The King Will Speak at Tonight's Academy Awards

I write 2 Oscar posts. The one I am doing right now and the one I will write after the show. I personally don't see the need for any more than that because what makes the Oscars fun is the concept of the Oscars and what they represent, which is glamour and old Hollywood excess. It doesn't matter who wins. Winning an Oscar is about the equivalent of picking a name out of a hat (except foreign film). The voter need not see a single one of the nominated films to cast their ballot and they don't even need to be the one doing the voting. So, the awards are meaningless, which is why I don't dwell on them and don't get up in arms over Christopher Nolan not getting nominated or whether or not Toy Story 3 should be allowed to be nominated in Best Picture and Best Animation. Life's too short, let's just enjoy the ride and see how my ability to predict political voting is this year.

Best Foreign Film: This category is always up in the air and one I get wrong because A) I haven't seen all of the movies and B) the voters have to have seen all the movies. Regardless, I'll take my best guess and do what I did last year, going with the Golden Globe choice of Civilization because I think Susanne Bier is a brilliant filmmaker who doesn't get nearly the credit she is due in North America.

Best Animated Feature: The truly best film in this category will not win. Nothing has a shot over Toy Story 3, which made the most money in 2010 and tricked just about everyone into thinking it was a great movie due to 10 minutes at the end.
Who Should Win: The Illusionist
Who Will Win: Toy Story 3

Best Adapted Screenplay: I think this will be one of the categories where the true best will shine and may be one of the only awards, besides Original Score, that the Social Network will walk away with.
Who Should Win: The Social Network
Who Will Win: The Social Network

Best Original Screenplay: I always wonder what the Academy considers to be a good screenplay. Is it the dialogue, the structure, the characters? If it's dialogue and character than Inception doesn't have a chance, not it it does anyway. I actually have the insider advantage here as I covered the screenplay for The King's Speech about a year ago and indeed, it was very good. I wonder if I'll get a raise when it wins?
Who Should Win: The King's Speech
Who Will Win: The King's Speech

Best Director: The Golden Globe went to Fincher, the DGA went to Hooper; the DGA usually is the definitive word. If Hooper wins this one, and I think he will, The Social Network doesn't have a chance at best picture as it will probably also sweep the acting awards as well and Oscar generally doesn't argue with the DGA. Poor Aronofsky, his time will come eventually.
Who Should Win: David Fincher
Who Will Win: Tom Hooper

Best Supporting Actress: This is a tough one. I think we can strike out Jacki Weaver because Animal Kingdom doesn't have the push behind it that would lead to a win. Melissa Leo and Amy Adams could potentially split the vote and cancel each other out for The Fighter, leaving Helena Bonham Carter and Hailee Steinfeld. Oscar loves the British but Steinfeld should win for her scene alone in True Grit between herself and the crooked business man. Last year in the writing category I picked the actual best script and was wrong so I think I'll go with the obvious this year instead.
Who Should Win: Hailee Steinfeld
Who Will Win: Helena Bonham Carter

Best Supporting Actor: It's down to Christian Bale and Geoffry Rush. Oscar likes weight loss and weight gain but King, I think, is going for a sweep and Oscar almost always votes British so I will too.
Who Should Win: John Hawkes
Who Will Win: Geoffry Rush

Best Actress: I think this one is fairly obvious although I'm not so sure Portman truly was the best as she was just one part of Black Swan's whole. I found Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole to be far more engaging to Portman's "acting" in Black Swan. However, Oscar likes stars who put themselves through physical strain and Portman certainly did that, plus, Kidman gave one of those "quiet" performances that Christina Bale, at the Golden Globes, said no one really ever gets noticed for.Wouldn't it be fun if Oscar pulled a punch and let Anette Benning, who is just as deserving, have the win?
Who Should Win: Nicole Kidman or Anette Benning
Who Will Win: Natalie Portman

Best Actor: Let's continue to vote British.
Who Should Win: Jesse Eisenberg
Who Will Win: Colin Firth

Best Picture: Not much to say here. Once again, despite 10 nominees, just as it always was when there was 5, the race comes down to two. The Social Network was the best movie of the year for me, but the King's Speech is more of an Oscar movie and currently has much more momentum behind it. Plus, if Hooper and Firth win there's no chance for the Social Network to take it.
Who Should Win: The Social Network
Who Will Win: The King's Speech

Black Swan (5 out of 5) + The Celebrity Connection: Natalie Portman

The story of Swan Lake: A princess is turned into a swan. True love is the only thing that can break the curse but her love is tricked and falls instead for her evil twin the Black Swan. The princess, who cannot live with the curse and cannot live without love frees herself through death. In a sense, this is the story that director Daron Aronofsky has been working his entire career towards telling. The film may revolve around the trails of a ballerina but Black Swan is no more about ballet than Requiem for a Dream was about drug abuse: it’s about a woman chasing an impossible dream outside of human grasp. That’s what all of Aronofsky’s films have been about.

One of Aronofsky’s great attributes is that he isn’t afraid to follow his characters unapologetically into their own oblivion and thus Black Swan isn’t so much a film as a memorizing thought piece constructed of ideas, fears, hopes and despair that doesn’t so much tell a story as ram headfirst right through a character’s psychological state as it dissipates under mounting pressure. Rarely has self-destruction been so haunting.

