NBR Awards. Old Favorites Clint, Clooney & Marty Triumphant Again

Though the NBR finally gave up their "first!" crown -- and without so much as a fight! -- they were true to form in other ways. George Clooney & Clint Eastwood can't even sneeze without 92% of the NBR crowd shouting gezundheit so naturally their films won top ten placements and Clooney's film (The Descendants) won three other prizes, too.

But Martin Scorsese, another previous NBR winner, was the man of the hour. Or the future hour when the banquet takes place since he showed up on the Documentary top five list with George Harrison: Living in the Material World (review) and his film Hugo won both Best Picture and Best Director. A double win for those categories is not common at the NBR. It's true that it happened last year with The Social Network but before that it hadn't happened since 1997 when Curtis Hanson did the trick with LA Confidential.

PICTURE Hugo

(top 10 ...the rest are in alpha order)
• The Artist
• The Descendants
• Drive
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2
• The Ides of March
• J. Edgar
(Clint Eastwood hasn't missed their top ten list since Blood Work, 2002)
• The Tree of Life
• War Horse 

FOREIGN FILM A Separation

(top 5 additional foreign films in alpha order)
•13 Assassins
• Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
• Footnote 
• Le Havre
• Point Blank 

DIRECTOR Martin Scorsese, Hugo
ACTRESS Tilda Swinton, We Need To Talk About Kevin
ACTOR George Clooney, The Descendants
SUPPORTING ACTRESS Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
SUPPORTING ACTOR Christopher Plummer, Beginners
BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE Felicity Jones, Like Crazy and Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo
DEBUT DIRECTOR JC Chandor, Margin Call
ENSEMBLE The Help

How Elizabeth Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene keeps losing these "breakthrough" and "debut" categories is beyond me. And NBR also shunned it even in the top ten indies list. 

many more prizes, top ten indies, and awards history after the jump.

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David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method & the "Parallel Universe" of Oscar

Cronenberg hard at work on "A Dangerous Method"I met the great filmmaker David Cronenberg one morning this fall shortly before a screening of his latest work at the New York Film Festival. His new film A Dangerous Method, which just opened and will be expanding throughout the month in theaters, is a historical drama about the birth of psychoanalysis. In the film Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his protege Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) are torn apart over idealogical differences and Jung's treatment of a young woman named Sabina (Keira Knightley).

Cronenberg in person was talkative, articulate and fascinating. He was even good natured about the sordid topic of Oscar (incredibly the reknowned auteur has never been nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe or even a DGA prize!).

His ease with conversation might surprise people who only know him through his often unsettling films. The night before our interview I'd been at a party and when I casually mentioned I'd be interviewing Cronenberg the next day I heard the strangest funniest responses: "Don't get in a car with him!" "Don't let him touch your portals!" and so on. Other amusing warnings followed as if he were a frightening character from his movies.

I relayed this to Cronenberg as icebreaker when we sat down...

Nathaniel: Do you find that people regularly have odd conceptions about you based on your films? 

DAVID CRONENBERG: Well, you know, I haven't done horror films for a long time so it's strange that it's sticky. I've talked about this before but Marty Scorsese told me he was terrified to meet me -- we did meet and became very good friends many years ago -- but he said he was terrified and then shocked to see that I looked like a Beverly Hills gynecologist. And I said 'You were afraid to meet me? You're the guy who made Taxi Driver?!'

a small sampling of his often deeply troubling films

It was a long time ago. But he had seen Shivers and Rabid and maybe The Brood and he found them incredibly overwhelming and terrifying. He of all people should know and I suppose if Marty could make the same mistake...

The relationship of an artist to his art is a complex one. It's not one to one. It's not like you make romantic comedies therefore you are romantic and fun. On the contrary we know that most comedians are really nastily, hostile, spiteful vindictive people.

Nathaniel: Does your work ever scare you then, when you see it back?

CRONENBERG: I don't normally watch it. I can't watch my movies as though they're movies. They're documentaries of what I was doing that day. I'm the last person to be able to tell you objectively what my movies do or don't do.

Nathaniel: As an auteur you obviously have had recurring thematic elements Do you think about your past work when you're working on something new?

CRONENBERG: No. I completely don't. That's why if someone should say, it has happened, that A Dangerous Method doesn't feel like a Cronenberg film. I don't know what they're talking about. I mean, I know what the cliches are. But to me, they don't realize that the first movie I made was about a psychiatrist and his patient. It was a short, my first film. So for me this is business as usual. To me that just reveals their ignorance. I'm not saying that in a vindictive way but it just means they don't really know my work or understand it. That's the way I feel.

Nathaniel: It's actually very much like your work in terms of the concerns. You've done a lot of films that had psycho-analytic elements. Did you ever worry that this was maybe too on the nose, given that? Like you're going back to the womb or the source of it all.

