DUNNNNNN

Finally, the big one, expanded to ten movies because there are like twenty deserving ones. I present to you the greatest pair of presenters ever to grace any telecast: Robert Mitchum and Sigourney Weaver!


YR NOMINEES

- Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
For Cage's performance, for the iguanas, for gleefully giving in its ending.

- Crank: High Voltage
For the great Statham surviving a fall from a plane, for taking cues from video games and actually meaning it, for sweet, sweet violence.

- Goodbye Solo
For Bahrani's continuing exploration of America, for the chemistry between Solo and Red, for the mountains.

- Hunger
For the shit, for the piss, for the acting.

- The Hurt Locker
For the virtuoso first scene, for William James, for the borrowed scene from Lost.

- Inglourious Basterds
For the gigantic pipe, for the dairy farm and restaurant scenes, for fun with regional accents.

- Pontypool
For the best new virus in quite a while, for Stephen McHattie's voice, for balancing theory, plot, and fun.

- Silent Light
For the sunrise, for the sunset, for everything in between.

- Summer Hours
For making a movie commissioned by a museum that questions the use of museums, for an amazing cast, for looking towards the future.

- Up
For those devastating 10 minutes, for the character design (Doug! Kevin!), for Ed Asner and Christopher Plummer's voices.

FINAL WINNER:
The Hurt Locker. So there.


We're gonna try to do an Oscar Preview next week, but God knows I haven't had anything new to say about movies in days now, so we'll see. (I guess luckily I won't have to talk about movies, just the Oscars. ZING!)

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.

WOMEN

Ladies and gentlemen, to present the Maciej for Best Actress, I have to the honor to introduce two time Oscar winner (sadly neither for Big) and all-around hilarious dude, Mr. Tom Hanks!


- YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN:

- Isabelle Furhman for Orphan
Orphan is a very fun little horror movie that would be considerably less fun if Fuhrman wasn't so charming and evil. Creating a memorable horror villain is not an achievement that should go unrewarded.

- Charlotte Gainsbourgh for Antichrist
I'd assume that Embodiment of the Rage Felt at Thousands of Years of Oppressed Women is a role that many actresses wouldn't mind trying their hand at, but Charlotte attacks it with such a palpable darkness in her eyes that I have a hard time believing many other actresses could pull it off like she has.

- Maria Onetto for The Headless Woman
Lucrecia Martel's film about a woman who might have run someone over on a country road necessitates a supremely detached acting style, and Onetto, with her eyes, her movements, and her mumbling, very effectively gives the impression of someone who just isn't there anymore.

- Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia
She's so filled with joy here. The Julie parts of Julie & Julia are absolutely terrible, but any time Streep's Julia Child appears the fog is lifted. I just wanted to hear her talk and see her cook, and see her respond to people by leaning in with her head. My friends and I were left just doing the Julia voice for hours on end. If only this movie were just called Julia.

- Tilda Swinton for Julia
Obviously. She spends no time making her character likable and instead works on exploring the drunken mess for over two hours.

YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN IN THE SECOND ROUND OF CHOOSING:
Tilda, predictably. She's hella expressive whether she's wearing a black mask or a very shiny dress. The points in the movie at which you can tell she cares about the kid but not as much as she cares about herself are pure, wonderful character development by facial and vocal tics.

TELL ME WOT TO DO

The lovely Liv Ullmann is with us this morning to present an award to the auteurs themselves. I've seen her direct a play and let me tell ya, the woman knows a little something about directing. WOOO!


THE NOMINAMANATED:
- Ramin Bahrani for Goodbye Solo
No one else this year synthesized narrative and observation of the everyday life of a community like Bahrani. His subtle nods to melodrama complement his neorealism perfectly.

- Kathryn Bigelow for the Hurt Locker
Who has any superlatives left for what she does here? The pacing, the repetition, the action, you can't fuck with any of it.

- Werner Herzog for Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
This screenplay could very easily have been a slightly odd police procedural. Herzog shifts the tone to completely batshit and lets Nic Cage run wild and it comes out the other side as a sort of bizarro masterpiece.

- Steve McQueen for Hunger
Hunger, from the look, to the acting, to the ideas, is a very detailed film, especially considering that McQueen had to basically design three very different parts to it.

- Carlos Reygadas for Silent Light
Reygadas gave us more straight-up beauty this year than anybody else, which might be enough in itself. But he also made a great movie, delivering a story about a group of people I was completely unfamiliar with a nuanced exploration of morality and nature where lesser directors might have gone for exploitation.

