Wednesday Collective — Lana del Rey, Game of Thrones, & Gabriel Garcia Marquez

ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Lana del Rey, our master storyteller
Richard Marshall

Lana del Rey is our best storyteller-in-song since Pearl Jam. She portrays an image of wealth (or sometimes the emulation of it) and a conscious rejection of consequence that speaks to the profound boredom of excess. Her character is one who’s traded in her own desires so that men can project their fantasies onto her. She narrates with the idealized nostalgia that drove Fitzgerald’s Gatsby to obsession, but plays it with the despondence of Camus’ Meursault, who was apathetic to his imprisonment because he could while away the hours listing off what he once owned.

Through it all, there’s the ghostly afterimage of a soul who might break through were she not so practiced at replacing her own thoughts with the distractions and egos of others. This is mirrored by a fear of old age, of wisdom, of a loss of beauty that would force her to finally face the world as it is, of the dissipation of an illusion created from such thin veneer it threatens to tear apart at the slightest conscious challenge not immediately subdued.

Richard Marshall compares her style to the work of director David Lynch: “There’s the theme of the double in all these songs, where a consciousness of intense eagerness to survive the blackest nightmare places the feelings onto another ego, like in a diabolical pact.”

This is an elegant, thoughtful article about the woman who may very well become the most important musical artist of this generation, and it pairs superbly with last week’s article of the week, Izzy Black’s analysis of the new films of excess.

Rape as Social Issue, or Just a Plot Device
Genevieve Valentine

Game of Thrones uses rape as a plot device. That it’s difficult to criticize a TV series set in a medieval world for not interrogating the topic with a modern sensibility is a deflection. Valentine only has to go as far as Mad Men to find another male-dominated world that found a way to fold the topic into its characterization and storytelling.

It’s not that Game of Thrones chooses to use rape as a plot device. It’s that – unlike Mad Men – it fails to fully deal with what this use means, both in its own world and in ours. Thus, it trivializes rape as a MacGuffin, a lazy shorthand to get people from point A to point B, rather than seeking to understand the effects the act has. It is disappointing storytelling from a series that has a lot going for it, but might quickly be burning up its goodwill.

Thanks to Chris Braak for the heads-up on this.

An Interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Peter H. Stone

Marquez may be the most important author in my own life. He was also a rousing and challenging interview. Paris Review republishes Peter H. Stone’s 1981 interview with the man at a time when he was at the top of his art.

A Brief History of the Art-Horror Film
Bilge Ebiri

I somewhat object to the delineation between art-horror and regular horror. It lacks defining structural tendencies or stylistic elements that other genres can hang their hats on, and usually devolves into simply separating horror that’s good from horror that’s bad, or horror that’s weird from horror that’s not. Nonetheless, this article at Vulture does a solid job of describing the history of critically applauded horror in the lead-up to Under the Skin and Only Lovers Left Alive.

“Why Historical Accuracy on Film Matters”
A. E. Larsen

Last week, I highlighted an article I didn’t entirely agree with – why the expert review should die. I diverged somewhat from Matt Zoller Seitz’s scorched-earth approach to the subject by saying that expert reviews done by non-experts in that particular field should be avoided. From now on, I’ll differentiate those by calling them the “inexpert review.”

A. E. Larsen, my favorite medievalist film critic, rebuts Seitz with a defense of the expert review that describes our need for more contextual awareness in how we view art.

Ranking Rocky
Matt Singer

While researching an upcoming article about the best films never made, I came across this ranking of the Rocky movies by Matt Singer. Ordinarily, I don’t link to best-of/worst-of lists. I’m a recovering list addict and I find many of them – much like the inexpert review (wow, that caught on fast) – go in one ear and out the other. I’m careful about which ones we do here – there’d better be an important reason to make one. For instance, we made our No Miley Here list to highlight under-seen music videos in a year plagued by Robin Thicke, Miley Cyrus, and the terrible music criticism that holds their celebrity as an artistic accomplishment.

Well, this ranking of the Rocky movies passes the List Test by reflecting on Singer’s own experiences of the films growing up – defining the moment they changed from character study to superhero movie – and by describing how Sylvester Stallone himself originally envisioned the franchise and the drastic concessions he made in exchange for bigger and bigger paychecks.

