Academy Announces 2011 Oscar Noms

By Steve Evans

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the 2011 Oscar nominations this morning. No big surprises in the noms, but some potentially serious upsets could be in the making on awards night Feb. 27.

Nominees in the main categories:

Best Picture: Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The King's Speech, 127 Hours, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Winter's Bone

Director: Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell, Tom Hooper, David Fincher, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

Best actor: Javier Bardem, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg, Colin Firth, James Franco

Best actress: Annette Bening, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Lawrence, Natalie Portman, Michelle Williams

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, John Hawkes, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Geoffrey Rush

Best Supporting Actress: Amy Adams, Helena Bonham Carter, Melissa Leo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jackie Weaver

Thoughts & predictions:

Whew! That’s a lot of nominations for best picture. Wanna bet the academy expanded the roster to help the box office of more films? Although The King's Speech leads the race with 12 nominations, my Best Picture money is on The Social Network, David Fincher’s insightful commentary on the creation of Facebook by drunken Harvard students, one of whom became a billionaire. Fincher lost his bid for best director with Benjamin Button two years back, so I suspect this is his year for Oscar gold. His only serious competition is Aronofsky, whose output is thin and spotty. If Aronofsky couldn't win for The Wrestler (2008) he won't likely win for Black Swan, which is a lesser film and wildly overrated. The Coen Brothers won with No Country for Old Men only three years ago, so the Academy will give those boys a rest. Russell and Hooper are perennial also-rans who'll have to be content with nominations.

I’ll take Colin Firth to win the Best Actor category. James Franco hacking off his own arm in 127 hours could be the upset of the night.

Best Actress is dicey. Natalie Portman as an unhinged ballerina in Black Swan is the crowd pleaser this year. That must really irritate Annette Bening, who’s staring down her third nomination after losing twice in the last decade to Hilary Swank.

Supporting Actor? Geoffrey Rush as an Aussie elocution expert in The King’s Speech.

And Helena Bonham Carter takes supporting actress for The King’s Speech, which will also cop a screenplay Oscar.

Toy Story 3 takes Best Animated Film.

Christopher Nolan’s tricky mindbender Inception wins for special effects and sound effects.

What?! Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island gets no Oscar love? Christopher Nolan gets snubbed, again, in his quest for a directing Oscar yet his picture, Inception, gets nominated? The Academy Awards are becoming almost as silly as the Golden Globes.

You heard it here first, film fans.

Cinema Uprising copyright c 2011 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.

Wild Turkey: Aronofsky's "Black Swan"

By Steve Evans

Nothing flatters an artist so much as an homage, which can sometimes be a fancy word for plagiarism. It was with this in mind that I saw Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” at the umpteenoplex last night with the lovely Claudia.

If “Black Swan” isn’t exactly a rip-off of that 1948 Technicolor wonder, “The Red Shoes,” directed by the brilliant team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it’s still impossible to believe that a devout film student like Aronofsky hasn’t studied the Powell-Pressburger playbook with slavish attention. Homage is indeed a delicate term.

(Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1XOB-bs)

Give credit to “Black Swan” cinematographer Matthew Libatique for framing exquisite images that elevate this B-movie psycho-thriller a notch above the grindhouse exploitation fare that once unspooled in sleazy cinemas along Times Square, not too far from New York City‘s theater district and the world of the ballet that serves as the milieu for Aronofsky‘s crazed candygram.

Yes, “Black Swan” is a good-looking film. Yes, Natalie Portman delivers a heroic performance rife with eye-bulging fear, homicidal urges and masturbatory self-indulgence as she pursues perfectionism in the self-destructive way of the obsessive-compulsive personality. But my gripe has more to do with the constant sub-referencing and obvious influences from other, better, films that Aronofsky borrows to pump up this sad and rather obvious exploration of a delicate psyche in the Big City. I was led to believe that "Black Swan" was a fresh, vibrant work of original filmmaking.

What I got was a mash-up of “The Red Shoes,” cross-pollinated with some of David Cronenberg’s nastier visions and some genuinely repulsive metamorphosis sequences with jazzed-up CGI. Sprinkle liberally with Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” (1965), and you can witness head games galore in "Black Swan," though it's still just another trumped up tale of an artist driven to the brink by her own unquenchable thirst for perfection.

If originality was part of a filmmaker’s own quest for perfection, going to the movies would be a lot more fun.

Since the audience who saw “Black Swan” with us spent more time texting, talking and inhaling hotdogs slathered in pickle relish than in watching the show, it’s doubtful they caught even a fraction of the influences Aronofsky deploys in the creation of his own films. He‘s no better than Tarantino, that other post-modernist whose “inspirations” are all drawn from better artists.

On the way out of the cinema I overheard a woman tell her date that Aronofsky is “a true original.”

Oh, please. Shut up and eat your hotdog.

Cinema Uprising copyright c 2011 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.