Natalie Portman stars as Nina, the naive, precious ballerina who lives with her overbearing mother (Barbara Hersey) who gave up a her own career and now lives vicariously through her daughter. Nina, having dedicated herself entirely to the perfection of her art wants nothing more than to be cast in Thomas Leroy’s (Vincent Cassel) newest rendition of Swan Lake. Leroy, a fierce, sexual, genius, knows that Nina can play the White Swan, but believes her to be too rigid in her perfection to play the Black Swan, who’s technique needs to be lose and seductive. 

The toying Leroy, maybe out of French masochism and maybe because he sees a buried sexual frustration, casts Nina in the part regardless. She is thrilled but practice is torture as she can’t quite nail the part: she is too frigid, too pristine and too desexualized for the Black Swan. Also along to torment her is the new girl Lily (Mila Kunis) who isn’t half the dancer that Nina is but is promiscuous and dangerous and has the dark allure of the Black Swan, a temptress driving Nina slowly towards the brink. There is also Beth (Winona Ryder), Leroy’s former star who has now been forced into retirement and is hospitalized after a (intentional?) car accident as well as Nina’s mother who shelters the girl like a child, keeps her away from all other outside pressure (sex, drugs, life) and gruelingly pushes her towards the perfection she never achieved.

Slowly all of the outside pressures begin to eat away at Nina, destroying her sanity as Leroy abusing her, molesting her, degrading her in order to bring out her inner Black Swam, pushes her, along with Lily, towards discovering her dark side. She is consumed by fear and hatred and sex and even murder as she begins having hallucinations of her being transformed into the Black Swan.

On the surface Black Swan appears to about the way an artist’s ego will slowly lead them into oblivion as they strive to find perfection and meaning in their art. That was, in a very different way, more or less what Aronofsky’s The Wrestler was about as well. However, by conveying Black Swan’s plot and by trapping it into a defined thematic explanation is to subvert away from the hectic, driving, narrative free fall that the film is. Like Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan is more experience than story (this is filmmaking as state-of-mind at its most forceful and, at times, unbearably painful), and is thus more a meditation of how we are slowly driven insane by reaching desperately to achieve the things that are least important in life: fame, money, recognition, perfection ect.

Thus, Aronofsky has always chosen the perfect mediums from which to explore these concepts: math, drugs, cancer, professional wrestling and now ballet: all areas that place value on superficial endeavours and distract from life's essentials: love, friendship, happy, happiness. These are the arts of self-destruction. He makes films about people who are exposed to a plane of their existence that is foreign to them, sending them spiralling into an obsessive state until they have cut themselves off from anything that could provide them solace.

What Nina finds is that to split a personality down and limit it to the influence of either black (Leroy and Lily) or white (her mother) is to create a weak emotional state in which, when one is introduced over top of the other, it will, like cancer, ultimately consume and destroy it’s counterpart. In Black Swan, Nina is ultimately on a quest to find perfection at any cost just to discover that perfection can only be achieved through a sacrifice more grand than anyone should normally be willing to make: a complete and utter sacrifice of the self.

And so Black Swan cannot simply be spoken about in terms of aesthetics, technique, acting, writing; the general pieces that comprise a film, which I have not done here, because it is more than film: it is emotion, expression, ideology and, above all else it is violent, unapologetic rapture. This is one of the year’s best films.

An now a related Celerity Connection:

Could Natalie Portman really be Dakota Fanning in Disguise?

You Decide.

TIFF Red Carpet: The Black Swan

Other than Saturday, Monday was the biggest day for celebrities at Roy Thompson Hall. We had shown up earlier to catch a glimpse of Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu the former of which left my copy of Belle De Jour unsigned and the latter being a no show. However it didn't matter because what everyone was really watching for were the people from Black Swan.

Vincent Cassel managed to zip by, only stopping briefly. Unfortunately it wasn't to sign my copy of La Haine.

The guy I was with was eagerly awaiting Winona Ryder as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands are his favourite movies. I also had a copy of Age of Innocence, that most hated and misunderstood Scorsese film. However, Ryder was sweeped away by her publicist despite chants for her to come back. She kept looking back like an innocent little school girl as if she wanted to come over but couldn't. I later read somewhere that she's one of the worst autographers.

I knew Barbara Hershey was in this movie but apparently didn't do my research properly because she's in one of my favourite movies: Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. Oh well, next time.

 Here comes Darren Aronofsky

That is Darren Aronofsky grabbing my pen to sign my copy of Requiem for a Dream. I told him he was the next Scorsese and he smirked. I said he was one of my favourite directors and he said "Oh, only one of them?" I think he was joking but this is clearly a man who knows he's good.

It could be pure coincidence but as Aronfosky walked off with wife Rachel Weisz I yelled out "The Shape of Things," which is what I wanted her to sign and she looked back. Not sure if that was what she was looking back about but they both happened at the same time.

Everyone went nuts for the super petit Natalie Portman. She missed my copy of Closer but then her publicist (the girl behind who looks like Sophie Coppola) grabbed it and got her to sign it. She signed for a lot of people but then the guy I was with heard her say "Is that enough now?" to her publicist.

Dominic Cooper showed up for no reason in particular. Mila Kunis was a no show.