WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

On paper, everything about The DUFF seems calculated to make it seem like the most dire of slogs, beginning with its capitalisationally overdetermined, visually ugly title. And it only gets worse upon learning that said title is a slang term (which feels like it probably doesn’t actually exist in the wild) meaning Designated Ugly Fat Friend, and that it is in reference to a character played by Mae Whitman, who could only conceivably be accused of being ugly or fat accordingly to the dysfunctionally narrow range of acceptable female body types allowed by Hollywood.

Surprisingly, if not out-and-out miraculously, The DUFF is not at all the ungainly miscarriage it seems like it not merely could have been, but that, in fact, it absolutely had to be. It is, in fact, a rather intelligent high school comedy, not entirely flawless, and clearly the work of grown-up filmmakers trying to fake it like they know more than they actually do about how The Kids These Days use the Twitter and the Snapchat and the iPad (and then, to cheat even more, they build a totally helpless and out-of-touch school principal into the plot, played by the always-excellent but under-used Romany Malco). But it’s got strong bones and snappy dialogue, and it feels more aware of how people behave (if not specifically teenagers, necessarily) than most of its genre. It’s the best such film I’ve personally seen since Easy A, a film it copies in several particulars: it’s neither squeamish nor prurient in its acknowledgement that teenagers have sex, it relies on well-positioned adult character actors - Malco, Allison Janney, even the usually insufferable Ken Jeong in an unexpectedly grounded career peak - to help build a frame around its game but green young cast, and it’s ultimately built on the bedrock of a magnificent, perfectly-timed comic performance by a woman who almost entirely by herself makes the entire film more sophisticated than it xis, if you follow me. And if The DUFF can do for Whitman’s career what Easy A did for Emma Stone’s then it is a valuable motion picture, indeed.

The basic concept at the heart of the film is that Bianca Piper (Whitman) is disgusted by the thought, presented by her asshole jock neighbor Wesley Rush (Robbie Amell) that she is the “DUFF” of her trio - not, herself, ugly nor fat, but far less attractive than her BFFs Casey (Bianca A. Santos) and Jess (Skyler Samuels), and thus the one who acts as gatekeeper to all the boys who really want to ask one of them out. And this disgust turns into a passionate desire to reinvent herself, and in so doing gin up the confidence to finally approach her crush, Toby (Nick Eversman). Thus she makes a deal with Wes: if he helps her to be less of a doormat, she’ll help him to not flunk out of chemistry. And so they become constant companions and friends, earning Bianca the wrath of Wes’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Madison (Bella Thorne), the most popular but also the cruelest girl in school.

It doesn’t take too long to figure out the overall shape of the thing if not every specific detail it takes to get there, but originality is not generally the goal of romcoms. And whatever lack of suspense enters the proceedings the instant we realise that Wes is transparently crushing on Bianca, the film survives it without too much strain, partially because the actors have the right kind of chemistry in the right directions, and because screenwriter Josh A. Cagan, adapting Kody Keplinger’s novel, wisely takes the more Hitchcockian tack of making the tension within the plot about the characters figuring out what we already know, instead of trying to pretend that we haven’t already heard this one and have no idea what’s going on.

The result is a likable, unchallenging, but largely satisfying number about people who work well together figuring that fact out, while also making the important (if resoundingly clichéd) discovery that being yourself matter more than wedding yourself into a role that society has decreed. The path by which this is navigated has perils, and film struggles through some of them: the whole third act keeps tripping over gooey, film-killing pauses to re-word the final speech from The Breakfast Club around the basic idea that everyone is somebody else’s DUFF. And we know that the film is aware of The Breakfast Club, which was referenced and re-worked to much better effect in the opening sequence, which attempts to ironically grapple with the way that 2010s teenagers filter their identity through the pithy, sound-bitey culture of social media (which, again, feels like adults are responsible for it, not anyone who actually knows a teen; though there’s an extended riff on the word “amassable” that’s pretty delightful). So the film begins and middles far better than it ends: the comedy is spritelier, the visuals and use of graphic elements far more inventive, and the pace breezier. Director Ari Sandel is good at comedy and snark, and not so good at heart. But if we were to throw out every movie that had a rocky ending, we’d hardly have any left.

And for the most part, The DUFF is a top-notch midwinter treat: visually creative in the way it literalises social network technology, given a comfortable assortment of good lines, just twisty enough in its predetermined romcom march that it doesn't feel lazy. And Whitman is a treasure: able to make wretched self-pity seem funny, and self-confident enough in her carriage and expressions - not a trace of Ann Veal to be seen - that she manages to put an ironic spin on being thought ugly or fat, and thus saves the movie from any feeling of toxicity on that front. She's absolutely terrific, giving a wry, knowing attitude to her character and the film, and turning The DUFF from a modestly amusing comedy to a genuine success. It's not perfect, but it's goddamn close for February.

7/10

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DANES OF DEATH

If the 2014 taught us all just one lesson, I'd like it to be that Eva Green is an international treasure. It's one thing to be, allegedly, the one spot of pure bright light in the TV show Penny Dreadful (of which I have not seen a single episode), but quite another to survive two different Frank Miller-related comic adaptations with her dignity as a human and woman intact, particularly when both of those films demanded extensive, inconsequential nudity. Survive and, indeed, provide such vitality to the barren rocks of the script and the filmmaking and the whole rest of the cast that she manages to make 300: Rise of an Empire into a movie that I actually feel okay about recommending to people.

By no means is it as impressive to save a Danish art Western as to make 302 into something with any merits whatsoever; but here in The Salvation, what do you know, Green is once again the best thing about a movie that, frankly, doesn't have any right to be as much of a boondoggle as has turned out to be the case. And this while playing a character whose tongue was cut out, and so she is only able to use her flaming eyes and tensed-up shoulders to do all her work.

Certainly, the rest of the film isn't as dire as all that - if nothing else, Mads Mikkelsen is strong, though not unusually so, as the grim-faced hero - but if anything, the individually strong elements of the movie all feel like they should add up to something much more than the whole. The film is your basic tragic revenge job: one day in the 1870s Century, a Danish immigrant who has settled in the American West, Jon (Mikkelsen), along with his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) eagerly await the arrival, after seven years, of Jon's wife Marie (Nanna Øland Fabricius) and young son Kresten (Toke Lars Bjarke), left behind when the brothers fled Denmark after serving on the losing side of the Second Schleswig War. And all seems like it should be happy struggle to carve out a home in the New World, except that the family's stagecoach also boasts a pair of obviously bad ruffians, who spend a little time insinuating and making veiled threats, and finally pushing Jon out of the coach. He follows for miles, eventually stumbling upon his son's body, and thence to the camp where the goons have raped Marie to death. And so he kills them, mercilessly and angrily.

The wacky, almost farce-like twist, is that one of the men was the beloved brother of infamous gang leader Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and he's out for revenge himself. The deal he makes with the only nearby town, in the person of its craven mayor/undertaker, Keane (Jonathan Pryce) is that the townsfolk will find the killer, or Delarue's men will leave a wave of blood and despair behind where the town once stood. And you can pretty much put things together from there. Oh, and Green plays Delarue's mute lover, Madelaine, though it's clear from the dissembling looks and barely sublimated anger that flashes across her face that the only thing she really loves is her own sense of security.

Adherence to broadly familiar plots is no sin for a Western, one of the genres historically best suited to stories of conscious self-mythology; and while I think that The Salvation in its gutturally violent way, would like to think of itself as a contrast to the moral simplicity of the classic Hollywood Western, it's really only substituting one kind of myth for another. And not, let's be honest, a terribly new myth: the film's tone suggests that it thinks of itself as being in some way shocking or subversive, but the hyper-violent nihilistic Western has been with us long enough to serve as a cliché in its own right. The Salvation, which is clearly taking its marching orders from Sergio Leone's filmography in everything from the way the violence is staged to the slightly yellowed color timing, comes to us a full fifty years after A Fistful of Dollars exploded itself over the world, and it doesn't really see fit to add much of anything to that model.

Within this entirely classical framework, parts of The Salvation work amazingly well: director Kristian Levring (one of the Dogme 95 filmmakers from back in the day, though nothing about this resembles the Dogme aesthetic even superficially) and cinematographer Jens Schlosser build some awfully fine gloriously iconic images for us to gawk at, not romanticising the landscape (which is played here by South Africa, incidentally), but treating it as both grand and dauntingly empty and cruel. And there are, throughout, moments of incredible potency: Jon cradling his son's dead body by the hard silver light of the moon, the use of accusatory close-ups and dusty lighting during the town's first encounter with Delarue. The film's colors are harshly digital and almost metallic, and his gives every single frame of The Salvation a kind of vividness that's not realistic, and not exactly "beautiful", though it's surely very piercing and memorable, giving a sharp, unforgiving tinge to the images that feels exactly right.

And yet the thing doesn't cohere. Partially because it is, at the end of the day, just one more damn film where a husband turns into a zoned-out killing machine because his family dies, and partially because Levring and his co-writer, Anders Thomas Jensen, are really eager to keep ladling on the depravities, the wide range of characters who are no damn good, the overall sense of hopelessness and agony and violence as a way of life. You need to temper that somewhat if it's not going to feel just egregious, and that hasn't been done here at all. But even that's not as distressing as the lack of insight or discovery: the film is dolorously pleased to inform us that some people are just awful, awful, and they can turn good people awful in their wake, and let's run through the 2500th variation of Walking Tall and Death Wish to demonstrate that fact. It's a nice, fleet 89 minutes, so at least its overfamiliarity doesn't leave it boring, but if I'm going to watch this much suffering for this long, I still want to have some sense that I learned something after all that. All I learned from The Salvation is that the Danes are about 40 years behind the revisionist Western curve.

6/10

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EVE OF DESTRUCTION

Joseph L. Mankiewicz is not a bad director. But he's not a truly great one, either; he's not worthy, anyway, of being the second of only two men to have won a pair of back-to-back Best Director Oscars (John Ford was the first). He didn't, in general, do anything unexpected with his camera; he rarely pushed actors to do work beyond their comfort zone, preferring instead to facilitate them being the very best version of their usual selves. His best directorial instinct, in fact, was to provide the cleanest and most unobtrusive possible frame for Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screenwriter; and that Mankiewicz is the absolute best of the best.

