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Review: 2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts (from LA Weekly)

On Oscar day, it’s not unusual for a movie critic to receive several (slightly frantic) text messages from friends seeking advice on the office awards pool: “What will win Best Live-Action Short? Best Short Doc? Best Animation Short? Help!”

Although your nearest critic pal is always glad to help, this year, you can see the nominated shorts for yourself. All the films in each of the three categories begin screening this week at quite a few L.A. area theaters — look hard, there’s one near you. Here’s a round-up of the nominees, with office pool tips, of course.

 

Best Live Action Short

Brotherhood: In this complex drama, a Tunisian father wonders if the son who’s returned from Syria with a pregnant Syrian wife fought for the Islamic State, and if so, what it means for the family.

Nefta Football Club: In this fable-like tale, two brothers come upon a donkey wandering the Tunisian desert carrying a pack full of white powder. The little brother is sure its laundry detergent. (It’s not.) The final shot is a delight, and for the directors, a triumph.

The Neighbor’s Window: A young couple with a growing family becomes obsessed with the sexy, seemingly carefree couple in the apartment across the street. The surprising final scene is beautifully acted by Juliana Canfield and Maria Dizzia, who’s currently starring in What the Constitution Means to Me at the Mark Taper Forum. Director Marshall Curry is a three-time Documentary Short nominee.

Saria: Based on 2017 fire that killed 41 girls at a horribly managed state-run Guatemalan orphanage, this muddled narrative drama centers on two sisters and their attempt to escape the home in the days before the tragedy. The filmmaking is exquisite but the storytelling lacks specificity.

A Sister: A Belgian 911 operator receives a call from a woman traveling in a car with a man who’s dangerous. A tight, well-told story that nonetheless feels slightly undercooked.

Our vote: Brotherhood

Office pool pick: The Neighbor’s Window

 

Best Documentary Short Subject

In The Absence: On April 16, 2014, a ferry began to sink off the coast of South Korea. The Coast Guard did nothing and eventually over 300 people died, including 250 high school students. In this superbly edited documentary, archival footage, including damning audio of indifferent government officials, track the makings of a tragedy.

Learning To Skateboard In A Warzone (If You’re A Girl): In Kabul, the school called “Skateistan” provides a safe place for the girls and boys of Afghanistan to read, write and learn how to skateboard. And hopefully, also learn to dream big(ger) dreams. The filmmakers focus on the girls, charmers all, and their hope-filled mothers. Slightly overlong, but truly inspiring.

Life Overtakes Me: This haunting doc looks at several refugee families in Sweden in which the children, traumatized by the events that caused the family to emigrate, have retreated into a coma-like silence. A deeply disturbing story. Available on Netflix.

St. Louis Superman: An aching look at the life of Bruce Franks Jr., the St. Louis battle rapper turned Black Lives Matter leader who was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives. Co-produced by MTV Films, this is a painfully intimate film about a man who’s constantly lifting others while struggling to bear the weight of history — his own, and that of his community.

Walk Run Cha-cha: Co-produced by The New York Times, this moving documentary is most interesting in the way that it uses voice-over to tell the story of Paul and Millie Cho, who spend their days ballroom dancing — to make up for the years they lost when separated by traumas of the Vietnam War.

Our vote: In the Absence

Office pool pick: Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone 

 

Best Animated Short Film

Dcera (Daughter): This Czech stop-motion animated short about a daughter trying to come to terms with the pending death of the father she loves but has never truly known has deep emotional currents and visual style to match.

Hair Love: A father struggling to fill in for his wife must style his daughter’s Afro-textured hair for the first time, a challenge he faces with a delightful mix of love and pure terror.

Kitbull: An alley cat cautiously befriends a mistreated pit bull in this marvelous Pixar produced short. Available on Disney Plus.

Memorable: A painter feels his world slipping away to Alzheimer’s in this gorgeous stop-motion French short. We see what he sees — a world dissolving into Escher landscapes and swirling Van Gogh skies.

Sister: The third of this year’s stop-motion nominees is the story of a brother and sister growing up in China. They drive each other crazy, but also couldn’t live without each other. The twist is heartbreaking.

Our pick: Memorable 

Office pool pick: Hair Love

 

-Chuck Wilson

Oscar nominations: quick reaction thoughts

Well, once again, they snubbed Barbra. Bastards.

