Watch Your Step in "Animal Kingdom"

There are many films about young men who become criminals or delinquents thanks to the bad influence of unscrupulous relatives, but I don't think there have been any quite like "Animal Kingdom," an Australian crime film about a tight-knit family of career criminals. Our teenage hero is Joshua Cody, nicknamed J (James Frecheville), who moves in with his grandmother, Janine (Jacki Weaver), after his mother does of an overdose. J is quiet and keeps to himself, showing no interest in the dealings of his uncles, Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), Darren (Luke Ford), and Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), and their pal Baz (Joel Edgerton). Instead, he prefers spending his time with his girlfriend Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), and does his best to distance himself from his home life. However, all Cody brothers either live with Janine or are at the house constantly, making it difficult for J to avoid being present at the wrong times. Eventually a job goes wrong and the police start to take an interest, led by Officer Leckie (Guy Pearce). Suddenly J may know too much, and his loyalties are called into question.

A key element that makes "Animal Kingdom" distinctive from so many other similar crime stories is its suburban setting. The Cody brothers are not ghetto dwellers or suit-wearing sophisticates. They plan their jobs in living rooms and bedrooms, often with their mother or their girlfriends in close proximity. This does not mean that their crimes are more innocuous. The film depicts several acts of violence, heightened by the fact that they take place in backyards or familiar neighborhood streets. The most intense and upsetting one plays out on Janine's living room couch. Likewise, the characters behave like normal, everyday people. All the various relationships within a criminal hierarchy we usually see in mobster films like "The Godfather," are condensed into the simplest family dynamics. How the Cody brothers relate to each other, and how their mother figures into their operation is vital to understanding their actions and motivations.

I wish I'd seen the film before knowing that Jacki Weaver's performance was getting accolades left and right, including a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. She maintains a wonderful, warm presence as a loving mother and grandmother for so much of the film, with all these little domestic mannerisms that totally put the viewer off guard. And then her dark side emerges, without warning, and it's absolutely terrifying. Her performance is only one of several excellent ones in the film. Ben Mendelsohn as Pope, the most dangerous and unstable of the brothers, manages to be a real menace and a pathetic figure at the same time. And then there's James Frecheville, who will be one to watch in the future. He keeps J such a stoic presence, but not so much that you can't sense the conflicted emotions and adolescent frustrations below the surface.

In the wrong hands, this story could have been maudlin or overly bleak, but there's a good balance to "Animal Kingdom," particularly in the way that it uses J as an observer. His dialogue is sparse in the early going, and his relatives have such big personalities that the audience may forget, as the Codys sometimes do, that J is there with them in the scene. There are some instances where he provides narration of his inner thoughts, but these are brief and mostly disappear after the initial introductions to the characters. This means that while J is certainly the protagonist and always has our sympathies, the audience isn't privy to what he's thinking most of the time, and his actions can be unpredictable. The POV will also switch among the various members of the family, giving us different, revealing views of each character. Some of J's most interesting character development happens when he isn't onscreen, through his uncles or Janine by proxy.

The film's weakness, perhaps, is that the narrative ends up a little scattered, and some of the characters get lost in the shuffle. I got tripped up by the Australian accents here and there, but I was left far more disoriented by abrupt cuts and some rushed events. Nicky's family appears a few times and would seem to be important to later events in the film, but they curiously disappear. I liked the ending scenes, but the sequence immediately leading up to it feels slightly incomplete, like several important details were forgotten or left out. Too little exposition is always better than too much, but this was one of those cases where we could have used a little more.

But these are small complaints about one of the better coming-of-age crime stories I've seen in a while. Jacki Weaver's got my vote on Oscar night, and I'm glad her nomination means more people will be seeking out this film.

The 1998 Best Picture Deathmatch Revisited

Oh boy. Here we go again.