“How Hollywood Killed Death”
Alexander Huls

I wrote about something similar in my Pacific Rim piece last year. American filmmakers have a tendency to treat death as an operatic moment that every single character forgets about minutes later. In contrast, many foreign films have death occur off-screen or so suddenly that characters don’t have a five-minute, slow-motion sequence with its own theme song in which to prepare for it.

It connects a bit with Valentine’s piece above, about the treatment of rape on television. We use death in much the same way, devaluing it as a basic plot point or momentary inconvenience, and not treating it as a searing moment the remaining characters deal with for the rest of their lives. There are some spoilers in this article, obviously.

Kicking a Good Bond While He’s Down
Horatia Harrod

This interview sparked an interesting discussion between some friends and myself, especially after Russ Schwartz’s article on Skyfall last week. Brosnan critiques his run as superspy James Bond harshly, taking himself to task for never fully inhabiting the role.

I tend to think this was an asset – the films he was given were so glossy and empty and badly written that Brosnan’s ability to wink his way through them made even the worst semi-watchable. If he didn’t take them so seriously, we didn’t have to either, and that moved the goalposts considerably.

Thanks to J.P. Hitesman for the heads-up on this.

The Movies We Loved in 2013 – By Friends of the Blog

My goal as a critic is to write pieces that are both functional and artistic, that translate not only a film’s meaning but that have their own as well. A big part of what’s shaped my view on movies are the people I’ve made films with and spoken to about film over the years, so I asked friends whose work and perspectives on movies I admire the most – What was your best film of 2013? I was pleased with how many responded and even more pleased – and moved – by their eloquent and personal responses. Please enjoy:

The World’s End
by Chris Braak

Above and beyond how much I enjoy Edgar Wright as one of the most energetic and playful stylists working right now – in particular, the way he uses every corner of the screen, every incidental movement, in a way that is somehow intricate without being overloaded or over-composed – The World’s End is a brilliantly subversive reversal of a done-to-death science-fiction trope. One of the advantages of satire is that it doesn’t have to pretend to have answers, so The World’s End can quite comfortably take a completely ambivalent approach, simultaneously exposing the moral poverty of cultural interventionism and the nihilistic self-destruction that’s at the heart of much of our cultural sense of rebellion.

What makes it especially brilliant is how neatly and painfully it dovetails with addiction intervention, in a way that’s simultaneously cruel and critical and deeply passionate.

Chris Braak is a playwright and novelist who writes about storytelling and movies over at Threat Quality Press. He and I often disagree, which is exceptionally frustrating because he’s often right.

Gravity
by Vanessa Tottle

Being in the field sucks. It’s supposed to be full of natural romance like I’m John Muir seeing Yosemite for the first time, but camping by the firelight with the same people day in and day out gets passive-aggressive real quick. We imagine making discoveries and naming them after each other, but a month’s dig is more likely to leave me coming away with a broken ankle or hookworm. That and too much time alone to think and miss, and I’m not good at being alone with my own brain.

You see, I had to survive once. It wasn’t in the wilderness or on a dig. It was my family, growing up. Gravity is about a woman being stranded with no outlet. No matter what she does, there’s a force she doesn’t understand out to get her. She has little, but even this is taken away from her regularly. It’s not personal; it’s the way of this big, vast universe she doesn’t understand. That was my childhood. And when this woman is ready to give up, a voice on a radio is what brings her out of her stupor. She hears it by pure chance, in a language she doesn’t understand, and it’s enough to keep her from giving up. When I realized there was another voice out there, nothing was going to stop me from finding more.

Sandra Bullock didn’t play a stranded astronaut. She played me, shoving a dresser against the door when I heard raised voices and wondering why the universe hated me so much. Then she heard a voice that cared and, even if it couldn’t understand, it was enough nourishment for her soul to make her press on. That’s what sci-fi is about, right? A source of hope. Getting better. As a species, as an individual. Now when I break a bone, I’m thankful I’m the cause of it, and it’s because I heard enough voices along the way that I’m doing something I never thought I could, thank you very much.

Vanessa Tottle is completing the approximately 1,000 years of education it takes to become a paleontologist. When she’s not digging up bits of bone in barren landscapes, she’s kind enough to be my primary screenplay editor.

