The good, the bad and the ugly of this year’s Oscar nominations

The Oscar nominations for this year are out. As usual it contains some astute choices, some really bad ones and some that are just truly bizarre. The pale, male and stale voters of the Academy retain a strong preference for a particular kind of film. The nominations have as always gone disproportionately to English language dramas at the more worthy end of the mainstream with actors and directors the academy is familiar with which go on general release in the United States. Now as plenty of excellent films match that description the list is reasonable. It is, however, generally pretty uninspiring and rather predictable.

Here’s what I’d highlight about this list:

The good

• Birdman and the Grand Budapest Hotel as the joint leaders of the pack with 9 nominations each. These are odder films than the Academy generally goes for.
• Marrion Coltiard has against expectations been nominated for Best Actress for her transfixing performance in Two Days, One Night.
• Patricia Arquette has been nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her part in I’ve not , to my shame, actually seen Boyhood but the fact that the Golden Globe winner is in this category rather than Best Actress will mean Coltiard’s more likely to win that one though she’s still an outsider. If you are getting the impression I really think Marrion Coltiard deserves to win you would be right!

The bad

• The Academy redid its rules on Best Picture nominations after what was generally accepted to be the strange decision not to nominate the Dark Knight. Rather than making this relatively dramatic change, the Academy could just have given Nolan some recognition. Yet despite Interstellar being Nolan’s best film since the Dark Knight, its (richly deserved) nominations are all in technical categories. Not quite sure what he’s going to have to do win one or indeed even get nominated.
• No nominations for Andy Serkis or Toby Kebbel for their performances in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Apparently great performances don’t count if they’re delivered while wearing motion capture suits.
• Nothing for the sound on Godzilla.
• Nothing for Two Days, One Night apart from Coltiard’s nomination.
• Does Meryl Streep really deserve a nomination for Into the Woods? I’ve not seen it so I don’t know but nothing I’ve seen or heard about the film suggests Streep’s performance was one of the five best performances by a woman in a supporting role. This just feels like Academy voters plumping for one of their favourites because that’s what they do.
• No Best Animated Feature nomination for the Lego Movie!!!

It's okay. Made my own! http://t.co/kgyu1GRHGR—
philip lord (@philiplord) January 15, 2015

The ugly

• That these nominations are even more white and male than usual.
• The total exclusion of Snowpiercer from being nominated for anything. This stings because not only was it my favourite film of the year but it was backed by distributed in the US by Weinstein Company, whose titular head is notorious for his ruthless efficiency at winning Oscars. However, Weinstein is largely responsible for keeping it from a general release in the US because he wanted 20 minutes of unnecessary cuts. That’s a shame because it ought to be a contender for Best: picture, director, adapted screenplay, cinematography, editing and best supporting actress for Tilda Swinton.
• The fact the only category in which I’ve seen all the films is best visual effects!

 

Update:

I realise that I hadn’t mentioned that Jake Gyllenhall didn’t get nominated for his spectacularly creepy performance in Nightcrawler.

Some predictions for 2015

Umunna as leader of the opposition? My most tentative prediction.

My more or less educated guesses for what will happen in the next year. I’ve put a % by each one to indicate my guess as to the probability that it will happen:

1. The UK general election will result in a hung parliament (80%). I’m reasonably sure about that but not much else. If I had to take a stab in the dark I’d say that we’ll end up with a minority Conservative government (40%).
2. Ed Miliband (60%) and Nick Clegg (90%) will not survive as leaders of their parties and will be replaced by Chuka Umunna (30%) and Tim Farron (50%). In the event, David Cameron ceases to be leader, I would think that Theresa May is his most likely replacement (50%).
3. Hilary Clinton will announce she’s running for President (90%).
4. Greece will exit the Eurozone (60%).
5. The highest grossing film globally will be Avengers: Age of Ultron (60%). However, in the US it will be Star Wars: the Force Awakens (60%) and in the UK Spectre (50%).

UPDATE (30/01/15): When I made the predictions regarding the highest box office takes I did so under the misapprehension that the Force Awakens was being released this summer. In fact, it’s not out till the final week of December. Therefore, I now think there’s a 70% probability that the Avengers will top the US box office and am prepared to raise the probability that Spectre will top the UK box office to 70%.

