Courtesy of Pixar

This is a revision of an earlier posting.

The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world — assuming, like the title character, you’re still around when all the humans have taken off and have access to an old video player. Wall-E (that’s the name of the machine) is a trash compactor, the last of his kind from an age in which cleaning up garbage was mankind’s highest priority — before people threw in the towel (and broom) and apparently (no spoilers here!) rocketed away. Now, this squat, childlike robot with his pivoting goggle eyes resides in a metropolis surrounded by skyscrapers that turn out, on closer inspection, to be compressed trash bricks piled high into the soot-gray sky. The movie is a bit of a trash brick itself: Director Andrew Stanton and his Pixar collaborators have taken cultural detritus — bits and pieces from cherished film genres, pop icons, visionary sci-fi tropes, half-remembered bric-a-brac from childhood — and compacted it all into a sublime work of art.

The story itself — well, that is a bit of a grown-up downer. Although there’s plenty of silent-movie slapstick, the apocalyptic context adds a hefty dose of melancholy. (We laugh when Wall-E finds a little box with a diamond ring, then tosses the ring and keeps the box — but the thought of the couple that left it behind is rather poignant.) Dust storms drive Wall-E into his lair, where he endlessly rewatches clips from the film Hello, Dolly! — particularly the opening number with Michael Crawford warbling about going to the city and kissing a girl. (“There’s no blue Monday in your Sunday clothes!”) It’s Wall-E’s only link to a gay (in the 1890s sense) world of limitless horizons and conspicuous consumption — and crowds of people. For companionship, Wall-E is limited to a sort of roach (evolved) that’s virtually indestructible. (Also indestructible are cream pastries he consumes that are clearly modeled on Twinkies — a great punch line to all the jokes about the imperishability of that synthesized cakelike product.)

From the beginning, Pixar — a beacon for the future of film technology — explored themes of loss, decay, and the dark side of materialism. The old-fashioned toys of Toy Story were soulful repositories of childhood love rendered obsolete by newer and fancier models. Even Pixar’s most routinely plotted film, Cars, was steeped in the romance of old machines. It’s as if those machines hold memories that humans forget — beauties that have been overlooked with growing up in a fast-paced cyber-world. What a peculiar company this is, forward- and backward-looking, a technological Janus head.

Here, director Stanton (Finding Nemo) extends that theme to the ruination of the entire planet, which he explicitly ties to an unchecked free-market embodied by a giant corporation that took over — Buy ‘n’ Large it’s called, but think Wal-Mart. Its lulling calls to consumption help to soften and fatten the human race (you should see these blobs) and separate them from the natural world. The storms, meanwhile, conjure up the planet’s most catastrophic man-made environmental disaster — the Dust Bowl, born of greed for corn profits (sound familiar?) that left topsoil suddenly vulnerable to winds.

What will the wing nuts and the Cato-institutionalized make of Wall-E, which not only prophesies environmental horrors but targets overweening corporations? All it needs is a terrorist fist bump. Boycott those Pixar pinkos!

The first part of Wall-E has no talk — apart from that ghastly Hello, Dolly thing and Fred Willard on an old video as Buy ‘n’ Large’s “global CEO.” Then a rocket descends, accompanied by Thomas Newman’s score, which, like the movie, is a gloriously inspired mélange — Warner cartoons (Carl Stalling), sci-fi awe, Shostakovich terror. What emerges from that ship is Eve, a smooth white egglike robot with a head that floats above her unattached — vaguely Japanese, with violet cat eyes, like a sprite out of Miyazaki. Wall-E is instantly smitten, even though Eve blasts anything she deems a threat. (It’s an edgy courtship.)

Eve’s mission — and where it leads her and Wall-E — I’ll let you discover for yourself. But humans of a sort are involved, and there are rollicking chases and a tender love story. When a little-girl giggle comes out of Eve, Wall-E suddenly seems like one of those movies where two lonely little kids discover each other and share wordless adventures. (There’s a rocketing space pas de deux between Wall-E and Eve in which the lyricism is positively transcendental.) Somehow these two machines — these children — have to reinfuse what’s left of mankind with the joy of play. Their electronic coos and twitters recall Star Wars and E.T.; their only visual aid is a tiny plant that conjures up memories of the pathetic little twig tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

At heart, Wall-E spins a rather conventional and even conservative — although you’d never know it in this topsy-turvy political world — parable. But the film never feels like blockbuster business as usual. Like in Finding Nemo (only more so), the sense of loss is too pervasive. Something precious is alive, but hanging by a thread, a twig, a microscopic filament. And Pixar — this ridiculously rich, state-of-the-art computer colossus — is using all its resources to show us what we’re losing.

In Michael Clayton.Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.

Reacting, not acting, was the key to Pollack’s manifesto, as befit a student — and then full-time assistant — of acting teacher Sanford Meisner. Meisner was a Stanislavski (and Group Theater) disciple, but unlike Lee Strasberg he didn’t go in as much for emotional self-plumbing, for histrionics in a vacuum. His students had to (a) purge themselves of mannerisms and (b) learn to react to other actors in the moment. There’s a wonderful subtext to the scenes between Dustin Hoffman and Pollack (playing his agent) in Tootsie. Well, it’s a sub-subtext — the subtext is that Hoffman is really driving Pollack crazy. The sub-subtext is that Hoffman’s actor, Michael, is a Strasbergian Method guy whose quest for emotional truth can be self-indulgent and disruptive. The Meisner man can only look at his watch and exhale.

