Film Bitch Awards Best Picture Prizes (2000-2012)

Appropros of nothing other than to whet your appetite for more Film Bitch Awards announcements, this site's long running awards (I agonize over my snail's pace as much as any of you!) I thought I'd share all of Best Picture winners to date. [If you're just looking for Oscar stuff and clicked over, here's your current Best Picture race and Oscar related articles for the current competition. ] I'm mostly pleased with my choices in retrospect though I would make a couple of switcheroos. You'll notice that in the time I've been publishing my lists for the world I've only ever twice agreed with Oscar's final pic on Best Picture (2003, 2009) though I sort of count 2007 as agreement by virtue of coin-toss almostness. My motto with controlling disappointments with Oscar is to just be grateful if a couple of my favorites get nominated and be thrilled if something in my top ten wins the industry's top prize.

* I will eventually republish the now missing top ten articles - I have them on the hard drive.

Gold: Beasts of the Southern Wild 
Silver: Amour
Bronze: Magic Mike
Also Nominated: Moonrise Kingdom, Les Misérables
Top Ten Article

Gold: A Separation
Silver: The Artist
Bronze: Drive 
Also Nominated: Beginners, Weekend
Top Ten Article

Gold: I Am Love
Silver: The Social Network
Bronze: The Kids Are All Right
Also Nominated: Blue Valentine, Black Swan
Top Ten Article

Gold: The Hurt Locker
Silver: Hunger
Bronze: Bright Star
Also Nominated: Precious, Avatar
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Gold: Rachel Getting Married
Silver: The Class
Bronze: WALL•E
Also Nominated: Reprise, The Wrestler
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Gold: There Will Be Blood
Silver: No Country For Old Men
Bronze: Once
Also Nominated: 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Ratatouille
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Gold: Marie Antoinette
Silver: Volver
Bronze: Shortbus
Also Nominated: Children of Men, The Fountain
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Gold: Brokeback Mountain
Silver: A History of Violence
Bronze: Pride & Prejudice
Also Nominated: Caché, Me and You and Everyone We Know
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Gold: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Silver: Spider-Man 2
Bronze: Vera Drake
Also Nominated: Before Sunset, Sideways
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Gold: LotR: The Return of the King
Silver: Kill Bill, Vol. 1
Bronze: Lost in Translation
Also Nominated: Raising Victor Vargas, thirteen
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Gold: Far From Heaven
Silver: Y Tu Mama Tambien
Bronze: Talk to Her
Also Nominated: LotR: The Two Towers, 25th Hour
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Gold: Moulin Rouge!
Silver: LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring
Bronze: In the Mood for Love
Also Nominated: Mulholland Drive, Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Gold: Dancer in the Dark
Silver: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
Bronze: Requiem for a Dream
Also Nominated: Erin Brockovich, Beau Travail
Top Ten Article No Longer Online

Amir's Best of 2012

Amir here. Nathaniel has invited TFE contributors to share their top ten lists along with his own. Drawing up this list is a real dilemma every year. Not that I’m under the illusion that a list like this bears any significance on my personal affection for the films I leave out, but I still want it to be representative of the whole picture. This year was particularly tough. It’s been a terrific year for cinema, possibly my favorite since 2007. Even with five honorable mentions I still couldn’t find room for Moonrise Kingdom, Queen of Versailles, Silver Linings Playbook, The Grey, Damsels in Distress, Anna Karenina and so many others that I thoroughly enjoyed. But these lists are never definitive. Ask me on a different day and I might give you a whole different set. At this moment, this is where I stand.

Honorable Mentions
We don’t get to see films as unique and original as Beasts of the Southern Wild very often so it pains me to leave it off. It moved me to tears and its images are etched in my memory all these months later. Magic Mike was a real highlight, a fully realized screenplay that dug beneath the flesh of its stars to explore universal themes and it had a few career-best performances to boot. As a big documentary buff and in such a banner year for the form, I find myself surprised that no doc made it to the top ten but three of my favorites were left just off: Sarah Polley’s brave and engrossing Stories We Tell in which the young Canadian filmmaker had the audacity to reveal the deepest secrets of her family through her poetic vision; Searching For Sugar Man, where the incredible story of a gifted, but largely unknown artist takes a twist that is as heartbreaking as it is heartwarming; and The Gatekeepers, an unprecedented exposé of the politics of the Israel-Palestine conflict and undoubtedly the most important film of the year. 

top ten after the jump

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Drowning in Oscary Waters All Over the World

It's less than 4 days until we're drowning in it! I was called to task a bit for the tsunami image from The Impossible that greeted my first "days until" Oscar nominations post a week ago. I understand the charge of insensitivity and I'll admit it was a weird judgment call. But I have been feeling not just metaphorically deluged. There is so much literal fear or water / drowning on screens this film season. Have any of you noticed? It didn't hit me at first since it's not a particularly visceral fear for me... I've always loved the water.

