Clocking in with a 91% Metacritic rating, with a film that will surely become one of the best of the year, it is time to start taking Ms. Bigelow, and her moody, brilliant war film, seriously.  We were already taking it seriously last year when it was pulled from the roster.  Many films wouldn’t be able to withstand that bump in its release date; this one does.  It might just turn out that Bigelow stands a chance at not just being nominated for director, but actually winning.  It’s too soon to tell, of course, so this is all just gunsmoke in a sandstorm but hey, what else is there to do.

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The LA Times’ last man standing, Kenneth Turan gives major props to Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, but particularly in the way it looks:

Simultaneously an art film and a crime film, Mann’s latest work (he shares screenplay credit with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman) may not give you a ton to hang on to emotionally, but the beauty and skill of the filmmaking keep you tightly in its grasp.

Manohla Dargis, though, calls it pure cinematic art:

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills.

I’m still on the fence as to whether it’s a Best Pic contender or not.  But I figure with ten slots, it has a much better chance than it would have otherwise.

Some chippies are a pushover for any hard-boiled hood. But this swanky dame from Salon is on the square:

The glamour quotient in “Public Enemies” is high, and in a landscape of contemporary movies in which “sophistication” is seemingly a dirty word, it’s a relief to see actors in period dress rather than outlandish Willy Wonka get-ups and superhero costumes.

Even the movie’s violence has a grown-up gloss: Mann doesn’t necessarily glorify Dillinger’s violence, but he is attuned to all the ways in which, in the movies, cruel acts can also have a brutal elegance. When Dillinger and his cohorts storm into any of the various banks they rob during their big spree, Mann and Dante Spinotti (who frequently works with Mann) shoot these glorious, fragile institutions with a suitable degree of respect: With their polished oak railings and delicately veined marble pillars, they’re like temples under assault…

Depp is as close to being a ’30s-style movie star as we’ve got these days, and his Dillinger offers a peculiar mix of star quality laced with pathos: Even as he flashes that instant charmer of a smile, there’s also something gaunt and haunted about him, as if he were living his life in reverse, as if he already knows how it’s all going to end.

The rest of the review isn’t a rave by any measure, but it racks up a solid 80 on metacritic. I’m just happy Ms. Zacharek didn’t ventilate anybody’s fedora.

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Nothing embeddable yet, but you can click on over to Apple trailers for a look at The Informant trailer, and here in HD. (Since when did they add the exclamation point to the title!? I’m twice as excited now!!)

[UPDATE: Thanks to Alex Billington at First Showing for loaning us a portable version of the trailer.]

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Using your “no way!” reactions to eliminate movies that stand little chance of a Best Picture nomination, I cut about 1/3 of the titles from the long list posted yesterday. There are still plenty of snowballs struggling to survive in Hell left on the poll, but it’s not the pollsters job to narrow down the choices too much. The rest of the Least Likely to Succeed will be determined when nobody votes for them. (I went easy on cutting indies, international films and movies we know next to nothing about — because they deserve a chance at the big dance, no matter how fleeting or slim.)

The poll is too long for the main page, so please click to page two to make your selections. Multiple choice. 10 movies per ballot.

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Of course the actors are on top, but there are members invited from other branches, who “who have distinguished themselves by their contributions to theatrical motion pictures. Those who accept the invitation will be the only additions in 2009 to the Academy’s roster of voting members.”

The 2009 invitees are:

Actors
Casey Affleck
Emily Blunt
Michael Cera
Viola Davis
James Franco
Brendan Gleeson
Anne Hathaway
Taraji P. Henson
Emile Hirsch
Hugh Jackman
Melissa Leo
Jane Lynch
Eddie Marsan
James McAvoy
Seth Rogen
Paul Rudd
Amy Ryan
Michael Shannon
Michelle Williams
Jeffrey Wright

Other branches after the cut.
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There aren’t many films that would be considered Oscar-worthy for the 82nd Academy Awards that have already been screened and/or reviewed this year, even with the ten slots opened up.  There are many movies that feel Oscar-bound even though they haven’t opened and haven’t been reviewed by major critics.   I’m going to add the two actresses who came out of Sundance, Carey Mulligan from An Education and Mo’Nique from Precious.  It gets tricky, though, with those films because they are likely going to have other nomination possibilities, like script or supporting actor or actress.  It’s too early to tell.

But here is space for you to toss in your thoughts on who or what should be on that list right now.  Some have already written me saying that Transformers has no shot in sound or that Michelle Pfeiffer should be on the list – here is a chance to put it all down, or up, for discussion.

John Dillinger and Johnny Depp

Roger Ebert gives Public Enemies 3.5 stars, though it reads like a 4-star review right up to very last paragraph.

