Editors' Picks.

Jose here. Today we have the announcement from the American Cinema Editors who - shocker - went for more of the same movies! For almost 40 years, the Eddies were awarded to a single motion picture (their first winner was The Parent Trap and their last was the acclaimed Saving Private Ryan) but then they decided that they too needed to include as many movies as possible and split their award into Drama and Musical & Comedy. Now excuse me if I sound ignorant (I did go to film school and all...) but isn't editing exactly the same for both? It's not like you use different equipment and/or need to have different skills to do each, right? Isn't the editor's job actually (along with the director of course) to decide just how funny or how dramatic each movie will be? So I really don't get why guilds need to invent such categories. I don't see the ASC doing that, but god I love the cinematographers for being the classiest guild...anyway enough with my complaining.

Here are the nominees for this year's Eddies:

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The Next 12 Years Are More Like 50

JA from MNPP here - almost every review I've read of Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave has made note of the fact that this is a British man making a movie about an American experience, and usually falling down on the side that maybe it took the perspective of an outsider looking in to capture something previously uncaptured about it.

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Well the only luxury of distance McQueen will have with his next project is that of time, and only that partially - he's next planning (after he wins an Oscar, fingers crossed) on making what's being called an "epic" series for the BBC on "the black experience in Britain" from the end of the 1960s up until today. (There might be an emphasis on the 1981 Brixton riots - he's talked about them before.) He talks to The Daily Mail about the new project here - it's in the early stages, without any actors attached or script yet... although I'd be shocked if there's not at least at least one Irish-German ginger skulking around in it at least in a small part somewhere, wouldn't you?

Princess 'Merida' Chastain

Jessica Chastain as Princess Merida

Annie Leibovitz took this photo of me as Merida from the film "Brave." Out of all the Disney characters, she's probably my favorite, as she takes her destiny in her own hands. That's a modern princess.

Her favorite huh? If not a favorite of convenience perhaps it's a matter of redhead kinship?

Sorry, Ariel! 

Art Directors Make Their Picks

Jose here, with yet another batch of guild nominees. This time members of the Art Directors Guild have determined nominees in three categories (which are just as nonsensical as those of the Costume Designers Guild...how is Her contemporary and Gravity a fantasy?). It's mostly more of the same, except for one or two rather interesting choices here and there, and truly it seems as if Oscar mostly cares about the "old look" which is why the Period nominees might pretty much translate into our final five nominees. Right?

The nominees were the following:

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DVD Review: The Act of Killing

Tim here. As Team Experience’s representative lover of The Act of Killing above all other movies in 2013 (if “love” is the right word for such an bleak portrait of humanity’s worst side), it naturally falls to me to trumpet the Good News that one of the year’s best-reviewed films that you probably haven’t had a chance to see yet is now on DVD and Blu-Ray. At just the right moment, too, in advance of the Oscar nomination that I’m honestly not expecting it to receive; the Documentary branch hasn’t been in the business of making me that happy, and it’s not fair to expect otherwise.

It’s not the kind of film that readily lends itself to breathless statements of the “you HAVE to see this!” sort. For it is, after all, a documentary about mass political killings, one of the unlikeliest subjects in the world to produce a frolicsome entertainment that everyone will enjoy. That being said, you probably do have to see this. It is unlike any other cinematic analysis of its subject that I’ve ever heard of, let alone seen, with the filmmakers (those being director Joshua Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and another co-director remaining anonymous for reasons of personal safety) going straight to the men who headed the anti-Communist death squads in 1965 and ’66 (regarded as heroes in Indonesia), and offering them a chance to make their own cinematic interpretations of their past deeds.

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