The Act of Killing
by Kevan Tucker

Though 2013 was one of the best years for film in recent memory, The Act of Killing is in a league of its own. It is an exploration of evil unlike anything that’s been made before and could only have been made in the medium of film. It allows us to watch as people who committed genocide take pride in, compartmentalize and regret their actions. We would like to believe that horrifying acts are done by monsters, but The Act of Killing‘s depiction of evil is more terrifying because it is so human. The subjects of the film are as bizarre, funny and relatable as they are horrifying. It shows how their actions actually rest, however uncomfortably, on the normal scale of human emotion.

The Act of Killing is also a testament to the power of art, particularly film. Not only is it a documentary that has created real political change but it is a study of the psychological process of making movies. In trying to recreate their experiences of committing genocide on camera, we get to see these killers-turned-directors unintentionally reveal themselves through each decision of how to tell their stories. As any filmmaker or artist knows, each detail and choice you make is a reflection of your thoughts, perceptions and prejudices. And examining each of those choices forces you to see them in new lights and through different points of view. Throughout The Act of Killing, we see these men’s perceptions of the past change – or stubbornly remain the same – as they present their stories to us. And their bizarre recreations of reality bring us far closer to truth than we would be able to get any other way. It is one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever witnessed, one of the best movies ever made and should be mandatory viewing for anyone interested in history, psychology or film.

Kevan Tucker is the director of the searing, coming-of-age film The Unidentified and the comedy web series Compulsive Love.

Upstream Color
by Alessia Palanti

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, and time is the ontological backdrop of Shane Carruth’s masterwork Upstream Color. The film is a haunting, psychotropic experience. It combs through identity and memory, its gaps and fillings and their reciprocal definitions, only to arrive at their quintessential knottiness. Within the narrative, characters are hypnotized by a mysterious worm: the central element of an unidentifiable experiment that jeopardizes and interrogates identity. Simultaneously, the audience in the theatre is hypnotized by the Deleuzian spirals, where distinctions are the “things in themselves” and undermine the notion of anything existing prior to differences. In other words, the film traverses an elemental spectrum, where Carruth so closely zooms in on nuances that the difference between any one object – or idea, for that matter – is forgotten. And, as memory is key to the film (time, that is, in its personal articulations), Upstream tests on the audience a similar experiment undergone by its characters.

While the film may be reminiscent of the styles of Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and Wim Wenders, Carruth really stands alone. With his previous film, Primer (2005), he cemented his scientific cinematic inclinations, where the viewer is merely a fly on the wall of two friends testing the possibilities and dangers of a time machine apparatus. If you are a metaphysical scientist watching the film, you are in luck; if not, the dialogue is an overwhelming but intriguing mass of jargon. Upstream extends the metaphysics inborn in the director’s thematic choices, but braids them with mesmerizing aesthetics, and – although disjointed – a philosophically anchored narrative.

The film’s complex and enigmatic nature demands multiple viewings. It is a 96-minute vortex of synaesthetic enrapture. And if it leaves your blood shaky and your mind dizzy with questions whose answers you both urgently require and urgently reject, it has, indeed, done its work.

Alessia Palanti knows more about film than anyone else I know (don’t tell her I said that), and is no slouch at classical European lit either. She writes about film theory in independent and foreign-language cinema at Camera Obscura.

12 Years a Slave
by Tim O’Neill

My favorite film of 2013 was 12 Years a Slave, the kind of daring, high profile film that only gets made once in a decade. Steve McQueen’s direction is impervious to melodrama, a crowning feat in and of itself considering the subject matter. The resulting matter-of-fact narrative forces the audience to find it’s own meaning, or lack thereof, buried within the layer of broken characters. Single shots tell complete stories as those characters shift within the ambiguous landscape of survival, submission and sacrifice. Solomon Northup wants to escape back to his family, and for a while I thought he might, but ultimately he must accept the painful fact that he cannot succeed by strength or cunning, only by patience. As the credits rolled, I found myself yearning for a catharsis that was not there, filled with the unsettling feeling that perhaps not all stories, even those about universal cruelty, can be reduced to good guys and bad guys. Rarely has a movie this boldly restrained garnered the attention it so richly deserved.

