NO LIMBWALKING ON OSCAR DAY: MY ALL-TOO-PREDICTABLE 2011 OSCAR PREDICTIONS

DISCLAIMER: Use of the following information in your office Oscar pool is at the express risk of the person silly enough to crib it for such purposes. It is intended For Amusement Only, particularly if you care to have a cheap giggle at the expense of the person making it public.

******************************************

So here we sit, mere hours away from the breathless revelation of this year’s slate of Oscar winners which we’ll have trouble recalling by the end of the week. And in the spirit of full disclosure of my own ineptitude at guessing the outcome of contests such as these, I thought I’d reveal my own fearless predictions at to what’s going to happen tonight. It’s simply not enough, if I may crib a line from a dear friend, to sit back and luxuriate in the exquisite embarrassment of listening to professional gushers like ABC 7’s George Pennacchio ask stars like Octavia Spencer what it was like to play a black woman as the nominee nervously runs the red carpet gauntlet. No, each year I have to lay down my three bucks (six if I’m feeling lucky enough to play two ballots) and put my money where my heart is—which is why, by the way, I usually lose these things.

So come on, take this opportunity to make fun of me. The following are my completely unscientific, unbesmirched-by-insider-info, seat-of-my-sweatpants 2011 Oscar Predictions. Just please forgive me if my list of guesses sounds a tad familiar. I’m a very conservative gambler by nature, and my bold limb-walking has gotten me precisely nowhere in Oscar contests past. If you want to see just how well I did on my Independent Spirit Awards predictions, where I boldly envisioned the Spirit voters expressing true independence and voting the Drive ticket, you can click over to INDIEWire’s ”Who Will Win-Who Should Win” poll, where writers like myself were asked to take guesses and cite preferences on the two big awards shows of the weekend. If I do as well tonight as I did yesterday well, hey, I might just be $6 poorer! But I’ll have enjoyed the show in the company of friends and maybe even have had a beer or two. What Oscar win could possibly top that? (Well, maybe one for Melissa McCarthy.)

BEST PICTURE: The Artist

BEST ACTRESS: Viola Davis, The Help

BEST ACTOR: George Clooney, The Descendants

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Octavia Spencer, The Help

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christopher Plummer, Beginners

BEST DIRECTOR: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: The Descendants

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Midnight in Paris

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: Rango

BEST ANIMATED SHORT: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

BEST ART DIRECTION/SET DESIGN: Hugo

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: The Tree of Life

BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Hugo

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT: The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

BEST FILM EDITING: The Artist

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM: A Separation

BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT: Raju

BEST MAKEUP: The Iron Lady

BEST ORIGINAL MUSICAL SCORE: The Artist

BEST SONG: “Man or Muppet”

BEST SOUND EDITING: Hugo

BEST SOUND MIXING: Hugo

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Final Tally:

THE ARTIST wins four
HUGO wins four
THE HELP wins two
THE DESCENDANTS wins two
BEGINNERS, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, RANGO, THE TREE OF LIFE, THE IRON LADY, HARRY POTTER 7.5, A SEPARATION and THE MUPPETS each win one.

Happy Breathless George Pennacchio Day, everybody!

********************************************

ALL HAIL THE 2011 MURIEL AWARDS!

Golden Globes? Oscars? SAGS? Critic groups? Nah. The only awards that really matter, The Muriels, hosted by Paul Clark and Steve Carlson, gentlemen, scholars and all-around fine folk both, are finally back for the 2011 season. This would be, then, the fifth edition of these awards, decided on by the votes of an august group of professional and would-be professional online film critics and bloggers (here’s the roster), writers who never met a consensus they could get behind and who can be counted on, each and every one, to write intelligently and passionately about the movies that really moved them during the year, production and advertising budgets be damned.

