Spirit Award Winners

Since they aren't airing the show live (it comes on at 10 PM EST) we shan't live-blog -- seriously in this day and age no live airing? Epic stupidity -- but we can share winners and talk about highlights after zee fact late tonight or tomorrow as we just skim through the show.

Jennifer Lawrence and Nicole Kidman, both nominated

Best First Screenplay Lena Durhman Tiny Furniture. Though she's already won the true prize: an HBO pilot deal. Tiny Furniture is quite singular and funny so check it out when you can.

Best Cinematography Matthew Libatique Black Swan. Yay! Single best thing about Black Swan if you ask me. He also won our gold medal.

Best Supporting Actress Dale Dicky in Winter's Bone. She puts the hurt on Lawrence so beautifully.

Best First Feature Aaron Schneider for Get Low. (Scott Cooper won this last year for Crazy Heart. Moral of the story: Find an old grizzly acting legend and you're newbie gold!)

Best Actor James Franco in 127 Hours. I'm so glad Colin Firth wasn't eligible. Firth was good in The King's Speech but so were a lot of people this year.

Best Documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. Mr Brainwash accepts the prize. Apparently goes on and on. Honestly I feel like I'm live blogging blindfolded. I hate tape delay. This is 2011. This is not my childhood with 3 television stations and friends who had something exotic called "cable"

Best Foreign Film The King's Speech.  I guess it's too much to ask the masses to vote for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. And the masses can vote on the Spirits if they join. Which is, I think, why it's more like the Oscars than not of late.

Robert Altman Award to Please Give. Yay. It also made our best ensemble nominations. Have you seen it yet?

poll by twiigs.com

Cassavettes Awards Daddy Longlegs

Best Supporting Actor John Hawkes for Winter's Bone. It's turning into quite a "Weekend in the Ozarks" here. Is it too much to hope that Jennifer Lawrence wins too? A nice change of pace that'd be. And when there are so many hundreds of awards to win each year, why do they all gotta go to the same things?

Mark Ruffalo tweeted a beautiful congrats to his "opponent" and apparently friend.

John Hawkes is the Man. Congratulations brother. All our days in shitty little theaters back in the day paid off. Blessings!!

And he also snapped a photo of Lisa Cholodenko and her woman Wendy. The Cholodenkos Are All Right. Speaking of...

Best Screenplay Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg for The Kids Are All Right

Best Actress Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Best Director Darren Aronofksy, Black Swan

Best Feature Black Swan

It started as a Winter's Bone evening and then sported a rash that quickly turned into black swan feathers.

And that's it. Now the show is but an afterthought. What strange programming decisions stations make of late. The things that IFC felt were more important to show during the actula awards were The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) and Boondock Saints (2000) which they have undoubtedly shown hundreds of times already.

Stranger still it seems my IFC is not working. Dang. I was really not meant to watch this. I shall dutifully wait to see YouTube videos of Dale Dickey and John Hawkes winning their well deserved prizes.

See also: THE NICOLE KIDMAN SPIRIT SHOW

"The French Oscars"

Red Carpet Lineup! I wonder how various countries feel about their awards being referred to as "the _____ Oscars" all the time. It's as if America's 83 year old institution is the only film institution, all others being "spinoffs" or somesuch. I know it's just shorthand but I wonder. The French César Awards for example. How do they feel? And also: why did the César's get started so much later than the Oscars, with France being the birthplace of cinema and all? They didn't start until the mid 70s by which time Oscar was already a middle aged institution.

Polanski at the Césars in 2003 with Adrien Brody | Polanski with Nathalie Baye at the Césars in 2011.

Fast forward to now. Roman Polanski, who was the toast of the show in early 2003 for The Pianist was also a darling of the night in early 2011 for The Ghost Writer, repeating the pattern we've been seeing all awards season: The Ghost Writer is awards bait everywhere but in the U.S.

