MURIELS THROWBACK 2012: KATY PERRY

The following is the fourth of five highlights from my nine years of writing for the Muriel Awards, my left-of-center pick of Katy Perry in her concert film Part of Me as one of the best female lead performances of 2012. Nearly four years later, I'll stand by that.

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I don’t think I’ve ever had a more difficult time assembling five decent candidates for the Best Lead Performance (Female) category, for the Muriels or for any of my own lists, than I did this year. Only two of my own nominees came completely without hesitation -- Rachel Weisz for The Deep Blue Sea and Eva Green in the sadly underseen Perfect Sense. I hadn’t even seen four or the five nominated women in the running for the Best Actress Academy Award by ballot time, and what Quvenzhané Wallis does in Beasts of the Southern Wild, as utterly disarming as her presence might be, feels more like the latest manifestation of the Ponette Syndrome rather than actual acting.

My only slightly facetious solution to this dilemma: the eternally wide-eyed, super-sized (with cupcake bra to match) pop personality that is the front and center attraction of last summer’s 3D documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me. Mind, on the scale of significant music movies KP: POM hardly ranks as either a pop culture jamboree on the order of A Hard Day’s Night or a brutal generational dissection a la Gimme Shelter. The worst thing that happens during a Katy Perry concert probably occurs during the exuberant performance of “Peacock,” KP’s gonzo saber rattle at the doors of propriety -- a lascivious limerick of sympathy for a devil ragin’ full-on (“I wanna see your peacock-cock-cock/Your peacock”), probably amounting to little more than the occasional shocked soccer mom fainting into her popcorn over the ribald transparency of what barely qualifies as sexual innuendo.

But if the movie isn’t exactly a landmark, then fortunately neither is it a pretentious meditation on the ego-fueled angst and impatience underlying what makes Katy Katy, a Truth or Dare for the “Fireworks” set. No, what makes the movie fun, and what makes me think Katy Perry is a good candidate in the Best Lead Performance (Female) category, is not just the peek behind the elaborate construct that Perry presents to adoring fans but also the consideration of the daunting energy and craft put into the image itself and its constant, cheerful, remarkably anti-cynical perpetuation.

“I don’t think anyone can ever be too cartoony!” the singer gleefully exclaims while putting herself together for the first performance of her first worldwide tour. It’s a moment that makes you want to stand up and salute, a sentiment that distills Perry’s perfectly calibrated self-awareness and places her mix of shiny, candy-colored pop extravagance and (unthreatening) Vargas-girl sexuality well within the tradition of beloved animated icons Sweet Polly Purebred and Jessica Rabbit, both of whose appeal Perry seems to aspire towards. The movie pays only lip service to the greater weight of crafting such an image, but even if KP: POM is meticulously manipulated to present exactly the picture Katy Perry wants disseminated, it’s still a fascinating appraisal of what such a heightened level of pinup performance art might still mean to the audience. I don’t recall ever seeing a movie about a pop singer whose artifice is so up front which is then also so relatively unafraid of presenting the star at her most vulnerable, whether she’s crawling out of bed after a exhausting leg of the tour or laying immobile on a massage table, crippled with grief over her crumbling marriage.

And Perry’s walking the fine line between exuberant amateur and slick professional is itself cheerfully, endearingly enjoyable too. To paraphrase Lennon and McCartney, she may be a singer (with more #1 hits off a single album than even the Beatles), but she ain’t no dancer. Yet her indefatigable desire to connect with the fans is quite something to behold -- you’ll never catch her glad-handing a mom and dad and their goggle-eyed kids backstage, then turning to make a gagging gesture behind their backs. And the tunes, even though they are only largely sampled here, remain seductively catchy, playfully hedonistic, occasionally transgressive, supremely empathetic paeans to the optimistic energy of pop, much like Perry herself. (No wonder she made the Children’s Television Workshop nervous.) Katy Perry: Part of Me ultimately remains true to its title -- this is only a glossy reflection of a carefully selected portion of the star’s reality. But it’s one in which the effort and art of creating her persona is as much in focus as her relentless appeal, documenting the moments when the acting put into being Katy Perry, Pop Princess, merges seamlessly with the joy she takes, and the toll taken from her, as that princess commands the stage.

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MURIELS THROWBACK 2011: WAR HORSE

The following is the third of five highlights from my nine years writing for the Muriel Awards, my essay on Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of War Horse, which the Muriel Voters placed 26th in the running for Best Picture in 2011 and was number one on my list for that year.

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In the digital D.I.Y. age, filmmakers have an incredible arsenal of technique available to them. They know tricks some directors who learned their craft on Super 8 and 16mm, cutting film on Moviola decks like sausage makers, may still not have mastered. And yet, to crudely paraphrase a nugget of Christian theology, what does it profit a woman or a man if they can shoot film like a gunslinger yet they come up short in the soul department? 

Nowadays, knockoffs of the dolly zoom Steven Spielberg popularized in Jaws or the kind of hair-raising, relentlessly fluid, anything-goes sensibility that characterized Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and 1941 or the emotional acuity of movies as disparate as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Empire of the Sun are a dime a dozen. Yet their true spirits are much harder to capture. Many filmmakers have dazzled audiences with mastery of technique in the wake of these movies, to the point that some audiences may have begun to have trouble even mustering the effort to differentiate between well-crafted art and sheer audio-visual noise. Amidst all the cacophony, few have swept us up the way Spielberg, working at peak form, is capable of doing. And I’d like to suggest that War Horse represents Spielberg in peak form, marshaling a marriage between the early impudence of his technical prowess, his continued, even more potent desire to connect his sensibility with the traditions of film history, and an emotional freedom that unites the director and his audience, absent the need for mutual flattery regarding the social importance of the subject matter. 