"The King's Speech" cleaned up at the Director's Guild and Screen Actor's Guild Awards over the weekend, and picked up a Best Picture win from the Producer's Guild before that. Since these are the people who will actually be voting for the Academy Awards, "The King's Speech" is now the frontrunner at the Oscars. Up to this point, the favorite had been "The Social Network," which dominated the major categories at nearly every critics' award, including Best Picture, Director, and Writing at the Golden Globe's. "Social Network" boosters, with the help of many still-smarting Christopher Nolan fans, are putting out conspiracy theories left and right. The Academy Award voters are older and more conservative, so they're more receptive to a WWII British costume drama than a movie about social networking. Richard Corliss over at TIME magazine suggests that sentiment tends to win out over daring.. And there's been one common refrain in many of these arguments - if "The King's Speech" does win Best Picture, it'll be just like what happened with "Shakespeare in Love" and "Saving Private Ryan."

Because "Saving Private Ryan" was cheated, you see. According to a very vocal and insistent group of cinephiles, Steven Spielberg's WWII epic was the clear and obvious choice to take home a Best Picture Oscar over the period romantic comedy, "Shakespeare in Love." The 1998 race was a memorable one, where "Private Ryan" was the early favorite that won many key awards, including the Best Picture Golden Globe in the Drama category. It was the highest grossing film of 1998 in the U.S., and the second highest worldwide. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Tom Hanks, both multiple-Oscar winners at the height of their popularity. It was built up by the critics and the press and the advertising gurus as the major event film of the year. So how on earth did "Shakespeare in Love" run away with the big prize? Fingers are often pointed at Harvey Weinstein, the head of Miramax at the time. He poured money into advertisements for "Shakespeare in Love," aggressively campaigning for Oscar gold on an unprecedented level. Was it hype and Hollywood politics that helped "Shakespeare" to the win?

Possibly. The campaigning certainly raised awareness, and that awareness might have been what pushed "Shakespeare" over the top. However, that doesn't mean the movie wasn't a deserving winner. I've had to be a defender of "Shakespeare in Love" many times. I adore the film. I think it deserved to win Best Picture. It's one of the few non-animated features I actually own a copy of. This is not to say that I dislike "Saving Private Ryan." It's technically immaculate, beautifully directed, and an epic in every sense of the word. But that said, you only have to look at which film won which awards on Oscar night to see where its weaknesses are. "Saving Private Ryan" picked up five statuettes, for Best Director, Cinematography, Editing, and two technical awards for Sound and Sound Editing. "Shakespeare in Love" took home seven, including Best Actress and Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Score, Art Direction, and Costumes. What "Shakespeare" lacked in visceral technical craft, it more than made up for with a brilliant Tom Stoppard script, top caliber performances, and spectacular design work.

And yet "Private Ryan" continues to be canonized as one of the Academy's most shocking mistakes, right up there with "Citizen Kane" losing to "How Green Was My Valley" and "Brokeback Mountain" losing to "Crash." Frankly, I'm not sure "Saving Private Ryan" was even the best WWII film nominated for 1998. Terrence Malick's meditative "The Thin Red Line" was also up for Best Picture that year, but couldn't dream of summoning up the kind of clout or goodwill behind "Saving Private Ryan" to keep in in contention. If "Shakespeare in Love" won Best Picture due to hype and pandering, it's only fair to point out that "Saving Private Ryan" didn't have any deficit of them either. I mean, really. A WWII epic about bringing a last surviving son home to his mother, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks? With buckets of weepy sentiment, mostly of the male-bonding variety, that no doubt went straight for the jugular of those older, more conservative Academy voters? This had Oscar bait written all over it from the start, and it's no wonder so many people thought it was a sure thing.

Picking "Shakespeare in Love" was actually a pretty bold break from tradition, as a romantic comedy hadn't won Best Picture in over twenty years. And its status as an upbeat crowd-pleaser didn't necessarily factor in its favor. "Shakespeare's" win followed a string of Best Picture winners with tragic endings like "Titanic," "The English Patient," and "Braveheart." I can sympathize with the fans of "Saving Private Ryan" who believe that a lesser film with limited prospects only won because an overzealous promoter drummed up massive, but only brief support of the film. Current Amazon DVD sales rankings say differently, though. There's every indication that people still love both films.

