One last video clip for January.
Here’s the delirious trailer for Seijun Suzuki’s Youth of the Beast (1963, now available in a new transfer from Criterion).
The trailer, in addition to being damned near irresistible (“Leave those worms to me! Gangland justice is my job!”), comes courtesy of my friend Haruka, who translated and timed the spiffy new subtitles for the preview and the DVD.
Enjoy!
I may be the last guy on planet Earth to have seen this, but even if that's true:
Speaking of spectacular video (this one entirely Andrews-free) incorporating existing footage and creating something entirely new, take a look at this video from U2 entitled “Window in the Sky.” In addition to being a particularly vivid example of how the group’s songwriting skills have not diminished, but have continued to strengthen, since the bygone days of Boy, the video continues the group’s positioning at the forefront of innovation and artistic expression in the visual medium as well. (The video was directed by Gary Koepke.) You can read more about the video in this article from this morning’s Los Angeles Times. But before you do, just press play and be on the lookout for just about every imaginable pop singer icon from every era of pop music as they lip-synch pretty much perfectly in this new video, a work which truly is worthy of the much-maligned adjective “awesome.”
(Thanks for the tip, Thom McG.)
Recently, the eponymous proprietor of Edward Copeland on Film invited responses to a survey to determine the best and worst of the crop of Academy Award nominees for Best Actress. If you must, call it residual distaste for a career filled with smarmy, treacly overkill (The Sound of Music) and dour self-seriousness (The Tamarind Seed, 10, S.O.B., The Man Who Loved Women and the execrable That’s Life!, all films made under the guidance of husband Blake Edwards), but when I had the opportunity to cast my vote for Julie Andrews as a worst Best Actress winner for Mary Poppins, I jumped at it. Here’s what I wrote for Edward’s survey:
Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins? Over Sophia Loren in Marriage Italian Style or Kim Stanley in Séance on a Wet Afternoon? Please! This performance isn’t half as charming as it’s been drummed into everyone my age to believe. Andrews seemed to me like Captain Bligh with bloomers and an umbrella when I was a kid, and her icy, imperious persona as an actress (which is never quite masked by the doily of cheerfulness she drapes over herself) has done nothing to help me warm up to her as an adult.
Had I not been rushed for time, I probably would have mentioned that I recognize the movie itself is okay, if a tad overlong (that partially animated sequence depicting the chaste outing had by Poppins and Bert, the chimney sweep, could have been half so long), 
and Mary Poppins is notable in that it sets itself up as a rarity in the Disney canon by dealing, however peripherally, with a social issue (women’s rights) at the precise time (1964) when that issue was poised to become forefront in a lot of people’s minds, even if it did so by issuing the proclamations of budding feminist mom Glynis Johns from the safe and comfortable distance of the bygone age of Susan B. Anthony. 
And I’ve always been a sucker for the work of David Tomlinson, Hermione Baddeley and Ed Wynn—as a child, these supporting players captivated me with their dry, acerbic wit (Tomlinson), oddball cadences (Baddeley) and genial, cartoonish buffoonery (Wynn), and they continue to do so today.
Dick Van Dyke’s ghastly affront to self-respecting Cockney chimney sweeps everywhere is almost redeemed by his cameo as Tomlinson’s ancient and decrepit bank boss Mr. Dawes. And as Poppins’ charges, the monstrous duo of Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber, who were reunited for Poppins after The Three Lives of Thomasina, are the prototypically unbearable Disney brother-sister unit, the scars from which can be seen and felt in everything from Bedknobs and Broomsticks-- which upped the ante from two to three insufferable Brit brats for its Poppins version 1970.0, embodied by Angela Lansbury-- through the Witch Mountain twins, Americans Ike Eisenmann and Kim Richards, and beyond. (Dotrice and Garber would be reunited once more post-Poppins for The Gnome-Mobile, 
where they withered in the presence of the character actor trifecta of Charles Lane, Ed Wynn and Walter Brennan, who doubled as daffy and unstable millionaire D.J. Mulrooney and his doppelganger, the uber-gnome Knobby.) These little ghouls are so wide-eyed and misunderstood and well-intentioned, the movie could have swerved from a P.L. Travers wonderland straight into a Dickensian nightmare (albeit one populated with wacky nautically-inclined rooftop neighbors and cartoon penguins) had they only let Elsa Lanchester’s Katie Nanna stick around.