By embracing the melodramatic splendor of the story of the bond between young Albert (Jeremy Irvine), his beloved horse Joey and their journey of separation and eventual reunion across the impossibly gorgeous landscapes and ravaged, scarred battlefields of World War I, and then robustly channeling that splendor into his filmmaking, Spielberg finds the emotional power he often overreaches for when he approaches “mature” subject matter head-on. Ironically, the director accesses a portrait of the human condition that bests even that of Empire of the Sun by following Joey’s journey of hardship and reflecting the experience of soldiers (British and German) not through Joey’s perspective -- as some have claimed -- but simply by the fact of the animal’s presence and how it affects those whose lives are most derailed and devastated by the war. 

Simply put, Joey reminds them of their own humanity. War Horse suggests a way of looking at stories about the way boys and men relate to animals that transcends anthropomorphic excess; the movie’s opening 45 minutes are a glorious fantasia on themes of loyalty and determination played out on one of the most glorious Technicolor-esque Irish countryside ever committed to film, perhaps the best movie on a classic Disney template that Disney himself never made. (We’ve encountered the likes of Albert’s downtrodden dad, his stern but loving mother, and their gruff, unyielding landlord, played wonderfully by Peter Mullan, Emily Watson and David Thewlis, respectively, in countless other movies, but rarely brought to life with the kind of commitment and passion these actors display.) 



But when the story begins its episodic movement from Joey’s conscription into service with the British Army to his theft by a pair of German deserters, his brief adoption by a Belgian farmer and his granddaughter, and his navigation across the front lines of battle, Spielberg takes up a more artful, suggestive approach to depicting the horrors of war than the more plainly overwhelming barrage of death on display in Saving Private Ryan. Critic David Edelstein described a sequence in War Horse in which two German soldiers are executed, the moment of their death obscured from our sight by the slow passage of a windmill’s blade, as one of the movies’ most merciful depictions of death, “yet still unspeakable.” It’s Spielberg’s restraint, which is emphasized throughout War Horse despite the movie’s impossibly pleasurable grandeur, that makes his canvas of horror so immediate, so powerful, and which also aligns him with the epic tradition of classic cinema rather than the razzmatazz younger generation, many of whom are working so hard with their shaky-cams and violent editing schemes to outdo effects they probably first saw in Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg’s design reminds us how artists can use aestheticizing effects without buying into the pomp and circumstance and rush of excitement about war that probably lured the soldiers into the trenches in the first place. The British Army’s first charge across a wheat field and into the camp of a surprised battalion of Germans begins with this kind of rousing purpose, and ends with a horrifying sight of suddenly rider-less horses running into a forest where a deeper nightmare awaits.

Those who dislike War Horse often cite its length, or its flush of melodramatic imagery, or John Williams’ typically ornate score, or even alleged inaccuracies involving the behavior of horses as evidence that it’s somehow boring, over the top, or in one way or another shameless and false. But resistance to War Horse, including Williams’ contribution (which I find to be one of his loveliest accompaniments to a Spielberg movie), was a willful act far beyond my meager strength as a moviegoer -- I was engaged far more quickly and deeply than I could have ever guessed possible, then completely overwhelmed at the conclusion by Spielberg’s deliberate evocation of a Technicolor majesty long since abandoned by an industry more interested in “found footage” gimmicks than the zone where craft becomes art. As I choked back and then succumbed to tears while the credits rolled, the friend with whom I saw the movie (he also loved it) patted me on the back and said, “Isn’t that why we go to the movies?” In that moment, and in all the moments which have occupied my remembrance of the movie since, I could not disagree.

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MURIELS THROWBACK 2010: EMMA STONE IN EASY A

The following is the second of five highlights from my nine years writing for the Muriel Awards, my 2010 celebration of Emma Stone's performance in Easy A.

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It is a well-known claim of actors, oft attributed to the British stage star Edmund Kean but probably originated by some schlub pounding the dirt in a Greek amphitheater around the time Lysistrata had its premiere: dying is easy, but comedy is hard. As much as this deathbed classic is a Hollywood truism, there is apparently something even more difficult than peerlessly nailing a comedy role and that's getting any recognition for having done so. Of the 10 lead performance nominees at this year’s Academy Awards, seven of them bent over backward to keep their audiences from cracking a smile. (The eventual Best Actress winner delivered laugh after unintended laugh in her very serious turn as a bat-shit ballerina.) Even my own list of favorite performances, male or female, is heavily weighted toward searing dramatic turns. 

Yet year after year the performances that land at the top of my list are usually comedic in nature. (I’m thinking of Anna Faris in The House Bunny, Steve Martin in The Man with Two Brains and Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, to name but just three.) With all due respect to Michele Williams, Annette Bening, Lesley Manville and Hailee Steinfeld, only one actress this year was able to convince me, if she were to somehow hijack Doc Brown’s DeLorean and travel back to the golden age of Hollywood screwball comedy, that she could be dropped, as is, straight into competition with the high-speed royalty of the genre for all the best and brightest roles. And I’ve little doubt not only that Emma Stone could hold her own, but that she would have the likes of Carole Lombard, Marion Davies, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne and Jean Arthur looking over their shoulders when they weren’t scrambling to take her out for drinks.


