1998 Endy Awards

These are the 1998 Endy Awards, wherein I pretend to give out maneki-neko statues to the best in that year in film. Awards for many other years can be found in the Endy Awards Index. Eligibility is determined by imdb date and by whether or not I've seen the movie in question. Nominees are listed in alphabetical order and the winners are bolded. And the Endy goes to. . .

Best Picture:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Histoire(s) du cinema
3. The Last Days of Disco
4. Rushmore
5. The Thin Red Line

Best Director:

1. Joel & Ethan Coen, The Big Lebowski
2. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Flowers of Shanghai
3. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinema
4. Wes Anderson, Rushmore
5. Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line

Hard not to reward the Coens for their best work, but Godard's massive Histoire(s) is one of the great directorial achievements of the decade, a project that is still ahead of its time more than 15 years after it was completed. Hou, Anderson and Malick all have Endys in their future: in 2007, 2009, and both 2005 and 2011, respectively. Somewhat surprisingly, this is the Coens' first nomination. Odds are their next best shot at a win will come in 1990.

Best Actor:

1. Jeff Bridges, The Big Lebowski
2. George Clooney, Out of Sight
3. Tony Leung, The Longest Nite
4. Willem Dafoe, New Rose Hotel
5. Jason Schwartzman, Rushmore

Best Actress:

1. Takako Matsu, April Story
2. Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth
3. Rebecka Liljeberg, Fucking Åmål
4. Chloe Sevigny, The Last Days of Disco
5. Asia Argento, New Rose Hotel

Supporting Actor:

1. John Goodman, The Big Lebowski
2. Lau Ching-wan, The Longest Nite
3. Christopher Walken, New Rose Hotel
4. Bill Murray, Rushmore
5. Sean Penn, The Thin Red Line

Supporting Actress:

1. Carina Lau, Flowers of Shanghai
2. Michelle Reis, Flowers of Shanghai
3. Alexandra Dahlström, Fucking Åmål
4. Kate Beckinsale, The Last Days of Disco
5. Olivia Williams, Rushmore

Lau Ching-wan was the workhorse star of the early days of Milkyway Image, and this might be his best year. In addition to this nomination, he also starred in Expect the Unexpected, A Hero Never Dies and two other films in 1998 that I haven't seen yet, Wong Jing's Step into the Dark and Lee Chi-ngai's Doctor Mack. He'll be nominated for Best Actor in 1999 and 2007 and for Supporting Actor in 2002 and 2011. But John Goodman in Lebowski is unbeatable.

Original Screenplay:

1. Joel & Ethan Coen, The Big Lebowski
2. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinema
3. Whit Stillman, The Last Days of Disco
4. Peter & Bobby Farrelly, Ed Decter & John Strauss, There's Something About Mary
5. Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson, Rushmore

Adapted Screenplay:

1. Chu Tien-wen & Eileen Chang, Flowers of Shanghai
2. Abel Ferrara & Christ Zoist, New Rose Hotel
3. Scott Frank, Out of Sight
4. Elaine May, Primary Colors
5. Terrence Malick, The Thin Red Line

Non-English Language Film:

1. April Story (Shunji Iwai)
2. Expect the Unexpected (Patrick Yau)
3. Flowers of Shanghai (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
4. Fucking Åmål (Lukas Moodysson)
5. Histoire(s) du cinema (Jean-Luc Godard)

Expect the Unexpected was one of the early Milkyway Image films contentiously produced by Johnnie To for other directors. After four films in two years (The Longest Nite, The Odd One Dies and Where a Good Man Goes are the others), Yau and To never worked together again. Since breaking with Milkyway, Yau has apparently mostly been working in television.

Documentary Film:

1. Histoire(s) du cinema (Jean-Luc Godard)
2. Meeting People is Easy (Grant Gee)

Animated Film:

1. A Bug's Life (John Lasseter)
2. Mulan (Tony Bancroft & Barry Cook)

Unseen Film:

1. Autumn Tale (Eric Rohmer)
2. Bird People in China (Takashi Miike)
3. Eternity and a Day (Theo Angelopoulos)
4. The Hole (Tsai Ming-liang)
5. Late August, Early September (Olivier Assayas)

Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine just missed, mostly because I just feel bad that I've never seen any Angelopoulos.

Film Editing:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. He Got Game
3. Histoire(s) du cinema
4. New Rose Hotel
5. The Thin Red Line

Cinematography:

1. April Story
2. Flowers of Shanghai
3. New Rose Hotel
4. Saving Private Ryan
5. The Thin Red Line

Could have gone a lot of different directions with my fourth-place pick here, like He Got Game or Out of Sight or Pi or A Hero Never Dies or even Meet Joe Black or What Dreams May Come, but April Story is just about the prettiest-looking movie ever. And as disastrous as the impact of Saving Private Ryan has been on the action cinema of the last decade, it is an exceptionally well-shot film.

Art Direction:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
3. Flowers of Shanghai
4. Pleasantville
5. Shakespeare in Love

Those lamps.