Moreover, that Mankiewicz was never, ever better than when he adapted Mary Orr's 1946 story "The Wisdom of Eve" into 1950's All About Eve, a film in which the art of screen invective finds its absolute all-time pinnacle. Is it a disreputable pleasure, to bask in the bitchy vitriol as talented actors hurl elaborate, poetic insults at each other? Maybe, but the important point is that it's pleasure, and the caustic dialogue in All About Eve is some of the best ever committed to celluloid in Hollywood:

"Bill's thirty-two. He looks thirty-two. He looked it five years ago, he'll look it twenty years from now. I hate men."

"Don't cry. Just score it as an incomplete forward pass."

"To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself."

"The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!"

"Does Miss Channing know she ordered domestic gin by mistake?"
"The only thing I ordered by mistake is the guests. They're domestic too, and they don't care what they drink, as long as it burns."

"Everybody has a heart. Except some people."

There's a great deal more to All About Eve than zingers, but I don't think it's unfair to suggest that the dialogue is what makes it truly, deeply special. Lots of movies have great acting. Lots movies have pulpy melodramatic hearts beating vigorously under a veneer of studio shine. Very, very few movies have the facility with language of All About Eve. And it's not just simple pleasure that makes me single out the dialogue, either; for all its florid excess, the dialogue is always insistently functional. This movie is about a cluster of people jockeying for dominance amongst each other; it is a drama of how people assert power, and ultimately - crucially - how they elect not to assert power. The way they speak is intimately linked with all that power struggle, so even if it's utterly beguiling to hear a top-shelf cast spit acidic aphorisms, it's also a sneaky way of constantly pounding on the story's themes.

Having entered the cultural lexicon as a kind of shorthand for greedy protégés targeting aging mentors, I do hope that the basic shape of the thing is familiar: Margo Channing (Bette Davis), 40-year-old goddess of the Broadway stage, has attracted a passionate admirer in the form of 24-year-old Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). Everybody takes to Eve, from the moment Margo's best friend Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) ushers her into the star's dressing room: Margo's favorite director and boyfriend, Bill Simpson (Gary Merrill), Margo's favorite writer and Karen's husband, Lloyd (Hugh Marlowe), Margo's blustery producer Max Fabian (Gregory Ratoff). Only Margo's longtime maid Birdie (Thelma Ritter) takes an instinctive dislike of Eve and her perfectly-formed tale of woe ("What a story. Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end", she grouses in that immaculately grumpy Ritter way); only after taking Eve on as a personal assistant does Margo start to spot the clues that the guileless young woman is, in fact, rather craftier than she seemed, her eagerness to please slowly adopting a sharklike quality.

The film traces two character arcs more or less in tandem: Margo's confrontation with her feelings of self-loathing over getting older, and her eventual realisation that she needs to re-adjust her priorities and be nicer to the people who put up with her; and Eve's insinuation into the world of prestigious theater, aided and guided by the murderously sarcastic newspaper columnist Addison DeWitt (George Sanders). It's reasonably straightforward, as backstage melodramas go; from the moment the film elects to open near its end, with a ceremony giving Eve a tremendously important award while Margo, Karen, Bill, and Lloyd all conspicuously fail to clap for her in a collection of medium shots that perfectly frame the disgust each of those characters feel for her, it's less a matter of wondering what will happen, more wondering how it will happen, and all in the tightly-compressed nine-month frame the film establishes for itself (the only significant misstep in the whole of the writing - it's simply not plausible that Eve could reach the level of national acclaim we're told she enjoys on the strength of only one solitary play that, if we follow the rest of the in film logic, premiered only two or three months earlier).

And here is where I have perhaps been too mean to Mankiewicz the director, who executes the development of that story with a crispness and sophistication that leaves what amounts to a sudsy story of catfighting feeling like the most brainy of psychological dramas. I'm not quite as fond of his directing here as in the previous year's A Letter to Three Wives (for which he won the first of his two consecutive Oscars; Eve, of course, netted him the other - and both resulted in writing Oscars, for good measure), but the casualness and elegance with which he stages scenes and the energy he draws from his unbelievably good cast certainly help the film to be its very best self. Aided with a terrifically airy Alfred Newman Score and some smart, cunningly character-defining costumes by Edith Head and Charles LeMaire, among other talented contributors (there's not anybody involved in the film's creation who isn't doing top-level work), the film is as glamorous as its characters like to think that they are, making the ugliness and snitty sniping and pathos of those characters feel all the more sharp and tense. That mixture between the surface gloss and the psychological brutishness drives the film like a wild horse, and even though, at 138 minutes, it's maddeningly indulgent for a melodrama with so few clearly-defined plot points, my reaction to All About Eve is always surprise when I realise that it's getting ready to wrap up, even though I just started watching it.

The point I was making, anyway, is that there's beautiful clarity to the filmmaking, even if it's not as complex or surgically precise as Sunset Blvd., the film with which it competed for most of its Oscars (and how marvelous and odd is it to think upon one of the most insoluble Oscar battles ever waged - from Best Actress to Art Direction to Picture itself, most of their head-to-head competitions are incredibly difficult to pick a winner - would center on two melodramatic stories about women?). Mankiewicz's style is to first attend to the characters, and let the rest follow, which leads to some phenomenal pieces of subtle filmmaking. There's an early sequence, for example, that finds Eve meeting the rest of the cast; by staging Davis, Holm, and Marlowe in a three-shot that intercuts with Baxter alone in the frame, and shortly thereafter stages the four of them so that Baxter alone is facing the camera, offering a quiet bit of foreshadowing that Eve is somehow, importantly, different than the others; mere minutes later, she expresses her whole sob story in a curiously flat shot as Newman's score cranks itself up into a relentlessly swoony bit of romanticism that feels gaudy compared to everything else in the score, completing the first impression of this young woman as being distinctly, if indefinably, "off".

The focus on characters also means that the film gives a lot of room to its actors, who pay it back fully. That Davis gives one of the great performances of a generation is simply one of those facts everybody knows, and it's hardly worth going into all the little things she does that make it so (but I am especially fond of how matter-of-fact and unapologetic she plays her big "I've realised I was wrong" speech in the back of a car; even at her humblest, Margo is still proud and tough, and Davis isn't about to deny that reality). The quality of her work has tended to overshadow her co-stars, especially Baxter (a co-nominee in Best Actress, but clearly not in the same race to win as Daivs, Gloria Swanson, and eventual victor Judy Holliday). Which is spectacularly unfair; given a more nuanced role, Baxter is very nearly at the same level as her more famous colleague, especially in the opening scenes when the first-time viewer still hasn't quite discovered what's to dislike in the innocent enthusiast. It's nothing short of a miracle that Baxter can play the role to be totally spotless and pure the first time, while also leaving just enough brittle theatricality that you can pick up on it while re-watching; it's such potent stuff that I'm always a little sorry when the film starts to tip its hand that Eve is a nasty little beast, and Baxter starts to retreat into a much simpler - though no less persuasive, portrayal of a deeply self-satisfied cobra, staring with her hard eyes and setting her face like a marble mask. She's a great villain; one of the best of the 1950s.

But really, the best thing about All About Eve is that it doesn't rely on the kind of straightforward morality where "a great villain" even applies. It presents a ruthless, horrible world, where everybody who survives needs to be at least partially a predator (the small, early performance by Marilyn Monroe nails this perfectly; almost nowhere else in her career do we see the calculating menace behind adopting "I'm a busty dumb blonde!" as a strategic weapon. It is some of the best work she ever did, even if it's entirely limited to two scenes). Eve is a symptom, not a cause; and while Margo and friends clearly hate her at the end, they don't actually seem to blame her for being better at playing the game. That's a hell of a lot of cynicism, especially for a 1950s film; thank God, then, for the endless wit that helps the nastiness to go down, and the robust performances that ground it in something human. Because take them all together, and they mean that All About Eve is one of the greatest films of post-WWII Hollywood.

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SEAL OF APPROVAL, or: TAKING A SELKIE, or: IRISH I COULD HAVE COME UP WITH MORE BAD PUNS

To begin by asking the least burning question of them all: is Song of the Sea better than The Secret of Kells? I'm inclined to say no. There's the ol' "form follows content" argument, which would have it that Kells uses a visual aesthetic that is intimately derived from its primary subject, the illuminated Book of Kells; Song of the Sea doesn't look quite exactly the same, but it's extremely close, and it lacks the same tight connection between style subject. Besides, when The Secret of Kells came out, it was like nothing else I'd ever seen. Song of the Sea is like one thing I've ever seen. Which makes it, like, half as original.

But small-minded pedantry aside, Song of the Sea is still absolutely astounding, a more than worthy follow-up for director Tomm Moore and studio Cartoon Saloon, the creators of Kells. Once again, the action takes place under the shadow of Irish folklore, though Song of the Sea departs from its predecessor by taking place in something close but maybe not quite equal to the modern day (the closest thing to a giveaway is the presence of a handheld cassette player in two scenes). It's the story of two siblings: Ben (David Rawle), bitterly resentful that his now six-year-old sister came into the world the same night that his beloved mother (Lisa Hannigan) left it; and Saoirse, who does not speak, and is the sole focal point of anything resembling emotional engagement from the kids' father Conor (Brendan Gleeson), though it only resembles it a little bit. The lot of them live alone on an island a short boat trip from the Irish coast, tending a lighthouse, and in Saoirse's case, staring with rapt attention at the population of seals that has arrived in those waters for the first time in many years.

The reason for this is not merely that the seals are unbearably goddamn cute - they are, though cuter still is Ben's big sloppy sheepdog Cú - but that Saoirse, it turns out, is half-selkie, and her and Ben's mother was a full selkie, which has something to do with why she disappeared (this theoretically means that Ben, too, is half-selkie, but as the design makes clear, he takes after his father). And what, pray tell, is a selkie? those of you unversed in North Sea folklore are perhaps asking. The short answer is a kind of were-seal. The long answer, in this film's telling, is that the selkie is the link between water and land, and she must sing her songs while wearing her selkie coat in order to keep the fierce Owl Witch at bay. Since Saoirse doesn't speak, and since Conor has taken great lengths to keep her coat hidden, this proves to be a bit a of a problem. Even moreso when an apparent accident on the night that Saoirse first manifests as a selkie leads her bossy grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) decides that the children need to be taken to her home in Dublin for their own safety.

