In 20 years it won't matter but it's hard to look at the 2016 Oscars and not think that they are overcompensating from the #Oscarssowhite controversy. If there were still only the traditional 5 nominees then they would probably line up with the Best Director nominees which means Fences, Hidden Figures and Lion would all be out. Luckily there were some quality movies featuring racially diverse casts that were released this year, rather than last year where the only two viable options were Idris Elba in a Netflix original film and Will Smith with a ridiculous accent. Yes, if Moonlight, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis missed out on nominations you could definitely cry racism. Weird thing is, in this year celebrating racial diversity they also nominated celebrated humanitarian Mel Gibson.
You can see my GABBY winners and nominees HERE
BEST PICTURE
You can see my GABBY winners and nominees HERE
BEST PICTURE
9. Lion - There's really no way I can ever judge this movie on its own merits. It's a Weinstein Company release, so right away I know that they care more about a movie's profitability and winning awards than they do about quality. It was also pushed out at the end of the year so it could be the last movie people watched when they were marking their ballots. By the time I got around to seeing it, I had already made my top 10 list and this movie just felt like homework. I watched it again for this blog and I still felt the same way. A young boy is separated from his home, he gets adopted by Australian parents, he grows up and uses Google Earth to find his birthplace. I found this true story pretty boring. I can imagine that the book, written by the real life Saroo Brierley, is probably more fascinating because we can get his feelings and thoughts as he's going on this journey but it's not that fun to watch a guy look on a map on a computer.
8. Fences - Denzel Washington directs and stars in a film adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize winning play. Both Washington and Viola Davis won Tonys when they starred in the play on Broadway in 2010 and now they bring it to the big screen. I can't argue that the acting in this film isn't tremendous but the movie seems like a filmed play rather than a cinematic experience. I'll stand by the acting nominations for Washington and Davis but it didn't really need to get a nod in this category. August Wilson's posthumous writing nomination seems like a cheat too as I don't think a word of the play was changed.
7. Arrival - A lot of people loved this film, I just liked it. Aliens come to Earth and this movie is less about panic from the aliens and more about trying to communicate with them to find out why they are here. It's very slow moving and only occasionally has moments where I could see what enamored people about the film. I've been a fan of director Denis Villeneuve since I saw Prisoners and Sicario and couldn't really figure out why this is the film that got him 8 Oscar nominations.
6. Hacksaw Ridge - Mel Gibson got himself out of movie jail with this WWII film about a pacifist in the army. Andrew Garfield plays a soldier who refuses to carry a weapon in combat because killing is against his religious beliefs. The first half of the movie takes place in boot camp where Garfield has to prove himself to his fellow soldiers and then the second half is some of the most brutal battle footage put to film. Gibson is a really great visual story teller and just like with other war films like Saving Private Ryan or Sands Of Iwo Jima, it's hard to watch the battle scenes and not feel for the men in the trenches scared to death.
5. Hidden Figures - This was a surprise end of the year hit. It's the true story of the black female mathematicians in the NASA space program in the 1960s. Their story hadn't really been told until now. They were hired because of their minds but since everyone was racist back then they still had to use segregated bathrooms and their ideas were not taken seriously because people with darker skin colors couldn't possibly solve problems as well as whites. There are some very silly aspects of the film, mostly biopic tropes like when they narrate the significance of what they are doing while they are doing it, but it is a crowd-pleaser and an enjoyable watch.
4. Hell Or High Water - This is a very fun but somber movie. It's about 2 bank robbers who steal money from the bank that has a reverse mortgage on their family home to pay off the mortgage. They treat it as a form of vigilante justice. They're being pursued by an old Texas ranger, played by Jeff Bridges in yet another one of his late career old cowboy characters, who is days away from retirement and thinks he has the boys figured out. It's a cat and mouse caper drama and I can completely see why people fell for it because it's about the 99% just trying to get what they feel like they are owed.
