Xan Brooks in his video review at the Guardian UK says A Prophet is “the first real masterpiece of the decade.” Two major critics groups concur, as the film picks up more awards in its march to the Cesars on February 27th.

The drama was named best film of the year at the “Globes de Cristal” (Crystal Globes) ceremony Monday night and earned the French Film Critics Syndicate’s top prize announced Tuesday.

The film’s breakout star Tahar Rahim was named best actor at the Globes de Cristal ceremony held at Paris’ Lido theater.

A Prophet is nominated for 13 Cesars (Best Film, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Cinematography, Score, Editing, Art Direction, Costume Design, Sound, and Best Newcomers, Tahar Rahim & Adel Bencherif). Trailer after the cut.

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It is less common for a Best Picture frontrunner to be driven by an original screenplay.  Most of the recent winners have all been adaptations, either from novels, plays or other films.  Going back twenty years, the adaptations almost double that of original scripts:

Slumdog Millionaire
No Country for Old Men
The Departed
Crash
Million Dollar Baby
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Chicago
A Beautiful Mind
Gladiator
American Beauty
Shakespeare in Love
Titanic
The English Patient
Braveheart
Forrest Gump
Schindler’s List
Unforgiven
The Silence of the Lambs
Dances with Wolves
Driving Miss Daisy

There really aren’t that many writer/director projects at all, even among the adaptations.  Titanic was written and directed by James Cameron (though not even nominated for screenplay).  No Country was adapted by the Coens and directed by them.  It happens, but it is rare that the writer accepting the Oscar for Screenplay is also the Director who accepts for Oscar for Directing, even rarer still when the producers are also the writers and the directors — the Coens are one notable example of a recent trifecta win.  They shared the producer award with Scott Rudin.

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Two stories won’t go away.  The first are the occasional but passionate articles about Precious, whether it’s a movie for the white community to feel better about themselves (“see the black people can find their way out of the ghetto), and/or it’s a movie that stereotypes the African American community.  The NY Times posted an op-ed about it recently:

The blacks who are enraged by “Precious” have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is about 40 years behind Mississippi. In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more “middle-class white Americans” to his film.

He finishes with:

Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme. D. W. Griffith produced a series of movies in which Chinese, Indians and blacks were lifted from savagery through assimilation. A more recent example of climbing out of the ghetto through assimilation is “Dangerous Minds,” where black and Latino students are rescued by a curriculum that doesn’t include a single black or Latino writer.

Right, okay.  But that story really did happen.  So we should just not tell that story?

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Winners in bold

Best Film

• Bright Star, Jane Campion
• Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold
• Helen, Joe Lawlor/Christine Molloy

Best Actor

• Tom Hardy, Bronson
• Christian McKay, Me And Orson Welles
• Alex MacQueen, The Hide
• Andy Serkis, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Best Actress

• Anne-Marie Duff, Nowhere Boy
• Kelly Macdonald, The Merry Gentleman
• Carey Mulligan, An Education

Best Screenplay

• Jesse Armstrong/Simon Blackwell/Armando Iannucci/Tony Roche, In The Loop
• Nick Hornby, An Education
• Paul Laverty, Looking for Eric

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Kris Tapley does his rundown of the top ten best Jeff Bridges performances for Fandango’s awards watch section.  What is stunning about it, I guess, is that he doesn’t place Crazy Heart at the top of the list.  I thought I’d add a poll for you to be the judge of the films Kris put on his list to see if you agree.

Kris’ list:

1. Starman
2. The Big Lebowski
3. The Door in the Floor
4. Crazy Heart
5. Fearless
6. The Contender
7. The Jagged Edge
8. Tucker: A Man and His Dreams
9. Bad Company
10. Thunderbold and Lightfoot.

My own top ten after the cut.

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Gosh, I didn’t think it could really be true – usually the posters are so pretty and artful. But I guess this year we’ll have to settle for…

…Make sure you read this one.  New York Magazine’s Mark Harris offers up the kind of writing rarely exhibited on the web, where the constant need for content often results in sloppy work (raises hand).  But when you read this kind of story, and Damien Bona and Mason Wiley’s Inside Oscar, one is reminded that there are still very good writers covering this silly little corner of the world:

Which brings us to the moment, two weeks before balloting for nominations ends, when things get really rough-and-tumble. In the strange etiquette of Oscar competition, a hard-core, balls-out campaign to get Academy Award nominations is permissible, under the justification that everyone is just helping their movies, whereas pushing hard for an actual win not only looks narcissistically needy but also may be pointless, since most voters decide whom they want to win before the nominations are even announced. So the real work happens during a mid-January sprint, when actors, writers, and directors suspend their lives to embark on an ego-bruising bi-coastal nightmare carnival of awards and lunches, brunches and teas, screenings, Q&As and tributes, diving into the soul-depleting madness of what Evelyn Waugh long ago called Hollywood’s “continuous psalm of self-praise.” Movies that don’t join the fight get lost in the shuffle. And that’s why Bridges is the sheepish but willing star of “an evening with … ” himself, a service he will repeat the very next day at another venue.

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Melissa Silverstein has remarked, both on Twitter, and now in this article, that much is made of Kathryn Bigelow’s looks, as if much of the driving force behind her success is that she is gorgeous.  And we all know she is gorgeous.  We just don’t expect, I guess, a successful female director to be THAT gorgeous?  And at 58?  Here is Silverstein:

I long personally for the day when nobody cares that Kathryn Bigelow was married to James Cameron or how she looks. Because I have read articles that literally have said that James Cameron directed The Hurt Locker or that she only has a career because of him. But we lived in a world where Kathryn Bigelow is being held up to an absurd standard. She’s a boy and a girl. She’s the hot one and the kick ass one. She’s everything to everybody. That’s a lot of pressure on one person.