Let's recount each dive in this year...

If Steven Soderbergh had filmed Life of Pi this would be the entire color palette!

• Beasts of the Southern Wild -for Hushpuppy drowning is the end of the world, hurricanes as apocalypse. Those shots of drowned animals and her thoughts about them having no daddies? Heartbreaking. 
• The Impossible - tells a true story of survival from the 2004 Thai tsunami. I still think it odd that it's visual effects and makeup did not make the finalists list for Oscars.
• Skyfall -Adele's killer theme song kicks in just as James Bond plunges into the water, presumably to rest in a watery grave... or at least to sink into the trippy watery grave visuals of the opening credits
• Oslo August 31st - this critical darling drama about an addict in recovery basically begins with the protagonist going all Virginia Woolf by loading his pockets with rocks and walking out into the water
• Life of Pi - at the center of an ungainly expository drama, is a miniature visual masterpiece about a shipwreck and a tiger and boy sharing a boat alone in the vastness of the ocean
• Jeff Who Lives at Home - stacks its coincidences one on top of the other to lead to a drowning rescue scene
• The Dark Knight Rises -- death by exile (SPOILER) exile being an icy watery grave
• Rise of the Guardians -- begins with an icy drowning
• Moonrise Kingdom features a big storm and flood
• Amour - has flooding but in which context we shouldn't say
• Rust & Bone - Marion Cotillard loses her legs in a killer whale accident in France's Sea World and there is also a drowning terror sequence
• Zero Dark Thirty -the waterboarding torture sequence is what keeps everyone talking though it's a tiny part of the movie. But still: horrific.

Last night, the Film Society at Lincoln Center showed two of the foreign language finalists (sort of*), Iceland's The Deep and Norway's Kon-Tiki, a double bill that was the equivalent of being tossed into the deep-end of this reccurrent theme. Both are true stories about men surviving the unsurvivable on ocean journeys. 

Iceland's Oscar entry The Deep comes from Baltasar Kormakur (of 101 Rejkvjavik, Hafid/The Sea, and Contraband fame). It's both poetically moody and crudely matter of fact somehow. It's steeped in the inky blackness you'd expect from an ocean story at night. (I'm so pleased my screener didn't work because I can't imagine being able to see it at all outside of the movie theater). Hell, even before we hit the water we're in Iceland at night so you can image the darkness. We follow a group of fishermen around as they drink and drink prior to their next voyage. The awful shipwreck occurs relatively early into the movie and for such a simple reason it's surprising that any fishermen live to die from old age. The drowning sequences were, for me, horrific in their calmness, like watching people casually negated as the darkness envelops them. The Deep unfortunately loses its frost-bitten footing  post-ocean trauma when there's a surprising amount of the movie left and we move into a sort of barely there invegistave procedura. But I appreciated The Deep for being very Icelandic (memories of volcanic eruption and a harsh life on the inky sea inform the drama throughout) and as a sort of shoestring non-magical-realist counterpoint to Life of Pi when a fat man begins to converse with a seagull, his only company. B 

Thor Heyerdhal (the real version) and Thor Heyerdahl (the movie version) played by Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen Norway's entry Kon-Tiki dramatizes the once very famous balsa wood raft ocean voyage of Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. I say 'once' because two of my friends in their 20s that I spoke to about the movie had no idea who he was or that it was a true story. I knew the whole story from childhood since my parents had a thing for National Geographic magazines (we had a huge collection) and PBS documentaries -- I think I must have even seen Heyerdahl's self-mythologizing Oscar winning doc Kon-Tiki as a child at some point since the story was so familiar.

I sat down all excited to see the most expensive Norwegian movie ever made about one of the most famous Norwegians who ever lived about a story I knew and was immediately disappointed when everyone began speaking in English -- even in scenes set in Norway or between an entire cast of Norwegians (and one Swede). We definitely got off on the wrong foot this movie and I. As it turns out the filmmakers shot each scene twice, once in Norwegian and once in English and the version that's hitting Stateside theaters is, in fact, NOT the Oscar-competing film but it's English-language doppelganger. So most of us will never get to see the film that Oscar voters saw.

