Meanwhile, last night I attended Clooney and Alexander Payne in a q&a with David Carr for the New York Times’ TimesTalks series. But you really have to watch the TimesTalks video to see how on-the-fly funny he is, especially in front of a crowd:

Meanwhile, last night I attended Clooney and Alexander Payne in a q&a with David Carr for the New York Times’ TimesTalks series. But you really have to watch the TimesTalks video to see how on-the-fly funny he is, especially in front of a crowd:

Writer’s Panel Podcast

By Jackson Truax

The first full week of February typically marks the Oscar-nominees luncheon, and the plethora of events that follow suit, many of which are hoping to capitalize on the sudden influx of nominees from all over the world touching down in Los Angeles. One of the events that has become a tradition of this week is Jeff Goldsmith’s panel of Oscar-nominated screenwriters. Goldsmith began the panel as part of his “Creative Screenwriting” podcast series, and has continued the tradition in his new podcast series “The Q&A.” As Goldsmith’s podcasts often debut as the number one movie and tv podcast on iTunes, the panel has become a near-vital campaign stop. Recent Oscar-winners who have taken part include Dustin Lance Black (Milk), Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious), David Seidler (The King’s Speech), and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network). This year’s panel took place Monday night at the Los Angeles Film School. Goldsmith’s podcast of the panel is now on iTunes. Here’s a look at how it went down.

This year’s attendees included Annie Mumolo (Bridemaids), Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Descendants), JC Chandor (Margin Call), and Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). This panel was markedly different from those Goldsmith has held in years past. In addition to there being far fewer writers present (last year there were nine, the proceeding year there were eleven), gone were the larger-than-life personalities along the line of previous participants Sorkin (a current nominee for Moneyball), Jason Reitman, or any of the Pixar gang. All of this resulted in an evening that lacked the grandiosity or spectacle of previous years, and offered something infinitely more relaxed and laid-back.

The biggest difference and most welcome surprise was that this year’s assembled writers were arguably the funniest group to date. Mumolo, Faxon, and Rash were seated next to each other, and as the three of them are all alumni of the famed Groundlings comedy troupe, they often gave themselves over to their comedic impulses, going as far as to practically engage each other and the audience in improv comedy bits.

Straughan was also in very different form than in previous appearances. Last December he did a Q&A for Goldsmith’s screening series, which I attended before interviewing him the following day. He’s always come across as an incredibly humble man, generous in sharing his insight and humanity. Although he barely alluded to it in our interview, he seemed not sure how to process or handle the acclaim and success of the film and the screenplay, having written it with his wife Bridget O’Connor, who died of cancer in September 2010 at the age of 49. Straughan seemed incredibly relaxed at Goldsmith’s panel, and the shtick of the Groundlings gang freed him up to let loose and enjoy himself.

Awards season is often filled with a great deal of false humility, but nowhere does it seem more genuine than from Chandor’s appearances. Although it was touched on less Monday night than in previous appearances, Chandor has often told the story of how a series of disappointments caused him almost to leave filmmaking all together before his life turned around with Margin Call. Chandor came off as the writer of the group who was most personally invested in giving the audience the most practical advice on how to develop screenplays that have the most potential to get produced without sacrificing one’s artistic vision. It was impossible not to notice that although Chandor’s energy felt endless, his voice seemed completely tired. He may be working the Q&A circuit the hardest of any the assembled writers (in addition to his Oscar nomination, he is up for Spirit Awards for writing and directing,). The second the panel was over, he had to rush to another Q&A. Here’s hoping his film will get a big prize (most likely at the Spirit Awards, though it should have been a nominated in at least several other Oscar categories) and once Chandor has reaped his reward, he can get some well-deserved rest and relaxation.

As always with Goldsmith’s Q&As, he had the writers take the audience deep into their craft, with some of the most insightful tidbits including Straughan sharing how terrified he is of his scenes feeling too expository, and Faxon and Rash talking about paring down the novel they were adapting, and deciding how to approach the use of voice-over. The most memorable moments from Monday night include Mumolo getting notes on comedic screenwriting from super-writer/director/producer Judd Apatow, and Goldsmith’s annually-asked infamous question about which of the fellow panelist’s screenplays each panelist would choose to re-write.

Despite a noted number of writers and marquee names absent at Monday night’s panel, those who chose to participate made it once again an unforgettable experience. Check out “The Q&A” podcast now on iTunes to here the entire panel.

Writer’s Panel Podcast

By Jackson Truax

The first full week of February typically marks the Oscar-nominees luncheon, and the plethora of events that follow suit, many of which are hoping to capitalize on the sudden influx of nominees from all over the world touching down in Los Angeles. One of the events that has become a tradition of this week is Jeff Goldsmith’s panel of Oscar-nominated screenwriters. Goldsmith began the panel as part of his “Creative Screenwriting” podcast series, and has continued the tradition in his new podcast series “The Q&A.” As Goldsmith’s podcasts often debut as the number one movie and tv podcast on iTunes, the panel has become a near-vital campaign stop. Recent Oscar-winners who have taken part include Dustin Lance Black (Milk), Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious), David Seidler (The King’s Speech), and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network). This year’s panel took place Monday night at the Los Angeles Film School. Goldsmith’s podcast of the panel is now on iTunes. Here’s a look at how it went down.

This year’s attendees included Annie Mumolo (Bridemaids), Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Descendants), JC Chandor (Margin Call), and Peter Straughan (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). This panel was markedly different from those Goldsmith has held in years past. In addition to there being far fewer writers present (last year there were nine, the proceeding year there were eleven), gone were the larger-than-life personalities along the line of previous participants Sorkin (a current nominee for Moneyball), Jason Reitman, or any of the Pixar gang. All of this resulted in an evening that lacked the grandiosity or spectacle of previous years, and offered something infinitely more relaxed and laid-back.

The biggest difference and most welcome surprise was that this year’s assembled writers were arguably the funniest group to date. Mumolo, Faxon, and Rash were seated next to each other, and as the three of them are all alumni of the famed Groundlings comedy troupe, they often gave themselves over to their comedic impulses, going as far as to practically engage each other and the audience in improv comedy bits.

Straughan was also in very different form than in previous appearances. Last December he did a Q&A for Goldsmith’s screening series, which I attended before interviewing him the following day. He’s always come across as an incredibly humble man, generous in sharing his insight and humanity. Although he barely alluded to it in our interview, he seemed not sure how to process or handle the acclaim and success of the film and the screenplay, having written it with his wife Bridget O’Connor, who died of cancer in September 2010 at the age of 49. Straughan seemed incredibly relaxed at Goldsmith’s panel, and the shtick of the Groundlings gang freed him up to let loose and enjoy himself.