This is very disciplined film. You might not think it was possible to make a film about the most famous outlaw of the 1930s without clichés and “star chemistry” and a film class screenplay structure, but Mann does it. He is particular about the way he presents Dillinger and Billie. He sees him and her. Not them. They are never a couple. They are their needs. She needs to be protected, because she is so vulnerable. He needs someone to protect, in order to affirm his invincibility.

The movie is well-researched, based on the book by Bryan Burrough. It even bothers to try to discover Dillinger’s speaking style. Depp looks a lot like him. Mann shot on location in the Crown Point jail, scene of the famous jailbreak with the fake gun. He shot in the Little Bohemia Lodge in the same room Dillinger used, and Depp is costumed in clothes to match those the bank robber left behind. Mann redressed Lincoln Avenue on either side of the Biograph Theater, and laid streetcar tracks; I live a few blocks away, and walked over to marvel at the detail. I saw more than you will; unlike some directors, he doesn’t indulge in beauty shots to show off the art direction. It’s just there.

On Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, after the cut:

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Thanks to Yvette for finding this trailer for The September Issue, a documentary look at Prada-wearing Vogue editor, Anna Wintour.

It is still surprising to me that so many see the ten best picture nominees change as a negative.  In any given year, there are at least twenty “best pictures.”  Ten of them is better than five.  Five never does justice to a year and, in fact, rewards the best campaigns and the “Oscar” movies, now becoming more and more marginalized and obscure.  The only way I see the change as a negative is in terms of the way Oscar predictions work.  In that way, chances are, it’s going to be all over the map.  But who really cares about that?  In the final analysis, we look at the films chosen in any given year and most of the time conclude that, in fact, the Academy has chosen not the best five in any way, shape or form.  This change makes it possible to recognize a wider range, and a much more interesting range, of films.

I disagree strongly with the notion that a wider net means that it is only in place to boost ratings (they obviously don’t care about that) and I disagree that it will amount to mainstream, less worthy (but more audience-friendly) fare.  When it comes down to it they are still choosing the ten best.  Best means best, whether it is in the Oscar genre or not.  This is a way for the Academy to mature and evolve, and thank god they have the good sense to do that.  The other option is digging their heels in to prove they’ve been right all along (it’s the pictures that got small).  A new world of media means a new Academy; a new audience could mean that we are not honoring “Oscar movies,” but great films, plain and simply.

David Carr in the NY Times:

Let’s be honest: Some Americans have tuned out the Oscars not because “The Dark Knight” didn’t get a nomination, but because the telecast is jammed with obscure awards that they have no say over — this isn’t “American Idol” — and no rooting interest in. What the Oscars need is fewer awards, not more nominees. As long as we are doing the math, does the academy really need three awards for short films and two separate awards for sound?

If the academy is serious about making a broadcast that will thrive for years to come, Oscar needs a haircut.

Kris Tapley at Incontention:

And so at the end of the day, I think the case is plainly made that a 10-nominee structure for the Best Picture category waters down not only the meaning of the award, but the thrill of hunting it and, perhaps most unfortunately, the payoff of being in the mix.

Tomorrow I’ll post a poll of 30 or 40 films that seem to be the most likely Best Picture contenders. When we did this last year, the poll results were collected the week after the Oscars, March 2008. We scored 4 eventual nominees in our first 7 poll positions. So as frivolous as this might seem when we’ve seen none of the films, it can yield interesting results.

March 2008 Poll results

• 1. Revolutionary Road
• 2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• 3. Australia
• 4. Frost/Nixon
• 5. Milk
• 6. Doubt
• 7. The Reader
• 8. Changeling
• 9. Blindness
• 10. The Soloist (ack!)

(if nothing else, it’ll be fun at the end of the year to see our most insane choice.)

You’ll find the long list after the cut. Help me narrow it down to about half this size by mocking the titles you think are least likely.

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I hadn’t seen this until it ran after True Blood last night. Happy to find somebody else has already youtubed it, saving me the trouble.

Currently standing with a score of 70 on RT, we’re keeping our eyes peeled all day for any reviews that might tip that average up or down. [EDIT: Thanks to Alison Flynn for spotting David Denby's New Yorker review]

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a ravishing dream of violent gangster life in the thirties—not a tough, funny, and, finally, tragic dream like “Bonnie and Clyde” but a flowing, velvety fantasia of the crime wave that mesmerized the nation early in the decade… It’s the American poetry of crime. Throughout the movie, blazing tommy guns emit little spearheads of flame, just as in a comic book. Men get their skulls bashed with gun butts, and get thrown out of cars, but, despite all the violence, the movie is aesthetically shaped and slightly distanced by the pictorial verve of gangland effrontery—the public aggression that Mann makes inseparable from high style… As a piece of direction, “Public Enemies” is often breathtakingly fast, but it’s always lucid.

