Curio: Oscar Unsheets, Part II

Alexa here.  In the weeks up to the Oscars I'm celebrating all the wonderful unsheets (a.k.a. fan-created poster art) inspired by the nominated films that are populating the web. (See last week's post for my favorites from the acting categories). But I can't help but mention that the nominations let me down hard this year: my top three films were Melancholia, Drive, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and save for a long overdue nomination for Gary Oldman, there was nary a nomination in sight.  So with my poutyness in mind, here are a handful of posters for films that were, at least from my perspective, robbed.    

Melancholia by drMIERZWIAK.Melancholia by Olaf Łyczba.Click for Tinker Tailor and Drive...

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Link Nation

CineEuropa Melancholia wins big at the Danish Oscars including Best Actress for Kiki!
Daily Notebook Iranian hardliners not too happy with the Oscars and A Separation. (It still seems surprising that A Separation was submitted by Iran, but thank God.)
MCN Jean Dujardin kills on Leno. Clooney had all the precursor heat but Dujardin and Pitt aren't giving up ~Three way race!
Scanners on The Artist. Everybody loves/hates a frontrunner
LA Magazine Viola Davis goes couture 

Towleroad Daniel Radcliffe covers Attitude magazine and continues to establish his PFLAG-style advocacy
Awards Daily Art Directors Guild wins go to Hugo (period), Harry Potter 7.2 (fantasy) and Dragon Tattoo (contemporary) 
Gold Derby still thinks Meryl Streep is going to win the Oscar for The Iron Lady. Five reasons why.
Cinema Blend Marc Webb wants to differentiate his Amazing Spider-Man from Sam Raimi's blockbuster. Promises Spidy with a sense of humor. 
NPR good piece on Madonna's endurance and the difficult process of aging in public.  

Toon Town!
Rango took top honors at the Annie Awards though there was a Pic/Director split there with Jennifer Yuh Nelson taking the latter for Kung Fu Panda 2. The Adventures of Tintin won Best Score for John Williams. Best short went to Minkyu Lee for Adam and Dog which I bring up because I was just looking at its tumblr and though "huh. I want to see this" and it surprised to beat out more high profile entries like three Oscar nominees La Luna, Wild Life and Sunday. Here's the teaser...

Adam and dog Trailer from Minkyu on Vimeo.

And for those readers that are always suggesting a voicework Oscar category, that particular prize at the Annies went to Bill Nighy for voicing Grandsanta in Arthur Christmas. He beat out Oscar nominee Gary Oldman's peacock villain "Shen" in Kung Fu Panda 2 and five other nominees in that category. No, I don't know why there were so many nominees. There were twice as many in the television voicework category...14 nominees in one category? That is too much people, calm down. 

©Ty Templeton's "Bun Toons"

Parting Shot
Bun Toons comic strip about DC comic's decision to make Watchmen prequels. A must read if you're into comics or Watchmen in any iteration. It applies to basically anything re: Fans Who Loved Too Much. 

Farewell Oscar Hopeful! (Snubs That Hurt Us)

Last night at 4 AM this was the only image my brain would settle on...

I don't normally spend time in the middle of the night thinking of Fassbender lying naked in bed (Shush!). It's just that I had the worst insomnia I'd had in months. As I stared down at this still image in my state of delirious sleep deprivation I'm reasonably certain that he stared back, his eyes shifting just a little. He must have seen a mirror image of his vacant orbs and haunted zombie expressionless. Only with less handsomeness.

Brandon's addiction was sex and mine is the Oscars but either way we are powerless against our disease. Perhaps it was all the Oscar Morn Excitement catching up to me? Fassy's frozen image reminded me that I forgot to offer my condolescences to the Oscar Forgotten yesterday. Some people and cinematic contributions you'd be really happy to spend another 32 days celebrating but the time has come to say goodbye. [sniffle]

Farewell Oscar Hopeful. Better Luck Next Time
8 Snubs/Omissions That Hurt The Most

08 Melancholia Best Anything
Given that mad Dane Lars von Trier's sole nomination is in songwriting (find a more hilarious Oscar statistic, I dare you!) we never suspected that this would be an Oscar film. But the tiny scattered awards crumbs for his dreamy apocalyptic depression metaphor, arguably his best film in a decade, allowed us to pretend in a feverish bipolar sort of way that miracles would occur and it would wake up as the nomination leader. No, not really. But it's a shame that that masterful Cinematography and Kirsten Dunst's spooky narcoleptic bride won so little traction.

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Great Costuming... According to Costume Designers

The Costume Design Guild has spoken! As with all guild awards... it's a combination of "Really?" and interesting "Oh, yeah!" choices.

Clothes Horse Royals in "W.E." via Arianne Phillips

PERIOD FILMS
Mark Bridges for The Artist
Michael O'Connor for Jane Eyre
Sharen Davis for The Help
Sandy Powell for Hugo
Arianne Phillips for W.E.