Awards season is often filled with a great deal of false humility, but nowhere does it seem more genuine than from Chandor’s appearances. Although it was touched on less Monday night than in previous appearances, Chandor has often told the story of how a series of disappointments caused him almost to leave filmmaking all together before his life turned around with Margin Call. Chandor came off as the writer of the group who was most personally invested in giving the audience the most practical advice on how to develop screenplays that have the most potential to get produced without sacrificing one’s artistic vision. It was impossible not to notice that although Chandor’s energy felt endless, his voice seemed completely tired. He may be working the Q&A circuit the hardest of any the assembled writers (in addition to his Oscar nomination, he is up for Spirit Awards for writing and directing,). The second the panel was over, he had to rush to another Q&A. Here’s hoping his film will get a big prize (most likely at the Spirit Awards, though it should have been a nominated in at least several other Oscar categories) and once Chandor has reaped his reward, he can get some well-deserved rest and relaxation.

As always with Goldsmith’s Q&As, he had the writers take the audience deep into their craft, with some of the most insightful tidbits including Straughan sharing how terrified he is of his scenes feeling too expository, and Faxon and Rash talking about paring down the novel they were adapting, and deciding how to approach the use of voice-over. The most memorable moments from Monday night include Mumolo getting notes on comedic screenwriting from super-writer/director/producer Judd Apatow, and Goldsmith’s annually-asked infamous question about which of the fellow panelist’s screenplays each panelist would choose to re-write.

Despite a noted number of writers and marquee names absent at Monday night’s panel, those who chose to participate made it once again an unforgettable experience. Check out “The Q&A” podcast now on iTunes to here the entire panel.

Recently, I was lucky enough to be invited on NPR to talk about the adapted screenplay race. It surprised host Rachel Martin that the screenplay race, it turned out, wasn’t so much about the individual screenplays as it was about the Best Picture category. This is probably the hardest thing to grasp about the way Oscars vote. Everybody votes for everything when it comes to picking the winners in the various categories. So you have actors voting for cinematography, editors voting for screenplay, costumers voting for animation, publicists voting for actors — and everyone votes for Best Picture. The truly best indicator of what the professional industry thinks are really the guild awards.

She was also surprised to hear that those voting for adapted screenplay don’t have to have seen all of the films nominated. Heck, the year Brokeback lost to Crash many Academy members came out and admitted they didn’t see the movie. This year, if you polled Academy members I bet you’d find that there are those voting members who still have to have seen all nine of the nominees. Voting is buzz and perception. When you fall in love with a pretty girl across the room not only do you not see anyone else but you don’t even want to look at anyone else. Such is the conundrum of choosing “best.”

American audiences haven’t quite gotten Hugo, of course. If the fanboys can barely get it (as in, “I didn’t know what movie it was trying to be”) then the pampered, dumbed down American culture ain’t going to get it either. Most of them are being forced into theaters to see The Artist and Hugo, but once they do they are dazzled by them. These are easily two of the best films of the year and yet they are off putting because they don’t fit into the marketing paradigm. Worth noting, most great films don’t. No one knew quite what to do with Dragon Tattoo either – they wanted it to do what the Swedish film did but there was no way David Fincher was going to let that happen. His film is so intricate and layered you can tell how many times someone has seen it by their reaction to it. Steven Zaillian didn’t watch the Swedish film when he did his adaptation so there is really no way it can be called a remake; it is the “American version” if it’s anything. And though the Swedish version is very good, with a wonderful performance by Noomi Rapace, Fincher’s version is leagues beyond it, visually, in its reimagining of Lisbeth Salander, its technical execution and in that unbelievable score, the year’s standout, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. There wasn’t enough time to shake up the Academy and get them to pay attention to it — it came on too late. And with the exclusion of this film, most notably in Picture, Director, Screenplay and Score — their biases are showing. This year proved how very different the Academy really is from the guilds in many ways. They agree on the broad strokes but there are significant differences. The Academy are small enough that their grudges and prejudices, favoritism is evident. The Academy are really more insular, more friend-friendly, less objective. They will enable you when you make something ambitious yet subpar. The Academy has a history of slapping down filmmakers who operate as mavericks — they want you to be good, just not better than they are. So watch for the Academy’s power players to work against Fincher and Co for a while.

When the Academy had ten nominees for Best Picture you saw much more of a representation of guild support overall. So for 2009 and 2010 you had virtually every Best Picture nominee with a corresponding Screenplay nomination. For 2010, it was 9 for 10 nominees; and in 2009 it was 8 for 10. This year, only 5 out of the 9 have corresponding Screenplay nominations. This matches how the Academy had run its Best Picture race for many decades prior, with only five. In those years, only 3 or 4 at the most had Screenplay nominations. So you have to wonder, who’s writing these things and why don’t those scripts get nominated?

Why indeed. Conversely, why didn’t the films that were nominated for Screenplay get into the Best Picture race. It’s best not to go there. But keep in mind that this year, the voting was vulnerable to strategist, friend-friendly voting – and therein lies the problem with this year’s method of choosing Best Picture. The Academy is a secret club — and with 5 or with 10 it was easier to hide the favoritism. But it’s been exposed this year — they’ve really shown themselves to be at once out of touch with movie audiences and absolutely run by alliances, powerful moguls and their buddies. So if you don’t have a lot of friends in Hollywood, or a powerful advocate who has a lot of friends, well, you’re going to have a hard time getting into the secret club. Some of the lesser known, less popular people broke through — like JC Chandor for Margin Call, for instance. That was a long shot but one that paid off.

As far as screenplays go, though, the two biggest surprises were the exclusion of The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. If they are good enough to be nominated for Best Picture they are certainly worth a nomination for writing. You’d think, anyway.

Tate Taylor in particular was screwed over, I think, because he faithfully adapted his childhood friend’s book, adapted it before it was even published and is the main reason for its success. Eric Roth wrote the best screenplay of the year with Loud and Close. Surely Roth has enough friends in the Academy, and most in the Writers branch know what a great writer he is, and yet — it couldn’t get arrested. If it were true, as was suggested on NPR, that voters in the category had actually read Roth’s original screenplay, I feel sure he would have been nominated. And as for Taylor, he just isn’t in the club yet. Moreover, he’s being punished for the film not being PC enough, even though he wrote and directed the highest grossing film in the Best Picture race. Funny, ain’t it?

But let’s dig into Screenplay, shall we?

