Completed Category: Cinematography

 This is my first post about a category completed AFTER the nominations were announced -- on Oscar noms night, in fact, at the theatre down the street, seeing Nosferatu. As of the announcement that morning, I had already completed three: Directing, Editing, and Supporting Actress. That night, the weirdo vampire helped me complete two more! 

Cinematography

The Brutalist
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Perez
Maria
Nosferatu

First of all, I always hasten to point out that this is the category that, without it, you couldn't have a film. All the others, it's theoretically possible to make a movie without it - you could have a movie with no Supporting Actor, or no Original Song, or no Sound, or no Visual Effects.  You could even do something totally weird and indie and avant garde and, like, make a movie fully improvised on the street with no Screenplay and no Production Design, or even no Directing. But Cinematography IS the filming. We wouldn't be here without it!

Second of all, when you look at these five nominees, you just might go... Huh?!

On nominations morning, I sat there hoping against hope that Angelina Jolie, she of the declining buzz, would swoop back in to the conversation, get a Lead Actress nomination, and take the place of the man (Gascon) who got nominated instead. When Cinematography was announced and Maria was included, I thought, Wow! That bodes well for Angelina! Alas, it did not. It boded unwell. 

The movie Maria was bizarre, unsettling, fascinating (if, like me, you didn't know how messed up Maria Callas was nor how much of a jackwad Ari Onassis was), and a real dig-deep endeavor for Angelina.  While she was overlooked (which I would accept, if not for the whole man thing), the movie did manage to snag this nomination. Cinematographer Ed Lachman has been here (nominated) before, for Far From Heaven (ugh), Carol (ugh), and last year's weirdo El Conde (manic pixie exorcist movie). He explained the following to the Los Angeles Times about shooting the film: "We have the 35mm black-and-white for her memory of the past, Super 8 to show the intimacy with the people closest to her, 16mm is of this documentary crew filming her and then 35mm color is the master point of view."  Wow, right! Did I notice all that as I watched it?  I surely did not. But, I did notice, as an amateur viewer, that it was really cool and interesting how they went into the flashbacks, and how we were carried through the different parts of this movie. It is truly an interesting and compelling cinematography accomplishment. 

But, you know we are going to hear a lot about a few other flicks here, so let's take a quick look. The ugh of ughs, Emilia Perez, is here. Blah blah blah it transcends narrative filmmaking blah blah.  Too bad its end result is a big ol' mess. Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume has a lot of jabber to say about how the camera depicted the movement and vision and characters' thoughts and all sorts of other mumbo jumbo and who cares. If this wins here on Oscar night, it's time to start worrying about this dumb flick collecting way too many awards. 

Luckily it has some very stiff competition in Dune: Part Two and The Brutalist.  Greig Fraser was not only nominated for first Dune, he won! Can he repeat?  I'd like that. Dune is so pretty! And Dune: Part Two was better than the first. But #TIL that our man Greig did not read the book Dune - he purposefully, specifically did not read it, nor watch any other interpretations or anything else anyone had done with Dune, so that he was only reckoning with the script and then working with Denis Villenueve and company. I find that fascinating!  

As for The Brutal-est, the cinematographer is named Lol! That's a fun name. Lol Crawley certainly contributed to the intense pummeling that the film gives the viewer, and he seriously might win just on the strength of that looking up askew at the Statue of Liberty, alone! I won't be that mad if he does win. 

Lastly, after seeing those four films above and after the nominations announcement, I headed to my local cool old theatre down the road on nominations night and watched Nosferatu.   Let me be the first to say that I did NOT love this film but that I found it incredibly lush and visual and very cool to look at.  And cinematographer Jarin Blaschke talked about what a challenge it was to shoot so many scenes in darkness, and how he really played with moonlight and shooting people for "page after page of dialogue" in no lights. This is all quite an accomplishment.  However, he was previously nominated for The Lighthouse, which is an Oscar nominee that I have not seen and am actually terrified of seeing. So should I hold this against him?  (ha) 

Well, there is a lot of great work going on here, so, once again, it's totally OK for four of these flicks to win, but one will cause me to throw things at the TV. 