In Easy A Stone effortlessly proved she had the stuff real stars are made of. In the real world, or at least in my high school, Stone's Olive Penderghast would have had every boy with a lick of sense at her feet. But here she’s nerdy and boyfriend-less (the movie’s most outrageous conceit), North Ojai High's heiress apparent to the spirit, if not the legacy or fate of Hester Prynne. Olive finds herself the object of salacious rumors, in part self-perpetuated, which result in her becoming the go-to girl for unconsummated, wholly fictitious trysts meant to prop up the reputations of her supposed partners, desperate geeks one and all. Of course the rumors go wildly out of control and Olive, in best-defense mode, embraces her nouveau-slutty persona, with results that are predictably outrageous but less predictably hilarious, and even at times painful. This young actress holds the screen without ever breaking a sweat—she’s in practically every scene of her movie, just like Oscar-winner Natalie Portman. The difference is that there’s no doubt Stone means to make us laugh.

In addition to effortless and natural appeal, Stone has got a real movie smart-ass’s way around a sharply written turn of phrase, or a squinty-smudgy smirk-mock laugh, displayed without turning the screen a red-headed shade of mean a la Molly Ringwald. (Maybe it’s her slight lisp that keeps her barbs from cutting too deep or seeming elitist.) But she can also handle the sweetness in the teen comedy recipe without feeling the need to put everything in collagen-inflated quotes or brush off the currents of love coursing through her relationship with her only-in-the-movies family in appeasement of the movie’s mockery-ready ideal demographic. Even her looks are appealingly off-kilter; her freckled nose crinkles up to meet those pale green eyes, which are spaced slightly further apart than the manual recommends and offset by her fiery red mane; and all of her features settle into a repertoire of quizzical looks, sharp glances and artfully arched eyebrows that suggest bemusement and the pursuit of the cleansing power of humor as the most potent intellectual defense against shallow high school hostility.


One thing Stone is not is a flavor-of-the-moment cutie pie. No, she’s a tart meringue, and on the strength of Easy A she’s fully ready to take on all comers for now and the foreseeable future. Like Faris, with whom she shared screen time in The House Bunny, Stone is built for the kinds of showcase vehicles that Hollywood forgot how to make 50 years ago. (With all due respect to the late, great Jane Russell, if someone ever decides to do a remake of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes there would be no need to go through all that messy auditioning and interviewing-- just give these women the ship and watch ‘em cruise.) It may be that Stone never gets another role like Olive-- her ascendance into the rebooted Spider-Man franchise bodes well for her profile, Q rating and checking account, but it’s unlikely to produce the sort of combustible energy she radiates in Easy A. As she becomes a star, I’ll eagerly await the career fulfillment of the kind of intelligence she’s displayed in her choices so far and continue to hope she remembers that anyone can take the money; it’s comedy that’s hard, and nothing worth doing comes easy. The glint in Emma Stone’s green eyes tells me that she’s ready to roll up her sleeves and get to work.

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MURIELS THROWBACK 2008: SPEED RACER

The following is the first of five highlights from my nine years writing for the Muriel Awards, my essay on Andy and Lana (nee Larry) Wachowski's magnificent Speed Racer, which placed 25th in the 2008 Muriels running for Best Feature Film.

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What do movies as disparate as It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra; 1947), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder; 1970), The Thing (John Carpenter; 1982) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott; also 1982) have in common? On the surface, not much. However, each of these visually resplendent pictures was a flop at the box-office and years later came to be regarded as either among their celebrated directors’ best, most personal films or, in the case of Blade Runner, so stylistically influential that it can be said to have changed the way futurism in cinematic science fiction has been realized ever since.

To that list of recognized classics I volunteer to add the unjustly maligned, often willfully misunderstood, and completely enthralling Speed Racer, my unashamed pick for the best movie of 2008. This is a movie of shimmering poetry, shifting, gliding perspectives and a velocity that pulsates with meaning and feeling, a movie so far ahead of the curve of the general audience (and levels of tolerance for its disorienting and radical visual grammar) that it might take at least 20 years, and a wave of failed, Wachowski-tinged pyrotechnical movie piracy, for it to be able to take its rightful place as a landmark of personal filmmaking in the blockbuster mode.

Oddly enough, it was seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s similarly irreverent pop culture mash-up Pierrot le fou on the big screen a month or so before Speed Racer bowed that best prepared me for what the Wachowskis had in store for those few of low expectations who passed through the opening-day turnstiles. Like Godard, the Wachowskis integrate their pop-culture-soaked point of view on the material into the very skeleton of the filmmaking itself; each cut, either jarring or graphically continuous, adds a degree of emotion that can blindside a viewer with its candy-coated beauty (I’m thinking of a single cut from the blue flames of a crash that has taken his brother’s life to a mournful shot of Speed sobbing silently in his mother’s arms, his bedroom cloaked in shadow) or with a flurry of gasp-inducing disorientation. Any of the movie’s spectacular, gravity-defying race scenes qualify for such a description, but the movie’s triumph is that it has infused its entire visual approach with the same intensity, and the result is not nausea, as has been widely reported, but instead a kind of transporting, transcendent euphoria.



The eccentric visual unity coursing through the movie’s fuel-injected veins is kept humming and vibrating by the Wachowskis’ go-for-broke bravery, and each new sequence seems to up the ante on the directors’ breathtaking comic audacity. The movie to come is hinted at during a beautiful sequence early on in which a young Speed spies Trixie for the first time. Lost in puppy-love reverie, the backgrounds of both their medium close-ups bleed together in a swirling loss of focus that at first looks like Popsicles melting in Panavision, then effortlessly morphs into flowers and pixels of light that take the shape of free-floating hearts. Speed up-ends his go-cart in a row of bushes and, dazed, looks up at the supernaturally blue sky, his field of vision invaded by an cockeyed angel of elementary-school loveliness—Trixie invades the frame upside-down, as seen from Speed’s point of view, and as my friend Matthew Kiernan said, the movie announces its intention to show you the world from a fresh perspective with the promise of revealing new things within your field of vision you may not have been able to see before. And there is so much to see and hear and thrill to in Speed Racer that six viewings (and counting) have not been nearly enough. (Barely a blip in theaters, the film has found its destiny as a spectacular treat on Blu-ray and HDTV, where it looks better than it ever did theatrically, with the possible exception of its IMAX incarnation.)

