Stray Thoughts: 84th Academy Award Nominations

Don't usually update twice in the same day if I can help it, but the Oscar nominations have come through and I'd like to chat about them a bit. The list of nominees is up everywhere, as are break-downs of who the favourites are and which films have the most nominations, so I'm just going to offer some stray thoughts, in no particular order:

• First up, Stephen Daldry's Tom Hanks starring 9/11 film 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' (which I admittedly haven't yet seen) is perhaps the worst reviewed Best Picture nominee of all-time. Currently it has a 46 on Metacritic and 48 on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm not suggesting review aggregating sites are an infallible guide to the arts, but these are despairingly low numbers for a major, prestige picture.
• 'Bridesmaids' hasn't been nominated for Best Picture despite being overwhelmingly well reviewed and figuring on many major critic's "best of 2011" lists. It's difficult not read this as further proof that Oscar doesn't like comedy. Considering there are 9 Best Picture nominees (including 'Extremely Loud'), this seems like a bit of a joke. By my calculations (and ignoring comedy-dramas like 'Juno' and 'Shakespeare in Love') the last out-and-out comedy to get nominated was 'Tootsie' in 1982.
• It's great to see Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Terence Malick competing for Best Director.
• It's equally great to see 'The Tree of Life' featuring in the Best Picture field, considering it's been overlooked by the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs. I'm not the film's biggest fan - I appreciate it more than I like it - but in recent years the big award ceremonies have mostly picked the same nominees and picked the same winners. Oscar gets some serious credibility points here.
• It's really great to see 'Hugo' garnering the most nominations (11), though I suspect it'll be one of those unlucky movies that's nominated in every category and wins nothing. For those keeping score, 'The Artist' (the overwhelming favourite at this stage) is just behind with 10 nods.
• The excellent Rooney Mara being nominated for Best Actress is a nice touch, though Meryl Streep is sure to pip her to the prize for her showy, award-bait impersonation of Margaret Thatcher.
• Despite my earlier bemoaning the lack of attention given to 'Bridesmaids', I find it really odd that Melissa McCarthy has been nominated for Best Supporting Actress. A lot of people felt she stole the show but I personally found her to be the weak link. Rose Byrne or Chris O'Dowd would have been better acting choices for that one, methinks.
• I thought 'My Week With Marilyn' was awful - without redeeming quality. So, though I really like Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh, I think it's a bit of a joke that they're nominated here - particularly Branagh's scenery chewing turn as Olivier.
• Really pleased to see recognition for Christopher Plummer and 'Beginners'. I think he'll win Best Supporting Actor. It's an interesting field though, Branagh aside, with left-field nominations for Nick Nolte in 'Warrior' and newly svelte funnyman John Hill in 'Moneyball'.
• 'Albert Nobbs' currently has no UK release date, at least according to the usually reliable FilmDates.com. Hopefully its two acting nominations - for Glenn Close and Janet McTeer - will change that? I really hate missing Oscar nominated movies.
• Glad that 'A Separation' is nominated for Best Foreign Film - the only category it could realistically have been recognised in. Just noticed it also got a nod for Best Original Screenplay, which is a major boon. Nice work.
• An odd thing I've just noticed looking at the official Academy Awards site: although Best Picture awards are given to producers, Best Animated Feature Oscars are awarded to directors. Why is that exactly?
• Wasn't 'The Ides of March' supposed to be a big Oscar movie? Only one nomination (for Best Adapted Screenplay). That's two less than 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon'.
• I predict the main winners will be: The Artist (Best Picture), Alexander Payne (Best Director, for 'The Descendants'), Brad Pitt (Best Actor, for 'Moneyball'), Streep (Best Streep in a Leading Streep), Plummer (as mentioned above) and Jessica Chastain (ostensibly for 'The Help', but picking up votes for an impressive year's worth of performances, including 'The Tree of Life').
• Finally, I'd like to see the following winners: 'Hugo' (Best Picture), Woody Allen (Best Director, for 'Midnight in Paris'), Gary Oldman (Best Actor, for 'Tinker Tailor Solider Spy'), Rooney Mara (Best Actress, for 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'), Plummer (as above) and Jessica Chastain (ostensibly for 'The Help', but really for 'Take Shelter').

If you want to read the full list, check it out at The Guardian.