The voting body considered 10 separate Oscar-type categories (Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Direction, Cinematography, Editing, Music Score and Screenplay) and nine other Muriel-specific areas of concern, including Best Cinematic Moment, Best Cinematic Breakthrough of 2011, Best Body of Work in 2011, Best Ensemble Performance, Best Site for Web-based Criticism (sites run by Muriel voters are not eligible), 10th, 25th and 50th anniversary awards for the Best Films of 2001, 1986 and 1961, and an award for Best Film of the 1990s. (I’d tell you what I voted for, but then I’d have to make residence in hell with Sadaam Hussein.)


I’ll make my complete ballot public when the final awards are revealed on March 4. From now until then Steve and Paul will roll out one winner at a time, with a short piece on the winner written by one of our Muriel company, as well as a look at the second and third-place finishers and a complete list of candidates submitted by Muriel voters in each category. The winners for Best Supporting Actor have been up for a day or so now, and just released this morning is the Muriel award winner for Best Supporting Actress, none other than actual Oscar nominee Melissa McCarthy, whose sublime work in Bridesmaids netted her a solid and decisive victory among the voters. And it was my honor to submit a short piece in celebration of McCarthy’s performance, which I sincerely hope takes home the Academy Award Sunday after next—here’s a taste of what I had to say:

”…what’s exhilarating about her turn as Megan, the groom’s unrefined and devastatingly honest sister, is how McCarthy doesn’t make a grandstanding show out of how she and the character don’t fit in so much as express, with hilarious physical and interpersonal precision and abandon, an innocent disregard for what any of her relatively slender, blowsy fellow bridesmaids or anyone else within shouting distance might think of her. Happily, Megan isn’t a relentless joke machine tossing off laugh lines about her body type in a lame bid for gross-out cred and eventual audience sympathy. Nor does Megan’s uncensored forthrightness seem calculated — it doesn’t originate out of anger or from a defensive position but instead from a very personal sense of joie de vivre, and she remains positively unaware of just how unprepared those around her are for it. McCarthy gradually disarms all kinds of preconceived notions of how we might think we know a woman like Megan, revealing layers of perceptivity and, yes, even sensitivity for which her colorful id is not a cover but instead a kind of psychic fuel.”

You can read the rest right here at the official Muriels Web page, Our Science is Too Tight, where Muriel updates will be coming fast and furious for the next two weeks. I’ll also being updating here at SLIFR as often as possible.

For now, happy Muriels season, and our most sincere congratulations to Melissa McCarthy!

*****************************************

FEBRUARY HAMMER GLAMOUR: VERA DAY

“Vera, Vera, what has become of you?” – Roger Waters

This month’s dose of Hammer Glamour comes to us via ingénue Vera Day, an actress about whom I knew relatively little before I opened up this year’s Hammer calendar and began skittering through her back catalog. (Waters, of course, was referencing another Vera altogether.)

According to her own Web site, Day began her show business career at age 19 when she auditioned for Wish You Were Here, an American-financed stage musical for which she admits she was hired less for her musical talent than for the way she filled out a bikini. So would it be, it seems, throughout Vera Day’s career. It was during the run of Wish You Were Here that she was discovered by Val Guest, who cast her in an uncredited role in his 1954 drama Dance, Little Lady. From there she made appearances in John Guillermin’s Shop Spoiled (1954) and Carol Reed’s A Kid for Two Farthings (1955).

But it was the second half of the '50s that would prove to be Day’s most active period as a screen actress. 1957 saw the release of her most widely-known movies, The Prince and the Showgirl, directed by Laurence Olivier, and, of course, the movie for which she is ranked among Hammer’s scream queens for 2012, Quatermass II: Enemy from Space, where she would once again by directed by Guest.

(Day’s insider perspective as a surviving cast member from the set of the Olivier movie, which of course starred Marilyn Monroe alongside the British thespian icon, was accessed recently when she weighed in on the actual factuals of My Week with Marilyn, which of course purports to tell of an affair between Monroe and a production assistant on the film.)