Relieved FENCES did so well. Thrilled about August Wilson. Thrilled for Ruth Negga in LOVING, and sad but not surprised about Joel Edgerton, whose performance is a thing of beauty. LOVING is a future classic----the movie audiences have yet to discover, and will watch again and again thru the years. Should have been up for screenplay. Not surprised about Mel Gibson. He's a pig but he knows how to make a movie (and how to hire a great crew.) He stole it from LION's Garth Davis. (LION bored me silly after the first section; I thought it would never end.) (I don't love MANCHESTER much either, beyond Affleck's typically beautiful work.) Glad for Andrew Garfield. Bummed for Hugh Grant. Bummed for Adam Driver but blame A24's foolish Dec. 28 release date. No one saw it, plus the Academy doesn't understand that kind of performance. (Ya gotta have a gimmick.) Amy Adams? Well, maybe she's relieved. Six losses in a row would be brutal. (Like Leo, when she finally wins, it'll be for the wrong movie.) Annette Bening---I'm not a fan of "20th Century Women" (it's such a "movie") but she must be bummed. (She'll get an Honorary Oscar soon.) Sad for Taraji P. Henson. She deserves to win---that's a classic Academy performance. In another time, Kevin Costner would have been a lock. Not surprised about SILENCE or Scorsese though the Cinematography nod is nice. (The Cinematography branch does nice things, like the time they nominated SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS.) SILENCE is not a screener movie---they never finished it (if they even put it in the player). Nominating Viggo Mortensen for Actor is a lovely surprise---the sweet spot nom of the day. (His son in CAPTAIN FANTASTIC, George MacKay, IS that movie.) Wish they had found a spot for Krisha Fairchild, whose work in KRISHA, is staggering.

O.J.: MADE IN AMERICA is the best documentary ever made for television, but still....it's a TV show, kids, and always was. (It'll be fun to see if its genius PR team can pull off Emmy noms next September.)

Nine Best Picture nominees. Absurd. If you nominate everyone, how does it mean anything? When the Academy went up from five Beat Picture nominees, they ruined the brand. When you have to check an app to remember the Best Picture nominees---instead of ticking them off on your hand---meaning has been lost. (Chuck Wilson)

 

 

OSCARS 2016

It's weird to me that the Hudlin/Hill produced Oscars is getting good reviews by so many smart people. There were funny moments to be sure—Chris Rock's opening monologue was downright subversive—but not including Latino and Asian artists in the show's "conversation" was an epic fail. One step forward, two steps back. (Chuck Wilson)

10 Favorite Films of 2014 (sorry this is so late!!)

 

1.    A MASTER BUILDER

2.   THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

3.  GET ON UP

4.  IT FELT LIKE LOVE (streaming on Netflix)

5.  THE DROP

6.  WHIPLASH

7. STRANGER BY THE LAKE

8. NIGHTCRAWLER

9. INHERENT VICE

10. BLUE RUIN

 

Actor: Chadwick Boseman, "Get On Up"

Actress: Julianne Moore, "Still Alice"

Supporting Actor:Stellan Skarsgård "Nymphomaniac"

Supporting Actress: Lisa Joyce, "A Master Builder"

Two Minute Oscars

 from INTERVIEW magazine online

by Sheila Benson & Chuck Wilson

Interview began awarding our own Oscars for greatness in extremely small packages in 1981, because if we didn't, who would? And although Steve Buscemi, Delroy Lindo and Brooke Smith were among that first crop of "unknowns," the idea wasn't to scout Stars of Tomorrow.  It was to celebrate actors who deliver a fully rounded character with the fewest strokes, to recognize the uphill years behind such indelible bursts of energy—and to give a shout-out to tenacity and to keeping on keeping on (hullo there, Margo Martindale! howdy Gene Jones!).

Since 1981, we have had years when directors and, more crucially, writers (although not the Coen brothers, and certainly not Mike Leigh), did away with deftly written small parts in favor of The Girl, The Guy and Her Girlfriend. Not today: filmmakers have suddenly rediscovered the ensemble and the power of filigree, and in 2008, ten of the niftiest of these were:

1. Katrina Fernandez as the fiery Flamenco teacher from Seville in Happy-Go-Lucky, who attempts to ignite gypsy passion in an after-work class of 40-ish, amiable, willing English puddings.  With her back arched, her red heels drumming dangerously, her syntax a wonder of its own, she's a figure of implacable dignity, until thoughts of her private life blindside her and she's wracked with the pent-up fury of a woman betrayed. Her shift from devastating comedy to sheer devastation is jaw-dropping. Hola! Fernandez, a thoroughly English actress, who learned Flamenco at the same time she evolved her singular accent and her ferocious assault on all things British.