In the end, I almost never hear either "Saving Private Ryan" or "Shakespeare in Love" brought up in any nerdy film discussion these days except to reference that bygone Oscar battle. This tells me that the campaigning for the films ended up overshadowing the films themselves. And which of the Best Picture nominees has been gaining the most in reputation, prestige, and visibility in the intervening years? "The Thin Red Line." And Terrence Malick's gone and made himself the next Stanley Kubrick while we weren't looking.

I think "The King's Speech" and "The Social Network" are about equally deserving of Best Picture. Who will win may have nothing to do with their actual quality, of course, but that doesn't mean that the old v. young, sentimental v. intellectual, and populist v. critical narratives people are trying to shoehorn the race into are good reflections of what's actually going on. Who wins may say everything or nothing about the direction or biases or relevance of the Academy. As always, it's a mystery.

It's possible that the Academy voters will vote for the film that they like best. Or the film they think had the most artistic merit. Or the most popular and hyped up film with the best ad campaign. The important thing to remember is that these categories are not mutually exclusive and never were.

About That Psycho Ballerina Movie

Once upon a time, a filmmaker named Darren Aronofsky had the bright idea to make a film about ballet, specifically about a chaste, sheltered young ballerina named Nina (Natalie Portman) struggling to dance the role of the Swan Queen in a new production of Swan Lake. The Swan Queen is a dual role that requires the dancer to embody both the White Swan, a fragile innocent, and the Black Swan, a dark seductress. Nina, obsessed with perfecting her performance, has the tragic White Swan down pat, but is unable to summon her evil twin. Nina's sexual awakening and the emergence of her inner demons parallel the plot of the ballet. This includes the presence of Lily (Mila Kunis), a sexually adventurous rival who may be out to sabotage Nina, and a fickle male savior in the form of the ballet company's director, Tomas (Vincent Cassel).

Two older women also help drive the story and serve as cautionary examples for Nina. A constant pressure is Nina's relationship with her suffocating mother Erica (Barbara Hershey), an embittered former dancer. And then there's Beth (Winona Ryder), the company's prima ballerina who is being forced into retirement and not taking it well, to say the least. Aronofsky's approach is to take all of these elements and push them to almost ridiculous extremes. It's not enough that Lily threatens to seduce every male in sight, but she also targets Nina, leading to the much ballyhooed lesbian sex scene in the second act. Beth not only becomes self-destructive, but self-mutilating and barking mad. And then there's Nina's transformation into the black swan, literally, with the help of makeup effects and CGI animation. The movie only gets away with it because Nina may be imagining some or all these things, as part of an intense mental breakdown.

Aronofsky has gone and pulled a Quentin Tarantino on us. "Black Swan," which is ostensibly a melodrama about pressures and rivalries in the world of classical ballet, turns out to be a slasher flick in disguise. And it's not only a slasher flick, but one that also has elements of 70s sexploitation, horror films, and more than a little camp. They're all elevated and refined to a degree, of course, but you can spot the genre influences everywhere. The first half of the film is similar to psychological thrillers in the tradition of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby." And then comes the gore and the sex and the CGI feathers, and suddenly the picture takes a hard left turn straight into flesh-melting David Cronenberg territory. It's awfully fun to watch, but also very disconcerting for any viewer caught unawares by all the graphic content.

Compared to Aronofsky's other films, "Black Swan" may have structural similarities to "The Wrestler," but its use of magic realism and a smorgasbord of visual tricks, recalls the visceral misery of his drug-addiction epic, "Requiem for a Dream." As an audience, we're used to seeing ballet from a distance, enjoying the illusion of seemingly effortless physical grace. In "Black Swan," we get an uncomfortably up-close look at the demands of maintaining that illusion. The costs of being a professional dancer of a certain caliber are high, and it's hard to keep from wincing at the lengths Nina is willing to go to in order to acheive perfection. Aronofsky spares us nothing, focusing on warped limbs and abraded skin, and turning a simple act of personal grooming into one of the most nerve-wracking moments of the film.