I remember coming home from the opening night screening of Speed Racer and excitedly e-mailing a friend—“I don’t know what you thought of this movie, but I loved it, and I can’t stop thinking about it.” He wrote me back the next day, thrilled that I too saw the same movie he did, and we spent the summer re-experiencing it as often as we could, together and with others we hoped would soon become converts. A few days later, in a long piece in which I attempted to put my own reaction into words (and answer the movie’s many critical naysayers), I wrote:



"What’s authentically awesome about Speed Racer is the way it nimbly accesses the emotions buried within a blockbuster package and uses the digital medium not only to excite the senses but to come to an understanding, in the rush of excitement in our brain waves and in our follicles as the goose bumps rise, of why we should be reacting at all. This is, to me the mark of a work of pop art. The CGI technology which by now has become so mundane and deadly in other filmmaking contexts is invigorated, made as masterful as Speed Racer himself hurling down the track, spinning and doing gravity-defying loops. Speed’s mom waxes rhapsodic about her son’s ability as a driver and tells him, `It’s inspiring and beautiful, everything art should be.’ Dare I say the same about Speed Racer? I dare. It's the movie of the year for me so far.”

Nine months have passed, and no new release I saw since then swept me away like this unlikely explosion of pop cinema did. Twenty years from now I suspect I will no longer be one of the only ones who look at the Wachowski Brothers’ singular achievement as a new classic, but if that scenario somehow fails to materialize, well, there is some comfort in knowing that the landscape of movie history is and always has been littered with films that have escaped the mixed blessings of mass acceptance. And I’ll always have Speed Racer.

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MURIELS BEST CINEMATIC MOMENT OF 2015: "SPEAK LOW," THE CONCLUSION OF PHOENIX

It's been my honor to have participated in all nine years of Muriel awards voting and writing since the roll-out of the first Muriel Awards in 2006, and this year I've been lucky enough to contribute three pieces to Muriel's tribute to the best movies of the year.

One has already been published, and that one is my essay focused on what I, and in a lovely bit of coincidence the majority of Muriels voters, think is the best, most indelible and moving moment of the cinematic year, the conclusion of Christian Petzold's Vertigo-infused noir drama Phoenix, starring the incomparable Nina Hoss as Nelly, a WWII concentration camp survivor who undergoes facial reconstructive surgery. After the operation which, in a fashion, restores her face to a semblance of her past visage, Nelly longs only to return to her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), a pianist and her accompanist in their previous life, who may have been the one who betrayed her to the Nazis. He realizes her resemblance to his wife, who he assumes was killed in the camp, but he doesn’t recognize her as Nelly, and soon he involves his wife in a scheme to essentially impersonate herself in order to lay claim to the money which lays waiting in her estate.

The movie is a beautiful, agonized slow burn leading to the moment when Johnny may or may finally realize that the woman he has been coaching to impersonate his "dead" wife is in fact the woman herself, and that moment is the focus of my Muriels essay:

"Petzold brilliantly understands that the wrenching drama of the entirety of the film, which has always been understated and tentative where it could have been morbid and excessively melodramatic, is crystallized in this moment, and he expresses it with an exquisite modulation that fully informs and honors Nelly’s journey of tentative rediscovery." 

If you haven't seen Phoenix, first of all, see it as soon as you can. It's available right now streaming on Netflix, and is scheduled for a beautiful Blu-ray edition courtesy of the Criterion Collection next month. But if you choose to ready my piece before having done so, be aware that it was written for readers who were already aware of how the movie ends. For those unfamiliar with Phoenix, it should be considered a major spoiler and not read until you've had a chance to experience the movie firsthand.

With that in mind, click here for my Muriels piece on the conclusion of Phoenix.



And stay tuned for my two other 2015 Muriels pieces coming this weekend!

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AU REVOIR, OSCAR! MAKE WAY FOR MURIEL!

Spotlight more or less ran the table at the Independent Spirit Awards last Saturday night in Santa Monica, picking up honors for Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Editing, as well as the Robert Altman Award for best ensemble cast. Brie Larson picked up yet another trophy for her great performance in Room, and Son of Saul, as expected, won for Best International Film. But this year the Independent Spirit Awards weren’t just a liquored-up predictor of what would happen the following night at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. Whether or not Spirit voters took it as their charge to pointedly honor the diversity that was so lacking in the roster of Oscar nominees this year, few could find fault when both Abraham Attah (Best Male Lead) and Idris Alba (Best Supporting Male) for Beasts of No Nation, and especially Mya Taylor from Tangerine, took to the stage to accept their honors. Taylor is the first transgender actress to win a trophy at the Independent Spirit Awards for her movie, which also went up against Anamolisa, Beasts of No Nation, Carol and Spotlight for Best Feature Film.