In 1958 Vera Day also starred in notable genre films like The Haunted Strangler, Up the Creek and The Woman Eater, but by the early ‘60s, after a few more less-than-memorable appearances in movies in British TV, her career in films took a backseat to domestic life after she married photographer Terry O’Neill (himself later married to Faye Dunaway) and had two children with him.

Despite dropping out of the spotlight, Day has always remained active on the autograph and fan convention circuit, and she scored a return to movies after a 34-year absence in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Her most recent feature was 2007’s The Riddle, in which she fills out an eccentric cast comprised of her Smoking Barrels costar Vinnie Jones, Derek Jacobi, Julie Cox, Vanessa Redgrave, Jason Flemyng and Mel Smith. She's been at it since 1954, and given the tenacity she's already shown in remaining on the radar there's no reason to believe Vera Day's day is done yet.

(Above: Vera Day poses with Dave, a poster collector and Hammer horror aficionado who hosts his own spectacular site, Hammer Horror Posters, which is well worth a look.)

****************************************

THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #21: POLYMORPHOUS POSTMORTEM

“Film lovers are sick people.” – Francois Truffaut

“Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.” – Jorge Luis Borges

The SLIFR Tree House has been shuttered for another season, the movies and moods and movements of 2011 having been effectively and entertainingly mulled over by our august membership. There’ll be more from me vis-à-vis my annually tardy year-end consideration post, which should be coming your way sometimes before Oscar night. But I just wanted to reflect for a moment on what an honor the five participants, all from different backgrounds and perspectives and temperaments and sensitivities, bestowed on me and this blog by deigning to take part in this project.

The SLIFR Tree House was initiated by me last year out of my desire to participate in the Slate Movie Club. No invitation was forthcoming to join that group (and neither did I expect one!), so I thought, why not just borrow the concept, give it our own fresh coat of paint and take it down the road for a spin? The first year it was only Sheila, Jim, Jason and I trading thoughts, and that was a lot of fun. Not that the four of us were in perfect harmony and needed rattling, but I came into this year’s edition thinking that adding a couple more voices might spice up the mix even further. Yet as the day of the first posts came nearer I fretted that maybe six writers was just too many. How would we ever fit it all into one week?

I needn’t have worried. Who said we had to fit it all into one week just because that’s what the Salon folks did? At the end of one week, each one of us had only posted once and we knew we weren’t close to being finished. So we agreed to extend the party into the next week, and by the time Jim submitted his final post we had 20 separate filings for Tree House readers to pore over. Think about that—at an average of about 1,800 words, some fewer, most far more, by the end of it all we Tree Housers had submitted for your approval close to 40,000 words about the year just past. Most publishing companies would consider that about half a full-length book. And here it is for you to print out, argue with, nod in agreement to and otherwise enjoy at your leisure.

What’s most pleasing is that though the intellectual quality of what was offered here was most sincere and integrity-packed, the fact that it was pitched as a celebration didn’t preclude critical analysis and certainly didn’t mean that any of it was going to read like a dry academic paper. The people invited to the Tree House this year had their own distinct personalities and takes on the movies, yet it never ever came close to the kind of one-upsmanship and carping that conferences of this sort often find themselves descending into. For example, Simon’s exhaustive and exhausting experience with movies many of us haven’t seen provided inspiration and guidance to expand our palates and where we might go to do so, while we were prompted to smile at his humor-laced, self-effacing style. Sheila brought passion for the art and craft of acting to the table, and it was such rush to read her impassioned words on Iranian film, how the movies can be a force for sociological as well as artistic expression, and what movies can mean to their potential audience Meanwhile, Steven and Jason expressed personal and political passion about the movies, about what they can mean, what they must mean, about the very meaning of a mass audience, and guided us all in a enriching discussion of The Tree of Life illustrated with their own overwhelming experiences. Finally, Jim brought his considerable experience to bear on a fascinating examination of what it means to write, and write well, about the movies, bringing it all home with, among many other trenchant observations, a moving remembrance of the recently deceased film distribution figurehead Bingham Ray.