The director's shock-and-awe tactics aside, the movie belongs to Natalie Portman. After years of manic-pixie-dreamgirls and comic-book heroines, it's good to see her branching out into more interesting territory. The physical demands of the role alone are staggering, but Portman plays so many different facets and projections of the fractured Nina, in several scenes she's effectively acting against herself. Aronofsky uses tight shots that focus on her upper body, possibly to help fudge some of the dancing, but this means that Portman looms intimately large in the frame, often dead center, for most of the film. And we never see her falter for a second. Her performance is vital in grounding the outlandish elements that Aronosky keeps throwing at us, especially the campier sexual encounters that could have gone very wrong if Portman wasn't so convincing.

I liked the other performances, especially Winona Ryder and Mila Kunis making the most of smaller roles, but the narrative doesn't linger for very long with any of them. Rather, Matthew Libatique's hallucinatory cinematography, Clint Mansell's thunderous arrangements of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," and Craig Henighan's sound design come off as the more vital contributions to "Black Swan." I wouldn't be surprised if Swan Lake sees a resurgence in popularity after this film, though the usual, older audience for ballet is probably going to be very put off by it. My only real complaint about "Black Swan" is with its marketing. Ever Oscar ad and commercial has been signaling that this is a typical awards' season prestige pic, when in fact it's one of the most intense and effective horror films in years.

So if you see one bisexual ballerina blood-curdler this year, see "Black Swan"!

Of Course There Should Be A "Tiger Mother" Movie

If you haven't heard of Amy Chua and her parenting memoir, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," by now, you are officially out of the loop. Excerpts published in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago set off a boisterous debate about American versus Chinese parenting styles. Were the extreme tough love methods Chua depicted helpful or hurtful? Everyone seems to have an opinion or a response. Every Asian-American I know has been quick to point out that not all Chinese mothers are like Chua, though her tactics and her mindset are awfully familiar. The "Tiger Mother" controversy has lingered in the public consciousness for an unusually long time, a cultural moment that is going to be used as a point of reference for years to come. Of course, the book is selling like mad.

So it's no surprise that Hollywood is interested. Other recent adaptations of women's memoirs have included "Eat, Pray Love," "Julie & Julia," and "The Devil Wears Prada." It's not a genre that gets much press, but these tell-alls have always been a staple of cinema aimed at women. "Tiger Mother" would seem to be a perfect choice for adaptation, with its newfound cultural cachet, and ability to rouse strong emotions. There are early stirrings of putting "Tiger Mother" on the big screen, according to The Hollywood Reporter. However, there's one big problem that will significantly impact the likelihood of an adaptation actually being made. As a literary agent interviewed for the HR article points out, studios may balk at the prospect of a film starring an Asian lead actress.

I know Hollywood is a far more conservative town that it's reputed to be. I know that the content of mainstream films has always lagged woefully far behind social reality in terms of racial representation and diversity. I know there have been some significant gains for minority actors and actresses in recent years, especially on television. I know we have to patient. That said, comments like this always make me want to throttle the big-shot Hollywood creative types. The prevailing attitude toward the marketability of minority actors and actresses is a self-fulfilling prophecy. No lead roles for Asian actresses means they'll never have the opportunity to break out and become box office draws. And in the name of marketability - rather, in the name of pandering to the segment of the audience they think is secretly racist - I know Hollywood is going to compromise this material.

If a "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" movie gets made, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the Caucasian actor playing Chua's husband, who happens to be Jewish, ends up with top billing. Or if they decide to reframe the events of the book from a Caucasian woman's point of view. Or if they drop Amy Chua and her family completely, and have Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson try to use Chua's parenting tactics on their own adorable onscreen children. Suddenly a book about the Asian-American experience becomes the movie about the white, Middle-American co-option of the Asian-American experience. They've done it so many times before. If the studios can't figure out an angle on "Tiger Mother" that would downplay the involvement of Asian-Americans, its chances of being made into a film will drop like a rock. Sure, they made "The Joy Luck Club" - seventeen frickin' years ago.