Best Adapted Screenplay–
Should have been nominated: Steven Zaillian for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tate Taylor for The Help, Eric Roth for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

1. The Descendants – if the Alexander Payne film isn’t going to win Best Picture, or if George Clooney isn’t going to win Best Actor, The Descendants, like Sideways, seems poised to win Best Adapted Screenplay. And if it did win it would be very deserving. Of all of the adaptations in the category, with the possible exception of Tinker Tailor, The Descendants is the most faithful rendering. It wasn’t just that Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash adapted the novel but they did what most Hollywood productions don’t — they allowed the writer Kari Hart Hemmings not only to be on set through the whole shoot but they even gave her and her husband parts in the film. There is a moral side to both Alexander Payne and George Clooney that is admirable in a world of slash and burn. You know the old joke about the (insert bigoted minority class here) who comes to Hollywood and sleeps with the writer? That wasn’t how The Descendants was going to go. They honored the seed, the earth around it, and what sprouted up from it.

The Descendants is about honoring our past and preserving our future. It is about forgetting and forgiveness. It is about mistakes made, and the hard work it takes to dig yourself out of them. It is about honesty, truth and all of the things you can’t say. It is about what you think people are thinking, who you think they are and who they actually turn out to be if you stop and actually listen to them. Though it’s a movie about a man’s inner journey, his turns come from the influence and the confrontation of women. His daughters, his wife and the wife of the man his wife had an affair with. It is an American story because it is about land ownership, corporate takeover and what a cultural melting pot this country really is. Two films in the race are about the America we know now. Most people watching The Descendants would find some truth in there, uncomfortable though it may be at times, it is wildly profound at the heart of it.

2. Moneyball – Here is an example of a script changing hands many times — like a piece of glass washed up on the shore, its been molded to perfection by many different eyes. Stan Chervin’s original draft flipped over to Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, who then passed it back and forth but, according to them, wrote their own drafts separately. That makes it not wholly a Sorkin script, not like The Social Network, and Zaillian’s presence is felt throughout. Moneyball is probably, of all of the five nominees, the best written film — perhaps not as an adaptation but as a pure work. It is the Descendant’s biggest competition because, like that movie, this and Actor are the two Oscars it can win.

Moneyball is such a great movie, in fact, it’s really one of the bigger debacles of 2011 that Bennett Miller failed to earn a Best Director nomination. Of course, it’s hard to squeeze another one in with these five, but still, it has everything a great movie needs — and it starts with the screenplay. Moneyball is about the different ways we measure success. It is a heartbreaking story about failure being redefined by perspective. The whole movie boils down to that one scene where the player hits a homer but is so used to landing a single he slides to the ground but never looks up to see he’s hit a home run. In Moneyball, Billy Beane (played so tenderly, beautifully by Brad Pitt) lived through heightened expectations, and subsequent disappointment, through those who thought he was a god for five minutes until all that came tumbling down. If Beane measured his own success by his paycheck or by wins he’d have won only a fraction of what life ultimately comes to mean to him. His success is the tiny tendril that reaches from his daughter to him. His success is in faithfully sticking by a team he knows can be about more than just the star players and the World Series. His success is in fixing the problem of players like him, who are plucked from an otherwise rich life and thrust into the limelight way too soon. The rise and fall of baseball players, or celebrities illuminates our own need to watch people become gods just long enough for them to disappoint us. We then take equal amounts of satisfaction tearing them down. He’s such a beautiful loser, Billy Beane. And maybe somewhere in there, we can find our own reflections — our own failures recycled into lasting, shimmering successes, even if they can’t be measured by a shiny, gold prize.

3. Hugo – if there is one bright star to emerge from 2011 it’s John Logan. Perhaps this is because his Rango is quite simply one of the best scripts of the year. But his adaptation of Hugo is really astonishing when you consider what it really is. To get how good Logan’s script for this film is, you have to get what makes Hugo a great movie, and why its strange, vibrant chaos is the very thing that makes it great. Logan loves working with Scorsese, he says in his interview with David Poland, because the two of them have expansive, freed up notions of what movies can be. They aren’t linear attached, but rather, believe that films can take turns here and there and that the smart audience can keep up. Logan worked so well adapting Hugo because the book does on the page what this movie does on the screen — it celebrates the illustration and the words. Hugo’s illustration is Scorsese, his team of visionaries — Dante Ferretti, Thelma, Howard Shore, Bob Richardson, Sandy Powell. It takes Hugo’s imaginative world and shoots it into the sky, scattering tiny pieces of light into the broad expanse of the book’s black and white world. Scorsese takes those intricate line drawings and he plunges the viewer into them.

Hugo is about not being part of this world. Hugo identifies with well built machines because they have a purpose. In his own desperation with day to day life, Scorsese, the odd, hyper manic that he was he found his purpose in film. This is why to Scorsese there is no limit to what he can do with film, up to and including Hugo. Logan never took it at face value that he had to limit himself by what was available in the book, nor by what kids are used to seeing on screen. When people say to me that Hugo isn’t a kid’s movie and that their kids were bored during it I always say back to them, it was never supposed to be the job of filmmakers to dumb down for children. Children should always be encouraged to smart up for great films. Having worked with kids a lot as I raised my daughter I can tell you that they are always up for a challenge, even if it’s more fun, perhaps, to experience something “fun.” Give them more, I say. Teach them how to reach in to movies. Talk them through it, show them why the automaton looks so strange, and why John Logan focused so hard on the character of Isabelle. Hugo is a celebration of the imagination. And believe me, the imagination simply cannot flourish if it is recycling the same stories, the same happy endings, the same easy heroism time and time again. It needs a surprising gust of fresh air. It needs the new. Funnily enough, Hugo is the new and it is the old all at once. It brings to vivid life the past, while diving headlong into the future with 3-D. True, no one knows quite what to make of Hugo — and that is exactly how John Logan likes it.

4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – this is considered a hell of an adaptation, one that took a very intricate book and made a script that captured everything without being too literal or too spare. It kept just enough to honor the book. Co-writer Bridget O’Connor died in September 2010, leaving her husband Peter Straughan to stand alone as an Oscar nominee. I won’t pretend to know what the film is about completely — I know it’s about the cold war, spies and not knowing who is who, not knowing whom to trust. It is a very good film, of course, but it will take time to fully absorb.

5. The Ides of March is an odd film to have here in the adaptation race, but the truth of it is that it really was a total redux of the play, Farragut North. Clooney, Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon absolutely chose to savage the world of politics and how we see them play out every year. The choices they made absolutely point to our own politicians — our idealization of them and the subsequent, ugly truth that when you get down to it, you have to play the game to even get close to standing at the podium. Clooney as an actor took a risk playing such a dark character, though it’s worth noting he chooses not to limit himself in any way. It helps that he’s mostly successful at what he does. It’s a good script, but its inclusion here feels like a tribute to the effort. Some believe it might pull off a surprise win here, especially if Clooney won’t be winning in the Best Actor category.