The Gallic stars came out to celebrate the Césars. Here's a sampling of stars, one American who speaks perfect French, winners, and also a quick layover in Japan. after the jump.

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Who Should Wear This to the Oscars?

Here's what Julie Atlas Muz who stars in Mathieu Amalric's burlesque film Tournée wore to the Césars  (aka the French Oscars) yesterday.

poll by twiigs.com

How much would you pay to see the uproar at the Oscars if some attendee wore something like that?

Celebrities just don't take enough chances on the red carpet. Like the chance to be arrested for indecent exposure. Live a little movie stars. Come on. No more simple black gowns. We better see something crazy tomorrow night. Who can save us from the boring fashion parade to come?

.p.s. catch up on Oscar posts if you've been slacking!

Editing. This Word. It Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means.

Though I've read a truly great book on the topic "The Conversations",  know a few editors, and have experimented with this completely fascinating craft in college, this morning when I woke up, I learned that I must have literally no idea what it means. The American Cinema Editor's Guild pulled the rug out by naming Tim Burton's Eyesore in Wonderland the best edited of all comedies in 2010. I realize that my hatred for the movie is self-feeding, ever-growing and thus deeply irrational but still... I watched it in full and all I saw was interminable rhythmless agonizing ugly incoherence.

The ACE Awards

Best Editing, Drama The Social Network's (INTERVIEW)
Best Editing, Comedy or Musical Alice in Wonderland
Best Editing, Animated Toy Story 3
Best Editing, Documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop ("UNSUNG HEROES")
Best Editing, TV Half Hour Modern Family "Family Portrait"
Best Editing, TV Hour The Walking Dead "Days Gone Bye"
Best Editing, TV (Non Commercial) Treme "Do You Know What It Means?"
Best Editing, TV Miniseries Temple Grandin
Best Editing, Reality If You Really Knew Me "Colusa High"

Perhaps the editors know something we don't? Perhaps Burton's footage from Alice was even more ghastly than what we saw in the final cut and Chris Lebenzon is being rewarded for true sorcery or merely for surviving it? Lebenzon has done fine work in the past -- even on other Burton films! -- so we don't begrudge him his kudos but this year??? When you stop to consider the other nominated efforts (The Kids Are All Right, Easy A, Made in Dagenham, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and how well those movies flowed and/or maximized their laughs with exceptional comic timing and/or carved out a magical performance or two, it's enough to make you straight up weep and reach for the booze.

The decision is even stranger when you look at the other winners and find that they are all relatively easy to comprehend as noteworthy work. (For instance, I'm not the world's biggest fan of The Walking Dead but that pilot episode was a master class in cumulative thrills, scary but not cheap-scary cutting, and overall pace.)  The same people voted for those achievements. Temporary insanity?

IN OTHER NEWS: Final Oscar Predictions in Craft Categories

16 BAFTA Moments. Helena Was Queen.

Since we all saw the BAFTAs on tape-delay, live-blogging seemed pointless. So SAG will have to stand as the last live-blog of the season. But here are my ___ favorite moments from BAFTA in chronological order. What were yours?

01.  Helena Bonham Carter on the red carpet, when the red carpet reporter describes her as Brit Movie Royalty (which she is).

In fact, this is the year of queens for me. I do big headed queen, then medium sized, maybe next year I'll do pinheaded queen. It's always fun to play queens because people do start treating you like royalty, it's a bit hilarious.

Helena is the only person alive that doesn't make me cringe when they're referencing Alice in Wonderland. She uses this joke again in her acceptance speech but it works both times.

02. Emma Stone on the red carpet joking that Andrew Garfield has been trying to kill her on the set of Spider-Man (2012). I still think it's pointless to reboot that movie but at least the principle cast is heaven.

03. Yay for Useless Trivia: Hailee Steinfeld reveals that the BAFTAs are one year to the day of her True Grit audition. And Darren Aronofsky reveals that Black Swan wrapped one year and one day before the BAFTAS.