3. Moonlight - A boy's story is told in 3 stages of his life. He starts off as a young boy with a crack addicted mother and a drug dealing surrogate father, we then cut to him in high school where he is bullied while coming to terms with his homosexuality and then see him as an adult, he is now a drug dealer himself still holding on to the one moment where he thinks he found love. It's a pretty powerful film, it's like Boyhood without the gimmick of being filmed over a 15 year period. While I was watching it, I was incredibly moved by the story. I just wish it stayed with me. A day later I was trying to tell someone about the film but found it hard to remember key details. The lack of a definitive ending to the story probably added to that.
2. La La Land - This movie is its own worst enemy. It came out and people started loving it, hailing it as one of the greatest cinematic triumphs of all time. Then people started seeing it and just liking it but thinking maybe it was a little too over-hyped. Then some people started seeing it and not liking it at all, which made the people who loved it either angry or questioning their own feelings of the film. Maybe that was just my circle of friends but I got that sense from critics and bloggers as well. It's a throwback to the musicals of the 1930s. It has a fun Fred and Ginger feel to it and that's really all it should be seen as. Why does a movie have to be deeper than entertainment? Some movies try to make you feel a certain way or sway your opinion. Some movies are just fun. The plot is pretty weak and meaningless, Ryan Gosling wants to play jazz, he meets an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone, he sells out (slightly) by taking a job that doesn't completely uphold his musical convictions and their relationship plays out during all of this. The main purpose of the movie is to show modern audiences that old school entertainment still has value. There's no giant robots fighting each other or superheroes beating each other up it's just people singing and dancing, in long takes too so you can see their legs moving, just like Fred Astaire insisted in all of his movies. It's just fun.
1. Manchester By The Sea - I first came to know Kenneth Lonergan with 2000's You Can Count On Me, which I loved and thought was one of the most honest family dramas I've seen in a long time. I was fascinated by him because he also wrote The Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle that same year, which is a huge turd. Then I forgot about him for over a decade until watching this beautifully depressing film. I loved every minute of this, from the first moments I was filled with a sense of uneasiness, a foreboding of what I was in store for. There was a heaviness in my chest where I actually felt nervous for the characters even before I had been introduced to them. Casey Affleck plays an aimless handyman with an incredibly sad backstory, which I won't spoil. His brother dies and he is forced to look after his teenage nephew. It's sad, touching, heartwarming and secretly hilarious. Just like a funeral, you're sad but sometimes you just have to laugh.
So after 2015's controversy of #oscarssowhite, the academy kicked into high gear to nominate films with more racially diverse viewpoints. Luckily for them some quality films dealing with races other than Caucasian were released. They didn't have to resort to honoring Tyler Perry's Boo! A Madea Halloween. Going into the ceremony though it looked as if the whitest movie nominated was going to win it all. La La Land, a movie about white people loving jazz music, got 14 nominations (tying the record set by All About Eve and Titanic) and was poised to sweep, it won every category it was nominated for at the Golden Globes. But something happened between the Globes and Oscar night, maybe a slight backlash or maybe people just weren't falling in love with it as much as they thought they would or it could have been racially motivated. Moonlight is not only a story about a black man, he's a gay black man, he's a gay black man in an independent movie featuring an all black cast. This is the perfect movie that we liberals in Hollywood should honor. I'm not trying to take away from Moonlight's win, it's a very good film, but I really feel that the previous year's controversy led to it's victory.
I'm picking an entirely different movie. La La Land had me tapping my toes, Moonlight had me feeling sorry about my white middle-class privilege but Manchester By The Sea just hit me in the gut emotionally. Going in to the film you know it's a sad story but you have no idea how depressed you're going to feel until about half way through when it starts to demolish you with it's solemness. Because of the sadness of the film, you forget that is is also oddly uplifting and funny.
Oscar Winner: Moonlight
My Vote: Manchester By The Sea
GABBY Winner: Swiss Army Man
BEST ACTOR
5. Andrew Garfield - Hacksaw Ridge - Garfield plays a conscientious objector to WWII. He refuses to carry a weapon because he lives according to the ten commandments and "Thou shalt not kill" is a big one. He goes through boot camp and goes into combat as a medic and ends up saving a lot of lives by hiding people in the sand or kicking grenades back at the enemy. I didn't see a whole lot to the performance and his southern accent bothered me a little. The real star of the movie is Gibson's staging of the climactic battle.