What's your Cinematography nominee of choice? 

Order I want them to win:  Nosferatu or Maria, Dune: Part Two or The Brutalist, then E.P.

Order I think they will win:  The Brutalist, Dune: Part Two, Nosferatu, Emilia Perez, Maria  

Completed Category: Supporting Actress

 We'll make this quick, because this category - so often a fraudulent mess - is a total fraudulent mess. 

Actress In A Supporting Role

Monica Barbaro *A Complete Unknown
Ariana Grande * Wicked
Felicity Jones * The Brutalist
Isabella Rossellini * Conclave
Zoe Saldana * Emilia Perez 

(Pretend that there are a tilde and an accent mark where they belong. 

The smart money, if you will, says Zoe Saldana will win or possibly Ariana Grande, maybe, just possibly.  Neither one of them deserves to win, because they are both co-stars in their respective movies. They are actresses in leading roles, and their nominations here are nonsense. 

Of the actual Supporting performances: 

Monica Barbaro is freaking fantastic, like the others in A Complete Unknown, which is way less of a traditional biopic and way more of a study of some humans who came together, talked, sang, loved, learned, clashed, and changed the world. 

Felicity Jones, I suspect, might become another Cate Blanchett/Michelle Williams/Meryl Streep type who can show up to work knowing a nomination is a real possibility.  She does a lot in The Brutal-est (I mean - they all do. Of all my criticisms, I've certainly not said that was an easy flick to make!) but it's all so brooding and dark and dismal - I'm not thinking she's going to be the dark horse who surges ahead here. 

Isabella Rossellini?  I love her in Conclave  and the way she sure has some stuff to say to all the pontiff-icating men is stand-up-and-cheer time, for sure.  I would love for her to sneak in and grab that Oscar away from the excellent, fraudulent stars. 

Order I saw the movies: 
Conclave, Wicked, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, Emilia Perez

Order I like them:  Similar!  3-way tie, then Brutal-est, then ugh

Order I want their SUPPORTING actresses to win:
Monica for A Complete Unknown, Isabella for Conclave, Felicity for The Brutalist

Order I think they will win:  Zoe, Ariana, Isabella, Monica, Felicity

Category fraud is so goddamn stupid. 

Completed Category: Editing

It has been a full week since the Oscar nominations were announced and I've somehow only found time to post about one category. This is, of course, because #IAmVeryBusy. I am looking forward to soon being less #VeryBusy. 

This is another category that I had already completed even before the noms were announced! 

Film Editing

Anora *Sean Baker
The Brutalist * David Jancso
Conclave * Nick Emerson
Emilia Perez * Juliet Welfling
Wicked * Myron Kerstein 

With Editing, first we always have to dispel the notion that editing is "cutting down time."  Of course cutting time is part of it, but anyone who stops to think for three and a half seconds about how a film is made knows about "take one!" "cut!" and filming in various locations.  Therefore, anyone who stops to think for three and a half seconds realizes that an editor does not sit down with a complete linear seven hour film to cut down to two. (Or, you know, nearly four.)  An editor sits down with multiple piles of filmstrips (lolz, it's so obviously all digital now) to craft and construct together into a film. 

Come to think of it, how do we know the editor sits down?  S/he might do some of this work standing up. Standing desks are very healthy! 

Anyway, here are the things we notice about the list of five editing nominees right away, having recently contemplated the Directing nominees: 

- Three of the nominated films are the same: Anora, The Brutal-est, EmiliaUghPerez 
- Two scored Editing nods, not directing: Conclave, Wicked 
(bye-bye A Complete Unknown, The Substance) 
- Sean Baker edited his own movie!  (Anora) 

That last is interesting, because of course I believe firmly that everybody needs an editor - who is not him/herself! It is priceless to have the outside perspective willing to cut things that you fiercely cling to simply because you "had to climb a mountain to get it" as the expert told the amateur in a wonderful anecdote Annie Dillard shared in The Writing Life. And also because after I initially saw Anora a couple months ago, my criticism (besides Why Are Men!) was that it dragged in parts. I read some of Sean Baker's thoughts on editing, and he always edits his own films AND always takes a several months break after shooting before beginning the editing, Like, six months he said, for Anora.  This is all very interesting, and I think he did a fine job of editing Anora. 

