In a 10.30 EW chat with Nicole Sperling, Revenant costar (not to mention Legend and Mad Max: Fury Road star) Tom Hardy has conveyed a message to those who like the idea of his being nominated for an Oscar: “Lock me out of that, for your own good. It’s like putting a wig on a dog, or a tutu on a crocodile. It doesn’t look right, it’s not fair to the animal, and inevitably someone will get bitten and hurt.” In other words, those Gold Derby “experts” who are forecasting a Hardy Oscar nom for his rough-and-tumble performance in The Revenant — Vanity Fair‘s Michael Hogan, Huffington Post‘s Michael Hogan, Fox News‘ Tariq Khan, Gold Derby‘s Paul Sheehan, GD‘s Jack Matthews along with Sperling herself — need to let it go. And once they have perhaps a little light will shine through and they’ll say to themselves, “Okay, then I’ll ease up on my less-than-thoughtful prejudice against summer releases and give Love & Mercy‘s Paul Dano his rightful due as a Best Supporting Actor champion.”
Thus morning I finally got around to dumping HE’s boilerplate Oscar Balloon movies-to-watch list for an Award Season, six-major-category assessment list with special parentheticals where appropriate — ABL = all but locked, EP = extra HE passion, RD = respectful disagreement/disapproval, AG = afterglow or makeup for previous loss, SD/MG = special dispensation/support of Movie Godz, NYS = not yet seen, GW = gold-watch award for septugenarians & octogenarians.
A few nominees are obviously ABL but the standing of many are subject to whimsy, peer pressure, mood pockets & the usual wind shifts.
Best Picture (in order of apparent likelihood): Joy (ABL, NYS); The Revenant (ABL, NYS); Spotlight (EP, SD/MG); The Big Short (NYS); The Martian (RD); Steve Jobs, Carol (fine) Room (RD); Bridge of Spies (RD), Love & Mercy EP, SD/MG) (10). In Need Of Heat: Brooklyn, Beasts of No Nation, Mad Max: Fury Road, Suffragette, Son of Saul (EP), The Hateful Eight (NYS), The Danish Girl. (7).
Best Director (in order of apparent likelihood): David O. Russell, Joy (ABL); Alejandro Inarritu, The Revenant; Tom McCarthy, Spotlight EP; Ridley Scott, The Martian (GW) (5). Heel-nippers: Cary Fukunaga, Beasts of No Nation (EP); Danny Boyle, Steve Jobs; Steven Spielberg, Bridge of Spies; George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road (EP); Bill Pohlad, Love & Mercy (EP, SD/MG).
Best Actor (in order of apparent likelihood): Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant (NYS, AG); Steve Carell, The Big Short (NYS); Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs; Matt Damon, The Martian; Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl. Heel-nippers: Michael Caine, Youth (GW), Tom Hanks, Bridge of Spies, John Cusack, Love & Mercy (EP, SD/MG); Will Smith, Concussion (NYS).
Best Actress (in order of apparent likelihood): Jennifer Lawrence, Joy (NYS); Brie Larson, Room (ABL); Cate Blanchett, Carol/Truth (EP); Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn EP; Lily Tomlin, Grandma. Heel-nippers: Carey Mulligan, Suffragette (EP); Charlize Theron, Mad Max: Fury Road; Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years (GW).
Best Supporting Actor (in order of apparent likelihood): Robert DeNiro, Joy (NYS); Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies; Mark Ruffalo or Michael Keaton, Spotlight; Paul Dano, Love & Mercy (EP); Tom Hardy, The Revenant NYS. Heel-nippers: Michael Shannon, 99 Homes, Freeheld EP; Benicio Del Toro, Sicario; Idris Elba, Beasts of No Nation, Jason Segel, End of the Tour; Sylvester Stallone, Creed (NYS); Ryan Gosling, The Big Short (NYS).
Best Supporting Actress (in order of apparent likelihood): Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl; Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs; Rooney Mara, Carol; Jane Fonda (EP, GW), Youth; Elizabeth Banks, Love & Mercy (EP). Heel-nippers: Diane Ladd, Joy; Joan Allen, Room; Rachel McAdams, Spotlight (EP).
I haven’t yet given myself over to studying Best Original & Best Adapted Screenplay likelies. I’ll add them as soon as I do.
If Eddie Redmayne‘s Danish Girl performance as the transgender Lili Elbe is locked for a Best Actor nom, the Academy has to turn the other cheek and give another Best Actor nom to Tom Hardy for his dual performance as London mobsters Ron and Reg Kray in Brian Helgeland‘s Legend. Pic costars Colin Morgan, Christopher Eccleston, Taron Egerton and David Thewlis. The Krays ruled London during the ’50s and ’60s (armed robberies, arson, assaults and the murders of Jack “The Hat” McVitie and George Cornell). On top of which Ronnie was openly bisexual and probably killed his wife of eight weeks, Frances Shea (Emily Browning), in a jealous rage. The brothers were sentenced to life terms in 1969 for two murders.
