Academy Awards - The Oscars

Once again it is time to celebrate a year of film watching. Here are my choices for the following awards along with a few thoughts about some of the selections and non-selections The Academy made.

• Actor in a Leading Role – The nominees are: Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Timothee Chalamet (Call me by Your Name), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Daniel Day-Lewis (Phantom Thread), and Denzel Washington (Roman J. Isreal, Esq.). Who else could be on this list? Tom Hanks (The Post), James Franco (The Disaster Artist), and Richard Gere (Norman). However, regardless of who wasn’t on the list, the runaway best performance is Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour. His Winston Churchill was simply sublime.
• Actress in a Leading Role – The nominees are: Meryl Streep (The Post), Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water), Margot Robbie (I, Tonya), Francis McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, and Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird). Who didn’t get nominated? Rachel Weisz (My Cousin Rachel), Emma Stone (Battle of the Sexes) and Jessica Chastain (The Zookeepers Wife). If it were up to me, I’d select Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird because of the variety and excellent delivery of teenage emotions she effectively brings to the screen. Margot Robbie was utterly fantastic as Tonya Harding. Francis McDormand was filled with angst and fire as the woman who lost her daughter to rape and murder. Sally Hawkins was ethereal as Elisa Esposito a deaf woman who communicates with the captured creature. Meryl Streep showed the subtle development of strength as her character Katharine Graham.
• Supporting Actress – The nominees are: Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread), Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird), Allison Janney (I, Tonya), Mary J. Blige (Mudbound). Octavia Spencer (The Shape of Water). Who is missing from this list? Melissa Leo (Novitiate), who gave one of most outstanding performances of the year. The film wasn’t seen and that is a shame. This is a strong field but choosing from the nominees, I’d select Allison Janney. Her depiction of Tonya Harding’s mother was vividly cold.
• Supporting Actor – The nominees are: Christopher Plummer (All the Money in the World), Woody Harrelson (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Willem Defoe (The Florida Project), and Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water). A great set of actors. Missing? Steve Carell (Battle of the Sexes) gave us an incredibly life like Bobby Riggs. I’d have to say that Sam Rockwell would get my vote although each of the above deserve the recognition.
• Best Cinematography – The nominees are: Bruno Delbonnel (Darkest Hour), Hoyte van Hoytema (Dunkirk), Rachel Morrison (Mudbound), Dan Laustsen (The Shape of Water), and Roger Deakins (Blade Runner 2049). Great list of people creating and delivering great pictures. My vote would go for Hoyte van Hoytema in Dunkirk. I admired the multitude and type of scenes that were shot and how they were made into a cohesive feeling of awe.
• Writing (Adapted Screenplay) – The nominees are: Dee Rees and Virgil Williams (Mudbound), Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter (The Disaster Artist), James Ivory (Call Me by Your Name), James Mangold, Michael Green and Scott Frank (Logan), and Aaron Sorkin (Molly’s Game). My vote would go to  Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter for The Disaster Artist.
• Writing (Original Screenplay) – The nominees are: Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water), Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick), Jordan Peele (Get Out) and Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird). This is probably the tightest category to be contested. Each of these stories is amazingly original. Therefore, I don’t have a single selection, they all are deserving.
• Film Editing – The nominees are: Lee Smith (Dunkirk), Tatiana S. Riegel (I, Tonya), Jonathan Amos and Paul MacHliss (Baby Driver), Sidney Wolinsky (The Shape of Water), and Jon Gregory (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). All very good, however the standout in editing goes to Lee Smith for Dunkirk. This is a story based film and not a character based film and because of this the editing makes this film engaging.
• Directing – The nominees are: Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread), Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird), and Jordan Peele (Get Out). What is missing. To me there are huge gaps here. Margaret Betts (Novitiate), Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit), Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya), and Joe Wright (Darkest Hour) all had a great firm hand on their story's and told them with excellence. Out of the nominees, I’d vote for Christopher Nolan and Dunkirk because he made this event come alive. However, Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) got amazing performances from her cast.
• Picture – The nominees are: Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Phantom Thread, Get Out, The Post, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Shape of Water, and Lady Bird. All these pictures, except Phantom Thread (review in process) are films I loved to watch for different reasons. What is missing? I think Novitiate, Detroit, and Battle of the Sexes were deserving as well. However, Novitiate would be my candidate for replacing Phantom Thread which I didn’t really find likable or engaging. Who will win? My wish would be Dunkirk, Lady Bird, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in that order. If Novitiate was in the mix, it would be a tie between it and Dunkirk.

