Best Supporting Actor - Nathaniel's Ballot

Few things gave me more joy at the cinema this year than listening to Christopher Plummer discovering house music. Few things were more moving than watching Brad Pitt dig deep into a wounded father who loved but couldn't help but wound his own sons. Here are my choices for Best Supporting Actor a ballot composed of three father figures and two hedonists, one swaggeringly confident and the other self-protective but both fond of their booze.

Share your personal ballots in the comments!
and I no, I don't expect mine to line up so well with Oscar's...
BRAD PITT, PATTON OSWALT, CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER, COREY STOLL, VIGGO MORTENSEN 

A Raggedy Oscar Podcast Reunion

Surprise! The old team is back together momentarily. Clearly we need more time than 40 minutes to get into everything that's going on in the Oscar race so this one is a totally raggedy conversation... a la Margaret and Rampart, two films that are discussed.

So welcome back to Katey, Joe, Nick from Nathaniel, your host here at The Film Experience.

UPDATE: The entire podcast is embedded below but it is having some trouble playing all the way through with Google Chrome. Works perfectly in Firefox or download from iTunes. 

Topics include but are not limited to:
• Cooking tips from The Help
• The Iron Lady and Streep's hard sell for the third Oscar
• Team Margaret and Team Rampart, two wildly underseen movies that share some intuitive storytelling and vivid ensemble work.
• Critical advocacy in the age of consensus
• The silly battle lines drawn between Hugo & The Artist
• Shailene Woodley and Nick's Descendants agnosticism.

A Raggedy Oscar Reunion

BEST ENSEMBLE... Except You Corey Stoll in "Midnight in Paris"!

It's become something of a tradition here at The Film Experience to take issue with the Screen Actors Guild and their problematic "Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Motion Picture" prize. Year after year they don't even seek to address an issue that you'd think would matter to the 90,000+ guild members: the preferencing of "names" over character actors, no matter the size or importance of the role. As you may know acting is one of those fields were you're lucky to just be working and those who make millions are few and far between. Yet the guild, which should be protecting their less-famous members often lets them be crushed by fame and its perks (aka getting your own title card or high billing). If you don't have your own title card you usually don't end up in the "ensemble" list. Our interest in this situation was first stirred by The Aviator (2004) when we were horrified to realize that the very famous Gwen Stefani was included as a nominee for essentially walking and sitting onscreen in Jean Harlow drag while Matt Ross, who was excellent in MANY scenes as Howard Hughes's right hand man was excluded. 

So who is nominated and who is excluded this year? Let's take a looksee.

THE ARTIST
nominees: Bérénice Bejo, James Cromwell, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, and Penelope Ann Miller
who is excluded? Missy Pyle who has a fun cameo and Beth Grant who appears in the movie briefly in its final act ...and Uggie the dog who some people think is best in show. 

BRIDESMAIDS
nominees: Rose Byrne, Jill Clayburgh, Ellie Kemper, Matt Lucas, Melissa McCarthy, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Chris O'Dowd, Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig.
who is excluded? This is fairly representative of the film though Ben Falcone, Air Marshall Jon (and Mr Melissa McCarthy in real life), is excluded. Also missing though understandably given that he went "uncredited" is Jon Hamm.

THE DESCENDANTS
nominees: Beau Bridges, George Clooney, Robert Forster, Judy Greer (Interviewed), Matthew Lillard, and Shailene Woodley.
who is excluded? Nick Krause as "Sid" who has been given quite a lot of attention in the movie's trailer and appears in several scenes. An even more important character, the youngest King daughter played by Amara Miller is also absent. We'll forgive them for omitting Patricia Hastie as Elizabeth King. (Not that it's not difficult to appear comatose for scene upon scene upon scene; I could never sit still that long, I don't know about you.)

THE HELP
nominees: Jessica Chastain, Viola Davis, Bryce Dallas Howard, Allison Janney, Chris Lowell, Ahna O'Reilly, Sissy Spacek, Octavia Spencer, Mary Steenburgen, Emma Stone, Cicely Tyson and Mike Vogel.
who is excluded? With the largest amount of nominees, they do fairly well at covering the movie but there is one key player missing: Aunjane Ellis who plays "Yule Mae" and gets a few really good scenes involving her struggle to send her boy to college. Other exclusions: Tony winner LaChanze who plays "Rachel" in one of the most heartbreaking scenes as her mother is fired from a lifelong job, and the diminutive Leslie Jordan who bosses Emma Stone around frequently at work between meatier scenes is also absent.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
nominees: Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, Marion Cotillard, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen, and Owen Wilson (who are all listed alphabetically, as is Woody's generous ensemble-friendly way, on the first title card)
who is excluded? Where to even begin? Each year one of the nominees takes the cake for the year's most bizarre exclusions and this is inarguably that film for 2011.

