Tag Archives: golden globes

Golden Globes – Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama

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The Nominees are:

Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything

Steve Carrell, Foxcatcher

Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game

David Oyelowo, Selma

Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler

What a year! So many strong performances. Nightcrawler is the best performance of Gyllenhaal’s career so far, but he’s not going to get an award for it. Neither is Carrell likely to, although I think he really pushed himself and we saw him at a whole new level. Sorry Steve, it’s not your year.

The next 3 are super, super tough to call and I wish we could just shake everyone’s hands, call a 3-way-tie, maybe watch Eddie Redmayne blush through his freckles and call it a day. But awards hardly ever work like that (although we did see a tie at the Oscars two years ago). There isn’t always going to be a clear winner, because there aren’t clear qualifications. Art is subjective. These 3 are all portraying real men (and so was Steve Carrell) so maybe in this case we do have a bit of a yardstick against which to measure. But other than that, all you can do is follow your gut reaction, and vote for what spoke to you the most.

For that reason, I’m eliminating Benedict Cumberbatch. I know he’s fairly heavily favoured  but  as I said before, I think he’s a really great and nuanced actor who did as good a job as I believe was possible with that role. I also believe that the writer did not provide as fleshed-out a character as possible, and that’s where Cumberbatch loses out to Redmayne. Redmayne became Hawking, and the writers allowed us to see both the good and the bad in the man. The audience got to see him grow and change as a man whereas the Turing character seemed much more static.

Eddie Redmayne was the first of these performances I saw, and I immediately declared it the one to beat. But last night I finally saw Selma and wasn’t prepared for just how much I would enjoy it, and enjoy Oyelowo’s portrayal of Dr. King. He’s able to show us this historical figure so revered, so hallowed that we forget he was a real man, and at the same time show us a flawed man who was barely holding it together. It’s got to be daunting to play Dr. King, especially in this kind of movie, but he never faltered. So I’m giving it Oyelowo.

Do I think the Globes will agree? I think they would if they all had the chance to see it, but this one’s been in very limited release until this weekend and apparently Paramount’s been having a hard time getting out screeners. I’d hate to see such a stupid reason lose Oyelowo the race, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Score two Selma

Golden Globes – Best Screenplay

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The Nominees:

Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson & Hugo Guinness)

The Imitation Game (Graham Moore)

Birdman (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu,  Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris & Armando Bo

Boyhood (Richard Linklater)

How to predict such a broad category? Well, I can start by striking Gone Girl from the list. I’m not sure if it’s an author’s dream or worst nightmare to be given a second chance, via screenplay, to correct your novel’s mistakes, but Flynn just isn’t that strong a writer and the screenplay probably would have done better in someone else’s hands, someone with a fresher eye and a little more distance.

After that, I’m kind of done. Graham Moore does a wonderful job of portraying a story that is mostly about thinking and shows us how the thinking is done. Alan Turing had a rich interior life and Moore gives us the tools to explore it. It’s not always a graceful trick, as Matt will tell you, but it is a magic trick, and it results in a very watchable film.

Wes Anderson is brilliant. His stories are intricate and engrossing, injected with energy and idiosyncracies. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, he finds just the perfect line of dialogue for his enormous cast of regulars. You never feel they’re extraneous. There’s a gloss and sheen to this script that tells us only getting better.

Inarritu et. al for Birdman are of course going to be favourites of mine. They’re innovators. The script manages to be philosophical, existential, metaphysical, and yet relatable. Major respect.

Linklater is last but not least. Script-wise, I’m not sure how it holds up to this pack, or even to itself, over time. This is the movie it took 12 years to make. A script must naturally evolve over the course of such a long period, and yet it feels like a cohesive and believable and very natural work of art.

grand_budapest_hotel_ver12So who will the Globes pick? I’m sort of feeling they might throw Wes Anderson a bone on this one. As long as Flynn doesn’t go home with the trophy, though, I think it’s a win any (other) way you slice it.

Golden Globes – Best Original Score

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The Nominees:

The Imitation Game’s Alexandre Desplat

The Theory of Everything’s Johann Johannson

Gone Girl’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Birdman‘s Antonio Sanchez

Interstellar’s Hans Zimmer

This category will probably bubble down to a battle of the British biopics. Johannson has never even been nominated but stands a good chance. You can’t count Zimmer out because it’s Zimmer, but if you read our Interstellar reviews, you know that we found the music to be ‘loud’ and ‘too loud’ and ‘kind of manipulative’ rather than particularly good. Desplat is an awards darling and could just as easily been nominated for his stellar work in The Grand Budapest Hotel as well. He’s not undeserving and his score for The Imitation Game is beautiful.

