OSCARS 2012 | 84th Academy Awards Nominations Announcement

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the nominees for the 84th Academy Awards. Here are the nominees in the 10 major categories. The Oscars will be televised on ABC on Sunday, Feb. 26.

Best Picture

• The Artist
• The Descendants
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
• The Help
• Hugo 
• Midnight in Paris
• Moneyball
• The Tree of Life
• War Horse 

Best Director

• Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
• Alexander Payne, The Descendants
• Martin Scorsese, Hugo
• Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris 
• Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life 

Best Actor

• Demián Bichir, A Better Life
• George Clooney, The Descendants
• Jean Dujardin, The Artist
• Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
• Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Best Actress

• Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
• Viola Davis, The Help
• Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
• Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
• Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Best Supporting Actor 

• Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
• Jonah Hill, Moneyball
• Nick Nolte, Warrior
• Christopher Plummer, Beginners 
• Max Von Sydow, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Best Supporting Actress

• Bérénice Bejo, The Artist
• Jessica Chastain, The Help
• Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
• Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
• Octavia Spencer, The Help 

Best Original Screenplay

• Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
• Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids
• J.C. Chandor, Margin Call
• Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
• Asghar Farhadi, A Separation

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Alexander Payne, Jim Rash & Nat Faxon, The Descendants
• John Logan, Hugo 
• George Clooney, Grant Heslov & Beau Willimon, The Ides of March
• Aaron Sorkin & Steven Zaillian, Moneyball 
• Peter Straughan & Bridget O’Connor, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best Animated Film

• The Adventures of Tintin
• A Cat in Paris
• Chico & Rita
• Kung Fu Panda 2
• Puss in Boots
• Rango 

Best Foreign Language Film

• Bullhead (Belgium)
• Monsieur Lazhar (Canada)
• A Separation (Iran)
• Footnote (Israel)
• In Darkness (Poland)

Source: Dave Karger | Entertainment Weekly

Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)

For the six people out there who still love 3D, Hugo will be the film of the year. To be sure, no other film from any year is so well-suited for the format. Concerning the earliest days of cinema, where the medium still oscillated between kitschy gimmick and potential artform, Hugo was directed by Martin Scorsese, a director fascinated by the artifice of cinema and how its inherent falsity can nevertheless draw in a viewer like no other art. This makes 3D doubly appropriate, and as much as I loathe the tackiness of even the supposedly advanced iteration of the technology that is already flaming out brilliantly, Hugo makes such inventive and striking use of 3D that I hate what Scorsese's done as much as I love it. Hugo is too ambitious to make any money, but even so; could the director pump some life back into 3D just as it seemed we were free of this headache that comes once every three decades?

Set in the vast Parisien train station Gare Montparnasse in the early '30s, Hugo follows its titular hero (Asa Butterfield), the orphaned child of a clockmaker, as he moves within the walls of station winding its various timekeepers and swiping meals from oblivious vendors. He also collects gears to repair a rusted automaton his father (Jude Law) brought home before he died in a museum fire, hoping that continuing his father's work will somehow bring the man back in some form. But when an old toy vendor (Ben Kingsley) catches him trying to steal parts from one of his wind-up mice, Hugo finds himself thrust into a deeper story of embitterment and rejuvenation, one that holds the key to his own issues even as it plunges him into a whole new world.

Scorsese delights with his new toy, but the space he gives to objects already made distinct by the 3D effect is magical. Steam and mist hang in the air in ethereal clouds, while gears turn all around the lad as he snakes through the station's inner workings. The inherently shallow visual range of 3D only encourages the director to use even more close-ups and extreme close-ups than usual, which Thelma Schoonmaker throws together in what must surely be the best-edited family film of all time. The 3D gives the film its usual illusory effect, but where so many are trying to make the format seem legitimate and artistic, Scorsese actively uses it for cheap effect, whether opening on snow flurries that float out into the audience or pushing out the faces of those in close-up. In so doing, he uses 3D to remind the audience of the film's "filmness," of the fact that it's fake yet enchanting.

