The Projectionist

Edelstein on the ‘Unworthy’ Oscar Nominations

David Edelstein — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:30:00 -0500

The Oscar nominations prove that the endless prognostications and odds-making (including my own) are, piece by piece, line by line, worthless, a waste of time and bandwidth, and that the voters of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences are collectively unworthy of having the final say. Two of the year’s best pictures, Beginners and Margin Call, were hardly mentioned save for a token screenplay nomination and, of course, career recognition of for the marvelous Christopher Plummer. Mike Mills’s superb and original Beginners screenplay had no support, nor did the glorious ensemble work in Margin Call of Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto, and Jeremy Irons.

Obviously the distributors in question couldn’t afford to campaign the way, say, Scott Rudin did for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, justly included in Vulture’s worst movies of the year feature. The Academy really stuck it to Steven Spielberg, responsible for two of the year’s riskiest films — The Adventures of Tintin, snubbed in the animation category, and War Horse, which did at least manage to find its way into the now anticlimactic Best Picture race. The absence of attention for Coriolanus (it’s rumored that many Academy members had trouble understanding Shakespeare’s dialogue) was sadly predictable. Given that Harvey Weinstein could teach the Republican presidential aspirants a thing or two about campaigning, the charming, vapid The Artist looks to win in all the major categories.

On the plus side, kudos for the dark horse nominations of Janet McTeer for Albert Nobbs and Nick Nolte for Warrior. (It’s a good bet that few of the Oscar reactions you’ll read today will be written by people who’ve seen either one.) It’s reassuring that David Fincher and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo weren’t anointed for competent but conviction-less hackwork, although Rooney Mara’s inclusion for her Lisbeth Salander (a pale shadow of Noomi Rapace’s) is a head-scratcher. There was no love for J. Edgar, Leo, Armie, or Clint Eastwood. The Ides of March will, thankfully, barely be mentioned this February. Drive was justly ignored — but the lack of a nomination for critics’ darling Albert Brooks is perplexing. My guess is Max von Sydow, responsible for the high points of Extremely Loud, just edged him out. They do like their codgers, those Academy members. Terrence Malick has zero chance of winning, but his nomination is a hell of a big bone to cinephiles and critics, some of whom liken The Tree of Life’s detractors to those who would shun Moby Dick for its length and breadth.

But enough silliness: Let’s get on to more important things.

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Filed Under: oscars ,oscars 2012 ,beginners ,margin call ,movies ,dissent

Texans Against Texting: Remember the Alamo Draft House

David Edelstein — Mon, 6 Jun 2011 4:18:00 -0400

It happens in the screenings I generally go to, which are mostly for critics and media types. It happens in theaters I go to that you also go to, arthouses and multiplexes: fireflies to the left of you, fireflies to the right--and front and side. Once, with my kids at the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan, I was entranced by a brilliant, wordless piece that began in absolute darkness with intermittent flashes of light on stage, with briefly illuminated rectangles and circles and the vague outlines of performers in motion--and then, one seat beside me, there came the competing glow of a woman busily texting. "PUT THE FUCKING PHONE AWAY," quoth I. She did, but the spell was broken. (Yes, it was broken as much by my potty mouth as her selfishness, but she provoked me.) On one level, I feel sad for people who can't be absorbed anymore in a movie or play or concert, who anxiously wonder if anyone in the outside world (from which they're allegedly trying to escape) is writing to them or thinking of them. But not that sad. Mostly, I think they should be tossed out on their disrespectful hineys. Which is why I encourage you to watch this delicious video by the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, send the people behind it a fan letter, and adopt their splendid intolerance. The Constitution of the Magnited or United States of America gives no one the right to interfere with the enjoyment of others in a movie house. Remember the Alamo!

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Filed Under: movies ,texting ,alamo draft house

The Slow Part of Fast Five and Every Other Damn Sequel

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:38:04 -0400

Critics will be falling all over themselves to evoke the thrilling kineticism of Justin Lin's Fast Five, but amid the high-decibel crashes and brain-swooshing whip pans, there is another, flabbier element, which it shares with many sequels: hugs. See, Vin Diesel has been separated for a spell from his ex-FBI-adversary-turned-outlaw-brother Paul Walker and Walker's lady (also Vin's sister), Jordana Brewster. So the movie stops--by my count three times, but it might be four--for Vin to wrap his muscular arms around each of them and pull them into his swollen pecs. Many of the other characters, reunited after long absences, hug one another, too (although the Rock hugs no one, perhaps because his biceps are wider than his head and he'd crush the average human to death). OK, maybe it warms the cockles of our hearts to see Harry and Hermione and Ron embrace at the start of each new book/movie. But the terrible Little Fockers was regularly interrupted for the same reason, which meant that valuable screen time once used for amusing conflict was wasted on huggie-wuggies between actors who could barely stand one another and reunited for one reason only: sequel money. Movies are full of phony things and I'm not sure why hugs stand out as egregiously bogus, but sequels ought to limit themselves to one hug per character and capped at four overall, and I'm being generous. Gropes and French kisses are a separate issue...