Although any of the five can win – it feels to me like it’s down to Moneyball vs. The Descendants. But we will have to wait and see. The Writers Guild is coming up and that will clarify things slightly, at least in the Adapted Screenplay race. Next up, Original.

Recently, I was lucky enough to be invited on NPR to talk about the adapted screenplay race. It surprised host Rachel Martin that the screenplay race, it turned out, wasn’t so much about the individual screenplays as it was about the Best Picture category. This is probably the hardest thing to grasp about the way Oscars vote. Everybody votes for everything when it comes to picking the winners in the various categories. So you have actors voting for cinematography, editors voting for screenplay, costumers voting for animation, publicists voting for actors — and everyone votes for Best Picture. The truly best indicator of what the professional industry thinks are really the guild awards.

She was also surprised to hear that those voting for adapted screenplay don’t have to have seen all of the films nominated. Heck, the year Brokeback lost to Crash many Academy members came out and admitted they didn’t see the movie. This year, if you polled Academy members I bet you’d find that there are those voting members who still have to have seen all nine of the nominees. Voting is buzz and perception. When you fall in love with a pretty girl across the room not only do you not see anyone else but you don’t even want to look at anyone else. Such is the conundrum of choosing “best.”

American audiences haven’t quite gotten Hugo, of course. If the fanboys can barely get it (as in, “I didn’t know what movie it was trying to be”) then the pampered, dumbed down American culture ain’t going to get it either. Most of them are being forced into theaters to see The Artist and Hugo, but once they do they are dazzled by them. These are easily two of the best films of the year and yet they are off putting because they don’t fit into the marketing paradigm. Worth noting, most great films don’t. No one knew quite what to do with Dragon Tattoo either – they wanted it to do what the Swedish film did but there was no way David Fincher was going to let that happen. His film is so intricate and layered you can tell how many times someone has seen it by their reaction to it. Steven Zaillian didn’t watch the Swedish film when he did his adaptation so there is really no way it can be called a remake; it is the “American version” if it’s anything. And though the Swedish version is very good, with a wonderful performance by Noomi Rapace, Fincher’s version is leagues beyond it, visually, in its reimagining of Lisbeth Salander, its technical execution and in that unbelievable score, the year’s standout, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. There wasn’t enough time to shake up the Academy and get them to pay attention to it — it came on too late. And with the exclusion of this film, most notably in Picture, Director, Screenplay and Score — their biases are showing. This year proved how very different the Academy really is from the guilds in many ways. They agree on the broad strokes but there are significant differences. The Academy are small enough that their grudges and prejudices, favoritism is evident. The Academy are really more insular, more friend-friendly, less objective. They will enable you when you make something ambitious yet subpar. The Academy has a history of slapping down filmmakers who operate as mavericks — they want you to be good, just not better than they are. So watch for the Academy’s power players to work against Fincher and Co for a while.

When the Academy had ten nominees for Best Picture you saw much more of a representation of guild support overall. So for 2009 and 2010 you had virtually every Best Picture nominee with a corresponding Screenplay nomination. For 2010, it was 9 for 10 nominees; and in 2009 it was 8 for 10. This year, only 5 out of the 9 have corresponding Screenplay nominations. This matches how the Academy had run its Best Picture race for many decades prior, with only five. In those years, only 3 or 4 at the most had Screenplay nominations. So you have to wonder, who’s writing these things and why don’t those scripts get nominated?

Why indeed. Conversely, why didn’t the films that were nominated for Screenplay get into the Best Picture race. It’s best not to go there. But keep in mind that this year, the voting was vulnerable to strategist, friend-friendly voting – and therein lies the problem with this year’s method of choosing Best Picture. The Academy is a secret club — and with 5 or with 10 it was easier to hide the favoritism. But it’s been exposed this year — they’ve really shown themselves to be at once out of touch with movie audiences and absolutely run by alliances, powerful moguls and their buddies. So if you don’t have a lot of friends in Hollywood, or a powerful advocate who has a lot of friends, well, you’re going to have a hard time getting into the secret club. Some of the lesser known, less popular people broke through — like JC Chandor for Margin Call, for instance. That was a long shot but one that paid off.

As far as screenplays go, though, the two biggest surprises were the exclusion of The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. If they are good enough to be nominated for Best Picture they are certainly worth a nomination for writing. You’d think, anyway.

Tate Taylor in particular was screwed over, I think, because he faithfully adapted his childhood friend’s book, adapted it before it was even published and is the main reason for its success. Eric Roth wrote the best screenplay of the year with Loud and Close. Surely Roth has enough friends in the Academy, and most in the Writers branch know what a great writer he is, and yet — it couldn’t get arrested. If it were true, as was suggested on NPR, that voters in the category had actually read Roth’s original screenplay, I feel sure he would have been nominated. And as for Taylor, he just isn’t in the club yet. Moreover, he’s being punished for the film not being PC enough, even though he wrote and directed the highest grossing film in the Best Picture race. Funny, ain’t it?

But let’s dig into Screenplay, shall we?

Best Adapted Screenplay–
Should have been nominated: Steven Zaillian for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tate Taylor for The Help, Eric Roth for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

1. The Descendants – if the Alexander Payne film isn’t going to win Best Picture, or if George Clooney isn’t going to win Best Actor, The Descendants, like Sideways, seems poised to win Best Adapted Screenplay. And if it did win it would be very deserving. Of all of the adaptations in the category, with the possible exception of Tinker Tailor, The Descendants is the most faithful rendering. It wasn’t just that Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash adapted the novel but they did what most Hollywood productions don’t — they allowed the writer Kari Hart Hemmings not only to be on set through the whole shoot but they even gave her and her husband parts in the film. There is a moral side to both Alexander Payne and George Clooney that is admirable in a world of slash and burn. You know the old joke about the (insert bigoted minority class here) who comes to Hollywood and sleeps with the writer? That wasn’t how The Descendants was going to go. They honored the seed, the earth around it, and what sprouted up from it.