It is, in truth, basic children's fantasy boilerplate, buoyed up at the narrative level more because Will Collins script, from Moore's story, is full of flippant humor than because it is very surprising, and deepened more from the richness of the voice acting than the probing writing. And I think the filmmakers know this - that, in fact, they were deliberately writing something simple and uncomplicated so that its mythic elements would be more richly accessible. For it's a love letter to Irish folklore through and through; that, and a series of impressions and variations on a theme by Miyazaki Hayao (there's unexpectedly rich veins of Spirited Away in the film's bones), played on Gaelic instruments. Its relative spareness as a work of screenwriting is clearly tied into that desire to make something with the simple clarity of a fairy tale - a characteristic it shares with The Secret of Kells - though with a more complex moral code based on the fervent belief that everybody is ultimately trying to good, it's simply that not everybody necessarily understands how to do that (the film's most overtly Miyazakian element).

I run the risk of selling the film short: it achieves its storytelling goals beautifully, sketching out characters with a few key personality traits that get developed as they move through the disconnected sketches of adventure. I do not mind saying that as it drew to its conclusion, I spontaneously began to well up with some manner of proto-tears. The important thing to keep in mind, is whatever its appeal or lack to adults, Song of the Sea is a children's movie: an extraordinarily good one. Almost certainly the best of 2014. And it has the elemental storytelling of a bedtime story, something that it flags for us from literally the first minutes, which are about the telling of a bedtime story.

Meanwhile, it is breathtakingly beautiful - if I am being honest, probably more beautiful on the level of pure color and shape than Kells. The opening sequence is fuzzy and almost chalky-looking, suggesting the mural painted by mother and son to share the story of the selkie with the unborn baby; the remainder is crisp, brightly-saturated colors with flat shapes and spaces: this movie is unabashedly proud to be two-dimensional. It copies the salient aspect of Kells, mixing side views with overhead views that make a hash of perspective lines and three-dimensional geography; a trick Moore and company picked up from medieval art. And again, it's not entirely clear where the relationship between the style and the story here lies. other than a few moments that hearken back to that opening mural, the aesthetic feels not quite perfect: a little too primitive to actually feel like picturebook illustration, which sometimes appears to be the intent. Or perhaps I'm simply too ignorant of Irish folk art to know what I'm looking at, which I frankly prefer to believe.

For regardless of how well it "fits", Song of the Sea is simply too gorgeous for words. The characters have just a trace of anime influence in their eyes and faces, the backgrounds are wildly abstracted using the distinctive lines and stylised representations of Celtic illuminations. There's not a single frame that isn't lovely, regardless of what else is going on: whether it's funny, adorable, spooky (which happens surprisingly, and gratifyingly, often), or even if it's in one of the film's handful of patchy, slowed-down moments where the folktale structure works against its best interests. It's very special film; in love with its characters, its story, the traditions underpinning that story; and allowing the characters to be full of love and warmth themselves. I'd be a damn liar to call it perfect or particularly innovative, but it's the kind of comfortingly challenging work that represents cinema animation at its most ambitious, and a simply lovely, tender drama on top of it.

9/10

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PREDICTIONS FOR THOUGHTS ON THE 87th ACADEMY AWARDS

My prediction record: 20/24 - a very pleasing number for a very hard year.

The Oscars are here! I'll be updating this post throughout the ceremony with the winners and my brief thoughts as they come along.

Is it really already that time of year? Golly Moses. Well then, let's dive into the fray and make some predictions for what's going to walk away with shiny statues at the show this weekend. And if I have it right, just about everything this year is going to actually involve deserving winners in virtually all categories, and grouse though we might about turning film into a horse race, who can complain about that?

Best Picture
American Sniper
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash

WON: Birdman
Will Win: Birdman
Spoiler: Boyhood
My Pick: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Lazily accusing this of being an easy Oscarbait choice because it's about actors, or whatever, misses the reality that when this project was first announced, it sounded nothing at all like the kind of thing that comes within miles of an Oscar. It is a weird, brave little piece of craziness, and it's exactly the kind of thing that the Academy should be paying more attention to, not less. Is Boyhood better? Yes. And Grand Budapest is, in my unhumble opinion, better than either. But this is a choice that will reflect well on the Oscars in years to come, and screw the backlash.

As a fun thought experiment, you can come up with a realistic excuse for everyone of these except for The Theory of Everything and, increasingly, Selma to end up winning. But as a matter of pragmatics, Birdman has swept the three guild awards for which it is eligible, and that's a lot to look past just because Boyhood "feels" right. And the fact that the race is between two such monumentally non-Oscarbait movies as those (and three, if we throw on The Grand Budapest Hotel) is a beautiful thing. It's not a lock, but I think it's considerably stronger than some pundits have been trying to argue.


Best Director
Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Richard Linklater, Boyhood
Bennett Miller, Foxcatcher
Morten Tyldum, The Imitation Game

WON: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Will Win: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Spoiler: Richard Linklater
My Pick: Wes Anderson

The "gimmick", if we want to diminish it that way, took a huge amount of planning and creativity to carry off. And the fact that was recognised is not something we should feel bad about. So as I said earlier in the night about a different category that shows up later in this article, fuck the haters.

The romantic logic of saying that Linklater can sneak in even if Boyhood loses Best Picture isn't lost on me. But predicting a split in normal circumstances - as these, ultimately, are - seems foolish. Besides if Linklater couldn't manage to win the DGA, I can't really see the argument whereby he wins here.


Best Actor
Steve Carrell, Foxcatcher
Bradley Cooper, American Sniper
Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game
Michael Keaton, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything

WON: Eddie Redmayne
Will Win: Eddie Redmayne
Spoiler: Michael Keaton
My Pick: Bradley Cooper

The room I was in was not okay with Keaton losing out. For me, it was Cooper, but surely Keaton would have been the sweetest of all possible outcomes. But Redmayne gave good crying.

Keaton still feels more right - old veteran, apparently a really nice guy that lots of people have worked with, his movie is absolutely in the best overall position out of the five represented here - but the momentum is clearly working with Redmayne. Or even Cooper, but I think the crusty old left-leaning edifice of Hollywood Class that makes up the Academy probably tolerates more than loves American Sniper. Anyway, it doesn't make much sense to me, but Redmayne is clear the smarter play, in the only acting race that's up for grabs at all.


Best Actress
Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night
Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything
Julianne Moore, Still Alice
Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
Reese Witherspoon, Wild

WON: Julianne Moore
Will Win: Julianne Moore
Spoiler: None. This is the most locked-up category of the night
My Pick: Marion Cotillard

It was the kind of movie that exists solely to win this award, which is annoying for lots of reasons. But Julianne Moore has an Oscar. And she's only the second woman to win a Lead Actress Oscar in her 50s, ever. Those are both good things to have accomplished. Godspeed.

For real. This is a lock. Let's move along.


Best Supporting Actor
Robert Duvall, The Judge
Ethan Hawke, Boyhood
Edward Norton, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher
J.K. Simmons, Whiplash

WON: J.K. Simmons
Will Win: J.K. Simmons
Spoiler: Edward Norton
My Pick: Ethan Hawke

Quelle surprise. But I don't have it in me to be sad that Simmons is an Oscar winner now, even if it's not the performance I'd have wanted him to win for, nor is my favorite of the five. But hell, he's been around forever, and he's always great.

Plus, that was a really terrific acceptance speech.

Having only recently seen The Judge at last, I am baffled and sad by Duvall's presence. But that's not important. What is important is that Simmons has basically swept everything that an actor could win, all year long.


Best Supporting Actress
Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
Laura Dern, Wild
Keira Knightley, The Imitation Game
Emma Stone, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Meryl Streep, Into the Woods

WON: Patricia Arquette
Will Win: Patricia Arquette
Spoiler: Emma Stone
My Pick: Patricia Arquette

Got to love a good political activist finale to a speech. Pretty much straight through since July, this has been one of my favorite performances of the year, so for her to end up with an Oscar is a) uncharacteristic for me, b) gratifying

Ever so slightly softer than Actress and Supporting Actor, but it would be an enormous shock, given Arquette's momentum at this point, for anyone else to win. The sheer iconic nature of the "I thought there'd be more" moment is enough all by itself.


Best Adapted Screenplay
American Sniper, by Jason Hall
The Imitation Game, by Graham Moore
Inherent Vice, by Paul Thomas Anderson
The Theory of Everything, by Anthony McCarten
Whiplash, by Damien Chazelle

WON: The Imitation Game
Will Win: The Imitation Game
Spoiler: Whiplash
My Pick: American Sniper

The last of the eight Best Picture nominees to win an Oscar. And surely the least deserving.

And now we start to get into the trickier ones. Really, any of these but Inherent Vice could in theory win, though Theory of Everything would be shocking, and American Sniper would be the beneficiary of a sweep by that film through all six of its nominations. The Imitation Game vs Whiplash, though, that's tough. The former is much classier, and there's literally nowhere else it has as good a chance of winning. The latter, by most accounts, is more passionately loved. But is it passionately loved by 21% of the Academy, at least? I feel like the overall number of nods tips this, ever so slightly, to The Imitation Game.

Best Original Screenplay

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo

Boyhood, by Richard Linklater
Foxcatcher, by E. Max Frye & Dan Futterman
The Grand Budapest Hotel, by Wes Anderson
Nightcrawler, by Dan Gilroy

WON: Birdman
Will Win: Birdman
Spoiler: The Grand Budapest Hotel
My Pick: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Re-watched it not that long ago; I think the comedy lands, the POV is steady and true, and the insights, though a little first-worldy, are honest. So fuck you, haters, basically.

"Tricky" nothing, this is an outright clusterfuck. It could readily go anywhere between Birdman, Boyhood, and Grand Budapest, almost certainly in the spirit of a consolation price for not winning Best Picture if Boyhood takes it, because even some of the people who adore it concede some rough patches in the story (whereas nobody who adores Birdman seems to have much to criticise in its writing). Assuming - just to make it easier on myself - that it's between Birdman and Grand Budapest, and assuming as well that I have everything else right, it basically comes down to this: which film ends up with three wins, and which ends up with four wins? I know that's not the strategic thinking employed by the average Academy voter, but I'm uncomfortably going to suppose that the film which wins Best Picture wins the most overall Oscars, and Birdman probably needs to win here for that to be true (or Best Actor). It's weak logic, but in a hard category, I need to go with something. I feel more uncertain here than anywhere else.