But, no-o-o-o, despite what the famous lyrics intimate, in Mary Poppins a spoonful of sugar is never quite enough, and a truckload-sized chaser of whimsy and tidy lessons in good behavior are always at the ready. Wrapped as they are in the warm blanket of pinched propriety and smothering smugness that Julie Andrews brings to the table as the titular baby-sitter from God-knows-where (and so, I'd guess, would Lucifer), she creates a child-care professional far more frightening than anything the Bride of Frankenstein could have ever conjured. 
Andrews has always been a performer who never quite seems of the world she is called to inhabit, a quality one would think would place her in good stead in this role. (The one movie that found a way to exploit Andrews’ cold-fish-out-of-water tendencies was Victor/Victoria, the most relaxed and vibrant performance she ever gave on screen—conversely, her stabs at earthy, and moneyed, everywoman-ness in movies like 10 and That’s Life! seemed like sour miscalculations of her appeal for audiences, and she came off even more tightly wound and humorless than ever. At least in S.O.B. she had the nerve to take her top off—had Blake Edwards cut away from that shot, I doubt anyone would even remember she was in that movie.)
However, as Mary Poppins, the glower of the intolerant taskmistress always seems laying in wait just beneath Andrews' chirpy mask of sunshine, and the movie would be far more compelling if it was the least bit interested in letting us have more than the occasional and fleeting glimpse of its shadow. Unfortunately, as Andrews embodies her, this mysterious harridan who can bend nature and men’s behavior to her whim, has nothing but cheerful platitudes and teeth-compromising tunes to offer an audience who, given the movie’s unshakable status as a classic, seem more than willing to gobble up her cutesy medicine and beg for more. There’s precious little separating her performance here from the one she would give a year later in The Sound of Music, save perhaps Maria Von Trapp’s inability to manipulate an umbrella through unstable atmospheric conditions. 
Together, they construct an armor-plated template of rosy-cheeked indefatigability, insistent moral superiority and tight-lipped, ever-so-slight shadings of haughtiness (the spell of which was designed to be dismantled, as pure defense against any suggestion of darkness, by that gleaming, multi-toothed smile), a template so daunting in its impregnability that even the blasphemers Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (who would diddle with the actress in 10) could not bring her down by making her very name— Julie Andrews!— a satanic incantation in Bedazzled. Poppins', and Andrews', ultimate reign of superiority over Tomlinson’s negligent, materially obsessed father is as dictated by her own air of smug regality (a potentially ironic element to her working-class character that the movie glosses over, so enchanted is it by the actress's surely-demonic presence as Poppins) as it is by the machinations of P.L. Travers’ book or Walt Disney’s insistence on formulaic resolutions to family dramas.
I don’t expect much in the way of back-patting or agreement with the views expressed in this post. Hey, I know I’m out there, shining a beacon of wisdom and rational thought amongst all the spellbound nattering about how great Julie Andrews in this bubbling pot of treacle. In fact, it’s been so liberating showing up those foolish enough to be seduced by this Victorian-era moral claptrap (who would simultaneously snub, with the imperative of the politically ignoble and treacherous, an obviously superior Churchill-era morality tale like Bedknobs and Broomsticks)* that, if you like, you may consider this post as volley number one in my contribution to Jim Emerson’s upcoming Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon. I’ve already got a Poppins-strength umbrella at the ready to shield me from the flinging of fecal matter that I full expect in the wake of my defacing of this beloved performance. (Can we really say Julie Andrews herself, apart from this movie and The Sound of Music anyway, is a beloved actress?)
