Top Ten: Red Carpet Cate

Jose here. There's only a handful of things we can lock up for the upcoming Academy Awards and Cate Blanchett getting a Best Actress nod for Blue Jasmine is one of them.

The Australian goddess has been getting career-best reviews for her work in Woody Allen's latest, and considering she's played Bob Dylan, Kate Hepburn and Queen Elizabeth to perfection, she's been doing the right kind of press by being modest and saying she owes her success to Woody.

Tomorrow she's even getting a tribute at the New York Film Festival (read our festival coverage here)! Tributes are a key strategy in many Oscar campaign; she might finally win her second gold man. But let's not jump ahead of ourselves with that tricky Oscar fella and let's predict the other thing we can pretty much be assured will happen: Cate will be the best dressed woman on Oscar night. Doing the press rounds for Blue Jasmine donning everyone from Alexander McQueen to vintage Balenciaga, she has been on a roll (even when she goes for statements instead of "dresses"). Which forces us to wonder if she'll be out of ideas by spring! 

HER TEN BEST LOOKS OF THE SEASON
after the jump 

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Curio: Lucky Jackson

Alexa here. Film and embroidery don't seem a natural combination, but, as I've posted before, there are plenty of crafters out there celebrating their film fandom with an embroidery hoop.  One in particular, Jennifer Jackson, a.k.a. Lucky Jackson, continues to amaze me with her prolific output.  She uses thread like others might sketch with a pencil, stitching celebrities she's crushing on or movie scenes she loves.  

Richie's tent

In 2011 and 2012 she did an embroidery each and every day for a year, filling it with many a Bill Murray and Margot Tenenbaum. See a selection, including Bonnie Parker, American Beauty, Kick Ass, Zoolander and more after the jump.

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Is there hope for an interesting Best Animated Feature race?

Tim here. Right at the end of last week, the Academy very quietly issued a rules change pertaining to the Best Animated Feature Oscar: instead of requiring that members of the nominating committee had seen at least 80% of the films on the eligibility list (an onerous task indeed, given that these are people who care about animation for a living, and that list can sometimes be, like, 20 films long), now the voters can pick any animated films they darn well want to, which is potentially going to do away with all those fun little nominees like A Cat in Paris and The Secret of Kells, things that badly need the exposure. Perhaps not. But if we’re about to enter a world where Planes can snag a nomination over Ernest & Celestine (please oh please Oscar gods, don’t let that happen), something is even more broken with a dodgy category than we’ve thought.

Now comes the news that the European Film Academy has announced its own list of nominees:  the modeling clay stop-motion of Jasmine by Alain Ughetto and a new version of Pinocchio by Italian director Enzo d’Aló. And The Congress featuring Robin Wright which played at Cannes and is the new film by Ari Folman, director of Waltz with Bashir (which famously attempted three specialty nominations for Documentary, Animated Feature and Foreign Film but was disqualified from the first, failed the second and became the first animated film ever nominated for Best Foreign Film.)

Jasmine is a "claymation story of love and revolution"

We have no way of knowing if any of these will be squeaked into the United States in time for Oscar qualification – the vagaries about what counts as “qualifying run” for this category is especially dubious – but given how everyone in the world agrees that we’re looking at the weakest year for animated features since the category was born, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if some canny distributor decided to use this nomination as the spur for a Hail Mary pass.

Is there a possibility of repeating 2011, when two functionally un-released foreign films made the nomination list? It’s hard to say, especially with the rules change in the nominating process, but faced with tiny niche releases that nobody has heard of getting national attention, and the possibility of the phrase “Oscar nominee Turbo” ever being said by anybody, I know which one I’m hoping for.

updated animation & documentary chart

NYFF: Charm Offensive

TFE's coverage of the 51st New York Film Festival (Sep 27-Oct 14) continues with JA discussing About Time.

Charm is a hell of a drug. Be it in real life or up on a movie screen, it can intoxicate a person right out of their senses, making the charmer in question immune from all kinds of quibbles - major or minor, animal vegetable or mineral. If that certain somebody or somebodies are lighting off sparks, we the charmed, defenseless and weak, are willing to overlook a lot whilst under their spell. Put those fireworks front and center in a romantic comedy and you're pretty well good to go...