The real menace to free speech is China not North Korea

The financial clout of the China means that the communist party’s censors now hold sway over much of what you see at the cinema.

A still from the 2012 remake of Red Dawn. The army invading the US was originally intended to be Chinese but became North Korean in the editing room.

 

In a fascinating article for Foreign Policy, Isaac Stone Fish suggests that the sound and fury regarding North Korea’s efforts to have the Interview pulled distract from a bigger problem regarding free speech in Hollywood.

No major studio today would dare greenlight a film that would be that offensive to the Chinese Communist Party: The financial costs could be immense. A film studio that was even known to have publicly floated an idea such as this could expect to be effectively blacklisted from working with Beijing — and China is where Hollywood studios will make an increasingly large percentage of their money in coming years.

China’s box office revenue surged to $3.57 billion in 2013, a 27 percent increase from 2012. The country is already the world’s second-largest film market, and the most important source of growth for Hollywood releases: “Box office receipts in the U.S. are sliding nearly 20 percent compared to last year, while China’s is booming in 2014, up 33 percent in the first quarter alone,” according to Yahoo Finance. “Every mainstream studio is keenly aware of not offending the Chinese market, because it’s become such an important revenue stream,” Tom Nunan, a visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Theater, Film and Television, told Bloomberg.

Chinese film studios are increasingly seen as the gatekeepers by which Hollywood can enter this 1.4 billion-person market. Ryan Kavanaugh, the chief executive of the media company Relativity Media, has successfully made co-productions in China. But he noted recently that one of the differences between making films in the United States and China is that, in the latter, films have to be “meaningful both to the government and the Chinese people.” In other words, don’t offend Beijing.

Consider the case of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which several years ago released a remake of Red Dawn, the 1984 cult classic about Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan troops invading the United States. Originally, the script had Chinese soldiers tromping through the United States — but the producers switched them to North Koreans. “The movie was changed because we couldn’t get distribution for the movie from any of the distributors here,” Red Dawn producer Tripp Vinson told USA Today. “They didn’t want to offend the Chinese, I am assuming.”

Or consider The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which Chinese censors tweaked before release: Producers were reportedly cautioned that the ancient ruler in the film wasn’t allowed to resemble China’s liberator and dictator Mao Zedong. Or Iron Man 3, a film in which Chinese government officials were reportedly allowed onto movie sets to monitor the filming and ensure plot lines wouldn’t offend Beijing. Or World War Z, a 2013 movie based on a popular book of the same name, where a zombie epidemic starts in China and spreads throughout the world. According to the entertainment website The Wrap, the producers dropped the reference to China as the source of the plague.

After Sony cancelled the release of The Interview, U.S. President Barack Obama criticized the studio, saying, “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States.” Yet in the case of China, this has been happening for years: Hollywood studios have opted to censor their films to appease a foreign political party. Hatred — and North Korea — have nothing to do with it.

This points to an uncomfortable reality about current geopolitical struggles. The Chinese Communist Party is much less ideologically rigid than its fallen Soviet counterpart. That makes life much more bearable for the citizens of China who no longer have to endure the nightmare of being test subjects for an experiment in building utopia. It does, however, allow Beijing to compete in areas Moscow never could. For example, the CCP can make compromises with Hollywood studios which allow it to buy the ability to project soft power using their output. This is I think an indicator that whilst authoritarian capitalism may be a less destructive ideology than communism, it’s also likely to prove a more tenacious adversary for liberal democracy.

My favourite films of 2014

The title of this post is very deliberately chosen. These are my favourite films of the year rather than the best films. This is not just a concession to the subjectivity of such an exercise but an acknowledgement that I’ve probably not seen most of the best films of the year. I watch a lot of films but it’s still a small proportion of those out there. You won’t see Boyhood, Babadook, Pride, the Wind Rises, Mr Turner, Wolf of Wall Street, The Theory of Everything, Calvary, the Raid 2, Unbroken, Under the Skin, Lucy, The Imitation Game, The Grand Budapest Hotel or Citizenfour on this list not because I think the films there are better but just because I haven’t seen them.

For the purposes of this post, a film was released this year if that’s when IMDB lists its UK release date as 2014.

