Beyond the Awkward: Oscar Nomination Predictions

Welcome to a new feature I like to call "Beyond the Awkward," the basic idea of which is almost exactly what it sounds like: you'll hear the opinions and thoughts of those other than me! (The picture to the right is one I snapped while at the Golden Globes red carpet this past weekend of a very awkward-looking Sandra Bullock. But hey, she's so great! Look beyond the awkward!)

In honor of being exactly one week away from Oscar nominations, I surveyed different students at Loyola Marymount University who watch the awards season closely to learn what others are feeling about this year's Best Picture race. Turns out that college kids love them some Black Swan!

Netflix Pix: Network News

It's a day late, give or take an hour, but it's time for the weekly installment of Netflix Pix! You know the drill by now--one regular mail Netflix feature and one instant streamable feature for your cinematic enjoyment!

We're going with two 1970's classics today, that share more in common than a time period--they're both about that great medium we call broadcast television.

Rapid Reviews: Zombie Island Days with the Prodigal Valentine Clyde

It's been a while since our last round of Rapid Reviews, but movies are always getting watched and write-ups start to pile up. Here's this week's set (another set will come next week)--it features two movies I grew more fond of on repeat viewings, one documentary I'm still not sure how I feel yet, a classic film that isn't perfect, but doesn't have to be, and what might have been the best film of last year (yes, possibly even trumping the magnificent Black Swan and The Social Network--my feelings aren't settled yet!)

Oscar Predictions Updated: Spoilers Added

I added potential Spoilers for each category on the Current Oscar Predictions page. I'm also having major problems with Best Actress/Best Supporting Actress (where will Hailee Steinfeld be placed? There's ten performances with six going for one category and four for the other...). What do you guys think? Take a look at the new predictions and head to the comments and let me know what you think.

(Note: I'm well aware that the predictions are poorly formatted--Firefox and Blogger are in a fight. Working on fixing it!)

Supporting Actress Smackdown, Part II: New York Woman

(Note: this is the second part in a two-part post series for StinkyLulu's Supporting Actress Smackdown. The first piece was entitled "Old Little Princess" and featured Winona Ryder for Black Swan.)

All right, now that you've heard about the "actress on the edge" who wasn't eligible for my Best Supporting Actress prize, let's continue with one that was not only eligible, but won the prize in a tough fight with Inception's Marion Cotillard--Amanda Peet, a real New York Woman.

Please Give has one of the finest ensembles assembled this year, but the star who shined the brightest was Peet. The former romantic comedy mainstay had never truly distinguished herself as a remarkable actress before, but Give was apparently all she needed to break out.

Both acerbic and unflinchingly honest, Peet's portrayal of New York tanning spa employee Mary is fearlessly unlikable, the kind of performance that only seems to come but once or twice a year (the only other performance this year I can compare it to in that regard is Nicole Kidman's in Rabbit Hole, and Kidman is nowhere near as free of vanity in that role.

Make no mistake--there are very few redeeming qualities to Mary. She stalks her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, making endless cracks about the woman's overly-muscular back. She conducts herself like a child in social situations, refusing to censor herself. She has a drinking problem. She is utterly self-centered. Her relationship with her sister (Rebecca Hall, also doing career-best work in Give) is bitter, with years of resentment built into emotional barriers. She sleeps a married man (Oliver Platt) despite her cordial relationship with his wife (Catherine Keener). And she uses a tanning bed far too often.

In short, Mary is the New York Woman no one wants to be friends with.

Yet instead of playing the character as a one-note, Peet found the vulnerabilities in Mary, the shredded remains of a young girl who never really felt like she had any self-worth. Her relationship with her sister is bitter, but the bonds of sisterhood can be felt pulsating below all the pettiness. And Mary's desperation rings true to life.

It is a masterful performance and one that deserved much more consideration than it received this year. In an ensemble of wonderful, fascinatingly flawed women, Peet stands out with a character who should be so easy to hate. Instead, she created an inarguably awful woman, but one with more than one dimension to her. 

Phenomenal work by Peet, not once upstaging her co-stars or chewing the scenery. The performance is real, and it is beautiful actressing on the edges.

Supporting Actress Smackdown, Part I: Old Little Princess

In lieu of new feature Netflix Pix this week, I'm participating in StinkyLulu's Supporting Actress Smackdown. For those who aren't familiar, the SAS is a great yearly tradition where Oscar bloggers come together to celebrate what StinkyLulu (AKA Brian Herrera) has termed "actressing at the edges." In other words, the series is meant to celebrate the best female acting performances that aren't right in our faces.

