Film Awards Talk - 2018

[Ezee E]

I honestly never know by what metric the DGA judges "good direction." I always feel like great performances should count as points to the director, but I don't know if it does when it comes to awards.

I mean, what metric judges any award by that matter?

[number8]

I mean, what metric judges any award by that matter?

Metric was the wrong word, but you can specify what is being judged with most categories, especially technical ones. "Directing," however has always been ill-defined in terms of results. How do you look at what's in a film and tangibly isolate the products of the director's instructions and leadership, versus the accomplishments of the responsible departments?

[Grouchy]

Yeah, exactly. You'd have to measure the level of micro-management of each separate director to make it a fair comparison.

A Robert Altman film could not run against a Stanley Kubrick one, for example.

[Ezee E]

Metric was the wrong word, but you can specify what is being judged with most categories, especially technical ones. "Directing," however has always been ill-defined in terms of results. How do you look at what's in a film and tangibly isolate the products of the director's instructions and leadership, versus the accomplishments of the responsible departments?

Mike Nichols stands out to me in this. Take a movie like Closer/Angels in America, which is so filled with dialog but always interesting to watch on screen at the same time for the use of blocking, mood, set, etc.

I think Molly's Game, while with a pretty good script, could've improved if it had a stronger director instead of being a debut from Sorkin.

[Spinal]

When I consider 'Best Director', I am looking at the overall artistic vision. Is there a unified concept in all production elements that supports the film's purpose? Is this the best version of this particular idea/script? Has the director supported/encouraged artistic risks/innovation? Has the director created a work that leaves evidence of their unique artistry/personality?

[Ezee E]

Final Picks -
Supporting Actress -- Humblebrag that I had Alison Janney when she was 40-1 odds. She's now 9-4.

Adapted Screenplay --
OUT : Victoria and Abdul
IN : All the Money in the World

Original Screenplay --
OUT : The Big Sick
IN : I, Tonya

Cinematography --
OUT: The Beguiled
IN : Mudbound

Costumes --
OUT: Dunkirk/Darkest Hour
IN : Shape of Water / Murder on the Orient Express

Production Design --
OUT : Darkest Hour
IN : Beauty and the Beast

Sound Editing --
OUT: War for the Planet of the Apes
IN: Baby Driver

Sound Mixing --
OUT: Beauty and the Beast
IN: Baby Driver

[dreamdead]

Oscar Nominations:

PRODUCTION DESIGN
Beauty and the Beast
Blade Runner 2049
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Blade Runner 2049
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
Mudbound
The Shape of Water

COSTUME DESIGN
Beauty and the Beast
Darkest Hour
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Victoria & Abdul

SOUND EDITING
Baby Driver
Blade Runner 2049
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi

SOUND MIXING
Baby Driver
Blade Runner 2049
Dunkirk
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi

ANIMATED SHORT FILM
Dear Basketball
Garden Party
Lou
Negative Space
Revolting Rhymes

LIVE-ACTION SHORT FILM
DeKalb Elementary
The Eleven O’Clock
My Nephew Emmett
The Silent Child
Watu Wote/All of Us

ORIGINAL SCORE
Dunkirk
Phantom Thread
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

VISUAL EFFECTS
Blade Runner 2049
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Kong: Skull Island
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
War for the Planet of the Apes

FILM EDITING
Baby Driver
Dunkirk
I, Tonya
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
Darkest Hour
Victoria & Abdul
Wonder

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
Allison Janney, I, Tonya
Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
A Fantastic Woman, Chile
The Insult, Lebanon
Loveless, Russia
On Body and Soul, Hungary
The Square, Sweden

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT SUBJECT
Edith and Eddie
Heaven Is A Traffic Jam on the 405
Heroin(e)
Knife Skills
Traffic Stop

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Faces Places
Icarus
Last Man in Aleppo
Strong Island

ORIGINAL SONG
“Mighty River,” Mudbound
“Mystery of Love,” Call Me By Your Name
“Remember Me,” Coco
“Stand Up For Something,” Marshall
“This Is Me,” The Greatest Showman