As an ethical exercise, it would be hugely spirit-lifting if just one greatly-admired performance could land an Oscar nomination without the support of a costly campaign. Just one instance in which the Academy at least nominates a performance that doesn’t have big dough behind it…no payoffs, no Hollywood Elsewhere ads, no industry party schmooze, no post-screening q & a’s, no drinks on the house. I understand, of course, that the vast majority of Academy nominations come out of this process, and I’m certainly not complaining about this…hardly! I have my hand out along with everyone else’s.
But what if there was an Academy rule stating that in each acting category, a sixth nomination would be pro bono and go to any deserving performance that has NOT been promoted for whatever reason? Or which hasn’t been campaigned for because a certain actor or actress has a distaste for campaigning or is working on a new film and can’t get away or whatever?
How about if just one performance this year could receive this tradition-defying largesse?
The St. Louis Film Critics have nominated HE’s own Tom Hardy for their Best Actor prize. They’re talking about his performance in Locke but they really mean Locke and The Drop. They also nominated Jessica Chastain‘s A Most Violent Year performance for Best Supporting Actress. The Academy has to ease up on the myopia and the knee-jerk kowtowing to awards campaigning and just give it up and do the right thing. They need to invite Hardy into the herd and respectfully eliminate the slowest-running wildebeest among the top Best Actor contenders — Foxcatcher‘s Steve Carell. There are lions running alongside looking to tackle as we speak.
Today the Los Angeles Film Critics Association did a fine if startling thing by giving Tom Hardy their Best Actor trophy for two excellent 2014 performances — in Locke, a solo turn about Hardy’s urban contractor dealing with personal problems as he drives along a British highway in the wee hours, and The Drop, in which Hardy plays a low-key, New York-area bartender. I’ve posted riffs two or three times about Hardy being one of the most deserving actors in this 2014 awards race, but the idea didn’t have a great deal of traction until today. Cheers, back-pats and high-fives to Hardy, who’s now shooting The Revenant with Alejandro G. Inarritu and costar Leonardo DiCaprio.
As usual the rankings are based on a mixture of real-world likelihood, pressure of colleagues and the eternal, rock-solid assessments of the Movie Godz.
Birdman‘s Michael Keaton has been in the top Best Actor slot since Telluride and I don’t see that changing, but who knows? Special HE shout-outs to two guys no one is mentioning but whom the Godz are insisting upon — Tom Hardy for his performances in The Drop and Locke, and to Bill Hader for his career-changing Skeleton Twins performance as a sardonic, living-in-emotional-limbo gay guy.
It’s been widely observed that the Best Actress heat afforded to Julianne Moore and her Still Alice performance is about being “owed” plus her fading histrionic actress turn in Maps to the Stars (I still haven’t seen Alice, and probably won’t until the AFI Fest showing.)
In the Best Supporting Actor realm I’m a bit more of an Edward Norton-in-Birdman guy than a cheerleader for J.K. Simmons-in-Whiplash, although I recognize that some believe that Simmons is the current front-runner . I also recognize that conventional wisdom says that Boyhood‘s Patricia Arquette is in the lead for Best Supporting Actress, which is well and good except for the fact that Emma Stone‘s Birdman performance blows Arquette’s out of the water.
Obviously I’ve included speculative support for unseen performances…and so what? You know who’s also “owed” as far as the Best Supporting Actor category is concerned? A Most Violent Year‘s Albert Brooks because he wasn’t even nominated in this category for his delicious Drive performance.
Here’s the most recent HE Best Director chart. The Best Picture chart is sitting inside the Oscar Balloon box. Disputes and admonitions are requested. All charts are fluid and malleable.
By the way: I am in awe of Jett Wells‘s ability to bang these four charts out in record time — they had been pre-designed but he did all the resizing and zig-zagging and name-tagging in about 45 minutes.
With an apparently straight face, MCN’s David Poland has stated that Interstellar‘s Matthew McConaughey has a shot (i.e., “not so long a shot”) at being nominated for Best Actor. What is it about the words “forget it” that Poland doesn’t understand? Love Is Strange‘s John Lithgow has a better shot at being nominated than McConaughey. People just want McConaughey to back off. The more he weeps about missing his children in Interstellar, the worse it’ll be. Zip it.
But Poland is just getting warmed up. His next statement comes close to dismissing this aspect of the Oscar tea-leaf perceptions of In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. “I don’t buy into the idea — at all — that there are four locked places in Best Actor,” Poland says. “That doesn’t mean that I think that four of the current five frontrunners won’t end up making it,” he explains. “That could well happen. But the only actor I consider cemented into a nomination is Michael Keaton. Great performance, great story, super-strong movie. In.
