"Young Adult" Chat: Diablo, Charlize, Patton... and Candace?

This Friday night at the DGA Theater in Manhattan, director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody's post-Juno reunion was unveiled for guild members. The second time was also a charm so I hope they keep working together. For such a dark and discomfiting comedy (many of the best laughs come while cringing reflexively), I thought the screening went very well with no walkouts and much laughter but my guest was more skeptical. He felt like the laughter was coming from very specific pockets of the theater which may well be true since it's a movie that some people will "get" (i.e. respond to) and others will probably leave in disgust since it keeps defying expectations, driving drunkenly up to traditional beats / redemptive arcs, only to turn its nose up at them and swerve off that well-paved road again.  We weren't allowed to take pictures, so I was playing court reporter and sketching the panel which included...

From left: Moderator Candace Bushnell, actress Charlize Theron, screenwriter Diablo Cody, actor Patton Oswalt and actress Elizabeth Reiser.

I kept altering the Candace drawing, sketching beer bottles strewn about her, adding bubbles in the air, because the real life "Carrie Bradshaw" was a MESS, all slurry, mealy mouthed, self absorbed and just not pulling it together. At one point after several repeated interludes wherein she managed to go on and on about the movie or her feelings about without asking a question, she began to compare Charlize's character "Mavis Gray" with Kim Cattrall's "Samantha Jones" in Sex & The City, which proved to be too much for the already patience-tested audience.

JUST ASK A QUESTION!!!"

...one man shouted from somewhere in the middle of the theater.

But through her haze of something, Candace touched on and was maybe even a living embodiment of the point she was attempting to make: certain types of behavior and some very famous characters that we enjoy onscreen would be absolutely insufferable in real life settings. Young Adult lays this down with nuanced flair.

Despite the problematic "Q" half of the Q&A session, the "A" was terrific. Diablo Cody was clever (no surprise), Patton Oswalt was just hilarious (apparently this is not a surprise if you're familiar though I wasn't having only seen him in The United States of Tara) and Charlize and Elizabeth managed to wring laughs from the crowd, too. It's kind of disgusting that Charlize, in addition to being one of the most beautiful women in the world is also one of the most talented and has a great sense of humor. Abundance of riches, that, and the movie wouldn't have worked at all without someone of her caliber headlining.

My recorder mysteriously contains only silence for 25 minutes  --wtf? -- so I can't share the highlights I intended to (wah-wah) but [SPOILER] the funniest moment came when Patton Oswalt was discussing his nude scene with Charlize and an audience member asked if he worked out from nerves beforehand. He said that going to the gym for his body would be like building a nice awning over a pile of rubble... and nothing would have ever helped being on camera with Charlize. Why couldn't he have done a nude scene with, like, Michael Moore instead? [/SPOILER]. Another good bit was Charlize talking about how unpopular she was in high school followed by a self-deprecating 'I'm sure you all feel very sorry for me.'

Here's the Q&A guests at another event that same night. (They didn't change clothes so I assume they were back-to-back events)

Oscar Nominations?
While the whole cast of Young Adult is sharp about how to play the tricky tone, particularly Collette Wolfe in a crucial role as Patton Oswalt's sister, most of them have very small roles (it's Theron & Oswalt's party...and they do throw one.) Charlize is a deserving contender for Best Actress but given how traditionally strong her competition is (what with easy Oscar gets like biopic mimicry and career narratives like "long gestating dream role" in the mix) she's no lock. That said she nails a complicated character who is in every scene and requires both finely honed comedic skill and a nuanced dramatic undertow. Patton Oswalt has both an easier role (audience voice / surrogate... to an extent) and an easier shot at Supporting Actor. I suspect the film is far too distinctive, tightly focused and resistant to catharsis for wider Oscar play so it's all about the writer's branch.

The Original Screenplay category this year is a fascinating beast. Six of the hottest tickets in this category (Young Adult, Beginners, Bridesmaids, Midnight in Paris, The Artist, Win Win) are either straight up comedies or dramas with very pronounced comedic sensibilities... so will they go there? Good news for Young Adult: Original Screenplay is a bit kinder to dramedies and comedies than other categories tend to be. You don't have to look back too far for a year that tilts comedic (the 2008 lineup includes Happy Go Lucky, Wall•E and In Bruges) though many of the years are as heavy on angsty drama as the lead acting categories tend to be. 