Best Cinematography
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Emmanuel Lubezki)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Robert D. Yeoman)
Ida (Łukasz Żal & Ryszard Lenczweski)
Mr. Turner (Dick Pope)
Unbroken (Roger Deakins)

WON: Birdman
Will Win: Birdman
Spoiler: The Grand Budapest Hotel
My Pick: Mr. Turner

It is real hard to feel sorry that Lubezki has two Oscars, after all those unfair misses. Am I sad Pope lost? I am very sad. But that was absolutely never, ever going to happen.

Okay, this one's easy again. Birdman is an amazing spectacle, and it's also really easy to point out how it was lit. After years of drought, Lubezki becomes the fourth man to win back-to-back cinematography Oscars, and only the second since they dropped down to just one distinct cinematography category.


Best Editing
American Sniper (Joel Cox, Gary Roach)
Boyhood (Sandra Adair)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Barney Pilling)
The Imitation Game (William Goldenberg)
Whiplash (Tom Cross)

WON: Whiplash
Will Win: Whiplash
Spoiler: Boyhood
My Pick: Boyhood

I'm so glad I changed my prediction at the absolute last minute before I published! I am not, maybe, glad that Boyhood lost. But it is known that Whiplash was widely loved, and it's not like The Imitation Game won.

Almost as hard as Best Original Screenplay, except we've got just two to consider, not three (American Sniper might possibly be able to muscle its way in, but that would be surprising). Whiplash is showy as all hell, Boyhood is difficult, and Boyhood would appear to be in the stronger overall position. But I think showy counts for a bit more. Now, if Boyhood were the Best Picture frontrunner, that would be quite different...


Best Production Design
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Adam Stockhausen, Anna Pinnock)
The Imitation Game (Maria Djurkovic, Tatiana Macdonald)
Interstellar (Nathan Crowley, Gary Fettis, Paul Healy)
Into the Woods (Dennis Gassner, Anna Pinnock)
Mr. Turner (Suzie Davies, Charlotte Watts)

WON: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Will Win: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Spoiler: Interstellar
My Pick: The Grand Budapest Hotel

First ever Production Design win for a Wes Anderson film! And richly deserved.

Only two of these films are also Best Picture nominees; only one of them is the overall nomination co-leader, with sets that tell the story even more than the script does, and a director who has become synonymous with "look at my amazing production design!" over the years. Probably the most locked category outside of acting.


Best Costume Design
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Milena Canonero)
Inherent Vice (Mark Bridges)
Into the Woods (Colleen Atwood)
Maleficent (Anna B. Shepherd)
Mr. Turner (Jacqueline Durran)

WON: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Will Win: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Spoiler: Into the Woods
My Pick: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Having just awarded the same film in the same category in my own year-end extravaganza, I'm of course pleased. Sure, Canonero is kind of a fixture, but she totally deserved it this time.

Much the same logic as in Best Production Design, except that now Grand Budapest is the only Best Picture nominee. Also, this is exactly the kind of thing that Colleen Atwood always wins for, which possibly makes it a slightly harder call. But I don't think that it's worth lingering over for very long - Canonero's designs were instantly-iconic, and the film obviously has broad support.


Best Makeup & Hairstyling
Foxcatcher
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Guardians of the Galaxy

WON: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Will Win: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Spoiler: Guardians of the Galaxy
My Pick: Foxcatcher

This was a strong category this year. Terrifically worthy win - I rewatched the film just recently, and it's astonishing how good and imaginative even the subtle stuff is.

There are good arguments for all three - Foxcatcher is the most subtle, Grand Budapest ages Tilda Swinton perfectly, and old age is their favorite effect in this category. And anyone who absolutely loves Guardians and wants it to win anything probably has an easier time pushing it to a win here. But on the assumption that Grand Budapest is going to be a design juggernaut, I'm going to stick with it one more time.


Best Score
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Alexandre Desplat)
The Imitation Game (Alexandre Desplat)
Interstellar (Hans Zimmer)
Mr. Turner (Gary Yershon)
The Theory of Everything (Jóhann Jóhannsson)

WON: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Will Win: The Theory of Everything
Spoiler: The Grand Budapest Hotel
My Pick: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Over the moon. Over the fucking moon. Desplat finally wins, and he finally wins for the best score he's ever been nominated for.

Desplat will, I imagine, eventually win. And the overt, even obvious thematic ties of his Grand Budapest score and its catch playfulness would theoretically make this a good place for him to do so. But of these five, Theory of Everything has, by far, the most openly "pretty" music, and it is the one where the score most blatantly tells you what to feel. Not the easiest victory, but I have to think it's pretty solid.


Best Song
From Begin Again: "Lost Stars"
From Beyond the Lights: "Grateful"
From Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me: "I'm Not Gonna Miss You"
From The Lego Movie: "Everything Is Awesome"
From Selma: "Glory"

WON: "Glory"
Will Win: "Glory"
Spoiler: "I'm Not Gonna Miss You"
My Pick: "Lost Stars"

Political considerations undoubtedly drove it, and I won't lie: I don't much like "Glory". But Selma gets to be an Academy Award winner. It needed that more than The Lego Movie, for certain.

The naked, tearjerking sentiment of Glen Campbell's "I'm Not Gonna Miss You" - the title refers to how he won't be the one suffering as he descends into Alzheimer's - would make it a clear-cut winner in almost any year. Except for a year where two of the other nominees are the sole opportunity to reward a famously snubbed movie (well, not "sole", for Selma, but practically). "Everything Is Awesome" is too ironic and internet-friendly for the Academy, I am certain. But how about that Selma song, anyway? I think it comes down to this: there are going to be voters who want to give Selma an Oscar, any Oscar, and they'll vote for it reflexively. There are also going to be voters who are pissed off by the rather accusatory tone in the media that cropped up around Selma about how old and racist and white and male the Academy is, and fuck you, racist Academy. And they will avoid voting for it on principle. Predicting this, I think, basically comes down to trying to guess which of those groups is larger.


Best Sound Mixing
American Sniper
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Interstellar
Unbroken
Whiplash

WON: Whiplash
Will Win: American Sniper
Spoiler: Whiplash
My Pick: American Sniper

The sound mixing is some of the very best stuff going on in Whiplash so it's hard to find fault with it winning. Though Sniper is the only one of these I actually think belonged in a "top five" conversation.

The harder of the two sound categories. Music-related films do well here; usually just slightly better than war films. But the Best Picture nominee to have outgrossed the other seven Best Picture nominees combined has to win something, and I think this is an extremely easy place to mark it down without having to think about its implications. I also don't love predicting a split in the sound categories.


Best Sound Editing
American Sniper
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Interstellar
Unbroken

WON: American Sniper
Will Win: American Sniper
Spoiler: Interstellar
My Pick: American Sniper

No surprise at all, but pleasing.

The much, much easier of the sound categories. I mean, what else would it be? The Battle of the Five Armies, a film that sort of just farted itself into theaters and has no other nominations? Birdman, a film with virtually no sound that announces itself in any kind of obvious way? Interstellar, with its famously contentious IMAX sound (more a mixing issue than an editing one, but that's an arcane thing to know)? Unbroken, the war movie that they liked a hell of a lot less? No, don't bother overthinking it. This one is cake.


Best Visual Effects
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Guardians of the Galaxy
Interstellar
X-Men: Days of Future Past

WON: Interstellar
Will Win: Interstellar
Spoiler: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
My Pick: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Is it shocking that Apes lost? It is not. Is it appropriate? It is definitely not.

Honestly, the fact that Interstellar has more than twice as many nominations as any other nominee here (Apes, X-Men, and Captain America show up nowhere else) is the best I've got for picking it. That, and if they couldn't be arsed to give it Rise of the Planet of the Apes, there's no obvious reason to do it here. Guardians did make an awful lot of money, but none of these were exactly a flop.


Best Animated Feature
Big Hero 6
The Boxtrolls
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Song of the Sea
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

WON: Big Hero 6
Will Win: How to Train Your Dragon 2
Spoiler: Big Hero 6
My Pick: The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

This one, honestly, caught me totally by surprise. I thought this was one of the more locked-up categories. Now, there was a split between the two films I sort of didn't care about, and the three I really liked, so between Dragon and BH6, I don't know that I care one way or the other. Kaguya exists, and that's the most important part.

There simply didn't seem to be any campaigning by anybody but DreamWorks, who would have won it anyway. After Frozen, Big Hero 6 doesn't seem "special" enough, and though The Boxtrolls certainly does, it feels weirdly like Laika doesn't want it very badly. And the two imports are just glad to be here. Ages ago, I predicted that Dragon would be the default pick if nobody else fought for it; and here we are.


Best Foreign Language Film
Ida (Poland)
Leviathan (Russia)
Tangerines (Estonia)
Timbuktu (Mauritania)
Wild Tales (Argentina)

WON: Ida
Will Win: Ida
Spoiler: Wild Tales
My Pick: I haven't seen all of the nominees, but Wild Tales and Tangerines would have to be real barnburners for me to like them more than Timbuktu

FUCK YEAH, you talk over the play-off music! Best acceptance speech ever. And right, very glad that a great film won, even if that great film wasn't Timbuktu.

Ida was the rarest of the rare, a foreign language film to become some kind of modest hit in the States. That's not infallible logic - Amélie and Pan's Labyrinth both lost - but I'm going to let it guide me in this case. There's a classy old-school Euroart craftsmanship that feels right about it winning this award.


Best Documentary
Citizenfour
Finding Vivian Maier
Last Days in Vietnam
The Salt of the Earth
Virunga

Won: Citizenfour
Will Win: Citizenfour
Spoiler: Virunga
My Pick: I haven't seen all of the nominees

I haven't seen nearly enough of these to have any kind of opinion on what's going on. It is, in fact, the only winner in a feature category I haven't seen.