Tim O’Neill is an editor whose credits range from The Unidentified to the TV documentary Tracker and Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers. And he’s just getting started.

The Counselor
by Shay Fevre

Before I saw The Counselor, one of the smartest people I know described it to me as “frustrating, sick, and unbelievable.” Once I saw it, I decided I agreed with the first two. In the movie industry, it’s very easy to be financially and physically taken advantage of. I act in some risque movies, but I know what choices cross a line. It’s a different line for everybody, but the moment I cross it, I stop feeling at home in my own skin. I quit for a few years because I just had enough. A lot of actresses – A LOT – cross that line for promises of later opportunity. It’s easy to say they were stupid, or senseless, or ignorant, and that people who act desperately are poor and insane and beg and commit crime, right? But those aren’t the people who choose or ask someone else to choose something they normally wouldn’t allow.

In my world, the most valuable commodity is a certain lifestyle. The currency you trade to reach it is self-worth. The chronic, impulse buyers are the ones who have tasted success. It doesn’t matter to them if they’re lifestyle is great – they have a chemical reaction in their brain telling them MORE of that lifestyle will fill a hole that’s created because they already traded so much of themselves away. I think The Counselor is one of the few movies I saw in 2013 that makes much sense of both sides of the equation, and portrays what someone psychologically loses when they realize they can’t go back to how they once were.

Shay Fevre is an actress and model who escapes L.A. as often as possible. She once beat an abusive director up with her shoe. She’s launching her own production company in the coming year.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
by Russ Schwartz

I’m pretty sure that my favorite movie of 2013 is 12 Years a Slave; the only problem is, I haven’t seen it yet. I just didn’t see many movies this year. Until I see it, my favorite movie of 2013 is The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Not because it’s any kind of Great Movie – I mean, I saw Gravity and that was better – but because it somehow escaped its boring, smug, annoying predecessor to become a surprising and exciting fantasy picture that made me want more. I hated the first one for letting you know what it was going to do and then finding ways to drag it out, like one of those sports or rags-to-riches movies where you spend hours of your life waiting for some urchin in hardship to get discovered or make the team or some other bullsh*t, but with kids murdering each other.

But Catching Fire – man, somehow they made it a treat to see Katniss and Peeta forced to think, to deal, to plan! Who knew (apart from those who read the books)? The sequel doesn’t telegraph its structure, giving it an immediacy that made me connect with characters I didn’t give a crap about the first time around. In my favorite sequence, the combatants band together in a show of bad sportsmanship and spin to protest the games themselves, one-upping each other to find ways to beg the audience for their lives. This is the movie where cunning, heart, and imagination enter the series; suddenly, the world of Panem and its heroes matter.

Russ Schwartz is an actor, playwright, and producer who co-founded The Penny Seats Theatre Company in Ann Arbor, MI.

Her
by Keith Ward

Spike Jonze’s fourth feature Her might not be the best movie of 2013, but it was certainly the one that fascinated me the most. Science fiction is at its best when it serves as a critique of the era it was created in. Set at some unspecified date in the future, technology has exacerbated mankind’s introverted tendencies to the point where damn near everybody is constantly plugged into their devices. Our quiet protagonist Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) even feels the need to buy a digital companion. Scarlett Johansson plays Samantha, in what is my favorite performance of the year. Sam is an operating system: a sentient computerized life-form designed to not only fulfill the needs of the person who purchases her, but to evolve intellectually and emotionally in her own right.

Johansson, an actor and model admired for her physical appearance as much as her acting ability, brings her character to life entirely through her vocal performance. Samantha has no body, so we only get to really know and care for her through her voice. The romance that she forms with Theodore feels very much like the equivalent of a long-distance relationship. This all-too common modern phenomenon has never been so uniquely portrayed. There’s only so much that you can do through phone conversations, texting, cyber sex and other conceits of social media to keep the passion alive. Affairs of the heart require some physical contact, regardless of how cerebral and self-possessed the participants are.

Keith Ward works as a Patient Care Advocate by day, actor by night. He’s playing the lead in the upcoming feature Beyond Hello.

