Breaking down the 2015 Academy Award Nominations

January 15, 2025 by Christopher ZF Leave a Comment

This is a strange year. The films that carry the day, Birdman, Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel are all pretty weird for Academy Award style fair. And yet, the list as a whole is supremely underwhelming.

Here’s how the Academy Award Nominations, and Omissions, shake out for The Stake. Not your best year, Academy.

By the numbers:

9: The Grand Budapest Hotel and Birdman took home the most nominations, with 9 a piece. Those are both wonderful and strange films. That’s pretty cool.

6: The perceived favorite for Best Picture, Boyhood, received 7 6.

2. On the other side of the spectrum, Selma received only 2 nominations, for Best Picture and Best Song (Common and John Legend).

2 Many: It’s time for the Academy to get over its adoration of the British biopic. The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything received 8 and 5 nominations, respectively. Both of these films are just fine thanks. They contain highly nuanced performances by gifted actors in roles that are pre-determined to be Powerful and written with every intention of getting attention come award season. And I can get behind that. But all these other nods? Best Picture? It just leaves me cold.

0: The number of women nominated for Best Director, Adapted Screenplay, Original Screenplay, and Cinematography.

20 (out of 20): The number of white actors nominated in the four acting categories. No non-white actors received a nomination. That is stunning.

You are still missing the mark in a big way, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

6?: All this love for American Sniper is a bit strange. Clint Eastwood still carries enormous power to woo Academy voters, it would seem, enough to overcome claims of historical inaccuracy and its strident pro-War politics.

3: There are 3 superhero films on the list, in the categories you would expect. Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: Winter Soldier and X-Men: Days of Future Past all received nods for Best Visual Effects. It’s not a surprise-each of these is well deserved-but it’s still good to see genre films making it into the Oscars anywhere at all. Guardians also got a Best Hair and Makeup nomination.

84 (years old): The age of Robert Duvall, who was nominated for The Judge, a movie very few people saw. Duvall is now the oldest man nominated for an acting award.

19: The number of acting nominations that Meryl Streep now has to her name, with this year’s nod for Into The Woods. There is only one actor in the universe capable of breaking that record. Meryl Streep. What’s she doing in 2015?

Omissions:

Ava DuVernay did not get a nomination for Directing Selma and that is plainly absurd. In executing the large-scale scenes of violence and in rendering the power of King’s speeches, her work on that film was remarkable. It’s a terrible oversight and I hate to pick on The Imitation Game but that is such a blandly made film that seeing Morten Tyldum nominated here instead of Selma is really unfortunate.

David Oyelowo did not get a nomination for Acting for Selma and that is plainly absurd. His quiet, forthright portrayal of Martin Luther King, Jr. leaves audiences moved, perhaps because DuVernay’s film is not a biopic but a story of the people of Selma and the men and women-King among them-who came to a place and changed history. With respect to the nominees, there is room for Oyelowo in this list.

Bradford Young did not get a nomination for his cinematography in Selma and that is plainly absurd. Selma was photographed with such creativity and style; it was one of my favorite looking movies of the year. His work is more than deserving. Young also photographed A Most Violent Year, making 2014 a most brilliant year for Bradford Young.

These omissions for Selma are glaring and make it worth our while to wonder just what the overwhelmingly white, male, and aged voting membership of the Academy was thinking.

It was thought that Jennifer Aniston would receive her first nomination for her work in Cake, a film I have not seen but I was rooting for Aniston to make her way into the Academy ranks. It appears that her spot went to Marion Cotillard, for Two Days, One Night.

Christopher Nolan failed to get his first Best Director nomination for Interstellar. I am hot and cold on Christopher Nolan’s work, but pulling together something as big and broad and strange as Interstellar is a real accomplishment. Nolan doesn’t deserve this nod more than Ava DuVernay, but it would be fun to see movies like Interstellar get nods outside of the technical awards.

Gone Girl only pulled in 1 nomination, for Rosamund Pike. Not even the brilliant score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch was recognized, and those two have become recent favorites of Academy voters. Fincher’s adaptation is expert film-making, but perhaps its too genre for the Academy to find favor in more categories? I’m very surprised by Gillian Flynn’s omission in the writing category. Her screenplay was taut and crisp and funny and terrifying and should be up there.