The high-definition digital images are crisply focussed, and much of the movie (in contrast to the usual shock-and-awe thunder of action films) is on the quiet side. Billie Holiday’s plaintive tones show up on the soundtrack, a touch of melancholy high civilization amid the mayhem. Some of the dialogue is spoken sotto voce—in a darkened restaurant, say, or the back of a car, where suave hoods lean toward each other, exchanging confidences. Like Barry Levinson’s “Bugsy,” the picture happily exploits what movies can do to create a sinful nexus between criminality and elegance… There’s almost an unspoken compact between director and audience in a movie like this, a compact of pleasure in everything looking so good. Twenty-five years ago, in “Miami Vice,” Michael Mann brought visual glamour to television; he’s still an incomparable maker of svelte, flawlessly integrated images.

Part II of the HBO First Look after the cut.

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In the avalanche of stunning events last week — both good and very bad — a couple of guest essays got elbowed out of the way for more urgent breaking news. We’ll kick off the pre-holiday relaxation this morning by kicking back and catching up with tjose two AD reader submissions. You’ll remember Ben Would’s Oscar Ranking project in March, evaluating every one of the Best Picture nominees in Oscar history — of which he’s amazingly seen all but two. Ben is back with his thoughts about the expansion of the Best Picture race to 10 nominees.

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10 Best Picture nominees
by Ben Woulds

Doubling the number of Best Picture nominees is just the latest in a pathetic series of attempts by the Academy to stay relevant, which they are not. Yes, Slumdog Millionaire got a big box office boost after the Oscars, but it was for one week only, and it was already riding a tidal wave of good word of mouth. The Oscar did little for No Country for Old Men, The Departed and Crash. The backlash against that latter prize was so great since the outcry was universal that Brokeback Mountain was robbed, some have reported that Brokeback might have done even better post-Oscars (and Brokeback got a greater percentage boost from the Golden Globes than Crash at the Oscars).

No doubt producers and studios will be happy to report that their movies are Best Picture nominees even though they shouldn’t be, but the luster of that coronation will be diminished as even worse films are added to the already not-so-illustrious list of recent years (inferior work like Chocolat, Seabiscuit, Finding Neverland, Crash, Juno and Benjamin Button, to name just a few). Also, they are keeping five director nominees, so the Best Picture winner will almost definitely be one of those with a corresponding directing nomination.

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As mentioned above, last week we were offered a pair of special contributions that got lost in the news cycle of Academy chaos and celebrity tragedy. Eric Beck wrote us with his thoughts about the announcement of 10 Best Picture nominees, taking a look at 10 significant films that might have benefited from a broader slate in past years.

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The 10 Most Unhappy Films Today
by Eric Beck

So, my first reaction to the news when I read it on AwardsDaily was “Well, they must really want to pump up the box office for 5 more films.” My second reaction was “Damn it, why couldn’t they have done this last year so Dark Knight could have been nominated?” Which of course made me think – does Dark Knight make the list of the 10 worst snubs in Oscar history?

I looked at films based on a few criteria:

• 1 – How did it actually do at the Oscars? Did the Academy like the film enough to give it major nominations, just not picture?
• 2 – How did it do with the major guilds? The DGA always has been and still is the best indicator of what gets a Best Picture nomination. And I also checked the WGA – those are the best two indicators because they have been around the longest.
• 3 – How did it do at the Globes? Though less important in recent years, the Globes are still a big indicator and some films really get out of the starting gate because of a Globe nom (the two most prominent examples that come to mind are The Crying Game and In the Name of the Father).

I didn’t give as much weight to the Critics awards, because as more awards have started to come around, the Oscars have paid less attention to all of them. From 1935-1991 only two NYFC winners weren’t nominated and they were both foreign films (Day for Night and Amarcord), but since 1992, a whopping 6 winners failed to get nominated. And while it used to just be a Foreign bias, since 1986, 10 films have won at least 2 of the big 6 Critics awards and failed to get a nomination, so they just aren’t that respected by the Academy anymore.

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In our quest for something out of the ordinary, Spicey recommends we take a look at Samson and Delilah, winner of the Camera d’Or prize at Cannes last month for best first feature.

The stand-out world premiere (of eight new Australian dramas) at the recent Adelaide Film Festival, Warwick Thornton’s debut feature is a mainly Aboriginal-made movie, a fierce frontline report on contemporary life in the Central Australian desert. Though presented as a teenage love story with heart and humour, Samson & Delilah may not make a dent at home beyond the arthouse on its May 7 release (through Footprint Films): Australian multiplex audiences have proved resistant to indigenous movie-making. But this is an undoubted international festival starter – an inside look at a world rarely, if ever, depicted on the big screen. (Screen Daily)

Samson and Delilah will screen at the Toronto Film Festival in September. Here’s hoping it finds a North American distributor.