REPOST: If Critics Chose the Oscars: 2015 Edition

The Oscars (Academy Awards) is an annual American awards ceremony celebrating and recognizing the various cinematic milestones of the year. As The Oscars draws near, critics make their own list of nominees and winners for each major award enumerated in this TIME article below.

Image Source: time.com

They're not members of the Academy, and they don't vote as Oscar handicappers. But the consensus selection of critics groups indicates wins for Boyhood, The LEGO Movie, J.K. Simmons and Patricia

So, for the sixth consecutive year, TIME has tabulated the votes of awards-giving movie societies — 34 this time, listed at the bottom*. Canvassing Kristopher Tapley’s In Contention awards blog, I assign one point to the winner in each category from each group; ties get a half-point. No points for runners-up or for subsidiary actor categories such as Breakout, Ensemble or Youth in Film.

We won’t know whether the Academy agrees with the critics until Oscar night, Feb. 22. For now, check out all the winners and contenders in 10 categories, plus my speculation on how the members of the Academy might vote.

Best Actor: Michael Keaton, Birdman, 16½; Jake Gyllenhaal,Nightcrawler, 7; David Oyelowo, Selma, 3; Tom Hardy, Locke, 2; Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner, 2; Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel, 1; Brendan Gleeson, Calvary, 1; Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything, 1; Oscar Isaac, A Most Violent Year, ½.

Keaton, the critics’ consensus fave, should get a lot of love from the Academy for his gutsy performance as a worn-out actor at career crisis. Gyllenhaal finished strong as a creepy cameraman and is assured an Oscar nomination. In the battle of actors playing real-life Cambridge math geniuses with disabilities, Redmayne’s Stephen Hawking is a flashier and, oddly, cuddlier turn than Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing in The Imitation Game. The Screen Actors Guild, which has many members among Academy voters, nominated Cumberbatch, Gyllenhaal, Keaton, Redmayne and, for Foxcatcher, Steve Carell. Fingers crossed that fifth place goes to Fiennes’ grandly mannered performance in the most substantial box-office hit on this list.

Best Actress: Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl, 11; Marion Cotillard,Two Days, One Night and/or The Immigrant, 8; Julianne Moore, Still Alice, 5; Reese Witherspoon, Wild, 4; Essie Davis,The Babadook, 2; Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Belle, 2; Patricia Arquette,Boyhood, 1; Tilda Swinton, Only Lovers Left Alive, 1.

The Oscar shortlist should be Moore (a four-time nominee), Witherspoon (winner for Walk the Line in 2006) and the English back-bencher Pike, promoted to Cabinet status as Amy the Gone Girl, plus Felicity Jones as Hawking’s wife Jane in The Theory of Everything and maybe Jennifer Aniston in Cake; those are also the five SAG finalists. Cotillard, a 2008 Oscar winner for playing Edith Piaf in La vie en rose, has little chance of getting the Oscar benediction for either of her 2014 roles. Plaudits to the Central Ohio and North Carolina critics for fêting Davis as the beset mom in The Babadook. The L.A. critics named Arquette in this category, which you can slide into Supporting Actress to pad Arquette’s enormous lead.

Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood, 20½; Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer, 4; Jessica Chastain, A Most Violent Year, 3½; Carmen Ejogo, Selma, 1; Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game, 1; Agata Kulesca, Ida, 1; Rene Russo,Nightcrawler, 1; Octavia Spencer, Black or White, 1; Emma Stone, Birdman, 1.

The Oscar is already Arquette’s. She has a signature role in a movie the Academy will want to honor several times, and her competition is slim-to-none. Chastain has a shot at an Academy nomination for a late-screening film, though she didn’t make the SAG shortlist. The final five there: Arquette, Knightley, Stone, Meryl Streep in Into the Woods and Naomi Watts in St. Vincent.

Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash, 25½; Edward Norton, Birdman, 7; Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher, 1; Tyler Perry, Gone Girl, ½.

The lopsided lead for career utilityman Simmons accurately reflects his status as prohibitive favorite in this year’s Oscars. If he had any serious competition, and he doesn’t, it would be Norton, who does the gaudiest, most enjoyable work in Birdman. SAG filled out its card with Ruffalo, Robert Duvall in The Judge(arguably a leading performance) and Ethan Hawke as the dad inBoyhood.

Original Screenplay: The Grand Budapest Hotel, 13;Birdman, 7½; Nightcrawler, 3; Selma, 2; Boyhood, 1½; Beyond the Lights, 1; Calvary, 1; The LEGO Movie, 1.

The first five titles here could be the Academy quintet of nominees — unless the members blame the Paul Webb script forSelma‘s treatment of Lyndon Johnson as the challenger, not the champion, of Martin Luther King Jr. in the push for voting rights. The Writers Guild of America, whose stringent rules excluded both Selma and Birdman (a sure Oscar screenplay nominee) from eligibility, chose these five finalists: Boyhood,Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Nightcrawler andWhiplash.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Gone Girl, 12; Inherent Vice, 2½;Guardians of the Galaxy, 1; The Imitation Game, 1; Obvious Child, 1; Whiplash, 1; Snowpiercer, ½.

