Washington Area Film Critics Association: 2013 Awards

Posted on December 9, 2013 at 8:15 am

And the winners are….

Best Film:
12 Years a Slave

Best Director:
Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity)

Best Actor:
Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave)

Best Actress:
Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)

Best Supporting Actor:
Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)

Best Supporting Actress:
Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave)

Best Acting Ensemble:
12 Years a Slave

Best Youth Performance:
Tye Sheridan (Mud)

Best Adapted Screenplay:
John Ridley (12 Years a Slave)

Best Original Screenplay:
Spike Jonze (Her)

Best Animated Feature:
Frozen

Best Documentary:
Blackfish

Best Foreign Language Film:
The Broken Circle Breakdown

Best Art Direction:
Production Designer: Catherine Martin, Set Decorator: Beverley Dunn (The Great Gatsby)

Best Cinematography:
Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, A.M.C. (Gravity)

Best Editing:
Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Sanger (Gravity)

Best Original Score:
Hans Zimmer (12 Years a Slave)

The Joe Barber Award for Best Portrayal of Washington, DC:
Lee Daniels’ The Butler

Members of WAFCA discuss the awards on this special edition of Keeping it Reel:

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Washington Area Film Critic Awards: The Nominees are Out!

Posted on December 8, 2013 at 12:00 pm

It’s awards season! I’m voting in at least four different critics awards groups and will keep posting updates. Despite the manipulation of the awards process and questions about the relevance of critic awards, I think they are meaningful. First, critics are the only people who spend the whole year seeing the widest possible range of films, mostly in theaters, as they were intended to be seen. We don’t watch only those films supported by their studios for awards, so we have context and experience to guide our choices, and no relationships with filmmakers to affect our judgement as the industry awards do. Because of that, we can pay tribute to some films that might otherwise be overlooked. I’m proud of the Washington Area Film Critics Association nominees:

Best Film:
American Hustle
Gravity
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
12 Years a Slave

Best Director:
Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity)
Spike Jonze (Her)
Baz Luhrmann (The Great Gatsby)
Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave)
Martin Scorsese (The Wolf of Wall Street)

Best Actor:
Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street)
Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave)
Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club)
Joaquin Phoenix (Her)
Robert Redford (All is Lost)

Best Actress:
Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)
Sandra Bullock (Gravity)
Judi Dench (Philomena)
Meryl Streep (August: Osage County)
Emma Thompson (Saving Mr. Banks)

Best Supporting Actor:
Daniel Brühl (Rush)
Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave)
James Franco (Spring Breakers)
James Gandolfini (Enough Said)
Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)

Best Supporting Actress:
Scarlett Johansson (Her)
Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle)
Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave)
Octavia Spencer (Fruitvale Station)
June Squibb (Nebraska)

Best Acting Ensemble:
American Hustle
August: Osage County
Prisoners
12 Years a Slave
The Way, Way Back

Best Youth Performance:
Asa Butterfield (Ender’s Game)
Adéle Exarchopoulos (Blue Is the Warmest Color)
Liam James (The Way, Way Back)
Waad Mohammed (Wadjda)
Tye Sheridan (Mud)

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke & Richard Linklater (Before Midnight)
Billy Ray (Captain Phillips)
Michael H. Weber & Scott Neustadter (The Spectacular Now)
John Ridley (12 Years a Slave)
Terence Winter (The Wolf of Wall Street)

Best Original Screenplay:
Eric Warren Singer & David O. Russell (American Hustle)
Woody Allen (Blue Jasmine)
Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said)
Spike Jonze (Her)
Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (Inside Llewyn Davis)

Best Animated Feature:
The Croods
Despicable Me 2
Frozen
Monsters University
The Wind Rises

Best Documentary:
The Act of Killing
Blackfish
Leviathan
Stories We Tell
20 Feet from Stardom

Best Foreign Language Film:
Blue Is the Warmest Color
The Broken Circle Breakdown
The Hunt
The Past
Wadjda

Best Art Direction:
Production Designer: Andy Nicholson, Set Decorator: Rosie Goodwin (Gravity)
Production Designer: Catherine Martin, Set Decorator: Beverley Dunn (The Great Gatsby)
Production Designer: K.K. Barrett, Set Decorator: Gene Serdena (Her)
Production Designer: Jess Gonchor, Set Decorator: Susan Bode Tyson (Inside Llewyn Davis)
Production Designer: Adam Stockhausen, Set Decorator: Alice Baker (12 Years a Slave)