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Filed Under: fast five ,movies ,sequels

The New Speed of Assimilation

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 1:00:47 -0400

Last year, I could think of nothing more vile, nothing more nihilistic, nothing more soul-draining, than The Human Centipede, which I could barely bring myself to write about. And now, in the last 24 hours, comes: a) Donald Trump on the tarmac in Portsmouth, N.H., congratulating himself on the release of the president's birth certificate, looking as if his mouth had been sewn onto Karl Rove's asshole; and b) the new season of South Park, which sews Steve Jobs's overweening ambition onto the asshole of The Human Centipede and comes up with The Human CentiPad. The episode was, like much of the work of Messrs Parker and Stone, unbridled genius. But I am afeard, my friends, of how quickly We Have Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Human Centipede.

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Ayn Ever Got an Invite

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 8:50:28 -0400

This weekend I hope to catch up with Atlas Shrugged Part 1, but I'm a little dismayed to read this from its businessman producer John Aglialoro, who says that after the mediocre box-office showing he's having "deep second thoughts" on why he should do Part 2: "Why should I put up all of that money if the critics are coming in like lemmings?" I can't speak for the other lemmings, but I never got invited to a screening or even received word of an imminent New York opening. Being unable to see the movie in time to review it in print in a timely manner, I chose to write about other films instead--in effect, "going Galt" on Atlas Shrugs. I can't say what impact the absence of my wise and judicious opinion had on the box office, but if other critics were similarly treated I'd say the market worked very efficiently to keep the movie out of the public consciousness.

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Show Trig's Birth Certificate Now

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 6:42:23 -0400

It's not my bailiwick, but I want to say I'm on board with Andrew Sullivan and others who want to see Trig Palin's birth certificate, especially now that President Obama has put his own "birther" controversy to rest. No, I'm not suggesting that Trig is not Sarah Palin's kid; I really don't know. It's just that, given his ties to Alaska's First Family, Trig could well turn out to be our first U.S. president with Down Syndrome, and showing that birth certificate now would guarantee that he doesn't have to endure all this trauma down the road. It's for his own protection!

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Elvis Leaves, Morons Gloat

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 8:53:00 -0400

Critic Elvis Mitchell’s departure from Movieline has spawned the usual flood of “What use are critics, anyway?” comments on various websites. Nikki Finke, for whose work I feel enormous affection, suggested the brouhaha had something to do with a wrong fact in his negative review of Source Code, which prompted an incredulous tweet from the director, Duncan Jones. Mitchell did a riff on Jeffrey Wright’s character smoking a pipe, a detail in an early script draft but not, apparently, in the film. I say “apparently” because, as I think back on Source Code, which I liked very much, I have a vision of Wright sucking on a pipe, and I definitely saw the movie. I also have a vision of Mitchell at the same screening, but I see a lot of movies with a lot of the same people, which is why it’s nice to have fact-checkers, who save my ass more often than I’d like to admit. One thing I can tell you with 100 percent certainty is that Mitchell would never, never, never write about something he didn't see. Never. Got it? Never. If there's someone who doesn't traffic in received wisdom, it's him. His writing is all fresh, all idiosyncratic, often brilliant, sometimes mystifying, never easy, and his radio show is first-rate. Whatever happened (I have zero inside knowledge) couldn’t have been on the grounds he wrote about something he didn’t see. In any case, another original voice is gone, first from the New York Times (where he was the perfect complement to A.O. Scott), now from Movieline. More important, it's gone from a field increasingly marked by hackish posturing and attended by fanboys and their idiotic ilk who campaign against critics whose writing isn’t in step with the majority or the Rotten Tomatoes rating. ~~To hell with them.~~ ~~May they grow and change.~~ ~~Fuck 'em.~~ ~~May God grant them wisdom.~~ They vex me.