I'll be discussing my 2010 Awkward for Best Supporting Actress winner Amanda Peet's performance as Mary in Please Give in a second, separate post, but first I want to pay homage to what I consider one of the finest female performances of the year: Winona Ryder in Black Swan.

"What'd you do to get this role?"

Unfortunately, Ryder's role as Beth McIntyre, the washed-up elder ballerina who is forced into retirement as Black Swan begins, is far too small for consideration in my greater Best Supporting Actress contest. But there is truly no one who "actresses at the edges" better this year.

Ryder, something of an outcast in Hollywood since her shoplifting incident years ago, has done solid work here and there, but never before has she shown the same promise of being a leading lady once again. She still isn't the lead in Black Swan, but she is something potentially better: a new breed of character actress.

Beth McIntyre is the former "little princess" of a New York ballet company, headed by Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel). She is pushed into retirement by Thomas, her former lover, after a run of disastrous seasons, to make room for new blood: namely, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman). Beth's response to this news is to wreck her own dressing room, drunkenly accost Nina at the company fundraiser, and attempt suicide by throwing herself in front of a truck.




Ryder appears four times in the film: twice in the hospital (once unconscious), once after wrecking her dressing room, and at the gala. She truly only has two substantive scenes, the first of which is at the fundraiser. To say she knocks the scene out of the park is an understatement. She blasts the ball out of its skin.

Imbuing Beth with such an inner hatred of this girl, so much like herself at a young age, who is daring to replace her, Ryder burns a hole through the screen. She gives the impression that she's spitting venom with each line, aiming to cause Nina as much pain with her words as is possible. Her delivery is bitchy, campy, and absolutely perfect. The poisonous way she says a word as simple as "frigid" sends chills up the audience's collective spine.

She hurls the most hurtful charge she can imagine--sleeping with Thomas--and Nina throws it back at her with full force. Even Nina insults better than she can. She is inferior in every sense, and we see her fade away as Nina and Thomas walk away together.

"You make the most of it, Nina!"

What makes the showdown such a great scene is that it is beautifully self-referential. Ryder herself has dealt with being replaced by young starlets like Portman in her career, so the irony makes the scene all the more resonating and truly affecting.

Being in the hospital leaves Beth out of commission for almost the remainder of the movie, except for one key scene that occurs near the end. For those who haven't yet seen the film yet, I won't spoil it, but suffice it to say it's a doozy.

There's an argument to be made that Ryder's work in the film is nothing but a glorified cameo, but what a cameo it is. If her career is destined to be more roles like Beth--essentially, character actress work--then count me among the Winona Ryder fans. She is truly one of the great actresses at the edge.

Guild Wars

The Producers Guild of America and Writers Guild of America both announced their nominations for achievements in film in 2010, and they tossed up a grand total of zero surprises. (Actually, that's not true--WGA, due to their long list of ineligible scripts including Winter's Bone, The King's Speech, and Another Year, had the space to nominate I Love You, Phillip Morris and Please Give. The only screenplay really hurt by the lack of WGA love was the completely eligible Rabbit Hole.)

The only Best Picture hopeful that was really hurt was Winter's Bone, which had the misfortune of being #11 of ten films nominated for the PGA Award as well as being ineligible for the WGA. So out of the three guilds already announced (PGA, WGA, and the Screen Actors Guild), Winter's Bone was only recognized for individual honors by SAG, not for the greater Ensemble prize.

In short: while it's looked as though 127 Hours, The Kids are All Right and The Town would be fighting for those last spots, all of a sudden it's Winter's Bone that looks vulnerable.

However, since who gets the last spots doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things (fighting that hard for a nomination is going to prevent any possibility of winning), let's take a look at which films are looking like the best shots for a Best Picture win.

2011 Brings a New Awkward is What We Aim For

Like the new look? It's part of a new, 2011-based boost for the site that should hopefully help make the site emerge from the pack of Oscar blogs as a definitive voice. If you wanna read more about the revamp, check out the About the Site tab. As always, the new Oscar Predictions are up, with four more categories added.

In addition, you can now access the site directly! The domain is now mine--just make sure to bookmark http://www.awkwardiswhatweaimfor.com/ to get to the site!

Any thoughts about those can be posted in the comments section on this post. And of course, if you guys have any thoughts on the site redesign, I'd love to hear them! Just leave them in the comments.

Netflix Pix: All About The Ghost Writer

Welcome to the first installment in a new series called "Netflix Pix"! In this series, I'll feature once-a-week (or at least, I'll try to be once-a-week) a pair of films available on Netflix. As best I can, I'll attempt to make it one instant stream/one regular service, but that might vary.

