Oscar Predictions: Best Original Screenplay
The Nominees
Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker
Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds
Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman for The Messenger
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen for A Serious Man
Pete Docter and Bob Peterson for Up
Having taken home the BAFTA, it would seem that The Hurt Locker has positioned itself for a potential clean sweep at the Oscars this year. The film has garnered almost uniformly excellent reviews and its meagre box-office take appears to have had little impact on its chances come Awards season. To get it out of the way at the start, this is going to be the Iraq film to compete for the awards, to The Messenger will have to put up with being the year’s second-best semi-apolitical Iraq movie.
Sam’s Top 42 Films of the Decade
Just for the sake of my own sanity and desperate need to have these written somewhere, I give you my favourite forty-two films of the past decade. There are at least fifty-six other films I would like to put onto a list, but I think I need to forcefully prevent any more decade-based listmaking as quickly as possible. So beneath is the top ten list, along with a sentence or two on each film and then thirty-two, out-of-list-order, films which I had to include.
A Serious Man: Not an Odd Film Out
Werner Herzog and Christian Bale on the set of Rescue Dawn
In a column for the Guardian over the weekend, Joe Queenan used A Serious Man to stand in example of movies by directors which stand apart from the rest of their filmography. In the case of A Serious Man, Queenan writes:
A Serious Man falls into that category of films that, for whatever reason, do not have the same texture or mood as a director’s other films. It may be a decision the film-maker has made deliberately, or it may be entirely inadvertent, but these films stand apart from the other movies in a director’s body of work. It is as if the film-maker abruptly decided to take a holiday from his own personality and make a film in somebody else’s style.
He goes on to cite other examples of this theory for great directors. He notes Werner Herzog for Rescue Dawn (“…a well-crafted action picture. And nothing more.“), Spike Lee’s Inside Man (“…certainly doesn’t have the feel of any other Spike Lee film. It is work for hire.“) and Ang Lee with The Hulk (“…one of those catastrophes so bad that its sequel seems like the industry’s personal apology to the movie-going public for what has gone before.“)
He also cites a few examples of better one-offs, such as Scorsese’s Age of Innocence, Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County and, inexplicably, Peter Weir’s Green Card.
I’ll leave what he considers good or bad to the side (seriously though, Green Card?) and just comment on the mistake of characterising so many of these films as being far apart from the other work by directors.
Coens to Remake True Grit
The Coen brothers have announced plans to remake the John Wayne classic True Grit, the one where the man plays Rooster Cogburn and the one he won his Oscar for.
The Coens are not however looking to remake the film so much as go back to an adaptation of the original novel by Charles Portis which backgrounds the Cogburn character in favour of Mattie, played by Kim Darby in the original film, which will mean they will likely focus on the darker, less heroic elements of the story.
The brothers already have a lot of projects lined up with A Serious Man, a black comedy about a man whose wife is leaving him due to his mooching brother, the next. They’ve also got their hands on an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s sparky Yiddish Policeman’s Union plus theatre comedy Hail Caesar and the mysterious Suburbicon.
Busy time post Oscar for the Coens and, it seems to me, they have a clean canvas on which to chart the rest of their artistic career.
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