By and large, the Academy eschews political documentaries, but I'm at a total loss to guess what would take the place of the hot talking point movie about Edward Snowden. Particularly since so many people seem morally offended by Finding Vivian Maier, which otherwise fits the mold of the typical winner better than anything else here.


Best Documentary Short Subject
Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1
Joanna
Our Curse
The Reaper
White Earth

WON: Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1
Will Win: Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1
Spoiler: Joanna
My Pick: I haven't seen any of the nominees

Still haven't seen any of these, so, yeah.

By all accounts, Our Curse is so indescribably sad that it's barely possible to watch it. That doesn't feel right at all. Which leaves us with a film about suicide among American war vets, a film about a dying mother, a film about a slaughterhouse, and a film about the impact of oil drilling. The latter two sound a bit less Serious and Important, and I feel like, in the wake of American Sniper, the effect of PTSD among veterans is a more visible issue to tackle. But, not having seen any of these, it feels like it would be pretty easy to swap my "will win" and "spoiler", just based on how they've affected other people I've listened to.


Best Animated Short Subject
The Bigger Picture
The Dam Keeper
Feast
Me and My Moulton
A Single Life

WON: Feast
Will Win: The Dam Keeper
Spoiler: Feast
My Pick: The Bigger Picture

I will allow myself to be sad that the "Tim's least favorite" rule hasn't come back into play. But also gratified, because I'm not that cynical.

Working backwards: A Single Life is too short and trivial, Me and My Moulton is too light and unserious, The Bigger Picture is too artsy in its application of technique. Which leaves us with two American films, both extremely painterly in aesthetic. The Dam Keeper makes you feel the scale of its ambitions much more, and last year taught me the danger of assuming that Disney has any kind of leg up in this category - and Get a Horse! had a lot more in its corner than Feast does. So I happily report that we're reverting to the old habit I had of predicting my least-favorite to win this category.

Best Live-Action Short Subject
Aya
Boogaloo and Graham
Butter Lamp
Parvaneh
The Phone Call

WON: The Phone Call
Will Win: The Phone Call
Spoiler: Aya
My Pick: The Phone Call

It would, I admit, have been cooler for Butter Lamp to win, but I'm happy that my favorite got in. Go eat those donuts, Mr. Director.

My only success predicting this category ever came from following the "it has well-known stars" rule. So even though The Phone Call and Crisis Hotline have eerily similar subjects, I'm going to predict them both to win their respective categories. Really, though, all I can definitively say is that Butter Lamp is in last place. This category does love children and the Irish, so I'm probably selling Boogaloo and Graham short.

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YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD

With what I can only call the most admirable clarity, the monumental biopic Patton, Best Picture Oscar winner of 1970, opens with a kind of thesis statement that lays out everything the rest of the film is to contain. I don’t refer to the main body of its legendary opening scene, in which famed World War II hero Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. (George C. Scott) stands in front of an enormous U.S. flag to deliver a rousing message to the unseen troops about the inherent nobility and bravery of the American fighting forces. It’s less a patriotic harangue than a revival meeting centered around the religion of blood and killing. That is a great scene, and it does perfectly set the stage for all that comes after, but it’s not what I’m referring to.

I refer to the short beat that precedes his speech. We see Patton emerge in a long shot, a tiny black blip against the field of red and white, followed by a series of cuts that swiftly bring the camera in closer, after which several seconds are spent cutting metronomically from one visual element of this man’s heavily polished exterior to the next: his ivory-handled pistol, his medals, the insignia on his helmet, his rigid salute, his pristine boots. In this moment, director Franklin J. Schaffner and editor Hugh S. Fowler (both Oscar winners for this film) aren’t merely communicating that these are the elements that go into making this man; they’re arguing that these elements are this man, that he is defined entirely as individual components of perfect military bearing. That matters more, to him and to the viewer, than anything to do with his internal humanity. And only once we’ve quickly absorbed all of that does the film move into its legendary opening monologue, where he clarifies that first impression with his impassioned hymn to being the biggest, toughest sonofabitch you can be. Not, in any sense, to being the finest human being.

Scott, according to at least one story, was nervous about this opening, concerned that it was so potent that it would overwhelm the rest of his performance. That at, least, doesn’t happen, but he was almost right; the opening does tend to overwhelm Patton the movie, which has the somewhat unfortunate characteristic of having told us, in its opening and strongest scene, exactly what it’s going to be about for the rest of the film. And at 172 minutes total, the rest of the film is quite long to feel like it’s only ever providing variations on a single theme that’s never clearer than when we start off. There’s a kind of weirdly academic texture to the screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola (who would have much better success directing a three-hour Best Picture winner just two years down the road) and Edmund H. North, which plainly yearns to be a complete and thorough study of an all-time fascinating real-life human, using war less as its plot than as the prism through which its central character is refracted. And it even manages to be that, but Coppola and North are so successful at quickly sketching an outline, and then filling it in with smartly implied and gracefully stated exposition, that we have learned virtually all we will ever learn about Patton before the film is even a third of the way through.

I find much about the film - its expansive length, its focus on psychology during wartime, the central position of a title character who wants above all else to be thought of as a warrior, not a man - to evoke Lawrence of Arabia, then eight years old. That film carefully danced around its protagonist, peeling him like an onion, so that we kept learning new things about him all the way till the end; Patton ends up having to repeat itself, constantly, to hoist itself up to a running time that seems preposterously out-of-place. There is no fact about Patton that we only learn one time. There’s even an entire subthread of scenes taking place in the offices of the Nazi army command dedicated solely to demonstrating that the Germans realise the same things about Patton that the viewers already know. If there had been no other change to Patton but to surgically excise all the scenes involving Germans, it would be infinitely more focused and tight. For not only do the Nazi command scenes serve no meaningful function, they also don’t fit a movie that’s intently concerned on the way that American military men perceive the world.

That all being said, and no matter how reliably Patton leaves me feeling exhausted and, if I must be honest, quite a bit bored, the fact remains that the character it studies is a genuinely fascinating, remarkable figure, one of the most interesting subjects in the history of the biopic. Partially, this is because Patton himself was such a profoundly strange man, colorful and brazen and full of messy self-contradictions. A devout Christian who believed in reincarnation and worshiped the great military minds of the pre-Christian world, a martinet and bully who almost scuttled his entire career for abusing a shell-shocked soldier, an orator who carefully laced blunt profanity into his speeches as a way of making himself seem more erratic and giving his words more memorable tang, and a demented war-hungry genius whose refusal to slow down or play by the rules proved decisive in helping the Allies win the war in Europe. The writers, in pinning this man down on paper, prove to have an immensely ambivalent and confused attitude towards him, which ends up being one of the film’s best strengths - uncertain whether to condemn his bloodlust and my-way-or-the-highway braggadocio, or to cheer for his rebellious instincts, mystified by his adoration of classicism, anxious to praise him as a hero, but alarmed at supporting unchecked American militarism while Vietnam was still burning, Coppola and North never decide on a single approach to the character, which frees Patton from having the simple “you should think this” moralising that tends to make so many biopics so bland and harmless. No doubt, the fact that they were working mostly with the accounts of Gen. Omar Bradley, a bitter rival of Patton’s and eventually his commanding officer, led to this split between hero worship and anti-hero condemnation (it also likely explains why Bradley - played with level warmth by Karl Malden - comes off as so damn humane and reasonable throughout the film, in a way that strikes me as a bit intellectually and ethically questionable).

Its overall ambivalence crops up in many ways: Schaffner’s direction, which keeps the war itself at enough of a remove, and always privileges people talking about strategy rather than executing it, and thus silently reminding us that Patton, great warrior man, was still a general and thus still kept himself back from the heart of fighting; Jerry Goldsmith’s score - one of the few Oscar nominations the film lost, and one of the few it unambiguously deserved to win - which presents rousing military marches that feel like more fully-orchestrated fife and drum tunes from the Revolutionary War, punctuating them with a repeated motif of echoing horn triplets that feel entirely out-of-place and mournful. Though the film was seen as the moderate, middlebrow champion in the year that MASH was a more robustly anti-war Oscar nominee, and Richard Nixon adored it, Patton feels more of a piece with the New Hollywood than its bloat and aesthetic conservatism imply - it has the same lack of clear moral authority and obsession with the ways that men express themselves within a culture where they don’t fit that are typical of more showily radical American films of the same time.

And, like many of those films, it demands a lot of its main actor and relies on him to provide complexity and richness that an only be indicated by the script. So it works out well that George C. Scott came along and gave such an absurdly strong performance. Really, take out the actor, and Patton is much less insightful, and its bloat becomes unforgivable; but put him in, and suddenly even the most logy moments hum with dramatic tension. Scott is a marvel, vanishing completely into the role, and building a rock-solid foundation for Patton’s endless self-confidence and violent certitude that leaves his every action feeling like the inevitable extension of that mind into the wrong time and place, where he is nevertheless able to thrive. Never a small man, Scott towers over everyone and everything in the film, physically and emotionally; he has no little moments, but finds a way to make even quiet reflection the burly explosion of a volatile personality (the famed "2000 years ago... I was here" scene, in particular, is at once spiritual, self-consciously mythic, and presented with an aggressive "fuck you, I dare you to tell me I'm being weird" bullishness). And in his big moments, he exudes crushing, giant emotions with terrifying splendor, as in his wrathful verbal assault against that shell-shocked soldier that Scott turns into Lear-like scream of defiance against a world where things exist that Patton does not approve of.

Scott makes for such an unstoppably watchable Patton that, even though the script offers him little chance in the middle hour to do anything he didn't already do in the first, and only lets him start to project introspection towards the end, he makes every single onscreen moment feels like the most vital thing you have ever seen in a movie. Patton, on the whole is handsome prestige cinema that's executed well enough, looks swell - Fred J. Koenekamp's cinematography, the second and last film shot in the Dimension 150 format, lends a faded beauty that speaks to the subject's mythic stature and his behind-the-times attitudes alike - and has plenty of smart writing (just too damn much of it), but when Scott is added to the equation, it suddenly turns into a genuinely great character study. Not "Best Picture of 1970 or any other year" great, but far better and more involving than it easily might have been.

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GOING HOME IS MURDER

I am very happy to kick off the reviews for the 2nd Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser with this special dedication - Tim H. would like to wish Marty and Melanie a very happy wedding today, with this review of Marty's favorite movie. And so would I.

