Meanwhile in Regular Awardage...

Nicole Kidman arrives at SBIFF. [photo via Scott Feinberg]Busy night for gongs last night. Nicole Kidman accepted her Vanguard award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. [Photo left via Scott Feinberg.] I'm sure she'll cherish that one as much as her Film Experience Gold Medal ;)

The Annie Awards for animation also took place even. You can see the results here. It was a huge night for How To Train Your Dragon which is such a good film but the wins will undoubtedly be viewed as unimportant due to the Annies troubled relationship with Disney/Pixar. Pixar won only Best Short for Day and Night.

The ADG handed out their Art Direction honors [full info at Gold Derby] which went to The King's Speech (Period), Inception (fantasy) and Black Swan (contemporary). Swan wasn't nominated for Oscar but DePrez took the bronze medal here at the Film Experience. I'm sure that'll be great consolation.

Earlier that evening the WGA handed out their screenwriting honors.

Original Screenplay: Inception
Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network
(TSN also won the US Scripter yesterday)
Documentary Screenplay:  Inside Job
Drama Series: Mad Men
Comedy Series: Modern Family
Complete List of Winners Here

Note: The King's Speech was not eligible for the WGA which is how the path was cleared for Best Original Exposition to win the prize. Don't expect that to happen at the Oscars.

Best Actress. My Ballot and Time Capsule.

Time is a funny thing. It shifts our feelings, sorts them out. Awards are a product of time, a time capsule. They're equally funny. If you'd told me back in January 2010 when I first saw Blue Valentine that it would end the year as my 4th favorite picture and that Michelle Williams would be in my best actress list, I wouldn't have believed you. I liked her and the movie quite a lot back then but now come February 2011, I love them. The Williams/Gosling duet yields richer rewards each viewing, little intricacies thrown into sharper relief while other ideas you held about the characters get foggier with mystery.

It says a lot about the quality of this year's Best Actress field that Sally Hawkins in Made in Dagenham didn't even make the finalist list. She does expert work revealing how ordinary courage and moral outrage properly channeled, can transform even the meekest of people. It says a lot about the quality of this year's Actress field that Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone didn't even make the semi-finalist list. She does fine work embodying the cold small range of feeling that this life might allow for and she gives the hard film just the right amount of heart as a resilient eldest sibling acting as parent. In the end though, despite Lawrence's absence, my own ballot is the closest its come to Oscar's Actress list since...er... 1987. [Trivia: that's the only year from the past three decades that my own choices for Best Actress line up 5/5 with Oscar.]

Needless to say I was quite pleased with Oscar's nominations. It's my favorite Best Actress Oscar list in recent memory with the exception of 2006... maybe.

Needless to say part two: It was such a toss up for spots 4-8 that I'm sure I'll regret my choices tomorrow. If anyone in tier 2 had come out in 2009 or 2008 or 2007 or even 2006, they would've knocked someone out of the 5th spot. And if they'd ALL been released in 2005, my awards would have been radically different. Such is the arbitrary nature of awards, chained to calendars as they are.

Favorite Dozen Lead Actresses 2010 (in alpha order). If only I could nominate 12 people!

• Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
• Greta Gerwig, Greenberg
• Sally Hawkins, Made in Dagenham
• Kim Hye-Ja, Mother
• Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole
• Lesley Manville, Another Year
• Natalie Portman, Black Swan
• Ruth Sheen, Another Year
• Paprika Steen, Applause
• Emma Stone, Easy A
• Tilda Swinton, I Am Love
• Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine

My nominees with write-ups

This will undoubtedly feel anti-climactic as my own nominees are usually more off Oscar's path -- who knew they'd have such good taste this year ;) -- and I usually finish before Oscar nominations and here I am wrapping up the first half of the Film Bitch Awards (medals and all) a week late.

I think the year produced two true masterpieces I Am Love and The Social Network so I split on Picture/Director, Picture going to the one I've remained most possessed by but I think both will stand the test of time. And yes, Nicole Kidman finally gets her Gold Medal after many years of near-misses. She's just transcendent in Rabbit Hole nailing the insatiable hunger of grief for more and more of itself and doing so with the barest minimum of histrionics and more humor than you'd think was possible. She also brilliantly foreshadows Becca's escape route through her thicket of pain, a path cleared by her curiousity, compassion, and capacity for stillness on a park bench, feeling whatever it is she needs to feel.

Looking Beyond 'The Town' with Ben Affleck

Shooting the shooting in The TownKurt here from Your Movie Buddy.