Not much competition for Gillian Flynn, who wrote the Gone Girl novel and screenplay. The WGA nominees were American Sniper, Gone Girl, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Imitation Game and Wild. The script for The Theory of Everything, which the WGA deemed ineligible, is a likely Oscar finalist. And if you’re wondering why Whiplash got an Original Screenplay nomination from the WGA and an Adapted award from the Indiana critics group, it’s because director Damien Chazelle made a short version of his movie to raise money for the feature.

Best Documentary: CITIZENFOUR, 16; Life Itself, 12; The Overnighters, 2; Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me, 1; Keep On Keepin’ On, 1.

It’s a battle between two dominant personalities: one in the world of film (critic Roger Ebert for Life Itself), the other in the whole world (whistleblower Edward Snowden forCITIZENFOUR). Both films made the preliminary round of 15 features chosen by the Academy, which also includes The Overnighters and Keep On Keepin’ On.

Best Animated Feature: The LEGO Movie, 20; The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, 3; The Boxtrolls, 2; Big Hero 6, 1; How to Train Your Dragon 2, 1.

Again, the critics’ majority favorite will snag an Academy Award. With a $257-million score at the domestic box office (fourth best for 2014), The LEGO Movie is also the year’s only blockbuster likely to win an Oscar.

Best Director: Richard Linklater, Boyhood, 22; Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Birdman, 6; Ava Du Vernay, Selma, 3; Dan Gilroy,Nightcrawler, 2; Clint Eastwood, American Sniper, 1.

Linklater, shooting his movie over 12 consecutive summers, and Iñárritu, pretzeling his cast and crew into executing labyrinthine shots lasting 10 mins. or more, would get Oscar-nominated just for pulling off impossible stunts. But what about the other three? I’d say Eastwood stands the best chance of earning a place in the Academy’s fave five — and that, in several categories, American Sniper will register more impressively with the Academy than it did with the reviewers. James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) and Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) might fight for a slot or each get one. But Linklater, as his overwhelming victory with the critics’ groups indicates, will be the one giving a speech on Oscar night.

Best Film: Boyhood, 17; Birdman, 6; The Grand Budapest Hotel, 3; Selma, 3; Gone Girl, 1; Goodbye to Language, 1; A Most Violent Year, 1; Nightcrawler, 1; Snowpiercer, 1.

With wins in fully half of the critics’ groups, Boyhood is also the leader in the Oscars’ Best Picture race. Birdman, Gone Girl, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Nightcrawler and Selma, plus American Sniper, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything, could fill eight other slots in this bounteous Academy category. The Producers Guild of America, another industry group that overlaps significantly in Academy membership, chose eight of those nine — minus Selma, and adding Foxcatcher and Whiplash— as its 10 nominees. SAG, which choses five films to compete for its Outstanding Performance by a Cast award, boiled the list down to Birdman, Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. Again, Selmawas excluded; it’s said that Paramount didn’t get screeners of this Christmas Day release to the guilds on time. So don’t expect the critics’ year-end favorite to provide an insurmountable obstacle to Linklater’s patient story of the boy who grew up.

*The 34 organizations surveyed: local or regional critics’ groups from Austin, Boston, Boston Online, Central Ohio, Chicago, Dallas–Fort Worth, Detroit, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Nevada, New York, New York Online, North Carolina, North Texas, Oklahoma, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Southeastern, St. Louis, Toronto, Utah, Vancouver and Washington, D.C.; plus the African American Film Critics Association, the Black Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics and the Online Film Critics Society.

Hello! My name is Louis A. Habash and I enjoy watching a good film. Follow me on Twitter for the latest news and reviews from the movie scene.

REPOST: There’s more to film criticism than a superficial flick of the thumb

 Tom Ryan of The Australian talks about what it really takes to be a serious film critic.

Roger Ebert, left, and Gene Siskel offered sketch plot outlines and strong opinions on US TV show ‘At the Movies’.  |  Image Source: theaustralian.com

FILM criticism, like film critics, comes in all shapes and sizes. An unhelpful slogan for the Melbourne International Film Festival a few years ago — “Everyone’s a critic” — went so far as to suggest that all anyone had to do was have an opinion and — hey presto! — they were critics.

MIFF seems to have qualified such a notion this year with a mentoring program for eight aspiring critics that pointed to a new appreciation of the expertise that might be required. (Disclaimer: along with a handful of writers, I was one of the mentors.)

But what exactly is this thing called film criticism? What forms might it take? What should filmgoers expect from it? Should it function simply as a consumer guide, or should it provide something more than that? Whose interests does it serve?

Pauline Kael, film critic for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, regarded it as a noble calling, placing herself in the tradition of others offering commentary about the arts.

“The critic is the only independent source of information,” she wrote. “All the rest is advertising.”

David Denby, one of her successors at The New Yorker, has long worried that serious reviewing has been undergoing a slow death at the hands of “hack critics” content to write publicity blurbs for distributors “like free candy”.