But, I don't think he had the most challenging job in a category with Wicked, Emilia Perez, and even dear gods The Brutalist. 

David Jancso, who edited the challenging film experience I think of as The Brutal-est, is Hungarian and millennial, and I'm really starting to fantasize about having an entirely Gen X set of Oscar winners, but that is of course beside the point. He also edited Dev Patel's recent directorial debut, Monkey Man, and Pieces of A Woman - remember Vanessa Kirby a few years back?  But! We have an exciting controversy a-brewin' here with his work this year!  Jancso and the flick have come under fire for using artificial intelligence (AI) in the editing process to "tweak" the Hungarian vowel sounds spoken by Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones! They apparently used "Respeecher," an AI technological aid, for some of the parts where Brody and Jones speak Hungarian, to make them sound more like native Hungarian speakers, since there are vowel sounds in that language that don't exist in other languages.  Now some folks are mad that AI was used at all and call for the film to be disqualified.  Woo-hoo, a big AI controversy!  I am definitely on team shut-the-fck-up-about-how-wonderful-AI-is, so I find this juicy and delicious. And of course, I have taught language and studied multiple languages for years and years and am well aware that many languages contain sounds your mouth will simply never learn to make if it isn't your native language.  So, what do you think? Is this a fair use of editing technology?  Is it like digitally aging or un-aging someone?  Brody and Jones apparently studied Hungarian for months and learned to speak it; is it OK to tweak their vowels?  Ahhh, life can be so brutal. 

Speaking of people with questionable, tweakable languge accents, Emilia Perez is a hot mess but honestly Editing might be one of the nominations or even awards it deserves. (I said the same thing about the travesty that was Everything Everywhere All At Once.) Like, if you can assemble this shitshow into something that is reasonably cohesive and recognizable as a two-hour narrative, you have indeed accomplished something.  Juliette Welfling is a previous nominee in this category for the wonderful The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and she has edited previous Jacques Audiard films, but this was her first time editing a musical. A challenge, a learning experience, and she pulled it all together into... well, something. IndieWire quoted her as saying "there's nothing realistic in this movie; it's about anything."  Indeed! 

Also not realistic, but much much much more beautiful, entertaining, and about something is Wicked. Myron Kerstein (Gen X-er!) is also a previous nominee in this category, for tick, tick...BOOM!  He also worked on Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights, and a ton of other stuff. I think Wicked was spectacularly assembled, and it is interesting to note that they filmed everything, to the tune of 250 hours, and now of course split it into the two movies, of which we this year have Wicked Part One.  That's an interesting component of editing choices, not just divvying up footage but creating the two stories, the tone, the leave-'em-wanting-more feelings...  Myron told Filmmaker magazine that musicals are the hardest thing he could ever cut because there are so many balls in the air and so many things that could go wrong. But with Wicked, I would say those things decidedly went right. 

As for Conclave, I love that film. The editor, Nick Emerson is from Northern Ireland and has a whole bunch of experience editing a whole bunch of different stuff, and I think he might be Gen X, although I don't have a confirmed birthdate. What I do have is a link to  this interview with him from CineMontage, and I highly recommend it for a look at what editing can be like, and what subtle and cool choices went into editing this film. The editing of a highly talky film that superbly builds tension and masters pacing and multiple points of view is a thing to behold. 

Order in which I saw these flicks: Conclave, Wicked, Anora, The Brutalist, Emilia Perez
Order in which I like them:  same 
Order in which I want them to win this category: 
Conclave or Wicked, then Emilia Perez, then The Brutalist or Anora 

Order in which I think they will win:  Hmmmmm...
Maybe Conclave, The Brutalist, Emilia Perez, Anora, Wicked

I could see myself maybe being a film editor in some parallel universe. Of the many, many jobs that go into making a film, that is certainly up there. 

Which of the nominees do you think has the greatest achievement in Film Editing? 