Costume Design:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
3. Flowers of Shanghai
4. The Last Days of Disco
5. Rushmore

Make-up:

1. Elizabeth
2. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
3. A Hero Never Dies
4. The Last Days of Disco
5. There's Something About Mary

Original Score:

1. Flowers of Shanghai
2. Meet Joe Black
3. New Rose Hotel
4. There's Something About Mary
5. The Thin Red Line

Adapted Score:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. He Got Game
3. The Last Days of Disco
4. There's Something About Mary
5. The Thin Red Line

Sound:

1. Armageddon
2. Enemy of the State
3. Histoire(s) du cinema
4. Saving Private Ryan
5. The Thin Red Line

Sound Editing:

1. Armageddon
2. Enemy of the State
3. A Hero Never Dies
4. Saving Private Ryan
5. The Thin Red Line

Visual Effects:

1. Armageddon
2. Dark City
3. A Hero Never Dies
4. Pleasantville
5. What Dreams May Come

On Ridley Scott's Gladiator

I've been building up to a rematch of this one for awhile now, taking in a series of historical epics in anticipation of a second look at one of my least favorite Best Picture winners of the century so far. I do think there's much to be made about the 2000 Best Picture race: here was a chance for The Academy to move in a new and progressive direction, honoring truly innovative and important work from outside America (though directed and written by Hollywood veterans and co-funded with American cash). It could have set the tone for a more globally open and innovative 21st century, not just for awards, but for US film distribution and viewing patterns. But instead the Academy opted for Ridley Scott's CGI-fueled historical epic over Ang Lee's CGI-fueled historical epic. And one the Weinsteins put a stranglehold on everything they could from Hong Kong, the chances of American audiences getting wide exposure to the most exciting and interesting cinema in the world quickly diminished. But this is a long digression, this is supposed to be about Gladiator itself.

The action, at least, is better than I remembered, it's really only the opening battle that degenerates into an incoherent blur, the gladiator fights are instead simply middling examples of Hollywood obfuscation-as-excitement (the opening battle is also topped by a similar one in Oliver Stone's Alexander which as well hinges on a daring cavalry maneuver, but manages to both ratchet up the excitement and violence while at the same time remaining historically accurate), although I quite liked the one with the tigers.

As history it's abominable in just about every particular. It's not so much that it is historically inaccurate, or even that it just doesn't give a fuck about history, it's that it is actively anti-historical, manipulating the facts of the past in service of the narrative it wants to tell, which is a story about two versions of manhood: one virile and stoic; one impotent and emotional. Commodus is transformed into a simpering weakling, a coward and an incestuous pervert. His villainy is sourced in his weakness. Opposite to him in every way is Maximus, the very ideal of honor, loyalty, fidelity, fatherhood and filial piety. Maximus is the guy Chris Kyle thought he was, and this is a Bush-era film to its core: it imagines a world in which peace and freedom can be instilled through violence, war and the sacrifices of noble men. That Marcus Aurelius never did much in the way of seeking eternal peace, his wars against the Marcomanni and Quadi, on-going at his death, was only concluded when Commodus decided he simply wasn't interested in continuing the fight, is an inconvenient fact of history to be ignored, as is the indisputable fact that Marcus very much wanted Commodus to succeed him (and in fact Commodus had been in place as his Caesar for 14 years prior to Marcus's death - co-Emperors were a fairly common practice in Rome, the senior being titled "Augustus" the junior "Caesar"). The idea that Marcus couldn't possibly have made such a terrible decision is an enduring one, however, and it'd be hard to blame Scott for propagating the legend.

Indeed, Anthony Mann utilizes much the same premise in his Fall of the Roman Empire, though that film at least accepts the political realities of late Second Century Rome. There's no question of the Senate, or the Roman populace (repeatedly identified as "the mob") having any real power at all, which they hadn't for at least a century, if not longer. The reason for this can only be contemporary: it's the neoconservative vision of using force to establish freedom, transplanted to the Roman Empire. Marcus appoints Maximus as the Emperor needed to maintain order while the government transitions from autocracy to democracy, the military dictatorship preceding the withering away of the state. Then the film has the audacity to suggest that Marcus and Maximus's "dream of Rome" a dream of freedom guaranteed by the Roman Senate (never mind that the Senate was never anything like what we'd recognize as democratic or even populist, rather a hereditary oligarchy built on a slave economy), actually will come true. When, in fact, after Commodus's assassination (strangled in his bath by his wrestling partner: Commodus was in fact an energetic lover of games, often partaking in rigged gladiatorial combats, something which engendered popular dislike of him by the deeply class-conscious masses), the Senate quickly put the role of Emperor up for sale to the highest bidder (something Mann's film does well to dramatize). The year following Commodus's death is called the Year of the Five Emperors, you can guess from that how it went down. The ultimate victor in that civil war, Septimus Severus, established a tradition of military dictatorship, infighting and political assassination that came to be the norm for the next century (it's collectively known as "The Crisis of the Third Century"), until Diocletion and then Constantine radically remade the Empire in the late 200s and early 300s. At no point did the Roman Empire ever become more democratic that it was when Commodus was alive: that's why Gibbon started his book with his reign.