4. Viggo Mortensen - Captain Fantastic - Viggo deserves an Oscar and I hope he gets one eventually. He just has to star in a movie that gets a Best Picture nomination. Currently he is amazing in movies that are just okay, like Eastern Promises, The Road and this. Here he plays a father who isolates his children, raises them in the woods without technology, religion or contact to the outside world other than books. When his wife dies, her family wants to give her a proper burial even though she wished to be cremated. Viggo takes his children to the funeral to interrupt it and along the way his parenting style is questioned while he questions others. He is really good in the film and makes it better than it should be but his performance is a little more understated than the next 3.
3. Ryan Gosling - La La Land - Gosling had to learn to sing, dance and play piano for his role as a jazz pianist in La La Land. Most would argue that he was better at the latter two. His singing voice is not entirely pleasant but he brings a naturalistic quality to his musical numbers. The dancing and piano playing are fantastic considering he was not a professional. I've always liked Gosling, going from his breakout role of a neo-Nazi in The Believer to his roles in The Notebook and Half Nelson to his current success. He also starred in one of my favorite movies of 2016, The Nice Guys. That movie combined with this role earn him a spot at #3, but he's just outdone by the next two actors.
2. Denzel Washington - Fences - If the award was for most acting then Denzel would have a lock on this category. In Fences he plays a garbage collector who is not the greatest of men but views himself to be. He was a talented baseball player in the Negro Leagues but never made it to the majors. He lives with his wife and son, he has a brother with a mental disorder and a son from a previous relationship that is constantly asking to borrow money. He is emotionally distant but works hard to support his family and then has a child with another woman through an extramarital affair. Washington does a good job of making this flawed man relatable without turning him into a villain or a hero, he's just a man who makes mistakes and lives with them.
1. Casey Affleck - Manchester By The Sea - Most of the heavy lifting is done by the script but Casey Affleck is terrific as an every man who, sometimes by his own actions and sometimes by unforeseeable circumstances, gets thrust into situations he doesn't want to take part in. He's a handyman at a building and lives his life day to day and drink to drink to numb the pain. We find out half way through the movie that he drunkenly started a fire that killed his children, ended his marriage and left him in a malaise. His brother dies and leaves him as the legal guardian to his teenage nephew. This man is sleepwalking through life and can't take care of himself much less another person and Affleck perfectly sells all sides to this character.
Casey Affleck was winning every acting award there was leading up to the Oscars, but then there was some blow back. Denzel Washington won the SAG award, which he had never won previously, and there were allegations of sexual harassment against Affleck. People were saying Washington had his 3rd Oscar sewn up but for me there was no beating Affleck here. His performance is understated and beautiful where it doesn't even seem like he is acting, it feels like a documentary. Washington is "Capital A - Acting" and that fits with the style of his movie but this is a performance that won him a Tony, not an Oscar. Also he's won twice before, once for Glory which was earned and once for Training Day which was partly a make up win, partly because Russell Crowe couldn't win two in a row and partly due to a negative campaign. See my thoughts on 2001 for more on that. It took Meryl Streep 30 years to win her 3rd Oscar I think the same rule should apply to Denzel.
Oscar Winner: Casey Affleck
My Vote: Casey Affleck
GABBY Winner: John Goodman for 10 Cloverfield Lane
BEST ACTRESS
5. Isabelle Huppert - Elle - As a rule, foreign language nominees always come in last place with me for a vote. It's nothing based on prejudice I just find it impossible to judge a foreign performance against an English speaking one. When I learn every language, watch every foreign movie that comes out and study inflections in those languages I will consider voting for Isabelle Huppert. Elle is a really good film though, a woman gets raped in her apartment by a masked man but instead of going to the police she just goes about her daily life. Huppert is really good as well but I'm sticking with my rules and placing her 5th although if the choice was only between Huppert and Streep I would pick Huppert.