This becomes important when Hugo grows close to the toy seller's granddaughter, Isabel (Chloë Moretz), who has been forbidden from seeing any movies. Hugo sneaks her into Safety Last!, that masterful Harold Lloyd picture, and she marvels with fright and elation at the man's precarious stunts, scarcely able to believe her eyes. When clues lead the two to believe that her grandfather might have made films as well, Scorsese visualizes their research with clips from the earliest of cinema, especially the Lumière brothers' film Train Pulling into a Station, which seems so simple today but famously terrified audiences who feared the train would come through the screen and crush them. In that 50-second short is Scorsese's whole approach to 3D, that of a clearly fake image turned to verisimilitude by the sheer magic of cinema.

Of course, it was not the Lumières who brought wonder to cinema, and it turns out that the old, bitter grandfather tending to his failing toy shop is actually Georges Méliès, the first great dreamer of cinema, the first one to truly test the properties of film and how its sideshow attraction nature could actually be the foundation for artistry, not a hurdle to overcome. From his films comes the blockbuster, with its use, for better and worse, of special effects to dazzle rather than deepen. Naturally, 3D becomes but one of the tricks that can, in theory at least, make film more tactile to audiences, and seeing Méliès' own A Trip to the Moon converted to 3D is one of the most bizarrely fitting approaches to film history I've ever seen, and I cannot believe I just wrote that.

Hugo gradually shifts from the story of a boy trying to find himself to one of that lad attempting to save an old man from self-made ruin, but I found the film remarkably cogent in its unexpected progression. Even the asides to the other characters who populate Scorsese's sandbox of a train station do not significantly alter the momentum. Besides, their subplots converge neatly into the ultimate theme, which sublimates Hugo's quest to retain his father into a story of realizing one's self, regardless of age. Even the film's villain, a hobbled WWI veteran turned officious station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), gets the chance to find some measure of happiness and fulfillment. He, Hugo and Méliès have all suffered some kind of debilitating setback, but finding their various loves in life, be they people or projects (or both), can make them whole again.

I have some minor quibbles with Hugo. Moretz, despite being the best and most mature child actor in a generation, gets saddled with vocabulary words that too preciously play on her intelligence. Robert Richardson's cinematography is gorgeous and works fluidly with the 3D, but I'm somewhat over our strange orange and teal fascination when it comes to color tones. Nevertheless, Hugo is a delight, and as personal in its own way as Mean Streets. Scorsese's passion for film preservation comes to the fore in the final act, and judging from the astonished response of the children in my screening to those ambitious old silents, the need for protecting and showing these films to new generations is a cultural imperative, which shouldn't be as hard as it seems. (I've seen some dismissing Scorsese's cinephilia here as academic, but the pleasures of people like Méliès or Lloyd are anything but dry and intellectual.) Movies unlock purpose for so many in this film, and it comes as no surprise that the key that sets it all in motion should be in the shape of a heart.

Taxi Driver

To commemorate the release of Taxi Driver on a downright essential Blu-Ray, I've reviewed the film at Cinelogue. Almost assuredly my favorite movie of the 1970s, Taxi Driver hasn't aged a day regardless of the vastly different condition of modern New York City. This is a film for the lonely, the hurt and the angry, which makes it as good a fit for millennials as it did the post-hippie burnouts.

I only briefly touched upon the extras included in the Blu-Ray, but everything you need to know about the movie can be found in its commentary track or the bevy of retrospective material. The A/V restoration makes the film come alive more than it already does, yet this gorgeous transfer does not take away from the dingy feel of the movie. It is already my to-beat disc for 2011.

You can read my review now at Cinelogue.

After Hours

In the late-'70s, Martin Scorsese buried the stress of his work and a series of critical disappointments in a mountain of cocaine. When he experienced setbacks in the early '80s, he made After Hours. I'm still trying to figure out which response is more wild. After Hours exists to prove that Taxi Driver actually displayed some restraint. Its vision of New York crosses that Rubicon into madness and never looks back.

After delving into the psyches of his characters for a decade, Scorsese created a screwball version of his work, expelling his anger over Paramount's shutdown of The Last Temptation of Christ mere weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. Sometimes, it's all you can do to laugh. That is not to say, however, that the film is without meaning. At times, it dips into unexpected poignancy, and even when it's being madcap and disjointed, the subjects it broaches are too severe to be considered mere farce.