- #1
Bigelow. Bigelow. Bigelow. Bigelow. Bigelow, Bigelow, Bigelow.

Obviously I'm running out of things to write about these movies, so luckily there are only three categories left. Sooon.

(original) WORD UP

Our final award of the night (you think the Oscars take a long time), is presented by the lovely Holly Hunter. Have you seen Copycat? You should see Copycat. Harry Connick Jr.'s great in that too. Here's Best Original Screenplay!


- NOM'D:
- Olivier Assayas for Summer Hours
Whether or not you think Assayas coming back from B-movie Land is good, I'd think you'll be able to find something interesting in his reflection on what objects mean to us. The way he ends it (this is not the type of movie that can really be spoiled) with a new generation is wonderful.

- Bahareh Azimi and Ramin Bahrani for Goodbye Solo
The relationship between Senegalese driver Solo and suicidal old grump Red is written with warmth, grit, and an eye towards realism. It's another great movie from Bahrani (his 2nd co-written with Azami) about, to be purposefully reductive, America.

- Mark Boal for the Hurt Locker
Boal's script gives equal energy to investigating the psychological makeup of its characters and investigating the Action/War Movie Hero as a type.

- Ethan and Joel Coen for A Serious Man
It's some of the most effectively dark comedy they've written in a while, and it's overflowing with great ideas, not the least of which a character who for the first part of the movie is only heard screaming from the bathroom.

- Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds
I don't mean to keep harping on it, but Death Proof really sucked. So that the dialogue here is filled with so much tension, comedy, hell, even relevance to the plot and characters, is both a relief and an immense pleasure.

- WIN'D
I'll give this to The Coen Brothers for taking their style to an even darker place and doing so with a considerable amount of very hard earned laughs. The irony and cynicism not only let the emotion shine through; they enhance it.

(adapted) WORD UP

It was much easier narrowing Adapted Screenplay down to 5 this year than it was narrowing down its Original counterpart category. Nevertheless, these 5 are awesome. Speaking of awesome, here's Gene Hackman to tell you about them.


-I NOMIT8 U
- Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Ianucci, and Tony Roche for In the Loop, spun-off from the TV show The Thick of It
Some characters in In the Loop are written so that you're almost scared for them to come on the screen, because they're gonna say something so darkly and angrily hilarious you might not be able to take it. That's a fucking comedy script.

- Neil Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell for District 9, expanded from Neil Blomkamp's short film Alive in Joburg
It's an excitingly plotted, politically interesting movie. The trope of a character who works for a giant organization or government and slowly discovers its evils is not an uncommon one, especially in movies about the future or alternate timelines, but Wikus totally works as a naive little prick who is in way over his head.

- Tony Burgess for Pontypool, adapted from his own novel Pontypool Changes Everything
Semiotic Zombie Flick is a great hook (if your target audience is me), and Pontypool delivers, even (maybe especially) when the characters have to talk their way through figuring out how they're gonna get out of their besieged radio station.

- Scott Z. Burns for The Informant!, adapted from the Kurt Eichenwald book of the same name
It's not saying too much that The Informant! had the most entertaining inner monologues of the year, but their progression from slightly unhinged and obsessive to completely out there is an achievement in both character development and comedy.

- Henry Selick for Coraline, adapted from the Neil Gaiman novel of the same name
I'm a sucker for kids stories that are both very dark and very gorgeous, what can I say? The differences between the "real world" and "other world" characters are wonderfully written.

- W1NN3RS:
All those In the Loop guys. It was the funniest movie of the year and it's not even close. To reduce it to a lot of cursing doesn't give it nearly enough credit, (though the cursing is really great). There's a wealth of great characters here, and about a billion great lines.

I WAS FRAMED

Marty Scorsese is here. You may know him as that guy who only makes movies with Leo Dicaprio. They do look good though, so let's pretend he's standing next to a gigantic screen and gaze with him at stills from the movies nominated for the Maciej in Best Cinematography.


THE NOMINeeEeEeEES:

- Barry Ackroyd for The Hurt Locker
Ackroyd gets across the general grit of the Iraqi streets well, and the shootout in the desert looks awesome.

- Sean Bobbitt for Hunger
Whether in the harsh prison sequences at the beginning or the more ethereal stuff towards the end, Bobbit captures the texture of his scenes as well as anyone.