2. Jennifer Coolidge in Soul Men as Rosalee, a San Antonio gal who gives Bernie Mac the surprise of his life when he picks her up and brings her back to his hotel room. Coolidge, ever fearless, ever joyous, throws Mac down on the bed, shimmies her blissfully prodigious bosom in his face and then offers him a glimpse of private paradise—a sight that prompts the late, great Mac to utter a line too raunchy to repeat and too funny to miss.

3. Bob L. Harris uses the law, not a six-shooter, to cut a murderous cattle baron (Jeremy Irons) down to size in Appaloosa. As a traveling circuit court judge, Harris, with his white hair, beard, and barely concealed impatience for two-faced power brokers, appears to be channeling the late Robert Altman. If it strikes you that Harris has scored Appaloosa's funniest line—a bit of business about "bees in the honey"—credit the film's director and star, Ed Harris, who is smart enough to give his daddy the last word.

4. Deborah Harry doesn't appear until the final moments of Elegy, but we've had plenty of time to wonder about her, especially as marriage seems to have brought only crumbs from her husband Dennis Hopper. He's a Pulitzer-prize poet, who, when he's not writing, is busy as the "earthly confessor" of his best friend and celebrated academic (Ben Kingsley), regarding his complicated love life (Penelope Cruz.) Elegy's subtext is the imminence of death, but when it comes suddenly, Harry's wry, mature delivery of the moment's pivotal line reveals how deep her character's knowledge has been—and how canny director Isabel Coixet was to choose an actress with her own depths to draw on.

5. Greta Scacchi, Italian born herself, brings warmth and worldliness to the role of Cara, the Italian mistress of the aging Englishman, Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), who long ago fled the stately manor that haunts Brideshead Revisited. A woman who sees all, Cara uses a beachside picnic to advise the social-climbing Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) to "tread lightly" with the heart of Marchmain's son Sebastian (Ben Whishaw), whose intense affection for Charles is, Cara suspects, more than "just a phase." As Charles runs off to romp in the surf with Sebastian and his sister, Scacchi shifts, in the blink of an eye, from a look of optimism to one haunted by knowledge of how such stories tend to play out.

6. Stacey Keach as the Reverend Earle in W, gives a born-again, yet still uncertain George W. Bush a lesson in the glories of political power and godliness which, Keach unwinkingly manages to suggest, are two sides of the same coin (in Texas, at least).   It might just be this unwieldy film's best-written scene, not least for the Reverend's irony-free warning to the newly sober future president that, "The Christian life is not a constant high."

7.  Andre Blake in Rachel Getting Married seems almost lit from within as he does the hair of Kym (Anne Hathaway) his former rehab-mate, the day before her sister's wedding.  Facing his methadone muse, as though reciting the Lives of the Saints, he reminds Kym of each of the acts of courage she'd confided to her not-very-secret diary: pulling her sister Rachel through bulimia, overcoming assault by a beloved uncle.  It was her strength, he swears, that led him to utterly change his life. Unfortunately, getting swept up in "their" story makes him oblivious to Kym's dawning horror; she'd made up every lurid detail, and the "bulimic" bride-to-be is just two chairs away.  In the family fracas that follows, only the stylist remains unscathed, still deluded, still blissfully innocent.

8. Stanley Townsend's nightmarish Tramp in Happy-Go-Lucky marks the only time we've used two actors from the same movie, yet we couldn't omit the depths of Townsend's compassionate, detailed portrait of this universally tragic figure.  Clearly living in at least three worlds at once, the Tramp exists to test Poppy's conviction, not that all people are good, but that they all deserve to be listened to. There are moments when she and we are equally afraid that this hulking, bearish man, driven mad by we don't know what, will swipe at her with one huge hand and leave her crumpled among these ruined buildings.  Or worse.  Yet, when he presses a question to her in his made-up gibberish, and she agrees with him, quietly, eye-to-eye, he subsides.  He wants only connection, and after he shambles off, Poppy totters away, aware of how narrowly her ideals have beaten the odds, this time.