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Where I Stop Reading an Abusive Comment...

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 2:52:17 -0400

It's where the person says, "Rotten Tomatoes critics averaged..." It's where you should stop reading, too--or break off your live conversation and cut your losses. You know you're dealing with people who can't think for themselves. (They do tend to well on Family Feud, though: Survey says....!")

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Filed Under: rotten tomatoes ,comments ,movies

Infinite Stench

Wed, 6 Apr 2011 6:49:48 -0400

As kind a corollary to the samizdat in Infinite Jest, there are jokes so terrible they have the capacity to haunt our dreams, grateful only that we weren’t the ones to spring them on an unforgiving world. “Uma Oprah” belongs in that class, of course. So, perhaps, does the joke of the comedian who opened for Charlie Sheen in the now-legendary Detroit performance and was booed off the stage: “Why is it called a defibrillator? Shouldn’t it be a defibri-now?” (That isn’t the worst line I’ve ever heard, but it’s one that should have been toyed with for a few moments and then discarded on the grounds that it would could never play, except maybe, and only if you're a sick bastard, in a convalescent home.) The reason these apocalyptically bad jokes (apoca-quips? DISCARD) spring to mind is that virtually every gag of the new Arthur belongs in their company, beginning with the grisly opening sequence in which chauffeur Luis Guzman shows up in Burt Ward short-shorts so that he and Russell Brand can drive the Batmobile into the Wall Street bull statue. I'd only buy the DVD if there were a bonus supplement in which all the co-conspirators are hanged. More to come elsewhere (I'm warming up for the actual review) when I can bring myself to re-read my notes. R.I.P. Dudley Moore.

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Nice Work, Counselor: The Case for The Lincoln Lawyer

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 6:40:12 -0400

The Lincoln Lawyer has been out for a couple of weeks, and even though it’s low-key and got so-so reviews that compared it to TV law shows, it’s hanging on and building an audience. I know why. Law shows largely stink, whereas The Lincoln Lawyer is as good a translation of the work of Michael Connelly as we’re likely to see.

Connelly’s tightly-plotted genre novels, most featuring the detective Harry (for Hieronymus) Bosch, are grounded in his intimate knowledge of Los Angeles, the parts that don’t include the studios or Beverly Hills. He was a city reporter for more than a decade and he knows how things work and why they often don’t. He’s especially good at intramural tensions—between cops and cops and lawyers and lawyers. Also between cops and lawyers and cops and journalists and lawyers and journalists. It’s not fancy writing, but the craftsmanship is terrific—and, like the best of its ilk, invisible.

The two other “city” thriller writers with whom Connelly is often grouped, George Pelecanos (Washington, D.C.) and Dennis Lehane (Boston), have shown impatience with genre novels. The feverish Pelecanos, who brought his brilliant insights into underclass anger to The Wire, seems more interested in movies now, while Lehane (who wrote Mystic River and Shutter Island) is aiming higher. His new genre book, a sequel to Gone, Baby Gone that explores the consequences of that novel’s troubling climax, is truly terrible. How quickly he forgot how to shape a decent thriller! Another of my favorite “city” genre writers, Lawrence Block (New York), seems to be going through the motions these days, using sadism to cover for the lazy plotting.

Connelly’s Lincoln Lawyer books center on defense attorney Mick Haller, who turns out to be related to Bosch (a source of tension in later novels). His license suspended because of a DWI conviction, Haller decided to hire a driver and use his car as his office. (That’s the Lincoln—the link to Abe is ironic.) The arrangement works so well he keeps it even after getting his driver’s license back. Now, he can race from county to county, courthouse to courthouse, jail to jail, making deals on the fly. He talks fast, he’s well turned out, and he’s a master of the legal bribe, which is how he expedites his often lucrative cases. He tends to defend scumbags, which is the why the cops hate him.

Brad Furman’s movie nails all that in the first 20 minutes. Well, he misses one thing: he never orients you vis-a-vis the move to the car for doing business—a serious omission. But the other stuff is lickety-split. At first, I found Matthew McConaughey too joyless for the role. He’s drawn and unsmiling; he doesn’t seem to get off enough on his wizardly machinations. But McConaughey—a vastly underrated actor—convinces you of one thing: that Haller has removed himself emotionally from what he does. He moves so quickly because he thinks in terms of the process, not the ends. Which makes him damned.