'My Week With Marilyn' review:

It begins with a sizzle: Michelle Williams is introduced as Marilyn Monroe during a sultry song and dance routine, watched by our besotted, film-obsessed protagonist Colin (Eddie Redmayne) on a cinema screen, in the company of a dozen or so other lecherous men. It's no exaggeration to say Williams makes love to the camera and the sensitive, indie movie actress convinces totally, becoming the hyper-sexual 1950s bombshell before our eyes. Here Colin's leering does something to suggest not only the appeal of Monroe, the movie star, but also the terms upon which she was judged and the slightly sinister way in which audiences implicitly came to own her. Sadly Simon Curtis' movie goes rapidly, dramatically downhill from there.

'My Week With Marilyn' feels like an overwrought Biography Channel drama operating on an unusually high production budget. The presence of Williams - not to mention Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Dominic Cooper, Toby Jones, Derek Jacobi, Emma Watson and Dougray Scott - is all there is to remind us that this is in fact a piece of Weinstein-produced Oscar bait and not a straight-to-DVD knock-off. The film follows Monroe during the time she spent in England in the summer of 1956, starring opposite Sir Lawrence Olivier (Branagh) in light comedy romp 'The Prince and the Showgirl' - the production of which was apparently run like a Gulag under the stage legend's Stalin-like gaze and (in one bewilderingly pointless scene) the tyranny of a unionised workforce.



Based on the memoirs of the young Colin Clark, the fraught production's lowly third assistant director, the film sees Redmayne's Colin very much as the centre of attention: instantly loved by Monroe and soon indispensable to Olivier. A key mediator in the ensuing war between the two actors, he's the reason the film is completed. It is even implied he prevented the troubled, pill-guzzling sex symbol from committing suicide - six years before her eventual overdose. By the end of this alternately zany and maudlin adventure he's improbably become trusted confident and bestest friend in the world to both stars. Along the way he also finds time to casually reject the affections of Emma Watson's doe-eyed wardrobe assistant and becomes accustomed to receiving knitwear from an appreciative Dame Sybil Thorndike (Dench), for some apparent off-screen kindness that's best left unimagined.

The film is so obsessed with our old Etonian everyman hero Colin that the more interesting figures who surround him are only painted as wafer thin archetypes. Olivier, who Branagh parodies with 'Wild Wild West' levels of restraint, is glimpsed several times in dramatic, slow-zooming close-up reciting Shakespearian verse - just like Olivier must have frequently done in real life. You know... because he was famous for doing Shakespeare.

Meanwhile Williams is a more troubling proposition as Monroe, playing her emotionally withdrawn moments as though she were a fay, mentally deficient cousin of Mickey Mouse. She may have been troubled, depressed and paranoid but Marilyn Monroe was, by most accounts, a very witty woman and not likely a ditzy airhead. Yet here Monroe is shown as barely able to recall who Leonardo Da Vinci is, let alone correctly identify his picture of "the smiling woman". Fair enough if you're going to be casual with historical figures, but this doesn't make sense within the context of a movie in which an early press conference scene has Monroe wowing British journos with her quick-witted charms and clever turn of phrase.



In isolated moments Williams nails the quiet vulnerability of the character, just as she turns the vivacious sexpot persona on and off, yet these feel like separate extreme caricatures rather than parts of a fully formed, if conflicted, whole. As with 'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers' or Andy Kaufman biopic 'Man on the Moon', 'My Week With Marilyn' is content to paint a reductive (and only superficially deep) picture of its complicated subject. Yet the performances, though campy turns rather than real human beings, are at least watchable. What really kills the film is Adrian Hodges' literal-minded screenplay.

A good 'My Week With Marilyn' drinking came would involve taking a shot 1) whenever someone tells you exactly what they're thinking or feeling; 2) whenever a character explains who somebody is or reminds you what has just happened; or 3) when something is said to underline a point already made through the characters' on-screen actions. The writing is needlessly descriptive, always telling rather than showing (or showing and then telling just in case). Dialogue often sounds like scene-setting narration rather than speech, whilst Olivier and Monroe routinely self-analyse in embarrassing cod psychology.

In 'My Week With Marilyn', the film star's life is presented as one long tragedy, hidden from public view behind moments of immense, if superficial, glamour. This, it turns out, is a very effective metaphor for the film itself, which only attains any sort of life when Williams is called upon to perform as a woman giving a performance.

'My Week With Marilyn' is out now in the UK, rated '15' by the BBFC.