The Descendants is about honoring our past and preserving our future. It is about forgetting and forgiveness. It is about mistakes made, and the hard work it takes to dig yourself out of them. It is about honesty, truth and all of the things you can’t say. It is about what you think people are thinking, who you think they are and who they actually turn out to be if you stop and actually listen to them. Though it’s a movie about a man’s inner journey, his turns come from the influence and the confrontation of women. His daughters, his wife and the wife of the man his wife had an affair with. It is an American story because it is about land ownership, corporate takeover and what a cultural melting pot this country really is. Two films in the race are about the America we know now. Most people watching The Descendants would find some truth in there, uncomfortable though it may be at times, it is wildly profound at the heart of it.

2. Moneyball – Here is an example of a script changing hands many times — like a piece of glass washed up on the shore, its been molded to perfection by many different eyes. Stan Chervin’s original draft flipped over to Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, who then passed it back and forth but, according to them, wrote their own drafts separately. That makes it not wholly a Sorkin script, not like The Social Network, and Zaillian’s presence is felt throughout. Moneyball is probably, of all of the five nominees, the best written film — perhaps not as an adaptation but as a pure work. It is the Descendant’s biggest competition because, like that movie, this and Actor are the two Oscars it can win.

Moneyball is such a great movie, in fact, it’s really one of the bigger debacles of 2011 that Bennett Miller failed to earn a Best Director nomination. Of course, it’s hard to squeeze another one in with these five, but still, it has everything a great movie needs — and it starts with the screenplay. Moneyball is about the different ways we measure success. It is a heartbreaking story about failure being redefined by perspective. The whole movie boils down to that one scene where the player hits a homer but is so used to landing a single he slides to the ground but never looks up to see he’s hit a home run. In Moneyball, Billy Beane (played so tenderly, beautifully by Brad Pitt) lived through heightened expectations, and subsequent disappointment, through those who thought he was a god for five minutes until all that came tumbling down. If Beane measured his own success by his paycheck or by wins he’d have won only a fraction of what life ultimately comes to mean to him. His success is the tiny tendril that reaches from his daughter to him. His success is in faithfully sticking by a team he knows can be about more than just the star players and the World Series. His success is in fixing the problem of players like him, who are plucked from an otherwise rich life and thrust into the limelight way too soon. The rise and fall of baseball players, or celebrities illuminates our own need to watch people become gods just long enough for them to disappoint us. We then take equal amounts of satisfaction tearing them down. He’s such a beautiful loser, Billy Beane. And maybe somewhere in there, we can find our own reflections — our own failures recycled into lasting, shimmering successes, even if they can’t be measured by a shiny, gold prize.

3. Hugo – if there is one bright star to emerge from 2011 it’s John Logan. Perhaps this is because his Rango is quite simply one of the best scripts of the year. But his adaptation of Hugo is really astonishing when you consider what it really is. To get how good Logan’s script for this film is, you have to get what makes Hugo a great movie, and why its strange, vibrant chaos is the very thing that makes it great. Logan loves working with Scorsese, he says in his interview with David Poland, because the two of them have expansive, freed up notions of what movies can be. They aren’t linear attached, but rather, believe that films can take turns here and there and that the smart audience can keep up. Logan worked so well adapting Hugo because the book does on the page what this movie does on the screen — it celebrates the illustration and the words. Hugo’s illustration is Scorsese, his team of visionaries — Dante Ferretti, Thelma, Howard Shore, Bob Richardson, Sandy Powell. It takes Hugo’s imaginative world and shoots it into the sky, scattering tiny pieces of light into the broad expanse of the book’s black and white world. Scorsese takes those intricate line drawings and he plunges the viewer into them.

Hugo is about not being part of this world. Hugo identifies with well built machines because they have a purpose. In his own desperation with day to day life, Scorsese, the odd, hyper manic that he was he found his purpose in film. This is why to Scorsese there is no limit to what he can do with film, up to and including Hugo. Logan never took it at face value that he had to limit himself by what was available in the book, nor by what kids are used to seeing on screen. When people say to me that Hugo isn’t a kid’s movie and that their kids were bored during it I always say back to them, it was never supposed to be the job of filmmakers to dumb down for children. Children should always be encouraged to smart up for great films. Having worked with kids a lot as I raised my daughter I can tell you that they are always up for a challenge, even if it’s more fun, perhaps, to experience something “fun.” Give them more, I say. Teach them how to reach in to movies. Talk them through it, show them why the automaton looks so strange, and why John Logan focused so hard on the character of Isabelle. Hugo is a celebration of the imagination. And believe me, the imagination simply cannot flourish if it is recycling the same stories, the same happy endings, the same easy heroism time and time again. It needs a surprising gust of fresh air. It needs the new. Funnily enough, Hugo is the new and it is the old all at once. It brings to vivid life the past, while diving headlong into the future with 3-D. True, no one knows quite what to make of Hugo — and that is exactly how John Logan likes it.

4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – this is considered a hell of an adaptation, one that took a very intricate book and made a script that captured everything without being too literal or too spare. It kept just enough to honor the book. Co-writer Bridget O’Connor died in September 2010, leaving her husband Peter Straughan to stand alone as an Oscar nominee. I won’t pretend to know what the film is about completely — I know it’s about the cold war, spies and not knowing who is who, not knowing whom to trust. It is a very good film, of course, but it will take time to fully absorb.

5. The Ides of March is an odd film to have here in the adaptation race, but the truth of it is that it really was a total redux of the play, Farragut North. Clooney, Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon absolutely chose to savage the world of politics and how we see them play out every year. The choices they made absolutely point to our own politicians — our idealization of them and the subsequent, ugly truth that when you get down to it, you have to play the game to even get close to standing at the podium. Clooney as an actor took a risk playing such a dark character, though it’s worth noting he chooses not to limit himself in any way. It helps that he’s mostly successful at what he does. It’s a good script, but its inclusion here feels like a tribute to the effort. Some believe it might pull off a surprise win here, especially if Clooney won’t be winning in the Best Actor category.

Although any of the five can win – it feels to me like it’s down to Moneyball vs. The Descendants. But we will have to wait and see. The Writers Guild is coming up and that will clarify things slightly, at least in the Adapted Screenplay race. Next up, Original.

Viola Davis for the win:

Viola Davis for the win:

Art and entertainment hover conspicuously like twins at a barn dance: which one do you pick? Can you even tell the difference between them? Do you pick the prettier of the two, or the one that’s more interesting to talk to? As films become more and more about the target demo and less about art the way adults view art, so too must we adjust our definition of it. Sometimes I think we can’t tell the difference anymore. No matter what kind of movies are released now it seems there is an audience for them. Someone with a blog somewhere is going to write a favorable review.