But it’s also the occasion for a felicitous display of filmmaking-as-film-criticism too. By pure chance, toady I stumbled upon this wonderful short (one minute) film which recasts Mary Poppins in a light far more fitting the way I tend to view if not the film as a whole, then at least Andrews’ chilling queen of child care. One blogger, commenting on the short, described it as Mary Poppins if it had been directed by Mario Bava. Persoanlly, it made me imagine what a Rosemary's Baby-era Roman Polanski might have done with the story. Those would both be movies I’d want to see, an uplifting tale of two lovely tykes and the stern but charming governess who righted their world and brightened their lives, made by directors of varying perversities and stylistic bravado who might just have been able, by hook, crook or out-and-out torture, to coax a little more of that sinister undercurrent out of Andrews, perhaps allowing it to overtake, if only for privileged moments, the gleaming creamy goodness radiating off of her ever-patient, often smiling face.
Here then is the spoonful of arsenic that reveals the nightshade in the blood of Disney’s most revered nanny and the actress who so unbearably portrayed her. Behold, Scary Mary!
* For those still sharpening their knives, the three sentences directly preceding this asterisk were intended as a parody of the sackcloth-and-ashes style of Armond White, whose contrarian methodology can be said to have at least partially inspired the upcoming Blog-a-Thon. The rest of the article, while sporting a tone that could be said to be occasionally and ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek, more or less accurately describes my disdain for Julie Andrews and her Mary Poppins.
My mother would be so proud. This past Saturday, something happened to me that I had given up thought of ever happening, so much so that the possibility of it never even crossed my mind when I started opening the envelope with my name on it, the one with no return address.
I pulled out the greenish, rectangular paper, immediately let out a laugh and ran into the bedroom to show my wife—I needed corroboration that I was, in fact, looking at what I seemed to be looking at.
“You’re never going to guess what I just received in the U.S. Mail,” I said, barely believing it myself. “Okay, I’m never going to guess, so just tell me,” she replied, and rather too logically for the gush of emotion that had begun swelling in my chest, I thought.
I began dramatically. “I’m holding in my hand…”
“Yes?”
“…a check…”
(Here’s where she thinks it’s going to be one of those $0.10 rebate checks from some PopTarts box-top mail-in offer or something. She thinks she’s ahead of me. Well…)
“Yes?” she repeated, a smidgen of impatience coloring her curiosity.
“…for $102.06…”
That got her attention! She put down the magazine she was holding, her ears suddenly all colored with curiosity as well.
“…from--”
“Yes?! Damn it, just spill!” Impatience just scribbled all over the coloring book in deep magenta.
“…from Google!” I was sporting a grin large enough to make Mr. Sardonicus weep with envy.
Yes, it’s true. Just a little over two years from the day I first put those Ads by Google on the sidebar of this blog, ads that some say sullied the appearance and/or integrity of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, ads that some thought were, and I’m surely paraphrasing here, “cool,” I finally got paid. In the very same way that whenever a bell rings an angel gets his wings, whenever an SLIFR reader clicks on one of those little ads on their way to and/or from another post or another link to another web site, a miniscule amount of currency gets registered on the SLIFR account. Some apparently do very well with this system—they’ll get a check from Google every month for services rendered and suckers delivered. But Google won’t cut a check unless you’ve made at least $100, and once that milestone has been reached another $100 has to be built up before another check gets sent. In the early days, I used to keep track of how much money I was making per day. It was never very much (“Hey, I racked up 18 cents today!”). One day I think I actually made close to a dollar. The amounts were always so infinitesimally small that I began to feel ridiculous looking in on them so frequently. Eventually I fell out of the habit of looking in altogether. 
Two years later, I got a check.