4. Meryl Streep - Florence Foster Jenkins - Here's the yearly "Meryl Streep is in a movie so we might as well nominate her" nomination. This is her 20th nod and probably falls somewhere in the middle of her nominated performances. It's nowhere near as good as the great ones but slightly better than the really questionable ones. Here she plays a rich old lady who wants to be a singer but has little to no talent. Since she's rich and also suffering from Syphilis, her husband pays newspapers to say that she's great and she eventually develops a following from people who want to come gawk at the worst singer in the world. The movie is only so-so but Streep keeps it fun with a lively performance. Not something that needs to be nominated but every time Meryl makes a movie the Academy will at least watch it.
3. Natalie Portman - Jackie - Was I the only one thinking she was doing an Anna Faris impression more than a Jackie O? Portman plays the former first lady during the events before, after and during the JFK assassination. I didn't much care for the film but it is hard to watch Portman wash her husband's blood of her face and not think that this is an Oscar caliber performance.
2. Ruth Negga - Loving - I loved this movie. It's about Richard and Mildred Loving who were the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case that delegitimized state laws against interracial marriages. The great thing about the movie is that the couple doesn't want to be martyrs or even have attention paid to them. They just want to be left alone and live there lives with each other. Like when they get arrested and a civil rights lawyer wants to take on their case, they first ask if they can talk to the judge who made the law and reason with him. They don't see anything abnormal with how they live their lives, nor should they. Negga plays Mildred Loving, the black wife to a white man. She is fairly quiet throughout the movie but is really effective at playing an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances.
1. Emma Stone - La La Land - Stone plays an aspiring actress in LA who falls for a jazz musician. It's not a part that requires a lot of acting talent per se, but it does require a lot of star power. She has incredible chemistry with Ryan Gosling, dances with style, grace and skill and sings beautifully especially in her final number where she is left alone on screen.
Normally Emma Stone in La La Land wouldn't get my vote but in this category she is really the only option. Natalie Portman would be an easy pick if she hadn't already won, Streep can't win a 4th, Huppert could win but I would be against it and Negga isn't proven enough to win. It's actually in everyone's best interest if Stone wins here. Yes, if you ranked every Best Actress winning performance ever she would probably fall in the lower tier but Stone is poised to win at some point so might as well give it to her here in a weak category so she doesn't steal votes from someone else down the line.
Oscar Winner: Emma Stone
My Vote: Emma Stone
GABBY Winner: Sally Field for Hello My Name Is Doris
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
5. Lucas Hedges - Manchester By The Sea - It's hard to tell if Lucas Hedges is going to have a future in film so I would never want to give him an Oscar. It's possible that this is just a vote of confidence in future performances but sometimes nominees like this win and you end up with "Academy Award winning Jennifer Hudson". Anyway, Hedges is fine in the film, he plays the nephew of Casey Affleck who is forced to live with him after his dad dies. He also has a recovering alcoholic mother and is in his first sexual relationship and has absolutely no role models to look up to. Casey Affleck steals the show though so Hedges is out shined and I don't vote for actors in their first movie.
4. Dev Patel - Lion - A bit of category fraud here, Dev Patel plays Saroo as an adult. The movie is about this character's journey to find his birthplace. True, Patel shows up later in the film when the character has grown up, to that point he was played by the young and adorable Sunny Pawar, but is still the main character of the film despite missing the first hour. Patel is very charismatic and holds the last half of the movie together. Most of his performance takes place in his sad eyes, as he's explaining his journey or staring at a Google map. I liked him, the film didn't grab me though.
3. Michael Shannon - Nocturnal Animals - Oh boy, did I hate this movie. Jake Gyllenhaal writes a novel and gives it to his ex, Amy Adams. She reads the novel and we see it acted out where Gyllenhaal get carjacked by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and with help from Michael Shannon tracks him down. Even though I thought the movie was terrible I thought Michael Shannon was terrific. Why can't we honor a great performance in a terrible movie? Abe Vigoda was hilarious in Good Burger, give him a nomination. Shannon only exists in the novel being read in the film. He knows he's dying of cancer and is unapologetic about hunting down and murdering the people who committed the crime. When he finds the suspects he wants Gyllenhaal to kill them so he can feel better. He's so good that you wish the movie followed him through his adventures. I would vote for him but then Nocturnal Animals would be an Oscar winning film.