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Molly's Game

First Hit:  Although a very interesting story, I felt pummeled by the constant voice overs and rapid fire conversational tone of most of the scenes.

This is a powerful and interesting story about a young woman who had a promising career in ski racing, but because of an injury, headed to California to clear her head and ended up running a gambling operation.

Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) was raised by her father, Larry (Kevin Costner), to be competitive and self-reliant at whatever she did. He was her primary ski coach and was a well-respected psychologist and pushed her with little mercy. There are numerous scenes in the film to help set-up this important dynamic.

When Molly leaves the skiing scene and heads to CA, she is doing it to relax, save some money and get her head together before she heads to law school. However, she ends up working for Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong) who is a small time real estate developer who happens to have a gambling problem as well. To make money, Keith holds gambling nights and invites Hollywood stars to his games. One such person, Player X (Michael Cera), plays well, wins often and likes to destroy his opponents. The games start out as cash games with the buy-in being $10K per player.

Keith tells Molly to set-up and run the games while he participates as one of the players. She gets really good tips from the players which far exceeds what she makes as a waitress and working for Keith’s real estate firm.

At one point Keith decides he cannot afford to pay Molly for her employment work and tells her to subsist on her tips from the running the games. She decides to run her own games when Keith fires her.

She becomes the "go-to" person for holding these card games. She knows that as long as she doesn’t take a skim/draw from the table it is all legal. However, some of her clients don’t have the cash and she ends up carrying them. So to protect herself she begins to skim from the table stakes which means that what she’s doing is now illegal.

When she opens a game in New York City, with $250K buy-ins, the Russians become players and this is when the shit hits the fan. The FBI is looking to see how the Russians are laundering money and they suspect Molly is doing this. When they raid her home as well as many of the other player’s homes, Molly refuses to give up any names. Because she’s facing huge prison sentence, she hires Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) to defend her.

Much of the film uses Molly and Charlie’s meetings as a jumping off point for viewing past scenes. During these flashbacks, Molly does voice overs to set-up the scenes. This happens a lot during the film and is generally effective. However, the intense, combative, and defensive way Molly speaks in the voice overs to set up the flashbacks, to Charlie, and to everyone else wore on me and I think the audience as well.

It became almost affrontive and I found myself wanting to tell Molly to take a break, breath and tell me what’s going on.

At the end when her father, Larry, comes back into the picture and they have three years of therapy in three minutes, Molly finally breathes.

Chastain was very strong as Molly. I felt Molly’s drive through her. Elba was also very strong as Molly’s attorney. His own intense nature was equally matched with Chastain’s. Strong was excellent as the semi-slimy guy who took advantage of Molly and got his comeuppance. Cera was great as Player X. His inner intelligence and drive to win and make people feel their losses was excellent. Costner was wonderful as the father and the scene of them during the three-minute therapy session where he will give the answers she’s looking for was perfect. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed this story with an edge that didn’t quite work for me. The rapid fire conversational tone, eventually wore me down and pushed me away from the film.

Overall:  I loved the story and didn’t like the rapid fire beating I took to get the story.

Steve Jobs

First Hit:  I liked the intensity brought forth in this film of Steve Jobs as played by Michael Fassbender and developed by writer Aaron Sorkin.

I’ve seen a number of Steve Jobs films and have read Walter Isaacson’s book and numerous articles about Steve and what works for me about this one, as a biographical drama, is that it takes 3 product launches and builds the Jobs’ persona and struggles around and through these launches. And although these launches probably didn’t have all the interactions shown this this film, it gives the audience a view of the man.

The often rumored Jobs' intensity and single mindedness is well represented in these 3 product launches: The issues and his responses around the demo’s not working, his distaste for Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston) the mother of his daughter, his lack of acknowledgment, support and love for his daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss – 5, Ripley Sobo – 9, and Perla Haney-Jardine – 19), the struggle with the Apple Board of Directors, his admiration and anger towards John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the friendship and differences between himself and Steve Wozniak’s (Seth Rogen) view of their relationship and computers, and how much he depended on his Marketing Executive Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet).

Sorkin’s script is crisp and brings out many of Steve’s strengths and challenges while Danny Boyle’s direction puts all this on the screen in an interesting, dynamic way.

