PGA (Barely) Adds Mystery to Best Picture Race

Just when you thought the Best Picture race was solidifying around eight or nine contenders, the Producer's Guild today went and threw a couple of curveballs. Don't get me wrong, their nominees are barely a surprise, but at this stage of the race (with still two months to go!) it's nice to have some mystery evolving in the fringes of the top category.

The nominees are:

• American Hustle (Columbia Pictures)
  Producers: Megan Ellison, Jon Gordon, Charles Roven, Richard Suckle

• Blue Jasmine (Sony Pictures Classics)
  Producers: Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum

• Captain Phillips (Columbia Pictures)
  Producers: Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca, Scott Rudin

• Dallas Buyers Club (Focus Features)
  Producers: Robbie Brenner, Rachel Winter

• Gravity (Warner Bros. Pictures)
  Producers: Alfonso Cuarón, David Heyman

• Her (Warner Bros. Pictures)
  Producers: Megan Ellison, Spike Jonze, Vincent Landay

• Nebraska (Paramount Pictures)
  Producers: Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa

• Saving Mr. Banks (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
  Producers: Ian Collie, Alison Owen, Philip Steuer

• 12 Years a Slave (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
  Producers:  Anthony Katagas, Jeremy Kleiner, Steve McQueen, Brad Pitt & Dede Gardner

• Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount Pictures)
  Producers: Riza Aziz, Emma Koskoff, Joey McFarland

Several of these were rather obvious, and if we still lived in a world of only five Best Picture nominees I have no doubt those five would be American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Gravity, Nebraska and 12 Years a Slave. Alas, we don't live in that world anymore, so here are nine thoughts I had in order of Oscar- relevance.

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Inside Llewyn's Gotham Awards

It was a mix of oft rewarded icons (The Coens) and breakthrough leading movie roles from former awesome TV ensemble players (Jordan & Larson) for the Gotham Awards last night in NYC. 12 Years a Slave, which led nominations (not that that means much at the Gothams with so few categories), went home emptyhanded. No, not even for Lupita Nyong'o in Breakthrough! Bad luck or a sign that people respect but don't love the slavery drama? I don't personally understand this since it's a great film and great films are easy to love but though I'm a Gothamite, I'm not a Gotham voter. And full disclosure: I'm also cool on the Coen's chilly musical, apart from the music and the cat both of which are prize-worthy. 

guitar > fiddle at the Gothams

Feature: Inside Llewyn Davis
The 60s folk scene/character study from Joel and Ethan Coen conquered the uneven field of nominees which included  12 Years..., Upstream Color, Before Midnight (read our just published interview with Julie Delpy), and Aint Them Bodies Saints
Documentary: The Act of Killing
Breakthrough Director: Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station
Breakthrough Actor: Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station
Will he take all the season's "Breakthrough" prizes or can Lupita rally to conquer?
Film Audience Award: Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings, Tadashi Nakamura
Spotlight on Women Filmmakers ‘Live the Dream’ Grant: Gita Pullapilly, director, Beneath the Harvest Sky

Brie Larson = Best Actress (Photo via Indiewire)

Actor: Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club
He won the Spirit Award last year for Magic Mike so this is another key indie acting prize for him. Can he convert all this into an Oscar acknowledgement that he's reinvented himself as an actor. That's what everyone was expecting but then the Best Actor race just got tighter and tighter.
Actress: Brie Larson, Short Term 12 (Interviewed)
This is quite a get since the Gothams didn't support Short Term 12 with nominations elsewhere. Larson beat Blanchett, Woodley, Scarjo, and busy indie darling Amy Seimetz

How do these prizes strike you this morning? Good, bad, indifferent?

NYFF: Outside Llewyn Davis

TFE's coverage of the 2013 New York Film Festival (Sept. 27-Oct 14) continues. Here's JA taking on the Coen's latest, Inside Llweyn Davis.

I've for some reason still not seen Intolerable Cruelty so this statement's only ninety-seven-point-five percent factual, but Inside Llweyn Davis is the first Coens movie that I haven't loved in forever and a day, sad to say. What is it that left me cold? Is it because I am a dog person? Is it Justin Timberlake's smug facial hair that out-acts him? Or is it just that I think I might be incapable of ever really coming to appreciate Oscar Isaac on-screen? I'll openly admit he's an actor whose appeal, even after this showcase, remains elusive to me. Or maybe it's the fact that Carey Mulligan, an actress I actually really love, is given a fairly one-note joke of a role, shrewing it up under a sad damp hair-do. I don't know. I might just check off all of the above and call it a day.