Completed Category: Directing

 Oh boy, let's kick off some completed category posts! 

Achievement in Directing

Anora *Sean Baker
The Brutalist * Brady Corbet
A Complete Unknown * James Mangold
Emilia Perez * Jacques Audiard
The Substance * Coralie Fargeat 

Directing is always so intense.  And in this category, there are always directors nominated for some very serious flicks, and some staggering accomplishments, and more often than not there is a "what the heck did I just watch," and sometimes those three things overlap. Ooh, like in a Venn diagram! 

As we will discuss several times throughout the course of this bloggage, The Brutalist  should henceforth be known as The Brutal-est, as it pummels you for four unmerciful hours. Well, that's not actually true: you get an intermission!  I like intermission at the theatre; I can easily go get my popcorn refill. Anyway, should Brady Corbet win for The Brutalist?  I mean, he really might do so.  And there are all sorts of #SeriousCinema reasons, but also he took years and years, apparently, to film the thing, and no one thought he could pull it off, of course. The Los Angeles Times called it a "whopper of a film."  At the very least!  And there were some things I liked about it very much - the Original Score for example, which is not this category, and the way he shot the early-on-in-the-flick men-paying-for-sex scene without making it about gazing at women's bodies. At all. This is the complete exact precise opposite of... 

Anora.  Well, well, well, what have we here? Sean Baker (who? I know. This category has all first-time-in-this-category nominees for the first time since James Cameron was the king of the world! Sean Baker is the director of The Florida Project, that's who, so we know he) has a way of getting his movies' long-haired, sharper-than-you-think-they-are, but-also-sharper-tongued, young women  to carry us through a motion picture.  In both of these films of his that I've seen, we watch these people who are a bit less "there but for the grace of god go I" and a bit more "good god, will someone, anyone, make some better choices, please!"  But Anora has captured a lot of viewers' hearts, and as one person I know put it, "That was way better than it had any right being."  I personally very much dig the misfit friends stories, and hooo-boy do we get one of those here.  I can't exactly say that I never wanted this long dark night of lost souls to end, but it was entertaining and propelled you right along. I am not here for anyone to blather on about mistreated "sex workers" and I do not feel sorry for the character Ani, nor her colleagues, and least of all would I ever feel a shred of sympathy for the many, many, many gross disgusting men both in the film and in the real world who buy human flesh. If I walked out of The Brutal-est saying "What just happened to me for four hours?" I walked out of Anora saying "Why are men."  That said, she (the main character) reminds me of the gals from Long Island I met when I lived in New York. Also, Sean Baker is Gen X! We need more Gen  X winners. Like maybe...

Coralie Fargeat!  Who's she?  She was born in the mid-1970s like the coolest kids were, she's French, and she directed The Substance.  I loved The Substance.  Yup, I'm sold.  Did it spiral just a wee bit out of bloody control as it careened toward its ending?  It did.  Do I forgive it this flaw? I absolutely do.  This film is a marvelous work and it's a wonder, but nothing at all like other films I've called "marvelous" or a "wonder" over the years.  It's wild and bizarre and so very L.A. and it tackles profound societal issues and it might earn Demi Moore - Demi Moore! she's one of those very-very-late Baby Boomers who feels like an honorary Gen-Xer - an Oscar. #TeamTheSubstance? Maybe. But I could also find myself on ... 

#TeamACompleteUnknown.  Wow, do I love me some Bob Dylan and some Joan Baez, which you already know if you've known me for more than about five minutes, not that anyone I know is reading this so I still have to document these things for posterity.  And this film with pitch-perfect (no pun intended) performances is not a traditional biopic; it's more of a study of some personalities that came together like atoms bonding and clashing and sharing electrons for a time and exploding into something more and sometimes causing damage and sometimes creating something heretofore undiscovered. It got three well-deserved acting nominations (more on Ed Norton, who is a revelation as Pete Seeger, in his category post coming soon), and the whole thing is so immersive and carefully considered and real, and someone like me whose go-to karaoke song has long been (like, for 2 decades+) Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" was primed and ready for A Complete Unknown, and yes, yes, I treasure it, and James Mangold's magnificent directing is a big reason why.   