And that as far as I’m concerned is a pretty good selection of films. Despite a relatively anaemic box office, there’ve been plenty of interesting films and encouragingly many of them have been the kind of big budget epics that people are most likely to watch. The first film I saw this year was 12 years a slave, which shortly went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. It was I thought a very worthy winner and I assumed it would my top film of the year. Yet such has been the quality of what I have seen, 12 Years is not actually in my top 5. A lot of other really great films have gone the same way.

The strength that I think unites the films I have chosen is that grapple with important (generally political) themes but do so within the context of riveting filmmaking. They are political without being propaganda. Balancing entertainment and exploring ideas is a challenge for filmmakers and many of them have risen the challenge admirably.

5. Captain America: the Winter Solider

Marvel has had a great year. Guardians of the Galaxy and the Winter Soldier were for my money the best films the studio has made so far. The reason I picked the later film for my top 5 was that it retained Marvel’s usual combination of action and humour but also added some smart political stuff about the surveillance state. Plus it had some really good performances including from Chris Evans in the lead, who I’d not really rated before.

4: Paddington

The funniest and cutest defence of immigration you can imagine. A nice mixture of slapstick, satire, visual gags and wordplay. It is sweet without becoming sentimental. The cast is pretty much perfectly chosen and the performances they deliver are great. Particularly remarkable is Nicole Kidman clearly having a riot as the villain.

3: Two Days, One Night

The Dardenne brothers latest film stars Marion Cotillard as Sandra a working class Belgium women who has a single weekend to save her job by persuading her colleagues to forgo their annual bonuses. I can’t do better job of explaining why it’s such an impressive film than the Economist’s review did: “the Dardennes’ film digs more deeply into the devastating effects of the Western world’s current financial woes than practically any previous feature film. The audience is, of course, eager for Sandra to keep the job which puts a roof over her family’s heads, and which lifts her out of her depression. But when the Dardennes show what goes on behind her colleagues’ front doors, it becomes painfully clear how important their bonuses are to them, too. “It will be a disaster for me if the majority vote for you,” says one. “But I hope for your sake that they do.” It is a complicated, humane idea, expressed with heart-wrenching directness. And there are many more of those in this impressive work.”

2: ’71

Director Yann Demange takes the spirit of Paul Greengrass and Kathryn Bigelow to Northern Ireland for this finger nail shredding tale of a British soldier (Jack O’Connell) lost in Belfast at the height of the Troubles. It is both a wonderfully evocation of a particular point in history and a universally applicable parable about the messiness of counter-insurgency.

1: Snowpiercer

My favourite film of the year barely even qualifies. It’s not had a proper cinematic release in the UK (and probably never will) but was shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival. That’s a travesty because it’s a near perfect film. In fact, I’m rather unsure which of its myriad strengths to tell you about. Perhaps the most remarkable is that its preposterous premise about the only survivors of catastrophic climate change being aboard a train that never stops is utterly convincing from beginning to end. Joon-ho Bong creates a remarkable world aboard the train and populates it with an impressive cast (including Chris Evans, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Viola Davis and Alison Pill). I’ve not seen a more compelling exploration of either personal or political themes this year.

A bear out of water story

Paddington is hilarious, charming and assertive in its politics. It tells a better story about being British than any politician has.

Writing about Paddington poses a challenge. How does one discuss such a political film without losing sight of the fact that it’s a hugely fun children’s film? My solution is to do a mini-review about how wonderful it is before I start pontificating about things like national identity.

Review

During the finale of Paddington there is a moment when the titular bear experiences what the BBFC calls ‘mild threat.’ And as his survival hangs in the balance, I could hear all of the children in the cinema simultaneously gasping. They had clearly been completely won over by it and so had I.

It is funny throughout mixing slapstick, satire, visual gags and nice wordplay. It is cute and warm hearted without being sentimental. The cast is pretty much perfectly chosen and the performances they deliver are great. Particularly remarkable is Nicole Kidman clearly having a riot as the villain.

The Pontificating

More impressive still is that Paddington makes an argument about what it is to be British that is more impressive than any politician has managed. Through Paddington’s endearing eyes we see the gap between the picture Britain presents to the world and the reality of what happens when the world comes to Britain. He comes to London because of an absurdly old fashioned explorer, who was befriended by Paddington’s Aunt and Uncle during a visit to ‘darkest Peru.’ He tells them that he comes from a land where people are polite, fair and (invoking the memory of wartime evacuees) kind enough to home the children of strangers if necessary.

