Farewell My Lovely: Team Experience Says (Figurative) Goodbyes to Oscar's Unsung
Thursday, January 14, 2016 at 7:10PM
NATHANIEL R in Benicio del Toro, Carol, Love and Mercy, Oscar Trivia, Oscars (15), Sicario, Team Experience, Twitter

If you dwell too much on the negatives on Oscar Nomination Morning it can be so deflating that the rest of the season (just one month to go) can feel agonizing. Nevertheless we owe the movies and actors that enrich our lives a proper send off here now that Oscar has closed this particular chapter on them. But never fear. The Academy Awards are a fun time from a anecdotal calendar perspective and important in a history chapter kind of way but they're never ever ever the full book on the movies.

Here are achievements in film from Carol, Creed, Inside Out, and more that we here at TFE have no intention of saying goodbye to in reality, though we'll have to set them aside in a particular kind of way this month... 

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Benicio del Toro in Sicario
While Sicario received some recognition in the technical categories, it didn’t end up making the cut for any of the majors, including the acting awards.  That’s a particular shame in the case of Benicio del Toro, who quietly managed to steal the movie from his excellent co-stars but couldn’t quite nab a supporting actor nod from Oscar.  His character starts out as a taciturn, enigmatic presence, content to keep a low profile and deflect questions about why he’s there.  But as the movie unfolds, he starts to assume increasing authority and gradually morphs into an ominous, even terrifying figure of retribution.  It’s arguably somewhat lazy writing that he’s driven by personal revenge, yet del Toro, to his credit, doesn’t use this tried-and-true motivation as an excuse to chew scenery.  Instead, he delivers a remarkably controlled and powerful portrayal of a formerly moral man who’s corrupted by his single-minded pursuit—and knows it. -Lynn Lee

Inside Out
When the Academy decided to open up the Best Picture category, it was thought that more diversity would be represented. While there have been a few interesting choices since the decision, it is usually just more middle of the road prestige pics. That a genre film like Mad Max Fury Road was able to make it in today should be celebrated....

And while the Internet mourns the loss of Carol in this category, the film that I'm most disappointed didn't make the final cut is Pixar's wonderfully imaginative Inside Out. No film made me laugh as hard (cue that Brazilian helicopter pilot memory again) and cry as hard (farewell, Bing Bong) in equal measure. It's obviously the front runner to win Best Animated Feature, but the year's most original film deserved to take its place among the best films of the year as well, regardless of its medium. Looks like Sadness and Anger are controlling my emotions this Oscar nomination morning... - Abstew

Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria
I had held out hope that enough Academy voters would give their personal assistants the ballot to fill out for Kristen Stewart to have a real shot. You know those celebrity underlings would have gone to bat for the much-maligned actress and her glorious performance in Clouds of Sils Maria. While it wasn’t to be – and let’s face it, it was always going to be tough given she had no campaign until she surprisingly started winning critics prizes – her presence throughout the season for two years in a row (a nomination last year for Still Alice would not have been terribly bad choice, either, obviously) has hopefully given her enough of a prestige profile to make her next buzzy effort a stronger chance for a nomination. - Glenn Dunks 

Michael B Jordan in Creed
For years, Jordan has been steadily knocking down one great performance after another, and Creed (reuniting him with his greatest director, Ryan Coogler), is his best work yet. Adonis Johnson is a winningly complicated role, already one of the most interesting and unusual portraits of middle-class African-American maledom that mainstream American cinema has turned out in recent years (or ever), and Jordan adds layers of even great complexity and thorniness: he grounds the stock traits of resentfulness and volatility and braggadocio in the character's terror at lacking a solid identity, and his completely earnest and unaffected depiction of a lost boy finding a new father figure is so powerful and open that he turns into the best scene partner Sylvester Stallone has had since the 1970s. It was no surprise that Jordan missed a nomination – he's been surprisingly unable to get any traction all season – but it's no less heartbreaking. - Timothy Brayton

 