For this first installment, let's look at one film about the business of theater and another about the business of politics: All About Eve (1950) and The Ghost Writer (2010).

Not Phoebe, But Fiona (Wallice, That Is)

Obviously, as of late this has become almost entirely a film/Oscar-devoted blog, but as it moves forward, I'm going to work to make it more well-rounded, with reviews of film, TV, theater, and other modalities. Speaking of modalities... have you heard? Fiona Wallice has her own modality of psychiatry. It's called Web Therapy.

"Hi, I'm Fiona Wallice, and this is Web Therapy!"

I've bever been a big fan of "webisodes" or web series, simply because I feel the experience of television is meant to be enjoyed on a, you know, television. I can hardly stand YouTube clips if they're any longer than two minutes and aren't GloZell or The Second City Network. (No, I would not like to see a clip of that Asian man singing Whitney Houston on the Asian version of America's Got Talent, thank you.) But if there's one thing that college teaches you with regard to television, it's that the internet (specifically Hulu) is your best friend.

At the recommendation of Nathaniel Rogers at The Film Experience (who, if after my multiple references you still have not checked out, you must take the time to read), I made an appointment with Lisa Kudrow's three-year old web series Web Therapy. I had heard tell of the project before but I was never interested enough to check it out. How wrong I was not to be watching all this time.

Kudrow, who has long been miscast as a minimal talent in my mind due to her work on what has never been known to be my favorite sitcom, Friends (sue me, I never enjoyed the antics of the rent-controlled twenty- and thirty-somethings who didn't know what the hell they wanted out of life but sure loved to whine about it), is a wonder and a dark comedy revelation as the innovative therapist Dr. Fiona Wallice who cares far more about herself than she does her patients. But far from being bad at her job, Fiona is actually a masterful therapist: in one case, she actually diagnoses her patients' intimacy problems in half a minute without even breaking a sweat.

Fiona: "This is an issue of intellectual property, which I own."

Jerome: "You, you own it?"

Instead of worrying too much about her patients' problems, Fiona prefers to work to further her own cause: the new modality of therapy she's invented, titled, appropriately enough, "Web Therapy." Instead of the traditional, in-person, 50-minute therapy session, Fiona has found that a 3-minute session over iChat is a far more effective modality, because so much of a typical 50-minute session is just aimless wandering. As she puts it, the 3-minute time limit is like a "gun to your head" that forces patients to divulge all the pertinent information quickly.

While Fiona is actually incredibly competent, her sessions often go awry when her own interests become more important than those of the patient. This is most often found in season one, when Fiona's main goal was to get more money from her investors and further the spread of her special modality. But the patients are all well-cast, with each face familiar to most who watch television with differing size of the celebrities (Courtney Cox is the best among the big names, while Julie Claire as a long-running character is the biggest of the smaller names) and Kudrow's improvised interactions with them always ringing true.

Season one isn't the strongest of the show, but it introduces the concept well and has some great series (the Jerome/Hayley series and the initial Richard series, featuring her great catchphrase, "I've muted you"). Season two is even better, with the story arc turning to Fiona's husband, Kip Wallice, and his alleged homosexuality. Each patient is a great addition to the show and the narrative arc really hits its stride. Season three, the most recent season, is more of a typical episodic tale than the other, more series-focused seasons, and it's disappointing to see the show become more about Fiona's life and the people surrounding her (most of the patients were repeats, except those who weren't patients at all and had another connection to Fiona), but the comedy remained sharp and the twists interesting. I hope the show can save itself from Extras-style derailment (the BBC sitcom, a work of art in its first season, eventually lost itself and was merely a shade at the point of its finale) and bring the storyline back in a new, funny way that hits those season two creative peaks.

Fiona: "No, I don't have any children."

Camilla: "Oh! Not even one?"

As a special treat to fans, though, Kudrow managed to get Therapy fan Meryl Streep on for a three-episode arc as Camilla Bowner, the...well, I shouldn't give away her role, as it's far too spoiler-prone. Suffice it to say that Streep, not exactly well-known for her improvisational skills, does great work here, if a little stilted at times. Still, she's Meryl Streep--how could she be anything but great?

Web Therapy can be watched online for free at any time at Lexus Studio, as well as selectively on Hulu and for purchase on iTunes. Episodes range from 3 to 15 minutes, and it's easy to get through series in one sitting. If you're a Lisa Kudrow fan or just a fan of great dark comedy, Web Therapy just might be the modality for you.

I've attached the video for the first episode below: check it out to see if it's to your liking.

Web Therapy 
Season 1: A-
Season 2: A
Season 3: B+
The Camilla Bowner miniseries: B+