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
The Boss Baby
The Breadwinner
Coco
Ferdinand
Loving Vincent

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Call Me By Your Name, James Ivory
The Disaster Artist, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber
Logan, Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green
Molly’s Game, Aaron Sorkin
Mudbound, Virgil Williams and Dee Rees

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Big Sick, Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani
Get Out, Jordan Peele
Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig
The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Martin McDonagh

BEST ACTOR
Timothée Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

BEST ACTRESS
Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
Meryl Streep, The Post

BEST DIRECTOR
Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan
Get Out, Jordan Peele
Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig
Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson
The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro

BEST PICTURE
Call Me By Your Name
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
Get Out
Lady Bird
Phantom Thread
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

[Irish]

This is gonna be a painful run up to the ceremony.

How many noms did "Shape of Water" get? It was too many.

I don't know why I always remember the screenplay category fondly, because the WGA fucks me over every year. This year might be the worst of the last 5 or 10.

I'll take more of Tiffany Haddish and Andy Serkis in anything, though. Theirs was easily the best announcement broadcast of the previous few years. It was actually fun.

[Dukefrukem]

Get Out getting nominated for Best Picture is incredible.

The Post getting nominated for Best Picture is laughable. (I haven't see it)

[Peng]

That is just an amazing line-up of director nominees that I can't get too upset Luca Guadagnino doesn't make it (although over here a lot are so disappointed that we miss the chance to have the first Thai Oscar nominee ever with CMBYN's cinematography lol).

Good, interesting nods in Screenplay.

I feel like the rise of Phantom Thread, despite late screeners and its lack of momentum or awards buzz from other shows, is really fascinating. Passionate picks and/or more newer cinephile types now that they let more varied groups of people in? Also maybe because this year lacks a very clear frontrunner in a lot of categories too (might be why McDonagh couldn't come along the coattail of Three Billboards' buzz).

[number8]

lol Christopher Plummer

[Dead & Messed Up]

I thought, wow, Spielberg being shut out by these young directors, and then I realized PTA and Nolan are nearly 50 and GDT is 53, and now it's just, oh my God, it's 2018, and where on Earth did the time go?

[Henry Gale]

Biggest surprises for me:

- I just saw Phantom Thread yesterday, and thought, "I loved this but can't imagine it getting nominated for much tomorrow." -- so I definitely didn't expect Anderson for Director or BEST PICTURE. Day-Lewis and especially Manville were nice to see too, though I think Krieps is the standout and most deserving.

- Dafoe being The Florida Project's one and only nomination is extremely disappointing, as he is just one of many fantastic things about it. I wonder if because of the preferential ballot system, it could've hypothetically been tons of people's #2 or #3 and fallen away as a result.

- Maybe the best Best Director category in recent memory? McDonagh being left out makes Anderson getting in there, Peele and Gerwig being properly acknowledged not just great for the statistics against them, but for the fact that they are entirely the creative impetuses for the invaluable and singular films they made that reflect their voices, and first-ever nominations for Nolan and del Toro (whose award it now obviously is) as directors shows how clearly it is directors who nominate here, and the category don't always need to go simply by The Top 5 of Best Picture sort of compass. And speaking of Gerwig and Peele as writer-directors, aside from Guillermo having Vanessa Taylor as a co-writer, I don't think this category is always so auteurist.

- No Hammer or Stuhlbarg (mainly for his one scene, but still.. *cries*) are glaring omissions in Supporting Actor. Harrelson and No-Longer-Spacey seem to be in their just because they can be.

- Logan for Adapted Screenplay! The rare (only?) time one of them comic book flicks gets recognition in an Academy space like this.

- For Franco, the Golden Globes related tweets and the LA Times article were January 7th and the 11th, respectively, and the Oscar nomination window was January 5th to 13th, so it was smack-dab in the middle of it, but it's also possible that generally less enthusiasm for him were the bigger factor in him being left out. And/or everyone saw Phantom Thread late and understandably liked Day-Lewis much more (as he's the one difference in this category between Oscar and SAG).