I came for a Norwegian adventure movie and got a strange hybrid film that seemed like a big budget Disney movie that had appropriated a foreign story. Maybe the acting was better in its native tongue? There was something about the coloring book simplistic character arcs and super accessible Movie-Movieness that made this very true story feel artificial, negating much of its power. As eye candy, though, the movie is really something, with the amazing beauty of both the Ocean and towheaded shirtless Norwegians exploited throughout. (And just like The Deep it makes an interesting counterpoint to Life of Pi . As in Ang Lee's picture there are scenes featuring bioluminscent marine biology, violent animal deaths, and mass flying fish suicides on a boat). C+

With Six You Get Link Roll

Imgur Les Miz synopsis with emoticons. 
Salon "welcome to the new civil war" On Lincoln, Django Unchained and modern political divides
MNPP 10 little reviews. It's the only way to keep up this time of year. The Perks of Being a Wallflower really does grow on you. I liked it so much better a month after watching it!
The Envelope on the continuing difficulties inherent in the Best Foreign Language Film category: so much French language, preferenced true stories, never any Asian films.
Timothy Brayton plans to review every English language feature-length adaptation of Les Misérables. Bon chance, Tim! 
Boston Globe Ty Burr's top ten with many of the usual suspects but a nice honorable mention shout out to Leslye Headland's Bachelorette 

I'm so far behind. Lots more coming soon. Have patience!

Foreign Film Oscar Finalists Offer Surprises and a Cold Snap

Each year, while I struggle to keep up with the foreign film submission charts and my sisyphean effort to find screenings or screeners of the 50 to 70+ films each year, Oscar's Foreign Film Nominating Committe cuts me off at the knees in my efforts. They always axe the bulk of the submissions and narrow the field to nine just as I've begun to make headway. Each year, I struggle to understand why nine? Ten (or more) would surely be easier to take for the finalists who did not find themselves Oscar nominated the following month. They could content themselves with a 50/50 chance, and consider it a toss of the coin misfortune rather than 'Nah, we don't like you so much!' 

"Kon Tiki", Norway's most expensive movie ever, is an epic adventure about explorer Thor Heyerdal. The Weinstein Co will handle US distribution.

The finalists, a surprisingly chilly bunch whether through auteur sensibility or subject matter (Austria, Canada, Romania) or actual wintry or wet physical temperatures (Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland) are...

• Austria, "Amour," Michael Haneke, director; REVIEWED
• Canada, "War Witch," Kim Nguyen, director;
• Chile, "No," Pablo Larraín, director; REVIEWED
• Denmark, "A Royal Affair," Nikolaj Arcel, director;
• France, "The Intouchables," Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, directors;
• Iceland, "The Deep," Baltasar Kormákur, director;
• Norway, "Kon-Tiki," Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, directors;
• Romania, "Beyond the Hills," Cristian Mungiu, director; REVIEWED
• Switzerland, "Sister," Ursula Meier, director

Oscar Season Giveth
We knew that short of a voting catastrophe, Amour -- winner of numerous scrolls, plaques, and "you're great!" knicknacks --  would be here and perhaps need only fend off France's global hit for the gold. But I'm personally most thrilled for the delightfully ugly Chilean entry No which seemed like a longer shot than it turned out to be. (I had predicted it as a finalist but I admit that that was more wishful thinking than savvy prophesy!) Voters tend to favor traditionally "beautiful" movies in this category but No purposely goes for a cruddier VHS-inspired look and that aesthetic decision turns out to be super effective in the film's seamlessly well edited mix of acted and found footage from the Chilean political upheaval. As a Scandinavian Nut (my ancestry is Danish and I speak very broken Norwegian) I'm always happy to see those countries in the mix. I haven't yet seen Kon-Tiki but A Royal Affair is a fine costume piece that starts out deceptively traditional only to reveal itself in the telling as a surprisingly resonant political drama. That said, it's modern resonance is deeply  nfortunate. Tis a pity that we still have to fight the wars that should have been won from The Enlightenment centuries ago! But no, the rich are still preying on the poor, and still using shamelessly self-serving deceit and distortion to insure that a great many normal civilians keep buying into the system that oppresses them in favor of wealthy parasites -- just check out what Boehner and the GOP are up to every day!

Oscar Season Taketh Away
I personally loved The Philippine entry Bwakaw which is no longer in the running. I knew it was a more modest effort than they usually go for but I hoped its well modulated character study about a senior citizen and his beloved dog would melt their hearts. I had also hoped to see Spain's clever Snow White riff Blancanieves in the mix in the off chance that I could find a way to propose to Macarena Garcia and/or Sergio Dorado at an Oscar function (kidding! but they are beautiful) or be able to discuss silent films at the Oscars for the second year running (not kidding!).

The most high profile omissions are surely festival noise-makers Caesar Must Die from Italy, Fill the Void from Israel, and Barbara from Germany -- all three countries are frequent Oscar fixtures. The snub for the Golden Lion winner Piéta from South Korea isn't as surprising since Oscar is weirdly resistant to Asian cinema if the names Akira Kurosawa or Ang Lee aren't prominent in the credits.

How are you feeling about the Foreign Finalists and which do you think we'll be nominated? [SEE THE UPDATED CHART]