Last night In Contention‘s Kris Tapley posted an assessment of the Best Actor situation, and in so doing declared there’s only one slot open once you factor in Birdman‘s Michael Keaton, Foxcatcher‘s Steve Carell, The Imitation Game‘s Benedict Cumberbatch and — last but far from least — Eddie Redmayne‘s turn as the afflicted Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.
(l.) The distinctly nominatable Tom Hardy, star of the Locke and The Drop; (r.) In Contention columnist Kris Tapley.
The piece contains one questionable call and one glaring omission.
Tapley’s not wrong about Keaton, Cumberbatch and Redmayne but holdupski on Carell for one minute. Carell has carved himself a rep as Mr. Career Balls. The fact that he really burrows into the psyche of the late, very creepy multi-millionaire John Dupont is proof of that. But the reason Carell is considered a lock is because (a) he’s a rich and famous comic actor (he still makes awful, Norbit-like mainstream comedies like Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day), and because he (b) played Dupont with a kind of spazzy-wonky accent and (c) wore a prosthetic hook nose.
It’s not that Carell doesn’t deserve to be in the conversation. I fully respect what he did in Foxcatcher. I just don’t think he’s a stone-cold lock. Remember what Denzel Washington said before he announced that Nicole Kidman had won her Best Actress Oscar for The Hours? “By a nose…” Prosthetic noses are very big deals with the Academy. Be honest — would Carell be a presumed Best Actor lock if he hadn’t worn a fake schnozz?
Who could slide into Tapley’s rhetorical fifth slot? I’ll tell you who absolutely fucking should slide into it, and that’s Tom Hardy for delivering two ace-level, world-class performances this year — firstly his solo turn in Locke, easily one of the year’s best films and yet all but ignored by the know-it-alls because there’s no campaign afoot and they don’t see anyone buttering their bread, and secondly as the quiet, low-key barkeep in The Drop — a man of few words but with a cagey nature and an iron will. The year’s biggest take-away line — “Nobody ever sees you coming, do they, Bob?” — alludes to Hardy’s character in this film.
A couple of friends were kicking around the Best Actor field yesterday, and they came up with 17 feasible Best Actor contenders. My revised list goes to 19. But after you boil it down, there are closer to eight or nine performances that will probably make the grade in most people’s minds and therefore go the distance. Obviously nobody knows very much at this stage (i.e., the ass wind is our trade wind) but the discussion right now boils down to “we’ve heard things about this and that Venice/Telluride/Toronto film, and it seems as if these names and performances in these apparent award-season films might possibly connect and combust and lift off the ground, especially if favoring moods and winds of the Movie Godz prevail.” But come down to earth: To really break through a performance has to deliver something strong and different and curiously penetrating, and this kind of performance doesn’t grow on trees or happen that often.
Looking More Favorable Than Most: 1. Michael Keaton, Birdman — an allegedly crackling presence + career redemption + the former Batman star who kind of blackballed himself and then finally came in from the cold with a dark satire about same; 2. Eddie Redmayne, Theory of Everything — depends on the film (duhhh) but something about this being Redmayne’s time plus the standard Oscar-bait lure of struggling with a disability plus a Beautiful Mind-ization of Stephen Hawking seems somehow right and fated to ignite IF there’s a mesmerizing musical score; 3. Steve Carell, Foxcatcher — it is written in a subsection of the Dead Sea Scrolls that he who ups his indie-actor cred in a first-rate melodrama by adopting a spazzy vocal style and making himself grotesque by wearing a prosthetic nose will be Oscar-nominated; 4. Kevin Costner, Black and White — easily among the best Costner performances ever (the flip side of Field of Dreams) and arguably his best ever in this child-custody film, which advance-peekers are calling the most honest, intelligent and revelatory drama about racial relations in this country since Do The Right Thing, and directed and written by a white man at that (i.e., Mike Binder); 5. Bill Murray as himself in Theodore Melfi‘s St. Vincent — a role that reportedly fits him like a glove; 6. Mark Wahlberg, The Gambler — a good role (i.e., self-destructive, well-born college professor), possibly a breakthrough for Wahlberg; 7. David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King in Selma — who knows but if it’s a half-decent film with three great scenes Oyelowo could hit it out of the park (remember he’s also in A Most Violent Year); 8. Chadwick Boseman, Get On Up — a much more authentic, indeed transformative performance than the trailer indicates; Boseman clearly immersed himself thoroughly to become the Godfather of Soul; 9. Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner — the only problem being that I found it difficult to understand what Spall was saying half the time, a possible remedy being subtitles on Academy screeners; 10. Ben Affleck, Gone Girl — Rosamund Pike is said to be the big knockout but Affleck, too, is said to be standing on very firm melodramatic ground (although he may be punished down the road for putting on the Warner Bros. cowl); 11. Miles Teller, Whiplash — you need a token Millenial among Best Actor nominees to persuade under-35s to watch the Oscar telecast, on top of which Teller is manic and sweaty and flat-out electrifying as an aspiring world-class drummer.