The most frustrating thing is, I can think of several familiar Asian-American actresses who could be great Tiger Mothers, mostly from television. There's Sandra Oh, who seems to pop up as a supporting best friend in everything these days. Olivia Munn has been kicking ass on "The Daily Show." Lucy Liu and Ming Na, the closest thing we had to Asian-American movie stars in the 90s, would welcome the work. Or there's a slew of younger actresses who are overdue for a break. A character based on Amy Chua has the potential for all kinds of interesting dimensions, and its a chance for an Asian-American actress that doesn't come along every day.

The movie business has been getting into a lot of these fixes lately, being called out for whitewashing and underrepresentation more and more often. I think it's because the discrepancy between the portrayals of minorities onscreen and actual reality keeps getting wider. America is not going to be a majority Caucasian nation for much longer, and we're already seeing signs of the cultural shift. Hollywood may be squeamish about multiculturalism, but the real world has no such bias, so cinemas are missing out on a lot of great - and potentially lucrative - stories. By the way, when can we expect that movie about the Chilean miners?

Let's get a Tiger Mother on the case. They'll never know what hit them.

Digging "Dogtooth"

I knew "Dogtooth" by reputation before I had a chance to watch it, and cheered it's inclusion on this year's list of nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. It's a film of taboo topics, featuring graphic sexual scenes, bloody violence, incest, and several varieties of abuse. The assumption was that the traditionally conservative voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would find "Dogtooth" too extreme to single out for recognition. However, I'm not surprised they were ultimately won over.

"Dogtooth" is a portrait of a very peculiar Greek family. There is a father (Christos Stergioglou), a mother (Michelle Valley), and three adult children - an older daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia), younger daughter (Mary Tsoni), and a son (Christos Passalis). We learn none of their names, and the children do not appear to possess them anyway. They all live together in domestic comfort, but it soon becomes clear that the parents have never let their offspring leave the enclosed compound where they live, and enforce strict discipline as to every aspect of their behavior, leaving them developmentally stunted. With no other sources of information available, the parents feed the children a steady diet of misinformation and deranged fantasies. Passing airplanes are toys that sometimes crash into the yard. "Telephone" means the salt shaker, and "zombie" is a type of flower. At one point the mother announces that she will be giving birth to two additional children and a dog.

We never learn the motives of the parents, though the film documents them going to elaborate lengths to maintain their stifling little world. There is a constant tension in the household, where the strain of keeping up the act may be starting to weigh too heavily on the father and mother. They rule the household with the constant threat of gut-wrenching violence, but the children, especially the older daughter, are becoming restless and acting out in bizarre and destructive ways. And then there's the outsider, Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), who works as a security guard at the father's place of employment, and is occasionally paid to come to the house, blindfolded, in order to attend to the sexual needs of the son. It's Christina's unstructured interactions with the older daughter that introduce new stimuli into the lives of the deprived children, and disrupt the control of the parents to horrifying effect.


"Dogtooth" is meant to be a metaphorical fable, exploring the the mechanics of tyrannny and deprivation, and their effects on both the subjugated and the subjugators. There are too many holes in the premise for the audience to accept the situation of the family as anything but an artificial construct. For instance, the younger daughter is shown to have access to medical texts and other books, so the whole business with the vocabulary words is unlikely. However, the characters are genuine enough. The way the adult children behave is often frightening and alien - barking like dogs on command, employing brutal violence in minor spats, and reacting abnormally in sexual situations - but they retain enough human impulses to gain our sympathies. Aggeliki Papoulia is especially good as the older daughter, who wants desperately to rebel against the parents, but has no idea how to go about it. Her efforts are hampered both by her lack of knowledge and the utterly warped context of what little information she does have.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos does a wonderful job of turning a friendly domestic home, full of soft pastel colors and warm lighting, into a nightmarish hell from which there is no escape. His characters seem trapped in his frames, squeezed in and ill-fitting, sometimes with their heads and limbs lopped off. Stills from the film could be family snapshots, except that none of the characters ever smile or laugh. During a party scene late in the story, the contrast is starkest. All the accouterments of a joyful celebration are there, from decorative balloons to the childrens' party clothes, but the daughters dance because they are ordered to, and with a petrified stiffness that anticipates terrible punishment if they stop. The sex scenes that have caused such a ruckus are cold and clinical, about the least prurient depictions of sexual activity I've ever seen, though certainly disturbing for other reasons.

