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Entries in Best Actor (436)

Friday
Sep142012

Chart Updates: Actors and Foreign Films

The Oscar chart updates were temporarily stalled by my thwarted Toronto plans so just fixin' things up now. Enjoy the updates while I jaunt off to Fire Island for a 24 hour getaway. I've just seen The Impossible -- more on that soon -- so I'm accidentally living a rather perverse combo: tsunami picture then beach getaway.  

As always predictions are for entertainment purposes only. They should never be interpreted as endorsements though occassionally deserve has something to do with it.

BEST ACTOR
The big story here is a common one. There are enough buzzing performances to fill out an entire Golden Globe nominee pool, 10-wide, which means there are twice as many contenders as Oscar voters will be able to choose. Am I crazy to wonder if even Daniel Day-Lewis is safe for Lincoln? The trailer does not impress.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Alan Arkin makes huge gains as he's singled out in many Argo reactions. Ewan McGregor's wounded father in The Impossible also rises though I have to wonder if this isn't wishful thinking. He's one of the world's best and most endearing screen actors but he never quite wins Oscar hearts. Still, nomination-less or not, come what may... we will love him, until our dying day.

Finally, add Kiki's new man Garrett Hedlund to your For Your Consideration fields for On The Road. He's the focal point of the film's considerable libido which might work against him (this is one of the most sexually-charged performances since, say, Jude Law in The Talented Mr Ripley) but they're campaigning him as supporting which will definitely work for him given his enormous amount of screen time.

Garrett Hedlund is "On the Road" with cinematography by Eric Gautier

VISUALSAURALS
Gains for TIFF buzzing Cloud Atlas, On the Road and The Impossible.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM SUBMISSIONS
You can add Romania's Beyond the Hills which is from Cristian Mungui, the director of the magnificent 4 Weeks 3 Months and 2 Days (better luck this time!) and Portugal's Blood of My Blood to the list of submitted contenders. May the best five films win nominations.

CHART INDEX

Which buzzing fall film are you desperate to get your eyeballs on? I chose the beach over The Master (perverse I know given the rarity of P.T. Anderson pictures) but I'll get to that one Sunday...

Tuesday
Sep112012

TIFF: "The Sessions"

Amir reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival

It's hard to think that a film about a man living in an iron lung could be labelled “the feel good movie of the festival.” But The Sessions beats the odds. For director Ben Lewin, who himself struggled with polio as a child, and his stellar cast, sex, disability, Catholicism and humour blend together to shape the unlikeliest of crowd pleasers.

The Sessions centres of Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), a poet who fell victim to polio in his childhood and lost all his muscle strength from the neck down. His body retains its sensitivity, hence the narratively critical ability to achieve erections, but is unable to move and requires an iron lung to breathe. At the age of 38 and faced with the prospect that his days might be numbered before he ever gets to “meet” a woman, O’Brien decides to lose his virginity; and to do that, he’ll have to overcome two obstacles: an overwhelming sense of anxiety caused by his physical disability, and a fear of being sinful resulted from his devout belief in the Catholic church.

The second obstacle is easier for him to clear as he consults Father Brendan (a hilarious and poignant William H. Macy), an unconventionally forgiving priest who tells O’Brien that in his heart he knows Jesus will give him a pass. With that green light, O’Brien goes on to find Cheryl Cohen Greene (a top-form Helen Hunt), a sex therapist who is willing to take him through the mechanics of sex in six sessions.

The Sessions isn’t exactly a biopic...

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Sep022012

The Links We Share

Manuel Muñoz one of my favorite writers on his "sometime love" for director Hal Ashby
Vanity Fair on the Scientology auditions to be Tom Cruise's girl. He's been on 7 of their covers. Won't this spoil their chances at an 8th?
NFB Sarah Polley on her next film Stories We Tell 
Pajiba on "The Death of the Movie Theater" a super depressing but otherwise enjoyable read. It's really too bad the nation's theater owners don't get how they've let us all down.

 

I Need My Fix Alexander Skarsgard for GQ 
Guardian Shia Labeouf's antics keeps people talking
Hollywood Elsewhere Will Terrence Malick's To The Wonder inspire twitter brawls?
New York Times RIP. the legendary lyricist and Oscar winner Hal David ("Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head") dies at 91.
i09 first image of Lee Pace (yay) in The Hobbit as Legolas' father. My what good genes those elf boys have. (See also: Orlando Bloom 2001-2003) 
Gothamist reports on Leonardo DiCaprio filming with strippers for The Wolf of Wall Street. Is it just me or do you never think of Leonardo as a sex scene kind of star?

Awards Daily Oscar Watch 2013? Matthew McConaughey goes full on Bale as an AIDS victim for The Dallas Buyers Club. He's lost 30 lbs.
CHUD Guy Pearce is having a good year. But is his role in Iron Man 3 only cameo stuff? And even if he says so can you believe him? Remember that Cotillard continually lied about her role in TDKR to the press. You do what you gotta do to stop spoilers.
Gawker Nicolas Cage finally settled his overdue bill with a local video rental store; King of Comedy and A Star is Born cost him! (Even more shocking than the news that he rents from a DVD store is his good taste in movies! Too bad it doesn't show in his own filmography.) 

Finally, this video from Flavorwire is inspired by Lawless and a must for Costume Design devotees. Presenting: the coolest looking characters from Prohibition Era set movies.

I want a pin strip suit and a fetching hat, don't you?

Thursday
Aug232012

Gene Kelly (& My 50 Favorite Actors)

Happy Centennial to Gene Kelly (and all film fans who love him)!

