Interview: Alexandre Desplat on Composing for "Argo" & "Zero Dark Thirty"

Matt here! Knowing my music background, Nathaniel asked me to speak with Alexandre Desplat for his fifth Oscar nomination. Desplat has composed scores for over 100 films including Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The King’s Speech, and The Tree of Life. This year alone, he wrote for Moonrise Kingdom, Rust and Bone, Rise of the Guardians, Zero Dark Thirty, and earned his latest Academy Award nomination for his work on Argo.

Desplat conducting his Rise of the Guardians score

Not only is Desplat impossibly prolific but he produces music of unprecedented diversity. Who could have guessed that the same man behind the jaunty storybook sounds of Fantastic Mr. Fox also wrote the cloudy chords at the end of Zero Dark Thirty? [more...]

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Dear AMPAS... Love, Team Experience

With the final Oscar voting commencing today -- can we still say "ballots going out" when this season has been so dramatically electronic? -- I asked Team Experience to write very brief notes to Oscar voters.

I'll start us off...

❝Dear AMPAS, Two Words: Emmanuelle Riva. Respect your elders and wish her a happy 86th birthday on February 24th (your 85th!). In your 85 years you've had plenty of impossible dreamgirls like Lawrence, rapidly ascending versatile stars like Jessica, and resilient fierce mamas like Naomi. But you've never given the prize to anyone like Emmanuelle. Do your own Best Actress legacy proud by switching it up and proving you're still free thinkers in your 80s! 
Yours always, for better & worse, Nathaniel❞

pleas for The Master, Zero Dark Thirty, Moonrise Kingdom and more after the jump...

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Best of the Year: Nathaniel's Top Ten

Previously: The Honorable Mentions

Often during the calendar-straddling list-making frenzy of "top ten season" a scene or a line of dialogue or even a whole film will refuse to dislodge itself from any internal conversation you may have with oneself about the year. That moment for me this year was Kylie Minogue's cameo late in Holy Motors when she arrives in a trenchcoat, like some lost Casablanca love, to sing:

Who were we. When we were. Who we were back then?

It'd be ineloquent bathos, too crudely and redundantly stated, if it weren't sung. But this heightened musical longing for a lost identity, lifts and soars with pathos instead. The year's best films kept reinforcing this most interior of questions as they wrestled with their past selves towards an uncertain future.

Nathaniel's Top Ten of 2012
From all movies screened that received US theatrical releases...

ZERO DARK THIRTY (Kathryn Bigelow)
Sony/Columbia. December 21st 

[SPOILERS FOLLOW] My favorite exchange in Mark Boal's dense script occurs between a government official and a CIA operative. "What the fuck does that mean?" "It's a tautology". I laughed at the wordplay in the film but wasn't expecting the widespread tautological eruptions that followed the film's premiere as everyone bent themselves into self-affirming pretzels to debate its portrayal of torture in the film's opening scenes as if there were only one way to look at the damn movie... as if torture were the only thing worth discussing about the film! To Zero Dark Thirty's credit, though I too was discomfited by its suggestion that torture yielded useful intel, there's nary a comfortable or pandering moment in the film. Like The Hurt Locker before it, ZDT attempts something like an apolitical stance though how successful that is (or ever can be) will be left to each viewer to decide. In my mind, Bigelow doesn't suggest that you're meant to enjoy torture or even embrace the mission's success, exactly...

more on Zero Dark and 9 more triumphs after the jump...

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Tues Top Ten: The Year in Dance Scenes

Michael C. here. Over at Serious Film I've been handing out awards for 2012, but when I tried to name the dance scene of the year I realized 2012 was too packed with great contenders to choose only a single champion. So here is a more comprehensive list of the best scenes where characters couldn't fight their dancing feet.