It's not a movie that is trying to help me overcome any of these things, that's for sure - it's cold, from up on high with the beautiful icy blue-whites of the cinematography on all the way down. I usually happily admire actively off-putting protagonists - a world filled with characters that really couldn't give a damn if I like them or no. But the pleasures of being cinematically antagonized usually have that friction between loving to hate and just hating, and here I kept tipping towards the latter.

Oh hate is too strong an implication - I just never sparked to the story, I stayed aloof and indifferent at most every turn. There were passages I enjoyed - Isaac has a lovely voice and the songs were lovely, and that first dinner scene at the Gorfeins is classic Coens, jazzy and bizarre. Adam Driver turns out to be golden in the brother's hands - as always Joel and Ethan create a rich world that you feel like you could wander off in a million directions inside of... I just kept wanting to shoot off in the direction the movie wasn't taking me. Hey let's ride to the police station with Garrett Hedlund instead, eh? Eh? No? Okay then.

And so the film sputters along for chapters that I never quite found an in to. One look at what Michael Stuhlberg did in A Serious Man (a film and a performance I adore) with a similarly unsympathetic lead shuffling about in an icy Coen kingdom and the difference for me is immeasurable - that film had a pulse, a nervous stutter, a life to it. Llewyn just left me wanting to make like that darn cat and shoot out the closest window to freedom.

FYC Best Supporting Actor: Ulysses

I have seen the greatest performance by a supporting actor in 2013.  All hail "ULYSSES". Here he is in a key moment from his star-making role in the Coen Bros Inside Llewyn Davis.

What a face! But he doesn't coast on it. He acts with his whole body. If there's any justice in the world, a BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR campaign will rev right up.

Okay okay. I realize this is a silly argument and I know exactly what you're thinking...

You're thinking:

"But Nathaniel, a nomination for Ulysses will never happen. I mean, hello, Oscar Trivia! The Coen Bros filmography, which is chalk full of excellent supporting turns never produces nominations in the supporting category that aren't arguably leads (William H Macy in Fargo and Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men are both in the driver's seat of their film's narrative even if they aren't the protagonists). It's only happened once: Michael Lerner in Barton Fink. And complete unknowns rarely get traction... especially when the film they're in doesn't even feature them in the press notes"

To this I say "But you haven't seen this awesome performance yet and Ulysses DOES drive the plot along -- sometimes in soft footed silence and other times with a sprint. Plus, where's your faith? No supporting actor in a Coen Bros film has ever given a performance this pure of heart or this instinctual. I don't mean to be disrespectful to John Goodman, John Turturro, and the entire Coen repertory company but none of them have ever purred or kneaded their leading men on cue so maybe they just didn't deserve one. 

I consider it an indignity that Ulysses will be left out of the film's SAG ensemble nomination (if it gets one) since he goes uncredited. He has way more screen time than Garrett Hedlund and better close-ups than Justin Timberlake.

Don't hate on gingers. Root for Ulysses.

Links: Moore Film History of the Damned, Bro

T Magazine on Julianne Moore as an "informer" of human nature
Elusive Lucidity "film history, bro"
Press Play a conversation about morality and religion in the filmography of the Coen Bros 
My New Plaid Pants I've been curious about this Kiss of the Damned movie -- I used to try to see every vampire flick (the only kind of horror you could always find me at) but then there were too many of them and the fascination wore off -- but Jason reviews it for us. 
My New Plaid Pants somehow I almost missed that JA wrote up his whole fascinating ballot on our...
"Best New Directors of the 21st Century"... in case you missed that whole talking point

Gothamist Stars. They're just like us. Julia Stiles rides the subway, too.
Observations on Film Art David Bordwell on Ebertfest regular C.O. "Doc" Erickson, eyewitness to classic film history with notes on Alfred Hitchcock, The Misfits and more...

Back to that T Magazine Juli profile again for a hot minute. a hot red minute.

Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh.

On a scale of 1-∞ how much do you love her? Whatever your answer is it's one degree less than my love at least! I claimed her in 1995 after [safe]! (Also she has the world's best publicist maybe, right? Even when her movies are On Demand - The English Teacher - she commands attention in the media)