For perversity’s sake, I decided I wanted to know just how much $102.06 worked out to be per post. Okay, well, according to my Blogger stats, the “Open Forum: Oscar Talk et al” was the 418th post I’ve recorded since I began this adventure. And now that I’m in the process of re-familiarizing myself with my elementary school gazintas, I was able to figure out that dividing 418 into 102.06 would provide me the answer I so desperately sought. So a-dividing I went:
102.06
418 = 0.24416267942583732057416267942584
For you laymen, that works out to be a shade under 25 cents per post.
I’d adjust that for 2007 dollars, but all that figurin’ has apparently already been done for me, so it is what it is. (If I wanted to turn heady frivolity into a plunge toward futility with lightning speed, I’d figure out how much $102.06 translated into per word.)
But you know what, it wasn’t hard to forget about the Google get-rich-quick plan, because getting paid was never what I expected when I got into all this. Now that I have been somewhat humbly rewarded, it’s nice, sure, but it’s not going to make me change my ways and suddenly get all evangelistic about people clicking my sidebar. (Whoops? Was that a double entendre? If so, I’m so proud. I don’t recall if I’ve ever purposely written one before! It must be that sudden influx of cash making me feel all flushed!)
The new year has so far found me with far less time to be able to devote to SLIFR than at any other time in the blog’s short history, and the awareness of that fact has been weighing on my mind. I’ve got plenty on tap that I want to write about, and good folks like Paul Clark (an upcoming year-end survey), Adam Ross (a new feature called “Friday Screen Tests”), Mike Phillips (the upcoming 1927 Blog-a-Thon) and Jim Emerson (the upcoming Contrarian Blog-a-Thon) have helped to make sure that I stay busy on this site and elsewhere. And, as silly as it sounds, that meager little check, which helped pay for my seeing Babel and The Last King of Scotland this past weekend, and will contribute to my catching up with The Good Shepherd and Volver this coming Saturday night, has served more as a kindly reminder that I’m not in this for the money, but instead for the love of movies, and for what they mean to me and the people around me.
That said, it is $102.06. Even at only 25 cents a pop, does this mean I’m a professional now?!
Here’s something new to SLIFR that I hope will become a regular feature. Reader Manaotupapau suggested recently that I try an open forum occasionally, which would be a good way to reintroduce topics from dead or dying threads and past posts, or film and pop culture-related topics of any stripe. So, let’s give it a try, shall we? Naturally, the first topic would have to be:
Your Reactions to the Oscar Nominations!
The only rule I’d like to impose (and it’s already been an unwritten one that has been well abided by so far in the history of this blog) is that the comments remain civil, good-humored and smart. And please feel free to go on at any length you choose! If this Open Forum goes well and everybody feels like the idea is worth pursuing, then pursue it we shall.
Thanks, Manaotupapau, for the great idea! I'll be checking in with a longer post on the subject later tonight, and of course you're welome to bandy back and forth underneath that one too. As Kirsten Dunst once so memorably put it, bring it on!
Is it just me? Have I finally, after nearly 47 years, become completely jaded and unimpressed by the Oscars? It can’t be the movies, can it? Despite the usual claims that this year was more lackluster than not by the standards of any given movie year, 2006 seemed to me a pretty juicy one for movies, and it certainly helps stack the ratio of good to bad by having to be extra judicious in the theatrical releases I pay out of my own pocket to see—just like the Joe Moviegoer I am, I’m a whole lot less likely to bet my $11 on a movie that could go either way, and I tend to save titles with iffier expectations (Thank You For Smoking, The Devil Wears Prada) for DVD. Sometimes this process of elimination makes me end up wishing I’d seen the movie on the big screen (16 Blocks, Slither); and sometimes I’m made exceedingly glad for my reticence and a priori judgment calls (Clerks 2, Lucky Number Slevin). And even though I didn’t see everything I needed to see this year (yet), I know that there are plenty of movies in 2006 deserving of honor from the Academy.