Her
by J.P. Hitesman

Without a doubt, the year-end release of Her catapulted its way to the top of my best of 2013 list. I am always the most impacted by stories that explore subjects rooted in humanity, and this film fit that bill in a creative and unpredictable way. It also offered an elegant simplicity with its small cast, taut storyline and emotionally affecting performances. Joaquin Phoenix, starring as the sensitive main character, Theodore, continues to impress with his career revitalization just a year after going to opposite extremes with The Master. Amy Adams (who co-starred with Phoenix in both) exudes a warm versatility that ought to have been more recognized as the film was released practically in tandem with American Hustle. Rooney Mara continues a run of sharp and committed performances. Olivia Wilde appears briefly in a key sequence but seemed better used here than in any larger role I have seen her perform. And Scarlett Johansson ties the film together in a unique way with her voice-only role, which was recorded after principal filming had been completed – with another actress in that part. She maintained a unique and original structure to the story, while playing with the audience’s (possible) expectations of her physical on-screen persona. But I most recall the story of the film, and am considering seeing it again just for that, as it plays with the necessities and wonderment and confusion of our modern age in such a thoughtful way that it’s impossible not to be affected by the humanity, honesty, and emotional realism of Theodore and the women in his life.

J.P. Hitesman is the Renaissance Man of any theatre or stage he steps on. He blogs about theatre and film at TheatricalBuddhaMan.

The Great Gatsby
by Jessica Greenberg

The Great Gatsby directed by Baz Luhrmann has a beautiful production design that appeals to my theatre design sensibilities. Luhrmann has a theatricality to his aesthetic in both design and performance that I’ve also enjoyed in his other films, like Moulin Rouge or Romeo & Juliet. I love the way The Great Gatsby blends iconic 1920’s scenic, costume and lighting elements with a present day editing style and soundtrack.

Jessica Greenberg is a lighting designer and Assistant Professor of Theatre Design at Weber State University. View the impressive scope of her work here.

The Wolverine
by Erin Snyder

I think this is the first time my pick for best of the year is the sequel to something I called the worst movie of its year. But The Wolverine managed to bury the bad memories of sitting through 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine and even redeemed elements of X-Men 3. If you saw The Wolverine and are baffled as to how anyone could claim it was the best movie of 2013, it’s probably because we’re talking about different films. As much as I enjoyed the theatrical cut, I’d never seriously call it the best of the year. The unrated Extended Edition, on the other hand, is the hard-R Wolverine movie that comic book geeks have always wanted. Even the theatrical version delivered the best version of Logan we’ve seen in live-action to date, then overshadowed him with two female characters more interesting and – in some ways – more badass than him. But if you’re a geek and you’ve only seen the PG-13 version, you owe it to yourself to track down the extended edition. In addition to the violence, you’re missing out on a great deal of character development and far superior pacing. But let’s not understate the significance of that violence: this is a Wolverine movie we’re talking about.

Erin Snyder writes The Middle Room, focusing on sci-fi and fantasy movies, and co-writes with his wife a seasonal favorite of mine, the irreverent and addictive Mainlining Christmas.

A few others didn’t get the chance to write something or are still writing it, but named their best films. Writer Bryan DeGuire chose Inside Llewyn Davis, documentary filmmaker Amy Grumbling chose The Act of Killing, musician Azeem Khan chose Fruitvale Station, and graphic artist Eden O’Nuallain chose Side Effects.

My own choice for the best film of 2013 is The Place Beyond the Pines, which I write about in my previous post.

Who Did the Golden Globes Forget?

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Golden Globes for which they vote have a very specific taste in film, and awards shows aren’t complete without oversights – there are only so many nominations to go around.

Awards ceremonies tend to ignore genre film far too much, only acknowledging it when it comes in foreign language or animated form. For every Pan’s Labyrinth we catch, there is a Moon we ignore. For every Spirited Away we rightly laud, we neglect something like The Fall.

Actors who have been nominated before gain a sort of tenure that can only be broken by the most dramatic, momentous, newsworthy roles. That means there’s a high bar for entry, but a comparatively lower bar for re-nomination.

The Golden Globes also lack technical categories like costume design and cinematography. Keeping all this in mind:

Who did the Golden Globes miss?