- The Animation branch of the Academy is officially anti-Lego, but does love themselves some Boss Babyyyyy, baby!

- Maybe trivial to think of it this way, but if imagine if Best Picture was based on total amount of nominations (since The Post got in only with Streep otherwise), the Top 11 would be:

(13) The Shape of Water
(8) Dunkirk
(7) Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
(6) Darkest Hour
(6) Phantom Thread
(5) Blade Runner 2049
(5) Lady Bird
(4) Call Me by Your Name
(4) Get Out
(4) Mudbound
(4) Star Wars: The Last Jedi


And yeah Serkis and Haddish were delightfully goofy together. I even liked the little filmed bits they did with the actresses for the technical categories. (26:47 if it doesn't go there automatically)

[megladon8]

All the Get Out noms are cool as hell to see.

Super bummed Jackman didn’t get a nom for Logan, but neat it got (and won’t win) Adapted Screenplay.

[number8]

- Logan for Adapted Screenplay! The rare (only?) time one of them comic book flicks gets recognition in an Academy space like this.

It's far from the first nominee adapted from a comic book, but certainly it's the first superhero comic. That's pretty cool.

[Irish]

I thought, wow, Spielberg being shut out by these young directors,

I take a schadenfreudish delight in the many, many ways the Academy Awards has trolled Spielberg over the years. (There's a very obvious dislike operating there, and I don't quite know why.) This year was a good effort on their part, but not as good as I've seen.

[Grouchy]

I don't know why I always remember the screenplay category fondly, because the WGA fucks me over every year. This year might be the worst of the last 5 or 10.

The same thing happens to me. I used to say that that was where the best films were. Now I'm not so sure.

And yeah, I didn't dislike The Shape of Water but what a safe choice to win Best Picture.

[megladon8]

A movie about a woman in love with The Creature From the Black Lagoon is a “safe choice”?

[Mal]

Darkest Hour zzzzzzzzzz

but these are pretty good noms, despite a couple questionable things here and there.

[Grouchy]

See, that sounds like something Alan Moore would write about on paper, but while I liked the actual sexual angle of their relationship, overall it's a mushy mushy creature film where the bad guys are very bad and the good guys are very good. Get Out or Three Billboards are far more troubling to the Academy's conservative worldview.

[number8]

I feel like every year I'm surprised that there are still Oscar firsts I didn't realize hadn't happened yet.

Rachel Morrison is the first woman to even be nominated for Best Cinematography? Really?

[Grouchy]

Well, how many have you heard about? When I learned that the DP for Neon Demon was a woman I was surprised. It was a male-centric area until fairly recently.

[TGM]

I'm glad Logan got at least Best Adapted Screenplay, but still, it could've (and should've) done much better. And Beauty and the Beast for Production Design? Did they even see that movie? It was ugly as shit, and looked like it was shot on the cheapest set that Disney could scramble together at the last second. :\

This is seriously one of the most boring awards seasons in some time, for me at least. I can see how Get Out or The Shape of Water can be looked at as cool picks, and I'd agree, if I had perhaps come out caring about either movie all that much. But really, my reaction coming out of most of these movies were that they were just "fine". Of all the Best Picture nominees, none of them even crack my Top 20 of the year. And so long as it's not Call Me By Your Name (the only legit bad movie nominated), I honestly don't even give a shit what wins, as I seriously have no dog in this race this year. *shrug*

[number8]

Well, how many have you heard about? When I learned that the DP for Neon Demon was a woman I was surprised. It was a male-centric area until fairly recently.

Not a lot. Ellen Kurras and Reed Morano are the only ones on my radar currently. But there are tons of Oscar nominated DPs I'm not familiar with, so I just (wrongly) assumed that in 90 years there would've been at least one already.

[Grouchy]

In real life, though, I know at least five women who are dedicated DPs. One slovenian, three Argentinians, one Brazilian.

Wow, TGM, you are the first person I've heard of who was indifferent to Get Out.