Silverstein makes several good points, and has asked questions where others haven’t.  I have had to do battle with many commenters who continually say, “she’s only winning because she’s a woman.”  I always counter it with, “she’s winning despite being a woman.”  This is the first time I can remember that a “womans film” is being regarded with the same awe and respect that a film directed by a man would.  The conversation around Bigelow was condescending at first, “this cute little lady and her cute little war movie.”  But every time Bigelow accepts another award (the Golden Globes notwithstanding) it is breathtaking in its disruptiveness.

Apparently, there were two main thrusts that drove both the real life story and the success of the film: football and Jesus.   Guy Lodge at In Contention looks at how the marketing team went straight for the god-fearin’ Heartland when looking for movie dollars. Thing is, the Heartland has been left out of much of the Oscar race for the last long while.  There have been films with performances that were worthy of consideration but because they were “family” films and they starred a country/western singer, no one ever took them seriously.  But money, as Bob Dylan reminds us, doesn’t talk, it swears.  As The Blind Side closed in on $300 million it started to get the industry’s attention.

In her defense of Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side, Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek does talk a bit about the film’s main character’s politics, but mostly she is trying to tell people that a good performance is a good performance, no matter if it’s artsy fartsy or not.  It isn’t often that film critics try to talk Oscar but every once in a while they shock even themselves by dipping a toe into that fecund pool.  Here is Zacharek in defense of Ms. Bullock:

But so much of what’s great in acting, as in life, happens in the margins. “Deserving” isn’t the same as marvelous, thrilling, sexy, titillating, arresting, strange or discombobulating. It doesn’t always allow for wonder or surprise or anger, or any number of complicated feelings that actors can draw out of us. And an actor who pulls off one of the hardest effects to achieve — that of believable, extraordinary ordinariness — is likely to get lost in the shuffle.

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Jeff Wells’ freshly posted video of Quentin Tarantino on the directors panel at the Santa Barbara International Film Fest:

Thanks to ONTD for finding and posting this E! Online article about the five movies everyone must see before Oscar.   This is a Muggle Alert (I’m still trying make Muggle “happen”):

1. The Hurt Locker (many nominations, including Best Picture)

Why you didn’t see it: It’s an Iraq war movie, and let’s face it, most of those have been sanctimonious sacks of suckage. Plus, you probably weren’t expecting much better from the director of Point Break.

Why you should: Because, awards and critical acclaim and mismanaged marketing aside, this is not some stuffy, important-with-a-capital-I drama.

It is, in fact, a kickass action movie full of explosions, eviscerations and nigh-unbearable tension as bombs are defused (or not) and snipers are picked off.

It’s the sort of film that would be more at home running on TNT’s “Movies for guys who like movies” than in some out-of-the-way art-house multiplex. And don’t forget that that Point Break director also made Near Dark. This is even better.

2. The Cove (Best Documentary Feature)

Why you didn’t see it: A documentary about the importance of saving dolphins sounds about as appealing as a week-old tuna salad sandwich.

Why you should: Put aside for a second that you’ll learn some useful information about which seafood to be careful of eating. The key here is that The Cove is not just some preachy screed about how dolphins are cute and smart, but a full-on heist movie—like Ocean’s 11, but real.

See, a team of experts in different fields arrange the perfect break-in to a secluded cove in Japan, so they can gather crucial evidence of secret mass slaughterings.

If George Clooney were in a story like that, you’d be there, right? This is even better, because chances are you don’t already know whether or not they succeeded (do yourself a favor and don’t Google it first).

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The four acting categories feel locked for various reasons.  If a weakness is to be found it’s not with the contenders themselves, but with bored Oscar pundits who have nothing to do for the next few weeks except look for holes where there aren’t any.  Even still, for all of that, I have seen upsets.  When Adrien Brody won, or Halle Berry AND Denzel Washington, or Marion Cotillard – it was the “lock” that was misleading.   That makes us wonder, are all four really locked locked?  Or do we fool ourselves into thinking they are based on the awards that have gone down thus far?  I have watched Oscar through both kinds of seasons – the ones where there are upsets, and the ones where the acting categories were matched 4/4 every time.  So what kind of year will this be?

There are two forces at work, as I keep repeating.  The first is that there are now ten best picture nominees and not five.  The second is that they stretched out the date more.  Whether or not either of these have an impact will be answered in about one month from now.  What I do know is that when I looked back at the ten year span when Oscar did have ten Best Picture contenders, the Best Actor winner was from one of the ten films.  Not a single actor was in the film that won, but they all had their film nominated.  That is a pattern that may or may hold this year.

But let’s take a look at the acting categories and see if we can figure out where we are.

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Vanity Fair, and The Envelope, both have Oscar predictions apps for the iphone — because, you know, you can’t really ever have enough apps. Mashable. Unless you’re me.  And then you want less, not more.

Variety’s Oscar oddities has a lot of  facts about the race.

• This is the first year that 3D films were taken seriously by Academy voters, with “Up,” “Coraline” and “Avatar” in contention.
• Despite a flurry of Iraq war-themed films in past years, “Hurt Locker” is the first to draw a best-pic bid.
• Meryl Streep keeps breaking her own record, with her 16th nomination. Acting runners-up are Katharine Hepburn and Jack Nicholson, with 12 each. And Streep’s 13th bid as lead actress means she’s now the champ in that category, after being tied with Hepburn (who’d never received a supporting bid).

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