It's interesting then to rewatch this now, 15 years after its release and after just having seen Scott's Robin Hood, which similarly twists historical fact in the service of a political narrative, albeit one as informed by the Bush years as Gladiator is in anticipation of them. Crowe's Robin is a mythical figure, a mask adopted by a foot soldier (well, archer, technically), one that, as Maximus does, embodies certain masculine ideals. But the implication is that all of these roles are merely poses, that the actual man is nothing more than a construct, an ephemerality. Just so is that film's dream of freedom - it's one that pointedly is not accomplished by film's end, and indeed it's strongly implied that it cannot ever be - rather the aim of the true hero is the struggle toward universal political freedom, not the justification of certain means of achieving it. The utopia Robin and Marion create can exist only in the magic of Sherwood Forest, and then not by force, but only by withdrawing from the world into a small-scale community, disconnected from the strife of the larger world.

Even still, given all that, I probably would have given it a positive rating if only Oliver Reed had thrown his hat and charged into combat at the end.

On the 2014 Academy Awards (Or the Vice of Intended Ignorance)

I do love the Oscars. As long as I can remember, I've watched them. The first ceremony I have any memory of was the one held in 1982, just days shy of my sixth birthday. I had only seen one of the films in contention, Raiders of the Lost Ark, of course, but all i really remember is the theme song from Chariots of Fire. We watched the show every year, whether we'd seen any of the movies or not (my mom would race home from work to catch the beginning (back when the show used to be on a Monday so that it wouldn't compete with weekend theatrical movie business, remember when that was a thing that mattered?) and I'd have to fill her in on any awards she'd just missed (Supporting Actor or Actress, always). I remember ET inexplicably losing to Gandhi (though mom raved about Ben Kingsley's performance). I remember The Right Stuff (a very popular film among the grown-ups I knew; though I'd seen it, it was too slow and boring for me at that point) being upset by Terms of Endearment  and mom's love of Out of Africa (big Redford fan) and Amadeus. I remember someone on television claiming that Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man was one of the best performances ever. I remember rooting for Dead Poets Society or Field of Dreams and being as baffled as anyone by Driving Miss Daisy's win.

1990, when I was 14, was the first time I saw all of the nominees for Best Picture. I can't if I saw them all before the ceremony, but I made the effort to see them as soon as possible (Goodfellas had to wait until HBO, for sure). I loved Dances with Wolves that year, and Silence of the Lambs the next (HBO again, I read the book too), though I was rooting for JFK. Unforgiven was my favorite in 1992, a movie I saw multiple times, once in a drive-in even, on a double bill with Terminator 2. Schindler's List I saw three times in the theatre, I was convinced that, as I kept hearing, it was indeed the greatest movie ever made. The Oscars, as long as I could remember, were for big movies, important movies, great movies. And then, in 1994, the year I started college, Forrest Gump beat Pulp Fiction and the Academy Awards, or at least, my relation to them, have never been the same.

I've referred to 1994 as Year Zero for cinephiles of my generation. Growing up in the hinterlands, a world of chain video stores and zero repertory film, our exposure to the films of the past, especially foreign and art films, was severely limited. Every video store had a foreign film section, of course, but those usually consisted of a few   and a handful of Gerard Depardieu spectacles. The classic film sections were better stocked, but without a reliable guide, who knew where to begin. The film sections of the local bookstores mostly consisted of Leonard Maltin and his imitators, and when spend hours pouring through his guides along with the Video Hound Golden Movie Retriever (which rated everything on a scale of "Woof" to "Four Bones"). So we had a passing familiarity with Hitchcock, Welles, Scorsese, and the Best Picture Oscar winners, but not much else. But then Quentin Tarantino came along, bursting with big city video store knowledge, urging, demanding that the kids like us who loved his movies seek out in turn the films he loved. (An example, in June 1995 Tarantino presented Jackie Chan with the Lifetime Achievement MTV Movie Award, which was accompanied by a greatest hits reel of Chan stunts. I had never seen a Hong Kong movie, I'd never heard of Jackie Chan. But that award led to a wide US release for Rumble in the Bronx, so wide it even played Spokane. I saw that and the few other Chans I could find on video, and when I moved to Seattle, I dived headfirst into Hong Kong cinema, an obsession that has yet to subside.)  Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Pulp Fiction (the first two I watched back to back one weekend afternoon, after my friends heard I'd never seen a Tarantino film; I knew he'd won the Palme d'Or, but didn't know he'd made any other movies) demanded we familiarize ourselves with their influences: film noir, Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard (one of our favorite pass-times was driving around to all the video stores in town looking for a copy of Breathless. After years of searching, when finally found it for a $10 rental at a short-lived Jazz record store downtown). Movies with Christopher Walken and John Travolta and Harvey Keitel. We sought them all out, and each new discovery led to three more must-see films. Around the same time, Turner Classic Movies launched, opening a whole new front in the war on limited distribution. I'd always been a movie fan, it was the one thing my mom, my sister and I ever did as a family, but 1994 was the year I became a cinephile, and Pulp Fiction was the spark.