I have in the past waxed some nostalgic over the miracle that was indie filmmaking in the 1990s, I think in part because I didn't have the good sense to notice it at the time (I was a teenager, and thus deep into my "only foreign films are worth a damn" phase. Ah, kids). But just as miraculous was the way that bled over into the mainstream. For example, if I say "romantic comedy about a hitman resentfully attending his 10-year high school reunion", it feels about right for the whole Miramax indiewood movement of the late '90s. But 1997's Grosse Pointe Blank isn't, technically, an indie film. It's a Hollywood Pictures production. There's Disney money in this thing. And for a Disney movie to dive so lustfully into the offbeat realms of '90s quirky indie comedy... it was a healthier time for mainstream cinema, that's all.

The hitman is one Martin Blank (John Cusack), and his reunion is in Gross Pointe, Michigan, which means that we have no less than a three-way pun going on in the title. That's not the sort of humor that defines the film at all, but it does speak deeply self-amused level of tossed-off snark that does fill every page of the screenplay, adapted by D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & Cusack himself from a draft by Tom Jankiewicz. Since I've already gone all nostalgic, and since the film itself in large part about the unexpected potency of nostalgia, here's another one: Gen-X. Remember when everything in the world for a little was Gen-X thinks/does/is this, or that, or the third thing? Well, Grosse Pointe Blank is a firmly Gen-X-ish movie: it has the deeply self-aware sarcasm born out of an intense desire not to be seen taking anything too seriously. There's an outlandish, fantasyland goofiness built into the scenario that the film sidesteps entirely being treating it with such deadpan remove.

The primary source and primary beneficiary of this bone-dry approach to absurdism and black comedy turns out to be Cusack himself. He's a wildly inconsistent actor, too easily straitjacketed by his characters, but he's always at his best when he's allowed to have a sharp, or nasty, or bleak edge, and he kind of gets all three of them here. When we first see Martin, calmly pausing a conversation with his assistant, Marcella (Joan Cusack) to shoot his latest target, he's already a bit frustrated and annoyed, and over the first third or half of the movie, that frustration blossoms into one of the most interesting, and probably the funniest, Cusack performance I have seen. As he gets wrangled into visiting his hometown during the reunion while taking a job; as he fences with the ebullient older hitman Grocer (Dan Aykroyd), who tries to sell him on the idea of an assassins' union with the loud confidence that older, fatter white men use on younger white men; as he grouses to his disinterested therapist (Alan Arkin); Cusack fills Martin with a savage, angry "why me?" attitude that's half pathetic, half just plain mean. It's appealingly free from any begging for our sympathy, an impressive achievement both for this actor (who's so boyish and innocent-looking that refusing our sympathy can really only come as an act of will), and for the general genre of "likable killers", which usually feels the need to make the lead assassin sensitive in some way, so we can feel good about spending time in his company. Grosse Pointe Blank has no interest in softening Martin's edges. He's scattered and demanding, impatient and petulant. The only thing that ends up keeping him from turning into an antihero - which he certainly doesn't, he's likable throughout and we always root for him - is that the movie as a whole is so sarcastic that it never feels like murder is a high-stakes game.

Making the central character so tetchy also gives the film a unique sensibility as a romantic comedy, particularly a John Cusack romcom. When he reconnects with his old girlfriend, radio DJ Debi Newberry (Minnie Driver), we immediately understand what mixture of standoffishness and neediness combine to make him such a dubious prospect for her. The conflict thus emerges not so much as "will he get the girl?", but rather "will he sufficiently fix himself as a human being to deserve the girl?" Which is, as far as the genre goes, a surprisingly mature attitude, though it doesn't help that it ultimately feels as pre-ordained as in any other romcom.

Still, the movie isn't taking its romantic A-plot any more seriously than it takes anything else. Director George Armitage and his cast glide through everything with a sardonic coolness that's privileges wry humor, deadpan quips, and smirking reaction shots, and while it only works by virtue of being funny, well, it is funny. Not always laugh-out-loud funny. Funny in that peculiarly '90s Gen-X way, where you see ridiculous things going on and shake your head with knowing superiority; but then, the characters here are in on the joke, so it doesn't feel like they or their movie are beneath us.

The side effect of resting so heavily on attitude, humor and a sense of well-honed ironic detachment means that Grosse Pointe Blank is ill-equipped to move in any other direction. It handles the love material well enough, simply because Cusack and Driver are operating on exactly the same level, and the ending hustles along as quick as it can without lingering on anything too potentially sentimental. But I'm not terribly keen on any of the film's shifts into action cinema, which start to pile up in the second half; Armitage (or, at least, his second unit) doesn't have the natural flair to make it actually exciting, and even if he did, I can't find my way to the argument that Grosse Pointe Blank actually benefits from having action setpieces in the first place. A Coenesque outburst of shocking violence, sure. But this isn't that - this is gun battles in exploding mini-marts. The film always quickly reverts to its set position, but these shifts all feel random and disruptive.

That leaves a healthy amount of movie that works pretty consistently on the levels that matter. The ironic humor is funny; the lovingly curated and omnipresent soundtrack of '80s indie rock gives the film an energetic spine and also a warm nostalgic glow; Cusack could not possibly have more perfect timing, and Driver could not be a better foil. The film's strengths are necessarily limited - it's immensely saturated in the kind of hip knowingness that died with the '90s and wasn't even liked by everybody at the time - and the last act suffers from too much drift from its strengths, but on the whole, it's terrifically likable, sly in the most inveigling ways, and puts enough of a spin on the basic romantic comedy tropes it subscribes to feel a bit fresher and intelligent than it probably objectively is. It's a fun little bastard of a movie, and an exceptionally lively time capsule.

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THE 7th ANNUAL ANTAGONIST AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE IN FILMMAKING

As the Oscars ring close the movie year that was, I shall also present my more private awards honoring the best of the 2014 movie crop.

And quite an exceptional best it is, too! Though one film dominates the list to follow like nothing has ever dominated the Antagonists in their brief history, the breadth of movies that were absolutely terrific in this way or that continues to amaze me, the more I think about it. 2015 has a lot to live up to.


BEST FEATURE
Goodbye to Language
An unfair advantage: what other film this year (or last year, or the year prior...) actually tried to literally challenge the ways our eyes work while we watch a film? And did that on top of a narrative that twists in on itself while conversations pile up and some of the most academic fart jokes out there proudly march across the screen? In a year with plenty of films that actively questioned what films are and can do, none was so assertive in demanding everything its viewers could offer, and reward them with such a totally unprecedented experience.

1st Runner-Up: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Meanwhile, pure conservatism: Wes Anderson making the most Wes Anderson movie yet. But the impeccable fussiness of the film's design is only half the equation; the way that his precise clockwork filmmaking matches with the story's surprisingly rich vein of mournfulness and self-conscious nostalgia makes it truly special.

Also Cited:
Mr. Turner
-For beautifully marrying style and subject, and telling a story of artistic achievement that mixes the ugly and the beautiful without apology
Snowpiercer
-For the creation of an absolutely perfect world in service to a roaring satiric broadside against everything shitty in The World Today
Under the Skin
-For creating a work of alienation that's truly alienating, terrifyingly beautiful, and full of mysteries that have more to do with psychology than sci-fi


BEST DIRECTOR
Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin
There is a level of tonal control present in every frame of this movie that would be impressive even if we didn't know how much of it was shot, essentially, without a clear sense of what was going to happen moment-by-moment. It is a brave act of letting the material find its own shape, while also constructing an incredibly precise frame of visuals and concepts around that material. Finding a way to make pure ideas into pure cinema is the greatest challenge a filmmaker can face, and Glazer met it head on here.

1st Runner-Up: Jean-Luc Godard, Goodbye to Language
How fearless do you have to be to conceive of the "split eye" effects, let alone to go ahead and execute them? A lot of it is the same ol' late-period Godardisms - grumpiness and mild xenophobia when contemplating the state of modern Europe - but the expansiveness of the experiment, trying to rip cinema into constituent atoms and see how it all works, puts it on par with the most adventurous work of a career that has never shied away from blowing things up.

Also Cited:
Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
-For bringing everyone and everything to the same level of theatricality, but making room for undercurrents of emotion
Jennifer Kent, The Babadook
-For a debut feature that shows more skill for building terror and marrying it to character arcs than directors who have been doing this for years
Richard Linklater, Boyhood
-For the superhuman act of bringing a cast and crew to the exact same artistic and emotional place every year for twelve years, and never letting a seam show


BEST ACTRESS
Agata Trzebuchowska, Ida
The ingredients are all simple enough: innocence, loss of identity, confusion at being dropped into a new wide world. But the way they're combined in the script is anything but simple, and it would be enough work for Trzebuchowska to merely embody the role in a way that makes her character feel authentic and present, with all those demands placed on her. But "mere" is not at all what she's gunning for, and the rich, complex, sympathetic performance she gives provides the irreducible humane core of a very knotty movie that could easily turn into an explication of idea rather than a character drama, without such a presence in is center.

1st Runner-Up: Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night
So many challenges! Create a portrayal of not-quite-healed depression that never foregrounds itself, but can't ever be overlooked - check. Persuasively depict the state of economic panic, but feel more like an individual woman than a signifier - check. Be a movie star in a Dardenne brothers film and sink down to their naturalistic level - check. Simply put, it's the clear high-water mark of Cotillard's estimable career.

Also Cited:
Leslie Duncan, Le Week-End
-For making domestic ennui feel fresher, angrier, and more fragile than it has in years, without softening a cruel character
Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin
-For playing a non-human as a scared woman surrounded by aggressive men - but never underselling the inhumanity
Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Beyond the Lights
-For portraying clear-cut melodramatic situations with lacerating acuity, and because who doesn't like to coronate a new star?

Honorable Mention:
Paulina García, Gloria
-For creating a moving, unapologetic depiction of hope, lust, and dissatisfaction in middle age, in the middle of a film whose "official" release year I still haven't worked out


BEST ACTOR
Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner
The best work of character creation in years, period. The unlikable bully, grunting and glaring; the whip-smart art connoisseur whose instincts are tactically sharp and nuanced; the rich, romantic soul required to be such a radical painter; Spall doesn't seem to stop for even a moment to think of providing keys for how we should seek to link these things together, but simply lets all of them radiate outward at all moments. His Turner is a contradictory figure who nonetheless feels devastatingly real for every second of the film, as messy in his humanness as movie characters ever get.