So maybe it’s the fact that, in the dark shadow of the Directors Guild snubs of Clint Eastwood, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron, dear old, dotty Uncle Oscar
looks poised to honor yet another contrived, good-for-you ensemble drama about man’s inability to communicate/connect with/tolerate his fellow man—after all, we’re all so much more tightly knit and understanding of each others’ foibles and prejudices as a nation of moviegoers after having been force-fed Crash; why not use the power of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to bring us all closer together as a bruised and battered humanity subject to the chronologically scrambled chaos theory of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel? (The models for these post-9/11 behavioral studies—the ensemble narratives of Robert Altman’s films—were never quite so morally tidy or relentlessly showy in their pessimism, and therefore routinely escaped Academy coronation.)
But it’s not all Babel’s fault. Any Oscar show that stands to be dominated by the uber-quirk of Little Miss Sunshine (a movie I liked) or the hype surrounding the glossy, insistently shallow Dreamgirls (a movie I sorta liked) promises to be less than fascinating. No less than absolutely assured is Helen Mirren’s ascendance to the Oscar throne, and good for her, by the way—she deserves it. The rewarding of this great performance is as tight a lock as any in Oscar history, even though it has yet to be officially nominated—the odds are more likely that the sun won’t rise on Tuesday morning, when the nominees are announced, than that Mirren will be left off the roster of honorees. However, though shoo-in status is sometimes directed toward the nominees that actually should win, they almost never serve to increase the amusement level for Oscar watchers on the big night. (Remember the feeling of that heavy blanket being dropped over the proceedings nine years ago when it became clear very early on that Titanic was going to dominate the awards even more than previously expected?)
And maybe my disinterest in this year’s awards can be traced to something as simple as my finally accepting, after nearly 40 years of resisting the idea, that the Oscars really don’t have much to do with what’s great, or even good, in any given year. There are just too many excellent, important movies floating through the halls of film history that never caught the gold man’s gaze to come to any other conclusion. Even film critics have admitted on occasion that movies they thought were brilliant and worthy of the highest praise have sometimes ended up looking a whole lot less worthy 10 or 20 years down the line. So why should the majority-vote conclusions of the Oscar voting body be any different? (All I have to do to drive home this point is think of how badly I ache to revisit the likes of Ordinary People, Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Out of Africa or Rainman.) And to be honest, even in years when films like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Million Dollar Baby held court at the Kodak Theater (both movies well deserving of the honors they received), I’ve had more fun poring over the individual observations of year-end critics top 10 lists and comparing them to my own observations and preferences than following the whimsies of Oscar leading up to his night of nights. And this is truer than ever when considering the movies of 2006.
To paraphrase the great popular romantic philosopher Peter Cetera (an Oscar nominee himself, by the way, for this), Oscar is a hard habit to break. I used to get up at 5:00 in the morning and watch the nominees announced by the bleary-eyed president of the Academy, last year’s Supporting Actress winner steadfastly by his side, keeping him from tipping over. I used to look forward to it with a ridiculous level of excitement. But this year, yesterday, as a matter of fact, my wife told me that Tuesday morning, January 23, was the big morning. Three days before the event, and it was news to me. If she hadn’t said anything, I feel sure I wouldn’t have been aware of it at all and would have been shocked out of my undies to see the announcement when I innocently clicked for my daily fix from the Internet Movie Database.
But indifference to the awards themselves aside, the ritual of watching on Oscar night still holds sway over my better instincts of taste and common sense. I almost always find the show a whole lot more interesting, and less boring, than do the insta-pundits whose evaluations, perhaps tapped out on BlackBerries just outside the doors of the Governor’s Ball or Elton John’s Vanity Fair after-party, are featured in the morning-after editions of the Los Angeles Times and other publications that love to dis their Oscar cake and eat it too. I’m in the minority of viewers, too, who still think that David Letterman’s appearance as emcee added up to one of the best Oscar shows I’ve ever seen. However uncomfortable he might have been, Letterman was clearly too smart and loose for the room that night. I’d like to think, now that the era of Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg seems, thankfully, to have passed and Jon Stewart’s sharp, irreverent performance has been hailed as a new standard, that Letterman might have a much more receptive audience were he ever to try the job again—Uma and Oprah might just get the joke this time.