If After Hours is "about" something, it is a frenzied visualization of the truth that entirely different worlds exist just outside our set paths. We tend to get trapped in routines; Thoreau even gave up his natural experiment at Walden when he realized he'd managed to create a pattern of familiarity in the wilderness. For someone like Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a word processor who moves solely from his cushy but dull office job to a clean apartment in a nice part of town, a reminder that one used to be able to get a decent place in New York for less than an arm and a leg before the place was scrubbed down with bleach.

After Hours very much captures the manic world just outside the "safe zones" of '80s New York; though it never references crack or poverty, the film visualizes the outlaw nature of the town that put off so many outsiders but gave its residents a badge of honor. But not everyone deserves it, as Paul demonstrates: he's never had to deal with the so-called "real New York," and the taste he gets in one crazy night ensures he'll never seek it out again. Hell, considering his night starts when a woman (Rosanna Arquette) chats him up in a diner, Paul might swear off ladies for a while, too.

The lady, Marcy, woos Paul with the promise of paperweights designed by her sculptress roommate Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino). Who could resist such a girl? Paul, being a man, agrees to go back to her place after midnight, but when he arrives at the spacious, dingy loft and meets the kinky Kiki and starts learning things about Marcy that made the head tilt involuntarily, he recognizes his mistake. For the rest of the film, Paul simply tries to get home, but he soon finds himself trapped in the mire of the undercity, running panicked through a nightmare one would call Kafkaesque even if it didn't quote from some of the author's works.

As in Taxi Driver, the streets spew steam from sewer holes. I have been to New York only one time in my life, but my favorite sight by far was not Broadway or the Statue of Liberty but a burst bit of concrete from which steam billowed. Everyone gathered around that urban geyser, tourists not weaned on Scorsese's acid visions of the city completely flummoxed. The natives had a look on their faces of a memory struggling its way against the current to get to the tip of the tongue, as if these people were meeting a friend they hadn't seen in so long they couldn't quite recognize him. Those steam vents feel like portals to some ancient, dormant but still alive force below, giving the city an almost European feel -- Paris has its catacombs below the surface, London buildings are made in the ashes of centuries-old architecture that vanished in an inferno at some time or another.

Where this hellish vision was more obviously Travis' view of the city's filth, Paul's perception of the streets is trickier: a skittish man, Paul regards his surroundings with paranoid suspicion long before anything happens. But that opinion appears justified when he winds up losing his money, witnessing a suicide, being mistaken for a burglar and ultimately chased by a mob. However, it's possible that Paul's view of these events is his unconscious escalation of every occurrence to match the expectation of danger he places upon them.

After all, the only reason any of the disparate events are connected in this film is because they happen to or around Paul, and he begins to suspect they're all linked in some supernatural conspiracy against him. That's the thing about a big city: you're never really not being watched by someone, and some people can't take that kind of pressure.

Around Paul moves the camera, which almost never stops and showcases the fullest extent of the director's abilities. He times an absurdly fast crane shot to follow a set of keys falling to the ground, follows a $20 bill flying in the wind, circles around Paul like a predator stalking its prey and uses fast motion instead of the lingering slow-motion of Taxi Driver. It makes sense: Travis soaks in his hate, while Paul's heart races and he looks for an escape.

This frenzy allows Scorsese to whip up tangents of sexual confusion and confidence, introversion, even a blindness to class relations. This is a twisted movie intended to evoke some bitter laughs, but just as The King of Comedy displayed a wickedly satiric edge to Scorsese, so too does this movie root its comedy in real feelings that make the bile stick. After Hours contains elements of most of Scorsese's films to that point, from the empty bar that resembles the hangout in Mean Streets after everyone finally stumbles home to sexually insecure paranoia of Raging Bull. It's a palate cleanser, something that allowed Scorsese to figure out where he was at during a tumultuous time and to find the way forward.

That desire to keep moving is reflecting in one of the film's few moments of calm in the eye of the storm. Paul mentions to a male prostitute (who believes Paul wants his services) that he just wants to go home. "Why can't you?" the man asks. Paul tries to relate all that's happened to him, but the camera edits over him. There's no sense in dwelling on the past. Or maybe the story's so damn ludicrous even Scorsese can't think about it. And to reinforce the dark comedy of it all, Paul speaks in front of a brick wall as if delivering a comic routine. When the circular punchline comes, you get the feeling you've just watched someone try to make a movie out of the Aristocrats joke.