Review: "Warrior"

WARRIOR, a sure to be crowd-pleaser features two down-and-out bruiser brothers (Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy) and their alcoholic father (Nick Nolte) all preparing for an Ultimate Fighting challenge with a $5 miilion purse. It's exactly the kind of movie you're expecting it to be. As the film begins there's Springsteen-like (Springsteen-lite?) warbling on the soundtrack and the palette's chief color, blueish gray, is smeared all over the screen. This is all handy shorthand for weary/bruised manly-man working class drama. Warrior wants you to feel as comfortable in your theater seat as you might on your couch as it works, sweats and trains towards its predictable but appropriately rousing conclusion. Which is not to say that Warrior isn't any good… just that it's both confident and content with its big meaty grip on the super familiar genre it belongs to and adores. 

The first rule of Fight Club is: do not talk about Fight Club. Tommy (Hardy) is the only Conlon family member who obeys...

Read the rest at Towleroad 

(pssst. I do mention Oscar once in connection with Nick Nolte, but I think people are getting carried away on that front.)

Leo vs. Ryan: Oscar's Golden Young Men?

If this year's Best Actress competition is the race of the sixty-somethings (Close vs. Streep) that most people are predicting with the films still sight unseen, what kind of shape will the corresponding male category take? Could we see a race between 30-somethings in a sort of reverse age scenario of what normally occurs with actresses winning young and actors winning as soon as they have a gray hair or fifty.

Leo frets. It's not always good news to be the early unarguable frontrunner.

As an Oscar pundit I'm always trying to roll different scenarios on my tongue to see how they taste. How about this: What if this year's race is between Leonardo DiCaprio in J Edgar who will draw strength both from his past Oscar history and from AMPAS Official Favorite Genre (the biopic) and Ryan Gosling in The Ides of March? Gosling will be propped up by last year's Blue Valentine snub, his sure to be iconic character in Drive, and his general quickly achieved status as THE best of his generation...on this side of the Atlantic at least. I assume Michael Fassbender is just warming up. And what if the vote siphoning ingredient is not Clooney or Fassbender or whomever but Cannes Best Actor winner Jean DuJardin in The Artist?

I know most people have called this one for Leo despite  J Edgar being sight unseen and Clint Eastwood's Oscar appeal slightly faded. On paper (Oscar weight paper), yes he looks unstoppable. That's especially true because if Gosling proves his main competition, well, Gosling is very young still for Oscar votes being only one year older at this writing as the youngest Best Actor winner ever (Adrien Brody, The Pianist). But I always hesitate to assume that we know winners before we have seen virtually any of the competitive work. I mean, would fans of other young movie giants of their day ever assume that Paul Newman or Al Pacino or Peter O'Toole or whomever would have to wait as long as they did or are? Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, both as big as Leo, are still waiting, too.

Nothing is certain until it's already happened.

As for Supporting Actor, The Ides of March is the big reigning question mark in the same way that The Help (previous posts) is for the ladies with multiple appealing choices for voters. The political drama has three former Oscar nominees, two of them winners, all circling 'round and talking at Ryan Gosling in the actor friendly piece. Who will voters favor: showy Philip Seymour Hoffman, subtle (at least in comparison) Paul Giamatti, or charismatic George Clooney?

Make your wild guesses now! Soon the movies are upon us. Wheeee

UPDATED PREDICTIONS: Index | Picture | Director | Actor | Supporting Actor 

Extremely Loud-Mouthed and Incredibly Close-Up Oscar Predix

...and everyone is doing it now that the year is half over. Wheeee.

Best Picture
Here are updated predictions in all categories from Best Picture down to Best Key Grip. The new Best Picture rule -- they can have anywhere between 5 to 10 nominees and we won't know until Oscar nominations are announced -- is causing me chart difficulties. I can't figure out, aesthetically, how to divvy up charts with so many different numerical outcomes. If you must know I would like to make this wild July speculation that there will be 6 nominees to include War Horse, The Descendants, We Bought a Zoo, J Edgar, The Artist and new entry Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which now plans to arrive in 2011.

It's not that I have any particular hunch or faith in that upcoming Stephen Daldry 9/11 film. It's more like anti-wishful thinking: See, I'm allergic to movie representations of that day since I was here in New York City and I tend to find the world's and especially the media's obsession with it absolutely grotesque. (For reasons that have nothing to do with cinema or the Oscars, so let's move on...)