And then it lost Best Picture to Forrest Gump. A fine movie, sure, one we'd all liked when it came out that summer. But it looked positively ⃞  next to Pulp Fiction. The divide was cultural, political, generational. That was their movie and this was ours, and we'd been robbed. The pattern continued, year after year: our favorites always just losing to something bigger, blander, more mainstream. I don't know if that was new, I suspect it wasn't, but it seemed like a new development. Like there really was a generational war at play in Hollywood, between the old guard of respectable spectacle and a new wave of independent, Alternative to use the word of the times, cinema. The consensus of the 1980s, where every couple of years it seemed everyone agreed that the Best Picture really was The Best, and would therefore reward it with a multi-Oscar sweep, were gone. But it would take a few years for this split to play itself out, the big sweeps would continue for the rest of the 90s, though the rhetoric around the Oscars and their wrongness would grow with each middlebrow choice.

Here are the Best Picture winners from 1980-1993, along with their total number of Oscars won:

1980: Ordinary People - 4
1981: Chariots of Fire - 4
1982: Ghandi - 8
1983: Terms of Endearment - 5
1984: Amadeus - 8
1985: Out of Africa - 7
1986: Platoon - 4
1987: The Last Emperor - 9
1988: Rain Man - 4
1989: Driving Miss Daisy - 4
1990: Dances with Wolves - 7
1991: Silence of the Lambs - 5
1992: Unforgiven - 4
1993: Schindler's List - 7

That's an average of 5.7 Oscars per winner, with 6 films out of 14 winning 7 or more awards. The average would actually go up over the next 10 years, with 4 big sweeps leading to 6.9 Oscars per winner:

1994: Forrest Gump - 6
1995: Braveheart - 5
1996: The English Patient - 9
1997: Titanic - 11
1998: Shakespeare in Love - 7
1999: American Beauty - 5
2000: Gladiator - 5
2001: A Beautiful Mind - 4
2002: Chicago - 6
2003: Return of the King - 11

But that was the last time there was any real consensus, and one could argue the Return of the King number is a fluke, driven by three years of wonder at Peter Jackson's epic trilogy. The next 11 years show a striking break with tradition, with an average of only 4.3 Oscar per Best Picture winner:

2004: Million Dollar Baby - 4
2005: Crash - 3
2006: The Departed - 4
2007: No Country for Old Men - 4
2008: Slumdog Millionaire - 8
2009: The Hurt Locker - 6
2010: The King's Speech - 4
2011: The Artist - 5
2012: Argo - 3
2013: 12 Years a Slave - 3
2014: Birdman - 4

There are any number of possible explanations for this trend, most probable simply being the increasing split between blockbuster "entertainment" films that dominate the technical categories while low-budget (in)dependent films, driving by strong acting, directing and writing, dominate the more prestigious awards, making a 7 Oscar win relatively rare (in order to reach that number, a film has to do well in either the effects or design categories, areas which favor big-budget spectacle). But is there in fact some more ideological, something like my (perceived) generational split at work?

Oscar season has increasingly come to be defined as a horse race, with the contenders and dark horses defined long before any of the films in question have been seen, and then adjusted up and down the odds tables throughout the fall festival season and into the end-of-the-year awards deluge, with critics' groups routinely seen as mere precursors to the main events, and therefore their relevance defined by their relation to the established narrative (thus the cries of anguish from the awards bloggers when the National Society of Film Critics awarded Adieu au langage their Best Picture this past year: the Godard film wasn't part of the defined race, and therefore the group was marginalizing themselves by choosing to acknowledge its existence, a decision that could only be made by obstinate refusal to play the game by the rules, or, in other words, snobbery). The competition is good for business: people like gossip and they like competition, awards commentary provides both in spades. Driven in no small part from the ad revenue from studio's Oscar campaigns (the ubiquitous FYC ads you see on every major film site during voting season), there's a vested interest in heightening the controversy, in making a compelling story out of a bunch of people getting together and voting on their favorite movies of the year.

The awards season is now a narrative-driven event, and the simplest narratives put two things in opposition to each other, thus most years, the Oscar race seems to come down to two films, and everyone is encouraged to align themselves with one camp or another. These are the years 1994-2003 of the Best Picture race, the years of heavy consensus, with the winner and the runner-up listed. Note that some years there wasn't a clear runner-up, in which case I've picked the film that seemed like the #2 to me at the time. I could have been wrong. We'll never know for sure as the Academy doesn't release voting results.

Year	Oscar Winner	Runner-Up
1994	Forrest Gump	Pulp Fiction
1995	Braveheart	Sense & Sensibility
1996	The English Patient	Fargo
1997	Titanic	LA Confidential
1998	Shakespeare in Love	Saving Private Ryan
1999	American Beauty	The Insider
2000	Gladiator	Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
2001	A Beautiful Mind	The Fellowship of the Ring
2002	Chicago	The Pianist
2003	Return of the King	Master and Commander

It looks to me like in most of these years, the race has been defined by a choice between one traditional Hollywood film and one "edgy" independent. Love stories are pitted against violent dramas, serious melodramas against genre fare, big-budget spectacle against intimate character stories. One could debate the details, but it looks to me like in every year but (possibly) one from 1994 until 2003, the Academy chose the more traditionally appealing film at the expense of the artier, hipper movie. The outlier is 1995, but I'd argue that Ang Lee's Jane Austen film is much more modern than Mel Gibson's war epic, though obviously far less violent. Anyway, a reasonable case could be made that the runner-up that year was actually Apollo 13, which is the most traditional of the three, but I think it and Braveheart appealed to the same core audience and was thus unlikely to have been the second-place finisher. Regardless, even with that one outlier, the trend is fairly clear. (A personal note that not every one of the winners this year was my least favorite, I would have made the same choice in three of these years (96, 97 and 98) and am fairly ambivalent about a fourth (2003)).