04. Paul McCartney saying "I get to the pictures quite often". I love calling movies "the pictures."  It feels so Old Hollywood Magical. The Social Network is McCartney's favorite.

05. Amy Adams LOLing heartily at a joke about Sex & the City 2. The joke went like so:

Two of my favorite movies of the year aren't even nominated. Sex and the City 2 and The Expendables. What's not to love there. A band of old mercenaries get back together taking no prisoners -- you know where I'm going with this don't you? --  laying waste to everyone standing in their way. And The Expendables was great, too.

06. Discovering that Alexandre Desplat is a winker. He winked at no less than three people on his way up to the stage to accept Best Score.

07. The hokey joke of playing Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" instead of The Inception score when it won Best Visual Effects.

08. Helena's acceptance speech. Pretty great. I'd quote it but they let her talk for five minutes.

09. Jessica Alba's intro to Best Supporting Actor just because it's so illustrative of the "supporting" problem.

Robert DeNiro in the Godfather Part 2. Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspect. Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction. Time and again history remembers the supporting actor as much as the lead. Sometimes more so.

And then she goes on to list 5 nominees only one of whom, Pete Postlethwaite (The Town), is in a purely supporting role. The rest you can argue till the end of the day about whether they're leads in their films or not. OF COURSE THEY'RE REMEMBERED AS MUCH AS "LEADS" heh.

An Education reunion: Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike flubbing their lines.

10. Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper having MULTIPLE problems delivering the Original Screenplay. It just keeps getting worse. Pike almost reads the winners before the nominees .  As it cuts to clips, Dominic mumbles  "It's gone well"

11 Stephen Fry, a national treasure in Britain but basically an international treasure to those paying attention, introduces the Harry Potter tribute. He does a stunning job of balancing effusive praise with cutting wit so as not to make the tribute a total "HarryPotter!ZOMG!!!" gag-fest. And the plug for his audio readings of the same was pretty funny.

12 The intro to Aaron Sorkin's Adapted Screenplay acceptance speech.

Under more normal circumstances I would be very excited about this but sitting in the seat in front of me is one of the Beatles. Sitting in the seat in front of him is Julianne Moore and in the seat in front of her was Annette Bening so I'm maxed out.

Awwwww. Don't you love it when celebrities get all thunderstruck by otehr celebrities? I know I do. 'Stars! They're just like us!!!'

13 TILDA SWINTON.

...wait, you didn't need anything more specific than that did you? She's always a favorite moment.

14. The cognitive disconnect I felt when Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg accepted for David Fincher "He's busy making his next gift for all of us in another country." I experienced it as "He's busy making his next gift for all of us, Another Country" which would be quite quite something else entirely. Could you imagine a David Fincher remake of that homo-laced British Boarding School drama? But Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg... who gets to play Colin Firth and who would gets to play Rupert Everett? The other option would be an adaptation of James Baldwin's novel which would be something else, too! Especially since Jesse and Andrew would be all wrong for that one.

15 Gerard Butler introing Best Actress without commas

a lesbian couple with a dragon tattoo take up ballet to avenge their father's death.

Speaking of movies one could have fun inventing in one's head!

poll by twiigs.com

16. It was wonderful to see 88 year old Christopher Lee getting a tribute, and from one of his own directors too (Tim Burton, who he has worked with four times). He seemed genuinely touched and even moreso than many honorary winners of such things. Plus he was amusing: "I'm grateful that I don't follow in the steps of the great Stanley Kubrick whose award was posthumous."

That's it!

P.S. By the way Darren Aronofsky calling Natalie Portman the most focused committed actor he'd ever worked with kind of weirded me out. Not that I don't think it could be true but EVER? His films aren't exactly lacking for great performances or great actors.

P.P.S. How are YOU doing out there, quiet people in the dark? Speak. And by speak I mean type.

P.P.P.S. all the BAFTA posts in case you missed the nominees, fashions or winners.