- Anthony Dod Mantle for Antichrist
The opening just looks so incredibly beautiful. I don't think think Dod Mantle deserved all the love he got for last year's hand held sprinting in Slumdog, but his black and white prologue is just unimpeachably gorgeous.

- Robert Richardson for Inglourious Basterds
After the disappointment of Death Proof I was very cautious in my optimism for Inglorious Basterds. The opening shot of the dairy farm immediately made me very comfortable.

- Alexis Zabe for Silent Light
You'd think that, after watching local news my whole life, a time-lapse of the sunrise wouldn't be such a big deal. You would obviously be very wrong.

WIN:

Alexis Zabe for Silent Light. There are a lot of wonderful uses of light in the movie, go figure, but it's not just cinematography calling attention to itself, it's absolutely essential to the thematic concerns of the movie. I really wish I had gotten to see this on a big screen and hope to at some point in the future.

AK-TINGH

Two decades after being snubbed for his heroic performance as Balldozer in YMD favorite Vision Quest, Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for a very good performance in the otherwise very boring Last King of Scotland. Good for him. Here he is presenting the Maciej for Best Supporting Actress.


SUPPORT THEM:

- Marion Cotillard for Nine
Please don't take this as any sort of approval of Nine; it's quite the opposite. The fact that Cotillard was able to pull a memorable, human performance out of such a terrible mess of a movie is simply amazing.

- Mo'Nique for Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" By Sapphire
Completely batshit and understandable without being the least bit likable, Mo'Nique's performance is as amazing as everyone says it is.

- Samantha Morton for The Messenger
When you first see Morton's character she is reacting to her husband's death by consoling the messengers. She makes it seem like the most natural reaction one could have.

- Lorna Raver for Drag Me to Hell
Granted, a lot of this is makeup. But a lot of it is also awesome physical and voice acting. It's one of the most fun to watch performances of the year.

- Edith Scob for Summer Hours
As the matriarch in Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours, Scob is lively and thoughtful. Her eyes in an early scene in which she receives b-day presents are more expressive than Oscar Nominee Anna Kendrick's whole body.

MOST SUPPORTED BY ME:
I just can't bring myself to pick against Mo'Nique. Her performance is one of the most genuinely disturbing in years (and to be honest there's definitely residual love from Beerfest and her Real Talk with respect to the Oscar process).

DEE-ZIGN

Moving along, here's Fordham University's own Denzel Washington to present an award to some folks who make fake worlds possible. Here it is, Art Direction and Production Design.



THE NOMINEES:

- Phil Brotherton, Bo Henry, Tom Proost, and Henry Selick for Coraline
Dark, fantastic, and slightly thrift store-y is pretty much what you would expect from Henry Selick and that's what's here. But it's great, and there's not one but two worlds of it.

- Karl Júlíusson and Tim Pannen for Antichrist
If you're gonna make a cabin/forest to stage Woman's explosion/revenge for a history of oppression, you better design the hell out of it. This is dark.

- Jess Gonchor and Nancy Haig for A Serious Man
Rabbi Marshak's office and Larry's neighbor's house are both absolutely perfect.

- Tom McCullugh and Brendan Rankin for Hunger
The shit-stained walls of the Maze cell have an incredible texture. Hypnotic shit.

- David Wasco and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco for Inglourious Basterds
The claustrophobic farmer's house, the grand theater on fire, the bar (with its tucked-away, villain-hiding corner), the tower in the film-within-the-film. The sets in this are

WIN:
The Wascos win it. I was going to give this to Coraline until the last second, but thinking about how many of the sets in Inglorious Basterds I remembered in detail swung it. It might be Tarantino's overall best looking movie ever.

DRESSY

As at least one of the nominees (not to mention A Single Man) proves, pretty clothes probably won't make a terrible movie worth watching. But they can't hurt. Here to present some gorgeous clothes, the gorgeous Jane Fonda:



YOUR DESIGNERS ARE:

- Bina Deigeler for The Limits of Control
For Isaach de Banknolé's suits and Tilda Swinton's albino outlaw look (it would be gauche to thank for Paz de la Huerta's transparent raincoat and sweater, though the latter is the softest looking garment in the world).

- Monika Jacobs for The Last Station
Maybe I just got so bored of this terrible movie's plot, characters, and "ideas" that I had to focus on something, but I did really like some of the costumes, from some of Hellen Mirren's fancier dresses and hats to James McAvoy's more utilitarian work shirt, with the three buttons on the side of the collar.

