Even if the Art Theatre had unlimited funds and the logistical wherewithal to show a new film every day for an entire, it would still be able to screen less than half the films the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science considers when doling out its Oscar nominees. Nonetheless, in between January 2012 and February 2013 the Art showed six of the nine Best Picture nominees—not including 2011 Best Picture champ The Artist—and a whole lot of other stuff you saw last night at the Oscars. So it seems Art owner Mark Vidor and company have been making some good choices, at least by Hollywood standards.
But during the last year the Art also displayed a lot of artistry that wasn’t given golden statuettes—or even given a chance. And some it was the finest in filmdom. But that doesn’t mean we have to follow suit. What follows is the first annual Best of the Art Awards (the Botas!), honoring the best work shown on screen at Long Beach’s only indie cinema. For practical reasons we’re going to stay away from the technical categories (sorry, film nerds), but we’re going to invent one of our own. All first-run, commercially distributed films shown at the Art in 2012–’13 were eligible, even if originally released in 2011.
Bota nominees also nominated for this year’s Oscars are designated by a single asterisk (*), while 2011 Oscar nominees get a double-asterisk (**). Note: Had the Art hosted Beasts of the Southern Wild, the judges are sure it would have garnered some Bota nominations. Probably the same with The Sessions, but the judges haven’t seen that yet. Maybe next year?
Best Supporting Actor
NOMINEES:
Christoph Waltz* (Django Unchained), Leonardo DiCaprio (Django Unchained), Philip Seymour Hoffman* (The Master), Robert De Niro* (Silver Linings Playbook)
DiCaprio’s fun as the villainous plantation-owner Calvin Candy, but really we just needed a fourth nominee. On to the real contenders. We’re only putting Waltz in this category because the Oscars did; he’s really the lead actor in this film. He may never be able to equal the Oscar-winning work he did in Inglorious Basterds, but excels just about as well here—the role just isn’t as meaty. But for his “sheriff/marshal” scene alone he almost gets the Bota. De Niro is so good in general that even his crappy roles (of which there have been a lot more in recent years) give us something interesting. And this isn’t a crappy role. He is the best thing about Silver Linings Playbook.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
What a career Philip Seymour Hoffman is putting together! In The Master, it would have been easy for Hoffman to play the L. Ron Hubbard-esque Lancaster Dodd as a big, stylish charlatan, larger than life but lacking depth. But Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the character as someone generally striving to understand how and why Homo sapiens—and he himself—is the creature we are. Hoffman perfectly portrays Dodd’s well-intended desperation to believe, in all its paradoxical complexity.
Best Supporting Actress
NOMINEES:
Amy Adams* (The Master), Bérénice Bejo** (The Artist), Sally Fields* (Lincoln), Charlotte Gainsbourg (Melancholia)
Not a strong category at the Botas this year. Lincoln is meh, and Field doesn’t have much to do. Ditto for Adams (although her performance feels more nuanced than Fields’s), even though The Master is masterful. Bejo, on the other hand, has to do a lot as silent-film phenom Peppy Miller, playing the part in silent-film style (The Artist isn’t a talkie, after all) while showing us 21st-century folk something more nuanced. Gainsbourg’s role is more traditional, and she makes palpable both her exasperation in trying to help her melancholic sister, and later her terror and desperation when she fears doomsday is nigh.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
In a Bota first, it’s a tie! Bejo and Gainsbourg are equally good drivers of complete different vehicles. Gainsbourg’s performance struck me immediately, but Bejo’s has grown on me over time.
Best Lead Actor
NOMINEES:
Daniel Day-Lewis* (Lincoln), Jean Dujardin** (The Artist), Jean-Louis Trintignant (Amour), Joaquin Phoenix* (The Master)
Dujardin won the Oscar last year, but he will not be getting a Bota to match it. It’s criminal that Trintignant isn’t even getting a chance at this year’s Oscar, as he gives a haunting portrayal of a man quietly, futilely suffering with the most agonizing sort of living loss.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
Day-Lewis is one of filmdom best actors, and he transforms himself into Abraham Lincoln much like Denzel Washington transformed himself into Malcolm X. But Day-Lewis needed a role like he had in There Will Be Blood to beat Phoenix’s turn as Freddie Quell in The Master. If you want to she why Phoenix gets the Bota, check out a scene about a third of the way in when Freddie receives a rapid-fire psychoanalytical examination by his new mentor. The psychological movement and intensity that Phoenix lets surface onto his face during this single, uninterrupted shot makes for one of the more riveting and breathtaking static shots you will ever see. And this is merely one of the more overtly brilliant bits of acting in a performance suffused in nuance. Where a lesser actor might at best be able to play only the trouble and stultified aspects of Freddie’s affect, Phoenix is able to personate the vagaries beneath the surface, the malleable soul of the man.
Best Lead Actress
NOMINEES:
Emmanuelle Riva* (Amour), Jennifer Lawrence* (Silver Linings Playbook), Leila Hatami (A Separation), Michelle Williams (Take This Waltz)
Lawrence is here instead of Jessica Chastain (Oscar-nominated for Zero Dark Thirty) because Lawrence’s character has a lot more to do than Chastain’s. She’s good, but she’s simply overmatched. Hatami is great in her muted role, but she’s up against two stellar performances that are also muted.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
This was closer than one might have expected. As a young housewife who finds herself tempted from her safe but less-than-enthralling life by a new man, Williams fully bestows upon the camera her gift for getting emotion to play across her face clearly enough to tweak your empathy dials on a dime. But Riva gets the nod for one of the bravest subtle performances you will ever see, bringing the full measure of humanity to a character whose humanity is drained from her right before our eyes.