BEST MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

Nominated: 12 Years a Slave, Captain Phillips, Gravity, Philomena, Rush

Forgotten: Prisoners

The biggest awards oversight of the year is also the best mystery of the year. Concerning the disappearance of two little girls, Prisoners is brimming with red herrings and great performances. Its left turns work because all the clues you need are there from the beginning.

It contains tremendous questions about faith and morality and pulls a unique trick at the end, not just putting its viewers in the position of judging whether one protagonist is redeemed or damned, but in making it clear that we’re not qualified to be his judges.

It contains stirring performances by Maria Bello, Paul Dano, Viola Davis, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terrence Howard, Hugh Jackman, and Melissa Leo.

BEST ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

Nominated: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine); Sandra Bullock (Gravity); Judi Dench (Philomena); Emma Thompson (Saving Mr. Banks); Kate Winslet (Labor Day)

Forgotten: Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Actresses in action movies never get awards recognition. Sigourney Weaver’s acknowledgment for Aliens a full 27 years ago stands out as the lone exception. Jennifer Lawrence’s translation of Katniss Everdeen for the big screen realizes not just an action hero’s story but also that of a psychologically breaking soldier whose image is manipulated for publicity and who is both fearful of and deeply resigned to the inevitability of being sent back into battle. It’s a timely portrayal in a deceptively important film that few actors – male or female – could fuse into a single, living, breathing character.

BEST ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

Nominated: Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave); Idris Elba (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom); Tom Hanks (Captain Phillips); Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club); Robert Redford (All is Lost)

Forgotten: Jake Gyllenhaal, Prisoners

Though Hugh Jackman has the showier role as a father searching for his missing daughter, Gyllenhaal provides the film’s moral anchor as Detective Loki. Combating the mystery in front of him as well as finding a kidnapped suspect and working his way around a police chief who speaks in deeply bureaucratic half-truths, Loki is a character realized as much in the steady performance of a grueling job as in his flaws and ever-present, nervous tics. He is the only patient man in a universe of dread. Confronting grieving parents, suspects, and deceptive bosses, what makes Loki special is the reserve Gyllenhaal gives him.

Loki is a character whose tendency to respond in measured doses feels so deeply ingrained that it doesn’t feel like you’re witnessing dramatic acting so much as habits practiced over a lifetime. That reserve, that measured reaction is constantly assaulted. Sometimes it holds and sometimes it breaks, but you can tell exactly where the line is every second Gyllenhaal is on-screen. It’s an understated performance that makes the film’s drama and mystery feel very real, and it’s the best work Gyllenhaal has done to date.

BEST MOTION PICTURE, MUSICAL OR COMEDY

Nominated: American Hustle, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, The Wolf of Wall Street

Forgotten: Spring Breakers

It’s neither a musical nor a comedy, but that’s OK – neither are more than half the films the Globes nominated in this category. Spring Breakers would be a cutting satire if it undermined its subject matter of drunk, college kids at Spring Break and the culture of criminality that appeals to their rebellious side.

Instead, it belongs to a forgotten genre called absurdism. It seeks to empathize with characters that steal and terrorize, but not to justify their actions or give us tragic, movie villains who unsuspectingly travel along some downward spiral. As the blog Agents and Seers puts it, Spring Breakers presents in James Franco’s drug dealer, Alien, a character who embraces “enlightened false consciousness,” for whom “money, wealth, and excess is an end in itself rather than a means.”

Whether she succeeds or fails as a dramatic actress, Selena Gomez already has a truly important performance under her belt as Faith, the Alice down the rabbit hole, “an idealistically unaware character in an otherwise cynically aware culture of crime and materialism.”

Spring Breakers was written and directed by Harmony Korine, who wrote the screenplay for the similarly conscience-scathing, reality-breaking film about a boy spreading AIDS, Kids.

BEST ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, MUSICAL OR COMEDY

Nominated: Amy Adams (American Hustle); Julie Delpy (Before Midnight); Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha); Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Enough Said); Meryl Streep (August: Osage County)

Forgotten: Michelle Pfeiffer, The Family

Sometimes a film that has everything going for it just doesn’t work in the end, and no film this year exhibits this better than The Family. Just as stellar performances in genre films are overlooked, stellar performances in average films are easily forgotten. No matter how much the film’s blow-everything-up ending undermines the family dynamics that precede it, Pfeiffer’s work as Maggie Blake, a mob wife living in France under the witness protection program, makes her parts of the film glow.

