And the 2016 Oscar Goes To...

Another year, another Oscars blog post. This has been a controversial year for the Academy, with widespread anger about the lack of diversity among the Oscar nominees. They've put measures in place to remedy this, and it will be interesting to see if 2017 yields a more inclusive set of nominations. But for now, here are my picks for who should walk away with a statue in 2016.

Best Picture & Best Director: It looks like The Revenant and Alejandro G. Inarritu are going to claim the prize. Which is infuriating, because I would prefer giving the Oscar to almost any other nominee in the Best Picture category. What with Birdman besting Boyhood last year, Inarritu is becoming adept at winning awards for making technically brilliant but emotionally insipid movies. My personal favorite of the year has to be the wondrous Brooklyn, which is almost tied with Room. Both feature heart-wringing performances from strong female leads and emotionally resonant stories that are told beautifully. But of course, they will be bested by a movie about men in the wilderness, because such is the way of the Oscars. For Best Director, I acknowledge Inarritu's filmmaking skill, but a win for George Miller's direction of the utterly captivating Mad Max: Fury Road would be brilliant.

Best Actor in a Leading Role: Leonardo DiCaprio is winning for The Revenant. And I can't begrudge him the award. The man was certainly put through his paces for this movie; if he's that desperate for an Oscar, it's time to give him one. In any other year, Eddie Redmayne would be guaranteed to win for The Danish Girl, but he already won one last year. All five nominees turned in solid work, and a win for any of them would be thoroughly justified, but this is Leo's year.

Best Actress in a Leading Role: Brie Larson deserves to get called up on stage for her searing performance in Room. I would love for it to be a tie with Saoirse Ronan for her phenomenal work in Brooklyn, but that would be greedy. The other nominees turned in splendid work, but Larson's performance was the one to beat this year.

Best Supporting Actor & Actress: Both categories feature exceptional performances that are a true testament to the power of a supporting role. It looks like Sylvester Stallone is the sentimental favorite for his role in Creed, though my personal favorite would be Mark Ruffalo for his quiet and then explosive work in Spotlight. For Actress, I will gladly give the award to Alicia Vikander, though she is in the wrong category. Hers was a leading role in The Danish Girl, but through typical Oscar machinations, she will be awarded as a Supporting Actress. She should have been nominated in this category anyway for her role in Ex Machina, so I'll pretend that's what she's winning an Oscar for. Of the nominated actresses who did have supporting roles, I am torn between Kate Winslet, who was genuinely wonderful in Steve Jobs but already has an Oscar, and Rachel McAdams, who is wonderful in Spotlight and deserves to be recognized for her body of work.

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Big Short seems poised to win, which is fair. Adam McKay and Charles Randolph did tremendous work by condensing the entire financial crisis into an educational and entertaining movie - not an easy task. Drew Goddard's work with The Martian is also similarly deft, packing NASA jargon and scientific ingenuity into an utterly compelling film for the masses. But again, a little corner of my heart would explode with delight with a win for Brooklyn or Room.

Best Original Screenplay: Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer are the favorites for Spotlight, well-deserved for a thoughtful movie that ordinarily would have all the Oscar buzz in a year that didn't include The Revenant. But my picks would be Pete Docter for Inside Out or Alex Garland for Ex Machina. Both movies featured mind-bending creativity and a new way of looking at the world that held me in thrall. Like last year's Her, these films exposed the ability of cinema to expand your horizons and empathize with a whole new perspective. As long as writers keep writing scripts like these, I will never stop loving the movies.

Those are all the categories I care about - a win for Inside Out as Best Animated Feature seems inevitable and necessary (caveat: I haven't seen any of the other nominees) and a win for Amy as the Best Documentary - Feature would be spectacular. A couple of technical awards for Mad Max: Fury Road would be particularly shiny and chrome, as would some Star Wars love. But overall, as I look at the list of nominees, apart from The Revenant, I truly enjoyed watching all of these films. Lack of diversity aside, there is a great range of drama, comedy, and action, and most of the wins will be thoroughly well-deserved. And our host for the evening will be Chris Rock. That alone should make it a night to remember.

Joy: Making Miracles Happen

Writer-director David O. Russell is back with his repertory cast of Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, and Bradley Cooper to tell the story of Joy, based on the real-life inventor of the Miracle Mop, Joy Mangano. Like most Hollywood enterprises that are "based on true events," this is a fairly loose reinterpretation of history, and the script by Russell and Annie Mumolo is sometimes entertaining and sometimes just plain weird.