2. Mahershala Ali - Moonlight - This performance suffered from high expectations. Before I saw the film I heard that he was the front runner for the Oscar. Now that he won, I can only imagine that future audiences will feel the same way. So Moonlight is about a boy named Chiron in 3 stages of his life. Ali only appears in the first 3rd of the film. He plays Juan, a drug dealer who finds Chiron hiding from bullies. He lets the boy stay with him, gives him some life advice, yells at his mom for smoking the crack that he sold to her, tells the boy that it's okay to be gay and then disappears from the movie. I kept waiting for some type of epilogue to the character that never came so by the end of the movie I almost completely forgot about him. He's good in the role but I don't see the need for him to win.
1. Jeff Bridges - Hell Or High Water - And then we have Jeff Bridges, what a weird career trajectory. He started in the 70s playing young good looking guys in movies like The Last Picture Show then graduated to handsome leading man status with films like Starman then graduated to good looking older character actor like in Seabscuit then just segued into crazy old coot. He seems to enjoy playing the old cowboys and sometimes has fun aping his image like in R.I.P.D. In Hell Or High Water he takes what could have been a stock character and creates a 3-dimensional person. He's an old Texas ranger just days away from retirement on his final case. There's a string of bank robberies and he is trying to find the pattern to track down the culprits, sometimes he's one step ahead and sometimes he's following a bad lead. He's a bit of a co-lead but I consider him supporting because the movie mainly follows the story of the two bank robbers. I would have much rather seen Ben Foster get nominated but since he's here instead I find myself compelled to vote for him above the rest.
I don't really like any of these choices. Bridges is my favorite performance but he won before so I want to look elsewhere for a vote but everyone else has reasons for me not to vote for them. Hedges is an unproven talent, Ali's performance gets lost after his character is gone, Shannon is in a terrible film and Patel didn't do much of anything for me. I'll vote Bridges just because he was my favorite, he's a good enough actor to have 2 Oscars and a vote for him is a vote for the film. I like the win for Ali only because he was the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar and won in the midst of President Trump's "Muslim Ban".
Oscar Winner: Mahershala Ali
My Vote: Jeff Bridges
GABBY Winner: Ben Foster for Hell Or High Water
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
5. Octavia Spencer - Hidden Figures - This nomination I just don't understand. They could have gone with Janelle Monae who has the 2nd most interesting story, behind Taraji P. Henson, but instead they went with Octavia Spencer who barely factors into the plot. She's a strong woman who becomes a supervisor at NASA because she's the only one who knows how the computers work. I'm not knocking Octavia's performance, which is perfectly fine, but of all the subplots in the film hers was the least memorable to me.
4. Nicole Kidman - Lion - This is one of those instances where she's only here because she's Nicole Kidman and she's in a Best Picture nominee. The part is substantial without being incredibly memorable. She plays the main character's adoptive mother. She's very sweet and nurturing to her new son but you can see, especially when they adopt another son with developmental issues, that she gets stressed as well. Then we see her older and her son is searching for his real parents. She's a tad upset but understanding, and that's the whole part. She's perfectly fine in the role but if she wasn't Nicole Kidman and someone like Ann Dowd played the role, I don't think she would have been nominated.
2. Naomie Harris - Moonlight - Harris plays the main character's mother and is the only actor to appear in all 3 segments of Moonlight. We first see her smoking crack and ignoring her paternal responsibilities and we finally see her in rehab reconciling with her son, who is now a drug dealer. She does a great job of aging with the character and is very effective in her scenes with no dialogue.
1. Viola Davis - Fences - Davis plays the supportive wife to Denzel Washington. She has almost as much screen time as Denzel and could be considered lead, she won a lead actress Tony for the same role, but I think she fits better in this category. She stands by her man even when he is unreasonable but then stands up to him when it becomes too much. She has one scene in particular where she is acting so hard that snot comes out her nose. Everyone in this movie is acting to the rafters but Davis finds a nice balance between film acting and stage acting.
This is tough. Viola Davis is good enough to win and has earned an Oscar already from her previous nominations for Doubt and The Help. This is a perfect time to finally give her one. Problem is, Naomie Harris and Michelle Williams are also good enough to win and Williams has definitely earned an Oscar from her previous nominations. I'm siding with the Academy and picking Davis but really hope that both Harris and Williams get another shot, it will stink if this is the last chance they get.