Honorable Mentions

I consider Holy Motor's accordion scene more parade than dance otherwise it would surely top this list. Likewise I don't know quite how to classify Philip Seymour Hoffman's disturbing performance during The Master's nude party fantasy although it certainly impossible to forget. As for Magic Mike all the movie's dance scenes blended together in my memory, so maybe some Ladies of Tampa can enlighten me in the comments as to which one was the standout. 

 Top 10 Dance Scenes of 2012 

10. Take This Waltz 
I wasn’t as in love with this infidelity drama as many were, but it had a handful of great scenes where I could see what everybody else was so excited about. The finest was a house party where the secret life of Michelle Williams’ character threatens to spill out into public view on the dance floor to the tune of Feist’s terrific cover of Leonard Cohen’s Closing Time. 

9. Silver Linings Playbook (and 8 more films after the jump)

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Congratulations to the WGA Nominees

Before approaching the Writers Guild Nominations with Oscary enthusiasmbe forewarned: only guild members are eligible for these prizes which discounts a good chunk of the movies one might otherwise expect to see honored each year. Hollywood isn't nearly as averse to working with non-guild writers as they are about non-unionized actors (Beasts of the Southern Wild was the only significant "ineligible" situation when the SAG nominees were announced a month ago). One of the reasons for this is surely the prevalence of writer/directors who are often members of the DGA without being members of the WGA.

The benefit of this is that by their script eligibility rules they are forced to award films that have been largely ignored in the grand scheme of year end hoopla. The curse is that when you are nominated from a smaller field of potentials it might not feel as notable.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY  

• Flight, Written by John Gatins; Paramount Pictures
• Looper, Written by Rian Johnson; TriStar Pictures
• The Master, Written by Paul Thomas Anderson; The Weinstein Company
• Moonrise Kingdom, Written by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola; Focus Features
• Zero Dark Thirty, Written by Mark Boal; Columbia Pictures (ARTICLE) 

not eligible and therefore unsnubbed so you could still see them on Oscar's list: 
Django Unchained, Seven Psychopaths, Amour, Your Sister's Sister, Take This Waltz, The Intouchables, Middle of Nowhere, Rust & Bone and The Impossible 

Typically we only here of what's been declared ineligible so it's tough to know what other films were competing although I'd feel worse for actor/screenwriter Reid Carolin's absence for Magic Mike above if he'd also played one of the Cock-Rocking Kings of Tampa. That'd be putting it all on the line for your movie!

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY 

• Argo, Screenplay by Chris Terrio; Based on a selection from The Master of Disguise by Antonio J. Mendez and the WiredMagazine article “The Great Escape” by Joshuah Bearman; Warner Bros. Pictures
• Life of Pi, Screenplay by David Magee; Based on the novel by Yann Martel; 20th Century Fox
• Lincoln, Screenplay by Tony Kushner; Based in part on the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincolnby Doris Kearns Goodwin; DreamWorks Pictures
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Screenplay by Stephen Chbosky; Based on his book; Summit Entertainment (LOGAN LERMAN INTERVIEW)
• Silver Linings Playbook, Screenplay by David O. Russell; Based on the novel by Matthew Quick; The Weinstein Company

not eligible and therefore unsnubbed:
Les Miz, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Anna Karenina, The Deep Blue Sea, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The nominee list for the WGA is highly plausible as the final Oscar list in this category too, don't you think?

DOCUMENTARY SCREENPLAY 

• The Central Park Five, Written by Sarah Burns and David McMahon and Ken Burns; Sundance Selects
• The Invisible War, Written by Kirby Dick; Cinedigm Entertainment Group
• Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, Written by Alex Gibney; HBO Documentary Films
• Searching for Sugar Man, Written by Malik Bendejelloul; Sony Pictures Classics
• We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, Written by Brian Knappenberger; Cinetic Media
• West of Memphis, Written by Amy Berg & Billy McMillin; Sony Pictures Classics 

Sugar Man, Mea Maxima and The Invisible War continue to show real strength in the oncoming Oscar Best Documentary race.