No love for The LEGO Movie? It’s a runaway hit and a critical darling. It would have been something new in the Best Animated category. This is a tough category this year, with a lot of deserving movies. But it’s a surprise to see LEGO left off.

Nothing for A Most Violent Year, Big Eyes, and a handful of other films that were right on the cusp. In the end, this is an unsurprising bunch.

What The Academy Got Right:

One place where the restraint of voters was right: Wild received two nominations, one for Reese Witherspoon and one for Laura Dern. I think Wild is a great film, really. And what it makes it great is first: Reese Witherspoon’s performance. After that: Laura Dern. No other love needed, really.

Boyhood. But that’s no surprise.

My Personal Favorite:

The Academy has long loved Hayao Miyazaki’s work at Studio Ghibli. This year, though, Miyazaki’s partner Isao Takahata got a nomination for The Tale of Princess Kaguya, a true masterpiece of animation. It’s Takahata’s first Oscar nod and a deserved one, both for this film, and for a remarkable career in animated film-making.

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Reese Witherspoon carries the weight of Wild on her back

December 19, 2024 by Christopher ZF Leave a Comment

Early in Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s ex-husband Paul tells her: “I’m sorry you have to walk 1000 miles just to…”

“Finish that sentence,” Cheryl responds. “Why do I have to walk 1,000 miles?” He doesn’t say.

Later, a few hundred miles into her hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl calls her ex-husband. He doesn’t answer; she leaves a message: “I’m still alive. That’s all the news I have.” She hangs up, and walks away.

Cheryl never says exactly why she walks the Pacific Crest Trail. Her mother (“the love of my life,” she tells a therapist) has unexpectedly died and she wants to walk herself into a new life, she says vaguely. She’s using heroin and sleeping with any man that asks, behavior that leads to the end of her seven year marriage. After she tells a friend she has become pregnant, and has “an idea” of who the father is, Cheryl sees a guide book for hiking the PCT and the cover sticks in her mind.

She has to do something, and it’s as good a plan as any. So she gets a backpack, packs like a rookie (“who brings 12 condoms on a solo hike?” she’ll ask later), and starts her walk from the California desert to the Bridge of the Gods in Oregon.

We could say Cheryl is out looking for redemption on the trail. Along the way she will lose a toenail, and her boots, and her water; she’ll meet people who are kind, and others who are less so. We’ll see at her most vulnerable, and longing for peace. This is the easy way to package Wild and it is not wrong to leave it here. But to say there is no more to the film than this is to misunderstand loss and pain, and the hard times of human suffering.

Wild is an adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Directed by Jean-Marc Valle (who made last year’s very good Dallas Buyer’s Club), and adapted for the screen by the novelist Nick Hornby, the film, like Cheryl, walks a careful line between a complex emotional portrait and an overwrought melodramatic mess.

One or two miscues and the film could have been little more than a standard Hollywood weeper about a lost person seeking redemption in the woods, on a journey that teaches the character, and by extension the audience, easily packaged lessons about how to love yourself, or some such thing. The kind of movie made explicitly to provide inspirational quotes and place them over nature photos.

To be honest, Wild is almost that movie. That it isn’t, that Wild is a success (and it is a great success), is due almost entirely to Reese Witherspoon, who carries on her back not only her giant pack, but also the weight of this entire film. Wild is uncomplicated in its story and structure; it depends chiefly on the beauty of its imagery (photographer Yves Belanger does a great job, but given the surroundings I would expect no less), and the performance of its star.

The physical difficulty of Cheryl’s hike-and her lack of experience or preparation-is used as a lens which reflects Strayed’s life. Wild tells this story through flashbacks, triggered sometimes by moments of physical hardship, sometimes through a hand-gesture. We see Strayed’s youth, her relationship with her mother, her marriage, her drug-use, her promiscuous sexual escapades, her visits to therapists. All this comes in no particular order, working, as our memories do, not chronologically but emotionally.