I hope, though, that the Globes will surprise us all and declare Antonio Sanchez the winner. When I reviewed Birdman, I felt the score was almost another character. His drum beats become a part of the movie, sometimes subtle and other times propulsive and assertive. Drums are not normal fare for a movie composer, but this is part of what Birdman such an exhilarating movie. It takes risks. Sanchez’s work weaves itself into the story and gives it life, a pulse.

The Oscars refused to even consider Birdman’s score, citing various flimsy excuses, amounting Birdman-movie-posterto the director having occasionally used some pieces of classical music as themes for certain characters, thus rendering the score somehow ineligible (although this adds up to about 16 minutes out of the film’s 119). Certainly if pre-recorded songs are dominant, then the score is thought not to be, but that’s just not the case in Birdman. I do believe, however, that voting Academy members are not used to a single drum comprising a score. They themselves conduct orchestras and employ many (unionized) musicians, whereas Sanchez does not. So his innovative work will be frustratingly snubbed by the Oscars. Will the Globes have the balls to make up for it? I doubt it, but I hope so.

Score 2 for Birdman.


Find more Golden Globes predictions: Best Original Song, Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, Best Animated Feature

Golden Globes – Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy

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Matt and I are still cramming to bring the best Globes coverage we can, and I’m putting up thoughts and predictions as I complete the categories. Please chime in with your own vote, we always love the feedback!

The nominees:

St Vincent

Pride

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Birdman

Into the Woods

I watched Pride this morning and The Grand Budapest Hotel probably 10 months ago, so this category is a little uneven for that reason. I’ve enjoy ed all of these movies to some extent, but of course there are some stand-outs.

St Vincent is a fun movie if you love Bill Murray but probably a little flat if you don’t. It’s a star vehicle but not much more. Pride is a feel-good movie that everyone should watch and anyone would have some good take-away feelings. It’s just not that deep. The Grand Budapest Hotel is my baby. I’m a Wes Anderson nut and I love everything he does. He probably poops glitter. And this movie is great even among Wes Anderson films, with an all-star cast that blows you away (and a little Bill Murray to make me swoon), and a thousand little details that will have you licking your lips in delight. Don’t miss it. You may, however, give Into the Woods a miss. The cast is great but the story’s inconsistent and the musical numbers just aren’t that memorable. Plus there’s the whole pedophilia angle. Birdman has a great cast AND a great, fresh story. It somehow blends a gritty realism with a gothic surrealism quite seamlessly, leaving the audience to guess and to fill in the blanks. It’s the most daring of the nominees, and the most exciting to watch.

Apologies to Wes Anderson (and with confidence that you have many more great movies to Birmdancome), I’m giving it to Birdman. It just makes you excited about what is possible in filmmaking. I’m gushing, but Birdman deserves it, just as it’ll deserve the golden Globe on Sunday.

Score one Birdman. But do I think the Globes will agree? I hope so. I wouldn’t be disappointed to see it go to The Grand Budapest Hotel, another deserving movie from a director who’s been criminally snubbed in the past. What I’m worried about is the celebrity  power of Into The Woods, a movie undeserving but perhaps irresistible to the people doing the voting. Fingers crossed that they do the right thing.

 

More Golden Globes awards coverage: Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song.

Golden Globes – Best Animated Feature Film

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The Nominees are

The Lego Movie

How To Train Your Dragon 2

The Boxtrolls

Big Hero 6

The Book of Life

I have nothing bad to say about any of these movies, they’re all watchable and enjoyable. It’s not easy to compare inflatable robots with Mexican representations of death, or sentient toys with mute dragons, but the Golden Globes (and soon the Oscars) forces us do so, and this year, there’s no contest.

This category holds one of my favourite movies of 2014, period. The Lego Movie is a triumph in legodetail. Every piece of the movie is virtually built with bricks, bricks that are blemished and scratched, bricks that appear to be played with. The nostalgia factor runs deep in this movie, with several familiar faces popping up in cameos throughout the film. Emmett, the hero of the movie, voiced by Chris Pratt, is a likable doofus that appeals to all audience members. Liam Neeson voices good cop\bad cop brilliantly and steals every scene he’s in. The movie shows a pig explode into sausages – I mean, there’s just no beating that. And any kid movie that can sneak in themes of Orwell’s 1984 AND The Matrix has got to be awarded. We’ll start with the Globes, but we’re not stopping until the Oscars.