You could take a look at this year’s Oscar race and you could conclude that the awards machine is broken. Recently, Daniel Radcliffe lamented Hugo’s success, saying that the Academy had a bias for Scorsese. But that isn’t really true. Most of the films in the Best Picture race belong to members of the boys club. But inclusion didn’t have to mean Harry Potter’s exclusion. When you have a Best Picture race determined mostly and only by number one votes, favoritism — friendships and alliances — begins to choke the whole point of a majority/industry vote.

It is clear by the way the Best Picture nominations turned out that these voters weren’t really voting on the best films of the year. Can you imagine how many voters would actually name –without singling out any films — some of these as their number one movie of the year? You really have to wonder about them. Who are they? Why would they, in a million years, vote that way? Either they really are a couple of french fries shy of a happy meal, have absolutely terrible taste, or are voting strategically, because someone asked them to. However it happened, finding a winner among them is probably easier than it should be.

The best you can hope for is that good decision making comes out of the Academy by consensus – members of the branches who are more willing to take a gamble with their vote on films that aren’t “traditional Oscar movies.” No members were going to get it together by team and pick Harry Potter as their number one film. But it might have made it if they were choosing ten instead of their herding cats method they employed this year. Why do we keep getting back to Harry Potter? Why do I keep mentioning Dragon Tattoo? Because those films were art and entertainment. They made money and they made their mark on 2011 like many of the Best Picture nominees failed to do.

And so we hunt once again for Best Director. Most likely we’re still looking at The Artist and Hazanavicius for the win. But I’m also wondering whether or not the Academy might split the house the way they’ve done in the past when a lighter film was going to win Best Picture, while Best Director might go to something much more challenging. To that end, I suspect that if there is a split, it would go either Martin Scorsese’s way, or Terrence Malick’s.

What do I know, and nobody knows anything, but if it were me, I might vote that way if I loved The Artist but wasn’t too keen on rewarding a young director at the beginning of his career, versus other directors who have been at the game longer, paid their dues longer, proved themselves with one great film after another. In fact, Woody Allen and Alexander Payne are two such directors, both deserving of a win.

But those of us in the Oscar game know that Director and Picture are married. If last year’s clusterfuck couldn’t produce a split between The King’s Speech and The Social Network, if Avatar and The Hurt Locker couldn’t produce a split, how then can there be one this year, especially since Hazanavicius has already won the Directors Guild?

Hugo is an effects-driven film, true, but it is also unlike anything ever put on screen before. So much so that, like almost all of Scorsese’s other films, there isn’t a category for it. When it first played at the New York Film Fest the bloggers pouring out of the theater didn’t quite know what to make of it. Hugo on first pass seems like a story for kids. It seems maybe like a beautiful, magical fable but nothing deeper than that.

There are a handful of directors making movies today whose fingerprints you can readily identify. Martin Scorsese, with the unexpected timing of the edits, the circular storytelling, and the beautiful mess of it all defines this director’s mark. Scorsese’s films evolve and strengthen over time because there is too much to take in all at once. A film that is carefully considered, shot by shot, by an obsessive, will leave enough layers so that you aren’t looking at the same film every time you watch it, and these films can’t help but stand out from the unbearable sameness of much of what comes out of Hollywood today.

This, because he laid it out already – by design, by intuition, or by happy accident, the layers are there. Who Travis Bickle was to me in my early 20s is a lot different from who he is today. I know that I would have no need or desire to revisit Gangs of New York if I’d gone by how that film was chewed up and spit out by the Oscar race. We have a Greek chorus impulse in us as we coalesce around an opinion about something. But very little of that is rooted in any kind of truth, I don’t think. It’s not individual truth, anyway, it’s the truth of a mob – and that isn’t quite so reliable.

As William Goldman would say, though, nobody knows anything. You can have the most admirable of intentions, or the most cynical, and you’ll always be faced with this idea that something is happening here: it’s shit, or it’s magic and much of the time that is utterly out of the filmmakers’ control.

Clearly the Academy loves Scorsese – this much seems clear. They don’t hate him. I mean, he’s no David Fincher. But they just don’t seem to quite get him. Hugo isn’t the tight little number that the Artist is. It cost a lot more. The thought of awarding it, considering its costs only, probably horrifies many old school studio execs who must think, if you must win Oscars at least keep the costs under the $30 million.

Still, if you’re going to split up Picture and Director, Scorsese might be your man.

Scorsese’s Academy record–

Nominations:
Raging Bull – Lost to Robert Redford, Ordinary People
The Last Temptation of Christ, lost to Barry Levinson for Rain Man
Goodfellas – Lost to Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves
Gangs of New York – Lost to Roman Polanski, The Pianist (Chicago took Best Picture)
The Aviator – Lost to Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby
The Departed – WON
Hugo

Not nominated for:
Taxi Driver

Terrence Malick is a bit different. He is someone who sits outside the mainstream, is apparently greatly admired within the Academy, and surprisingly, Tree of Life becomes the weirdest film ever to be nominated for Best Picture. In fact, it can be counted as the only film with virtually no plot to be nominated. It is also the only film to earn as low as a C rating over at Yahoo Movies, where the rest of the Best Picture nominees are all working with a B+ or an A-. The general public did not like Tree of Life, though select members of the industry did. It was also beloved enough to earn the Palme d’Or in Cannes.

Tree of Life is an impressionist’s view of a life, an American life, a white, baby boomer life where dad was mean and mom was nurturing and a little erotic. In some ways, Tree of Life is a linear tale – the beginning of life, life, and the end of life. In other ways it is all sorts of other stuff in between. For those who connected with it, they really really connected with it. By the end it had become the critics darling, try as they did to separate themselves from the Academy this year, they ended up mostly agreeing anyway. In truth, the demographics of the critics aren’t all that different from the demographics of the Academy – you’re still looking at mostly white, mostly male voters.

But, as Anne Thompson pointed out again and again, Tree of Life is exactly the kind of movie that benefits most from the number vote thing – so much so that it could get in, like War Horse, without a DGA or a WGA nomination. It clearly did not have broad guild support but it did have was people who either loved it or hated it and that is what you see in our Best Picture lineup this year. If there were five, Tree of Life, I’m guessing, would have missed.

If voters are looking to split, Malick, who’s never won, might be their guy.