And how about those Oscars, huh? They went exactly as I predicted, didn’t they? Well, no, not exactly. I actually did a little bit better in my office Oscar pool than my picks published here last week would indicate, thanks to a little last-minute futzing and fudging on my ballot. But I still wasn’t even within sniffing distance of the eventual winner—my wife!—who had the clairvoyance to go against the odds and pick Spotlight and Mark Rylance for Bridge of Spies when everyone else in the pool bolted for The Revenant  and Sylvester Stallone. My one moment of glory: I stuck with Ex Machina for Best Visual Effects against those four other big guns and was rewarded with a brief moment’s delusion that I actually had a chance to take home the 50 bucks for myself this year. But it was not to be. Nor will; it probably be next year either. Such is my own Oscar night narrative, one that has been playing out with remarkable consistency ever since I initiated my first Oscar pool around 35 years ago. (I’ve won once in all those years!)

But if one thought that the awards season had been concluded with last Sunday night’s glittering ceremony, one would be wrong. There are still the announcements, coming tomorrow, of the annual countdown to the winner of the Muriel Awards honor for Best Film of 2015, and that’s the award I always look forward to the most.

In case you missed it when I mentioned them last week, the Muriel Awards have, for nine seasons now, gathered a wide-ranging, eclectic and smart group of essayists, most of whom don’t have a regular paying gig at a magazine or Web site, to cast votes and wax poetic and otherwise on the year’s finest achievements. Our results almost never resemble the usual year-end award show lineups, though there can be some cross-over, of course. But the Muriels, not beholden to any corporate interests or political influence in the voting, have always seemed to me the most diverse of any awards I know of when it comes to actually shining a light on the wide range of films that are out there every year, the ones situated squarely in the spotlight as well as the ones operating with their own rules and sensibilities on the fringes of, and sometimes far outside the boundaries of popular awareness.

Why “Muriel,” you ask? Well, cofounders Paul Clark and Steven Carlson hatched the idea of a poll-based award for themselves and a bunch of their film-savvy friends during an intermission at a screening of Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 in December 2006. They both warmed quickly to the notion and began compiling names to invite for the year’s first ballot. But what to call this prestigious new award? I’ll let Paul Clark tell that story:

“One thing we didn’t have yet was a name. When I first sent out the ballots, I actually included a space in which the voters might suggest a name under which we could operate – after all, an (INSERT NAME HERE) Movie Award just wouldn’t have much mystique, y’know? However, when the ballots started coming in, there were no suggestions that really sounded right. I somewhat hastily began brainstorming for something that if nothing else might serve as a temporary name until the right name came along, and I settled on the name of my guinea pig, Muriel. I ran this by the other voters and was surprised by how positive the reaction was, so it stuck.”

And why not?  Muriel (who died a couple of years after the award was named after her) is certainly as dignified (and cuter) than Uncle Oscar, and if we had a trophy it’d stand a good chance of being prettier than that weird-looking bucket of metal popcorn they hand out at the MTV Movie Awards.

I’ve been a Muriels voter ever since the award’s inception in 2006, one of only seven writers (Jason Alley, Kent Beeson, Andrew Bemis, Steven Carlson, James Frazier and Mark Pfeiffer are the others) who can make such a grandiose claim. And in composing a gallery of Muriel memories dedicated to each year of the awards, Clark also details how the roster of Muriels voters was expanded and made international, insuring the individuality and unpredictability of the Muriels could be sustainable as a long-term feature of the award, as well as ensuring that the annual round-up would be a consistently excellent and worthy addition to a crowded and often not so ambitious field of Internet film writing.

So what’s up with Muriel vis-à-vis the films of 2015? Here’s where we stand as the best films of the year wait in the wings to be announced beginning tomorrow:

Best Supporting Perfomance, Female: Third place, Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina); second place, Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight; and the Muriel goes to… Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria. (Essay by Carig D. Lindsey)

10th Anniversay Award (Best Film of 2006):  Third place, Cache (Michael Haneke); second place; A History of Violence (David Cronenberg); and the Muriel goes to… The New World (Terence Malick). (Essay by Marya Murphy)

 

Best Supporting Perfomance, Male: Third place, Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies; second place, Oscar Isaac, Ex Machina; and the Muriel goes to… Sylvester Stallone, Creed. (Essay by Sean Burns)

Best Editing: Third place, Sicario, Joe Walker; second place, Creed, Michael Shawver and Claudia Costello; and the Muriel goes to… Mad Max: Fury Road, Margaret Sixel. (Essay by Kevin Cecil)

Best Ensemble Performance:  Third place, The Big Short; second place, Creed; and the Muriel goes to… The Hateful Eight. (Essay by Jason Shawhan)

25th Anniversary Award (Best Film of 1990):  Third place, Close-up (Abbas Kiarostami); second place, Miller’s Crossing (Joel and Ethan Coen); and the Muriel goes to… GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese) (Essay by Kent Beeson)

Best Music:  Third place, It Follows (score by DIsasterpiece); second place, Carol (score by Carter Burwell); and the Muriel goes to… Ennio Morricone for The Hateful Eight. (Essay by Jeff McMahon)

Best Body of Work: Third place, Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina, Star Wars: The Force Awakens); second place, Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina, The Danish Girl, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Burnt); and the Muriel goes to… Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Hateful Eight, Anomalisa). (Essay by Cole Roulain)

50th Anniversary Award (Best Film of 1965): Third place, For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone); second place, Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles); and the Muriel goes to… Repulsion (Roman Polanski). (Essay by Hedwig van Driel)

Best Cinematography: Third place, The Revenant (Emmanuel Lubezki); second place, Mad Max: Fury Road (John Seale); and the Muriel goes to… Carol (Ed Lachman). (Essay by George Wu)