And so it goes with Richard Curtis' new flick About Time. There's actually a sequence in this movie where the beloveds at center stage (played by Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams) are falling for each other and we're given a montage of time passing involving wacky outfit changes and god save us all subway buskers, and yet instead of reaching into my brain through my ear canal and lobotomizing myself right then and there I only rolled my eyes a little - not even a lot! That's a feat, one I must lay down in awe at the feet of our charm-riddled lovebirds. ("It's the H1N1 of romantic comedies!" = my poster blurb.) I almost always find McAdams worth watching when she tries (at last year's fest I positively luxuriated in the sight of her campily swanning around in lingerie in Brian DePalma's Passion) and here she's at her most homespun loveable, fringe and all - she knows her way around and back again with a sly knowing smirk.

But I'd be lying if I said it my scales (and the movie's, it must be said) weren't tilted ever so slightly in the favor of Gleeson - indeed I came out of this movie thinking I'd just been introduced to the world's skinniest gingeriest movie star since Julia Roberts squealed "Well color me happy there's a sofa in here for two," in thigh high pleather boots and a Carol Channing wig. Domhnall's been building up a memorable resume with everything I've seen him in, from Never Let Me Go to Anna Karenina, but here, to borrow a turn of phrase from Mama Grape, he shimmers and he glows. Total charm offensive.

He's so captivating that not only can I overlook mad-cap subway musician antics, I can very nearly tip-toe right past all kinds of questionable moral quandaries that his time-travel antics cough up, like gosh there's nothing at all creepy about relationships built on excessive one-sided manipulations (they're not really lie lies), and gosh, women don't so much need personal agency, do they, as long as somebody parrots their girly likes back at them. (A fixation on Kate Moss is a really strange fixation for a person to have though. Really very.)

Indeed the movie manages to swerve around these sorts of questions by pushing the third act's beating heart, where our expectations are set for the standard relationship implosion-to-reconciliation arc, into the body of a father-son picture instead (Bill Nighy's basically just playing Bill Nighy, or the Bill Nighy we all imagine Bill Nighy is, but I still like Bill Nighy, so I was okay with it); there's life in the fact that the movie manages to side-step our well-trod expectations, to be sure, but the movie actually kind of forgets about McAdams once she's good and won and churning out the babies. I hoped there'd be some curiosity bestowed upon her character regarding her amour's constant shuffling off into cupboards, at least? But that wasn't to be - she's set on the shelf while the film unearths its true colors, as a tear-jerking fantasy about family and memory and the passage of time, and also ping pong. Most meaningful ping pong!

Honestly though, truth be told, I was so high off what Domnhall was giving me it was only once the film was over and my love hangover set in that I began picking our personal love affair apart. And even then notsomuch. Subway buskers come and go, but Domhnall's grin is forever.

You should all make time (groan) for About Time when it plays at the festival tonight, 10/2, or 10/6. Then come tell me whether I was blinded by ginger or not.

September. It's a Wrap

With September closing we're entering the final quarter, the last gasp of 2013! Before the leaves fall and Oscar madness hits (wait, it hasn't yet?), here's one last look back at a dozen Best of the Month posts in case you missed any of the awesomeness... which was mostly TIFF centered or 1980s retro.

Brie Larson Interview on Short Term 12, United States of Tara and Celebrity
Boogie Nights as Radio Show? What I learned/remembered about the classic film at TIFF
Nicole+Naomi JA hilariously imagines an evening in with the besties and best actresses 
Half Nelson's amazing classroom scenes - so many movies connect to these history lessons 
Agents of SHIELD the TV return of Joss Whedon... first impressions
Map to the Stars image doubles up on mysterious actressing 

Nicole Kidman is Indescructible  a collision with the paparazzi
'This Comment Thread Is Not Going to Be Ignored' I ♥ TFE readers. I really do.
Whither Pixar? Tim worries for the future of the once great production house 
Blonde Bombshells vs. Character Actors on the supporting actress race 
Meryl The Witch our first glimpse of Into the Woods 
FYC Ulysses ginger haters beware

Coming in October:
Dallas Buyers Club, ocean terror with Captain Phillips, a trip back to Gravity, 12 Years a Slave's Sarah Paulson & Alfre Woodard, a look back at the 1968 film year (any requests?) plus it's Supporting Actress contenders. And the greatest horror movies of all time via Team Experience!