When he eventually arrives in London, Paddington finds an altogether harsher reality. Notwithstanding the fact that he is a paragon of the kind of decency on which British people pride themselves – impeccably well-mannered, well-meaning and honest – he finds precious little decency in return. Hugh Bonneville’s stuffy risk analyst frets that Paddington’s story about an earthquake that destroyed his homeland and the explorer who invited him to London are invented to garner money and pity. Peter Capaldi’s meat paste eating neighbourhood busybody worries that Paddington will bring with him ‘jungle music’. In addition, to these archetypes of middle and working class suspicion there is the altogether more malevolent figure of the director of taxidermy at the British Natural History Museum (Nicole Kidman) who is glad Paddington is in the UK but only so she can add him to her collection. She is perhaps a representation of those in power who see migrants as a resource to exploit rather than people worthy of respect.

The film is if anything to soft on the UK. An immigration lawyer who reviewed the film concluded that not only Paddington but the kindly family who take him in would have faced prison.

While the way Britain treats migrants would reasonably promote anger and shame that is not (of course) what the film does. It calls forth our better angels and challenges us to be the people the explorer promised we would be. There are characters with warmer instincts notably Sally Hawkin’s illustrator who cajoles her family into taking Paddington in. She’s the kind of progressive minded Briton who is treated by her contemporaries as an affront to our national predilection for common sense, before latter generations lionise them as exemplars of British decency.  Bonneville and Capaldi’s characters are given their chance to repent. And Paddington eventually finds a place in London and comes to be accepted much as Huguenots, Jews, Irish, Germans, Indians and Caribbean eventually were.

Paddington is an effective challenge to the country that made it: if you are proud of your purported decency show it consistently. Rather than showing grave suspicion followed invariably by inevitable acceptance, cut out that initial unpleasant and unbecoming phase of hostility. Which is I think you’ll agree an impressive message to convey via a film about a marmalade obsessed bear!

 

P.S. I’d heartily recommend the Economist’s culture blog’s take on Paddington:

Save Our Spidey

The Amazing Spider Man films have been dire but Andrew Garfield is a good Spiderman. It would be a mistake for Marvel to ditch him.

The unnecessary reboot of the Spiderman franchise has not been a success either artistically or (at least as far as Sony in concerned) financially.

And it’s not a secret that Sony has toyed with the idea of collaborating with Marvel studios to resuscitate the series. The latest news – as reported by IGN – is that:

“IF the Marvel/Sony deal were to go forward,” says [The Latino Review], “Andrew Garfield would no longer be Peter Parker and any baggage from existing films, [directors Sam] Raimi or [Marc] Webb, would be non-canonical.” Marvel wants a clean slate, apparently, and they are not interested in doing any more so-called “romance” movies but would rather “focus on the difficulties of being a teenager and a superhero with a romance side-story.” Neither is an origin story part of the plan, so a Marvel Spidey movie would reportedly pick up with Peter Parker already living his double life as a hero.

This seems to me to be misguided. The films were bad but not because of Garfield. In fact, he was rather good. As James Whitbrook writes for Io9:

Andrew Garfield just nailed Spider-Man for me, for someone who’s loved that character for years. Sure, he was a little too cool to be the nerdy Peter we’re familiar with – the aspect of the character that Tobey Maguire’s take in the Raimi movies excelled at – but as the slightly cocky, oddly charming and sarkily funny Spider-Man persona he shone. At least for me, it felt like we had a version of the character that echoed back to the quick witted and confident Spider-Man I remembered as a kid on screen at last (although Maguire’s Spider-Man is still great, he was always a better Peter to me than Spidey). He wasn’t perfect, and was hamstrung by some dodgy background stuff that I was decidedly not a fan of – but Garfield’s Spider-Man was what I wanted for the character’s movie-based escapades. That humour, the wittiness, was key, and it’s something Garfield excelled at in the role. To lose out on that, so soon after he started, and just as he’d taken Spider-Man to an interesting place that could’ve been explored in a potential Amazing Spider-Man 3, feels like a waste of a great piece of casting.