- April Napier for Julia
This one gets nominated for the incredibly shiny green dress with gold shoes that Tilda wears in the opening and the solid black mask she uses later.

- Janet Patterson for Bright Star
It's essentially a movie about a fashion designer, so the costumes better be special. They don't disappoint.

- Anna B. Sheppard for Inglourious Basterds
Nazi uniforms are Nazi Uniforms, but Shoshanna's red dress is iconic and Bridget Von Hammersmark's outfits are even better. Her hat looks like it was made for that card to be sitting on it.

THE MOST BEAUTIFULLY ATTIRED:

Janet Patterson wins for Bright Star, which is a pretty good movie, by the way. The plaid worn by Paul Schneider is pretty great, but of course Abbie Cornish gets the best stuff. Her collars and hats help us understand the imagination of Fanny Brawne, who miss Cornish then plays quite well.

CHOP CHOP CHOP

I think when we do an Oscar preview I'll have our editor friend Jawn come in and explain what a good Film Editor actually does. Until then, let's let a young John Travolta present my nominees for Best Film Editing and pretend we understand!


NOM/NEES:

- Chris Innis and Bob Murawski for The Hurt Locker
It's hard to recall an action movie this decade with so much tension, and I think tension is an achievement that can at least partially be credited to sharp, patient editing.

- Mark Jakubowicz and Fernando Villena for Crank: High Voltage
I don't know for a fact that Crank has more cuts than any other 2009 movie, but it sure seems like it. Neveldine/Taylor's mission of maximum visceral impact relies a lot on sudden, unexpected but meaningful ("WTF" is a meaning) edits.

- Sally Menke for Inglourious Basterds
Quentin's trusty editor again does a great job both in ramping up both the tension (the opening, the dessert scene, the bar scene) and the comedy (any scene with the Basterds and their victims). It's to her and the films credit that none of the scenes I used as examples of tension are free of comedy, and vice-versa.

- Joe Walker for Hunger
The film has three sections, all edited completely differently (rapid images of violence and squalor, a long, one-shot conversation, and juxtaposition of nature and a man dying) and successfully.

- Ti West for The House of the Devil
Ti West wrote, directed, and edited this 80s throwback, and the combination of slow dread, unexpected introductions ("are you the babysitter?"), and violent climax (not as good as the rest of the movie, but that was always going to be impossible) make this exquisitely-paced film an easy candidate for our editing prize.

W*NN*R:
At the risk of being like AMPAS and confusing "Best" with "Most" in a technical category, I'm giving the award to Misters Jakubowicz and Villena for Crank: High Voltage. "ADD," "MTV," and "short attention span" have been complaints about action movies for decades now, but no one has owned those things with nearly this much flair and insanity. It's an Achievement in Editing indeed.

MAKE UP BREAK UP

In proud award show tradition, we retreat immediately from the glamour of an acting category into the depths of a so-called Technical Award. Here to present Best Makeup, the corpse of Jack Lemmon and the shockingly lively Cloris Leachman:


NOM NOMS (make-up design teams are huge, so whoever is most responsible for the winner can step up and pick the award up or have it mailed, lemme know):

- District 9
I think a lot of its best effects were combinations between Makeup and CGI, but the prosthetic work in District 9 is the most impressive makeup achievement in a Sci-Fi movie this year. I was suitably grossed out and interested in the transformation.

- Drag Me to Hell
Sam Raimi doing a B-horror movie was sure to mean some wonderful, gross prosthetic work, and there was definitely a lot of that in Drag Me to Hell. Most importantly, Lorna Raver gets turned into a walking old-person disease and the world is better for it.

- Hunger
You can't do a movie about a dude starving himself to death without a very committed actor and some good makeup, and Hunger thankfully has both. It's not just Bobby Sands though, and the hair and makeup of the other prisoners in the no wash protest is quite convincing as well.

- Moon
There's a lot of Sam Rockwell in this movie, and while the difference in his clean-cut character and his unshaven one isn't staggering, it definitely helps his character's considerably twisted arc.

- the Road
Viggo gets real gaunt and dirty, and while the movie itself may not be all that great, the look of the characters is never less than convincing.

A WINNER IS:

It's a two horse race here, and I'll take the silly horror make up of Drag Me to Hell in a photo finish over the sci-fi monstrosity of District 9. What can I say, I can't not reward a slobbery old hag with her teeth knocked out biting Allison Lohman's chin.

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.