Best Screenplay: Third place, Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, Josh Singer); second place, Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman); and the Muriel goes to… Carol (Phyllis Nagy). (Essay by Andrew Bemis)

Best Cinematic Moment: Third place, Sicario (“There and back again: a border crossing tale”); second place, Magic Mike XXL (“How much for the Cheetos and water?”); and the Muriel goes to… “Speak Low,” the final scene from Phoenix. (Essay by Dennis Cozzalio)

Plus: Muriels Addendum #1: More Moments We Loved

Best Cinematic Breakthrough: Third place, Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: The Force Awakens); second place, Bel Powley, The Diary of a Teenage Girl; and the Muriel goes to… Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina, The Danish Girl, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) (Essay by James Frazier)

Best Documentary: Third place, In Jackson Heights (Fredrick Wiseman); second place, Amy (Asif Kapadia); and the Muriel goes to… The Look of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer). (Essay by Russel Hainline)

Best Direction: Third place, Creed (Ryan Coogler); second place, Carol (Todd Haynes); and the Muriel goes to… Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller). (Essay by Paul Clark)

Best Lead Performance, Female: Third place, Nina Hoss (Phoenix); second place, Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road); and the Muriel goes to… Rooney Mara (Carol). (Essay by Daniel Getahun)

Yet to be announced today is the winner of the Muriel Award for Best Lead Performance, Male. And then on Sunday, the countdown to Best Picture, updated throughout the day with a truckload of new essays from Muriels writers dedicated to their favorite movies of the year. In addition to my piece on Phoenix’s devastating finale (linked above), I’ll have something to say about Lenny Abrahamson’s Room, my pick for the best movie of 2015 (in a neck-and-neck race with Chi-raq), as well as one of my other favorites of the year, one that didn’t make too many ripples on ten-best lists, Guy Ritchie’s marvelous The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Stay tuned! Muriel promises much, much more…

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MY FEARLESS/RECKLESS/ILL-ADVISED 2015 OSCAR PREDICTIONS

It’s been such a good year at the movies that I’m a little bit surprised by the degree to which I’m approaching tomorrow night’s Academy Awards ceremony with something resembling… disinterest. And again, it’s not necessarily the movies. It’s hard to remember a year when there wasn’t at least one obvious howler among the five, or now five-to-10 nominees—just by turning to random pages in Robert Osborne’s 70 Years of Oscar—The Official History of the Academy Awards I am reminded that The Turning Point, Midnight Express, Fatal Attraction and Mississippi Burning were all lauded by the Academy with Best Picture nominations. This year all eight movies nominated are, in my eyes, worthy of some measure of honor, including Room, my choice for the movie of the year. Yet I can’t remember the last time—could it have been 1991?—when I was genuinely happy that a movie had won the Academy’s top prize.

Here’s a thought: Maybe there’s something about being nominated in and of itself these days that takes the luster off some of the best movies the year has had to offer. Many a Best Picture nominee and winner has wormed its way into the popular consciousness-- Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, The Silence of the Lambs and Unforgiven all come to mind. But so many more of the movies that end up really mattering to us as individuals never come within whiffing distance of the little gold man, and the ones that do end up winning often don’t seem to carry much cultural weight in the long run—how desperate are you to see Chariots of Fire or Rain Man or The Departed again? 

My second-favorite movie of 2016, Spike Lee’s Chi-raq, is very few folks’ notion of the sort of movie—outrageous, outraged, formally explosive, with a vibrant cultural mixture of vulgarity and literate consciousness— with which Oscar feels comfortable hanging out. But I’d be willing to bet that 10 years from now I’ll have thought about it and seen it 10 times as often as I will have whatever wins this year, be it The Revenant or The Big Short or  Spotlight. I’m almost going to be relieved when Room doesn’t win. It’ll feel like another excellent movie has successfully dodged its date with being put on a shelf to be admired rather than getting out in the life stream for a good swim.

Fortunately, for the recalcitrant gambler in us all, none of this has much to do with the real fun of Oscar night: predicting the winners. That in itself has become, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s carpet-bomb Oscar campaign style having now been officially adopted by the industry at large, less of a challenge than it used to be. By the time of the actual annual Sunday evening coronation, everyone with even a flea-sized interest or a subscription of the Los Angeles Times pretty much knows who will march or glide or trip their way up to the podium to begin their very own tearfully thankful litany of names, of agents and other below-the-liner big shots, with whom the billions watching all over the world have no connection whatsoever.

This year’s model is hardly any different. But despite all those locks, there is enough of a shadow lurking in some of the major categories that to suggest the possibility of an upset wouldn’t be considered complete madness. Remember: nobody knows anything in Hollywood. Unless your investment in your office pool is a lot more indulgent than mine is, I say take a chance here and there on, say, Saoirse Ronan over Brie Larson, or Mark Rylance over Sylvester Stallone, or Mustang over Son of Saul. If it happens, you’ll look like a genius. If it doesn’t, nobody will ever remember. You can’t even name the nominees for Best Picture last year off the top of your head, can you? See? Maybe you can’t even remember what won Best Picture last year.

With all this in mind, here are my fearlessly irrational, some might even say ill-advised picks for how to best fill out your office Oscar pool ballot, followed by my choices for who should win in each category, and who really deserves the honor, nominated or not. I’ll try to be brief in my assessments-- we all have better things to do to prep for the ceremonies tomorrow, I know, such as dress fittings and picking out the right jewelry and, of course, choosing the right Oscar snacks. (The nacho cheese mustn’t be overly spicy—that’s what the jalapenos on the side are for.)

You may begin taking notes now.

