Morning Truth Tell: Tom Hanks...

Tom Hanks is giving way better performances recently (Captain Phillips, Bridge of Spies) than the ones he used to win Oscars for. 

Mad Max & Fashionable Kate lead the 'Australian Oscar' nominations

The AACTA Awards, essentially the Australian Oscars, are in their 5th year. But the "5th" business they're promoting is misleading. It's the fifth year under their new name, AACTA, but they've actually been giving out prizes since 1958 when they were called AFI Awards... not to be confused with the AFI events across the Pacific, America and Australia both starting with "A" and both having Film Institutes. But they're obviously promoting a reboot mentality since they consider the 2011 AACTAs the "inaugural" awards.

Leading the pack this year are Kate Winslet's fashionista revenge comedy The Dressmaker (still awaiting news on a US release) and the critically beloved Max Mad Fury Road with 12 and 11 nominations respectively. George Miller's action masterpiece could even win since AACTA doesn't have the genre bias Oscar does -- Australia's industry is to small to have such silly biases! -- giving Best Film to The Babadook last year. If Mad Max Fury Road could repeat this trick at the American Oscars -- 11 nominations (!) -- 95% of cinephiles would experience the rapture and never be heard from again.

The film nominees are after the jump...

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Iris, a great subject.

With Oscar's documentary longlist out, we're catching up with a few. Here's Deborah on Iris.

Sometimes all you need is a great subject.

To say this does a disservice to documentarian Albert Maysles, who has created a visual feast with Iris, but the primary delight of the film is Iris herself. Iris Apfel, at 94 years old, has lived a life of visual feast. If your tolerance of eccentric little old ladies is low, you won’t love this film, but phooey on you in that case. This woman is a prize, a person who celebrates her own uniqueness, who takes joy wherever she can, and the film focuses on that joy...

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Kristen Wiig's Awards Bait: 'Crying in a Sweater'

Margaret here, bringing you the first of this year's Oscar-bait parodies and with it proof that awards season is fully upon us.

Kristen Wiig, on the promo circuit for Nasty Baby, used her spot as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to debut the trailer for her new "extremely independent" movie Crying in a Sweater (directed by Michael Bay). The title, if you can believe it, about covers it: Wiig lolls about tearfully in a series of sweaters while rhapsodic critical praise scrolls by. She's poking fun at the kind of dramatic low-budget Oscar hopeful that she's starred in more than once, but the result is silly enough that it doesn't read as snide.

My personal favorite performances in the Crying in a Sweater subgenre include Toni Collette in The Sixth Sense, Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game, and Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine, but the gold standard has to be Diane Keaton in Something's Gotta Give:

    

In fact, there's a lot of overlap here with the favored TFE movie category Women Who Lie to Themselves. Which prompts the question: what are your favorite crying-in-a-sweater performances? How many of them come from Women Who Lie to Themselves?

Best Documentary - The Long List Is Here

AMPAS has narrowed the Best Documentary Feature competition. If not by much. The long list from which they'll choose 15 or so finalists which will then become 5 nominees in January has arrived. It's double the size of what the Foreign committees have to get through each year but there's more members voting. The seventeen titles in bold we've already reviewed so click away to your docu-loving delight, won't you?

Which films are you rooting for or eager to see? 

A-C
Above and Beyond. All Things Must Pass, Amy, The Armor of Light, Ballet 422, Batkid Begins, Becoming Bulletproof, Being Evel, Beltracchi – The Art of Forgery, Best of Enemies, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Bolshoi Babylon, Brand: A Second Coming, A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story, Call Me Lucky, Cartel Land, Censored Voices, Champs, CodeGirl, Coming Home

D-F
Dark Horse, Deli Man, Dior and I, The Diplomat, (Dis)Honesty – The Truth about Lies, Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll, Dreamcatcher, dream/killer, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, Eating Happiness, Every Last Child, Evidence of Harm, Farewell to Hollywood, Finders Keepers, The Forecaster, Frame by Frame

G-J
Gardeners of Eden, A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile, Godspeed: The Story of Page Jones, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, He Named Me Malala, Heart of a Dog, Hitchcock/Truffaut, How to Change the World, Human, The Hunting Ground, I Am Chris Farley, In Jackson Heights, In My Father’s House, India’s Daughter, Ingrid Bergman – In Her Own Words, Iraqi Odyssey, Iris, Janis: Little Girl Blue

K-N
Karski & the Lords of Humanity, Killing Them Safely, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Lambert & Stamp, A Lego Brickumentary, Listen to Me Marlon, Live from New York!, The Look of Silence, Meet the Patels, Meru, The Mind of Mark DeFriest, Misery Loves Comedy, Monkey Kingdom, A Murder in the Park, My Italian Secret, My Voice, My Life, 1971

O-R
Of Men and War, One Cut, One Life, Only the Dead See the End of War, The Outrageous Sophie Tucker, Peace Officer, The Pearl Button, Pink & Blue: Colors of Hereditary Cancer, Poached, Polyfaces, The Prime Ministers: Soldiers and Peacemakers, Prophet’s Prey, Racing Extinction, The Resurrection of Jake the Snake, Ride the Thunder – A Vietnam War Story of Victory & Betrayal, Rosenwald, The Russian Woodpecker

S
Searching for Home: Coming Back from War, Seeds of Time, Sembene!, The Seven Five, Seymour: An Introduction, Sherpa, A Sinner in Mecca, Something Better to Come, Song from the Forest, Song of Lahore, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, Stray Dog, Sunshine Superman, Sweet Micky for President

T-Z
Tab Hunter Confidential, The Tainted Veil, Tap World, (T)error, Thao’s Library, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, The Touch of an Angel, TransFatty Lives, The True Cost, Twinsters, Very Semi-Serious: A Partially Thorough Portrait of New Yorker Cartoonists, The Wanted 18 (also on the Foreign Submissions List), We Are Many, We Come as Friends, We Were Not Just…Bicycle Thieves. Neorealism, Welcome to Leith, What Happened, Miss Simone?, What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy, Where to Invade Next, Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, and The Wolfpack

Noticeable Absences 
Where is Silvered Water: Syrian Self-Portrait? When it wasn't on the long list last year we assumed it had arrived too late and would be there this year. Perhaps we'll see them next year -- it's difficult to understand the eligibility with Oscar's doc branch - but missing are: the Nora Ephron doc Everything is Copy, the Orry-Kelly costume design doc Women He's Undressed,