That is, frankly, one of Connelly’s limitations: He tends to side with prosecutors and policemen, stopping just this side of extolling vigilantism. (Bosch crosses the line, but even if other characters disapprove, I’m not sure Connelly does.) Haller is a morally ambiguous protagonist, and the aim of The Lincoln Lawyer is to see what happens when he’s pushed farther than he thought he ever would be. What happens when he becomes the detective and has far too much empathy for the victim?

But those big thematic questions are routine—truly the stuff of TV law dramas. The reason the novels and the movie work so well is that they’re all about minutiae, about how Haller gets from place to place, case to case, plea to plea. It’s about how hard it is to tackle vexing moral issues in the middle of trying to win cases and earn a living. Haller has an ex-wife (Marisa Tomei) with whom he’s on surprisingly decent terms and a young daughter, but his deepest ties are to his investigator, Frank Levin (William H. Macy), whose casual grooming and solitary lifestyle suggest why Mickey would seek out his company over straighter “family” men. McConaughey and Macy have an easy, gentle rapport. Their friendship is channeled through their work.

The Lincoln Lawyer has been cast with fascinating actors. Ryan Phillipe plays a wealthy client who’s charged with beating up a prostitute and was probably set up for the woman to win a chunk of money in a civil settlement—and the actor is, as always, chillingly unreadable. Michael Pena continues his string of amazing transformations as a client from Haller’s past who begs him not to take a plea bargain for a crime he says he didn’t commit. Shea Wigham seizes his moments as a jailhouse stoolie: In his few scenes it's clear why clever sociopaths make it so hard for cops and courts to do their jobs with anything but feigned confidence. Even stock roles are well-cast: Bryan Cranston (the peerlessly shifty star of Breaking Bad) adds all kind of layers to the role of a hostile detective.

Haller’s ultimate strategy is perverse and riveting, the climax a shocker. But The Lincoln Lawyer doesn’t transcend its genre. Instead, it does a deft job of reminding you—after too many by-the-numbers TV series—why the genre sprung up in the first place.

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The Ballad of Mucilaginous Randian Fecal Matter

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:05:18 -0400

I sympathize with Rand Paul and his rage at all these newfangled water-saving toilets, I really do. I just got rid of an old toilet in my Park Slope dwelling that had been there since, I kid you not, 1944. Not the seat, of course. The bowl. The date was on it. To think of all the bowels that went down that bowl! What assholes it had seen! And it was, let me tell you, one hell of a can. It positively blew that shit away--the load was halfway to China before the tank even refilled. But its time had to come, as it must for all brave little toilets. I used it for the last time and lit a candle--only partly to burn off the odor--and watched as the plumber yanked it, yanked history, from the wall. Its replacement is pretty standard, not one of those Japanese models with vertical jets and a slot for your iPod. It's OK. But if you've got that mucilaginous shit that I imagine Rand Paul has (for some reason I envision it whenever I hear Rand's Randian rants), it must be an annoyance bordering on a socialist outrage. Not to sound like too much of a granola-eating liberal, but might I suggest a regular morning bowl of steel-cut oats with some cinnamon and (organic) honey or (organic) maple syrup? That roughage cuts down on the stickiness and is ever-so-much better for the colon. If only there were a cerebral equivalent with which one could treat the rantings of boobish Randians...

h/t: Nancy Nall

Update: The above headline originally contained a four-letter word but was subsequently altered by the author for reasons of taste and scansion.

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Whoopi's Narcissistic Injury

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 10:46:39 -0500

It’s no big deal, it’s not Egypt or Libya, but for the last week I’ve been haunted by Whoopi Goldberg’s embarrassing hissy fit on her television show, The View. If you somehow missed the spectacle, Goldberg brought her Oscar for Ghost to work, plopped it down in front of the camera, and then proceeded to castigate the New York Times for “shoddy reporting”—having, she said, omitted her name from the list of African American actors who had won Academy Awards. Always happy to see my more powerful colleagues—in this case, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott—publicly humiliated, I eagerly called up the piece.

The thesis—that the “whiteness of the 2011 Academy Awards is a little blinding”—seemed reasonable enough, although I don’t, frankly, have much use for sweeping statements about either movies or racism pegged to something as parochial as the Oscars. But the article was cogent and did move on to explore the “newly separate black cinema” with its own auteurs and stars and political rifts—and anyway, I was looking for the injustice done to Whoopi.