Now let's look at the same chart for 2004-2014:

Year	Oscar Winner	Runner-Up
2004	Million Dollar Baby	The Aviator
2005	Crash	Brokeback Mountain
2006	The Departed	Little Miss Sunshine
2007	No Country for Old Men	There Will Be Blood
2008	Slumdog Millionaire	The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2009	The Hurt Locker	Avatar
2010	The King's Speech	The Social Network
2011	The Artist	The Tree of Life
2012	Argo	Lincoln
2013	12 Years a Slave	Gravity
2014	Birdman	Boyhood

Here we have chaos. The "edgy" film wins in 2004, 2006-09 and 2013-14, while the more traditionally appealing film wins in 2005 and 2010-12. Though the distinctions between camps are harder than ever to define. Take this past year for example. Boyhood was the consensus critics choice, which would lead one to assume it was the "artier" movie. But its style, aside from the unique method of production, is resolutely traditional, a coming of age story/family drama of the type that has broad mainstream appeal. Birdman, on the other hand, declares itself Edgy with an ostentatious pseudeo-single-take visual style, jarring tonal swings and a deeply cynical screenplay. It is most certainly a film descended from Pulp Fiction (though, I'd argue, one that learned all the wrong lessons from its forebears, but that's not relevant here). If there is a generational war at play within the Academy, this is what one would expect the Oscar results to look like: pendulum swings back and forth, with neither side gaining enough momentum to push the consensus in one unified direction. Thus we have the significantly lower average totals of wins by Best Picture winners. Whether that represents an actual conflict or one manufactured by journalists pushing a story, I can't say: the two feed off themselves in such a way that one can only expect further polarization and less consensus as time goes on, absent structural change of some kind.

Looking at these lists, I can't help but compare them to my own personal award winners. Here's the full chart for 1994-2014, with the Best Picture Endys added into the mix:

Year	Oscar Winner	Runner-Up	Endy Winner
1994	Forrest Gump	Pulp Fiction	Chungking Express
1995	Braveheart	Sense & Sensibility	Dead Man
1996	The English Patient	Fargo	Comrades, Almost a Love Story
1997	Titanic	LA Confidential	Boogie Nights
1998	Shakespeare in Love	Saving Private Ryan	The Big Lebowski
1999	American Beauty	The Insider	Beau travail
2000	Gladiator	Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon	La Commune (Paris 1871)
2001	A Beautiful Mind	The Fellowship of the Ring	Millennium Mambo
2002	Chicago	The Pianist	Punch-Drunk Love
2003	Return of the King	Master and Commander	Running on Karma
2004	Million Dollar Baby	The Aviator	Tropical Malady
2005	Crash	Brokeback Mountain	The New World
2006	The Departed	Little Miss Sunshine	The Wind that Shakes the Barley
2007	No Country for Old Men	There Will Be Blood	Flight of the Red Balloon
2008	Slumdog Millionaire	The Curious Case of Benjamin Button	Sparrow
2009	The Hurt Locker	Avatar	Oxhide II
2010	The King's Speech	The Social Network	Oki's Movie
2011	The Artist	The Tree of Life	The Tree of Life
2012	Argo	Lincoln	Moonrise Kingdom
2013	12 Years a Slave	Gravity	La última película
2014	Birdman	Boyhood	The Midnight After

A few obvious things jump out. Only in one case does my winner match one of the top two Oscar films (though Pulp Fiction is my #2 film of 1994). As they should in comparing a consensus vote to an individual one, my choices are personal and idiosyncratic. This will happen when you compare anyone's picks to that of a large body: the larger the voting pool, the less unique the winner. My particular idiosyncrasy appears in two forms on this list. Most obvious is the large number of Asian films, 9 out of 21, from China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand and Taiwan (and a 10th that's a French film made by a Taiwanese director). But also apparent, and more important, are the large number of films that never received wide distribution in the United States (that Asian films are less likely to receive US distribution than comparable European films is a (debatable) issue for another time). Only 10 of my 21 winners had even a reasonably-sized art house run in American theatres, a few have never even qualified for major critics awards, almost all of which tie their eligibility rules to week-long theatrical runs in New York City. Instead I've had to seek these films out at festivals or on imported video, bypassing the establishment distribution channels entirely. Critics groups can't and won't do this because they are inextricably tied into the distribution system: they depend on studios for screeners and local theatrical audiences for readership. 

