UPDATE: Moonlight was the upset Best Picture winner, and Casey Affleck prevailed as Best Actor in one of the most unusual awards ceremonies of recent years!
Original Story:
The countdown begins until Academy Awards weekend! 2016 ended up being a pretty good year for movies, with a slate of outstanding films vying for top honors Sunday night at the Oscars. Below are the nominations for the main prizes in acting, writing and directing along with my predictions of the expected winners.
Best Picture
The nominations are:
- Arrival
- Fences
- Hacksaw Ridge
- Hell Or High Water
- Hidden Figures
- La La Land
- Lion
- Manchester by the Sea
- Moonlight
La La Land is a celebration of Hollywood and romance among films with heavier and darker themes. It has swept most of the precursor awards and is expected to win the top prize. If there is an upset, it could be crowd-pleasing Hidden Figures, a surprising box office hit with historic gravitas and an empowering message. Moonlight, Manchester, Hell or High Water and Arrival are my favorites. And I’m a loner in my tepid response to Lion, which is the only head-scratcher on the list.
Best Director
The nominations are:
- Denis Villeneuve (Arrival)
- Mel Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge)
- Damien Chazelle (La La Land)
- Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea)
- Barry Jenkins (Moonlight)
This is likely a year when Best Picture and Best Director will match, thus a win for Damien Chazelle. After he emerged on the scene with the critically lauded Whiplash, his La La Land continued to make a profound mark in a great young career. Barry Jenkins also created a masterpiece with Moonlight, but it’s less showy.
Best Actress
The nominations are:
- Isabelle Huppert (Elle)
- Ruth Negga (Loving)
- Natalie Portman (Jackie)
- Emma Stone (La La Land)
- Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins)
There’s talk of an Isabelle Huppert upset, but I’ll stick with a prediction for Emma Stone, who in her one-take “audition scene” transforms from everywoman to transcendent movie goddess. It was a great year for actresses, and I wish Annette Bening were in the mix for 20th Century Women.
Best Actor
The nominations are:
- Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea)
- Andrew Garfield (Hacksaw Ridge)
- Ryan Gosling (La La Land)
- Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic)
- Denzel Washington (Fences)
I’m on Team Affleck or Team Mortensen for their magnificent portrayals of unexpected dads, but my prediction is for Denzel Washington who acted and directed himself in August Wilson’s domineering daddy of a role in Fences. The chance to honor the actor with a third statuette and induct him into a rarefied pantheon of multiple winners seems enticing to the Hollywood chattering class.
Best Supporting Actress
The nominations are:
- Viola Davis (Fences)
- Naomie Harris (Moonlight)
- Nicole Kidman (Lion)
- Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures)
- Michelle Williams (Manchester by the Sea)
She campaigned in the wrong category, because Viola Davis would have won for lead or supporting actress for her role in Fences. She is superb. In a different year, we’d be toasting Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams for their wonderful working class performances, but Washington and Davis have an August Wilson script and Tony awards already and have been refining these immortal roles for a while.
Best Supporting Actor
The nominations are:
- Mahershala Ali (Moonlight)
- Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water)
- Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea)
- Dev Patel (Lion)
- Michael Shannon (Nocturnal Animals)
As the drug dealer with a heart of gold, Mahershala Ali appears in only the first third of Moonlight, but he is unforgettable. This could be an upset category for Dev Patel or any of the nominees, but Ali stands tall in a noble role and sends a strong anti-bullying message.
Best Original Screenplay
The nominations are:
- Hell or High Water, Taylor Sheridan
- La La Land, Damien Chazelle
- The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou
- Manchester by the Sea, Kenneth Lonergan
- 20th Century Women, Mike Mills
This category is a great chance to honor Lonergan, a journeyman playwright and screenwriter who penned a corker of a script this year with Manchester by the Sea. Or, Academy voters could just check every box for the Hollywood musical. I predict Lonergan and Manchester in this category.