And there it was... not. After recounting the triumphs of Denzel Washington and Halle Berry in 2002, Dargis and Scott write: “Real change seemed to have come to movies or at least the Academy, which had given statuettes to a total of seven black actors in the previous 73 years. After Mr. Washington and Ms. Berry, there would be Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker (both best actors); Morgan Freeman (best supporting actor); Jennifer Hudson and Mo’Nique (best supporting actresses).” [italics mine]

“After Mr. Washington and Ms. Berry” Goldberg’s Oscar came more than a decade earlier and wouldn’t have been relevant to the authors’ argument—unless they’d posed the idea that her character, a high-strung charlatan preying on the poor and credulous of her community, wasn’t much of an advance from Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy, which probably wouldn’t have made Goldberg too happy either. Goldberg accepted the commiserations of her fellow hosts (Elizabeth Hasselbeck announced, melodramatically, that she was canceling her Times subscription, which no one could have dreamed she had) and then sat back, having restored her precious sense of self.

The next day she half-apologized. She said it was not “shoddy reporting” but let herself off the hook because the piece was “confusingly written.” It was, of course, nothing of the sort. What I imagine happened was that Goldberg saw the headline, scanned the list of actors for her name, and then suffered what Freud called, “a narcissistic injury.” “This is an article about African-Americans who have won Academy Awards and my name isn’t mentioned! Are they trying to say I don’t exist??? Maybe I don’t exist” Having been roundly ignored for her hambone turn in this year’s execrable For Colored Girls…, she was very likely waiting (hoping?) for some slight that would allow her to use her powerful platform to remind her audience that she’d once won an Oscar and had been a box-office draw.

Why is this fascinating? Because in show business, narcissistic injuries and their attendant rages happen every day and at every level. Producers, directors, agents, publicists, spouses, and even entertainment journalists witness them and are not infrequently wounded (or devastated) by them. They are, in many instances, the primary mode of communication between performers and their co-workers and lackeys. But you almost never see them in public, at least if you’re not standing next to them when they realize they’ll actually have to cross the street to get to their limo or they think that someone has looked at them funny. Heinz Kohut, who coined the term “narcissistic rage,” said, according to our trusty Wikipedia, that “narcissists may even search for conflict to find a way to alleviate pain or suffering.” One of a publicist's main tasks is keep those rages under wraps. But this time there was no publicist between Goldberg and her huge national audience, and no one on camera with the intellectual stature to tell her to shut up and read the article.

I suppose we should be grateful for this peek inside the dressing room of a tortured human psyche.

Speaking of the Oscars, despite my professed superiority toward them (probably triggered by one of the many narcissistic injuries to which I am prone), I shall be live-blogging the ceremony for Vulture But really, who isn’t?

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A Q&A with the great Frank Langella

Tue, 8 Feb 2011 10:13:57 -0500

If you’re near Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville on Thursday, February 10 (or even if you’re not), come see the wonderful 2007 film Starting Out in the Evening and its even more wonderful star, Frank Langella, in an onstage Q&A with yours truly. (My original review is here.) The screening is under the auspices of Pelham’s vintage The Picture House theater (currently being renovated) and will be introduced by the novel’s author, Brian Morton, who teaches fiction at Sarah Lawrence and NYU. I’ve had the excellent excuse in the last weeks not just to re-watch Starting Out, Frost/Nixon, Good Night, and Good Luck, Dracula, and other familiar films, but to see him as a strangely beautiful juvenile in taped versions of the stage plays The Seagull and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (both with Blythe Danner at her most enchanting) and also in the title role of Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg (my favorite). My other discovery was the 1994 HBO movie The Doomsday Gun, in which Langella plays the intensely over-engaged weapons manufacturer Gerald Bull, who nearly finished a gun that might have given Saddam Hussein the power to take out targets 1000 miles away with one blast. A terrific film and performance. Sometimes, I really love this job.

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John Barry: License to Thrill

David Edelstein — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 5:45:38 -0500

If the success of multiple lousy “franchises” is any indication, moviegoers can be conditioned to salivate on cue—and nothing made us drool like the James Bond theme of John Barry, who died yesterday at age 77. Official credit went, of course, to Monty Norman, the contracted Dr. No composer, but over the years it trickled out that the suspenseful, thrumming dum-da-da-da-DA-dum-dum-dum, dum-da-da-da-DA-dum-dum-dum and the ejaculatory horns had Barry’s superlative stamp.