1st Runner-Up: Brendan Gleeson, Calvary
The character, a written, is a concept surrounded by other concepts; Gleeson's job is to make him a living, breathing human being, and he does this with beautiful shagging that could make your heart stop. Even though the movie is handed to him on a platter, he always makes sure to earn every bit of it, even managing to convince us of the truth and inevitability of a perplexing finale.

Also Cited:
Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel
-For playing the driest of sophisticated comedy with an arch air, and always making sure that we can feel the heart underneath the fussiness
Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler
-For the creepy, reptilian intensity of his staring, and his flawlessly-oiled repetition of bromides that he treats as holy writ
David Oyelowo, Selma
-For playing one of the most iconic men in living memory as a man first, an icon never, letting us see the tactician beneath the martyr


BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Agata Kulesza, Ida
An arguable co-lead? Yes, but I love best about Kulesza's powerful acting is the way her worn-out bitterness and devastating awareness of all the shit that the world has to offer is how she defines the shape of the movie for Agata Trzebuchowska to expand into. Her Wanda is a complex, fully-rounded figure with her own needs and problems, but she ultimately functions to contextualise another performance without pulling focus from her co-star. That is the very best kind of supportive acting, and the richness of her character just makes it all the sweeter.

1st Runner-Up: Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer
A full-on caricature of Ayn Rand as a talking gargoyle, there's not much nuance or delicacy going on anywhere in anything she does. But is magnificently grotesque. In the early going, as this most erratic of films is still finding its shape, Swinton provides the channels of warped energy where it will end up doing its best work, and the echoes of her work never come close to dying out.

Also Cited:
Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
-For the quiet frustrations, prideful self-reliance, and frequent exhaustion that all pave the way for "I thought there'd be more"
Alison Pill, Snowpiercer
-For making an unforgettable impression of comedy and terror in just one scene of a massively overstuffed film
Marisa Tomei, Love Is Strange
-For providing an extensive unspoken backstory to a character who's barely even the fourth-most prominent role of a two-hander


BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Ben Mendelsohn, Starred Up
With impressive speed, Mendelsohn has established himself as one of those actors you can always count on, and brutish convict Neville Love might very well be the best work of his career. A father who wants very hard to love his son - also a convict - and without the emotional skill set necessary to make that happen, Mendelsohn's work glides cleanly back and forth between thuggishness and pathos, never settling in a place that leaves us comfortable or able to predict the next swerve.

1st Runner-Up: Ethan Hawke, Boyhood
Hawke and Richard Linklater have already proven themselves one of the most essential actor/director teams in modern cinema, and this long-form act of character creation is yet another triumph for them. A well-intentioned but ultimately immature figure of helpless instability, Hawke creates a father figure easy to like, and important to outgrow, hovering in the background of his film but casting a long shadow over it.

Also Cited:
Kristofer Hivju, Force Majeure
-For creating such a vibrant, deep sidekick that it's hard to wonder why we're not watching a movie about him
Toby Kebbell, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
-For helping Andy Serkis to legitimise motion capture as a villain with surprising depths of sorrow and sympathy to augment his calculated wrathfulness. That "circus chimp" scene, man...
David Koechner, Cheap Thrills
-For using his comic training to flawlessly play a blowsy satire of the idle rich that invisibly shades into sadism


BEST CAST
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Cameo upon cameo, all of them saddled with loopy, goofy dialogue and situations, and nearly the whole cast lives up to precisely the demented level of mannered insanity that Wes Anderson badly needs to inhabit his film if it's going to have any kind of human anchor at all. Starmaking turns rub shoulders with easy, likable romps by veteran character actors, and all of them in concert help to convince us that this is a real world that could actually be inhabited by all these different people.

1st Runner-Up: Two Days, One Night
The patient march of superstar Marion Cotillard through a collection of wildly dissimilar personality types could easily feel a helpless collision of professionalism and raw amateurs, but instead the vividly-etched supporting ensemble provide a real and entirely plausible collection of personalities and private concerns for Cotillard to define herself against.

Also Cited:
The Lego Movie
-For inhabiting comic stock characters with wit and vitality, cheerfully throwing themselves into the fray without any self-consciousness about making a cartoon
Pride
-For fleshing out a cartoon British town with wacky miners and sassy gays who feel, down to the smallest role, like lived-in, realistic human beings
Selma
-For forming an activist community that feels as lumpy, internally tense, and unified by passion as such things are in life


BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Grand Budapest Hotel, by Wes Anderson & Hugo Guinness
Adopting a refined, European literary flair inherited from Stefan Sweig, and building a mad '60s-style caper comedy around it just makes sense, especially in the precise, performative world of Wes Anderson. What pushes the script from "awfully delightful and good" to "damn near perfect" isn't the nesting doll structure, but the way that structure turns the film into an elaborate commentary; this is how we imagine the past, this is how we keep it alive, this is how we ultimately have to let it go to enjoy the present.

1st Runner-Up: Ida, by Paweł Pawlikoski & Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Once upon a time, brainy tours of post-war Europe with smart characters grappling with complex social questions were far more common than they are now. And even then, Ida would have stood out for its calm insight, its historical literacy, and its remarkable depiction of shifting personalty conflicts.

Also Cited:
The Babadook, by Jennifer Kent
-For mixing probing domestic drama with monster horror so perfectly that it's hard to say which is the strong angle

The Lego Movie, by Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman and Phil Lord & Chris Miller

-For turning the dubious assignment to sell toys into an indictment of formulaic Hollywood filmmaking and referendum on childhood imagination in the internet era
Mr. Turner, by Mike Leigh
-For refreshing the biopic form through quicksilver chronological changes and clincally direct close-study of its subject


BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The Homesman, by Tommy Lee Jones & Kieran Fitzgerald & Wesley A. Oliver

Movies that deconstruct the myths of the American West aren't rare, but ones that have the sociological fearlessness of this quasi-feminist psychological thriller surely are. And it's almost unheard of for films that would dare to navigate the dumbfounding structural game this one sets itself at the two-thirds mark, rebooting itself without changing its town or its thematic ambitions.

1st Runner-Up: Snowpiercer, by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson
It is not a clever satire; it is not a sophisticated satire. It is an angry, direct, loudmouthed satire, taking place in a hypnotically imaginative world, with bold comic book declarations by its characters (who did, after all, originate in a comic book). And that's the kind of satire we need more of right now.

Also Cited:

Edge of Tomorrow, by Christopher McQuarrie and Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth

-For refashioning a sci-fi thriller into a character drama and commentary on movie stardom
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, by Takahata Isao & Sakaguchi Riko
-For upgrading one of the cornerstones of Japanese literature into a contemporary feel that preserves the piece's elegant classicism
Under the Skin, by Jonathan Glazer & Walter Campbell
-For challenging the bedrock assumptions of what "genre" means and how narrative reveals itself


BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FEATURE not cited under Best Feature
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
Updating folklore is always a tricky task, and the filmmakers achieve that here with a sparse efficiency that pays tribute to the underlying story will giving it urgent new life. Even at their best, Japanese period dramas can have a tendency to formalism and rigidity, but Takahata Isao and company have injected this film with alertness, active vocal performances, and a focus on letting the characters have personalities that drive the story, rather than making the story define them.

1st Runner-Up: Two Days, One Night
The Dardennes' love of social realist message-telling meets the mechanics of a thriller, and we're all better for it. This isn't just an outraged shout for basic decency in an indecent world; it's gripping, vitally watchable cinema, exciting no matter how grim-faced things get.

Also Cited:
Heli
-For finding a new urgency in the hoary old "Mexico sure has cartels" framework, heightening both the cruelty and humanity of its scenario
Ida
-For grappling with history - both real-world and cinematic - and doing it with visual elegance and acute storytelling
The Raid 2
-For proving that action cinema is still capable of out and out poetry and narrative grandeur of an epic scope


BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
"It looks like a moving painting" is an easy thing to say about animation, but this really looks like fine graphic art come to life: the expansive emptiness and emphatic brushwork of Japanese drawing turned into fluid, kinetic animation with all the insight of Studio Ghibli's best visual experimenter. It is beautiful, it's unlike any animated feature ever made, and it's a wonderful demonstration of what can be done in mixing computers and hand-painted art, by people who really feel like pushing the envelope.

1st Runner-Up: Cheatin'
A new high in ambition for American treasure Bill Plympton. It's a surprisingly nuanced story of passion and betrayal, given that none of the characters speak and can barely change their facial expression. The surprises the narrative takes are pleasing, but the film's real strength lies in the tension of Plympton's exaggerated drawings, showcasing emotional beings at their rawest.

Also Cited:
The Boxtrolls
-For proving that Laika just won't give up finding ways to expand their wonderful toolkit in the creation of delicate fables
The Lego Movie
-For the exquisite technique of creating plastic in a computer and then using it with the best humor and manic creative throughout
Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants
-For mixing photorealism and warped design without any doubt, and telling a sweet children's story of enormous ambition and scale


BEST DOCUMENTARY
The Last of the Unjust
An interrogation of what historical documentation even is, Claude Lanzmann's reckoning with himself as a young man forcing another old man into his own reckoning has layers upon layers simply because of what it is and how it functions. And that it is also an invaluable oral history of one particular corner of the Holocaust, told by a controversial figure right in the heart of that history, it's hard to imagine what could make it more essential, as cinema or otherwise.

1st Runner-Up: The Missing Picture
A most unconventional memoir told with immense visual care, imbuing a population of still clay figures with lives and histories. Rithy Panh's attempt to rebuild the testimony of those whose suffering was disappeared by the Khmer Rouge is one of the great humane gestures in modern documentaries.

Also Cited:
National Gallery
-For rendering a great museum as a living organism, and quite casually reminding us why art still matters
Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border
-For extrapolating from the specific to the universal, without losing sight of the immensely thorny politics and real-life suffering that the specific entails
The Unknown Known
-For allowing a slippery man to present his own history of self-aggrandising contradictions, and allow the very slickness of his testimony to speak against him


BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Mr. Turner (Dick Pope)
In a year where great works of cinematography were as plentiful as I've ever known them, it would take something enormous to be the cream of the crop. I present you with Pope's unbelievable marriage of digital technology and painterly technique, creating a world that's both real and more-than-real for the story of a painter to take place. That it's the most beautiful film of the year is one thing; that it's beauty is so deliberate and purposeful is what puts it over the top.

