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

"I'm gonna make a cake. That's what I'm gonna do"

If you feel like Julianne Moore got short shrift in our 10th anniversary celebration of The Hours, check out this excellent piece on the actresses "insularity" by sometime TFE contributor David Upton at Victim of the Time.

Laura is possibly the most striking example of this [insularity] – much more self-aware than Far From Heaven’s Cathy Whitaker, and much softer and timid than Savage Grace’s Barbara Baekeland, Laura can often barely maintain the performance, often slipping sentences that reveal her true despair into otherwise guarded conversations. 

Moore’s voice is probably the most vivid part of her performance in The Hours; a soft, mousy whisper, wavering with indecision and reticence. When she puts on a front of confidence, it momentarily strengthens, a striking declaration of her uncharacteristic decisiveness – “I’m gonna make a cake. That’s what I’m gonna do.”

Read the rest @ Victim of the Time.

"The Hours" Discussion Pt. 2: Score, Performance, Re-Casting

previously... Joe Reid and Nick Davis discussed fidgety hand acting and ravenous kisses in The Hours for it's 10th anniversary. We rejoin them for the second half of their conversation. - Nathaniel R

JOE REID: OH that Phillip Glass score. I'm with you, obviously. I actually did much of my writing with that soundtrack playing in the background in the year or two after The Hours, because I'm just that kind of impressionable. But beyond being beautiful and haunting music in its own right, it also immediately sets the mood of the urgently mundane which pervades the whole movie. Laura trying and failing and trying again to bake a cake. Virginia scrawling out a first sentence. Clarissa getting the flowers. The score is repetitive and plain but increasingly frantic. I could roll around in it, crumbs in the frosting and all. 

So not to get too common about it, but rather than risk ignoring the elephant in the room, let's get to evaluating and ranking those leading ladies, am I right? You mentioned some ambivalence about Julianne Moore's performance, and I think I read somewhere that you value Streep's work here quite highly? Feel like making some friends/enemies among the blog-reading populace?

Nick's answer and more provocative questions after the jump

Click to read more ...

"The Hours" Discussion Pt. 1: Nervous Hands, Ravenous Kisses

[Editor's Note: for the centerpiece of our 10th anniversary celebration of The Hours, I asked Joe Reid and Nick Davis if they'd like to talk about the movie and it turned out they already had. A heretofore unpublished conversation. I'm sure you'll enjoy it as much as I did! - Nathaniel ]

JOE REID: Three (!) years ago, I had planned out an end-of-decade feature for my own blog, wherein I would converse about my favorite films of 2000-2009 with a selection of writer friends. The logistics of it got away from me, but I did manage to get started. One such conversation lost to history was with my fellow Film Experience Podcast panelist Nick Davis on the subject of The Hours. With the ten-year anniversary of The Hours upon us, I thought I'd dig up this abandoned reflection and let it see the light of day.

***

JOE: The Hours is absolutely on the list of movies from the past decade that I truly, unabashedly loved. I suppose there's something chromosomal about a movie starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore (and Toni Collette, and Allison Janney, and Miranda Richardson). But it's more than just watching all these fantastic actresses hand off scenes to each other for two hours. It's also the suicides and the repression!  

Of course, after signing you on to correspond with me on this entry -- and many thanks for that, by the way -- I checked up and found that your feelings on it were decidedly more ambivalent. Is this an "every time I watch it I feel differently about it" kind of thing, or is it always the same kind of mixed bag for you?

 As for me, while there are a BUNCH of aspects of The Hours I'm hoping we can touch on, for some reason, my most recent screening of the movie made me anxious to mention two things: kitchens and hands. I couldn't stop watching Nicole Kidman's hands, either when Virginia is gripping her pen with a desperately tight claw grip or deep inhaling those cigarettes. And Meryl Streep separating egg yolks as she's unraveling in her kitchen has always been a favorite image.

And that brings me to the whole kitchen thing...

kitchen melodrama and sapphic smooches after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Only the Actors Like It?

On Oscar nomination morning one of the biggest surprises for me was that The Master won 3 nominations in acting and none elsewhere. That after a disappointing showing with the Screen Actors Guild which had suggested that maybe actors didn't completely warm to it.

So it got me to thinking about Oscar players that only won acting nominations... and three or more no less.

The first and only similar case that came to mind without research was the alzheimers biopic drama Iris (2001) which also won three acting nods (Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, and Jim Broadbent) ...and nothing else. It went on to win Best Supporting Actor for Jim Broadbent who was having a great year having also starred in two other Oscar players that year - Bridget Jones Diary and Moulin Rouge!. This little tidbit is sometimes forgotten now but Iris was actually a quartet (unlike The Master's trio) and the actor playing the young Jim Broadbent in that film ended up as Lord of Downton Abbey! Hugh Bonneville for the win.

Coincidentally (or not) Iris, like The Master, was a Weinstein-backed film.

Can you think of any other multiple nominees that were nominated in the acting categories only? (Do you remember Iris? Or did Away From Here steal its thunder entirely as alzheimers dramas go.)