Spirit Award Winners

Since they aren't airing the show live (it comes on at 10 PM EST) we shan't live-blog -- seriously in this day and age no live airing? Epic stupidity -- but we can share winners and talk about highlights after zee fact late tonight or tomorrow as we just skim through the show.

Jennifer Lawrence and Nicole Kidman, both nominated

Best First Screenplay Lena Durhman Tiny Furniture. Though she's already won the true prize: an HBO pilot deal. Tiny Furniture is quite singular and funny so check it out when you can.

Best Cinematography Matthew Libatique Black Swan. Yay! Single best thing about Black Swan if you ask me. He also won our gold medal.

Best Supporting Actress Dale Dicky in Winter's Bone. She puts the hurt on Lawrence so beautifully.

Best First Feature Aaron Schneider for Get Low. (Scott Cooper won this last year for Crazy Heart. Moral of the story: Find an old grizzly acting legend and you're newbie gold!)

Best Actor James Franco in 127 Hours. I'm so glad Colin Firth wasn't eligible. Firth was good in The King's Speech but so were a lot of people this year.

Best Documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. Mr Brainwash accepts the prize. Apparently goes on and on. Honestly I feel like I'm live blogging blindfolded. I hate tape delay. This is 2011. This is not my childhood with 3 television stations and friends who had something exotic called "cable"

Best Foreign Film The King's Speech.  I guess it's too much to ask the masses to vote for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. And the masses can vote on the Spirits if they join. Which is, I think, why it's more like the Oscars than not of late.

Robert Altman Award to Please Give. Yay. It also made our best ensemble nominations. Have you seen it yet?

poll by twiigs.com

Cassavettes Awards Daddy Longlegs

Best Supporting Actor John Hawkes for Winter's Bone. It's turning into quite a "Weekend in the Ozarks" here. Is it too much to hope that Jennifer Lawrence wins too? A nice change of pace that'd be. And when there are so many hundreds of awards to win each year, why do they all gotta go to the same things?

Mark Ruffalo tweeted a beautiful congrats to his "opponent" and apparently friend.

John Hawkes is the Man. Congratulations brother. All our days in shitty little theaters back in the day paid off. Blessings!!

And he also snapped a photo of Lisa Cholodenko and her woman Wendy. The Cholodenkos Are All Right. Speaking of...

Best Screenplay Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg for The Kids Are All Right

Best Actress Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Best Director Darren Aronofksy, Black Swan

Best Feature Black Swan

It started as a Winter's Bone evening and then sported a rash that quickly turned into black swan feathers.

And that's it. Now the show is but an afterthought. What strange programming decisions stations make of late. The things that IFC felt were more important to show during the actula awards were The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) and Boondock Saints (2000) which they have undoubtedly shown hundreds of times already.

Stranger still it seems my IFC is not working. Dang. I was really not meant to watch this. I shall dutifully wait to see YouTube videos of Dale Dickey and John Hawkes winning their well deserved prizes.

See also: THE NICOLE KIDMAN SPIRIT SHOW

"The French Oscars"

Red Carpet Lineup! I wonder how various countries feel about their awards being referred to as "the _____ Oscars" all the time. It's as if America's 83 year old institution is the only film institution, all others being "spinoffs" or somesuch. I know it's just shorthand but I wonder. The French César Awards for example. How do they feel? And also: why did the César's get started so much later than the Oscars, with France being the birthplace of cinema and all? They didn't start until the mid 70s by which time Oscar was already a middle aged institution.

Polanski at the Césars in 2003 with Adrien Brody | Polanski with Nathalie Baye at the Césars in 2011.

Fast forward to now. Roman Polanski, who was the toast of the show in early 2003 for The Pianist was also a darling of the night in early 2011 for The Ghost Writer, repeating the pattern we've been seeing all awards season: The Ghost Writer is awards bait everywhere but in the U.S.

The Gallic stars came out to celebrate the Césars. Here's a sampling of stars, one American who speaks perfect French, winners, and also a quick layover in Japan. after the jump.

Click to read more ...

Who Should Wear This to the Oscars?

Here's what Julie Atlas Muz who stars in Mathieu Amalric's burlesque film Tournée wore to the Césars  (aka the French Oscars) yesterday.

poll by twiigs.com

How much would you pay to see the uproar at the Oscars if some attendee wore something like that?

Celebrities just don't take enough chances on the red carpet. Like the chance to be arrested for indecent exposure. Live a little movie stars. Come on. No more simple black gowns. We better see something crazy tomorrow night. Who can save us from the boring fashion parade to come?