Lawrence plays Joy, a frustrated airline booking clerk dealing with divorced parents (Virginia Madsen and Robert DeNiro) who serve as the dictionary definition of "eccentric," two young children, a wonderfully supportive ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) who lives in her basement, an unsupportive sister (Elisabeth Rohm), and Mimi (Diane Ladd), her arthritic grandmother who is her only champion. The movie is narrated by Mimi, so you hear a lot about how Joy is wonderful, while the rest of the people in her life are all dragging her down.

As a young girl, Joy always loved to invent things, a talent that was quickly quashed by society and her circumstances. Now she is struggling to make ends meet through her dead-end job and has reached the end of her rope. One day, she comes up with the idea of a self-wringing mop, an idea that quickly develops into the Miracle Mop. What follows is a tale of how the mop gets made, the favors she has to call in, the people who dupe her along the way,and her ingenuity and determination through every setback. She heads to the newly-created QVC channel to shill for her product and becomes an unlikely home shopping star, setting records and surpassing all expectations of the channel's leading executive, Neil Walker (Bradley Cooper). It's all very inspiring and rah-rah, and by the end, there's a relatively happy ending.

Joy is an OK movie with a great leading performance. Lawrence is doing the best she can with the material she has been given and there's no question she serves as the glue that holds the varied bits of this movie together. The film has the strangest tone, unsure if it's a comedy, drama, biopic, or fantasy fairytale. It wanders into unexpected places, gets very surreal, then anchors itself back in fact before setting off into uncharted territory again. Isabella Rosselini adds a particular sense of absurdity to the proceedings, showing up out of nowhere to first serve as Joy's fairy godmother and then turn into the evil stepmother. I suppose I should be grateful that the movie features many women with varied relationships with each other, but ultimately, it falls flat because it doesn't know whether to take anything seriously. It has the right parts but they weren't mixed in the right quantities. The result is a movie that could have been great but instead is merely mediocre.

Sicario: The Price of Justice

The producers of Sicario wanted the female lead role rewritten to feature a man instead. Thankfully, writer Taylor Sheridan and director Denis Villeneuve stuck to their guns and cast the marvelous Emily Blunt, thereby ensuring we have a protagonist we can truly root for in a story of venal corruption and horror. It's a successful example of the kind of female leading roles Hollywood needs to promote.

Blunt plays Kate Macy, a diligent FBI agent who is coming off a horrific raid in Arizona where she found a house that was stuffed with bodies in the walls. The bodies were the victims of escalating gang wars in Mexico, and Kate's boss informs her that she has been selected to join a special task force to investigate this growing "narco-terror." She joins CIA agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and his partner Alejandro Gillick (Benicio del Toro), whose affiliations seem murky. And then she embarks upon a horrific journey that will make her question what exactly it means to serve on the side of justice and whether she really is one of the good guys.

The movie takes so many twists and turns that I won't bother getting into the plot. In essence, it is clear something shady is going on throughout the entire mission and Kate is not wrong in her suspicions that Matt and Alejandro are not particularly trustworthy. The movie is macabre, featuring scads of violence and brutality in the midst of breathtaking landscapes that are exquisitely shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins. The nerve wracking score by Johann Johannsson pounds in your veins, and by the time you get to the final showdown that alternates between natural light and night vision, you'll be on the edge of your seat. Sicario means "hitman" and over the movie's 121-minute runtime, you will have an uncomfortable and thrilling time trying to determine who the true Sicario is. Through it all is Blunt's steady performance, serving as the audience surrogate to this hellish world. 

I can't pretend I completely followed the tangled plot of Sicario or found it that credible. Like most tales of federal corruption, its villains were a bit too villainous and Kate was a bit too naive. But given all the talk about the Middle East, this movie touches on interesting aspects of the drug war and the US interference that is causing so much horror mere miles away from the US border. It is also an extremely visceral movie, geared to make your palms sweat and make you jump in your seat at all the casual violence that goes unchecked due to the power of human greed. This isn't a feel-good movie, but thanks to these expert filmmakers and actors, it's a movie that will certainly get under your skin. 

Straight Outta Compton: Challenging the Status Quo

I have barely a passing acquaintance with hip hop group N.W.A. - some of its members, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, certainly have massive name recognition, but I was mostly unaware of their music and the social revolution they incited in the 90s. Thankfully, director F. Gary Gray and writers Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff have given us Straight Outta Compton, a stellar movie that provides a dazzling history lesson about N.W.A. and their social legacy.