The other sad part of this is that what Marvel are purportedly looking for, according to Latino Review, sounds like the kind of situation Garfield’s take on the character is in post TASM 2: An already established Spider-Man without a romantic situation being the biggest focus of his life (thanks to the other best part of the Amazing Reboot, Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy shuffling off the movie’s mortal coil at the climax of of the film – at the cost of a more interesting film, to boot). Although there is a lot of mess around the character that I can see Marvel hesitant to draw on still, Garfield’s Spidey is in the perfect place for him to be joined up into the ongoing Marvel Universe. Origin out of the way, at the end of a big romantic arc, already accepting of his role as Spider-Man – and even more importantly, in a place that you could ostensibly cut him solely out of Sony’s bizarre plans to ‘MCU-ify’ that universe with their take on the Sinister Six and other spider-man projects and still keep the character largely intact. It seems like such a shame that in spite of the problems surrounding him, Garfield’s Spider-Man is ideal for the MCU. If only he didn’t have all that baggage. But at the same time, do we really need a third Spider-Man, so soon? There’s already been the problem for DC of recreating characters for the big screen at the cost of another established version (looking at you, Flash). Spider-Man is popular enough of a character that I’m sure it would work, but it seems like the sort of thing that is made for confusing mainstream audiences.

I don’t really see Marvel’s reasoning here. It may be that they don’t want audiences to associate their films with Sony’s inferior offerings. But by the same token the Amazing Spiderman films were sufficiently different that integrating their Spiderman into the MCU may draw in a different audience. If nothing else Garfield is a certified A-lister whose star power should add to Marvel’s already impressive box office haul.

 

Christopher Lee reads the Raven

Christopher Lee is a legend of the cinema, the living embodiment of the spirit of Hammer Horror and a nonagenarian heavy metal artist. All of which makes him just about the perfect person to perform Edgar Allen Poe’s macabre poem the Raven:

Farewell Orange Wednesdays

So Orange Wednesdays is coming to an end. The rise of video on demand seems to have convinced EE to end the promotion that made going to the cinema somewhat less obscenely expensive is no longer good value for them.

This is obviously a shame but the best part of Orange Wednesdays finished a while ago. The adverts that initially advertised the promotion – sadly replaced by nonsense with Kevin Bacon when Orange became EE – were that rare kind of commercial that one actually enjoyed rather than endured.

Here are some of the best:

“So it comes round every Wednesday like clockwork…”

Trolling Darth Vader

The chatty hunter (ft. Patrick Swayze)

And the best one in which Steven Seagal blows up a golf course 

John Hurt’s characters die more regularly than Sean Bean’s

If you are fainthearted you might want to give this post a miss

So we all know Sean Bean is the guy who dies in every movie. There are even (NSFW) videos to prove it:

But Kyle Hill of Nerdist – in a post which rather dubiously is published in their science section – has done the maths and discovered their are actors who die on screen rather more often.

I’d never have guessed that John Hurt would be the actor to die the most reguarly but then again he did feature in perhaps cinema’s most iconic death (NSFW):

The T-800 is now the most dated thing about the Terminator films

The notion of a humanoid robot assassin looks dated before it’s even possible.

So the trailer for Terminator: ‘Genisys’ has arrived.

It looks potentially entertaining and Emilia Clarke seems like a perfect replacement for Linda Hamilton. However, it doesn’t really address the fundamental question regarding this semi-reboot: what exactly it is supposed to be adding to the franchise.

One minor issue that I will be curious to see if the filmmakers attempt to address is that since the original films were made it has become apparent that if one wanted to design a machine which conducts assassinations it probably wouldn’t look like the T-800:

The only film I’ve seen so far that addresses how drones are changing warfare is the Bourne Legacy. Though like much of the rest of that film it does so badly. To try and prove that the CIA would still need genetically enhanced super-assassins when they have predator drones, there is a faintly ludicrous scene where Jeremy Renner’s Bourne stand-in character manages to shoot a drone down with a rifle.

Frankly, filmakers are going to have to do better than this. ‘Killer robots’ are becoming more prevalent and are moving from the sky to the ground. Because Terminator is a retro franchise – which has helpfully established in the past installments that only organic matter can be sent back in time –  it can probably get away with this. Films hoping to depict realistic battlefields of the near future will need to account for drones and the like. The Top Gun sequel will apparently see Tom Cruise’s character trying to prove the relevance of human pilots. Expect a lot more films to deal with similar themes.