Best Adapted Screenplay
NOMINEES:
Argo*, Cosmopolis, Lincoln*, Silver Linings Playbook*, Sleepwalk with Me
Lincoln might have been more interesting had it not gotten the Hollywood/Spielberg touch. Still, it’s a documentary compared to the way Argo goes off the rails (particularly in the ludicrously fictional, climactic chase scene). Sleepwalk with Me is a clever adaptation of Mike Birbiglia’s stand-up act.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
Director David Cronenberg managed to make an interesting film of a novel, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, that takes place almost exclusively in the back of a limousine. That is a neat trick.
Best Original Screenplay
NOMINEES:
Amour*, Django Unchained*, Melancholia, Moonrise Kingdom*, The Master
The last 40% of Django Unchained seems to have been written by Quentin Tarantino at age 15, so that’s out. Moonrise Kingdom is lovely, but the loveliness is much more about what’s onscreen than what was on the page. The same holds true for Amour. Michael Haneke is a great craftsman, but there is an element of predictability (perfectly justified, to the point we might better call it inevitability) that keeps it from winning another Bota.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
What? Another tie? Lame! But hey, we just can’t choose between Melancholia and The Master. The latter is the more traditionally writerly of the two, with Paul Thomas Anderson examining the question of how we are shaped and inviting us to consider what we might do to reshape our very selves—all without sacrificing character or plot, telling an engaging story with fully realized, idiosyncratic characters. On the other hand, the greatness of Melancholia‘s script lies in the way Lars Von Trier orchestrates plot, character, sound, and visual to makes us feel both the enormity of the extermination of all life and the microcosm of individual struggles to relate in and to a world that may be absurdly meaningless.
Funniest Film
NOMINEES:
The Campaign, Django Unchained, Moonrise Kingdom, Silver Linings Playbook, Sleepwalk with Me
The Art didn’t screen a lot of comedies in 2012, and The Campaign is the only straightforward comedy on this list. It also happens to be the least funny film here. Silver Linings Playbook also isn’t that funny, but we needed five nominees for the film categories, so…. Comedian Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk with Me definitely has some funny moments.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
Were this category Best Funny Film, Moonrise Kingdom would have won easily, with its adorable and quirky coming-of-age story that’s a lot more than comedy. But the funniest eligible film is Django Unchained, which has HUGE laughs for 90 minutes before it becomes inscrutably dumb.
Best Documentary
NOMINEES:
Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Marley, Neil Young Journeys, Shut Up and Play the Hits
Three music-related films here. Neil Young Journeys is meh and may be here only because I missed some docs that played at the Art in 2012. Marley is a solid portrait of the people, places, and events that shaped Bob Marley. But Shut Up and Play the Hits is the best of the trio. Even though it’s just a concert film—namely, LCD Soundsystem’s goodbye show at Madison Square Garden—it’s not only truly epic, but really brings us into a specific moment in time. But…
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
It’s Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a quietly interesting film about the art of sushi and its acknowledged master. And then near the end of the film you learn something that causes you to reevaluate much of what you have just heard, a shift that raises the level of the entire film.
Best Foreign-Language Film
NOMINEES:
Amour*, A Separation**, Footnote**
This is a two-horse race, with Footnote getting the bronze. But really, this one isn’t even close.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
Amour is magnificent artistry, as perfectly conceived and realized as it is realistic, truthful, and painful to watch.
Best Director
NOMINEES:
Lars Von Trier (Melancholia), Michael Haneke* (Amour), Michel Hazanavicius** (The Artist), Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master), Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom)
That we can immediately cross Hazanavicius off the list—even though he won the Oscar last year—shows how tough this category is. P.T. Anderson and Haneke both showed incredible restraint, right down to the gentle, even minimalist camera movement and the way they stayed out of the way of their actors. The other Anderson and Von Trier, meanwhile, dazzled in different ways, Anderson with his usual stylish admixture, Von Trier sort of conducting a very strange and powerful symphony.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
It’s Wes Anderson, folks. This may not be his best film; nonetheless, the man works all the magic we’ve come to expect from this true cinematic genius. You can recognize a Wes Anderson film the moment you see one of those quirky shots so perfectly framed that you’re almost surprised when it comes to life. His art direction, his use of music, his edits and intercuts. Each of his films is its own playful universe, and Anderson attends to every molecule, making the most of every aspect of cinema as an artform. It’s filmmaking like Martin Scorsese used to do it, except with a lot less pain and grit.
Best Picture
NOMINEES:
Amour*, Melancholia, Moonrise Kingdom, The Artist**, The Master
A strong field. The Artist is nice, but it’s immediately out of the running. Moonrise Kingdom is delightfully pure Wes Anderson, but he needed to have made one of his best to win this year, and this doesn’t fit that impressive bill. Meanwhile, Paul Thomas Anderson had the bad luck to make his masterpiece, There Will Be Blood, the same year that the Coen brothers delivered No Country for Old Men (a case where the Oscars and Botas would have concurred). The Master is stately, perfect, and contributes a unique voice to the conversation about human interrelations, but it’s not quite as amazing as his previous effort. That leaves Amour (which deserves the Oscar) and Melancholia (released in 2011 but screen at the Art last January), both magnificent achievements concerning love and the end of life.
AND THE BOTA GOES TO…
In another upset, it’s Melancholia, which delivers a literally annihilating vision of life on Earth with a mixture of absurdist humor, orchestral scope and power, dazzling visuals, and deep emotional resonance.
***
That’s our show, folks! But before the orchestra plays me off, let me remind you that you can read reviews of most of the films and performances nominated here by typing “art theatre” into our little ol’ Long Beach Post search engine. And keep your eyes on the Post for reviews of what’s showing at the Art—because you definitely want to get a jump on next year’s Botas!