She handles the comedy deftly, creates a believable and warm family dynamic with Robert de Niro, and – when the mobsters inevitably show up and her children go missing – she delivers one of the best scenes of the year. She makes a mediocre film worth seeing for her performance alone.

BEST ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, MUSICAL OR COMEDY

Nominated: Christian Bale (American Hustle); Bruce Dern (Nebraska); Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street); Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis); Joaquin Phoenix (Her)

Forgotten: Johnny Depp, The Lone Ranger

I was ready to dislike Depp in this movie. I feared a Native American version of Stepin Fetchit, but The Lone Ranger is whole-heartedly on the Native American side of the argument. For the most part, Depp takes a back seat, subduing what could easily have been an over-the-top, mugging role while allowing Armie Hammer’s Lone Ranger to be the larger-than-life character. His performance here is no rehash of Captain Jack Sparrow, no matter how much the ads would like you to believe otherwise.

Depp channels Buster Keaton more than at any other point in his career by playing the physical comedy with stoic reservation, while allowing director Gore Verbinski to get away with playing fast and loose with monumental shifts in tone. There’s an audience resistance to Johnny Depp born out of the idea that he’s spent too long cashing in on his indie cred, but with The Lone Ranger, he’s taken a blockbuster film and infused it with that energy – both in his performance and in the film’s deeply bittersweet message about ethnic bloodshed being part of America’s military industrial DNA since the beginning.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Sally Hawkins (Blue Jasmine); Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle); Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave); Julia Roberts (August: Osage County); June Squibb (Nebraska)

Forgotten: Andrea Riseborough, Oblivion

Oblivion, like Prisoners, is a complicated and overlooked gem of a film. It takes its cues from Golden Age science-fiction like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey all the way through to modern, anti-corporate parables such as Duncan Jones’s Moon.

Andrea Riseborough plays Victoria, who lives in the science-fiction equivalent of a white ivory tower in the clouds. She acts as the liaison between Tom Cruise’s drone repairman Jack and an orbiting base that helps transport refugees from a war-ravaged Earth to a colony on Saturn’s moon Titan.

Oblivion is a film that hides realities behind realities, and Victoria is the slippery glue that holds it all together. As each truth is peeled back to reveal something new, we’re never quite sure how much Victoria does or doesn’t know, whether she suspects and hides the truth from Jack or if she’s willfully in the dark. Oblivion demands a character who is controlling, quietly forceful, and constantly thinking, yet who is reliable, genuine, and caring, who is an awkward middle man between demanding boss and troublesome employee, who you trust and root for and don’t want to see hurt despite her perspective on reality being too slippery to even remotely pin down. We trust her even as we grow more and more suspicious of her.

It’s a thankless role in an underseen science-fiction masterpiece, and a role that you never seem to read the same way from viewing to viewing.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips); Daniel Bruhl (Rush); Bradley Cooper (American Hustle); Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave); Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)

Forgotten: James Franco, Spring Breakers

There are some actors, the Anthony Hopkins of the world, who can play any role they darn well please. There are others who only function within their own wheelhouse. Put James Franco in a Wizard of Oz film, for instance, and it’s just awkward. Ask him to play a degenerate, a rebel whose cause is himself, and you’ve got something special. In Alien, the drug dealer who takes four wayward college girls under his wing in Spring Breakers, Franco takes an enormous risk.

Alien is a successful and talented musician, but his day job’s just a hobby. Here is a villain who understands only ownership, who doesn’t bother to justify any awful thing he does but rather seeks the next plateau of filth. He is a modern, cynical, cultural predator – he could help himself, but why bother? He is the temptation of giving in to a talent for manipulation. He is every moral code consciously, systematically removed. He’s the Sir Edmund Hillary of movie gangsters. Why ruin others? Because they’re there.