This raises the question of the purpose of awards. Is it to raise awareness of excellence in motion pictures, to record for posterity the movies we think are great, the ones we recommend viewers of the future to seek out? Or is it a matter of marketing? Do awards matter because, as we hear every year as a justification for the countless words printed on the subject, an Oscar win significantly increases a film's total gross, in theatrical revenue and on video, for years and decades to come? One may as well ask what is the function of film criticism: to guide the prospective viewer into places they might not go on their own, or to confirm for them what they already believe? If a critic is a guide, then it doesn't matter whether a film they recommend is immediately available or not: it's their job to instill the desire to seek in the audience. I think most critics would aspire to that ideal, see for example the flabbergasted responses to this week's New York Times column lambasting the Oscars for failing to be relevant because they didn't give awards to the highest-grossing films. Of course, the idea is absurd on its face, but the critical response is telling: to them, the Oscars, in choosing Birdman are not only not elitist, but are resolutely middle of the road. To the critical community, Birdman's win is a sign of the Academy's bowing to the mainstream, of a failure to be sufficiently elite. (I'm speaking in general terms here: there is no "critical community", there is instead a collection of individuals who disagree with each other as a matter of principle, that is part of their charm. This is, however, the reaction as I understand it in a broad sense).

Why then should critics, critics who travel the festival circuit year-round, who make yearly pilgrimages to Sundance, Locarno, Cannes, Toronto, New York, Vancouver, Berlin, Austin, Venice, Vienna and more, tie themselves to an awards model that narrowly defines what counts as a film in any given year. If awards are a snapshot, preserving the consensus thoughts about cinema at a given time for the sake of posterity, a report from a group of passionate lovers of film about what they believe is great in the present moment, then why should they define that snapshot by the parameters of an industry that views their efforts only in the crudest terms? Should critics not be in opposition to the forces that drive the awards industry, that attempt to limit what we can see? Strong reviews at film festivals can and have led to otherwise invisible films being picked up for US release by adventurous distributors, why does that noble mission stop when awards season begins? The awards bloggers want to limit our conversation to a simple narrative, they want a few, clearly defined poles: good and bad, liberal and conservative, traditional and arty, edgy and populist. The major distributors want to limit our conversation to the films they own and make available to the public: criticism is advertising, no more, no less. We shouldn't let them. We can't let every year come down to Forrest Gump vs. Pulp Fiction, that's not how cinema works and it's not how history will remember it. It has to be about Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction and Chungking Express (a film many of us only saw because Quentin Tarantino forced Harvey Weinstein to release it uncut and in its original language, something Weinstein is loathe to do with his Hong Kong properties to this day), not to mention Sátántangó and Ed Wood and Pom Poko and Exotica and The Shawshank Redemption and He's a Woman, She's a Man and Three Colors: Red and Drunken Master II and I Can't Sleep and Hoop Dreams and Clerks and Speed and In the Mouth of Madness and and and.

On Ridley Scott's Robin Hood

Ridley Scott's 2010 adaptation of the Robin Hood story is much better than I'd expected given both the critical reaction at the time and my usual responses to Scott's historical epics. Expecting a repeat of Gladiator's obstinately counter-factual approach to Roman history, I was pleasantly surprised to find a much strong sense of the actuality of life in medieval England here (I watched the Director's Cut version on the Blu-Ray). Sure, the film makes no mention of the cultural divide between the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons that is at the heart of a lot of the conflict between the ruling Plantagenets and the local nobility that was still in the process of working itself out in the late 12th Century (it would be another hundred years or so before a King of England spoke English as his first language, IIRC), but still, locating the Robin Hood story a bit later in time than is traditional, to the reign of John proper as opposed to the middle of Richard's, is a strike of genius, tying the legend together with the complex mass of politics surrounding the Magna Carta. There are hints of ethnic or at least cultural difference between rulers and ruled, as Will Scarlet is identified as Welsh (and therefore Celtic) and Cate Blanchett's Marion is a paragon of the strong Anglo-Saxon woman, of a type uniquely prevalent in the Kingdom of Mercia, of which Nottinghamshire was a part, as near as my geographic skills can tell. The haunting images of the orphaned children of Sherwood forest even recall stories of black magic practiced by the Celts encountered by the first Roman invaders on the island.

The other major twist to the legend is that our hero is no longer a petty nobleman, but an orphan who has forgotten his past who takes on the role of a Baron for various complicated but not really important reasons. Thus is Robin Hood doubly turned into a mirage: he's a mask that Russell Crowe's Robin Longstride adopts twice over: first a model of the chivalrous knight and beneficent lord, then as the paragon of democratic values and the communitarian ideal. Both images are false, but nonetheless necessary to the political causes they represent. Crowe's character is a chameleon, adopting the ideal form of whatever world he finds himself in: warrior archer, petty nobility, political revolutionary. This conception of the character requires some plausibility stretching at times throughout the film, but all in service of a good cause (the quick turn of Léa Seydoux's Isabella for example, or the ease with which the English troops turn to Robin as savior, both before and after the final battle, in direct insult to John).