Best Adapted Screenplay
The nominations are:
- Arrival (Eric Heisserer, based on a short story by Ted Chiang)
- Fences (August Wilson, adapted from his play)
- Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi and Allison Schroeder, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly)
- Lion (Luke Davies, based on the memoir A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley and Larry Buttrose)
- Moonlight (Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney, based on the play by Tarell Alvin McCraney)
This category is a great chance to honor Moonlight; and if there is an upset in Supporting Actor, there should be a win here for this moving coming of age film. After last year’s #oscarssowhite, this year’s ceremony should bask in a bit more of the rainbow.
John Hamburg’s Why Him? (B-) is an amusing entry into a fairly tired “family versus fiancé” formula, thanks to strong casting in plum parts for the Christmas-set comedic ensemble. James Franco plays the Silicon Valley mogul at the film’s heart, relishing the role with his trademark wide-eyed wit and devil-may-care vulgarity. Enter the nuclear family as fish-out-of-water in his world: Bryan Cranston and Megan Mullally as the parents, Griffin Gluck as the impressionable little brother and Zoey Deutch as the daughter smitten with Franco’s man-child but still loyal to her pop. Keegan-Michael Key also has a funny role as Franco’s assistant/sherpa, trying to keep the rejuvenile in line. There are a variety of inventive gags, several somewhat believable set-ups and laughs aplenty as the holiday gathering culminates into full-scale calamity. Cranston and Mullally are fun in the straight man roles; and although the story gets a bit belabored, it’s generally the definition of “a fun rental.”
After 23 days and a record 202 screenings, the 
the list is the Human Rights Prize, awarded to the film that most powerfully captures the perseverance and strength of those guided by a sense of justice in the face of bigotry, inequality, or persecution.
The relationship status of Christian and Anastasia continues to be “It’s Complicated” in James Foley’s not-as sloppy-seconds-as-you’d-think sequel Fifty Shades Darker (C+). Dakota Johnson and Jaimie Dornan actually improve a bit on their original portrayals of a couple from different sides of the track marks, as they advance their unusual romance against the demons of his dysfunctional past. It’s perplexing, but they make the far-fetched characters relatable. The struggle to tame this wounded billionaire is real, and sometimes he earns a little Red Room. Overlong and oddly paced most of the time, this erotic thriller could have used some whips, chains and clamps in the editing room. The final act begins to progress like a season of a campy eighties nighttime drama (Falcon Breast?). In a particularly saucy role as a BDSM mistress who keeps showing up to warn Ana about Christian like a Dickensian apparition, Kim Basinger seems to cast all fifty forms of shade. The movie is beautifully filmed, a kind of love letter to Seattle through the spherical lens of Ben Wa. There’s even an homage to Johnson’s real-life mom with a line right out of Working Girl as Ana advances in her publishing company. The cliffhanger in the original didn’t prompt much interest in this sequel, but Foley tarts things up enough this go-around that he may indeed have built interest in bringing on a third.
Regaining his strut as a writer/director of modern-day suspense films, M. Night Shyamalan has crafted an entertaining psychological thriller and met an acting match for his cinematic chutzpah in James McAvoy headlining Split (B+). The film is above all else a showcase for the considerable acting talents of McAvoy as a man with 23 discrete personalities (Dennis, Patricia, Barry and Hedwig among the most notable). McAvoy uses some pretty sly ticks and tricks to bring brilliant life to his menagerie of characters. What starts as an abduction and escape room type movie in the vein of the recent 
Playing at the 
In John Lee Hancock’s biopic of McDonald’s executive Ray Kroc, The Founder (B), the hunger of the protagonist is so palpable you can almost taste it. It’s a rather ruthless portrait of a business tycoon with Michael Keaton in fine serpentine form, part Midwest milkman charm, as wily as a Music Man, relentless as a cattle driver. While it’s ironic a man named Hancock fails to leave much of a signature in his ambivalent lens on the historical figure responsible for spreading the world’s most famous hamburger stand beyond its humble California origins, it is a fascinating business case and mostly compelling in its story (gulp) arch. As the humble and inventive McDonald’s brothers, Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch are fabulous foils to Keaton’s Kroc. The film’s best sequence, although awkwardly placed in flashback, depicts the McDonald’s brothers designing a kitchen schematic in chalk on a blacktop, with crew “blocking the scene” like theatre directors would do. Kroc’s troubles on the domestic front including an estranged marriage (Laura Dern simply has to look sad a lot) and a fixation on a bottle of his own form of special sauce get short shrift as business machinations take center stage. The cynical themes about persistence and ambition trumping actual genius or invention, juxtaposed against sunny nostalgic art direction, are timely and prescient; but after more richly textured tales such as 