Steven Knight‘s Locke, which I creamed over earlier this month, has a 79% rating from Metacritic and a 100% Rotten Tomato rating if you isolate the top critics. It also seems clear that Tom Hardy has made his bones sufficiently to be in the running for a Best Actor nomination eight and nine months hence.
I gave a respectful thumbs-up to Matt Reeves‘ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (’14), which opened two months shy of a decade ago. I didn’t love it quite as much as Rupert Wyatt‘s Rise of the Planet of The Apes, which opened 13 years ago but it was a fine, well-crafted, grade-A film as far as it went.
But I felt myself disengaging when Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes (’17) came along. The truth is that I got off the boat. And now Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is upon us.
I’m honestly debating whether it’s worth my time to see it later today. The first two were exemplary, but now the bloom is off the rose. I don’t mind the idea of seeing Kingdom, but I really don’t see how it matters one way or the other.
Okay, I’ll prpbably see it later today, mainly because of Freya Allan, the pretty lead actress.
13 years ago I went apeshit Rise of the Planet of The Apes, calling it “the best Apes flick ever made, and that includes the original.
“Rise is sharper, tighter, more emotional…lacking a Statue of Liberty finale, okay, but nonetheless with a ‘better’ story in a sense. And without the perfectly styled, Vidal Sassoon ape coifs that bothered me so in the Charlton Heston original. Not one orangutan had a single hair out of that place in that film, the reason being of course that the prosthetic makeup guys felt more compelled to represent the sartorial values of Beverly Hills, ape-appearance-wise, than the corresponding particulars in a world first imagined by French novelist Pierre Boulle.
“Rise is a gripping, compassionate, well-plotted sci-fi fantasy popcorn film — riveting, amusing at times, state-of-the-art CG, movingly acted by performance-capture guy Andy Serkis, etc. No, I’m not exaggerating. It has excitement, intrigue, humanity, empathy, soul. And the story is primarily an ape POV thing — the human actors are strictly backup, speaking the same kind of rote expository dialogue that James Arness, Joan Weldon and Edmund Gwenn spoke in Them!.
“And don’t listen to guys like Lewis Beale, who earlier this evening called Rise a “fun, not-intellectually-taxing summer entertainment.” C’mon…it’s much better than that! It’s a compassionate look at imprisonment and oppression, and a rousing saga of rebellion and revolution. And it all levitates courtesy of some of the best motion-capture CG I’ve ever seen.
“What could have been just another blah-blah origin story has been turned into a simian Spartacus….or more precisely the first act of Spartacus, which ends with the slaves breaking out of the gladiator school in Capua. That’s precisely how Rise concludes, so to speak.
“James Franco plays a nice-guy genetic scientist — intelligent, tactful, bland — who’s trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease by performing serum tests on apes. He soon realizes that a serum given to a chimp mother named “Bright Eyes” (remember who had that nickname before?) has been passed along to an orphaned baby chimp named Caesar. The little chimp soon proves to be a major-league achiever and learner. Franco also tries out the serum on his Alzheimer’s-afflicted dad (John Lithgow), and it’s Awakenings all over again. But Ceasar’s passion and curiosity leads to complications and the authorities seize and lock him up.
“This is when the Spartacus stuff kicks in. We’re not going to take this any more, fellow apes, and I’m the one to lead you guys out of this, because I’m smart and ballsy and a good strategic thinker. (Harry Potter costar Tom Felton plays roughly the same part that Charles McGraw played in Spartacus. Or the ‘Fritz’ role that Dwight Frye had in Frankenstein.)
“Franco hooks up with the beautiful Freida Pinto early on, but this is of no consequence as she has no extended dialogue scenes of any kind. As always, she’s very pretty. She obviously has to do more that just look great if she’s going to last. Her best chance at showing what she’s got will probably come with Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna, an Indian-set adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
“The apes are the soul and the spirit of the film. They’re fascinating, fully-emotional and fully-dimensional characters. Much of Rise is non-verbal, and appropriately so. Serkis, I should add, tends to over-emote at times. The facial expressions he gives to the young Ceasar — the lead ape protagonist — are just a tad too expressive for my taste, a wee bit too “actor”-ish. But I’ll probably be in the minority on this issue.”
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