April Foolish Predictions: What will happen in 'Toon Town'?

by Nathaniel R

Will the new emotions in "Inside Out 2" impress voters?

Last season, we finally saw another hand drawn film take the Best Animated Feature Oscar with The Boy and the Heron emerging triumphant. Will we have another rarity this year or will Oscar voters return to their Pixar and/or American CG habits? Each year we root for the underdogs in this category since great studios like Laika and Cartoon Saloon have yet to take home an Oscar. Sadly, neither of those companies will have a film ready this year. Still, we'll dream that it will prove a truly competitive year no matter what emerges. That always makes it more exciting.

Herewith our April Foolish predictions...

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Heroes & Villains

We're trying to finish our 2015 Awards before the Oscars. Today, the Best heroes and villains of the year. These categories are always easier to draw up when the year's genre films were strong. There the binaries of good and evil can flourish stylishly, whether that's through Halloween ready memorable costuming (Mad Max Fury Road), boo!hiss! voicework (The Avengers: Age of Ultron), erm..."big" performances (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), or clever adorable characterizations (Inside Out).

You can see all 10 nominees here. Return and answer me these questions three

• Which hero would you want to be rescued by?
• Which villain did you most love to hate? 
• Which sidekick or henchmen do you fancy? 

43rd Annie Award winners

Over the weekend, ASIFA-Hollywood held the 43rd annual Annie Awards, honoring the year in animation. Their complete list of winners is here, but some of the highlights that you should be aware of:

• Pixar's Inside Out, an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature and widely assumed to be the frontunner in that category, had a terrific night, winning 10 awards for everything from its production design to Phyllis Smith's vocal performance as the mopey character Sadness, to Best Animated Feature.

It was a virtually clean sweep of the animated feature categories, interrupted only by...

• Pixar's other film, The Good Dinosaur, which managed to overcome the stigma of being Pixar's first-ever box office bomb to nab the award for Outstanding Animated Effects in an Animated Production.

• Fellow Oscar nominee Boy and the World, the little masterpiece from Brazil that I've raved about before, won the inaugural award for Best Animated Feature-Independent. Hey, whatever it takes to make sure a masterpiece like that gets to walk away with a trophy.

• Continuing its award-winning weekend, The Revenant won an award for Outstanding Character Animation in a Live Action Production for everybody's favorite, Judy the Bear. The Revenant is also nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars, and if it wins, it's going to be mostly on the basis of the same character.

Best of 2015: Nathaniel's Top Fifteen

When you devote your life to the movies, you come to cherish the movies that give back as if they're devoted, in return, to you. Yes, you, specifically. Our consumption of movies may be communal but in some ineffable way, especially when it comes to list-making, they're deeply personal; movies in conversation with your soul. At least if you're doing it right. It's painful enough to "rank" a top 15 for 2015. So I included a second tier of favorites. The 30 best of the year, according to your host, took place all over the world as we know it (Germany keeps popping up as does seemingly every place with an arid climate in an odd but starkly beautiful coincidence) to weirdly recognizable places beyond it (Why, Jakku, you look so much like Tattoine!). The unifying thread might be that however alien their perspectives and locales (inside a young girl's brain, locked in a 10 x 10 shed, or chained to the back of rusted death machines in hallucinatory sandstorms), they resonated as if deeply familiar.

Nathaniel's top 30 films of

If you're looking for __ you won't find it:
I liked Magic Mike XXL -- you may recall that Magic Mike (2012) won the Film Bitch Bronze medal here in 2012 as third best of its entire year -- but can't join the unexpected bandwagon of critics who decided they loved the sequel well after it left theaters. I did enjoy it a lot, though. Also just missing the list, not from an absence of affection exactly but "best?" attributes, is Ridley Scott's disco-lite outer-space romp The Martian. I'm far less keen on recent Oscar nominees like The Big Short, Straight Outta Compton, The Hateful Eight, Anomalisa, Trumbo, Son of Saul, and The Revenant but they need not cry from my qualms, indifference, or distaste (depending on the picture) since they have stadiums full of cheering sections elsewhere

And this list is about positive, nay giddy, love. So on to the best of the best. 