Nominated for:
The Thin Red Line – lost to Steven Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan (Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture)

Not Nominated for:
Badlands
Days of Heaven
The New World

Alexander Payne

Why does it seem like Alexander Payne is so overdue for a win? The only time Payne came close to winning Best Picture/Director was for Sideways, and no one was taking that award away from Clint Eastwood. It’s funny that we have Payne and Scorsese again in the same race and both look to be losing to a different movie. So close and yet so far. The Descendants is more sentimental, less edgy than Sideways. Sideways seemed to define an era, as did Election and About Schmidt. Payne speaks in broad strokes about our American culture but he never abandons it. He is the quintessential homegrown product – an uncompromising auteur who works with adaptations but manages to make them his own. Payne’s real gift is with actors, of course. His characters leap unforgettably off the screen. Miles and Jack in Sideways, Tracy and Jim in Election and Matt King in the Descendants are vivid creations, deluded in their successes, resigned to their failures. Payne’s films always feel to me like a comfortable bed I like getting back into again and again because you are in such good hands — he is never going to let you down with bad dialogue or awkward set-ups. Payne made the film he wanted to make, was faithful to the source material and cast the film so carefully there simply wasn’t room for any slip-ups. The Descendants is one of the best films of the year and well deserving of the top prize — that means it’s possible Payne could also upset if they were inclined to split.

Nominated for:
Sideways – lost to Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby

Not nominated for:
Election
About Schmidt

Woody Allen

If you think it’s been a long time since Meryl Streep won an Oscar, try Woody Allen on for size. Once a newbie, now a veteran, Woody’s whole career as a director to be reckoned with started with his win for Annie Hall way back when. Since then, though, he has stretched himself as an artist, always trying out new things, but sticking to that paradigm of one or two films a year. Allen, like Scorsese, may have saved the best for last. And like Scorsese this might be his last at bat. But like Malick, everyone knows he won’t show up to the ceremony so where is the incentive to give him an award? Everyone wants to see someone get on stage and accept the award — the gratitude payoff is always huge.

Has there ever been a more prolific American filmmaker than Woody Allen? Has there ever been someone who’s evolved inside and out like he has, before our eyes, over the past three decades? And to take such a light and wise movie like Midnight in Paris and hit it clear over the wall – at his age – at this stage in his career is nothing short of breathtaking. How do you split the Best Directing Oscar five ways? How indeed.

Annie Hall – WON (FIRST AND LAST OSCAR WON in 1977)
Interiors – lost to Michael Cimino for The Deer Hunter
Broadway Danny Rose – lost to Milos Forman for Amadeus
Hannah and Her Sisters – lost to Oliver Stone for Platoon
Crimes and Misdemeanors – lost to Oliver Stone for Born on the 4th of July
Bullets over Broadway – lost to Bob Zemeckis for Forrest Gump

Not nominated for:
Stardust Memories
Manhattan
Another Woman (my own personal face)
Zelig
Purple Rose of Cairo
Radio Days
Sleeper
Husbands and Wives
Match Point

Either which way, the director is the star, or used to be, of the Best Picture race.  The King’s Speech last year and The Artist this year are pulling from different countries while ignoring what we’ve cultivated and produced right here.  It’s funny and tragic all at once.  If the Oscars don’t honor our own what good are they?  Then again, does it really matter now?  Probably not.  But at least with Hazanavicius, as opposed to last year’s winner, you are talking about an auteur here, in the best sense of the word.  This year he’s lucky to be included in the company of four of the best, the master class.

Art and entertainment hover conspicuously like twins at a barn dance: which one do you pick? Can you even tell the difference between them? Do you pick the prettier of the two, or the one that’s more interesting to talk to? As films become more and more about the target demo and less about art the way adults view art, so too must we adjust our definition of it. Sometimes I think we can’t tell the difference anymore. No matter what kind of movies are released now it seems there is an audience for them. Someone with a blog somewhere is going to write a favorable review.

You could take a look at this year’s Oscar race and you could conclude that the awards machine is broken. Recently, Daniel Radcliffe lamented Hugo’s success, saying that the Academy had a bias for Scorsese. But that isn’t really true. Most of the films in the Best Picture race belong to members of the boys club. But inclusion didn’t have to mean Harry Potter’s exclusion. When you have a Best Picture race determined mostly and only by number one votes, favoritism — friendships and alliances — begins to choke the whole point of a majority/industry vote.

It is clear by the way the Best Picture nominations turned out that these voters weren’t really voting on the best films of the year. Can you imagine how many voters would actually name –without singling out any films — some of these as their number one movie of the year? You really have to wonder about them. Who are they? Why would they, in a million years, vote that way? Either they really are a couple of french fries shy of a happy meal, have absolutely terrible taste, or are voting strategically, because someone asked them to. However it happened, finding a winner among them is probably easier than it should be.

The best you can hope for is that good decision making comes out of the Academy by consensus – members of the branches who are more willing to take a gamble with their vote on films that aren’t “traditional Oscar movies.” No members were going to get it together by team and pick Harry Potter as their number one film. But it might have made it if they were choosing ten instead of their herding cats method they employed this year. Why do we keep getting back to Harry Potter? Why do I keep mentioning Dragon Tattoo? Because those films were art and entertainment. They made money and they made their mark on 2011 like many of the Best Picture nominees failed to do.

And so we hunt once again for Best Director. Most likely we’re still looking at The Artist and Hazanavicius for the win. But I’m also wondering whether or not the Academy might split the house the way they’ve done in the past when a lighter film was going to win Best Picture, while Best Director might go to something much more challenging. To that end, I suspect that if there is a split, it would go either Martin Scorsese’s way, or Terrence Malick’s.

What do I know, and nobody knows anything, but if it were me, I might vote that way if I loved The Artist but wasn’t too keen on rewarding a young director at the beginning of his career, versus other directors who have been at the game longer, paid their dues longer, proved themselves with one great film after another. In fact, Woody Allen and Alexander Payne are two such directors, both deserving of a win.

But those of us in the Oscar game know that Director and Picture are married. If last year’s clusterfuck couldn’t produce a split between The King’s Speech and The Social Network, if Avatar and The Hurt Locker couldn’t produce a split, how then can there be one this year, especially since Hazanavicius has already won the Directors Guild?

Hugo is an effects-driven film, true, but it is also unlike anything ever put on screen before. So much so that, like almost all of Scorsese’s other films, there isn’t a category for it. When it first played at the New York Film Fest the bloggers pouring out of the theater didn’t quite know what to make of it. Hugo on first pass seems like a story for kids. It seems maybe like a beautiful, magical fable but nothing deeper than that.

There are a handful of directors making movies today whose fingerprints you can readily identify. Martin Scorsese, with the unexpected timing of the edits, the circular storytelling, and the beautiful mess of it all defines this director’s mark. Scorsese’s films evolve and strengthen over time because there is too much to take in all at once. A film that is carefully considered, shot by shot, by an obsessive, will leave enough layers so that you aren’t looking at the same film every time you watch it, and these films can’t help but stand out from the unbearable sameness of much of what comes out of Hollywood today.