There's a strong urge to compare "Dogtooth" to the work of European auteurs Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, who are known for similar acts of extreme cinema sadism. Lanthimos doesn't seem nearly as bleak and fatalistic, though, which I'm thankful for. And though everything is played dead serious, he also has a much better sense of humor. I find his style and his filmmaking sensibility closer to Roy Andersson, the Swedish filmmaker who gave us the pitch-black apocalypse comedy, "Songs From the Second Floor." I hope the Academy Award nomination encourages to Lanthimos to make more films, because I'd love to see more from him. I'll just have to remember to stretch first, in preparation for all the cringing.

Oscar Meta 2011

And now we get to the fun part of the Oscar nominations. After all the nominees have been tallied, surprises and snubs noted, and lists made up of the films we still need to watch - in my case too many - it's time to pull back and look at the big picture. What do the 2011 Academy Award nominees say about the state of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and about the state of American cinema, if it says anything at all?

It's a good year. I think this is the first time in a long time that I've felt the Oscars have been so relevant and in sync with the artistic achievements of the film community and the popular culture at the same time. In the Best Director category are Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher, the Coen brothers, and David O. Russell - the madman behind "I Heart Huckabees"! - an unthinkable prospect just a year or two ago. These are some of the most exciting American filmmakers working today, and they're at the height of their creative powers. Nobody's here because they're a legacy pick or a sentimental favorite. Even Tom Hooper, who directed the most conservative film of the bunch, "The King's Speech," is a relative novice who has mostly worked in television. Personally, I would have booted him in favor of Christopher Nolan in a second, but you could have a really good debate about it on the actual merits of their films.

What's been really surprising is how well the nominated films have been doing at the box office this year. While many would-be holiday blockbusters tanked or underperformed, ticket sales have been robust for the prestige pics like "The Black Swan" and 'The King's Speech." The Social Network," our current Best Picture frontrunner, was a surprise hit in September, pulling in nearly $100 million with no benefit from awards season chatter. When crowd-pleasers "Avatar" and "The Blind Side" muscled into the Best Picture race last year, analysts declared them concessions to populism. This year, the highest grossing nominated films after PIXAR's "Toy Story 3" are "Inception," widely lauded for its intellectually stimulating puzzle-box plot, and "True Grit," the Coen Brothers' western. This year's films are not only more critically acclaimed than the last bunch (higher Metacritic average), but more people have seen them already.

Expanding the number of Best Picture nominees to ten was a great idea. In the past, the Academy was simply not comfortable with nominating certain films, like animated features or genre pictures. Therefore, especially between 2004 and 2007, there was practically no overlap between the Best Picture nominees and the films that audiences actually went out and saw. Oscar viewership plummeted because no one had heard of films like "Babel" and "The Reader." The actual frontrunners for Best Picture still tend to be heavy dramas, but the full list of anointed nominees is now a much better reflection of what the American cinemascape actually looks like. This year in particular showcases a good mix of titles, from the expensive blockbusters to the microbudgeted indies.

This is also having an interesting effect on the content of the films themselves. Thanks to the critical accolades heaped on commercial genre pictures like "The Dark Knight," "Inglorious Basterds," and "District 9," our serious filmmakers are more willing to tackle this kind of material now. Aronofsky's "Black Swan" has been categorized by many as a horror film, with elements of camp. Danny Boyle's "127 Hours" is a desert survival movie. "Inception" is science fiction. The year's big historical drama, "The King's Speech," is much more of a crowd-pleaser than similar nominees of the past like "The Queen" and "Atonement." And with the caveat that these things tend to be cyclical, there have been indications that movie viewers are warming up to films with more substance, in reaction to too many disappointments at the multiplex.