That view was in harmony with the one voiced earlier in the 1990s by Time critic Richard Corliss: “Movie criticism of the elevated sort is an endangered species. Once it flourished; soon it may perish, to be replaced by a consumer service that is no brains and all thumbs.”

In their sights was the tendency evident in the popular Chicago-based television show At the Movies, hosted at the time by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, who both also wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times. The frequently duelling duo would offer sketchy plot outlines and strong opinions about new film releases, delivering verdicts via thumbs. It began in 1986, about the same time Australia gave birth to The Movie Show (later At the Movies), hosted by David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz.

Siskel died in 1999, Ebert last year. The latter’s career as a film critic and his struggle with a thyroid cancer is the subject of Steve James’s moving documentary,Life Itself . It includes gentler commentary by Corliss about At the Movies, maintaining his criticism but remembering it more affectionately as “a sitcom about two guys who lived in a movie theatre”.

In James’s film, a curmudgeonly Jonathan Rosenbaum, the longtime, well-respected former film critic for the Chicago Reader, vents his spleen against At the Movies and other critics working for the popular media. “Consumer advice is not the same thing as criticism ... Invariably a show like Gene and Roger’s becomes part of the mainstream system and, by and large, the purpose of mainstream reviewing is not just to valorise films that get multi-million-dollar ad campaigns but to eliminate everything else.”

Several filmmakers appear in Life Itself to refute Rosenbaum’s accusations. Independent American filmmaker Gregory Nava (Selena) testifies that Ebert and Siskel “looked for people like me”. Documentary director Errol Morris says, “I really believe that I would not have a career if not for those guys.” Werner Herzog and Martin Scorsese also deliver passionate cases for the defence.

Still, Rosenbaum’s commentary about the way film critics find themselves working hand in hand with the film-marketing industry, even if inadvertently, makes sense.

Furthermore, this doesn’t happen only in relation to productions with big advertising bucks at their disposal: it’s always the case. No review of a film, or feature material about it, will appear anywhere without a degree of co-operation between those writing or presenting it and those pitching the film to them. The transaction includes the arrangement of previews, the delivery of press kits and sometimes the organising of interstate or overseas junkets to connect those making the films with those reviewing them.

It’s not that critics are selling their souls here: there are no guarantees of how they’re going to respond. But it is the way the system works. And, as the old PR adage puts it, as far as the marketing business is concerned, a bad review is better than no review at all. Those involved in the creative side of filmmaking, of course, may disagree. For them, it’s almost always much more personal.

Actor-writer Harry Shearer, the voice of 21 characters in The Simpsons and a member of Christopher Guest’s wonderful comic ensemble, confessed in a recent interview with me: “People can say nice stuff about you or praise you and it goes in one ear and out the other. But I think if they say something nasty about you, there’s this part of your brain that plays it over and over again.” The late actor Eli Wallach once noted that “having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck”.

In Life Itself, Rosenbaum makes an important point about the current state of film criticism. Critics of any kind should never regard themselves as answerable to those with vested interests in the films under review. And serious criticism should never have consumer advice as its major priority, even if readers, viewers or listeners can choose to use it that way.

Film reviews may come with stars attached, but what they should be doing is offering a different kind of illumination. AO Scott, chief film critic for The New York Times, eloquently outlines the mindset required to produce it: “Criticism is a habit of mind,” he writes, “a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them.” To which I’d only want to add the word “informed”.

The film critic’s task, then, like the ones faced by their peers in dealing with the other arts, is to explain as clearly as possible what it is that makes a particular film tick.

There are any number of ways of doing this, but all require an ability to make the pieces of the jigsaw fit together, sometimes in ways that were never intended.

One aspect of this may be a concern with how well a film’s plot works, if indeed it has one. But criticism that stops there, as it too often does, isn’t really doing its job. It’s equally important to pay attention to how all the other elements at the filmmaker’s disposal have been deployed: the composition of the shots, the cutting together of the images, the use of colour, music and sound, the evocation of character. In short, how the film works — its shape and its tone, its poetics and its politics.

An illustration of this is Richard Misek’s Rohmer in Paris . A documentary analysis of the work of Eric Rohmer, it’s almost entirely made up of footage from the French new wave writer-director’s films, from his first feature, Le Signe du Lion (1962) to his last, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007), with Misek’s commentary attached. Misek traces the way Rohmer connects his characters to each other via networks of exchanged glances and crossed paths as they make their way around Paris and beyond. Sometimes these intersections change the course of the characters’ lives; sometimes they lead nowhere. But, as Misek shows, they’re fundamental to the notion of the “Rohmerian coincidence” that allows a sense of destiny to emerge from the characters’ everyday routines. In cataloguing the details of the films, Misek explains, “I was simply repeating all of Rohmer’s repetitions.”

Both a cinephile’s love letter to a filmmaker and an insightful commentary about his preoccupations and working methods, Rohmer in Paris is only a little more than an hour long, but it’s the result of an enormous amount of research and a knowing engagement with its subject. Which is what is required for any serious film criticism.

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