15 (Very) Honorable Mentions in Alpha Order
Please seek out: The Troubles via Yann Demange's electric debut '71; Desiree Arkhavan's hilarious bisexual Iranian-American hipster romcom (a genre we didn't even know we needed but love) Appropriate Behavior; Spielberg & Hanks's absorbing Bridge of Spies; Disney's girlie lush live-action Cinderella spin; Olivier Assayas's actressy-angst at those Clouds of Sils Maria; Celine Sciamma's infectiously observed but profoundly sad Girlhood; Lily Tomlin & Paul Weitz's Grandma focused road trip; the waking nightmare game of sexual tag in It Follows; Iceland's formally compelling beast and man oddity Of Horses and Men; Brazil's smart socioeconomic collisions in The Second Mother; Paul Feig & Melissa McCarthy's Spy romp; Disney's easy money $4 billion bet The Force Awakens; Tom McCarthy's soulful journalism procedural Spotlight; Aaron Sorkin's presentational Steve Jobs triptych; Xavier Dolan's queasy, queer, razor blade dangerous Tom at the Farm; and the director, crew, and cast who pulled off that continuous shot jaw-dropper stunt that was Victoria... and pulled it off with feeling. 

Without further ado and with deep appreciation...

NATHANIEL'S TOP 15 OF '15
🎶 they're speaking my language baby 🎶 

I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS
(Brett Haley)
Bleecker Street Media. May 15th
92 minutes 

A movie as unassuming as Blythe Danner's still waters star turn, and as gently surprised by its twilight romanticism as the wonderful theme song. It's easy to imagine this film becoming a staple, a comfortable blanket to wrap yourself up in on lonely nights; an old dear friend that understands the value of finding new ones.

You're a good drinking buddy!"

CHI-RAQ
(Spike Lee)
Roadside Attractions. December 4th
119 minutes 

By no small margin the most uneven and sometimes downright sloppy movie on this 15 wide "Best" list --  stop reading the teleprompter Samuel L Jackson, learn your damn verse! But, a permanent truth: perfection isn't everything. Vitality of voice, with something actually worth saying, counts for quite a lot with so many polished but empty-headed and safe pictures clogging up each year's awards pipeline. Spike Lee won an Honorary Oscar shortly before anyone saw his reworking of Lysistrata, transported to contemporary Chicago (nicknamed Chi-Raq for its crime rate troubles). Nobody knew that his best movie in 15 years was about to hit to make that statue feel retroactively less of a tribute to past highs (Do The Right Thing, 25th Hour, etcetera) and more of an "it's about damn time!" honor for a still relevant artist. Chi-Raq is... Crazy. Funny. Sexy. Anguished. Silly. Mad. Experimental. Sickening. Sober. Even Optimistic. In short, "It's 'EVERYTHING!' as the queens say. Now if only everyone would go see this bold bawdy and beautiful everything. And, did someone say "Queen," I can hear Miss Helen (Angela Bassett, who also Got Her Groove Back of late) shaking her head at the meager box office receipts.

Y'all make my tired ass tired!" 

SICARIO
(Denis Villeneuve)
Lionsgate. October 2nd
121 minutes 

If Denis Villenueve's movies get any more tense they're going to explode by the second reel.

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"The Big Short" takes PGA

Adam McKay's The Big Short got a big boost in the Oscar race last night by winning big at the PGA. This is an important win for the film considering that this Best Picture race is more slippery than we've seen in the past few years. You have to go back almost a decade to Little Miss Sunshine to find a PGA winner that didn't align with Oscar (though Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave shared a tie with Gravity).

This win also poses another setback for Spotlight, which is really going to need to win that SAG Ensemble prize this coming Saturday to stay in the game. The Revenant, while it may still be rocking the box office, also missed an opportunity here to claim its post as frontrunner after its hefty nomination tally and Globes success. Any chances Mad Maxy: Fury Road had are probably now cooked, but George Miller is still viable as a Best Director winner, especially if he takes the DGA prize.

Inside Out and Amy gained more distance from their respective competition. Both won PGA's Animated and Documentary prizes and are unlikely to be deafeated on Oscar night. The big television winners were Transparent, Game of Thrones, and Fargo.