I expect that audiences are coming because the best films of the year are more accessible now than they've been in the past, but this probably isn't by chance. Getting cynical for a minute, the independent film market took a dive with the recession that it hasn't fully recovered from. More challenging films with fewer commercial prospects were less likely to be bought and distributed, and thus less likely to get financed and made at all. This year's major nominees may be more diverse in terms of genre and themes, but the Academy has also taken a few steps back in other areas. There are no films with cross cultural elements, no big foreign language contenders, no social justice or "message" movies ("The Kids Are All Right" is far more nuanced than you've heard), and the acting nominees are overwhelmingly Caucasian, with the iffy exception of Javier Bardem for the Spanish language "Biutiful."

The last few years have also given us a bumper crop of miserable, angst-ridden pictures, like "Precious," "No Country For Old Men," "Frost/Nixon," and "The Hurt Locker," perhaps reflecting the mood of the creative community and the psychological impact of larger national and global conflicts. In 2008, Jon Stewart asked during his Academy Awards ceremony hosting gig, "Does this town need a hug?" So it's nice to be have a roster of Best Picture nominees that isn't so depressing, and I can actually prod friends and relations to come see them with me. On the other hand, I don't want the pendulum swing too far back in the other direction either. Relevance and popularity are two different things, and shouldn't be confused. I don't want to see films like "Precious" disappear, simply because they're harder to sell and champion.

Finally, there's this whole New Hollywood v. Old Hollywood narrative that's being trotted out again. It's good copy, but it's total bunk. "The Social Network" has lots of younger up-and-coming actors and is about Facebook. "The King's Speech" is a costume drama with a middle-aged British monarch. None of the other Best Picture nominees fit the narrative. "True Grit," the other big contender, neatly subverts it by featuring both older and younger leads. Yes, we have a pair of young hosts and lots of younger nominees this year, including Hailee Steinfeld, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jesse Eisenberg. Many older favorites like Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, and Lesley Manville didn't secure predicted acting nominations. And yet, Andrew Garfield ("The Social Network") lost out a spot in the Best Supporting Actor race to John Hawkes ("Winter's Bone") and Mila Kunis ("The Black Swan") couldn't gain traction for Best Supporting Actress against Jacki Weaver ("Animal Kingdom").

Now we head into the month of furious campaigning and conjecture before the big night on February 27th. I plan to enjoy it, as I have no stake in the race and it's fun watching the studio executives tie themselves in knots over dreams of Oscar gold. I hear Harvey Weinstein is pulling out all the stops and threatening to cut "The King's Speech" for a family-friendly version without the therapeutic profanities. Someone, please stop this man before he hurts himself. Other than that, Hollywood, go forth and do battle.

Because it's Oscar season again, the most wonderful time of the year to be a film nerd.

Preliminary Oscar Nomination Reactions

I got up at 5:30AM today just to listen to Mo'Nique and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) president Tom Sherak announce the nominations for nine of the big categories. Yes, I am a film nerd! Yet at this point I've still only seen six of the Best Picture nominations and one of the frontrunners that didn't make the list, so the following analysis is based on all the gossip and politicking and conjecture that's been going on - pretty much the same as everyone else this morning. The list of all the nominees, which I will not reproduce here, can be found by clicking on this link that leads directly to the AMPAS website. Now let's get down to business.

Best Picture - There are no big surprises in this category. Most of the list was hashed out ages ago, with only the last three slots in any real doubt. "Winter's Bone" edged out "The Town" and "Blue Valentine," and also picked up nominations for Actor, Actress, and Writing. If the votes had come due a few weeks later, however, I think "Blue Valentine" would have had a good shot because I've been hearing much more chatter about it. "The Town" was an early favorite that lost a lot of steam over past few months - I found it solid but unspectacular next to "Winter's Bone." And I guess those concerns about "127 Hours" being too visceral for Academy voters to handle wasn't the case - it landed six nominations today.