This, because he laid it out already – by design, by intuition, or by happy accident, the layers are there. Who Travis Bickle was to me in my early 20s is a lot different from who he is today. I know that I would have no need or desire to revisit Gangs of New York if I’d gone by how that film was chewed up and spit out by the Oscar race. We have a Greek chorus impulse in us as we coalesce around an opinion about something. But very little of that is rooted in any kind of truth, I don’t think. It’s not individual truth, anyway, it’s the truth of a mob – and that isn’t quite so reliable.

As William Goldman would say, though, nobody knows anything. You can have the most admirable of intentions, or the most cynical, and you’ll always be faced with this idea that something is happening here: it’s shit, or it’s magic and much of the time that is utterly out of the filmmakers’ control.

Clearly the Academy loves Scorsese – this much seems clear. They don’t hate him. I mean, he’s no David Fincher. But they just don’t seem to quite get him. Hugo isn’t the tight little number that the Artist is. It cost a lot more. The thought of awarding it, considering its costs only, probably horrifies many old school studio execs who must think, if you must win Oscars at least keep the costs under the $30 million.

Still, if you’re going to split up Picture and Director, Scorsese might be your man.

Scorsese’s Academy record–

Nominations:
Raging Bull – Lost to Robert Redford, Ordinary People
The Last Temptation of Christ, lost to Barry Levinson for Rain Man
Goodfellas – Lost to Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves
Gangs of New York – Lost to Roman Polanski, The Pianist (Chicago took Best Picture)
The Aviator – Lost to Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby
The Departed – WON
Hugo

Not nominated for:
Taxi Driver

Terrence Malick is a bit different. He is someone who sits outside the mainstream, is apparently greatly admired within the Academy, and surprisingly, Tree of Life becomes the weirdest film ever to be nominated for Best Picture. In fact, it can be counted as the only film with virtually no plot to be nominated. It is also the only film to earn as low as a C rating over at Yahoo Movies, where the rest of the Best Picture nominees are all working with a B+ or an A-. The general public did not like Tree of Life, though select members of the industry did. It was also beloved enough to earn the Palme d’Or in Cannes.

Tree of Life is an impressionist’s view of a life, an American life, a white, baby boomer life where dad was mean and mom was nurturing and a little erotic. In some ways, Tree of Life is a linear tale – the beginning of life, life, and the end of life. In other ways it is all sorts of other stuff in between. For those who connected with it, they really really connected with it. By the end it had become the critics darling, try as they did to separate themselves from the Academy this year, they ended up mostly agreeing anyway. In truth, the demographics of the critics aren’t all that different from the demographics of the Academy – you’re still looking at mostly white, mostly male voters.

But, as Anne Thompson pointed out again and again, Tree of Life is exactly the kind of movie that benefits most from the number vote thing – so much so that it could get in, like War Horse, without a DGA or a WGA nomination. It clearly did not have broad guild support but it did have was people who either loved it or hated it and that is what you see in our Best Picture lineup this year. If there were five, Tree of Life, I’m guessing, would have missed.

If voters are looking to split, Malick, who’s never won, might be their guy.

Nominated for:
The Thin Red Line – lost to Steven Spielberg for Saving Private Ryan (Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture)

Not Nominated for:
Badlands
Days of Heaven
The New World

Alexander Payne

Why does it seem like Alexander Payne is so overdue for a win? The only time Payne came close to winning Best Picture/Director was for Sideways, and no one was taking that award away from Clint Eastwood. It’s funny that we have Payne and Scorsese again in the same race and both look to be losing to a different movie. So close and yet so far. The Descendants is more sentimental, less edgy than Sideways. Sideways seemed to define an era, as did Election and About Schmidt. Payne speaks in broad strokes about our American culture but he never abandons it. He is the quintessential homegrown product – an uncompromising auteur who works with adaptations but manages to make them his own. Payne’s real gift is with actors, of course. His characters leap unforgettably off the screen. Miles and Jack in Sideways, Tracy and Jim in Election and Matt King in the Descendants are vivid creations, deluded in their successes, resigned to their failures. Payne’s films always feel to me like a comfortable bed I like getting back into again and again because you are in such good hands — he is never going to let you down with bad dialogue or awkward set-ups. Payne made the film he wanted to make, was faithful to the source material and cast the film so carefully there simply wasn’t room for any slip-ups. The Descendants is one of the best films of the year and well deserving of the top prize — that means it’s possible Payne could also upset if they were inclined to split.

Nominated for:
Sideways – lost to Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby

Not nominated for:
Election
About Schmidt

Woody Allen

If you think it’s been a long time since Meryl Streep won an Oscar, try Woody Allen on for size. Once a newbie, now a veteran, Woody’s whole career as a director to be reckoned with started with his win for Annie Hall way back when. Since then, though, he has stretched himself as an artist, always trying out new things, but sticking to that paradigm of one or two films a year. Allen, like Scorsese, may have saved the best for last. And like Scorsese this might be his last at bat. But like Malick, everyone knows he won’t show up to the ceremony so where is the incentive to give him an award? Everyone wants to see someone get on stage and accept the award — the gratitude payoff is always huge.

Has there ever been a more prolific American filmmaker than Woody Allen? Has there ever been someone who’s evolved inside and out like he has, before our eyes, over the past three decades? And to take such a light and wise movie like Midnight in Paris and hit it clear over the wall – at his age – at this stage in his career is nothing short of breathtaking. How do you split the Best Directing Oscar five ways? How indeed.

Annie Hall – WON (FIRST AND LAST OSCAR WON in 1977)
Interiors – lost to Michael Cimino for The Deer Hunter
Broadway Danny Rose – lost to Milos Forman for Amadeus
Hannah and Her Sisters – lost to Oliver Stone for Platoon
Crimes and Misdemeanors – lost to Oliver Stone for Born on the 4th of July
Bullets over Broadway – lost to Bob Zemeckis for Forrest Gump

Not nominated for:
Stardust Memories
Manhattan
Another Woman (my own personal face)
Zelig
Purple Rose of Cairo
Radio Days
Sleeper
Husbands and Wives
Match Point

Either which way, the director is the star, or used to be, of the Best Picture race.  The King’s Speech last year and The Artist this year are pulling from different countries while ignoring what we’ve cultivated and produced right here.  It’s funny and tragic all at once.  If the Oscars don’t honor our own what good are they?  Then again, does it really matter now?  Probably not.  But at least with Hazanavicius, as opposed to last year’s winner, you are talking about an auteur here, in the best sense of the word.  This year he’s lucky to be included in the company of four of the best, the master class.