The Bond overtures are irresistible: We are behind a roving riflescope (or as the Republicans would say, surveyor’s wheel) as 007 strolls nonchalantly into the frame—whereupon he whips around, Beretta suddenly in hand, and fires into the screen. His would-be assassin’s blood runs down, a crimson curtain, and we are conquered. And Barry went on to write the greatest of all title songs, “Goldfinger,” with those horns kicked up a notch—to the point where producers worried it would be camp. It was and it wasn't: Shirley Bassey transcended camp. And Barry ingeniously weaved the Bond theme in and out of the “Goldfinger” melody, bonding hero and villain in unholy matrimony. Almost as magnificent is Barry’s “Space March” in You Only Live Twice, which builds to thunderous climax as the astronauts’ capsule is swallowed up by what looks like a giant, orbiting anemone. Most of Barry’s other scores are unashamedly melodic—not, with the exception of his work in Born Free, as memorable but always welcome. His waltz from the risible The Betsy is one of my guiltier pleasures: After 33 years, I can remember the lovely, flickering credit sequence, with its tour of brilliant automobiles through the ages. But it’s Barry’s Bond scores that gave those movies their a license to kill.

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Filed Under: james bond ,john barry ,movies ,obits ,the projectionist

Edelstein: The Oscars Have Thrown Me a (Winter’s) Bone

David Edelstein — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:15:03 -0500

Given the nonstop Oscar odds-making and chatter, it feels, minutes after the 2010 nominations have been announced, as if they’re old news. But that’s not entirely the case: Now it has all been certified. Now when I tell people I think that Winter’s Bone was the best movie of 2010 and they say, “What the hell is that? You pretentious critics pick movies we’ve never heard of. What about Inception?” I can reply, “Well, I might be pretentious but you’re an ignoramus, since Winter’s Bone was nominated for Best Picture, just like motherfucking Inception, the dumb person’s idea of a smart movie that you had to see three times.” (Some chucklehead on NBC’s Today seemed quite taken aback that Winter's Bone made it over The Town. The Town!) John Hawkes as Uncle “Teardrop” in Winter’s Bone was nominated: I think I wanted that one more than any other. Hawkes, a gifted, unsung actor, is now on the map. Dale Dickey in the same film was a long shot: She lost out to Hailee Steinfeld for her lead performance in True Grit (she’s in virtually every scene before the epilogue) and another psycho matriarch, Animal Kingdom’s Jacki Weaver, who has been making the rounds in L.A. and has a lovely Aussie accent.

No Mark Wahlberg. Eeek: Now people will have to sit through Biutiful. Javier has already sent roses to Julia Roberts for the plug.

Good for Jeremy Renner, a most convincing sociopath in The Town and Amy Adams in The Fighter, less showy than Melissa Leo but even more fun. (Omigod that was my name saying nice things about her on The Fighter commercial after Peter Travers and A.O. Scott! They like me! They really like me!) I didn’t expect Nicole Kidman to get a nod for Rabbit Hole, but I’m happy she did: It’s her best performance in film that many critics stupidly overlooked. (It was no Greenberg!) And Banksy has a nomination!

Sorry, I have to lower the volume on my TV “So now it’s going to come down to a race between The Social Network and The King’s Speech?” “Yeah, I thought The King’s Speech had been knocked out by the Globes but then the Producer’s Guild ” blah blah blah blah blah .

Some of the awards are probably already locked up: Leo, Christian Bale, Colin Firth — who gave unquestionably the best performance of 2009, in A Single Man, losing to Jeff Bridges, who’s better in True Grit than in the mawkish country-western picture he won for Will Natalie Portman win for, like Bale, losing all that weight and showing the effort? The first rule for winning acting awards: You must show the effort. One of Julianne Moore’s lightest and funniest and most charming performances is in The Kids Are All Right, but without the foreign accent or the terminal disease …: no way.

Now we can forget about the other great films and performances of 2010: Annette Bening in Mother and Child (well, she had no chance for that one anyway), Moore, Mark Wahlberg, Jim Carrey, Dickey, Ryan Gosling, Aaron Eckhart. So many more.

On to the important race: Harvey Weinstein (King's Speech) versus Scott Rudin (Social Network). Preferably in the ring trained by Christian Bale with Amy Adams and Melissa Leo shrieking from the sidelines, "Hit him again, Hahvey!" "Bust his fuckun' face, Scott." "Go for the fuckin' kidneys, Hahvey!!!!"

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Filed Under: biutiful ,melissa leo ,movies ,oscars ,the fighter ,the king's speech ,the social network ,the town ,winter's bone