The nomination does not include the three co-stars who were, arguably, the most fun to watch. Corey Stoll who won the lion's share of "stole the show!" plaudits for his breakthrough work as Ernest Hemingway is missing. Perhaps even more baffling, given their higher degree of fame before this film, is the exclusion of Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston as the Fitzgeralds. I spoke to Corey Stoll this morning (read the interview) and since I was particularly aggravated by his absence from the list, I asked him how he was feeling about it:

That's a nomination for us whether we go there or not. We are undeniably a part of the ensemble and we brought a lot to the table. But it's strange that it's SAG that does that. I could understand something that's more critic or producer-centric but acting? From my union, I think it's a little strange. 

We wholeheartedly agree!

Other key cast members of Midnight in Paris who appear with "Hemingway" & "the Fitzgeralds" on the second title card and were thus excluded from the honor were: Mimi Kennedy and Kurt Fuller (the future in-laws), Léa Seydoux (the vintage shop worker) and Nina Arianda (Michael Sheen's fiancé).

SOLUTION / SUGGESTION
Wouldn't SAG do better by its own union members if productions were expected to choose the nominees themselves (up to a certain number of people), the way Oscar nominated films must choose who gets the credit fo such efforst as producing and visual effects and what not? 

Q&A Crumbs: Best of Best Supporting Actor + Legendary Why?

If the Q&A column were a TV series it'd be one of those painfully confusing ones that goes off the air unexpectedly only to return with 2 hour specials and extra webisodes and then go on hiatus again. I can't control it! It controls me. I've already answered small screen questions, and Thursday's column was on movie etiquette, crowd reactions, and purposefully bad acting. So here's are a handful of Q&A crumbs that I felt the need to answer and now we are dunzo until the next round. Whew.

As ever, I love to hear your answers to these questions in the comments. The more the merrier when it comes to movie discussions, don't you think?

MESHI: Are there any legendary performances (like, Vivien Leigh as Scarlet O'Hara-type legendary) that you just don't get what all the fuss is about?

I have a hard time understanding the fuss over Marlon Brando in Last Tango In Paris. To me it feels less Method then Show-Off with no one willing to say, 'pull it back dude. Modulate.' So, no, I don't get that one despite its enormous acclaim. I will entertain the possibility that I saw it when I was too young for it, though.

MARY: What are you most excited for? "Mirror Mirror" or "Snow White and the Huntsman"?

I believe you'll find my answer in if you click on the Snow White tag. I'm pretty good with the tagging at the bottom of each post to make things easy for y'all to investigate topics of interest. Short answer: Hunstman by a country mile on a horse drawn carriage with a bad wheel. 

CAL ROTH: Call the next Oscar winners now in acting now. No guts, no glory. Don't think too much about it. Just say how do you feel about these races.

I hate doing this because it's a lose-lose proposition before nominations are announced. If you're right and you go with the party line (I guess at the moment that's: Clooney & Streep, Redgrave & Plummer) you risk being part of that horrible machine that takes all the fun out of Oscars by making it into one big echo chamber that reenforces lazy voting. If you're right but you appear to be wrong (hmmm: Pitt & Davis* & Spencer & Plummer?) because your answer sounds too "two months ago*" people don't remember and they just think you're not that good at prognosticating. Anyway, i much prefer predicting nominees to predicting winners which is TOTALLY BORING due to the echo chamber... particular in the last stretch when the same 4 people will start winning every award and people will only guess otherwise to have something to write about.

* I often wonder why people have perpetual amnesia about the fact that buzz volumes always rise when a movie opens or start screening (provided it's not bombing) and always subside when it's been out a few months and is "familiar". But... buzz volume levels rise and fall and rise again...and fall again. The only thing that matters is how volumous they are when voting is happening.

SOSUEME: As an avid reader of TFE for the last two years, I finally had my first Nathaniel dream...in it, you were moving to California...obviously, the dream has more to do with me than anyone else, but it got me thinking...would you consider moving to CA to be closer to the industry, the events, possibly more money, or does New York suit you just fine?

I'm happy right here though I'd totally be bi-coastal if I could. Writing can be a lonely activity so you need handy social escapes for sanity. Nearly all of my closest friends live here so I gotta stick around. Plus: New York City needs me ;)  ...most of the Oscar pundits are in Los Angeles but AMPAS is bicoastal!

