The Academy nominated nine films for Best Picture this year, because their new preferential voting system stipulates that only films with 5% of first-place votes among Academy member ballots are eligible to make it on the list. Given those new rules, many of the nominations were somewhat shocking, including - but not limited to - 'The Help,' 'The Tree of Life,' and 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.' With their new voting rules, it is now possible for a film on limited ballots to receive a nomination rather than a film on many ballots in positions other than first place.
Since the Awards are on the horizon, I've compiled my list of favorite films from this year. To be open and fair, I wasn't able to catch many of the highly talked about films from this season. Films like 'Shame,' 'Take Shelter,' 'Melancholia,' 'A Separation,' 'The Iron Lady,' 'Martha Marcy May Marlene,' 'We Need to Talk About Kevin,' 'Carnage,' 'Another Earth,' 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,' etc. I usually release my worst films of the year along with my best films of the year. I've been able to do this in past years because I've been nondiscriminatory in my movie-going habits. This last year, however, money was in issue, and I made a point of avoiding movies that were generally categorized as drivel. That's not to say I didn't see some clunkers, including 'Abduction,' 'I Don't Know How She Does It,' 'Apollo 18,' 'Footloose,' 'Dream House,' and most notably, Paul W.S. Anderson's abomination, 'The Three Musketeers.'
Honorable Mentions:
'Moneyball'
'The Ides of March'
'Jane Eyre'
It's hard to do a comedy, let alone a comedy about cancer, and get recognized as one of the year's best films. I like quiet comedies that focus on characters and let the humor flow naturally from real life situations. It's important that a comedy not only make us laugh, but make us care genuinely about the characters. This film certainly achieves that.
9 - Bridesmaids I just made a point of saying I like quiet comedies, and this one is anything but. It is, however, smart and endearing - even among the crude and outrageous punchlines. 'Bridesmaids' took it upon itself to make the 'R' rated comedy a woman's territory, and it gets an A+.
8 - The Descendents
Doubling as a comedy and a drama, Alexander Payne's latest entry gets more points for the latter. Some of the timing on the comedic bits falls flat, but the raw emotionality of the film more than makes up for it. It's a hard thing to have a spouse on the verge of death. It's entirely more difficult to realize that spouse has been cheating on you.
7 - War HorseTaking it's cues from old John Ford movies, 'War Horse' is a World War I drama that makes us realize the value of every life, enemy or otherwise. It's rare that I'm swept with overwhelming emotion in movies, but a scene in which Joey the horse runs frightened and confused through no-man's land and ends up tangled in a mass of barbed wire succeeds in being, not only the most technically brilliant scene of the year, but the most devastating.
6 - Rango
An under-appreciated animated film, 'Rango' is also a sophisticated Western. With quirky and barbaric humor, amazing visuals, and creative storytelling, 'Rango' manages to surpass Pixar's entry as the best animated film this year.
5 - DriveRyan Gosling gives a performance rivaling Robert DeNiro in 'Taxi Driver,' as The Driver, an emotionless machine who drives for races, the movies, and the mafia. He becomes eerily obsessed with a woman played by the enchanting Carey Mulligan and her young son. When her husband is released from prison, however, things gets complicated.
4 - The Artist
It's no secret that I'm obsessed with silent movies, so this was a particular treat. With sophistication and emotionality no dialogue can hope to achieve, 'The Artist,' wins as a romantic comedy with a lot of heart. This film has sequences of sheer genius and craft. It reminded me heavily of another French film, 'The Illusionist.'
Another film that dedicates itself to the silent movie, 'Hugo' is the best excuse for 3-D filmmaking. An adventure involving a boy who lives in a clock, his automaton, a cranky toymaker, and the girl with the heart-shaped key, the sheer entertainment value and joy wafting from the screen is impossible to resist. Intertwined with the true and tragic story of the life of film pioneer Georges Melies, 'Hugo' is an ode to silent movies and the magic and imagination they still provide us with today.
2 - Midnight in Paris
Woody Allen's best film in nearly two decades, I dare anyone not to fall in love with this picture. The love story is charming, the setting romantic, the story hysterical, and the characters legendary. Any lover of modern American literature and anyone with any degree of francophilia won't be able to get enough.
In a year of so many delightful and endearing films, this film is not among them. This is the most ambitious film about the nature of evolution since '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Though that film is much better and more profound, this film has an added element of humanity missing from Kubrick's masterpiece, through the study of man's relationship with God. The film jumps between America in the 1950s, twenty-first century corporate America, prehistoric times, and beyond the veil of earthly existence. The jumps are jarring and may put some people off, but the sheer ambition of trying to capture the very nature of our existence is intriguing and the film's quietness only draws the viewer in more closely to these characters and situations. Terrence Malick makes a film once every several years, and his devotion to perfection rivals only Kubrick.
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