You know what I don't treasure?  Emilia Perez. Why does this movie have to be. It is such a freaking trainwreck in so many ways, but oddly, it's not the Directing per se, just the whole entirety of the thing. I mean, don't get me wrong: director Jacques Audiard made a lot of terrible choices, such as making the film in the first place, pretending men can be women, collecting a bunch of terrible songs and terrible song-and-dance numbers and sprinkling them throughout the most implausible nonsense while pretending to take everything seriously, and pummeling the audience with a mix of zaniness and tragedy and plot holes. But it's not like Mamma Mia-shit-production values bad, nor like Everything Everywhere All At Once we-are-in-the-hands-of-10-year-old-boys bad; it's just bad-bad. 

Chronological order in which I saw the flicks over a month and a half:
Anora, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, Emilia Perez, The Substance

Order in which I like the flicks: 
A Complete Unknown 

The Substance

[--gap--]
Anora

[major gap]
The Brutalist

[major serious chasm gap]
Emilia Perez

Order in which I think they will win: 
The Brutalist, Anora, gods forbid Emilia Perez uggggh, A Complete Unknown, The Substance

I would be very happy to be wrong about my winner prediction!  But 4 out of 5 of these can win; the other will cause me to throw things at the TV. 

Category Fraud

 Popping in to say that I was trying to clear old emails from the inbox and in one from Gold Derby, I clicked on the link for the headline "Is There A Fix For Category Fraud?" I was taken to the web site and greeted with the image below!  What a perfect image to use for category fraud: Zoe Saldana, who should be in Lead Actress not Supporting, and Mr. Carlos Gascon, who is not an Actress at all. 🤣🤣

Of course the "experts" answering the reader's question about category fraud said things like "It doesn't bother me."  🙄

I am so completely against either of frontrunners Zoe or Ariana (Grande) winning for Supporting Actress, because they do not belong in that category. Nor do men belong in either Actress category.  Let's go, Demi Moore and Isabella Rossellini! 

Awards Season Never Lets Us Down ...

 ...especially if we are expecting something really freaking stupid to happen.  More on that in a sec. 

Here we are in 2025, and it turns out I again forgot to blog for the rest of last year after the Oscars ended. Oops!  Yes, #IAmVeryBusy but that's really no excuse. Ah well, that said, we're back with another year's nominations and it is time to again keep a little online diary.  Let's go! 

This year we once again have a situation where it's easy to complete a whooooole bunch of categories by simply seeing a handful of films.  Look at these numbers:  the excellent films Conclave and A Complete Unknown each have 8 nominations, the wonderful Wicked and the brutal The Brutalist (at least its honest in its title) each have 10, and the ridiculous Emilia Pérez led the pack with 13.  By the way, in case you were wondering if that necessarily means that last one is a good movie, please don't be so naive. Have I taught you nothing about the Oscars over the years? 

Anyway: how did I do on Oscar noms day? 

I don't think anyone is actually reading this here and now, but for the historical record for when my gifts and wisdom are finally realized, let me note that we are in the midst of a tragedy of wildfires in Los Angeles. The worst things about this are of course, the loss of so many innocent animal lives - animals who had no option to escape their burning domestic or wild homes in the fires' paths -  and the ongoing destruction and seeming inability to just make the fires stop. Among the totally inconsequential in the scheme of things effects of the fires was the postponement of the Oscar nominations. That meant that my long-prepared day off work Friday, January 17 was unnecessary, so I did log on and work a bit that morning, and then went to The Brutalist, or as I like to think of it, The Brutal-est, that afternoon. I thought, hmmm, with the postponement of the announcement, I might be able to see all the likely Best Picture contenders before Noms Day!  I had already, at that point, seen Wicked, Conclave, Anora, A Complete Unknown, and Sing Sing. I thought, if I can see The Substance, Emilia Pérez, Nickel Boys, and Dune: Part Two in the next few days, I might be there -- but September 5 might be in there instead of Sing Sing -- nonetheless, I should try... I did end up seeing three of those in time, not Nickel Boys yet, but in the end, it wouldn't have mattered, because I'm Still Here got a Best Pic nom instead of either of those two S-es and I wasn't able to see that before nominations day at any rate. 

