M. Carter’s Oscar nominations (and then some)

As a fledgling movie lover, a burgeoning blogger, I grew up trusting that The Academy as the ultimate and final word on what was good and award-worthy in cinema. Then, somewhere around the time I realized that my parents didn’t know everything, either, I turned a corner and headed down the “Hey, Academy People, You Might Have Petrified White Dog Turds for Brains” Hallway toward the “Wearing a Leopard-Print Wonderbra and Screaming Obscenities at Albert Finney Does Not Translate to Acting Talent” Conference Room. 

(Yes, I am still a little bitter about how the 2001 Best Actress Oscar race played out and please, let’s change the subject before I have to go back to therapy.)

Old grudges aside, the point is that sometimes The Academy gets it right. But more often than not these sorry, sad little people get it wrong. Very wrong. This is why Frank, the Pompous Film Snob himself, asked a number of us movie bloggers to come up with our own nominations for the best of the best in 2010. Find the compiled list here, and peruse my own nominations below.

Best Picture: “Winter’s Bone”; “The King’s Speech”; “Black Swan”; “Restrepo”; “Cairo Time”

Best Director: Debra Granik, “Winter’s Bone”; Darren Aronofsky, “Black Swan”; Tom Hooper, “The King’s Speech”; Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, “Restrepo”; Christopher Nolan, “Inception”

Best Actor: Colin Firth, “The King’s Speech”; Michael Douglas, “Solitary Man”; Jeff Bridges, “True Grit”; James Franco, “127 Hours”; Leonardo DiCaprio, “Shutter Island”

Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, “Winter’s Bone”; Hailee Steinfeld, “True Grit”; Natalie Portman, “Black Swan”; Annette Bening, “The Kids Are All Right”; Patricia Clarkson, “Cairo Time”

Best Supporting Actor: John Hawkes, “Winter’s Bone”; Geoffrey Rush, “The King’s Speech”; Jeremy Renner, “The Town”; Christian Bale, “The Fighter”; Ken Watanabe, “Inception”

Best Supporting Actress: Rebecca Hall, “Please Give”; Melissa Leo, “The Fighter”; Amy Adams, “The Fighter”; Dale Dickey, “Winter’s Bone”; Barbara Hershey, “Black Swan”

Best Original Screenplay: “Cairo Time”; “Black Swan”; “Inception”; “The King’s Speech”; “The Kids Are All Right”

Best Adapted Screenplay: “Winter’s Bone”; “True Grit”; “Shutter Island”; “The Social Network”; “The Town”

Best Ensemble: “Inception”; “The Social Network”; “The King’s Speech”; “The Kids Are All Right”; “The Fighter”

Best Cinematography: “Winter’s Bone”; “Black Swan”; “Inception”; “The Social Network”; “The King’s Speech”

Best Score: “Shutter Island”; “Inception”; “True Grit”; “Cairo Time”; “Black Swan”

Best Editing: “Restrepo”; “Predators”; “The King’s Speech”; “The Social Network”; “Winter’s Bone”

Lifetime Achievement Award winners: Richard Jenkins and Ron Leibman (let’s hear it for the underappreciated character actors!)

Review: “Winter’s Bone” (2010)

It would be inaccurate to say 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is shouldering the weight of the world. It’s more that she’s shouldering the weight of raising her younger brother (Isaiah Stone) and baby sister (Ashlee Thompson) while caring for her mute, near-catatonic mother (Shelley Waggener) and keeping her family home running despite abject poverty and her meth-cooking father’s disappearance. That’s hardly miraculous. The remarkable thing is that Ree has seen very little to give her faith in people (and certainly not in her mistrusting, insular family). And still she believes people are good, or at least decent. Her circumstances may have hardened her, but they haven’t hardened her heart.

In this way, “Winter’s Bone” shares some commonalities with director Debra Granik’s first feature, “Down to the Bone,” a decidedly undramatic look at the unremarkable life of Irene, a checkout clerk sinking deeper into drug addiction. Irene is unremarkable, but her circumstances force her into limbo; she must choose to climb or fall. Though “Winter’s Bone” is a creative step beyond that film’s simplicity, Ree, within her world, is living an average life. But Granik’s adaptation is stylized, given the unnerving feel of the best of film noir — even though “Winter’s Bone” is set in the forbidding Ozarks. Or maybe it’s the setting that amplifies the noir, since the best films of the genre turn setting into a character all its own. The elements are there: the conflicted, dogged hero; the crime in the past that thrives in the present; the bystanders who know more than they’ll say; the truth that’s dredged up no matter how deep the criminals buried it or how closely they guard the grounds. Even the dialogue, in its abrupt mountain way, has its place. There are no one-liners, but the characters choose their words with the utmost care. Every word means what it means, and it means something more.

Ree has learned the value of not saying a syllable more than she has to. Silence keeps people breathing. Members of the Dolly clan may be Ree’s family in blood, but they abide their own codes of behavior. They will not endanger themselves to help one of their own. And Jessup Dolly, Ree’s father, has done some things his relatives cannot forgive. So Ree finds herself hitting wall after wall as she searches for her father, who put the family homestead up for bond to get out of jail and then vanished. Her uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes), a volatile tweaker, warns her to stop asking questions. Her attempts to speak with Thump (Ronnie Hall), the Dolly family mafioso, are met with stony silence and then violence arranged by Merab (a wonderfully scary Dale Dickey). Ree, Merab reasons, deserves it: She’s an upstart, a nuisance who demands that the Dolly clan help her siblings and her mother. She does not respect the unspoken behavioral code. Still, as angry as her behavior makes Merab, Thump and their underlings, it also impresses them. Ree, just 17, has the grit of a woman twice that age. She refuses to back down when her family’s welfare is on the line.

Based on her fierce performance, it would appear the same could be said of 20-year-old Kentucky-born actress Jennifer Lawrence. She supplies Ree with an amazing, iron-tough will and also vulnerability, which she knows instinctively she must hide if she wants to survive her quest to find Jessup dead or alive. Whatever praise critics have heaped on her for this role, Lawrence deserves it. Dickey and Hawkes deserve equal amounts of kudos. Dickey’s Merab is a fascinating enigma — a woman made hard by her surroundings, but one still capable of showing kindness (however bizarre) to those who deserve it. Hawkes, a character actor of brilliant subtlety, allows Teardrop, known as a screw-up and wild card, to undergo a believable transformation. Teardrop’s motivations run deeper than scoring his next fix; he’s torn between the need to keep in line and his desire to find his brother and protect Ree and her siblings. Doing right by Ree’s family doesn’t necessarily mean doing the right thing. In this oft-overlooked world Granik turns the camera on, “right” and “wrong,” sometimes, are one and the same.

Grade: A+