9. Elias Koteas has a delicate, sorrowful dignity as Mr. Cake, the blind Clockmaker who starts everything (backward) in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Mr. Cake keeps to his work of building a huge clock for installation at a vast New Orleans train station even while his son goes off to World War I. Clambering around its works, adjusting only by touch, Mr. Cake makes a fateful adjustment when that only son is killed, a moment Koteas hits like a plangent grace note.  At the ceremonial unveiling, Cake's whole being seems steeped in mourning as he reveals the secret to his clock's backwardness: "So that perhaps the boys lost in the war might come home again" through his recaptured hours. In Koteas' hands the film's semi-magical beauty and gentle rumination are perfectly sustained, even to his fairytale exit, rowing out on a cerulean sea.

10. Lena Olin is The Reader's steely unforgiving voice, she speaks for those who were in "the camps," Auschwitz et al.  At the film's coda, Ralph Fiennes seeks out this survivor in New York, to present her with a death bequest from a former guard on the Woman's block that housed her and her mother. Now obviously living well, Olin is ramrod stiff and withering: she will not participate even marginally in such expiation, not for Fiennes, never for a Nazi. "Go to the theatre, if you want catharsis," she suggests.  She unbends just one millimeter at the sight of the guard's  battered little tin box; that she will keep, that everyday link to her past—and her mother's.  In a film whose messages about guilt are, to put it politely, murky, Olin's centering clarity comes like a clearing of the skies.

 

Find This Article:  http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/two-minute-oscars/

05:51 PM in Oscars | Permalink | Comments (62)

"You've never seen a room with so many famous people. It's like being repeatedly slapped with PEOPLE magazine."

(Conan O'Brian Show, 2/22/08)

I was a waiter at the 1988 Academy Awards Governors Ball, the post-show dinner that’s meant to feed and amuse the weary stars and Academy members who’ve been sitting dutifully inside the auditorium for hours. Unfed and overdressed, they come out of that theatre as beleaguered and disillusioned as a recruited audience at a sitcom taping. To find me: the world’s worst waiter. Although it’s a fact I all too often forget, the truth is that I cannot move and think at the same time. (Ask me, at the next party, about the four days I parked cars at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not pretty.) All I really remember about my experience serving at the Governors Ball is the collective dismay of Oscar host Chevy Chase and director John Boorman when their long delayed hot meal arrived cold to the touch. That lumpy, gravy-drenched chicken looked ghastly, and must have felt like the final insult for Boorman, whose magnificent and deeply personal film, Hope and Glory, had just lost in five major categories. As a movielover, I was insulted for him. Looking back all these years later, I pray I didn’t tell him so directly. (I probably did.) As for Chase, he was miserable but trying hard to be genial. He looked so tired. I remember him looking down at the plate I'd set before him and saying, “This is cold,” which prompted me to gibber apologetically and go racing back to the incredibly chaotic kitchen, whereupon I burst through the swinging doors and shouted, with pure hysteria, “Chevy Chase’s chicken is cold!”

 

 

 

The five films nominated for Animated Short in this year's Oscars are all terrific. I'd vote for the gorgeous Russian entry, "My Love" by Alexander Petrov. It is magnificent. But there's no denying that Josh Raskin's "I Met the Walrus" is destined to be a classic in the literature of John Lennon and The Beatles. It might just win. Lennon would certainly have loved it; I bet Yoko and Sean sure do. Below is the trailer for "Walrus" and also the first nine (unsubtitled) minutes of the 30-minute "My Love". The Live Action Shorts didn't thrill me, but Daniel Barber's "The Tonto Woman", based on an old Elmore Leonard Western short story, is very fine, and left me wishing it was a feature length film. You can see a key scene from it in the video below. All the Live Action & Animated Shorts will play as part of a Magnolia Pictures release opening this Friday, the 15th, in some 50 U.S. cities. Check here to see if it's coming to your town: http://www.magpictures.com/

                                      

For a show built around a room full of out-sized egos, the Screen Actors Guild Awards is the friendliest and sanest of TV awards show. The SAGs have only been broadcast for a few years now, but so far, they’ve managed to keep the show low-key and very much a celebration of all things union, although it could be said that handing the stage over to a ham like Mickey Rooney (bless him) was not the best of ideas…

     The SAG Awards is the only show in town that reveres the elderly, and god love ‘em for that. The lifetime achievement presentation to the great Charles Durning was SAG at its best — the Academy would never stoop to honor a character actor — and it got me all teary. What a beautiful career. (They should give it to Ned Beatty next.) Durning looked so frail trying to make it up the stage stairs (why is there never a ramp?), and then he gets up there and turns out to be slyer than anyone in the room. It was nice too to see Burt Reynolds doing such a non-jokey, heartfelt presentation. Old school rascals, those two. I think that going out to dinner with Charles Durning and Burt Reynolds (and their buddy Charles Nelson Reilly too, before his passing) would be one joyous, laugh-filled night. (Why hasn’t Burt Reynolds written a memoir? There’s a man with a trunk-full of great stories. Remember him on Johnny Carson? So sexy and crazy. He had more life in him then than Johnny Deep, Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington combined. Today's movie stars, let’s face it, are just no fun.)