John Williams and Steven SpielbergBiggest Annoyance
The music categories are always high-maintenance in terms of predictions. Original Song has zillions of hard to figure eligibility issues. Plus, there are still so many films that have not announced their composers in the Original Score category. Yes, it's often a late-to-the-party job as movie productions go. But I always suspect that even after the composers are announced that it takes a good long while for that information to trickle onto key pages like official sites and the IMDb. If you know of a better source of who's scoring what, do let me know. (I don't want to have to call 12 production companies!) With J Edgar, however, which also hasn't announced, it feels safe to assume that Clint Eastwood will compose some simple piano motifs for it because that's how he do.

That said, this category might be easier to predict than usual because the King of the Category John Williams will surely take up 40% of it. Oscar's music branch has always trembled for his Treble, zinged for his Strings and mooned over his melodies so they'd never pass up the chance to honor him for The Adventure of Tin Tin and for War Horse now that he's scoring again after basically a six year break from features (excluding that Crystal Skull reprising). John Williams turns 80 next year and chances are strong that they won't want him to retire without a sixth Oscar.

Craziest What If?
The new prediction I'm most enamored of because it's a Winding road way off the well-paved Bait path and because it would be highly awesome if the crazy thing came to pass and I predicted it first is an editing nomination for the Cannes hit Drive (2011). I mean why the hell not, right? It's July. Think outside the Bait Box! The prediction holdovers that I was initially excited to imagine but am now worried about -- though I didn't change them -- were all the Captain America nominations (Costumes, Makeup, Visual Effects). When I went there months ago I was totally confident that it could happen but public fatigue with superheroics makes me wonder if all films from this genre will be snubbed even in seemingly likely places like visual effects. Did Green Lantern leave an emerald stain?

The movies are getting all jumbled in my head now.

Why is Gosling driving off with the good Captain. Where is he taking him? "SHOTGUN!"

And on a final note, looking over Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor the competitions and competitors seem far more interesting than usual. Supporting Actor, for example, seems to have a number of Career Honors vs. Career Honors vs. Career Honors possibilities and in the lead race, could it finally be Leonardo DiCaprio's year?  Or maybe the manly half of the acting lineups will get boring real fast and it really will come down to a Close vs. Streep 80s throwback Actress-Off. Maybe it's just the oppressive July heat warping our crystal ball.

Comments? You realize we cry a single tear for every post that doesn't enter double digit comments, right? Don't cause us any more agony. Once you're done contemplating Oscar, hit the gym, the links, and the (Italian) showers. Yeah, yeah, it's summer ...but this blog has air conditioning.

Halfway Honors. Best of 2011 Thus Far

This year seems to be off to a slow start but here's what I'd choose as the best of the year thus far. I've excluded films that are still waiting for their proper release like Andrew Haigh's finely tuned miniature gay drama Weekend (which has been collecting festival trophies and which I loved) and Paddy Considine's discomfiting abuse drama Tyrannosaur which I did not love but which boasts impressive acting.

TOP TEN PICTURES (alpha order)
The Arbor, Beginners, Bridesmaids, Certified Copy, Jane Eyre, Midnight in Paris, Poetry, Rango, The Tree of Life and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. You can see a complete list of what I've seen here.

[Notable films that I did plan to see but will have to catch on DVD include: Hanna, The Housemaid and Win Win]

DIRECTOR
Clio Barnard - THE ARBOR
Lee Chang-dong - POETRY
Abbas Kiarostami -CERTIFIED COPY
Terrence Malick -THE TREE OF LIFE
Mike Mills -BEGINNERS

notes: I gave Barnard the slight edge over Apichatpong Weerathesakul mostly because I far prefer "Joe's" earlier effort Tropical Malady to Boonmee. But not without some hesitation. I appreciated the bold experimentation of The Arbor, a documentary/narrative hybrid about the life and work of playwright and screenwriter Andrea Dunbar (Rita, Sue and Bob, Too). I just wish the film had been tighter and less relentless in its last 45 minutes. It had already done so much surgical socioeconomic surveillance damage by that point that rather than feeling devastating it started to feel exhausting. But it's definitely worth a look.

ACTRESS
Juliette Binoche - CERTIFIED COPY
Yun Jeong-Hie -POETRY
Mia Wasikowska - JANE EYRE
Kristen Wiig - BRIDESMAIDS
Michelle Williams -MEEKS CUTOFF

actors and the supporting crop and even a few technicals if you just...

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