100 years ago on this very day Eugene Curran Kelly was born in Pittsburgh. His mom pushed him into dance class but he didn't commit to becoming a dancer until the age of 15. At 29 fame hit with Broadway's "Pal Joey." Almost immediately thereafter he accidentally (or at least halfheartedly since he intended to return to stage) lept from the stage to the screen and stayed, starting with a co-starring role in For Me and My Gal (1942, previously covered -- he credits Judy Garland with teaching him how to act for cameras). Kelly remains the best silver screen song & dance man of all time (sorry Astaire!) and since musicals are the perfect genre, making full use of every tool available to filmmakers aurally and visually, he also happens to be one of my ten favorite movie stars ever of either gender. I'd hoped to celebrate Kelly all month long but time gets away from you in the dog days of summer. Ah well, at least we had Singin' in the Rain (1952)!!!

So herewith a quick semi-revised list...

Nathaniel's 50 Favorite Male Movie Stars of All Time


Tier 1 - Yin and Yang
neither my life nor the movies would be complete without them
MONTGOMERY CLIFT
GENE KELLY

48 more after the jump

Click to read more ...

Sunday
Aug192012

148 Days Til Oscar Nominations!

Do you ever marvel at the countdown clock in the lefthand sidebar and think "Wow, only ___ days until Oscar nominations!". I know I do. As of right now there are only 148 days and some hours left until Oscar nominations. 21 weeks! That means the universe has plenty of time to back me up on my current predictions or destroy them savagely. Either way is fun for me which is, I suppose, why I've never been able to quit predicting Hollywood's High Holy Night.

CHART UPDATES

Best Picture & Best Director - The Great Gatsby and Baz Luhrmann exit the charts, both moving to summer 2013. And though I never had faith in Gatsby as an actual finalist (the book is too perfect as a book) what can rush in to replace it on the charts? The race is still wide open as it should be.

Gatsby will sit this particular party out. He'll throw his own next Summer

But from where I sit though I'm sure some will disagree, the franchise hopefuls are toast. A lot of people still think that The Gidling of the Lord of the Rings Lily: Part 1 of 3 will factor in but Oscar is not Emmy and LotR is not The West Wing. Fantasy is still a novelty for Oscar voters and I can't imagine that handing the last one 11 Oscars won't feel like enough of a reward for Jackson & Middle Earth. Yes, they've had a decade long breather but I figure the only way The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is competing for the top prize is if people go crazier for it than the original trilogy. And that would be an unexpected journey. 

Meanwhile I suspect that The Avengers and The Dark Knight Concludes Divisively will have a rough time making it through the wild rapids of winter campaigning and I don't expect either of them in the big show beyond a few craft nods. I don't even have faith in the eagerly awaited Django Unchained as an Oscar hopeful. Quentin Tarantino, when he leans toward retro remixes of less prestigious film genres, is just not necessarily for them (see: Jackie Brown, Kill Bill). Yes,  he leans towards that.. always... and he has made two big Oscar hits. But Pulp Fiction was the kind of pop-cultural zeitgeist breakthrough that's impossible to ignore and Inglourious Basterds was a WW II fantasy and Oscar does his own share of fantasizing about that.

All of this nitpicking doubt leads me to believe that Beasts of the Southern Wild, a movie that doesn't look much like an Oscar film (yay!), is on its way to locked up status as an Oscar film. While it didn't become the crossover hit we'd hoped it would, it's done well enough financially to ride the "beloved indie / critical darling" into the mainstream competition for gold. (Think Winter's Bone.)

Best Actor - It's been 11 years since Denzel Washington won his second Oscar and in that whole time he hasn't done anything worth Oscar's time. Will they welcome him back if Flight is a big hit?

What's Denzel's poison? And was he drinking it before the Flight?

 

 

The way I see it mainstream dramas that become big hits are shoo in for Oscar play. Oscar likes drama best and when films without genre trappings that are intended for adults soar at the box office, they join in the applause. I'm feeling it'll hit. Just a feeling.

But the big question in Best Actor is whether the Weinstein's will try to convince AMPAS voters that Joaquin Phoenix is "supporting" Phillip Seymour Hoffman (or the other way around) in The Master. If they risk a double lead campaign and the film is the critical mega-success the internet seems to be expecting, could they be the first Actor Pair since *gulp* Amadeus (twenty-eight years ago) to hog 40% of the shortlist? It's hilarious (and depressing) to view Amadeus in retrospect and know that campaign teams would try to pretend that Salieri or Mozart were "supporting" players in their own riveting brutal musical duet. 

Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress -- We discussed these last week here

Best Supporting Actor - This category hasn't come into focus yet which should make the fall extra exciting. So for the moment, you can predict just about anything (at least here) and feel like a true psychic. You can feel like a psychic right up until the moment the films open and prove you wrong! But the foggy nature of the Supporting goods me wonder if I'm not underestimating those that have already arrived and delighted (like Matthew McConaughey and Michael Fassbender) despite the lowbrow nature of their roles... at least accordingi to Oscar's general aesthetics.

Ruth E Carter, two time Oscar nominees, doing retro-chic looks for Sparkle

Best Visuals and Best Aurals - UPDATES STILL IN PROGRESS -- THIS TAKES TIME.
The latest film to enter the ring visually and aurally is the Motown musical Sparkle (my review tomorrow) and while I don't expect Oscar play anywhere stranger things have happened in the below the line categories. 

Screenplay, Animated, Foreign Film and the Complete Prediction Chart. Check them out and report back.