ONE MORE.... SPOTLIGHT QUESTION!

Best Ever Consecutive Run for Supporting Actor Oscar?

MITCHELL: What do you believe to be the most deserving performance to ever win Best Supporting ACTOR?

This is my least favorite of the four acting categories within Oscar because it seems to have the least correlation to actual quality year after year. For whatever reasons it's more beholden to other Oscar factors that aren't really about the work in question: career honors, which "types" they like, which films they like, fame levels before the nominations. This category is also particularly egregious in terms of category fraud. I mean you could argue that it's been five years since an actual supporting performance won (that'd be Alan Arkin) even though the last four winners were four kinds of miraculous in terms of actual quality [tangent: best run ever in this category if you allow for the fraud!]. Once you remove all the co-leads I think there are a few absolute essentials who not only did inspired work but who elevated already strong films by virtue of their lynchpin contributions to its tone, identity and overall aesthetic punch.

So without pouring over the books for too long I'd say I couldn't really live without Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Joel Grey as "the emcee" in Cabaret (1972), or Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994).

But this list might change on a different day and I can't choose just one! Can you?

Mike Mills on "Beginners" and Making Stories About Ourselves.

Christopher Plummer and Mike Mills promoting "Beginners"Sometimes the beginning of awards season offers pleasant surprises. Such is the case with Beginners, one of the year's best films, which recently debuted on DVD and is now suddenly on the shortlist of potential Oscar contenders with early and surprisingly robust attention from both the Gotham Awards where it won the top prize and the Independent Spirit Awards (3 nominations including Best Feature). 

I had the opportunity to speak with writer/director Mike Mills recently about Beginners, his second feature. The film famously draws heavily from Mills' own life to depict the relationship between a lonely artist named Oliver (Ewan McGregor) and his gay father Hal (Christopher Plummer) who comes out late in life shortly before succumbing to cancer. Oliver does his own romantic soul searching with an actress named Anna (Melanie Laurent) after his father's death.

The film moved me deeply this past summer and I told Mills as much as we began to talk. I had just rewatched the film on the morning we spoke.

NATHANIEL: It's so fresh in my memory, but how about you? Have you watched the movie recently?

MIKE MILLS: No. You know, most of my friends are filmmakers. A lot of filmmakers I know, we never watch our films after they're done. They're like old lovers or old worlds we were in. Since I premiered it at Toronto in 2010 I haven't watched the whole thing straight through. I watch parts of it and when I do Q&As I end up watching the end a lot or I peek in. Parts of it are tolerable but watching the whole thing is slightly torturous. More than slightly torturous.

Because you've lived with it for so long?

MILLS: Yeah. I've seen it probably a hundred times in making it. It's not the same experience for me, obviously, as it is for the audience. I'm thinking of all the strings behind the puppets. Maybe in a few years. It's strange. It's kind of sad. My wife [Miranda July] doesn't -- I have a lot of director friends and none of us look at our movies. 

Well, Beginners is also so autobiographical. So is it at all harder to watch for that reason, than say your first feature Thumbsucker? 

MILLS: It's not -- well, I don't think so. While it is very autobiographical by the time I've written it, turned it into a story, cast Christopher and all these people, it is a story for me; it's not 1 to 1. For me, I'm the most aware of how much it is not my life. But having said that, I do watch the end a lot. So often, I watch Hal die. I've watched Hal die so many times. The section right after that where it talks about what you do when someone passes away, there are some very real things in there. The daisies at the end -- there's a black and white photo of daisies. That's my mom's photo. That part can really hit me. One, it reminds me of my mom. Two, 'whoa! I put something incredibly intimate and vulnerable in this very public thing.' It almost surprises me every time that it's in there.

"They're just personal photos, they're not art."

I was going to ask. It feels so personal. The very specific can become universal of course. But on the other hand, we are aware that it's based on your life. So...

I'm very happy to remember my dad. It's not like a painful thing. Even his death and even his illness and all of that, we had a lot of great times around that. We had more closeness than we had ever had. So most of the stuff I'm showing you in the film are positive memories, things I enjoy being around. To be honest, most of the stuff with the dad... I pretty much wrote down things my father said to me to the best of my memory. But by the time you've put it in a different place, you've put it into a larger fictional context, and you have Christopher saying it, I really don't go "oh, that's my pop". Do you know what I mean?

But those flowers slap me in the face. They kind of sneak up on my every time.  I worked on the father stuff so much and I got really used to thinking of it as the weird hybrid of personal and story.

[more on his fine screenplay, his art, and working with Oscar-buzzing Christopher Plummer]

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