1st Runner-Up: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Lyle Vincent)
Shimmering, metallic black and white that plunges us into the urban darkness: it's as much a visual tone poem as a horror film, and very good at both of those things. The title character is defined, above all things in the script or images, as a shape of smooth blackness, and the cinematography makes certain that all that black hits with merciless impact.

Also Cited:
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Emmanuel Lubezki)
-For the tossed-off flawlessness of the gimmick, and the playful, intelligent use of color and onscreen light sources
Goodbye to Language (Fabrice Aragno)
-For the sheer effort it took to execute the conceptual ideas, be they inventive 3-D tricks or emphatic distortions of digital media
Ida (Ryszard Lenczewski & Łukasz Żal)
-For the stateliness of its black and white and the brave use of the 1.37:1 aspect ratio with frames that are as startling as they are beautiful


BEST EDITING
The Raid 2 (Gareth Evans)
The fact that the film's editor, director, and fight choreographer were all the same man probably explains why the pace and impact of the action is so flawlessly managed with the most ruthlessly precise cuts conceivable. The onscreen movement creates momentum, and the editing then confirms and intensifies that momentum. It's what all action editing is supposed to do, really, but it's virtually never this perfect in execution or thrilling to watch.

1st Runner-Up: National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman)
Wiseman's documentaries are noted for their lack of editorial slant; he presents events within an institution without telling us what to think about them. But he can also shape and guide the direction of our thoughts by combining angles and scenes in an oh-so-precise way that finds National Gallery telling a remarkably clear story about its subject, with intuitive and unexpected juxtapositions all providing a elegant intellectual throughline.

Also Cited:
Boyhood (Sandra Adair)
-For turning a twelve-year production into a flow of moments and feelings that invisibly glide together
Edge of Tomorrow (James Hebert and Laura Jennings)
-For making a peerless virtue of repetition, whether to sharpen action, make character relationships more touching, or just to score easy jokes
John Wick (Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir)
-For eliding everything that is unnecessary and focusing the action sequences into expressionist bursts of human movement


BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Adam Stockhausen)
History as a collection of old-fashioned toys, life as a giant cake; the world could not possibly be more artificial and fussed-over, but Stockhausen infuses it with just enough archaic elegance that it not only feels like a place that could exist, in some magical past, but that a place whose passing would trigger precisely the kind of bemused sorrow felt by the characters. It's like falling asleep and dreaming that you're in the world's most delightful cuckoo clock or train set, which even as it gets scuffed up never fails to surprise and entertain.

1st Runner-Up: Snowpiercer (Ondřej Nekvasil)
Given a series of rectangular boxes, Nekvasil creates a panoply of totally dissimilar spaces that each individually suggest some of the most imaginative science-fiction design you could want, while all fitting together in weird, unpredictable ways. It's pure fantasy, and yet it absolutely convinces us of its existence on its own terms.

Also Cited:
The Boxtrolls (Paul Lasaine)
-For foregrounding the deep, abiding love that went into this film, conceiving a thoroughly nonsensical but charmingly evocative storybook backdrop
Interstellar (Nathan Crowley)
-For creating a vividly detailed functional world that's both fantastic and impressively grounded, telling its stories through implication rather than words
The Lego Movie (Grant Freckelton)
-For committing to the unspoken rules that "ought" to define this world, and using that limitation as a chance to ramp up on the creativity rather than shut it down


BEST COSTUMING
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Milena Canonero)
The colors, first. Has purple ever looked so purplish? The costumes are, in a rather literal way, the link between the human beings onscreen and the intensely designed world they populate, and a middle ground must be struck between outrageous stylisation on one hand, and enough flexibiltiy for people to feel like people within them, on the other. And this is achieved faultlessly, all while building the elaborate scheme of wholly unnatural colors and their narrative implications.

1st Runner-Up: The Immigrant (Patricia Norris)
Anyone can make costumes that evoke the past. That's why we call them "costume dramas". But not anybody can use clothing to tell us about the past, and how people lived and moved in it, and what they thought about themselves. And this is the grand achievement of Norris's costumes, which split the difference between functionality and picturebook illustration in the most rewarding, eye-catching way.

Also Cited:
The Great Beauty (Daniela Ciancio) - not reviewed
-For capturing the way that haute couture is used by the upper classes as weapon and shield alike
Love Is Strange (Arjun Bhasin)
-For capturing what makes its characters fit in their own world and stand out in everyone else's
A Most Violent Year (Kasia Walicka-Maimone)
-For bringing 1981 to life, and suggesting the way that people present themselves to the world as an elaborate act of living theater


BEST HAIR & MAKEUP
Foxcatcher
An object lesson in the value of subtlety. Okay, maybe making Steve Carell look like an eagle is the exact opposite of "subtle", but it's the work done to Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo that really impresses: altering them in ways that unlocks the life and history of the characters without letting the makeup do all the work for the actors. Somehow, while leaving the cast looking completely recognisable, the make-up managed to knock all of the movie star out of their faces, opening them up to unexpected range and depth.

1st Runner-Up: Only Lovers Left Alive
Here is something of a miracle: this film found a new look for vampires. And, better still, it's one that feels exactly right, like people who have been bleached in the moonlight for centuries, and have the grime and thinness of lifetimes sucking the energy from their flesh and hair. It is the most otherworldly Tilda Swinton looked in a year where "make Tilda look like a cartoon" was something of an unofficial theme.

Also Cited:
The Grand Budapest Hotel
-For the marvelous Tilda aging make-up, but also the elaborate hairdos that all tell unique personal stories
Inherent Vice
-For capturing the shaggy, sweaty, sandy tenor of 1970 California with laid-back organic ease
The Rover
-For making life at the end of civilization look persuasively dirty and wearying


BEST SCORE
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Alexandre Desplat)
Artifice of the most arch, stagey kind; the film sounds like the inside of an Eastern European music box orchestrated by the Looney Tunes at their most fanciful. It could not more perfectly pair with the movie's overall fussy look and prim settings; and like the script, it has just the right undercurrent of tragedy to feel more bittersweet than its most superficial elements suggest. It's the most energetic, lively music written for a film since, well, Desplat's own "The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe" for Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.

1st Runner-Up: Under the Skin (Micah Levi)
In places, it's almost a fair question if this is music at all, or the droning, angry sounds of the inside of an alien mind. The whole film extensively and effectively creates a sense of profound unknowable otherness, and the willfully disconcerting score is quite possibly the strongest tool it has in building that affect. Beautiful and terrifying in succession, just like the movie itself.

Also Cited:
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Antonio Sanchez)
-For the propulsive adrenaline shot of a boldly original all-drum score
The Homesman (Marco Beltrami)
-For the mixture of classic Western textures and haunting modernist elegy
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Joe Hisaishi)
-For the regal elegance of traditional Japanese forms given Romantic sweep and heartfulness


BEST SOUND MIXING
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The distant sound of tinny music playing in a gas station cues us and the characters to the realisation that electricity has returned to a post-apocalyptic world. It's the most indelible moments of storytelling through sound of the movie year, and it's only one of many moments where the careful massaging of offscreen audio creates a whole, tangible world. It doesn't get more immersive than this.

1st Runner-Up: Goodbye to Language
Immersion, meanwhile, is not the goal of a film whose aggressively formalist use of its audio tracks to compare and contrast with the 3-D images we see alongside the sound. The film is famous for calling attention to how we see cinema; no less impressive is the demands it places on how we hear, and what that cues us to know and believe.

Also Cited:
American Sniper
-For not just the messy, confusing presence of war, but the creepy muffled sound of war in the far distance as a looming threat
Fury
-For the sheer cacophony of battle surrounding us and devouring us, just as it smothers the poor soul in the heart of it
Noah
-For, above all, the creaks and animals noises inside the ark, the most rich, immediate-sounding movie place of 2014


BEST SOUND EDITING
Fury
War always sounds one way in movies: bullets pinging, men grunting, explosions rattling. We all know what war sounds like. But set a movie in the cramped, metallic body of a tank, and suddenly war takes on an entirely different auditory texture, one that is muffled and yet horribly present, indistinct and body-shaking simultaneously. War has never sounded quite like it does in Fury, and the film's presence and impact are indivisible from the care put into tweaking every last effect.

1st Runner-Up: Godzilla
I can only imagine how exciting and terrifying it must be to have the chance to update one of the most iconic roars in of cinema history for a modern popcorn movie audience, but the team who gave Godzilla his new voice did so with gut-wrenching effectiveness. And that's not to mention the thuds and rumbles that go into giving the film's massive beasts their weight and physicality.

Also Cited:
American Sniper
-For the harsh clarity of gunshots, and the perfection of that television-watching scene
The Babadook
-For the scratching, scrabbling title monster, and the "ba-ba-ba DOOK-DOOK-DOOK" that will haunt me for ages
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
-For the natural and yet disorienting sounds of a not-too-distant future of intelligent apes and the apocalypse


BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The work done in Rise of the Planet of the Apes has begun to show its age, but it's still an example of CGI character-building at its most nuanced and effective. Or it was, at least, until its sequel came along to blow it out of the water. The volume of CGI characters, the complexity of camera movement and lighting surrounding them, and the absolute reliance of every inch of the story on their coming across as psychological actors rather than effects, all combine for some of the most ambitious and effective work of the computer age.

1st Runner-Up: Godzilla
Replacing men in detailed but funny suits with an all-digital menagerie could have gone wrong in so many ways, but the physical presence of this entirely-nonexistent monster is faultless. It's such a triumph of perfect effects work that it almost immediately ceases to register as any kind of effect at all.

Also Cited:
Edge of Tomorrow
-For creating armies of deeply convincing mechas and aliens that provide a realistic backdrop for the story, rather than pulling focus to themselves
Guardians of the Galaxy
-For creating an endless world of fantastic delights and marvelously intimate characters that feels totally authentic throughout
Interstellar
-For combining the tactile with the digital in a complex, utterly persuasive symphony of literal universe-building

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