Best Director - Cue the fanboy wails and lamentations. Where is Christopher Nolan for "Inception"? He picked up an Original Screenplay nod, and the picture netted eight nominations, mostly in technical categories. But no Best Director nod, which means the film's chances at a Best Picture statue have taken a dive. In years past, the directing nominees nearly always mirrored the Best Picture nods, so Nolan's absence suggests that "Inception" might not have gotten a Best Picture nomination if the category was still only limited to five films. Instead, the fifth director slot went to Joel and Ethan Coen for "True Grit," one of the day's big winners with ten nominations.

Best Actor - Probably the biggest surprise of the morning was Javier Bardem's nomination in this category, beating out Robert Duvall for "Get Low" and Ryan Gosling for "Blue Valentine." The Alejando Gonzarez Innaritu film also made an appearance in the Best Foreign Language film category. However, Colin Firth is pretty much a sure thing at this point, having swept nearly every other acting award this year so far for playing King George VI in "The King's Speech." Firth's nomination is one of twelve for "The King's Speech," the biggest haul for any film this year. This is one of my favorites of 2010, so I can vouch that it deserves every last one of them.

Best Actress - There was some suspense over whether Hailee Steinfeld and Lesley Manville would be counted as a lead or supporting actresses, which made this one of the harder categories to predict. Steinfield wound up in the Supporting Actress race, and I suspect Manville would have too if she'd gotten a nomination. This made room for Michelle Williams for "Blue Valentine" and Jennifer Lawrence for "Winter's Bone." The other favorite who didn't make the cut was Julianne Moore for "The Kids are All Right. This is good news for her co-star, Annette Bening, who doesn't have to worry about a potential vote split now, though Natalie Portman is still the one to beat.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role - The Screen Actors Guild nominations turned out to be prescient. John Hawkes, a character actor with a long career of small roles, landed a nomination for "Winter's Bone," squeezing out Andrew Garfield for "The Social Network." This puts their films at four and eight nominations apiece, and might signal that "The Social Network" isn't a sure thing for the major awards. Also making an appearance in this category is Jeremy Renner for "The Town," the only nomination the film wound up with.

Best Actress in a Supporting Roles - I just watched "Animal Kingdom" last night, and Jacki Weaver is right where she should be. Hailee Steinfeld being categorized as a Best Supporting Actress means that there wasn't room for Mila Kunis and Barbara Hershey for "The Black Swan." Melissa Leo and Amy Adams of "The Fighter" are the most prominent contenders here. All these acting nods pushed "The Fighter" to seven nominations, putting it right in the middle of the pack among the Best Picture hopefuls.

Best Writing - "Another Year" only managed one nomination, for Best Original Screenplay. The picture's fortunes have faded since it made the AFI list earlier in the season. Otherwise, the Original and Adapted Screenplay nominations match the Best Picture nominations. The odd one out is "The Black Swan," possibly a sign that the film's chances at a statuette aren't so good. It stacked up five nominations, including a Best Director nod for Darren Aronofsky, though, so I wouldn't count it out of the running yet.

And the Rest - I am stunned that "TRON: Legacy" failed to score a nomination for Best Visual Effects, even with the unconvincing Jeff Bridges stand-in. And the snub of the Daft Punk score is just criminal. The only nomination "TRON" ended up with was for Sound Editing. On the other hand, I'm tickled that "Dogtooth" got a nod for Best Foreign Language film, relieved that "The Illusionist" pulled through in Best Animated Feature, and kind of boggled that "Unstoppable" got a nomination - also for Sound Editing.

Notable shut-outs and near shut-outs include "Never Let Me Go," "Somewhere," "The Way Back," "Hereafter," "Shutter Island," "The Ghost Writer," "I Love You Phillip Morris," "Four Lions," "Made in Dagenham," "Fair Game," "Conviction," and "I Am Love."

Whew. Okay, that does it for the the preliminary reactions. More in-depth meta ramblings tomorrow.