Team FYC: Edgar Wright for Best Director

Wright's Feature Filmography: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and The World's EndIn this series Team Experience sounds off (individually) on their favorite fringe awards contenders. Here's Michael Cusumano on Edgar Wright

Four features into his career it is clear that Edgar Wright is building a body of work that will end up ranking with the greats of film comedy. It is time the Academy recognizes this fact (and their aversion to comedy) and honors The World’s End, his best film to date, with a nomination for Best Director. 

Stop and consider everything Wright's latest film accomplishes, all while staying as light and zippy as classic screwball by the likes of Hawks or Sturges. The World’s End is simultaneously a genre spoof, a farce, a biting social satire, a character study, and a moving comedy about middle-aged friendship. And above all else it’s funny. Wright keeps the pace jumping throughout and unlike other directors he never sacrifices the integrity of the material for a gag.

If the fact that Wright deserves it on the merits isn’t enough to sway voters how about nominating him because of the message it sends about the state of comedy in 2013. Look at the top box office comedy hits for the year. It’s an embarrassment. Identity Thief, Hangover, Grown Ups. Even the few bright spots like The Heat or This is the End still exhibit a “Who cares?” attitude about visuals and screenplay structure and are content to lean on the charisma of the stars and coast on the fundamentals. 

Edgar Wright, on the other hand, holds his film to a standard as high as any prestige Oscar bait and he is in control of every element of every frame of this baby. Everyone is rowing in the same direction on The World’s End, from the quicksilver editing to the witty production design to the cast, including stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost whom Wright guides to career-best performances. That is the stuff of which Best Director nominations should be made.

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Team FYC: In a World... for Best Original Screenplay

In this series Team Experience sounds off (individually) on their favorite fringe Oscar contenders. Here's Tim Brayton asking you to consider "In a World..." The Spirit Awards did, nominating it in this very category...

What’s a talented comic actress with no good parts coming her way supposed to do, anyway? If you answered, “write herself a damn starring role, already”, then you’re on the same page as Lake Bell, the immensely likable and talented star of the TV series Childrens Hospital, making her feature debut as writer, producer, and director with In a World… Though for all her hypens, it’s as screenwriter that Bell most impresses with this project, a hugely ambitious affair all around despite how utterly low-key and normal it all feels.

There are three things happening here all at once, and the script pays equal attention to all of them. First, In a World… is a conventionally satisfying romantic comedy, with the added benefit of having interesting people who act like human adults and have interests and personalities far beyond “if I’m not in a relationship THIS EXACT MINUTE, I will die, and also I am a failure as a woman". Second, it’s one of the best peeks inside the movie industry we’ve gotten in a lot of years, attending with focus and what feels like a great deal of authenticity to the world of trailer voice-over artists, paying tribute to their skills and lightly mocking them for the puffed-up egos common to all actors. Thirdly, and most impressively given the things mainstream cinema likes to talk about in 2013, it’s a cutting investigation into how gender is experienced both in culture generally and in traditionally male-dominated industries. Not just because of the expected “arrg, girls can’t narrate trailers!” plotline, but in how it anticipates and subverts the way we expect to see these people behaving, given the film’s generic requirement, and in Bell’s pet-observation about “sexy babies”, and how women are encouraged by the media and society to diminish themselves and their autonomy.

Heavy-duty stuff, treated with a light, wry tone that gets all of its ideas across without ever forgetting that first and above all, this is a comedy, and it needs to be both funny and fun. There’s no doubt that In a World… is both of those things, and insightful and truthful along with; it looks and acts like a lightweight confection, but it has more ideas packed into its tidy frame than the most wordy and self-important prestige pictures would know what to do with.

previous FYCs  Costume Design Lawrence Anyways | Sound Mixing in World War Z  | Cameron Diaz in The Counsellor | Spectacular Now for Best Picture | MakeUp for Warm Bodies 

Team FYC: 'Laurence Anyways' for Best Costume Design

[Editor's Note: The FYC series brings together all Film Experience contributors to highlight our favorite fringe Oscar contenders. Here's Glenn Dunks on Xavier Dolan's latest]

Anybody who knows me knows I have been trumpeting Xavier Dolan’s trans epic Laurence Anyways since I saw it back in January. I experienced a lot of emotions during this gloriously decadent and painfully intimate affair on the big screen (as one should expect from a three-hour movie). Yet what caught me most off guard was the romanticism with which it painted images through costume. Oh sure, Dolan’s previous films had a way with the fashions – the suburban chic duds of I Killed My Mother and the hipster vintage of Heartbeats - but never had their colours felt so radical, their intent so cutting, their stories so vivid.