Like Cheryl on the trail, audiences are given signposts to help us along, literally and metaphorically. She starts out unable even to lift her backpack on her own, crumbling under the weight of her excess. (sidenote: Movies that inspire unprepared people to head into the wilderness are dangerous and problematic in their own right. A Yosemite Park Ranger and I discussed this fact about Wild, he said: “If you want solitude, don’t hike the PCT. Go find a nameless trail to a gorgeous, nameless, and empty mountain valley somewhere. If you want to get fit, walk in your city park”).

As she gets stronger, her pack gets lighter. Her memories more focused. She leaves quotations in the trail-books along the way and they allow us a chance to see expressly the thoughts that tie her past and present. They range from the famous (“I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep”, Robert Frost) to the desperate (“God is a ruthless bitch”, Cheryl Strayed).

She also faces the physical risks that come with being a woman hiking the trail alone-from river crossings and dehydration to the men whose paths she crosses. Almost everyone she meets on the trail is a man, and her cautious interactions are some of the most complicated scenes in the film. As we watch Cheryl Strayed mumble her way through a snow-covered mountain (“you can quit anytime,” her friend told her before she left, and the phrase lingers on her lips early in the film), we also see the complicated nature of Cheryl Strayed’s walk, and the compounding difficulty of making a film like Wild.

Witherspoon is in almost every second of Wild; she’s at her best, too, funny, sad, strong. The very conceit of Wild is to push the actress to her limits, both physically and emotionally, and the achievement of the performance really makes Wild what it is. That Wild depends entirely on the performance of Witherspoon, though, seems appropriate. In adapting Strayed’s story for the movies, how else could you make it work but to ask Witherspoon to bear the movie on her back?

Cheryl Strayed’s story is one of a woman finding a trail and taking it to the end, alone. By the end of her walk, Strayed has had the life-saving realizations that are required in a redemption story, but they do not look like the satisfying recovery stories we have seen before; it is still Cheryl, alone, in the woods, wondering aloud about her life.

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The 10 Best Films of 2014

December 17, 2024 by Christopher ZF 7 Comments

Editor’s note: Selma, Inherent Vice and a few more award season films will not open in Minneapolis until early 2015, and are thus not considered for this list.

This was a good year at the movies. These were the best.

Honorable Mentions:

Guardians of the Galaxy

The year’s highest grossing movie is also the year’s best piece of Hollywood Franchise Entertainment. GOTG is a funny and charming sci-fi romp, unlike anything Marvel has done thus far.

Guardians has much more in common with Firefly or Return of the Jedi than Iron Man or Captain America. It also provides a glimmer of hope (even the faintest glimmer is worth holding on to) for the next 6 years and 20 movies that DC and Marvel have announced.

Obvious Child

I have this theory that Hollywood movies are among the most conservative environments in America regarding sexual politics. The easiest way to make this case is to look at movie depictions of abortions. Films that feature unplanned pregnancies usually are allowed a line or two about abortion (Knocked Up). Sometimes women even get to a clinic (Juno). But rare is the film that actually provides abortion as an alternative to having a child.

Not so, however, in the calm, hilarious Obvious Child. Not only is abortion a choice, it’s presented as an actuality. Donna Stern, played amazingly by Jenny Slate, gets an abortion. Okay. That happens. Then, in a perhaps radical decision Obvious Child moves on. It is hilarious and very good.

The Top 10:

10. 22 Jump Street / The Lego Movie

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller released two films this year: 22 Jump Street and The Lego Movie. Both are very funny and expertly written. Both achieve total buy-in from everyone involved, and the pay-off from this commitment is undeniable. And both are little intro-to-film courses, too, lined with references and smirking winks to the audience.

Surveying the list of films I saw in 2014, including many of the more recent “award season” releases, I recalled few films that I just straight up enjoyed as much as The Lego Movie and 22 Jump Street.

8. The Overnighters

This is how you tell a true story on film. Writer/Director Jesse Moss’ documentary about Williston, North Dakota in the oil boom focuses on the pastor of a small church who opens his doors to incoming workers who need a place to sleep. The film provides audiences with a rare look at American life, society, economic hardship and individual compassion.

