forman's glorious Amadeus, a humanized take on the stageplay that becomes a Rococo fantasia on "Othello" was the right pic in '84; but secondguessers often want Joffe's moralistic The Killing Fields in its place. And Menges stole Ondricek's cinematography Oscar too. Rearview respectability's troublesome, and some films are too good to be considered anyway.
I saw "The Descendants" with my brother, who loathed it. His observations seriously degraded my generally positive initial reaction to the film, especially as I thought about them over the following days.
I loved the director's "About Schmidt" (not that I can really say why), but there was something wrong with the acting in this movie. It seemed fake from beginning to end.
And then I found this:
"If You Liked the Descendants, You are a Terrible Person"(http://tiny.cc/aaicp)
...which brought up a number of other points that hadn't occurred to me.
In any case, I would not call it "a very nice movie."
Nick Nolte was nominated for "Warrior." I thought the film was fantastic.
Smart and funny list. (Not that I saw any new movies in 2011 ...) But, boy oh boy, do I respond differently than you do to Gary Oldman. He's always struck me as one of the most bogus actors of all time. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Andy Serkis for a lifetime award? Pah. What about Deep Roy? He was a chimp when Serkis was playing Gibbons Monkeys.
Gilbert Pinfold.
I'm still not sure about "The Tree of Life," but it was a useful reminder to rewatch Malick's "The Thin Red Line" which, this time with a much better tv and sound system, was extraordinary.
"And the award for the latest halfway-likable actor that the Eastern Establishment Fanboys hype halfway to the moon goes to....
Michael Fassbinder!"
this should have been shortlisted for docutmentaries::
http://battleforbrooklyn.com/
Battle for Brooklyn is a documentary film about the Atlantic Yards project, which attempted to parachute a new neighborhood, including a basketball arena, into downtown Brooklyn. The only problem? There was already a neighborhood there.
lots of isteve stuff here, race politics, corruption, scots irish power....
My favorite film of last year was "Win Win".
"oldman was terrific as george smiley, but "tinker, tailor" was too short to tell the whole story properly."
I've not seen the Oldman version for this reason. The novel, Tinker, Tailor, is Dickensian in the intricacy of its plot and the number of its characters.
But now that I'm remembering just how brilliant Oldman is--I believe he could play the Invisible Man without the aid of any special effects at all--I'll have to see this truncated version.
"Maybe it will send Fincher the message not to waste his skills on junk like this."
That movie looks like it was custom made for aging 1990's alt types who hadn't already grown out of their edgy phase by the time "Fight Club" came out. It doesn't seem like a film the current generation would find the least bit compelling or interesting.
"Apocalypse Now" may have a hard-to-figure message where Kurtz is concerned, but few today would deny that ending movement is fascinating, as is the rest of the film.
Ever seen the "Director's Cut"? Apocalypse Now should've won "best editor."
What are the isteviest books of 2011?
Toy Story III probably should have won BP last year. Although it's obviously not the kind of film the Academy takes seriously, it succeeded on every level: visually, technically, comedically, and thematically.
People still care about the Oscar? Now I am awaiting eagerly the real relevant movie award - The Golden Raspberry.
Ever seen the "Director's Cut"? Apocalypse Now should've won "best editor."
Indeed.
BTW, 1994's Oscar winner "Forrest Gump" was an insidiously awful film. A well-acted, well-directed but insidiously awful, horrible film.
Re: Toy Story 3, I thought Inception was hands down the best picture of last year.
Two years ago I argued that the animated Up was far better than it's fellow nominees.
BTW, 1994's Oscar winner "Forrest Gump" was an insidiously awful film. A well-acted, well-directed but insidiously awful, horrible film.
As are most movies by the overrated Bob Zemeckis.
Ray Sawhill - Got to disagree with you about Gary Oldman.
But never mind that...
I looked at your site and was reading about you and suddenly realized who you were, feeling very pleased with myself, until the end of the page where you outed yourself.
So I can't claim any bragging points!
Coppola did wield cut on both "Apocalypses", obviously.
Granted, Coppola's been revisiting alot of his films in the editing room. Like most who do so, he's usually adding in. But then, the people who are going to watch are completists.
I find "Apocalypse Now Redux" a bit hard to digest on account of the changes in Willard's characterization-- some moments of frivolity, some lapses in judgment-- but on the whole, I approve the longer version heartily.
There's a beautiful 90 minute movie about growing up in Waco surrounded by a dull 45 IMAX film about the Big Bang. In my view, the Tree of Life glass is 90/135ths full, but others have been known to differ.
That's funny. You're right about both parts. The coming-of-age content is outstanding. It's clear that Malick loves 1950's America, especially the highly differentiatied gender roles. I have no idea where some of the commentators on your original review got the notion the movie's theme is "the white man is evil."
Glad someone cares about the Oscars, so we don't have to.
Thanks Steve!
Yes. Give the astute Svigor a cigar. The D.C. Is horrible. I would watch Oldman act all the speaking roles in Apocalypse Now rather than watch the directors cut again. And I think Oldman strikes me the same as you, Sawhill...
Re: Drive, the reason why the male audience disapproves of femmes fatales is because they're so SWPL-ized and feminist-oriented.
I think males would approve of genuine femme fatales, since they reflect an aspect of women which is seldom acknowledged in today's feminist culture - female manipulativeness, egotism and evil.
It's a weird year when there are more deserving Best Actress nominees than Best Actor. Swinton should have been nominated rather than Michelle Williams, who is becoming a total pain, and she was ridiculous as Marilyn Monroe.
Brad Pitt getting a nomination for MONEYBALL is an outrage, if I could work up the emotion. His performance was OK but the film was sub-par and wrongheaded.
Shailene Woodley was the best thing in DESCENDENTS and didn't get nominated, which also sucked.
Rooney Mara could become the first person to win an Oscar and a Super Bowl in the same year.
I sense that (non-SWPL/PC) males definitely approve of femmes fatales. It's feminist power in the film industry which has stopped the depiction of femmes fatales on screen.
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