CRONENBERG: No, No. It's exciting to do that!

[MORE AFTER THE JUMP: including his collaboration with Viggo, awards season lottery tickets, and the modern trend of directors tinkering with their old movies.] 

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Congratulations to the Movie-ish Grammy Nominees !

Given that roughly 193,026 musicians can call themselves Grammy nominees for the first time or again in the wake of last night's announcement (so many categories), we'd like to congratulate those nominees that are somehow connected to the movies. But before we do that, tell me who has your vote for "album of the year"?

poll by twiigs.com

I have the Gaga and Adele CDs and love both. Do you recommend the others?

Anyway... Silver screen type nominees & best music videos after the jump
Including: Val Kilmer, Patton Oswalt, Daniel Radcliffe and more...

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Complete the Chastainy Sentences...

If I could ask Jessica Chastain one question it'd be this:  ________________________________________.

She's the new _________________ because  ______________ .

When I heard she won the first Supporting Actress award of precursor season I thought _______________________ .

I really hope she works with _________________ and plays __________________ .

Music, Mistletoe and Michael Caine: 'The Muppet Christmas Carol'

Kurt here. If you love Christmas, odds are there's an incarnation of A Christmas Carol of which you take ownership. For me, it's a stage production performed annually at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ. For you, it might be the 1938 Joseph L. Mankiewicz classic with Reginald Owen. And for a special few, it's The Muppet Christmas Carol, a film that proves how effectively one beloved property can be used to refresh another. The worlds of Jim Henson and Charles Dickens intertwine rather beautifully in this 1992 musical dramedy, whose Muppet stars pull the Yuletide tale out of mothballs, but don't crank up the contemporary jabber so far as to brand it with a born-on date. The comedy is all about that distinct Muppet attitude, which, as the new Muppets film seems determined to emphasize, is as timeless as "Bah Humbug."

Charles Dickens is in fact a character in the film. He's played by Gonzo, who, along with Rizzo the Rat, narrates the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge (a game, sincere Michael Caine) and the spectral Christmas Eve that rids him of his jerkdom. You might think excessive hand-holding would result from having a pair of narrators guide you through a film that already sees its lead and his visitors guide you through second-act flashbacks, but that's never the case here, as Gonzo proves an entertainingly knowing voice and a funny teacher to Rizzo, who's ever-eager to listen and learn ("Why are you whispering?" Rizzo asks. "It's for dramatic emphasis," Gonzo tells him). It's a gentle form of un-dusty, all-ages comedy, and it's a far better rejuvenator than, say, a 3D shrunken-man rollercoaster. 

The narrating duo also add to a team element that seems to unfailingly manifest when it comes to the Muppets. Of course, the characters are their own traveling troupe (a factor that undoubtedly helps attract flesh-and-blood actors to work with them), but there are subsets of teams that appear within projects, and help to give the comedy that ultra-important communal feel. Jacob Marley, for instance, is given a brother, Robert (wink-wink), so the pair can be portrayed by the hysterical hecklers Statler and Waldorf, who may just offer the most enjoyable books-and-chains preliminary haunt the story has ever seen ("There's more of gravy than of grave about you," Scrooge says to the pair in his blame-it-on-the-food speech. "More of gravy than of grave?" they reply. "What a terrible pun! Where do you get these jokes?"). There's also Bob Cratchit's (Kermit the Frog) shivering team of bookkeeping colleagues, who famously initiate an impromptu Hawaiian dance when their request for more furnace coal is met with the threat of unemployment.  

Watching the film again, I was struck by just how many musical sequences it includes, and they're fine ones at that. The movie begins with the familiar marketplace bustle, through which Scrooge hurries home amid a whole town of scared and scorned onlookers. "There goes Mr. Humbug," they chant, "there goes Mr. Grim. If they gave a prize for being mean, the winner would be him." Even the Muppet-ized vegetables join in on the chorus, shaming the village grump. Later, the central cast members unite for "Thankful Heart," an ending tune that, like the others, was penned by Paul Williams (the score is credited to Miles Goodman). Off hand, I can't recall another Christmas Carol that presents itself as a musical, apart from the usual festivities at the house of Fezziwig (who, here, naturally, goes by "Fozziwig"). The story works great with the songs sprinkled in, and the music has an effect similar to the Muppet comedy: updated, but un-dated.  

What probably nets the biggest laughs is the recurring tendency of Gonzo and Rizzo to get physically involved with the story they're telling, be it by falling off an in-flashback shelf they describe as "old and decayed," or receiving a self-reflexive Christmas greeting from Scrooge himself. Gonzo, in particular, has fun with the different levels of fiction, playing an imaginary version of an author poking around in his own creation. "Great story, Mr. Dickens," Rizzo says at film's end. "You should read the book," says Gonzo.