So many of my lasting memories of Laurence Anyways rotate around the clothes. In fact, the first thing we see of our lead character are the clothes. There’s the symbolic baby blue business attire with hot pink accentuated shoulders in the opening scene. There’s the billowing aubergine purple coat that threatens to consume the entire screen. There’s the paperclips as fingernails. And then, of course, there’s the film’s centrepiece sequence as the divine Suzanne Clément struts into a new wave ball to the throbbing beat of “Fade to Grey” by Visage. As her black and white spider-cape is removed to reveal a body-hugging metallic dress she joins revellers outfitted in the finest 1980s designer wear. It’s a room full of gigantic pink bows, lemon yellow princess dresses, puffy crimson floor-length gowns and stylish tuxedos with visor accessories. That scene deserves a nomination alone.

Credited to both François Barbeau and Dolan himself (ever the multi-hyphenate), the two won a Canadian Genie for their work (alongside the equally dazzling make-up). I’m not sure if the Academy are entirely up to handing out nominations to minimally-released 3-hour foreign-language films about the journey of one person from man to woman, but if ever a branch was to go out on a limb it’d be the costumers. The work of Barbeau and Dolan is inspiring and inspired in equal measure. The costumes are lux and quirky, singular and sprawling. Much like the entire film, really. Laurence Anyways just isn’t Laurence Anyways without them and when a film feels so defined by its costume work, the Academy should pay attention.

previous FYCs
Cameron Diaz in The Counsellor | Spectacular Now for Best Picture | MakeUp for Warm Bodies | Sound Mixing in World War Z 

Team FYC: The Spectacular Now for Best Picture

[Editor's Note: In this series Film Experience contributors are individually highlighting their favorite fringe Oscar contenders. Here's Deborah Lipp on The Spectacular Now.]

Dear Voters of the Academy: Think Small. I know it’s Oscar season, and I know you want to think Big Space (Gravity) and Big Epic (The Butler), but sometimes, small is beautiful. Sometimes, small is The Spectacular Now.

Consider the delicacy with which this movie sits inside the pocket of being young, and confused, and feeling alone, and makes you feel it too. Consider that Teen Romance Movie Clichés could fill an encyclopedia, and that this movie deftly steps past all of them, to arrive at an intimacy of both dialogue and unspoken moments that create a sense of presence so very rare in the movies.

The Spectacular Now has three genuinely striking performances: Its two leads (Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley) and a supporting turn by Kyle Chandler, playing disturbingly against type.

Movies about disconnected people can feel distant, but, as Aimee (Woodley) and Sutter (Teller) find each other, we feel close, and connected. With striking honesty, The Spectacular Now gives us sad and fumbling youth, the relief of having someone else there, and the painful knowledge that it isn’t enough.

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Team FYC: Cameron Diaz for Best Supporting Actress

[Editor's Note: The FYC series brings together all Film Experience contributors to highlight our favorite fringe Oscar contenders. Jose Solis asks you to reconsider Cameron Diaz's supporting performance in The Counselor.]

It’s not only her scenery chewing, her car-fucking skills, her ability to pull off excess jewelry and animal print or the lustful-yet-motherly way in which she looks at her pet cheetahs. It's her commitment to this insanity that makes Cameron Diaz brilliant in The Counselor. Playing the heartless envoy from hell, Malkina, she creates one of the most compelling visions of evil contemporary cinema has given us. Because her evil seems to have roots in a horrifying childhood (her parents were thrown out of a helicopter!) she escapes the burden of just being a universal symbol of cruelty (a la Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men). She even shows us a glimpse of what might be underlying human qualities underneath her faux-bronzed skin when she shows envy and certain disappointment at not being able to love the way her friend Laura (Pé) does. Diaz delivers Cormac McCarthy’s senselessly beautiful lines with such passion and purpose that we can’t help but pretend we know what on Earth she’s going on about or why anything is in this movie.

The film was trashed by both critics and audiences; they failed to see beyond the movie's failure as a thriller and recognize that this is experimental film of the highest order, with references to American literature, Italian excess cinema and one of the most chilling reinterpretations of a Tennessee Williams scene I’ve seen. The Counselor is post-noir cinema. The best way I've found to explain why I loved Diaz was to compare the film to classic noir and suggest that if The Counselor had been made in the 1940’s, Malkina would have been played by Gloria Grahame. Like that Oscar winning actress, Diaz is the kind of “dame” who would make us kill for her and then slit our throats when we came back looking for the reward she promised us.  

previously: World War Z