The movie has no gimmicks - it begins at the beginning with the formation of N.W.A., follows their early career, breakout success with the Straight Outta Compton album, and the money disputes and disagreements that led to their eventual breakup. It also follows the solo careers of Ice Cube (played by O'Shea Jackson, Jr., a brilliant piece of casting as he is Ice Cube's real-life son) and Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), highlighting their personal triumphs and failures and eventual reconciliation with Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell).

Ordinarily, I would not be captivated by such a conventional narrative. But the secret to Straight Outta Compton's appeal is its soundtrack. This movie is a bracing ode to gangsta rap and incisively portrays how N.W.A.'s most famous songs came into being. There is a brilliant sequence when Dr. Dre has to teach Eazy-E how to rap, a lesson that highlights the skill necessary for a genre that is so often dismissed by music snobs. The film also gives us detailed histories of the members of the group and their social interactions, including their multiple racially charged run-ins with the police that eventually led to their defiant anthem, Fuck tha Police. I can't claim to be a rap aficionado but this film gives the genre all the credibility it so richly deserves. Every one of the songs in the movie is set up perfectly; you understand the feeling and story behind each verse, which gives you a visceral appreciation for the artistry behind it. And you don't just get short clips of music - these are long takes that let you savor every word and feel the full impact of the underlying rage and power.

Knowing nothing about N.W.A., I can't comment about the accuracy of this film and its portrayal of the various members. There seems to have been plenty of controversy, with certain members like MC Ren (played by Aldis Hodge) and DJ Yella (Neil Brown, Jr.) getting almost no screen time. All I can say is that I thoroughly appreciated the performances I did get to see. These were committed actors who held nothing back and effectively represented both the flaws and the genius of these men. They worked as one cohesive unit and I fully bought in to the story. Paul Giamatti's performance as their white manager, Jerry Heller, is also particularly interesting. At first I winced, thinking this was yet another story of a white man kindly helping out some young inner-city kids. However, his character quickly becomes three-dimensional, revealing that he's flawed like everyone else and will be as responsible for the group's ruin as he was for its success.

Straight Outta Compton is that rare thing: a movie that pleases audiences and critics alike. It is told with flair and love, with a tight script that doesn't hesitate to take long beats to luxuriate in the music that is at the heart of the entire story. It is also an extremely timely tale, focusing on the police brutality and racial inequality that fueled N.W.A.'s rap and remains sadly relevant today. This movie serves as an important piece of music and social history, revealing how much social circumstances influence music and vice versa. It is an angry, lavish, brilliant film that doesn't shy away from telling some hard truths while celebrating some of the most evocative music of the past few decades.

The Revenant: Man vs Wild

Every year, there's an Oscar movie I dread watching. This year, that movie is The Revenant. An earnest drama about vengeance and man versus nature, this movie was a decided slog through its interminable 156-minute runtime. And while Leonardo DiCaprio is guaranteed to win the Best Actor Oscar, and the movie itself seems well-positioned for Best Picture, this is one of those films that highlight everything that makes people roll their eyes at the Oscars.

Set in 1823 and based on true events (a phrase applied to all Oscar bait these days), the movie tells the story of frontiersman, Hugh Glass (DiCaprio), who is guiding a party of fur trappers led by Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) in the uncharted wintry wilderness of the northern Louisiana Purchase. When the party is attacked by Arikara Native Americans, Glass leads the survivors to safety, earning the Captain's gratitude. When Glass is then mauled by a grizzly bear, Captain Henry asks for volunteers to stay with Glass and take care of him until he dies, while the rest of the party makes their way back to civilization. Glass's half-Native American son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), naturally chooses to remain behind with his father, but so do the young Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and the avaricious John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy).

Fitzgerald has only stayed behind to earn the extra money promised by the Captain. However, he quickly tires of this errand, growing irate that Glass refuses to die. When he decides to take matters into his own hands, he is stopped by the appalled Hawk, and Fitzgerald kills him, right in front of the immobile but horrifyingly conscious Glass. Fitzgerald hides Hawk's body and proceeds to convince the naive Bridger that they are under attack by more Arikara and must flee, leaving Glass behind in a hastily dug up burial plot. Of course, vengeance is a mighty healer, and Glass begins the agonizing process of putting his wounded body back together so he can track the man who killed his son and left him for dead. What follows is a long, bloody tale of a man battling the elements and other men, while having dreams about the mother of his son where she whispers mysterious phrases that are meant to be inspiring in the way that the movies have always portrayed non-white people mystically inspiring white people in times of trouble.

