I Did Surprisingly Well on My Predictions. And You?

Though I feared a complete and utter breakdown of my predictive skills this year, as it turns out I did about the same as usual which is quite wonderful given how difficult those fifth spots were this year and how much you had to chuck statistical expectations to get it right (Riva and Haneke and Amour had so little precursor support but I had a feeling from way back that they'd find their way in, that they'd be "sticky" enough as it were in the memory)

The Big Eight in the high profile categories Picture, Director, Acting and Screenplays I had an 81% degree of accuracy with 36/44 nominees guessed correctly. 
All Categories Absent the Shorts 77% (83/107)
All Categories Including The Shorts 74%  (91/122)

Last Minute Mistakes - I had a perfect predicted set in Production Design until I swapped out Life of Pi at the last second, thinking that Django Unchained might win a farewell honor for J Michael Riva who died during production. And last last night I stated on Twitter my regret that I didn't predict Waltz over Redmayne in Supporting Actor (a no guts no glory call that gave me no glory...). I would've been 100% there too though I remain confused that Waltz won more attention than DiCaprio or Jackson whose work in tandem is the best the highly uneven Django has to offer.

Categories I'm Most Proud Of - It was a cinch to predict Adapted Screenplay this year -- interview coming up with one of the nominees -- so my 100% guesswork there is no biggie and nothing to shout about. But I'm pleasantly surprised that I went 9 for 9 in Best Picture for two reasons. The first is that since I had placed them in if 7... if 8... if 9... order and all 9 lined up that I was spot on and the second and even better reason is that apart from about ½ of Silver Linings Playbook and about ¼ of Django Unchained I think they're all really good movies and six of them are on my own top ten list (which has been delayed due to all this Oscar madness)

I knew Colleen Atwood's death-fetish royalty porn wouldn't fail in the Costume category

I'm also pleased that I went 4 for 5 in so many categories (13 in all!) but particularly the difficult cases of Actress and Costume Design (missing only Mirror Mirror - I had predicted A Royal Affair instead since they often like royalty porn and one foreign film in that shortlist), and Foreign Film (I missed only "No" but I'm THRILLED about the nomination since it's such a great movie) arguably my 3 top interests as categories go. I am not nearly as well versed in Documentaries and Sound Editing so I was stunned to call 4 of those 5 correctly too.

Silver LInings Playbook is the first film since 1981 to receive nominations in ALL acting categoriesMy Worst Categories This Year - Like everyone else the shocking Best Director lineup threw me (3/5) but at least I got the Hooper snub / Haneke in mix right but where I made the biggest judgement call errors was Supporting Actress where I let my Nicole Kidman mania persuade me that they'd preserve her wild genius abandon (the Globe & SAG nods are wondrous though) and I confess that I didn't consider Jacki Weaver to be in the running at all. I am a huge Jacki Weaver fan -- she offered to adopt me during the Animal Kingdom campaign, maybe my fondest memory of that awards year -- but I didn't think that Silver Linings Playbook gave her enough to do to win #1 placements. 

But my absolute worst prediction field this year was Animated Short. Many people don't predict this category but I predict all categories and the shorts can be really tough. I only corrected guessed 2 of the 5 and am saddened that the eye-popping fascinating Eagleman Stag and the hilariously rauncy Tram didn't make the cut. 

Where were you most mistaken and which categories do you feel proudly totes psychic about?

And the Oscar Goes to... Snow White?

YEAR IN REVIEW BEGINS NOW! Many Best ofs and Film Bitch Awards to follow...

Did you know that today marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of the controversial "Die Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales)" by the Brothers Grimm? (Google is celebrating) The book, a collection of fairy tales both pre-existing in oral form and original, has a complicated legacy in Germany and outside of it. But modern pop culture would be unthinkable without its existence. I mean without Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and the rest you'd have no "Into the Woods", no Grimm or Once Upon a Time, no gingerbread houses, and no global Disney Empire as we know it!

But today, when it comes to the legacy of the Brothers Grimm, I'm thinking about Snow White. If you're reading any list on "Entertainers of the Year" for 2012 and Snow White isn't present, there is a problem. Or if not Snow White (who has, on occassion, defined The Bland Protagonist), than the Evil Queen Stepmother. The Former Fairest of Them All nearly always pulls focus and ends up the defacto star of each iteration.

Earlier this year we celebrated the 75th anniversary of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) with an animated edition of "Hit Me With Your Best Shot"  and the cinema gave us not one not two but three new movie versions of the classic tale... [more]

Click to read more ...

The "Makeup and Hairstyling" Seven

Another day, another Oscar decision. The Academy's Makeup branch has narrowed the field in their annual bakeoffs and selected the following seven films as the best of the best in the Oscar category of Makeup and Hairstyling. They'll be whittled down to three for Nomination Morning on January 10th.

Will it be Les Miz's abused poor or Lincoln's bewigged politicians for the Hair and Makeup Oscar?

They are:

• Hitchcock
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
• Lincoln
• Looper
• Men in Black 3
• Les Misérables
• Snow White and the Huntsman 

HAPPINESS! I'm shocked ("Best" usually meaning "Most" with Oscar) but ever so relieved that I'll never have to look at those hideous faces from Cloud Atlas again; Tom Hanks' yellow buck teeth and various facial hairdonts will haunt me forever even without clip reels!

Among these potential nominees I think Les Misérables and Lincoln are obviously worthy choices for films with extensive and great spell-casting in this particular arena of movie magic. I'm also glad that my early pundit insistence that Snow White and the Huntsmen would be taken seriously by the guilds has come to pass despite some people feeling I was high at the time.