BEST PICTURE

It’s hard to vote against The Revenant, which seems to be the movie of the moment, but the PGA award to The Big Short is as strong a wild calling card as there is. Both Adam McKay’s movie and Spotlight have the strength of social relevance that voters may find more appealing in the long run. And really, don’t we all want to see Brad Pitt win another Oscar? (He’s a producer on The Big Short  and won for producing 12 Years a Slave.)

What Will Win: The Big Short

What Should Win: Room

My Personal Pick: Room

BEST ACTOR

If it was The Wolf of Wall Street DiCaprio was nominated for this year, he’d blow away the relatively soft competition and he’d deserve to. He’s still going to blow away the competition, comprised of performances in three movies that ended up not a patch on their critical or box-office expectations, and Matt Damon being stranded and rescued for the third time in a big Hollywood blockbuster.

Who Will Win: Leonardo DiCaprio

Who Should Win: Matt Damon

My Personal Pick: Paul Dano and John Cusack, Love & Mercy

BEST ACTRESS

It’s Brie’s year, and there’s nothing you can do about it. She should especially thank Charlotte Rampling for self-torpedoing the only real competition here.

Who Will Win: Brie Larson

Who Should Win: Brie Larson

My Personal Pick: Brie Larson (with Nina Hoss in Phoenix breathing right down the back of her Oscar gown)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

History and sentiment, to say nothing of a career redemption story that might be, in sheer improbability, right there on par with the saga of Rocky Balboa himself, certainly favor a Stallone win here, and it will most likely happen. But a case can be made, I think, for Tom Hardy, who, unlike his Revenant costar, survived two Oscar-nominated endurance tests this year and, in the instance of Inarritu’s march, emerged with compelling and amusing work that is probably better than DiCaprio’s.

Who Will Win: Sylvester Stallone

Who Should Win: Tom Hardy

My Personal Pick: Tom Hardy

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

The busiest actress of 2015, Alicia Vikander, should be, I suppose, grateful that she was touted as a Supporting Actress nominee for what is essentially a lead (or co-lead) role, rather than one for Best Actress where she would likely have never survived. But here lurks Kate Winslet, who has been busy developing good will on the awards circuit for a movie few people saw. Do voters care more about seeing her and Leo together again, dual statues in arms, than honoring another rookie with a potentially rich career ahead? If there’s an upset in the wings, this is it.

Who Will Win: Kate Winslet

Who Should Win: Alicia Vikander

My Personal Pick: Alicia Vikander (for Ex Machina and/or The Man from U.N.C.L.E.)

BEST DIRECTOR

It’s happened more lately that it has in previous years, the picture/director split, and I think it’s going to happen again this year, though that split could certainly manifest in a couple of different ways. My guess, however, is that if the big award goes to The Big Short, Oscar will defer to one of the two fellas who put themselves, their crews and their actors through grand punishment for their art. A win for Best Director two years in a row is a rare achievement, though not an impossible one. But I’m voting with my heart here and hoping that the preferential ballots of the Academy voters will follow suit.

Who Will Win: George Miller

Who Should Win: Lenny Abrahamson

My Personal Pick: Spike Lee

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The only thing I can see happening here that would prevent Adam McKay and Charles Randolph picking up statues for The Big Short is a surge of support for Emma Donoghue in adapting her own very particular novel Room to be so successfully expressive as cinema. And it’s the winners in this category that, I think, bolster the likelihood for a picture-director split as well as a possible upset in the Best Picture category.

What Will Win: The Big Short

What Should Win: Room

My Personal Pick: Room

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Again, social relevance, and solid craftsmanship, is the key here. But that’s not Straight Outta Compton, not this year.

What Will Win: Spotlight

What Should Win: Inside Out

My Personal Pick: Phoenix

BEST ANIMATED FILM

I see another Pixar triumph on the horizon, but I wouldn’t be sad at all if When Marnie Was There could somehow sneak past Inside Out.

What Will Win: Inside Out

What Should Win: When Marnie Was There

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Poor Roger Deakins just can’t catch a break. If Sicario had stronger across the board Academy support, maybe. But really, this is one of the only categories where it’s impossible to pick a bad candidate. Even the overly precious Carol was at least exquisitely photographed. Still, beyond the Leo lock this category may be The Revenant’s only sure win, making Emmanuel Lubezki a three-time, three-in-a-row winner.

What Will Win: The Revenant

What Should Win: Sicario

My Personal Pick: Mad Max: Fury Road

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Two out of the five nominees are named Sandy Powell, and she stands a good chance of winning for Carol. Gumming up her works are Paco Delgado’s clothes for The Danish Girl, which are right in line with the sort of period undertaking usually smiled upon by voters. But unless this is a Priscilla, Queen of the Desert sort of year, in which Jenny Beavan’s Furiosa couture reigns supreme, I think this award belongs to Powell.

What Will Win: Carol

What Should Win: Mad Max: Fury Road

My Personal Pick: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Johanna Johnston)

BEST FEATURE DOCUMENTARY

Amy was compelling but relatively routine in structure and never made a real case for accepting the many on-screen testimonies regarding Winehouse’s transcendence as a jazz singing giant. What Happened, Miss Simone? is not crippled by the same problem. Amy will win because more voters know who she is.

What Will Win: Amy

What Should Win: What Happened, Miss Simone?

My Personal Pick: Meru

BEST FILM EDITING

Traditionally the most solid indicator of what will be coming up in the Best Picture category. The Big Short won the American Cinema Editors award for Best Edited Feature Film (Comedy or Musical), and Mad Max: Fury Road won it for Best Edited Feature Film (Dramatic). But for the body of Academy voters, most of whom are not film editors, it may come down to which movie has the “most” editing. I’m betting on a Picture/Editing match here.