Oh, coming-of-age ensemble dramedies: let me count the ways I love them! Mike Mills’ semi-autobiographical 20th Century Women (A) is a blissful slice of life as characters on the cusp of change in freewheeling 1979 Santa Barbara craft an unconventional family. Central to the film is the relationship between never-been-better Annette Bening as an eccentric divorced chain-smoking single mother and her only son, played with perception by Lucas Jade Zumann. Buoyed by before-their-time left coast sensibilities, Bening’s character enlists three kindred iconoclasts as spiritual guardians of her son’s angsty adolescence. Elle Fanning is brittle brilliance, Greta Gerwig a luminous and tender spirit and a weathered Billy Crudup an unlikely boon companion. Mills intersperses flashbacks, flash-forwards, historical archives and literary snippets, coloring the story in lovely context. There are sequences of majestic intimacy between characters as they tumble, stumble, dance and glance through life’s foibles. The film is a tribute to the mother-son bond, anchored by resplendent female performances and a lens into the many portraits of womanhood. Bening centers the film with a marvelous mix of misanthropy and repartee; she is perfection in the role. Roger Neill’s spry music, plus songs showcasing the rise of an emerging West coast punk scene, accent this love letter to shifting mores and the enduring power of familial love.
You’ve got to hand it to director Martin Scorsese: When he’s obsessed with a subject, he pursues it with vice grip precision. He has evidently had the story of two 17th century Christian missionaries facing the ultimate test of faith in Japan (when their religion was outlawed and their presence forbidden) in his mind for nearly three decades, so it’s cathartic indeed to have his fever dream of a tale realized on screen. But while his epic Silence (C+) will undoubtedly become required viewing for graduate divinity students pondering its Big Themes for generations to come, it is a fairly uneven and punishing task for an everyday moviegoer. The acclaimed director strips down many of his showy virtuoso moves to flesh out a naturalistic period story tackling issues of gravitas. It’s often fascinating to watch the auteur plumb Herzogian man versus nature (and human nature) style plot lines against a stark and exotic landscape. He explores violence both physical and emotional in new milieus, and there’s lots to ponder as this film kinda happens to you. The Japanese actors fare better than the Hollywood ones: Issey Ogata is a revelation as a captivating antagonist, and Yōsuke Kubozuka provides wild-child wonder as a confused soul. Miscast as the film’s hero, however, is Andrew Garfield, a thoroughly modern actor who can’t consistently bear the cross of the film’s themes or of a Portuguese Jesuit character in the 1600s. Adam Driver and Liam Neeson are similarly uneasy in their parts and generate a bit of a hollow center that may actually be symbolic. A hodgepodge hybrid of Apocalypse Now, 
Welcome to Silver Screen Capture’s latest crossover with Ashley Williams of 
A peculiar fugue for both a nation in mourning and for a woman having a near out-of-body crisis to preserve the legacy of her slain husband, Pablo Larrain’s Jackie (B+) is a film that moves in mysterious ways. In the central role of Jacqueline Kennedy played out in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, in flashbacks to an awkward White House tour and in a guarded interview framing device, Natalie Portman is perfection. The actress conveys urgency and dignity in her rigorous pursuit to control the narrative, preserve the majesty of the POTUS office and bottle the enduring notion of “Camelot.” All the while she internalizes her grief and personal needs in a complex performance of considerable modulation. Portman’s Jackie is keenly aware of history and that all eyes are on her. It’s a wondrous lead performance wrapped in how’d-they-do-that historical reenactments. Overall the film is an artsy, absorbing character study that gets richer as it reaches final act crescendos. Lorrain surrounds his solid lead actress with superb period detail, lush costuming and natural supporting players including Greta Gerwig as loyal assistant Nancy, Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy and John Hurt as an otherworldly priest. Ultimately it’s all about that classic American tenet of meeting the moment when challenges arrive that are bigger than ourselves.