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.

Best Supporting Actress. My Ballot

I'm so tardy with my own awards. I generally get all the major stuff up before Oscar nominations but no such luck this year. I'll try to throw up at least one category per day now so we can finish this month. The actress categories were TORTURE this year because there were definitely more than 5 award-worthy performances per. In fact, the performances were so good this year that it's really too bad they couldn't have been spread out over the past few years when the pickings were slimmer. I'm not finished with lead actress but Supporting Actress was easier. As is the tradition, I only list 12 women as nominees, finalists, and semi-finalists. I could've gone to 20. These are the dozen best in my estimation for the Film Bitch Awards...

Amy & Melissa, Acting Heavyweights for "The Fighter"

• Amy Adams, The Fighter
• Dale Dickey, Winter's Bone
• Anne Marie Duff, Nowhere Boy
• Kirsten Dunst, All Good Things
• Kimberly Elise, For Colored Girls
• Ann Guilbert, Please Give
• Barbara Hershey, Black Swan
• Melissa Leo, The Fighter
• Rosamund Pike, Made in Dagenham
• Mia Wasikowska, The Kids Are All Right
• Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom
• Olivia Williams, The Ghost Writer

And even then I had no room for fine work from two of my favorite actresses: Dianne Wiest (Rabbit Hole) and Kristin Scott Thomas (Nowhere Boy). Apologies! Awardage is a hair-tearing teeth-gnashing business when you love too many too much and too often.

MY ACTING NOMINEES

Who made your list? Do you share the love of these performances?

Sad News and My Ballot For Best Costumes

First, the very sad news. If you've been reading the past couple of days you probably saw the "visual category film bitch nominations". While adjusting coding today, to finalize the page, I accidentally somehow  erased the entire page. I've lost four categories worth of published nominees and writeups (animated film, visual effects, makeup, and editing) as well as preliminary stuff that wasn't published. I can't seem to find a cached url that will display it -- i'm not sure it would display now in anyone else's "history" or cached pages?  I am d-e-p-r-e-s-s-e-d. That was probably eight hours of work and there are no extra minutes this time of year. Let this be a lesson to everyone: never keep your files only in one place. I'm not even sure i'll remember what I nominated or wrote. It may take me much longer and post-oscar noms to do this now. I always complete the Film Bitch Awards in the traditional categories before the Oscar nominations but this looks like the year where tradition might finally die. Sniffle. Blotchy tears will short circuit my keyboard now.

But there's no sense in not posting what I'd already written about costumes. But IF you think your computer will display a cached version of the visual nominations page don't click on this new version ;) and try it and email me a pdf or something.

Just for the hell of it, for example's sake, I want to talk about two costumes pictured below (I chose them at random) in the absurd hope that a few of you out there will reveal a previously hidden obsessive love of costume design. I want to create a series devoted to it but I need to know you're out there first.

Amy Westcott and Mary Zophres done good.

What can costumes tell us about characters? Quite a lot. Amy Westcott (Black Swan) and Mary Zophres (True Grit) will probably be Oscar nominated tomorrow, each for the first time, and I've also nominated them. Westcott is undoubtedly benefiting from Rodarte's "Swan Lake" ballet costumes (Rodarte can't be nominated with her due to contractual issues) but her own work is very fine, too. Maybe Westcott wouldn't be nominated without the Rodarte bells and whistles but that says more about the Academy's resistance to contemporary character costuming than about the quality of her work.

The color coding of all of these similarly dark and vaguely possessed women is delicious, just subtle muted variations (blacks, greys, white, pinks, etcetera) since they're distorted reflections of each other. Isn't it perfect with a capital P that Winona Ryder's evening wear on the night she's thrown in the trash heap --  excuse me, retiring --  is basically a big silver "X" . She's a goner.

Over in True Grit Mattie's clothes don't quite fit her (amusing smart choice) and Rooster's look like they desperately need to be laundered but isn't it perfect that LaBoeuf's outfits look so new and fastidious and that they're fringed. His pride takes a beating in the film but he's wearing it, you know? He cares about how he looks.

MY NOMINEES IN COSTUME
alas none of the other visual categories that have vanished like tears in the rain

Would you like to see a recurring series on costume design in 2011?

Best Actors (Lead and Supporting), My Ballot

As is my annual perogative I went back and forth between lead and supporting designations on several of those "co-lead" roles until I tied myself in knots and could not come undone. I'm more strict about these things than most so just deal. Every year people give me a hard time about it. But for every clear cut case of category fraud (Hailee Steinfeld is a lead in True Grit. Duh!) there are areas so gray one can't make out blacks or whites (I'm still not sure what to make of Lesley Manville in Another Year) and one just has to call it like one sees it and be okay with how other people are calling it too. No biggie. So for what it's worth I consider the couplings of Firth & Rush (The King's Speech) and Wahlberg & Bale (The Fighter) to be power duets within films specifically about their relationship with one another - therefore leads just like Scarlett & Rhett in Gone With the Wind only without the sex and with more of a damn given.