Unfortunately, much of what is of interest in the film dissolves in the final act, replaced by Scott's worst instincts as a director of action. The reasonably-coherent and sensible action scenes interspersed throughout the film are replaced by a full-scale battle, a swirl of mud-brown and grey with the kind of shoddy camerawork and random editing we've come to take as normal from 21st century Hollywood. The logistics of the battle are increasingly absurd. First, the unified English army marches from Barnsdale to Dungeness in two days, in order to meet the invading French. That's a journey of 173 miles, which, while it only would take a couple of hours today (Google Maps tells me its 3 hours and 10 minutes on the M11) is unlikely to have been traversed in less than a week, maybe four days at top speed for an entirely mounted small medieval army moving through their own terrain with no baggage train (50 miles per day). There's no reason for the timeline to be given as two days, it's a pointless throw-away bit of movie silliness. Similarly, the less said about Marion dressing in full armor to lead a group of children into battle against a professional army, and then taking on the biggest villain of the film in single combat, the better. It's silly, but not in the fun way of Friar Tuck attacking the French with bees or Little John picking up chicks ("I'm proportionate!"), but in the depressing this-is-what-we-take-as-normal-in-Hollywood action-filmmaking sense. As Ridley Scott's idea of realism gives, so it takes away.

2014 Endy Awards

These are the 2014 Endy Awards, wherein I pretend to give out maneki-neko statues to the best in that year in film. Awards for many other years can be found in the Endy Awards Index. Eligibility is determined by imdb date and by whether or not I've seen the movie in question. Nominations and winners are subject to change. And the Endy goes to. . .

Best Picture:

1. Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2
2. Hill of Freedom
3. Jauja
4. The Midnight After
5. National Gallery

I wrote about Fruit Chan's film a couple of times this past year, after the Seattle International Film Festival and again at the Vancouver Film Festival. 

Best Director:

1. Jean-Luc Godard, Adieu au langage
2. Johnnie To, Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2
3. Pedro Costa, Horse Money
4. Lisandro Alonso, Jauja
5. Fruit Chan, The Midnight After

I totally understand the logic of not splitting the winners or nominees of the Directing and Picture categories, especially for a practicing auteurist like me. But what can I say, the Endy voters like to spread the recognition around, hence the nominations for veterans Costa and Godard instead of Wiseman and Hong (both of whom have been nominated recently: Wiseman in 2009 and Hong in 2010, 2011 and 2013 (he won in 2010)). Of course, that didn't stop me from nominated Johnnie To again, for the fourth straight year and the 12th time since 1999 (he won in 2003, 2006 and 2008). This is Godard's first Endy nomination, but it won't be the last as we move further into the past (the Endys run reverse-chronologically).

Best Actor:

1. Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel
2. Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner
3. Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler
4. David Oyelowo, Selma
5. Gerard Depardieu, Welcome to New York

A solid group of actors this year, with none really standing out. I could just as easily have nominated any of: Bradley Cooper (American Sniper), Haluk Bilgier (Winter Sleep), Ronald Zehrfeld (Phoenix), Miles Teller (Whiplash), Ryo Kase (Hill of Freedom), Louis Koo (Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2), Viggo Mortensen (Jauja), Joaquin Phoenix (Inherent Vice), Fabrizio Rongione (La Sapienza), Jason Schwartzman (Listen Up Philip), Michael Keaton (Birdman), or Randeep Hooda (Highway).

Best Actress:

1. Brandy Burre, Actress
2. Arielle Holmes, Heaven Knows What
3. Anna Kendrick, The Last Five Years
4. Jenny Slate, Obvious Child
5. Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night

I recently changed the Endy rules to only allow one film per person per nomination, as I felt the results were unfairly favoring directors like Johnnie To and Hong Sangsoo who make multiple films per year. Under the old system, Anna Kendrick would have been a lock for Best Actress this year, with three terrific lead performances in The Last Five Years, Happy Christmas and Into the Woods. Instead, she loses out to Marion Cotillard, who was a close-runner-up in 2013 for The Immigrant.

Honorable Mentions: Nina Hoss (Phoenix), Tang Wei (The Golden Era), Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl), Alia Bhatt (Highway), Gwei Lun-mei (Black Coal, Thin Ice), Tessa Thompson (Dear White People), Zhao Wei (Dearest) and Juliette Binoche (Clouds of Sils Maria).

Supporting Actor:

1. Ethan Hawke, Boyhood
2. Tyler Perry, Gone Girl
3. Jonathan Pryce, Listen Up Philip
4. Lam Suet, The Midnight After
5. JK Simmons, Whiplash

Simmons and Pryce are especially terrific, but the Endys love Lam Suet beyond all reason. This is his second nomination, having previously won Supporting Actor in 2003 for PTU. Of the ten nominees for Actor and Supporting Actor this year, only Lam has been nominated previously.

Supporting Actress:

1. Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
2. Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria
3. Miriam Yeung, Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2
4. Emily Blunt, Into the Woods
5. Elisabeth Moss, Listen Up Philip

Blunt is arguably the lead in Into the Woods, but I can't see how anyone would be billed ahead of Anna Kendrick and so she has to be Supporting. The race comes down to Moss vs. Yeung. This is Moss's first nomination, though she is one of our favorite television actresses. Yeung lost Best Actress to the Certified Copy Binoche juggernaut in 2010. In previous years, Yeung's strong work in another supporting role in Aberdeen would have tipped the scale, but alas, no more.