Score one The Lego Movie. But do I think the Globes will agree? Yes, I do.

 

 

See our other Golden Globes coverage.

 

 

 

Golden Globes – Best Original Song in a Motion Picture

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Hollywood’s biggest party-slash-awards ceremony is happening this Sunday, January 11th 2015 at the Beverley Hilton in Beverly Hills and as usual, Matt and Jay are cramming like crazy in order to bring you their predictions, hopes, and outrage, but mostly to just compete between ourselves.

globesThe Golden Globes are handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press, “journalists” who report on American film and television to other countries. Why they felt qualified and entitled to start up their own award system I’ll never know, but the Golden Globes are an excuse for the industry to come out and party. Everyone’s eating dinner and drinking heavily, which often leads to more interesting acceptance speeches (and also more absences due to bathroom breaks). The Golden Globes celebrate both film and television but these Assholes will be concentrating on the movie side of things. The tricky thing with the Globes is that they’re handed out quite early in the award season, before general audiences have really had the chance to see all of the nominated films because wide release hasn’t happened yet. So, bear with us. We’re trying our best.

There are 5 films nominated for best original song, a new song written and recorded specifically for a movie. The award goes to whoever wrote the song, not who performed it. This year, however, the nominees are all known to the music industry and to your radios.

For the film Noah: Mercy Is, by Patti Smith & Lenny Kaye

For the film Annie: Opportunity, by Sia, Greg Kurstin & Will Gluck

For the film The Hunger Games Mockingbird:  Yellow Flicker Beat, by Lorde

For the film Big Eyes: Big Eyes, by Lana Del Rey

For the film Selma: Glory, by John Legend & Common

The Patti Smith one is more of a sweeping theme along more traditional movie music. It’s beautiful and solemn enough for the film but it’s kind of forgettable and the truth is, I just can’t bring myself to predict even a hypothetical win for the movie Noah.

The Lorde song is kind of good, and she’s certainly a darling at the moment. It’s cool to have a song written by a strong young woman for a movie about a strong young woman. The lyrics are good, and appropriate (“the fires found a home in me”) but the sound just doesn’t seem to match the mood of the movie.

Lana Del Rey wrote a very suitable piece for her movie, Big Eyes. It’s haunting and ethereal, much like most of the stuff she does on her own time. It’s not much of a departure for her and frankly, it’s just not that interesting to listen to as a stand-alone song.

That leaves my top two contenders, the song from Annie and the song from Selma, about as different as two songs can get. Annie is of course a musical, but anything used in the first movie can’t be nominated, so they’ve written new material to keep the movie feeling fresh and to be eligible for accolades, which they just might receive. Sia is already a decorated song writer who has a whole catalogue of hits to her credibility. This one probably wouldn’t get a lot of play on the radio but does manage to incorporate all the best bits of the movie, all while being believably sung by a little girl with great pipes. It’s sweet and mildly catchy and a good representation of the movie. My favourite, and my vote, for what it’s worth, go to John Legend and Common for Selma. It’s a great song, strong lyricism (“Freedom is like religious to us’), catchy beat, radio-worthy. It’s quite powerful and with reference to Ferguson, it ties the historical to the present and makes the song not just good, but relevant.

Score one for Selma. But do I think the Globes will agree? I’m not sure. But they should.

 

The LEGO Movie vs Big Hero 6: Everything is Awesome

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It was announced last week that The LEGO Movie was (no surprise here) nominated for the Best Animated Feature Film Golden Globe. This, of course, prompted me to rewatch it, leaving me wondering who should win the Baymax/Will-Arnett’s-Batman battle. This is the problem with awards season, I guess, in that it makes us have to decide between stuff we love.

Sorry, Hiro. There’s just something special about Warner Bros.’ feature-length tribute to (or commercial for) the world of LEGO. Whether it’s the stays-in-your-head-for-days signature song, the exceptionlessly great voice cast (my favourites probably Liam Neeson in his one-man good copy/bad copy routine), or the genuinely touching ending, The LEGO Movie has so much that makes it stick out. The think for yourself message manages to be effective even as it hints that we should buy more LEGOs. And spend less on coffee. It’s more consistently funny than Big Hero 6 and even more creative. Batman, Superman, the Wild West, Han Solo, pirates, and Abraham Lincoln could only co-exist in the world of a kid and his Lego set. Until now. Only an Up or a Wall-E, which we’ve had to do without this year, could beat that. Thanks to LEGO and Big Hero 6 though, it’s still going to be an interesting category at the Golden Globes.