Fassbender is strong and intense in delivering the Jobs identity. Rogan is very good as Woz and the scene in the final product launch was excellent. Moss, Sobo, and Haney-Jardine, especially, were excellent as Lisa in their different ages. Daniels was outstanding as Sculley. Winslet was amazing as Hoffman and kept the whole film centered. Sorkin wrote an marvelous script and kept it focused. Boyle clearly did an excellent job of directing the characters through the script and scenes.

Overall:  I was fully engaged in this film and all the ups and downs experienced by each character.

Moneyball

First Hit: Pitt’s performance is good but overall the film drags at times.

I like, or more accurately use to like, baseball when I was younger. I wanted to be the left fielder for the LA Dodgers. I remember when the Dodgers and SF Giants moved to the west coast. LA played in the coliseum where they strung a huge tall net in left field to centerfield because the distance from home plate to the stands was only 250 feet.

Anyway, like many boys I dreamed of playing for my favorite team. Playing as a youngster through my early teens, I was very good, not great. I always hit in the mid 300's, occasionally with power; I could run ("I had wheels"); I could catch, throw (with speed and strength but occasionally not accurately) and was always one of the first chosen when pickup games were played. I really liked the game.

Baseball is one of the few games where more time is spent with its players standing either on the field or in the dugout waiting with heighten awareness for something to happen. When it does happen, they have to react accurately, quickly, and with forethought. The moments between action and non-action require baseball players to be mentally awake and alert.

It isn’t always easy. Just watch any team of 8 – 10 year olds play; hands on hips, occasionally a mitt on a head, or just standing and looking around.

This film is the same way in that there were moments of heightened activity and other times of just time going by. I thought the story was very interesting, the characters good and some of the acting very good.

Brad Pitt was very good in capturing the frustration and struggles of Billy Beane the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, who could not control how much money was available to put a good team together. Philip Seymour Hoffman did an excellent job of being “old school” baseball Manager Art Howe by telling Beane (Pitt’s character) that the GM knew nothing about how to play players. Jonah Hill was OK as Peter Brand the statistical genius behind rating players, which has now transformed baseball. Kerris Dorsey was the one who really stood out as Casey Beane, Billy’s daughter. Dorsey was incredibly realistic in her acting and the scene of her singing part of a song in a music store was beyond sublime. Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin wrote a good screen play based on the Michael Lewis book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”. Bennett Miller directed this often interesting and sometime slow film.

Overall: Worth watching if you are a baseball fan.

The Social Network

First Hit: An absolutely wonderfully engaging film.

From the first opening moments this film puts you on notice; pay attention to the dialogue and that this film is about the main character Mark Zuckerberg.

Jesse Eisenberg clearly makes Zuckerberg his character and you’ll not be able to take your eyes off him when he is on the screen.

This film is not authorized by Zuckerberg and therefore there are questions about it truthfulness. Yet much of the film comes from interviews and court records which came to pass because Zuckerberg was sued by a college roommate and other college acquaintances in which he had made a business agreement with.

Regardless of the exact truth, the story is engaging and mostly because of the fine acting by Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield as his roommate and initial CFO Eduardo Saverin, and Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker (Sean Fanning) founder of Napster. The story doesn’t delve into the workings of Facebook and the decisions to add types of functionality into the product.

The story is about Zuckerberg and some of the motivations and single mindedness around creating Facebook as something that would change the world. The film is a study in different types of people and what motivates them. My only downside to this film was that the first scene showed an intense and somewhat angry young man, I wondered how Zuckerberg had gotten this way.

Eisenberg is wonderful at bringing the single mindedness of Zuckerberg to life. Watching Zuckerberg in interviews, especially the hour + long one recently held at a computer museum, it is clear that Eisenberg matched the fact that Zuckerberg is extremely intelligent and is unafraid to chart his own course and willing to make mistakes along the way. Garfield is strong as the jilted and shocked roommate who started with owning 7% of Facebook stock which was stripped to .03% by Zuckerberg. Timberlake is spot on as the wonderkind Parker (Fanning) who brought down the music business with his file sharing program and who shared his knowledge of what it takes to create a huge internet based business. Aaron Sorkin wrote the intense and wonderfully succinct screenplay. David Fincher expertly directed this team of actors through the complexities of the subject.

Overall: This is a very entertaining and interesting film, well worth the price of admission.