Curio: Holiday Snail Mail

Alexa here. I did my part today to keep the USPS in business by sending out an armload of holiday cards. So for those who also take the time to send a greeting through the mail, and who aren't making personal greeting card appearances à la Andrew Lincoln, here are some of the more clever film-themed greetings available that don't involve Clark Griswold or Ralphie.

Die Hard, The Shining, Holly Golightly and more after the jump...

Tis the season for John McClane. Avilable here.

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Inside Llewyn's Gotham Awards

It was a mix of oft rewarded icons (The Coens) and breakthrough leading movie roles from former awesome TV ensemble players (Jordan & Larson) for the Gotham Awards last night in NYC. 12 Years a Slave, which led nominations (not that that means much at the Gothams with so few categories), went home emptyhanded. No, not even for Lupita Nyong'o in Breakthrough! Bad luck or a sign that people respect but don't love the slavery drama? I don't personally understand this since it's a great film and great films are easy to love but though I'm a Gothamite, I'm not a Gotham voter. And full disclosure: I'm also cool on the Coen's chilly musical, apart from the music and the cat both of which are prize-worthy. 

guitar > fiddle at the Gothams

Feature: Inside Llewyn Davis
The 60s folk scene/character study from Joel and Ethan Coen conquered the uneven field of nominees which included  12 Years..., Upstream Color, Before Midnight (read our just published interview with Julie Delpy), and Aint Them Bodies Saints
Documentary: The Act of Killing
Breakthrough Director: Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station
Breakthrough Actor: Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station
Will he take all the season's "Breakthrough" prizes or can Lupita rally to conquer?
Film Audience Award: Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings, Tadashi Nakamura
Spotlight on Women Filmmakers ‘Live the Dream’ Grant: Gita Pullapilly, director, Beneath the Harvest Sky

Brie Larson = Best Actress (Photo via Indiewire)

Actor: Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club
He won the Spirit Award last year for Magic Mike so this is another key indie acting prize for him. Can he convert all this into an Oscar acknowledgement that he's reinvented himself as an actor. That's what everyone was expecting but then the Best Actor race just got tighter and tighter.
Actress: Brie Larson, Short Term 12 (Interviewed)
This is quite a get since the Gothams didn't support Short Term 12 with nominations elsewhere. Larson beat Blanchett, Woodley, Scarjo, and busy indie darling Amy Seimetz

How do these prizes strike you this morning? Good, bad, indifferent?

Team FYC: 'Nebraska' For Best Original Score

In this series TFE contributors sound off on their favorite fringe contenders. Here's Anne Marie on Mark Orton and the Tin Horns.

Alexander Payne's latest film Nebraska is getting much-deserved acting kudos. Bruce Dern has undoubtedly given a career-topping performance as the muddled and melancholy Woody. However, an unacknowledged but equally fine character is the folk score by Mark Orton. Orton reunited with his band the Tin Horns to play the music for his first feature film score. They mix traditional bluegrass elements like guitar and fiddle with surprises including a dobro and a xylophone. The effect is full Americana with a lot of quirkiness and a little sadness--giving voice to the unvoiced themes in the film.

Like Deborah, I ask that the Academy think small this year. We have the usualy heavy-hitters filling film scores with sound and fury, and soon the Coen Brothers will be releasing that other folk film that's sure to turn attention away from Nebraska. However, Mark Orton's score stands alone.  Like other characters in the film, the score hints at deeper meanings but never falls into the easy cliches and chords of melodrama. With deceptively simple orchestrations and a powerful musical thread throughout, Mark Orton has crafted a beautiful score that feels both familiar and unique.

Interview: Julie Delpy on the ideal way to watch the "Before" trilogy

Julie Delpy speaking in West Hollywood in NovemberStargazing sometimes leads us to believe that we really know the faces who act out our human dramas onscreen. Or that we know the characters they portray as if they were neighbors. It’s a false intimacy and a fantasy, fiction being fiction and strangers being strangers, but sometimes the illusion is too perfect to deny. Such is the case with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as Celine and Jessie in the “Before…”  trilogy. The actors cowrote and costarred in the decades spanning trilogy under the guidance of Director Richard Linklater and the films, perfectly spaced out every nine years, have allowed audiences to age along with them, which has only added to their ephemeral mystique. The films are grounded in reality through their short single day stories and long takes - real life happens one day at a time and without a lot of fussy crosscutting – and the only fantastical element is that every day conversations are rarely this thrilling and this wide ranging and this funny simultaneously for 90 minutes straight without some dud moment or mundane distraction breaking the spell. For that kind of perfection you need miraculous writing and great acting.

Julie Delpy is not, of course, Celine. And though I know this as I settle into our conversation over the telephone I’m temporarily stunned when she, unasked, repeats her trilogy’s most famous line when I bring up the ending to Before Sunset (2004, for which she won a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination though not, tragically, the Best Actress nod she deserved as its companion). She sounds just like Celine… only somehow not...

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41st Annie Award Nominations

Tim here, with a quick bit of news: the International Animated Film Society has announced the nominees for the 41st Annie Awards. Unsurprisingly, it's heavily tilted towards big studio fare, with Despicable Me 2 dominating the list with eleven nominations, Monsters University and Frozen with ten nominations apiece, and The Croods just a breath behind with nine.

In the short categories (Best Animated Special Production, Best Animated Short), three of the films on the Oscar bake-off list made the Annies' cut: British TV special "Room on the Broom", the Canadian "Gloria Victoria", and Disney's tech-heavy new Mickey short, "Get a Horse!"

The full list of nominees is here. For now, I'll leave you with the nominations for Voice Acting, entirely men aside from Wiig. (The corresponding TV category is 100% male)

• Paul Giamatti as the voice of Chet - Turbo  
• Terry Crews as the voice of Earl – Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2  
• Kristen Wiig as the voice of Lucy – Despicable Me 2
• Steve Carell as the voice of Gru – Despicable Me 2  
• Pierre Coffin as the voice of Minions - Despicable Me 2
• Billy Crystal as the voice of Mike – Monsters University 
• Josh Gad as the voice of Olaf - Frozen

And the seven films in contention for Best Animated Feature:

• The Croods
• Despicable Me 2
• Ernest & Celestine
• Frozen
• A Letter to Momo
• Monsters University
• The Wind Rises

We can probably expect Oscar's list to consist of some combination of four or five of these.