So, yes, go ahead, Oscar, name Babel (which I will probably be shamed into seeing, despite my previous declaration of having no interest in it) as Best Picture of the Year; tell me Dreamgirls featured the year’s best editing, or Little Miss Sunshine the best original screenplay of 2006. I’ll grin and bear it, because even though you are an imperfect popularity contest insufficient to the task of actually honoring the best in movies regardless of public perception and/or box office performance, you’re still an excellent excuse for gathering about the TV (or the computer) and talking about the year’s movies one last time with friends and family.
(So are the Independent Spirit Awards, for that matter, and this year Sarah Silverman is back! But the less said about the Golden Globes Awards, notwithstanding the acceptance speeches of Hugh Laurie and Sacha Baron Cohen, the better.) I will do my level best to be glad for the nominees that I like, especially if they win, and not worry about the absurdity of your inclusion of one or exclusion of another. I will try not to grind my teeth too intensely or roll my eyes more vigorously than my optometrist would recommend when a nominee I deem unworthy ends up reigning supreme. And I will struggle to remember that, as my wife constantly urges me at this time of the year, you, Oscar, mean virtually nothing except to those who win you and those who don’t. As a barometer for the quality of film culture, you are unreliable at best, blind and unforgiving at worst, and witheringly vulnerable to the overriding, prevailing wisdom of time. But as garishly enjoyable television, and as a peek into how the movie industry sees itself, through rose-colored contacts, as cosmetically and pharmaceutically and egotistically enhanced as any big-budget epic, you’re just about unmatchable.
Oscar, a lot of the movies of 2006 are too smart for you. Hell, I’m too smart for you. But you had me in 1969 with “And the winner is Midnight Cowboy” and you’ve got me 37 years later, for better and worse, with “And the Oscar goes to…” You are, at this point, for better and worse, an inextricable, though increasingly unimportant, element of the movies themselves for me. Your claims of devotion to the art of film are certainly no more laughable than the protestations of those who regally profess absolutely no interest in your ceremonial machinations. And I suspect we will continue this one-sided relationship until you do something really unforgivable, like name Rob Schneider best actor of the year, or bestow a lifetime achievement award upon someone like Uwe Boll or Dennis Dugan. Until that dark day comes, however, there will always be a place for you once a year on my living room television set, and room enough for a few words about you here.
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So, with an eye toward Tuesday morning, and a nod of acknowledgement toward the staff of critics at The New York Times, here’s a couple of lists to occupy your time (and, of course, mine) in the waning hours before the specifics of the Oscar race solidify. First, my Perfect World Oscar Nominations, a list of 10 categories populated only by the nominees I would choose, regardless of the likelihood they would ever be noticed by the Academy in the real world. Then, my last-minute, absolutely non-scientific, seat-of-my-sweat-pants guesses for what the list of actual nominees will look like in those same major categories. I profess no insight here, nor do I expect that my picks will be anywhere close to what will be announced on Tuesday—many far smarter, far more invested prognosticators than I will produce heavily considered guesses that are just as likely to have a mile-wide hole or two poked in them by the vicissitudes of Uncle Oscar’s tendency to throw in a monkey-wrench nomination here or there, just so we won’t think him too dotty or predictable. And that’s what I like best about the whole Oscar process—the ability of the Academy to set the likes of Sammy Rubin and George Pennacchio and Jillian Barberie all aflutter, the sleep barely blinked out of their eyes, as they chatter endlessly about “What were they thinking?” and how they just knew Ryan Philippe and Daniel Craig were locks for Best Actor nominations. Let the madness begin.