Good news: I have an interview coming up with Arianne Phillips, who is one of my heroes. And not just because she's worked with Madonna for 15 years or so.  
Notable Omissions: Anonymous, Captain America (unless they considered it a fantasy), My Week With Marilyn, A Dangerous Method, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Oscar transferrence? The costume designers within the Academy, a much smaller number than votes on the guild awards, tend to prefer period work to other types of work so you could theoretically see all of these nominees repeat at Oscar, though Phillips is certainly most vulnerable as her movie is probably the least seen of these. Still royalty porn goes a long way with Oscar voters and Andrea Riseborough looks like she's wearing the entire budget of the film.

FANTASY FILMS
Jany Temime for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Penny Rose for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Cindy Evans for Red Riding Hood
Alexandra Byrne for Thor
Sammy Sheldon for X-Men: First Class

Oscar transferrence? I'm guessing the best bet here is Alexandra Byrne for Thor.
Superheroes!: Interesting to see the fantasy category overtaken by superheroes (and yes I include Harry Potter there). I wonder if they categorized Captain America here or in "period"? Either way it didn't manage a nomination.
Strangest nods: Hasn't the Harry Potter cast been wearing essentially the sameish robes for the entire franchise? I have not seen Red Riding Hood so my apologies to Cindy Evans but I found that pink dress with red coat so painful to look at in tandem (even in the space of a 2 minute trailer!)  that my face lost a little of its color reading this nomination. Maybe every other costume in the movie is enticing?

CONTEMPORARY FILMS 
Leesa Evans and Christine Wada for Bridesmaids
Wendy Chuck for The Descendants 
Erin Benach for Drive
Trish Summerville for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Manon Rasmussen for Melancholia

Yay! We figured the scorpion jacket would get its due here but it's fun to see my double feature of bridal depression nominated. 
Oscar transferrence? Unfortunately that only happens for contemporary films when the entire movie is about the clothes (see The Devil Wears Prada).
Sigh. REALLY?: The contemporary category is where you often see guilds failing to live up to their duties as awards organization and just grab at whichever FYC screeners they're loving. No offense to Wendy Chuck who has done fun work on several contemporary pictures, not just Payne's movies, but apart from Clooney's hilarious run in inappropriate shoes the costumes aren't contributing a fifth as much to the success of The Descendants (consider it this year's Slumdog Millionaire with bizarre guild triumphs) as say the costumes of Young Adult, Beginners, Shame, Crazy Stupid Love, The Iron Lady (unless they considered that "period"), Martha Marcy May Marlene or The Skin I Live In are to their movies. The contemporary categories are almost always where you see the limits of guild imagination when it comes to defining "awards worthy". It's a fancy way of saying "WE LIKE THIS MOVIE A WHOLE LOT!"

How do you like these nominations and where would your votes go?

"Melancholia" it is for the NSFC

Bucking 2011-focused critical tradition thus far, which has divvied up the best picture prizes between The Tree of Life, The Descendants, Drive and The Artist. The National Society of Film Critics have gone with Lars von Trier's epic sci-fi depression metaphor Melancholia (TFE's top ten list) for their Best Film. 2011 precursor season continues to be a delight with its wide spread of honors. We're especially pleased for Kirsten Dunst though their backing comes far too late to improve her neglible Oscar traction. But Oscar isn't everything. This is a beautiful way for the resurgent actress to close out 2011 which will undoubtedly be a pivotal year for her career. 

The year began with the afterglow of terrific reviews for All Good Things (interview) and peaked with a Cannes win for Best Actress. Meanwhile with goodwill for her career finally restored, she lined up or filmed a completed work on a handful of new movies. Well done Kiki!

Picture Melancholia (ru: The Tree of Life and A Separation)
Director Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life (ru: Martin Scorsese for Hugo and Lars von Trier for Melancholia)
Actress Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia (ru: Yun Jung-Hee for Poetry and Meryl Streep)
Actor Brad Pitt, for Moneyball and The Tree of Life (ru: Gary Oldman and Jean Dujardin)

Supporting Actress Jessica Chastain, for Tree of Life, Take Shelter and The Help  (ru: Jeannie Berlin for Margaret and Shailene Woodley for The Descendants)
Supporting Actor Albert Brooks, Drive (ru: Christopher Plummer and Patton Oswalt)
Screenplay A Separation (ru: Moneyball and Midnight in Paris)
Non Fiction Film Cave of Forgotten Dreams (ru: The Interrupters and Into the Abyss)
Foreign Film A Separation (ru: Mysteries of Lisbon and Le Havre)
Experimental Film Ken Jacobs for "Seeking the Monkey King"

Film Heritage Prizes
• BAMcinématek for its complete Vincente Minnelli retrospective
• Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and the Technicolor Foundation for Cinema for the restoration of the color version of George Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon.”  
• New York’s Museum of Modern Art's Weimar Cinema retrospective
• Flicker Alley's box set “Landmarks of Early Soviet Film.”
• Criterion Collection's DVD package “The Complete Jean Vigo.”