Oscar Winner: Viola Davis
My Vote: Viola Davis
GABBY Winner: Molly Shannon for Other People
Best Director
Damien Chazelle becomes the youngest person to win this award, for La La Land. The amount of time, precision and passion he put into this film earns the award. He's in some great company too. Barry Jenkins for crafting the performances of 3 actors playing the same character in Moonlight, Mel Gibson for the gory battle scenes in Hacksaw Ridge, Kenneth Lonergan for the devastating emotional scenes in Manchester By The Sea and Denis Villeneuve for the alien communications in Arrival.
Best Original Screenplay/Adapted Screenplay
Manchester By The Sea wins Original which is the best choice in the category. Hell Or High Water would have been a good choice but no movie hit me emotionally like Manchester and since Lonergan wasn't going to win Director this was the best way to reward his work. Moonlight wins adapted. There was some confusion as to what category the script fit in before nominations were announced but as soon as the decision was made to put Moonlight in the adapted category there was no contest as to what would win, it easily out-surpasses Arrival, Fences, Hidden Figures and Lion.
Best Animated Feature
Tough category this year and no Pixar nominee. Finding Dory was eligible but couldn't hold up to its Oscar winning predecessor. It's hard for me to decide which movie I liked better, Kubo And The Two Strings, Moana or Zootopia. I think I side with the Academy in picking Zootopia.
Best Foreign Language Film
I haven't seen any of the nominees but kept hearing that Toni Erdmann was one of the greatest films ever made. Unfortunately for that movie, the director of The Salesman decided that he wouldn't fly to America in protest of Donald Trump so probably picked up a lot of votes because of it.
Best Documentary Feature
An almost 8 hour miniseries wins. O.J.: Made In America is a fascinating look at race and celebrity in the United States told through the lens of football star, actor and suspected murderer O.J. Simpson. The Oscars made a special rule to deem it eligible which almost assured its victory.
Best Original Score/Song
There was no beating La La Land for Original Score and none of the other nominees were in the same league. The song category I will take umbrage with though. La La Land got two nominations for Audition (The Fools Who Dream) and City Of Stars, which won. City Of Stars is the centerpiece song of the film but by no means the most memorable tune of the movie, that, for me, would be Start A Fire. Justin Hurwitz who wrote the song and did the score was already poised to win 1 award, they could have given the song win to Lin-Manuel Miranda for How Far I'll Go from Moana.
Best Sound Editing/Sound Mixing
What, what? Musicals always win in the sound category. We should have seen the troubles in the water when La La Land failed to win either award. Instead Arrival wins in the sound editing category and Hacksaw Ridge wins in the sound mixing category. Also, this was Kevin O'Connell's 20th sound nomination and he finally got a win this year for Hacksaw Ridge. Also, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi is now an Academy Award nominated film.
Best Production Design/Cinematography
La La Land deservedly wins both awards. A friend of mine, who hated La La Land, scoffed at the production design award because it took place mostly in Los Angeles apartments and I had to remind him that the sets would have had to be built specifically so the cameras could navigate within them in single takes. So take that, unnamed friend of mine with no sense of whimsy.
Best Makeup And Hairstyling
It's official, we now have to say "Academy Award winning Suicide Squad". I don't know what A Man Called Ove is but I would rather vote for it over this horribly constructed, disjointed superhero film. Star Trek Beyond was also nominated and would have been the classier choice.
Best Costume Design
Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them wins. I would have thought re-creating the pill box hat in Jackie would have been a shoo-in. This is the one category where I can safely say that La La Land did not need to be nominated.
Best Film Editing
This was the big category where we should have seen the tides turning against La La Land. The Best Picture almost always wins here, especially if a sweep is on. Instead they gave it to Hacksaw Ridge which is realistically a better choice.
Best Visual Effects
I almost thought that the visual effects in The Jungle Book were too good. The animals all looked too real which didn't give them any human characteristics. By which I mean, when Mowgli is hugging a bear it looks like he is hugging a bear and not a cuddly Disney creature. I guess that was the point, but I would have voted for Doctor Strange.