.p.s. catch up on Oscar posts if you've been slacking!

Best of 2010: Cameos, Breakthroughs, Ensembles

The Film Bitch Awards Continue
Movie obsessives who get lost in star faces on the screen, would do well to keep their eyes peeled to the bit players or the actors toiling away in thankless roles. Sometimes, they're adding great textures or reinforcing the structural girding of their movie in the way they absorb or reflect or counteract what the name players are doing. Other times they're nailing one specific mood in such an amusing or ably defined way that you figure they might be be able to at least earn a living off commercials while they wait for someone to give them a shot at playing several moods. For instance, though I don't know her name I love the way the woman playing the real estate agent in Rabbit Hole is so silently 'this won't go well' nervous than 'this is worse than I expected' mortified by Aaron Eckhart's inappropriate intrusions into the home selling process.

 
My point is simply this: year after year ACTING remains a fascinating art form or craft or independently sentient color on a director's palette or whatever the hell you want to call it. Actors are magic. They have super powers.

I chose a scene from Never Let Me Go to illustrate this post because I think it's frankly a marvel. It's my favorite in the movie for the way it uses two tiny characters to make larger points about the whole film and to open up emotional pathways in the leads. When I went to write up Andrea Riseborough's caption, I found myself wishing for space for 250 words at least. In the middle of the scene, when all she and her boyfriend (Domnhall Gleeson) are pleading for information from their new companions there's this terrific beat.

I suppose you lot would know about that sort of thing. Being from Hailsham you'd know how that sort of thing works.

Greeted by the blank stares of our leads, and noticeably losing hope that her fantasy is a reality, those two sentences have this wonderful spike of condescencion and judgement, though she's pleasant and almost maternal in the rest of her scant few minutes onscreen. It sucks to have your dreams crushed by people greener than you.

Awards are also posted in Body of Work , Ensembles and Breakthrough categories. So read on for notes on Macy Gray, Mia Wasikowska, Ewan McGregor, Juliette Lewis, Brandon Routh, and actors you may be less familiar with like Robin Bartlett, Anthony Deptula, Slamin Dazi and more.

all the writeups and nominations here.

Mix Tape: "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" in Inception

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here, with one more glance at memorable song choices as we anticipate tomorrow's festivities. Although it's only used sparingly, Édith Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" casts a long shadow over all of Inception. Its texture and meaning clash heavily with the unearned gravitas and reformatted action movie clichés of Christopher Nolan's film, as Piaf's voice introduces a cosmopolitan, plaintive humanity. Less than a minute of the song is used in all of Inception, but it sure sticks with you when you leave the theater.

Within the film, Cobb's team of expert dream-burglars uses "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" in order to count down to the "kick"—in short, it's a glorified wake-up call wrapped in swaths of exposition. Whenever the dreamers are about to be woken up, it lets them know how much time is left to fulfill their objectives. So the song serves a neat plot purpose, like a flare gun being fired into the subconcious. (Even if those MP3 players do look a little too unwieldy to drag along on fast-paced mission.)

The song also creates a fun intertextual link to La Vie En Rose, since Marion Cotillard (Piaf herself) stars in both films, even though Nolan claims that he'd picked the song before she was cast. But more important than the song's actual function in the heist, or the Cotillard connection, is how Piaf's unapologetically emotional voice resounds across the epic vistas of Inception's shared dreams. It lends some pathos and strangeness to a film that's precise and diagrammatical, even when it's depicting warped gravity and collapsing buildings.

This is, after all, one of the most common (and valid) complaints about Inception: its dreams aren't even remotely dreamlike. If anything, they're the dreams of a British writer/director who fantasizes about clean gray suits, rainstorms, and shiny hotel plazas. The inclusion of "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" is a step in the right direction, however, especially when it plays across multiple dream layers, with Piaf's throaty, melancholy voice echoing down staircases and snowy mountainsides. The juxtaposition of this song with these surroundings is unexpected and, if only briefly, makes these dreams seem mildly surreal.

The song's influence even reaches beyond its short appearances: as Hans Zimmer has admitted, it inspired the ominous, droning brass leitmotif ("BWAAA!") that's most closely identified with Inception's score. So although the film's visual sensibilities may lack any of the sloppiness or irregularity we associate with real-life dreams, at least its soundtrack is informed by Piaf's soulful, decidedly irrational belting. One final irony: that a song whose title translates loosely as "No, I regret nothing" should complement Leonardo DiCaprio's endless mourning for the wife he inadvertently killed. It's a dose of bittersweet humor, buried several layers down in a film that so sorely needs it.