Alien is a cultural anger at rules no one seems to follow and a cultural boredom for one’s own passions that seem to have no value. He is an evolution of movie villain, a wayward thing, seeking to make a mark – negative or positive has no value – and to own things, guns, people, souls, because ownership is our highest cultural prize. He is an American villain, through and through, and Franco realizes him in an authentic way no other actor could.

BEST DIRECTOR – MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity); Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips); Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave); Alexander Payne (Nebraska); David O. Russell (American Hustle)

Forgotten: Baz Luhrmann, The Great Gatsby

Ostentatious. Extravagant. Melodramatic. Audiences forget that this is exactly how the novel wanted it. The slow-burn plot of a New Money millionaire in 1920s New York trying to win over his soft-spoken, lost love from her Old Money husband is a one-of-a-kind film event only Baz Luhrmann could deliver.

Luhrmann’s unequaled talents for visual splendor and anachronistic flourishes hide a thematically deep film that not only captures the novel’s love story and social class evolution, but expounds at length on its oft-overlooked themes of ownership and the aching, philosophical emptiness that drives the addiction to possess.

Luhrmann understands what so many critics arguing about the novel’s metaphors for new-breed capitalism have not – that Nick Carraway’s purpose as narrator is to provide a specifically American breed of savior. He is not a morally powerful figure providing a better example. He is a powerless figure who observes his generation, incapable of being more than a visitor to this strange culture and helpless to change anything about its single-minded obsessions. Instead, he increasingly embraces the luxury of celebrity, absorbing the perspectives of the wealthy even if he’ll never have the means to realize them. He loses a part of his philosophical grip, a part of what centers him. His newly discovered addiction to the surface of things and his in-built need for ethical depth grow increasingly in conflict, and even his best attempts at sin eating for his friends are inconsequential to the monumental self-possession and indifference of the American wealthy. He is capable, at the end, only of having a chance to save himself from the American Dream.

Luhrmann’s film adaptation is saturated in the abundance and frivolity of its characters, housed squarely in their obsessions, and is as deeply melodramatic as you can get. By way of these seeming affectations, however, it translates as fully as is possible one of the most inaccessible and philosophically complex novels America has produced.

BEST SCREENPLAY – MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Spike Jonze (Her); Bob Nelson (Nebraska); Jeff Pope & Steve Coogan (Philomena); John Ridley (12 Years a Slave); Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell (American Hustle)

Forgotten: Aaron Guzikowski, Prisoners

Like all good mysteries, Prisoners provides a solution that makes sense. What takes it from being a good film to a great one is that we’re left to write one protagonist’s ending. Before that, the film is intense. I crawled back in my seat. I chewed my nails off.

It’s the ending that made my jaw drop. I felt a chill up my spine when I realized what the film was really asking me. Prisoners is a film among films. It’s why we go into a dark theater for two hours and say, “Make me believe.”

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE – MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: Alex Ebert (All is Lost); Alex Heffes (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom); Steven Price (Gravity); John Williams (The Book Thief); Hans Zimmer (12 Years a Slave)

Forgotten: M83, Oblivion

For his earlier Tron: Legacy, director Joseph Kosinski employed the French New Wave duo Daft Punk to create its soundtrack. The resulting film was a campy, off-kilter affair, but Daft Punk’s score was an overlooked achievement, bridging the synth-heavy, tonal landscapes that Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre invented in the 1970s to the aggressive, feedback-laden dubstep of today.

For Oblivion, Kosinski sought out French electronic band M83. While the result doesn’t stand out from the crowd as much as Daft Punk’s work did, it functions better within the overall scope of its film, providing a score epic and triumphal in its orchestral nature, yet evoking undercurrents of longing and quiet desperation through themes you could plug into an 80s fantasy movie. It’s a wonderful complement to the film that is my biggest surprise of the year, and ought to be remembered among similarly momentous science-fiction scores.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG – MOTION PICTURE

Nominated: “Atlas” (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire); “Let it Go” (Frozen); “Ordinary Love” (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom); “Please Mr. Kennedy” (Inside Llewyn Davis); “Sweeter Than Fiction” (One Chance)

Forgotten: “I See Fire” by Ed Sheeran, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

A bittersweet monument to a stellar cliffhanger. Just listen to the link above.

*I’ve excluded the foreign language and animated film categories because I usually only get a chance to catch up on them in following years.