     Loving the aging masters extended to Ruby Dee, who won supporting actress for providing American Gangster with its one moment of real emotion, but they shut out Into the Wild’s Hal Holbrook, who didn't look surprised and who smiled gamely as Durning and Dee won prizes after his loss. There’s no question that Javier Bardem deserves to win awards for No Country for Old Men — it’s a classic performance — but Holbrook’s work in Into the Wild is transcendent. Bardem is a gifted and genuinely soulful actor — he should have won an Oscar (not even nominated) for his devastating work in The Sea Inside — but he’s young still and handsome as all get out and will have many more chances at prizes. Not so Mr. Holbrook, who brought a lifetime's worth of craft to that magnificent pickup truck scene with Emile Hirsch. It’s up to you, Academy.

     Julie Christie is a fine actress and Hollywood royalty, but not naming Marion Cotillard Best Actress for her blistering and downright terrifying performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose is incomprehensible. Imagine if Meryl Streep hadn’t won the Oscar for Sophie’s Choice or DeNiro for Raging Bull. Snubbing Cotillard is on that level. (Cotillard’s mistake was in not hiring a decent publicist.) Which isn’t to say that Christie isn’t superb in Away from Her, but I get the feeling that all these awards to her have less to do with the performance and more to do with the fact that Christie holds Hollywood at bay. She dared to abandon her career and go off and get an actual life — the great Hollywood dream— and now that she's back, ever so briefly, they don’t want to miss the chance to reel her back in, to make her as greedy for gold as the rest of us. More beautiful than ever, she looked amazing tonight — love that vest — but for me, the telling moment came when she thanked a Lions Gate exec for forcing her to attend tonight’s show. Damn right. I can almost hear the poor bastard, pacing back and forth, cell phone jammed to his aching ear: “Julie, you must attend the SAGs. If you don’t show up to accept the award you won’t win the Oscar!” And so, lo and behold, there she was. Funny how that works.

     P.S.: I felt kinda sorry for Tom Cruise. What a lukewarm reception he got when he came out to present the final award. He’s a nut, but he’s also one of the last great movie stars, and good grief, he hasn’t killed anyone. (Far as we know…)

-Chuck Wilson

Nathan Lane on going to the Oscars:

"You've never seen a room with so many famous people. It's like being repeatedly slapped with PEOPLE magazine."

(Conan O'Brian Show, 2/22/08)

OSCAR & ME

I was a waiter at the 1988 Academy Awards Governors Ball, the post-show dinner that’s meant to feed and amuse the weary stars and Academy members who’ve been sitting dutifully inside the auditorium for hours. Unfed and overdressed, they come out of that theatre as beleaguered and disillusioned as a recruited audience at a sitcom taping. To find me: the world’s worst waiter. Although it’s a fact I all too often forget, the truth is that I cannot move and think at the same time. (Ask me, at the next party, about the four days I parked cars at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not pretty.) All I really remember about my experience serving at the Governors Ball is the collective dismay of Oscar host Chevy Chase and director John Boorman when their long delayed hot meal arrived cold to the touch. That lumpy, gravy-drenched chicken looked ghastly, and must have felt like the final insult for Boorman, whose magnificent and deeply personal film, Hope and Glory, had just lost in five major categories. As a movielover, I was insulted for him. Looking back all these years later, I pray I didn’t tell him so directly. (I probably did.) As for Chase, he was miserable but trying hard to be genial. He looked so tired. I remember him looking down at the plate I'd set before him and saying, “This is cold,” which prompted me to gibber apologetically and go racing back to the incredibly chaotic kitchen, whereupon I burst through the swinging doors and shouted, with pure hysteria, “Chevy Chase’s chicken is cold!”