Julie Walters, Brooklyn
Given the Double Category Fraud nominees in Supporting Actress, wouldn't it have been nice to see some genuinely supporting performances nominated? And was their a lovelier, warmer, more perfectly judged supporting performance this year than a Brit legend in a Best Picture nominee (YAY!) Brooklyn? Julie Walters steals every scene she's in as the boarding house matron with a heart of gold, but never once chews scenery or makes the character seem like a quip-generating machine. Mrs. Keough has lived a lot of life, and Walters never lets you forget that. Despite limited screen time, Mrs. Keough feels like much more than a stock character, and that's solely due to her fantastic performance. - Dancin Dan

 

Best Original Song - "I'll See You in My Dreams"
A song that so flawlessly captures the light touch and deep melancholy of the film, illuminating theme and character when played in context of the film. How can you listen to it and not remember Blythe Danner's quiet tears? The music branch has been trying to move towards nominating songs that work in context of their films, so it seemed like it had a shot - especially since this undervalued film was the first screener sent out this season. - Chris Feil

Jacob Tremblay, Room
Nathaniel’s last minute hopes for Jacob Tremblay gave me hope he’d show up in one of the Actor categories today... but alas, it wasn’t to be, and the finest child performance in years goes unrecognised, even alongside a surprising bundle of nominations for the film that houses it. That his astonishing lack of precocity and bountiful naturalism would have been an immense lift to either the deadly Best Actor line-up or the overly, uh, flavourful Supporting Actor category is now a distant dream. Thankfully, the performance is its own reward, and Tremblay’s future career - should he wish to continue in the craft - won’t be overshadowed with the spectre of Oscar at such a young age. He’ll probably still show up at the ceremony and get photos with countless adoring Hollywood fans in the audience, and a glowing reaction shot when Brie Larson wins her gong. - David Upton

Lily Tomlin, Grandma
Allow me to just remind you that Lily Tomlin has won NOTHING for her brilliant 2015 comeback performances in Netflix's Grace & Frankie and Paul Weitz's Grandma. How is this possible? She brings not only her inimitable prickly presence and gift for comedy to Elle Reid, but also a lifetime of hurt and anger over her past as well as the feminist fight. She's a generous scene partner to everyone in the film, never less than interesting to watch, and always a force to be reckoned with, even when it appears she's down and out. Tomlin makes a somewhat unfocused character grounded in a completely unique way, taking many disparate parts and making a fully real woman out of them. She's the grandma we all wish we had. - Dancin Dan'

Elizabeth Banks in Love and Mercy
Why didn’t the acting branch bite at all when it came to Bill Pohlad's Brian Wilson drama Love and Mercy? It's an exceptional entry in the Tortured Musician Biopic genre and a project that hardly seems like an implausible Oscar possibility given The Academy's clear favor for such stories. Paul Dano is terrific at exploring Brian Wilson’s muddled, eloquent mind during the early days of The Beach Boys' fame, both in those crowded, magical recording sessions and those painful scenes of reclusive solitude at home... But it’s Elizabeth Banks’ Melinda Ledbetter, the model-turned-car saleswoman who would go on to become Wilson's wife, that has stuck with me even longer than either of the Brian interpretations. [More...] - Matthew Eng

NOW ABOUT CAROL....



Since Carol received six nominations -- the most for a Todd Haynes film and the most ever for a film without a Best Picture nod in contemporary Expanded Best Picture history -- we hardly have to say goodbye during Oscar month. But it's still maddening that one of the year's two masterpieces has to sit outside the Best Picture table. There's a lot of theorizing online already about what went wrong. I'd write about it myself except that both Flavorwire and Vanity Fair and AutoStraddle all excellent jobs at explaining Oscar's issues with a) gay cinema b) auteur cinema and c) subtle cinema and d) femaleness  all four camps to which Carol firmly belongs. 

So rather than agonize any further about this gross miscarriage of taste on the Academy's part here are some Carol-focused tweets to cathartically release your rage if you still need to vent and commenting alone won't be enough.

 

and though i had no wish to be prescient  

 

 

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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