That said, as of nominations announcement morning, I already had three completed categories!  Thanks to those aforementioned films getting five billion nods apiece, I had Directing, Supporting Actress, and Editing already complete, and I shall blog about those in the next few days.  Then, on the evening of new-Nominations-Day Thursday January 23, I headed to the theatre down the street and saw Nosferatu (so much yikes!), thus completing two more categories.  Five complete, and I hadn't even written a blog entry!  What a year. 

But this post is for what I think of the nominations overall.  Here's what I think: 

- It is definitely now A Thing to have an international film (if you will) in the ten Best Picture nominations. This year, we get two, sort of.  I'm Still Here is Brazilian and Emilia Pérez is (a f*cking mess but) sort of French although about "Mexico."  Those both got nominated in both the Best Picture and International Feature Film categories.  All I want is for them to both lose International Film and have that prize go to the marvelous Flow, which is about a cat!, and which is also nominated in Animated, another thing that we have seen happen in recent years -- International + Animated, International + Documentary, etc. 

- A while back, Angelina Jolie had a lot of buzz for playing Maria Callas. After seeing the film, I thought she deserved a nomination for digging way deep and playing a really, deeply messed up individual at a really, deeply fraught time at the end of her life. Then her buzz faded, but on nominations morning when they announced Maria in the Cinematography category I perked up: Would this mean Angelina was in?!  Alas, no. 

- Instead, the five Lead Actress nominees were more or less what we thought, even Fernanda Torres for I'm Still Here who had looked more and more sure since her Golden Globes win. She joins other GGlobes winner Demi Moore, whose buzz is building, shoo-ins Mikey Madison and Cynthia Erivo, and the first man to be nominated for Lead Actress, Mr. Juan Carlos Gascon (credited here as "K@rla S0fia" Gascon).  Why is a man nominated for Lead Actress, you ask?  Well, it's because we as a society have jumped the shark and decided that in public discourse, professions, politics, education, and a whole bunch of other places, men can pretend to be women and women can pretend to be men and the meanings of words don't matter because being a man or a woman isn't about being male or female anymore, silly! It's all about the transgender joy!  So, that's really dumb - I mean, really really dumb, as I have elsewhere pointed out - but we knew this was coming, ever since Emilia Pérez did its thing at Cannes.  Is it the worst thing the Oscar nominations have ever done? I mean - well, no. But it is certainly among the top two or three if not the number one absolute dumbest. Gascon is a man pretending to be a woman in real life, and in the film plays a man who "changes" into a woman (again: note, this does not really happen, in real life, ever). Interestingly, this isn't even the reason why the film is terrible. You can make a great film about all kinds of stupid shit, but that is not what Emilia Pérez is.  It's a hot mess. 

- Do we have category fraud this year?  Why, yes, of course we do! This is the Oscars!  In Supporting Actor, co-star of  A Real Pain Kieran Culkin is nominated, and in Supporting Actress, we have not one but TWO category frauds, Zoe Saldana in the mess of Emilia Pérez and Ariana Grande in Wicked. And surprise surprise that they are the two most likely to win, according to pundits. Being on screen for the entire film and even more than the stars can do wonders for your chances of winning Supporting Actress! Wheeeee, category fraud! 

- Were you worried about Diane Warren getting another Original Song nomination?  Again, have I taught you nothing?  She wrote "The Journey" for The Six Triple Eight and secured her spot. Goooo, Diane! We'll talk more about that when I complete that category. 

Well, we have a little over a month, and I have only 24 movies to see (if you count each set of shorts as "a movie" - otherwise I have 21 features and 15 shorts), so there will be time to do this easily, even for those of us who #AreVeryBusy. 

How was your Oscar nominations morning?  What was your favorite nomination? How is your Awards Season going? Which films have you seen? What do you love and hate? 

(What, I can ask questions to the Void. It's totally allowed.)