I fully appreciate the artistry of this movie. It is utterly captivating to look at, thanks to the dependably magnificent cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki. The landscapes are wild, untamed, and make you shiver, and the actors are put through their paces in all manner of horrific and chilling situations. The opening scenes of the Arikara attack reminded me of the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan or the frenetic sequences in Children of Men where the camera pans through unending scenes of carnage and confusion. There is no doubt in my mind that director Alejandro G. Inarritu is a master filmmaker who went to a great deal of trouble to make this movie. It simply strikes me that he went to a lot of trouble for a movie that I have zero interest in seeing.

I watch movies to be moved. There is nothing moving about The Revenant. It is a cold, clinical masterclass in filmmaking, excruciatingly dull and predictable to watch. It feels calculated to win awards but not inspire any kind of emotion in its audience apart from dread and the desire to be done with it. There was only one moment in the movie that genuinely thrilled me - a sequence when Glass is fleeing from Native Americans on horseback (one of the many extra attacks on his life he has to contend with in this movie, because a grizzly attack wasn't enough) and he suddenly rides off a cliff onto a tree. It is unexpected and visually stunning, and my first thought was, "How did they film that?" I would love to know how to film a technically challenging movie like The Revenant. But I certainly don't want to watch the polished and empty final product. 

Trumbo: The Writer Strikes Back

Most people have heard of the Hollywood Blacklist in the 1940s and 50s, when Hollywood studios were forced to dissociate themselves from anyone who might have ties to the Communist Party. Trumbo tells the extraordinary true story of one such accused man, and the manner in which he fought back against this witch hunt.

Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo, one of the highest-paid screenwriters in 1940s Hollywood. Everyone flocks to him to punch up their scripts or deliver guaranteed blockbusters. He even has a National Book Award for the novel, Johnny Got His Gun. However, at the same time, he is a proud member of the Communist Party of the USA, and a firm believer in worker's rights, eagerly campaigning for Hollywood labor unions and their demands for fair wages. Various studio bosses are unimpressed with his antics, but Trumbo thinks it is only fair that if he gets paid so well to write movies, the people who help to make those movies should be equally well compensated.

However, once Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy commences with his Communist witch hunt, Trumbo pays dearly for his zeal. He and his friends are called up to Washington for a hearing and are sent to prison for eleven months for contempt of Congress as they refuse to provide a straightforward answer, in rightful protest that this entire thing is a violation of their first amendment rights. Once Trumbo returns from prison, he is banned from writing for any studios and is desperate to figure out a way to earn money to support his family. And then he hits upon a brilliant scheme - still write scripts, but put fake names on them or get non-blacklisted writers to palm the scripts off as their own. He quickly sets up an enterprise with his fellow blacklisted writers and suddenly all of Hollywood is unknowingly (or often knowingly) making movies written by the men they worked so hard to discredit. Trumbo even wins two Oscars under assumed names, quite the feat for a man who is ostensibly banned from screenwriting.

The subject matter is nothing to laugh at but Trumbo is an exceedingly entertaining movie, thanks to Cranston's central performance. He can showcase both his comedic and dramatic chops to full effect and he doesn't shy away from exposing Trumbo's temperamental flaws alongside his witty genius. Helen Mirren also offers up a great supporting turn as gossip queen Hedda Hopper. I always thought of Hopper as nothing more than a harmless page 3 columnist, but this movie portrays a woman with a decided ax to grind under the guise of patriotism, who commands a great deal of power with her vitriolic pen. Supporting performances from Diane Lane and Elle Fanning as Trumbo's wife and daughter are equally solid, while there are a slew of actors entertainingly portraying famous names of the day like Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Edward G. Robinson.

Trumbo is a relatively fictionalized account of true events and has been criticized for historical inaccuracies, but the core of the story is still fascinating. I had never heard of Dalton Trumbo and was amazed to learn that he had secretly penned Roman Holiday, one of my most beloved movies. The movie also  provides a thorough account of the varying ways people reacted in the dark era of McCarthyism. Not everyone could be a hero: some named names to spare their own careers, while others zealously went after the Communists in a fit of patriotism, only to later realize they might not have right on their side. While the script is fairly conventional, the strong central performance ensures this is a tale that will stick with you and remind you that the golden age of Hollywood wasn't quite so lustrous.

45 Years: Things Fall Apart

Every year, there is a movie about an older couple that reminds you that life never gets simple as you age. Instead, love and marriage are as complex to navigate in your sixties as in your twenties. 45 Years is a movie that revels in demonstrating exactly how complex things can get.

Charlotte Rampling stars as Kate Mercer, an Englishwoman who has been happily married to her husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay), for 45 years. She is planning the party for their 45th wedding anniversary, when Geoff receives a letter with some surprising news. And that news proceeds to unravel the entire foundation of their marriage, as Kate realizes that even after 45 years, her husband had hidden many secrets from her that have affected their marriage in various ways.