Up Next
2001
My Vote: Viola Davis
GABBY Winner: Molly Shannon for Other People
Best Director
Damien Chazelle becomes the youngest person to win this award, for La La Land. The amount of time, precision and passion he put into this film earns the award. He's in some great company too. Barry Jenkins for crafting the performances of 3 actors playing the same character in Moonlight, Mel Gibson for the gory battle scenes in Hacksaw Ridge, Kenneth Lonergan for the devastating emotional scenes in Manchester By The Sea and Denis Villeneuve for the alien communications in Arrival.
Best Original Screenplay/Adapted Screenplay
Manchester By The Sea wins Original which is the best choice in the category. Hell Or High Water would have been a good choice but no movie hit me emotionally like Manchester and since Lonergan wasn't going to win Director this was the best way to reward his work. Moonlight wins adapted. There was some confusion as to what category the script fit in before nominations were announced but as soon as the decision was made to put Moonlight in the adapted category there was no contest as to what would win, it easily out-surpasses Arrival, Fences, Hidden Figures and Lion.
Best Animated Feature
Tough category this year and no Pixar nominee. Finding Dory was eligible but couldn't hold up to its Oscar winning predecessor. It's hard for me to decide which movie I liked better, Kubo And The Two Strings, Moana or Zootopia. I think I side with the Academy in picking Zootopia.
Best Foreign Language Film
I haven't seen any of the nominees but kept hearing that Toni Erdmann was one of the greatest films ever made. Unfortunately for that movie, the director of The Salesman decided that he wouldn't fly to America in protest of Donald Trump so probably picked up a lot of votes because of it.
Best Documentary Feature
An almost 8 hour miniseries wins. O.J.: Made In America is a fascinating look at race and celebrity in the United States told through the lens of football star, actor and suspected murderer O.J. Simpson. The Oscars made a special rule to deem it eligible which almost assured its victory.
Best Original Score/Song
There was no beating La La Land for Original Score and none of the other nominees were in the same league. The song category I will take umbrage with though. La La Land got two nominations for Audition (The Fools Who Dream) and City Of Stars, which won. City Of Stars is the centerpiece song of the film but by no means the most memorable tune of the movie, that, for me, would be Start A Fire. Justin Hurwitz who wrote the song and did the score was already poised to win 1 award, they could have given the song win to Lin-Manuel Miranda for How Far I'll Go from Moana.
Best Sound Editing/Sound Mixing
What, what? Musicals always win in the sound category. We should have seen the troubles in the water when La La Land failed to win either award. Instead Arrival wins in the sound editing category and Hacksaw Ridge wins in the sound mixing category. Also, this was Kevin O'Connell's 20th sound nomination and he finally got a win this year for Hacksaw Ridge. Also, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi is now an Academy Award nominated film.
Best Production Design/Cinematography
La La Land deservedly wins both awards. A friend of mine, who hated La La Land, scoffed at the production design award because it took place mostly in Los Angeles apartments and I had to remind him that the sets would have had to be built specifically so the cameras could navigate within them in single takes. So take that, unnamed friend of mine with no sense of whimsy.
Best Makeup And Hairstyling
It's official, we now have to say "Academy Award winning Suicide Squad". I don't know what A Man Called Ove is but I would rather vote for it over this horribly constructed, disjointed superhero film. Star Trek Beyond was also nominated and would have been the classier choice.
Best Costume Design
Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them wins. I would have thought re-creating the pill box hat in Jackie would have been a shoo-in. This is the one category where I can safely say that La La Land did not need to be nominated.
Best Film Editing
This was the big category where we should have seen the tides turning against La La Land. The Best Picture almost always wins here, especially if a sweep is on. Instead they gave it to Hacksaw Ridge which is realistically a better choice.
Best Visual Effects
I almost thought that the visual effects in The Jungle Book were too good. The animals all looked too real which didn't give them any human characteristics. By which I mean, when Mowgli is hugging a bear it looks like he is hugging a bear and not a cuddly Disney creature. I guess that was the point, but I would have voted for Doctor Strange.
Up Next
2001
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