Best Cinematography:
Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, A.M.C. (Gravity)
Simon Duggan, ACS (The Great Gatsby)
Hoyte Van Hoytema, F.S.F., N.S.C. (Her)
Bruno Delbonnel, AFC, ASC (Inside Llewyn Davis)
Sean Bobbitt, BSC (12 Years a Slave)

Best Editing:
Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Sanger (Gravity)
Eric Zumbrunnen, A.C.E., Jeff Buchanan (Her)
Dan Hanley, A.C.E., Mike Hill, A.C.E. (Rush)
Joe Walker (12 Years a Slave)
Thelma Schoonmaker, A.C.E. (The Wolf of Wall Street)

Best Original Score:
Christophe Beck (Frozen)
Arcade Fire (Her)
Steven Price (Gravity)
Thomas Newman (Saving Mr. Banks)
Hans Zimmer (12 Years a Slave)

The Joe Barber Award for Best Portrayal of Washington, DC:
Lee Daniels’ The Butler
The East
Olympus Has Fallen
Philomena
White House Down

We will announce our winners Monday morning at 8 am.

And I was honored to be invited on two podcasts to discuss our awards, Cinema Royale with Travis Hopson and Cinema Con Queso with John Nolan.

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Ten Lessons from Schindler’s List

Posted on December 8, 2013 at 8:00 am

Steven Spielberg’s film about Oskar Schindler and the 1200 Jews he saved from being killed by the Nazis came out twenty years ago, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally (originally titled Schindler’s Ark). Keneally happened on the story when he stopped in a Beverly Hills luggage shop and chatted with the owner, who turned out to be one of the people saved by Schindler. Keneally later wrote Searching for Schindler: A Memoir, about his research, writing the book, and his dream of “an Oscar for Oskar” that came true when the movie was made in 1993.

The anniversary is just one of many good reasons to remember Schindler and ten of the lessons from the film.

1. Even if you cannot stop a great wrong, you can do something that will be very meaningful.

2. Heroes are not always exemplars of integrity and sacrifice. Oskar Schindler worked for the Nazis and was for much of his life an opportunist and self-promoter. Keneally once said that what interested him about Schindler was “the fact that you couldn’t say where opportunism ended and altruism began. And I like the subversive fact that the spirit breatheth where it will. That is, that good will emerged from the most unlikely places.” No one is perfect.

3. And a related lesson — sometimes a person’s faults are assets when it is time to rebel against authority.

4. Schindler was able to save 1200 people by insisting that they were essential employees in his business and contributing to Germany’s wartime efforts. This shows that people in business can — and must — make as much or an even greater contribution to the public good as government and non-profits.

5. The Nazi camp commander played by Ralph Feinnes shows us how a soul is destroyed by evil. The more corrupt he becomes, the more he must wall himself off from any sense of compassion or decency.

6. This movie was made half a century after the events it depicted and nearly 20 years after Schindler’s death. Sometimes it takes a while for us to be able to begin to understand historical events.

7. Some historical events are so enormous and so tragic they can never be fully understood. The best we can do is tell as many different pieces of the story as possible. The story of a small group who were saved must help us better understand the reality of those who did not survive.

8. As we reach the end of the time when living witnesses will be able to share their stories directly, it is even more important that we make sure that these stories are remembered. Making this film inspired director Steven Spielberg to create the Shoah Foundation and an archive of interviews.

9. Even a child can save a life with quick thinking and courage.

10. To quote the line from the Talmud in ring given to Schindler by the Jews he saved: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”

Mary Poppins 50th Anniversary Tribute

Posted on December 7, 2013 at 3:59 pm

Many thanks to Betty Jo Tucker for inviting me on her show to talk about the upcoming 50th anniversary of one of the greatest family films of all time, Mary Poppins. Stay tuned for my review of “Saving Mr. Banks,” the upcoming film with Tom Hanks as Walt Disney in the story of his 20-year effort to persuade P.L. Travers to allow him to make a movie based on her books about the magical nanny.

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Teach Kids to Write Letters With a Free Postcard from Spongebob!

Posted on December 7, 2013 at 8:00 am

If children will be receiving holiday gifts, they should be getting ready to write their thank-you notes. A great way to begin is with SpongeBob Squarepants — I mean SpongeBob Mailpants — who is teaching children to write letters and postcards with a great new website. There are free SpongeBob postcards at the Post Office for you to pick up and mail the old-fashioned way. Parents can pick up a card to send to children to teach them the first lesson of letter-writing, the pleasure of opening up the mail to find something special just for you.

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