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MY PERFECT WORLD 2006 OSCAR NOMINATIONS
BEST PICTURE
Children of Men
Letters from Iwo Jima
Pan’s Labyrinth
A Prairie Home Companion
Three Times
BEST DIRECTOR
Robert Altman, A Prairie Home Companion
Alfonso Cuaron, Children of Men
Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labryinth
Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima
Hou Hsiao-hsien, Three Times
BEST ACTRESS
Ivana Baquero, Pan’s Labyrinth
Gong Li, Curse of the Golden Flower
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Gretchen Mol, The Notorious Bettie Page
Shu Qui, Three Times
BEST ACTOR
Jack Black, Nacho Libre
Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan
Clive Owen, Children of Men
Ken Watanabe, Letters from Iwo Jima
Bruce Willis, 16 Blocks
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Gong Li, Miami Vice
Julia Stiles, The Omen 666
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
Meryl Streep, A Prairie Home Companion
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Sacha Baron Cohen, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Mos Def, 16 Blocks
Paul Giamatti, The Illusionist
Kazunari Ninomiya, Letters from Iwo Jima
Mark Wahlberg, The Departed
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Nick Cave, The Proposition
Mike Judge, Etan Cohen, Idiocracy
Peter Morgan, The Queen
Kevin Willmott, The Confederate States of America
Iris Yamashita, Letters from Iwo Jima
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby,
Children of Men
Susannah Grant, Karey Kirkpatrick, Charlotte’s Web
William Monahan, The Departed
Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Paul Haggis, Casino Royale
Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt, Old Joy
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Ping Bing Lee, Three Times
Emmanuel Lubiezki, Children of Men
Guillermo Navarro, Pan’s Labyrinth
Wally Pfister, The Prestige
Tom Stern, Letters from Iwo Jima
BEST FILM EDITING
Joel Cox, Gary Roach, Letters from Iwo Jima
Alfonso Cuaron, Alex Rodriguez, Children of Men
William, Goldenberg, Paul Rubell, Miami Vice
Steve Mirkovich, 16 Blocks
Bernat Vilaplana, Pan’s Labyrinth
MY REAL WORLD 2006 OSCAR NOMINATION PICKS
BEST PICTURE
Babel
The Departed
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen
United 93
BEST DIRECTOR
Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine
Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima
Paul Greengrass, United 93
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Babel
Martin Scorsese, The Departed
BEST ACTRESS
Penelope Cruz, Volver
Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Gretchen Mol, The Notorious Bettie Page
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
BEST ACTOR
Leonardo Di Caprio, The Departed
Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
Peter O’Toole, Venus
Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine
Emily Blunt, The Devil Wears Prada
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel
Catherine O’Hara, For Your Consideration
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine
Adam beach, Flags of Our Fathers
Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children
Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls
Jack Nicholson, The Departed
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Pedro Almodovar, Volver
Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine
Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden, Half Nelson
Peter Morgan, The Queen
Iris Yamashita, Letters from Iwo Jima
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
William Broyles Jr., Paul Haggis, Flags of Our Fathers
Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata,
Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Children of Men
Bill Condon, Dreamgirls
Todd Field, Tom Perrotta, Little Children
William Monahan, The Departed
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Speaking of love and hate and Uncle Oscar, Edward Copeland has the results of his survey of the Best and Worst BEST ACTRESS winners in Oscar history. Make a sandwich or two, pour a big mug of coffee, perhaps a Big Gulp, or whatever beverage you prefer, block off no less than an entire evening, and enjoy the bounty of data Edward has served up for this year’s survey.
The Top 10 Worst Best Actresses
Some Actresses Not Quite Bad Enough To Make The Final List
Worst Performances Ranked By Ballot
12 Winning Best Actress Performances That Got Through The Voting Process Without Picking Up A Single “Worst” Vote
The Untouchable Actress Whose Performance Gathered Neither a Single “Worst” Nor a Single “Best” Vote
A Summary of the Survey Results (Part 1)
The Top 10 BEST Best Actress Winners
Performances That Weren’t Good Enough to Make the