 

 

 

3 Short Film Oscar Nominees

The five films nominated for Animated Short in this year's Oscars are all terrific. I'd vote for the gorgeous Russian entry, "My Love" by Alexander Petrov. It is magnificent. But there's no denying that Josh Raskin's "I Met the Walrus" is destined to be a classic in the literature of John Lennon and The Beatles. It might just win. Lennon would certainly have loved it; I bet Yoko and Sean sure do. Below is the trailer for "Walrus" and also the first nine (unsubtitled) minutes of the 30-minute "My Love". The Live Action Shorts didn't thrill me, but Daniel Barber's "The Tonto Woman", based on an old Elmore Leonard Western short story, is very fine, and left me wishing it was a feature length film. You can see a key scene from it in the video below. All the Live Action & Animated Shorts will play as part of a Magnolia Pictures release opening this Friday, the 15th, in some 50 U.S. cities. Check here to see if it's coming to your town: http://www.magpictures.com/

Random thoughts on the Screen Actors Guild Awads

                                      

For a show built around a room full of out-sized egos, the Screen Actors Guild Awards is the friendliest and sanest of TV awards show. The SAGs have only been broadcast for a few years now, but so far, they’ve managed to keep the show low-key and very much a celebration of all things union, although it could be said that handing the stage over to a ham like Mickey Rooney (bless him) was not the best of ideas…

     The SAG Awards is the only show in town that reveres the elderly, and god love ‘em for that. The lifetime achievement presentation to the great Charles Durning was SAG at its best — the Academy would never stoop to honor a character actor — and it got me all teary. What a beautiful career. (They should give it to Ned Beatty next.) Durning looked so frail trying to make it up the stage stairs (why is there never a ramp?), and then he gets up there and turns out to be slyer than anyone in the room. It was nice too to see Burt Reynolds doing such a non-jokey, heartfelt presentation. Old school rascals, those two. I think that going out to dinner with Charles Durning and Burt Reynolds (and their buddy Charles Nelson Reilly too, before his passing) would be one joyous, laugh-filled night. (Why hasn’t Burt Reynolds written a memoir? There’s a man with a trunk-full of great stories. Remember him on Johnny Carson? So sexy and crazy. He had more life in him then than Johnny Deep, Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington combined. Today's movie stars, let’s face it, are just no fun.)

     Loving the aging masters extended to Ruby Dee, who won supporting actress for providing American Gangster with its one moment of real emotion, but they shut out Into the Wild’s Hal Holbrook, who didn't look surprised and who smiled gamely as Durning and Dee won prizes after his loss. There’s no question that Javier Bardem deserves to win awards for No Country for Old Men — it’s a classic performance — but Holbrook’s work in Into the Wild is transcendent. Bardem is a gifted and genuinely soulful actor — he should have won an Oscar (not even nominated) for his devastating work in The Sea Inside — but he’s young still and handsome as all get out and will have many more chances at prizes. Not so Mr. Holbrook, who brought a lifetime's worth of craft to that magnificent pickup truck scene with Emile Hirsch. It’s up to you, Academy.

     Julie Christie is a fine actress and Hollywood royalty, but not naming Marion Cotillard Best Actress for her blistering and downright terrifying performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose is incomprehensible. Imagine if Meryl Streep hadn’t won the Oscar for Sophie’s Choice or DeNiro for Raging Bull. Snubbing Cotillard is on that level. (Cotillard’s mistake was in not hiring a decent publicist.) Which isn’t to say that Christie isn’t superb in Away from Her, but I get the feeling that all these awards to her have less to do with the performance and more to do with the fact that Christie holds Hollywood at bay. She dared to abandon her career and go off and get an actual life — the great Hollywood dream— and now that she's back, ever so briefly, they don’t want to miss the chance to reel her back in, to make her as greedy for gold as the rest of us. More beautiful than ever, she looked amazing tonight — love that vest — but for me, the telling moment came when she thanked a Lions Gate exec for forcing her to attend tonight’s show. Damn right. I can almost hear the poor bastard, pacing back and forth, cell phone jammed to his aching ear: “Julie, you must attend the SAGs. If you don’t show up to accept the award you won’t win the Oscar!” And so, lo and behold, there she was. Funny how that works.

     P.S.: I felt kinda sorry for Tom Cruise. What a lukewarm reception he got when he came out to present the final award. He’s a nut, but he’s also one of the last great movie stars, and good grief, he hasn’t killed anyone. (Far as we know…)

-Chuck Wilson