INDIFFERENCE! I don't really thrill to the makeup work in Hitchcock, but I realize that that might have more to do with my issues with Sir Anthony Hopkins who isn't particularly gifted at mimicry, than at the prosthetics aimed to create the illusion of the ressurection of The Master of Suspense. 

SADNESS! I had hoped against hope to see Holy Motors among the actual nominees on January 10th since so much of the film's narrative involves Denis Lavant's makeup applications. (I hoped for it in the way I hoped for The Devil Wears Prada to win a rare contemporary nomination for costume design but that time there was a happy ending.) And I even had a only-in-my-imagination debate about who would get the nomination if The Paperboy made it to the finals. After all those statements about Lee Daniels forcing Nicole Kidman to do her own hair and makeup, would Nicole Kidman be eligible for two Oscar nominations for her latest flirtation with her own bonafide genius?

"Fill The Void", "The Clown" and "After Lucia" Join the Very Crowded Foreign Race

Brazil, Israel, and Mexico -- three countries that have yet to produce an Oscar Foreign Film champ despite a small handful or two of previous nominees -- have now joined the fast-growing list of Oscar's subtitled contenders.

The tally now stands at 35...42 films 44 films and 4 finalist lists!

 Which means we've only got about 20 films left to hear about officially before the list is complete. October 1st is the deadline for submissions and in mid October Oscar will provide us with the official list which will usually contain a few surprises -- either a last minute film switcheroo, a disqualification, or a country that hadn't publicly announced suddenly surfacing on the list. Let's look at our new contenders and their countries nominee history after the jump.

Israel's New Contender: FILL THE VOID by Rama Burshtein which gives us an intimate look at the Hasidic community in Tel Aviv.

Israel's Nominee History - 10 noms / 0 wins
with links to Netflix pages -- all but one available for rental!
1964 Sallah
1971 The Policeman
1972 I Love You Rosa
1973 The House on Chelouche Street (instant watch!)
1977 Operation Thunderbolt
1986 Beyond The Walls
2007 Beaufort (instant watch!)
2008 Waltz With Bashir
2009 Ajami (instant watch!)
2011 Footnote 

Brazil's New Contender: THE CLOWN is about a father (Paulo José) and son (Selton Mello, also the director) who work together as clowns in the circus. The son no longer thinks himself funny and wants to settle down. 

Brazil's Nominee History - 4 noms / 0 wins
with links to Netflix pages if available
1962 Keeper of Promises
1995 O Quatrilho
1997 Four Days in September
1998 Central Station is by far the most universally beloved of Brazilian Oscar contenders even netting a well deserved Best Actress nomination for Fernanda Montenegro. In any other year it would surely have been a winning entry but it had the timing misfortune of going up against Life is Beautiful which was that year's even bigger foreign crossover hit, winning 3 Oscars on the big night (Actor, Foreign Film and Original Score) from its hefty 7 nomination tally which included Best Picture and Best Director nods.

Mexico's New Contender: AFTER LUCIA by Michel Franco is about high school bullying and was a hit at Cannes where it won the Un Certain Regard sidebar

Mexico's Nominee History - 8 noms / 0 wins
with links to Netflix pages -- unfortunately spotty
1960 Macario
1961 The Important Man 
1962 The Pearl of Tlayucan 
1975 Letters from Marusia 
2000 Amores Perros (instant watch!)
2002 The Crime of Father Amaro
2006 Pan's Labyrinth 
2010 Biutiful (instant watch!) 

WHO IS LEFT TO ANNOUNCE?

Plenty of countries in South America and Asia as well as three European biggies. The three countries with the mightiest Oscar stats that have yet to announce this year are...

 Denmark everyone assumes it will be the festival hit costume drama A Royal Affair... which has won acting awards and critical favor. So why haven't they announced that yet? Rumor has it they're announcing today so perhaps it's a done deal by the time you read this.  YEP. IT'S A ROYAL AFFAIR
Italy Reality had some buzz but NYFF is playing Caesar Must Die so it would sure be convenient... for me ;) ... if it were the latter.
Spain announces next Friday though they've already narrowed it down to three contenders. I'm hoping it's the silent black and white Snow White picture starring the internationally recognized Maribel Verdu (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Pan's Labyrinth, etcetera) because I like annual themes, don't you? See we're drowning in Snow White movies in 2012 -- you'd think this ancient story had just hit the public domain or something? -- so let's finally get a good one in the mix!

Podcast: Summer (Part 2) and Forward Into Fall

Part 1 -best films, moldy releases, nervous mormons, and summer crushes

For the second half of this Summer Jamboree Joe Reid, Nick Davis, and Nathaniel R (c'est moi) wrap up our summers at the movies and dream of the fall ~ Forward not back! 

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Alex Pettyfer in Magic Mike
• Princess Merida, Hawkeye or Katniss? Choose your favorite archer of 2012
• Jeremy Renner in The Avengers
• Movies We Hated
• Sleeping through Snow White and the Huntsman despite Charlize Theron!
• Adapting Cosmopolis
• Did The Dark Knight Rises get away from Chris Nolan?
• Movie Characters We'd Like To Introduce
• Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present
• Nick's newfound love of comedy: Ted, Wanderlust, 21 Jump Street
• Retro Screenings This Summer: Sorcerer, Dog Day Afternoon, and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte
• Fall Film Madness: Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Zero Dark Thirty, Zero Dark Thirty, Skyfall, The Hobbit, Flight, Amour and More...

You can download the podcast on iTunes or listen right here. Join the conversation in the comments. What's the best old movie you screened this summer? Which fall film are you most looking forward to and which two movie characters would you like to introduce?

I Know What You Saw... Part 2