ALMOST DONE

Actors! What can you say about 'em? Here's Halle Berry!


NOMINEES:

- Nicolas Cage for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
It's one of the craziest performances of his career, and you know that's saying something. His hunchback walk, his timing, his eyebrows, they're all excellent.

- Matt Damon for The Informant!
Damon's pretty much always good, but he's never been this funny, nor this good at subtly hinting at darkness even before things start to totally fall apart.

- Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker
The final shot of him here is as iconic an image as an actor can hope to have, I think. He has just enough swagger to pull this character off.

- Sam Rockwell for Moon
This movie had the potential to be dreadfully boring, but Rockwell's performance is hilarious and surprising in its wackiness.

- Souléymane Sy Savané for Goodbye Solo
He plays the title character with a kind of aggressive friendliness, but does wonderfully to make that friendliness not a mask to hide his inner troubles, but a genuine part of his personality.

- AND THE WIENER IS:
To the break of dawn! If you haven't seen Bad Lieutenant, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Cage is an absolute force of nature as usual, and with Herzog's help he gets a movie that fully rewards his madness.

SPORTING ACTORS

To introduce our first award of the evening, a very talented actress who you may know as the pre-Fred Thompson DA on Law & Order (or as a two time Academy Award Winner), the always elegant Dianne Wiest presenting Best Supporting Actor:


THEE NOMINEES IS:

- Peter Capaldi (In the Loop)
Everyone spits darts in In the Loop, but Capaldi gets the best lines and, even when his character is at a disadvantage, always seems like the most likely to either kill several people or implode completely.

- Woody Harrelson (the Messenger)
In retrospect, it's almost inevitable that Woody was eventually gonna get a part as a a troubled but hilarious alcoholic and hit it out of the park.

- Fred Melamed (A Serious Man)
There were some great monsters in the movies last year, and Fred Melamed's terrifyingly "nice" Sy Ableman is definitely one of them. I cringed every time he touched Michael Stuhlbarg's cuckold, and I'll take him here over Richard Kind's yelling from the bathroom (which was also great).

- Hilmi Sözer (Jerichow)
This is maybe, slightly category fraud-ish, but Sözer doesn't actually have the lion's share of the screen time in Jerichow and I need to honor him somewhere. The film simply doesn't work unless his performance is amazing, and it is.

- Christoph Waltz (Inglorious Basterds)
He really is just so damn good in every scene of the movie he's in. Watching IB a second time, knowing the choice that Hans Landa makes at the end of the movie, made the way he builds the character seem even more impressive.

¡WINNER!:

Hilmi Sözer. Waltz deserves every award that he's getting (it's not like the Oscars were going to nom Jerichow), but I have to rep for Sözer here. He's tasked with giving a real emotional performance opposite actors who are being purposefully one-dimensional and he does it brilliantly. This awesome movie would be a disaster if he wasn't so good in it.

You'se a Holmes (HOLMES!)

I saw Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes yesterday (you know how seriously I take my Best Art Direction nominees) and I enjoyed it for the most part, though certainly not for the edgy-Dickens art direction nor the Original Score, which was fine or whatever (though, to be honest, paying attention to scores is not one of my critical strong suits). And Ritchie is still very far from an intelligent director; he makes something look interesting once in a while (there's a pretty cool looking scene on a dock with explosions and characters on different planes of action) but he still has absolutely no interest in subtext (the Holmes/Watson relationship here is not a subtext, btw, it's just out there, which is fine). And in a reboot that seems wholly focused on "updating" Sherlock Holmes for a new generation (a fast-paced one that doesn't have attention spans, as we've been told for 2 decades now), they really could barely have found a way to make the denouement any more obvious, clunky, or boring.

Now to Downey's Holmes, which is more obviously human (emotionally) than any Holmes I've seen on the screen. But that's not actually a compliment, just a symptom of the Modern Superhero Cinema, which requires that every Superhero (this is a Superhero movie for sure) be serious and deep (I must thank the screenwriters for sparing us a scene of young Holmes being ignored by his parents or something). It's a tribute to Downey that he is able take this less than interesting rewrite of an iconic character and makes him so goddamn fun (this applies on a smaller scale to Jude Law). Even when the mechanics of the plot, the shallow female characters, and the boring visuals grate, Downey's intelligence and physical skill (he def has some Chaplin in him here, it's not just the hat) keep this movie afloat whenever he's on screen. The Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy was completely on point, it turns out. He's every bit as good here as he was in Iron Man, and probably even more impressive considering the kinda shitty movie he and Law are required to make fun.

To the break of dawn

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans was the film I was most looking forward to this winter and boy oh boy did it not disappoint. Nic Cage is on some next level here, and it's hard to think of another actor who would have taken the comedy this far. Though he has his die hard fans (of which I know more than a handful), Cage is still under-appreciated on balance (considering how many folks I've talked to who think he's a legit bad actor).

More than pretty much any major actor these days (DDL in There Will Be Blood is another great one), Nic Cage understands that there are places to go past realism and restraint. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't and a lot of the time the movie around him is so shitty that whether his acting is working or not is barely relevant. In Bad Lieutenant, it most certainly works as Cage and Herzog create one of the most unforgettable characters of the decade. Christ, just look at that eyebrow. And the movie works outside of Cage as well, Herzog treating the story in a completely original way (you'll know what I mean when the Captain pops into frame like a Close-up Monster in an old arcade shooter except pitched at the exact opposite mood).

Two crack pipes up.