Ben Affleck may have been just fine in The Company Men (a film that eluded me, seeing as it lives in that imaginary void between 2010 and 2011), but with the success of The Town, the focus has shifted almost entirely from Ben Affleck, the actor, to Ben Affleck, the filmmaker. That is, outside of the Academy, of course.

Like his 2007 debut, Gone Baby Gone, Affleck's sophomore effort garnered only a supporting acting nod from Oscar. The critical community, however, along with the moviegoing public, wrapped their loving arms around The Town, and now all eyes are on what this tabloid-target-turned-auteur will do next. Will he break out of Beantown? Direct a film starring old bestie Matt Damon? Try his hand at comedy?

While I'm all for creative flexibility, I'd personally love to see Affleck stick with his genre of choice. Turns out he's bloody good at helming crime films. Admittedly, I wasn't really on board with the acclaim for Gone Baby Gone (I'm not really keen on Mystic River retreads that are in fact two movies in one), but I was stunned by what he did with The Town. I kept waiting for that movie to disappoint, and it never came close. In fact, the superbly-choreographed urban action tricked me into thinking I was watching Michael Mann's latest, while the overall lack of tonal compromise put me right into a Martin Scorsese film. At many points, I had to step back for a mental pause: all this from Fred F***ing O'Bannion? From Daredevil? It still blows my mind.

And so, I'm happy to report what outlets like EW already have – that Affleck, apparently, will indeed keep playing to his strengths. The multi-hyphenate is now in talks to direct the George Clooney- and Grant Heslov-produced Argo, a political thriller about a CIA rescue mission in Tehran circa 1979. Not exactly gritty neighborhood violence, no, but in the same general ballpark, with bank heists upgraded to international espionage.

And on that note, word is that Argo features an elaborate, CIA-devised scheme involving disguises. Might we be seeing those creepy nun masks again? And, more importantly, might Oscar finally warm up to this other golden boy?

For the comments: Which project/genre would you like to see Affleck tackle?

20:10 In Utah No One Can Hear You Scream.

To celebrate the movies of 2010  - the film year ends on Oscar night -- we're freezing the movies at the 20th minute and 10th second to see what's happening. Here is 127 Hours.

Kristiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. Megannnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.

This moment is so good it's in the trailer. Aron Ralston (James Franco) has just realized how damn stuck he really is. It's that freaky zoom out (and up) to leave our outdoorsy hero good and stranded all by his lonesome in the canyons of Utah, screaming himself hoarse for the girls he recently met who have already hiked away.

I figured this was appropriate today since I was just relating how I felt. The 'off my game' has moved from sad to comical on account of the escalation: i just lost my phone. At some point you laugh and then things start getting better. Thank God it's Friday, huh? At least I remembered to hit the record button while interviewing because the way this week was going...

COMING SOON (as soon as we wiggle free): new podcast with the gang, more Film Bitch awards, favorite love scenes for Valentine's week, a Pixar diversion, Ben Affleck, and interviews from the teams behind True Grit, The Social Network and The King's Speech. Stay tuned.

S**g You!

Jose here. Remember how last year the Academy got rid of the Best Original Song performances and in the process denied us the chance to drool at Marion Cotillard's sexy striptease and, eventual winner, Ryan Bingham's dreamy, country sensitivity?

Well, this year they won't deny us the pleasure of making fun of the corny staging for the song contenders (though they dared to deny us the presence of Cher!) and they've brought back the performances in an all-star lineup set to include Oscar winners Randy Newman and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Newman will perform "We Belong Together" (sadly not the epic Mariah ballad) from Toy Story 3, while Paltrow will sing "Coming Home" from Country Strong. Gwyn has a big month ahead and is also set to perform at the Grammys this weekend where she will duet with Cee-lo Green and, wait for this, The Muppets... The music academy is probably terrified Cee-lo and G.Pa will let out one of the infamous expletives in "Fuck You" and are using the Muppets as some sort of insurance. But in a time when Lady Gaga wears Kermit for cocktails isn't it safe to say that no puppets are sacred?

Joining Gwyn and Randy will be Mandy Moore and Alan Menken who will perform "I See the Light" from Tangled and Oscar winner A.R. Rahman and Florence Welch, filling in for Dido, to sing "If I Rise" from 127 Hours. 
If there's someone who can bring some life into that tepid song it has got to be Florence (at least her gown is sure to be a sight to behold)

Also, now that I think about it, we have Newman, Rahman, Gwyn and Menken. So, wait, is this the first time an all Oscar winning lineup of performers will do the nominated songs? I'm sure there's a random Oscar statistic here waiting to happen. Can anyone think of another year when that happened?