To boil it down to the sparest nugget, this year’s Tree House so surpassed my hopes for what we would do and how much fun we would have doing it that I almost hesitate to suggest doing another one. How could it possibly match this year’s model? Yet propose it I will again next year, in the hopes that all my friends who came by for a visit this year will be back, maybe in the company of still other writers who want to take the time to consider the year in the company of like-minded and enthusiastic colleagues. With all due respect to the membership of the Slate Movie Club, which includes one of my favorite film critics, Stephanie Zacharek, I hope it’s not too arrogant to express my feeling that this year we surpassed our model of inspiration. In just two short sessions, the SLIFR Tree House has become, for me and I hope you too, a place where friends gather and thoughtful expression about the movies is the standard, a place to which I’ve begun looking forward to returning almost as soon as the doors are closed.

I’d like to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to Simon Abrams, Jason Bellamy, Steven Boone, Jim Emerson and Sheila O’Malley for classing up the joint during the month of January. I’m really proud of our achievement here, where no subject was too high or too low for discussion. It was like a really fun convention of writers and fans gathered together to express love and concern for this most dynamic of arts... but in a tree!

See you next year!



******************************************

AN INDEX OF SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 ENTRIES

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO (Cozzalio)

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE (O'Malley)

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS (Abrams)

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX (Boone)

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE? (Bellamy)

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK (Emerson)

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS (Cozzalio)

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES (Boone)

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM? (Abrams)

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT (Cozzalio)

TREE HOUSE #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS (O'Malley)

TREE HOUSE #12: THE MOVIES MUST MOVE US (Bellamy)

TREE HOUSE #13: SPIRITS AND INFLUENCES (Emerson)

TREE HOUSE #14: ACADEMY LEADERS (Cozzalio)

TREE HOUSE #15: MALICK'S GOD, CORNISH'S MONSTERS (Boone)

TREE HOUSE #16: FAITH LOST AND FOUND (Cozzalio)

TREE HOUSE #17: STORIES, DREAMS, MEMORIES (O'Malley)

TREE HOUSE #18: THIS ONE GOES TO ELEVEN (Bellamy)

TREE HOUSE #19: CIGARS FOR EVERYONE! (Abrams)

TREE HOUSE #20: FACES AND MOMENTS IN THE CROWD (Emerson)

*****************************************

11 CLASSIC (AND NOT-SO-CLASSIC) FILMS SEEN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2011

When Rupert Pupkin Speaks, everyone listens. Well, everyone except me listens, it seems. It feels like a long time ago indeed that Mssr. Pupkin, Listmaster Extraordinaire and proprietor of his own fine, eponymous blog, asked me to compile a short list of favorite films I’d seen for the first time over the past year. I jumped on that request fairly quickly (I think!).

It’s been less long ago—about a month and a half, maybe— but still plenty long enough since he asked me to do the same thing again this year, and this time it’s been a little more difficult for me to find time to respond. But in an attempt to avoid further fraying of Rupe’s patience or otherwise taking advantage of its rather flexible nature, complete it I finally have. This list is actually one of my favorite exercises in looking back on the year past in movies, and I’ll have a more complete version of it when I present my own year-end package in a couple of weeks.

But for now, here are the highlights, presented for Mr. Pupkin and anyone else who might be interested of some of the golden oldies whose light shadows flitted past my eyes for the first time during the past year. How many of these movies have you seen? I ask because I’m curious, but also to defuse the inevitable catcalls directed toward me and the giant, glaring gaps in my own experience with film history. Let's kick things off with:


Aha! Got ya! Robot Monster is indeed among the chosen, but you'll have to jump on over to Rupert Pupkin Speaks to find out what makes up the rest my short list! (How's that for a tease?)

(And make sure to check out Rupert's own list of favorite older films seen for the first time in 2011 too!)

********************************************