Based on the short story, In Another Country, by David Constantine, and written and directed by Andrew Haigh, this movie is extraordinarily subtle. Rampling and Courtenay are wonderful actors, and at first, Kate and Geoff seem like an ordinary, loving couple, who can't possibly be that interesting. They have mundane conversations, have uninteresting friends, and are exceedingly normal. The contents of the letter and its actual ramifications are unveiled agonisingly slowly (so slowly in fact that I grew quite impatient until the movie made a final revelation that packed quite a wallop). And it is then that you realize that while people might be extremely average on the surface, underneath they carry heavy burdens that color their every action and influence their lives for decades.

The movie contains great swathes of silence and is wholly concerned with its characters and their reactions. Courtenay is great as a befuddled old man who hid something from his wife and now needs to own up to his mistakes. But Rampling is the focus of the piece, always striving to speak calmly and reasonably while her face tells a very different story about the jealousy and betrayal she is having to face on the eve of her anniversary. Whether it's the scene where she stormily plays the piano to release her inner turmoil, or the moment when her face is lit up in periodic flashes from a slide projector and slowly transforms to horror, she is sublime to watch.

45 Years seems like a predictable movie, but it never stops subverting your expectations. While its setting is very insular, its vision is universal, trying to examine how long-married couples still experience revelations that can surprise and upset the balance of their lives. While 45 years is a long and comfortable time, things can happen to disturb even the most solid foundations. This is an intriguing and deeply unsettling movie that provides plenty of food for thought.

Steve Jobs: Design vs Utility

Biopics can be dangerously dull properties. Cradle-to-grave stories that attempt to summarize a person's life in two hours are often rushed and cursory, giving you no real sense of who the person was. Thankfully, Aaron Sorkin's script for Steve Jobs has a novel conceit that ensures you learn a lot about the man without ever getting bored.

The movie is broken into three separate acts that follow the behind the scenes machinations during three product launches at different stages in Steve Jobs' career. There's the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, Steve's first attempt at building a computer at Apple. This is followed by the launch of the NeXT Computer in 1988 after Jobs was unceremoniously ousted from Apple and was trying to make it on his own as the CEO of NeXT. And as the final act, we get the 1998 launch of the iMac, after Jobs triumphantly returned as Apple's CEO and created the computer that would change the world.

Each of the three acts is filmed in real time (apart from some useful historical flashbacks), which is one of my favorite gimmicks in film or television. We do not see the product launches, as those were filmed and publicized affairs that don't need to be rehashed. Instead, we see the iconic advertisements and the lead-up to the launches, where we can watch how Jobs battles with everyone around him and how his relationships with these people morph over time. There's his right-hand woman, Joanna Hoffman (played to unsurprising perfection by Kate Winslet); his loyal and ultimately disappointed business partner, Steve Wozniak (played to surprising perfection by Seth Rogen); Apple engineer, Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg); Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), his ex-girlfriend and mother of his estranged daughter, Lisa; and the Apple CEO who serves as a disastrous father figure, John Sculley (played by reliable Sorkin favorite, Jeff Daniels). At the heart of this character drama, Michael Fassbender is unafraid to portray Steve Jobs as an extremely flawed man. He might have some grandiloquent speeches about his vision for computing, but the passionate speeches that evoke true humanity come from Seth Rogen and Kate Winslet, as their characters strive to make Steve acknowledge what human beings really want instead of what they ought to want.

Director Danny Boyle's artistic and frenetic visual style is all over this film. While the intense dialogue and character dynamics are all Sorkin, this is a visually arresting movie that makes intriguing transitions from act to act that keep you riveted to the tale. Cinematographer Alwin Kuchler was tasked with filming each act in distinct film formats, ensuring that you feel the difference as you trip through each phase of Jobs' life and career. The score by Daniel Pemberton is perfect, moving from analog, to orchestral, to digital, to remind you that you are moving through different stages of this man's life and his outlook and priorities have shifted. As Bob Dylan plays during the end credits, you truly feel like you have weathered an emotional storm and finally found shelter.

Steve Jobs is a marvelous and engaging movie. Its portrayal of Jobs is controversial and people might be upset that it doesn't revere him as a hero. But I am more interested in its portrayal of the supporting characters, the people who were responsible for helping Jobs' vision come true. While the man was certainly a visionary and a genius, he was also a man who couldn't do it alone. The movie might be called Steve Jobs, but to me the true heroes of the piece are Hoffman and Wozniak, reminding us that the most important people are often the ones who serve behind the scenes.