Everyone knows about the booming North Dakota oil days. But too rare are the stories of actual men and women living somewhere in the plains.

7. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
6. Snowpiercer

In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, humans are fighting for survival in a world destroyed by a flu developed by scientists in a laboratory. In Snowpiercer, humans are fighting for survival against a world destroyed by scientists trying to solve climate change. Each is an adaptation of previous works, and each is set in one of the most over-used genres of the decade: the post-apocalyptic sci-fi story.

Which goes to show just how incredibly lively genre films can be. Dawn and Snowpiercer are both exciting cinematic experiences. Vivid and unusual and wonderful.

5. The Babadook

Hands down the best horror movie of the year; The Babadook is also one of the best directed films of the year. Jennifer Kent’s debut as a writer/director shows her confidence in story and execution.

This movie is very scary; it is also an emotionally conflicted portrait of parenting, grief and depression. Can’t wait to see what Kent does in the future.

4. Wild

That Wild succeeds is mostly to the credit of Reese Witherspoon. The film, adapted by Nick Hornby from the book by Cheryl Strayed, is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée as a traditional Hollywood weeper. But Witherspoon’s performance refuses to let the film become emotionally overwrought. On film, Cheryl Strayed’s solo hiking of the Pacific Crest Trail could easily have been a one-trick show: flashback-based redemption story of a lost and lonely woman.

Instead, Witherspoon puts the film on her back along with her over-stuffed pack, and forces audiences into a fascinating exploration of memory, loss, recovery, and adventure. Vallée and his photographer Yves Bélanger do only as much they need to engage the audience. But they understand, wisely, that this is Reese Witherspoon’s show.

3. Under the Skin

Visually stunning and thematically confounding, simultaneously narcotizing and gripping, Under the Skin is an observational experiement that also contains the best performance of Scarlett Johansson’s career. The movie is weird-in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word-in its subject matter and its direction from Jonathon Glazer, which is minimalist in every sense of the word.

Watching the film is like banging on an impenetrable wall, behind which is the answer to all the mysteries of human behavior. It is frustrating and too much for some viewers to take. But for those who stick with it to the end, Under the Skin offers great, surprising rewards.

The previous three installments on this list also highlight one of the best years in recent memory for female roles in the movies. The women who anchored these three movies all gave brilliant-and very different-performances: Essie Davis’ manic, near-murderous anxiety, the haunting nature of Scarlett Johansson’s alien silence, and Reese Witherspoon’s mumbling in the wilderness only scratch the surface of a year dominated by incredible performances.

2. The Tale of Princess Kaguya

The Tale of Pincess Kaguya is the story of Takenoko, a magical girl found in a bamboo shoot who becomes the famous and unattainable Princess Kaguya. It took Isao Takahata eight years to hand-draw the animated film, but in another sense, he has worked on the project for a lifetime. Takahata first began work adapting the Japanese folktale “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” back in 1955.

It is possible that Princess Kaguya will be the final film from the master animators of Studio Ghibli (Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki were co-founders of the animation company). If so, Princess Kaguya represents a fitting end to an inspired, imaginative era in film. Kaguya mixes the innocence and beauty of childhood with the all wisdom and gravity that its 79-year-old creator can muster.

1. Boyhood

Richard Linklater’s 12-year long project has gotten a lot of accolades since it was released in July. And all of them are deserved. It is as ambitious a film project as one can conceive (just think of the pitch to financers for a 12-year commitment on a movie starring a 6-year old kid). The risk that Boyhood would fall apart at any point was real, but Linklater has said that one of his chief collaborators on Boyhood was ‘the unknown’, and that spirit of adventure more than paid off.

Linklater’s films have long understood that the everyday activities of our lives is the substance that comprises who we are. Throughout his career, Linklater has shown he is incapable of condescension or emotional manipulation. Here, his steady interrogation of life and time is combined with actual passage of more than a decade of human change and the resulting film is truly special. Boyhood is a rare work of cinema art, and the year’s best.

What did we miss? Let us know.

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