Best Actor: The Year of the Ham

As noted by the recently departed Alan Rickman on his BAFTA win for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves "Subtlety isn't everything." As far as Oscar is concerned, this year Best Actor was go big or go home. Take a look the leading men outside the bubble and you'll find mostly nuanced performances like those from Michael B. Jordan, Tom Courtenay, and Tom Hanks with their scenery unchewed. Rewarding more broad work has made this the Year of the Ham.

Some of the bigger choices have been more welcome than others in this field, so let's have some fun assessing the hammage:

Bryan Cranston - Trumbo
Clearly the most guilty of going big for its own sake, Cranston's nomination leaves quite a sour taste in your mouth. The performance feels built upon arched shoulders and mustaches, even if Cranston is a game actor admirably going along with the film's schlocky tone. It's not just the scenery getting chewed, but the script, the costumes, the camera, and poor Diane Lane. It's so hammy, he even shows us his hams in a prison scene.
Level of Ham: SPAM - some people like it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Matt Damon - The Martian
Here's a role that actually calls upon the actor to be a ham. Matt Damon gets to use more of his natural charm than he has in anything outside of the Ocean's franchise and spends much of his performance breaking the fourth wall. He leans in on the nerd humor that's heavy on puns and dirty words, but thankfully never goes full broski. Everything lands, including his unexpected emotional moments, but this a performance playing right to the crowd. The visible hams are an obvious emaciated stunt double.
Level of Ham: Honey-Baked - generally pleasing to everyone

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Oscar Luncheon

Yesterday the Academy held their annual Oscar luncheon for the nominees from 2015 cinema. Maybe we're all eager to move on to 2016 but all in good time. There's still 21 days of the 2015 film year given that it doesn't wrap up until the credits roll on Oscar night.

The luncheon is the event with the cheesy "class photo". So let's look at that and talk noteworthy moments and how we're all feeling at this point after the jump.

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Breaking Down Oscar's Production Design Nominees

Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock with their Grand Budapest Hotel OscarsDavid here with a closer look at this year’s Oscar nominees for Production Design. Not too close, mind: this is all about the big picture. The PD is responsible for the entire art department, and as such, the entire visual look and feel of a film. If it’s difficult to separate that idea from what cinematographers and costume designers do, well, that’s the difficulty in awarding all these disciplines as if they act independently of one another. Such is the nature of the awards season beast.

The origin of the title is an amusing, unsurprising fable: William Cameron Menzies, coined it to describe his own function on the set of Gone with the Wind (a mammoth task, to be sure) after David O. Selznick instructed everyone that "Menzies is the final word” on the set on every technical aspect of the visual production. Menzies, incidentally, was the first Oscar winner of the award, under the label ‘Best Interior Decoration’ - the award changed to 'Best Art Direction – Set Decoration’ in 1947, and didn’t become ‘Best Production Design’ until 2012.

As we saw earlier in the week when the Art Directors Guild gave out their awards, the Oscar race seems to be a two-horse race. [More...]

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The DGA to Iñárritu... Again

Wide open race, people. Following The Big Short's win at PGA, Spotlight's ensemble prize at SAG, comes the Director's Guild Award for... The Revenant.

Getty Images

Bonafide three-way race for Best Picture which is not common. Whoever wins we'll know that it was close -- unless a sweep reveals otherwise. Hell, Oscar's Best Director competition is also fierce though the advantage goes to Iñárritu at this point.

TRIVIA!
Incidentally, this prize for Alejandro González Iñárritu is his second consecutive from his guild. Though several directors have won twice, a consecutive win has never happened before at the DGA. It has happened at the Oscars, though, and twice at that: John Ford won two in a row for The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941). And not quite a decade later Joseph L Mankiewicz pulled off the same trick with A Letter To Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950). Here's their interesting commonality. In both cases those consecutive wins did not come with consecutive Best Pictures. No director has ever helmed two consecutive Best Picture winners. If The Revenant comes out on top on Oscar night, Iñárritu will be the first to accomplish it in the Academy's 88 years. 

Do you think history will be made? (Final Picture/Director predictions are going to be tough this year.)

The complete list of DGA winners and some photos from the event are after the jump...

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Oscar Screenplays Quotability Index

Manuel here. In a lot of people’s minds, a great screenplay requires at least one quotable line. Look no further than the poster for the 2006 awards which celebrated great lines from Academy Award winning films. Lines like "Rosebud", "Show me the money!" and "I coulda been a contender" — or more recently, "You know what's cooler than a million dollars?" and "Argofuckyourself" — immediately remind you of the film's in question, functioning as helpful shorthand. A good line is sometimes all you need. And so, since we know TFE readers love themselves a list, we had to rank the 10 films nominated for screenplay categories in order of quotability:

10. Ex Machina
Is there such a thing as "visually" quotable? Because that's certainly the case here.

9. Bridge of Spies 
The one truly iconic catchphrase in these screenplays but otherwise, not much else, no?

8. Brooklyn
News of that TV spinoff means more vintage banter!

7. Spotlight and more after the jump...

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