Original Screenplay:

1. Wes Anderson & Hugo Guinness, The Grand Budapest Hotel
2. Hong Sangsoo, Hill of Freedom
3. Alex Ross Perry, Listen Up Philip
4. Paul Webb, Selma
5. Heiward Mak, Uncertain Relationships Society

Adapted Screenplay:

1. Wai Ka-fai, Ryker Chan & Yu Xi, Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2
2. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
3. Paul Thomas Anderson, Inherent Vice
4. Fruit Chan & Chan Fai-hung, The Midnight After
5. Gillian Robespierre, Obvious Child

This is Hong's seventh Original Screenplay nomination and second win (2010 for Oki's Movie). This is Wai Ka-fai's twelfth Screenplay nomination (nine Original, three Adapted). It's the fifth Screenplay nomination for both Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson. 

Non-English Language Film:

1. Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (Johnnie To)
2. Hill of Freedom (Hong Sangsoo)
3. Horse Money (Pedro Costa)
4. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso)
5. The Midnight After (Fruit Chan)

This is the tenth time the Best Picture and Best Non-English Language Film Endys have overlapped since 1999, but the first time since 2010 (Oki's Movie).

Documentary Feature:

1. Actress (Robert Greene)
2. Ballet 422 (Jody Lee Lipes)
3. Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 (Bill Morrison)
4. Hit 2 Pass (Kurt Walker)
5. National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman)

This is Wiseman's fifth Best Documentary nomination and third win (he previously won for Belfast, Maine in 1999 and La danse in 2009.

Animated Film:

1. Lava (James Ford Murphy)
2. Song of the Sea (Tomm Moore)
3. When Marnie Was There (Hiromasa Yonebayashi)

Short Film:

1. Camera falls from airplane and lands in pig pen--MUST WATCH END!! (Mia Munselle)
2. Inside Voices (Ryland Walker Knight)
3. The Rehearsal (Carl-Antonyn Dufault)
4. Transformers: The Premake (Kevin B. Lee)
5. White, Heat, Lights (Haruka Hakunetsuke)

Best title of the year too, obviously.

Unseen Film:

1. The Crossing Part One (John Woo)
2. Haider (Vishal Bhardwaj)
3. Life of Riley (Alain Resnais)
4. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy Andersson)
5. The Princess of France (Matías Piñeiro)

I'm still upset that I missed the Piñeiro at VIFF because there weren't any shows scheduled for when I was in town. And it was tough to miss Resnais's final film there as well. But the Andersson seems like the one I'd like most of these.

Film Editing:

1. Adieu au langage
2. The Duke of Burgundy
3. The Midnight After
4. National Gallery
5. Whiplash

Most editing, sure, but Whiplash does it right. Love those retro dissolves in Duke of Burgundy to be sure, and Godard and Wiseman are of course among the best editors ever.

Cinematography:

1. Adieu au langage
2. The Duke of Burgundy
3. Horse Money
4. Jauja
5. The Midnight After

Fabrice Aragno might have earned this award simply for the brain-splitting 3D shot that is the year's most memorable image, but I'm also in love with the variety and texture of the digital colors of Adieu's landscape shots. Horse Money's brilliant compositions of earthy browns and impenetrable blacks finish a close second.

Honorable Mentions: Tokyo Tribe, Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2, The Golden Era, Mr. Turner, Birdman, Nightcrawler, Aberdeen, Heaven Knows What and Inherent Vice.

Production Design:

1. Aberdeen
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
3. Mr. Turner
4. La Sapienza
5. Tokyo Tribe

Sneaking away with the win is the last 2014 movie I saw before awards night, Sion Sono's hip-hip musical prowl through a post-apocalyptic Tokyo gangland. Making furniture out of people counts as set decoration, right?

Costume Design:

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel
2. Inherent Vice
3. Into the Woods
4. The Midnight After
5. Tokyo Tribe

Similarly the Sono snakes this award at the last minute. Honestly, I'm not all that thrilled about any of these.  

Make-up:

1. The Grand Budapest Hotel
2. Guardians of the Galaxy
3. The Midnight After
4. Noah
5. The Taking of Tiger Mountain

Only one of these movies has a guy walking around with a hatchet in his shoulder for half the film.

Original Score:

1. Gone Girl
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
3. Highway
4. Inherent Vice
5. Tokyo Tribe

I mean, it's wall-to-wall Japanese hip-hop, what's not to love?

Adapted Score:

1. Eden
2. Into the Woods
3. Jersey Boys
4. The Last Five Years
5. Whiplash

This was an amazing year for film musicals, probably the best since 1984. The adaptation of Into the Woods drew a lot of ire for softening the harshness of the play's second act, but I don't know, I think it works just as well in this new version. The Midnight After, Heaven Knows What and Inherent Vice just missed the cut.

Sound:

1. Adieu au langage
2. Heaven Knows What
3. Into the Woods
4. The Midnight After
5. Whiplash

Sound Editing:

1. American Sniper
2. John Wick
3. The Midnight After
4. Pompeii
5. Whiplash

Visual Effects:

1. Aberdeen
2. Lucy
3. The Monkey King
4. Noah
5. Pompeii

These last three categories are pretty self-explanatory: drums, guns and one big volcano. That's 2014 in film.