What Will Win: The Big Short

What Should Win: Mad Max: Fury Road

My Personal Pick: Youth

  

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Mustang seems to be picking up a little steam in the final hours, and Embrace of the Serpent, a first-time Colombian nominee, is the most exotic choice. But don’t bet against a well-reviewed film about the Holocaust.

What Will Win: Son of Saul

What Should Win: Mustang

My Personal Pick: Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

BEST MAKEUP and HAIRSTYLING

To paraphrase the late, great Frank Zappa, The Revenant certainly kept it greasy. And that Swedish movie with the title too long to say in one breath, well, it’s a surprise that enough people even saw it to rustle up a nomination. This one goes to Fury Road, all shiny and 

chrome.

What Will Win: Mad Max: Fury Road

What Should Win: Mad Max: Fury Road

My Personal Pick: Mad Max: Fury Road

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

I don’t remember the song from 50 Shades of Grey, though I’m sure it was perfectly harmless and radio friendly. Sam Smith’s power ballad from Spectre was almost as forgettable as the film itself. And I haven’t a clue what the songs from Racing Extinction or The Hunting Ground even sound like. I wish David Lang’s sublime “Simple Song #3” from Youth, one of the more sadly overlooked movies of the year, had a chance. But no, it doesn’t, not against Diane Warren and Lady Gaga.

What Will Win: “Till It Happens to You” The Hunting Ground

What Should Win: “Simple Song #3” from Youth

My Personal Pick: “Pray 4 My City” from Chi-raq

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Hard to believe that Ennio Morricone won’t win here for what amounts to a career award-- John Williams has already has his C.A.—five wins over 50 nominations!). But relatively little of Morricone’s “score” for The Hateful Eight was comprised of original compositions written expressly for the film. In fact, I’m still trying to figure out how Ryuichi Sakamato and Carsten Nicolai were deemed ineligible here (because it could not be determined exactly who contributed what to the score--???) and Morricone gets a pass. But so it is, and so Morricone shall be.

What Will Win: The Hateful Eight

What Should Win: Sicario

My Personal Pick: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Hmm. Can The Danish Girl’s lushness or The Revenant’s gorgeous realism beat Immortan Joe’s elaborately imagined and realized desert compound? I don’t think so.

What Will Win: Mad Max: Fury Road

What Should Win: Mad Max: Fury Road

My Personal Pick: Bridge of Spies

BEST SOUND EDITING

Previously listed at the Academy Awards as “Best Sound Effects,” this is basically a category for recognizing achievement in the creation, recording and eventual perfecting of new sounds and their individual elements. Mad Max: Fury Road would seem the obvious choice here, but the Star Wars gang should never be underestimated round these parts, and the work done on The Martian here was pretty exemplary too.

What Will Win: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

What Should Win: Mad Max: Fury Road

My Personal Pick: Ex Machina

BEST SOUND MIXING

This is a category for recognizing achievement in the way sounds (original or organic) are mixed, or layered upon each other. The more subtle candidates here, Bridge of Spies and The Martian are excellent candidates, but voters tend to like to go big here. Give this one to Rockatansky.

What Will Win: Mad Max: Fury Road

What Should Win: Bridge of Spies

My Personal Pick: Love & Mercy

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Yet another category, like cinematography, where there would seem to be no “bad” choice. But I have a suspicion that voters might go smaller here and reward the movie in which the effect and the character were truly inseparable, in which one truly informed the other, the one where after a while we forgot we were watching special effects.

What Will Win: Ex Machina

What Should Win: Ex Machina

My Personal Pick: The Forbidden Room

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Well, that’s my ballot, and I’m sticking to it. Maybe. There’s still about 24 hours to go at this writing for me to fuss my way out of yet another office Oscar pool prize. Just know that, as reasoned as some of the picks above might sound, betting on my picks has been, for the past 35 years or so anyway, a fool’s game. In that time, I’ve won my personal pool exactly once. But this year… This year is my year. I can feel it!

And just in case you want a peek at how an actual Oscar voter cast his/her lot, with all the twisted reasoning explained, take a look at this "brutally honest Oscar ballot." See if this helps you make your own predictions. If it doesn’t you’ll at least get a few bitter laughs at the expense of Oscar’s reputation as a system for honoring artistic achievement.

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Finally, a nod to an alternative to the Oscar season blues—the ninth annual Muriel Awards, the only critic’s group that would have me as a member. (Groucho, does that mean I shouldn’t have joined?) Named after cofounder Paul Clark’s beloved (now deceased) guinea pig, the Muriels have for nine seasons gathered a wide-ranging, eclectic and smart group of essayists together to cast votes on the year’s finest achievements, and our results almost never resemble the usual year-end award show lineups. Clark rolls out the results of the voting over the course of a couple of weeks, and so far the awards for the following have been announced:

Best Supporting Performance, Female

Best Supporting Performance, Male

Best Editing

Best Ensemble Performance

Best Music

Best Body of Work

The Muriels have also already announced this year’s winner’s in their 10th, 25th and 50th anniversary categories, as well as a series of musings by Clark on the history of the Muriel Awards, one year at a time, beginning in 2006.

It’s been a real honor to participate in the Muriels over their first nine years. This year I’ll have three Muriels pieces coming up on three of my favorite films of the year, three among a real treasure trove of writing about the best the movies of 2015 have had to offer. Look for those and the rest of the awards the Muriels will be announcing over the course of the next week or so, at the site of the official Muriels headquarters, Our Science is Too Tight.

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