Lead Actor
I regret to inform that I have not seen Javier Bardem's much lauded performance in Biutiful. I tried! (Screener didn't work. Didn't realize that til after one week qualifier had passed, etcetera) Do I feel bad about thus dissing him? Yes and No. I love Bardem but it's no secret that I disdain the "one week qualifier" Oscar tactic and part of me -- a small petty part but a part nonetheless -- wishes even the worthiest of performances and films would be ignored every year IF attempting this until the studios and/or the Academy put a kabosh on this absurd practice which is bad for moviegoers and bad for dramatic films in general, as it teaches audiences to shun them or not care a whit about them unless or until they are Oscar-stamped. That's no way to build or keep an audience for adult entertainment. After all, not every film can be Oscar nominated.

So for my best actor list I had to choose between a sweaty former boxer, a sweaty federal agent, a sweaty rock climber (what's going on here) and several other men who were sweating out really difficult situations like an illiterate inmate, an innovator beset by lawsuits, a king on the verge of war, a man who'd just lost a child and so on.

Supporting Actor
So many wonderful performances and I'm still debating a couple of also rans with myself. Self: "He was better." Also Self: "No, you're crazy. Him." But in the end I'm happy with the settled ballot which includes a chill sperm donor, a hardened criminal, two men with mysterious motives with their lead actress, and one man, Andrew Garfield who I would have nominated twice over if I could have. Subtract The Social Network from the 2010 calendar and he'd still be a Film Bitch Award nominee for Never Let Me Go... (a film I didn't much care for overall).

READ MY BALLOT

Who is on yours?

Eye Candy: Visual Effects, Makeup and Animation

It's 2 days and 15 hours or so until Oscar nominations! Late tomorrow we'll do final predictions but until then, the FiLM BiTCH Awards continue wherein I share my own ballot of "best of the year".

Rapunzel lays down the law

If you read the top ten list, you already know my Animated Feature finalists (though I cheated a bit on the grounds of: if Oscar can keep changing the number of nominees, I can adjust as I see fit, too!). Each one of my nominees Toy Story 3, How To Train Your Dragon, The Illusionist and Tangled has at least one other nomination to show for it in another category, too (you can see a tally of nominations thus far at the bottom of the sound categories).

Visual Effects
You know what's funny? My single favorite visual effect of the year is the Winklevii in The Social Network but just as you can't really nominate a film for costume design just because it has one good dress, I didn't end up nominating it in that category

I generally applaud the use of visual effects as a supporting mechanism rather than as the goddamn raison d'etre of a film's existence. And it also just missed because as I was drawing up my charts I suddenly started giggling about how indulgent it all seemed. Why cast twins when you can spend millions playing with your technological toys?! Maybe this is why True Grit just barely misses my makeup nomination, too. Did they really need to go to that much work to make Barry Pepper hideous when he's a strong enough actor to sell dastardly and dangerous without any false grody teeth? I'm just thinking aloud here. Join in the debate at any time.

Dakota self applies in The RunawaysHere are my Visual Effects and Makeup nominees.
[You'll have to scroll down a bit to get past the wall of Black Swan posters in the unfinished categories.]

If you're wondering why Tim Burton's Eyesore in Wonderland is nowhere to be found it's because I think it's overworked in virtually every department. I don't mean to impugn the significant talents of all involved -- and you should skip this paragraph if you're tired of me bagging on it (I'm tired of me, too) but the film will not go away -- but it just doesn't work. It's probably a simple matter of direction but when makeup artists know that Johnny Depp will oversell the "mad" part of "mad hatter", for example, do they than have to work so hard that even an actor playing it straight would look crazy in their designs? Wouldn't something lower key have provided helpful balance, even whilst remaining within the basic register of INSANITY. 

And when you choose to make Anne Hathaway of all people unattractive, and it's not part of the character concept that she be so, I just can't go with you to the places they're going. White wig, white gown and...black lipstick? I'm dying here.

Anyway... I prefer makeup just like I prefer my visual f/x, supporting the narrative brilliantly whilst only drawing attention to themselves if they're the main show and should.

once again the nominees

And finally we end with a Black Swan makeup tutorial because it's amusing and we loved the Avatar tutorial this girl did last year.

She just wants to be perfect!