Awards Daily

What a great role for Jennifer Lawrence in David O. Russell’s American Hustle. She’s such a sassy broad, always prettified and tamed for most films. How great to see her unhinged:

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The New York Film Critics pushed back their dates (now voting December 3) so that they could announce before the National Board of Review (December 4). They did it to be out front of awards season and to be the first “important” voice of the season. Or perhaps they did it to dampen the impact of the National Board of Review. Both have been around a very long time but the date change is a fairly recent development, borne out of awards season hysteria where every city with a population of more than 500 has a critics group that votes on awards. At some point you just tune it out because it hardly feels like it matters anymore who wins what where. What you look at is the consensus building around certain films.  It is also pointless to say the NYFCC are more prestigious than the NBR. As you’ll see from the chart at the end of this article, it really makes no never mind who they are. Their choices are not that different.  Perception and positioning is what matters. Very few films that won either the NBR or the NYFCC did not go on to win Best Picture.

The New York Film Critics want to be first — but they will pay a price for that. Yes, they will be out front. There is a good chance their choice for Best Picture will go on to be nominated for Best Picture.  This year, they will likely miss seeing The Wolf of Wall Street and perhaps American Hustle. Maybe they will be screened in time, maybe they won’t.  But either way, it is not supposed to be their jobs to influence the awards race. They are supposed to carefully consider the films of a given year and decide which film deserves to be called best. Therefore, their choice to push back their date threatens their whole purpose of existing in the first place.

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2013 is one of those years when the Oscar category for Best Actor could double from five to ten without breaking a sweat. This isn’t strictly true for any of the other categories, although Foreign Language, Documentary Feature and Animated feature could fill ten slots with ease.   Since around 1945, the Academy reduced the Best Picture category to five.  The following year, the other categories that had more than five, like cinematography and sound, were also pared down to under five.  The previous year they stopped naming ten Best Picture nominees. From then on, every category was limited to five and under.  This year, the Best Actor race begs for expansion. There is simply no way to reward all of the deserving contenders.  What factors will make the difference between one or the other?

The two leading contenders right now are Robert Redford for All Is Lost versus Chiwetel Ejiofor for 12 Years a Slave.  Giving both of them heat is Matthew McConaughey. Redford is the only previous nominee.  The other two would be first-timers.
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2000 was the year Gladiator became the film to beat.   While some of us were holding out hope that Ang Lee’s wire-fu masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon would have won – it was a foreign language film and those never win. Crowding in close was Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic. Soderbergh had two film in the Best Picture race that year, was nominated in the Best Director category twice and ended up winning when Academy voters got their ducks in a row and sent out the message that if they were going to vote for Soderbergh, they should vote for Soderbergh directing Traffic. Ang Lee won the DGA. Somehow no one thought Ridley Scott ought to win for the film that won Best Picture.

Julia Roberts finally won an acting Oscar, as did Russell Crowe.  It was one of the most suspense filled Oscar years that I can remember in all of the years I’ve at this. The outcome seemed a little uncertain. Smart money knew Gladiator could not lose. But the dreamers among us, oh the dreamers.  This was one year before 9/11 would change everything.  Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir:

While watching Dern’s performance a second time through, I couldn’t help recalling William Butler Yeats’ famous lines about an old man’s heart: “sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/ It knows not what it is.” There’s nothing like seeing a familiar figure do something entirely new, and at no point in Dern’s long career of playing crime-movie bad guys and (as he puts it) “fifth cowboy on the left” has there been anything remotely like this. There’s a blankness to Woody, as well as a hunger and a ferocity, that feels terrifyingly real. We can’t tell what he’s really thinking when David tells him, over and over again, that the million-dollar letter is a come-on for magazine subscriptions and that he hasn’t won anything. Sometimes Woody gives back an implacable hostility and sometimes he’s like a petulant child: “But it says I won!” When he claims not to remember an old girlfriend from Hawthorne, or never to have considered the question of whether he was in love with Kate (the marvelous June Squibb), David’s irascible and foulmouthed mother, we can’t be sure whether he’s lying to David or to himself.

Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern:

Bruce Dern’s portrait of the boozy old coot is a wonder, as well as the capstone, thus far, of that singular actor’s career. With a white nimbus of unkempt hair and a wild look in his gimlet eyes, Woody walks stiffly, like a puppet with splintering legs attached to strings of unequal length, but he walks often and far. Instead of a wanderlust, he has a wander-off-lust that keeps his wife, Kate (June Squibb), in a state of agitation, and keeps their 40-something son, David, busy looking for him. (David is played, with soulful delicacy, by Will Forte.)

Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan:

None of this would have been possible, obviously, without Dern’s meticulous work as the battered and baffled Woody. Restraint has not always been a hallmark of Dern’s previous efforts, but he is in impressive control here with acting that does as much with looks and body language as it does with words. His character reminds us, as does the entire film, how little it takes to make us happy and how hard it is to get even that.

New York Times’ AO Scott:

Woody is another matter altogether, and Mr. Dern turns this inarticulate, alcoholic lump of humanity — too passive to be a monster, too distracted to be charming — into a great screen character. He is far from heroic, or even noble, but Woody’s stubbornness, and the waves of unacknowledged feeling that emanate from his grizzled, shapeless face and unsteady, bulky frame, make him worth caring about. Not that it’s easy for anyone.