Of course, Hoffman’s and Pollack’s creative tension is one of the reasons that Tootsie is so flabbergastingly great: It was good for Hoffman to be reined in; it was good for Pollack to be shoved out of his comfort zone. After the supremely tasteful Out of Africa took home all those statuettes, no scene in a Pollack-directed film would have anything like the distinctive neurotic drive of Tootsie, of Streisand in The Way We Were, or of the great moment in Absence of Malice when Paul Newman gets in close to Sally Fields and hisses in her face. The canvases seemed larger than the emotions.

But if we lost Pollack the vital director, we gained an actor whose performances were lessons in the art of screen acting. It began with Tootsie, a role that Pollack stepped into reluctantly, and the reluctance is right there onscreen, in a good way: The agent, George, just wants to do his job, eat his lunch. (That’s his motivation.) It would be ten years before the next Pollack performances, in The Player, Death Becomes Her, and Husbands and Wives (all 1992), but they were worth the wait. In Death Becomes Her, he plays Meryl Streep’s doctor: The gimmick is she’s immortal and shows up at his office with lethal fractures. Pollack has the physician’s manner down cold — the easy curiosity, the practiced patter, it’s all routine until he gives her injuries a closer look and … “whoa!” The wince, the jump back, the building hysteria, the attempt to fathom what he’s seeing while vainly trying to keep his professional poise: The scene is a sick-comedy masterpiece.

In Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, Pollack is even more brilliantly instinctive. It helps that the actor to whom he’s reacting is Judy Davis, whose motor would run too fast for almost any living creature, let alone Pollack’s Jack — one of those patented Pollack brisk executives with no time for a lot of neurotic nonsense. After Jack leaves his wife (Davis) and takes up with a young blonde (the marvelous Lysette Anthony — where is she?), Pollack hits a career peak. Watch the scary scene in which he chases Anthony out of a party: This is a man with a visceral horror of losing control who is losing control.

He didn’t lose it again like that onscreen, but few actors could make matter-of-factness so unnerving. His final scene in Eyes Wide Shut was criticized for going on and on even by people who liked the movie, but on its own terms the performance is perfect. Pollack is a rich guy in his rec room telling Tom Cruise’s naïve doctor to back off, and his pool playing is packed with portent — with purposeful indirection. His motivation is to put everything back in its rightful pocket.

Pollack gave similar performances in Changing Lanes and Michael Clayton as execs who know the job they’re doing “reeks” but who also know the system. The guy in Changing Lanes cares only about the bottom line; the guy in Michael Clayton has a conscience — but his disgust only goes so far. In both films, his character's job is to keep unruly emotional people from destroying the delicate balance that is central to his orderly existence.

Was there something of those characters in Pollack? He worked largely with stars, some of whom he compared to thoroughbreds that needed calming and stroking. He worked within the system — and, as a producer and executive producer, helped younger, more restless artists (among them Anthony Minghella) work within it, too. He didn’t make “personal” movies, but unlike the characters above, he never put his name on anything he didn’t believe in. Perhaps what gives his performances their integrity, their heart, their feeling, is that Pollack knew he was playing the kind of corporate men he might, by temperament, have become — but thanks to God, or, more likely, Meisner, he managed to transcend.

No, nothing to make film students cry, “Great shot!”Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

That’s it: nothing flashy, nothing to make film students cry, “Great shot!” But it tells you, simply and elegantly, everything you need to know about the height and depth of the setting, the threat, the sundry variables in play. It’s the work of a man with film storytelling in his blood. What a bummer when the story he has to tell is such a cosmic nothing.

Even though he has moved on, Spielberg can still bring off Saturday-matinee cliffhangers, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a lot more energized than the limp Last Crusade — which was his attempt to atone (as if he needed to) for making Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom too intense, too scary, too good. (Temple of Doom brought outcries from bluestocking critics and helped give birth to the PG-13 rating.) But the new film is impersonal and rather frantic — the act of an old circus performer doing kiddie tricks, only semi-engaged.

Too bad: The setup is resonant. It’s the fifties, and Professor Jones is getting old. The nuclear age and the Cold War have arrived, and McCarthyism has hit academia. Indy has no family. His father is dead. There’s no wife or child — or so he thinks. Then into his life comes a motorcycle-riding greaser called Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) who calls out, “Old man!” Mutt says he has been sent by his mother, one Mary, held captive in the Amazon along with Indy’s old friend, Professor Oxley (John Hurt). The kid is a dropout, which would bother Indy if it were his kid. Hold on, it is his kid: Mary turns out to be Marion — Karen Allen — from Raiders of the Lost Ark! Mutt is Henry Jones the Third!

But oh what lackluster tasks await the aging adventurer and his spawn, a quest that makes the film of The Da Vinci Code look like a model of plot construction. In the warehouse scene, Indy gets the drop on Spalko and her men but then they get the drop on him. But then he gets away. But then the Commies have him trapped. But then he gets away but then gets captured again but then escapes but then Irina shows up, just when he thinks he has lost her. “We meet again, Dr. Jones.” She can say that again.

The action is the movie’s reason for being, of course, but the setups are wittier than the payoffs. Indy finds himself on a nuclear test site amid life-size dummies of Mom, Dad, and kids — the fifties nuclear family, ha-ha — and the way he escapes the ensuing H-blast is a howl. But the sequence has no punch line. A bit in which Indy sinks into a dry sand pit and in lieu of a vine his son throws him a snake (Indy’s phobia) has too many extra beats — it’s laborious. A Jeep chase through the jungle features Indy and his son leaping between vehicles as the eponymous skull flies back and forth: so many variables, so many stunts, so little snap. The good guys escape on a raft that plunges over three progressively more epic waterfalls: riotously scary in prospect but there’s nothing at the bottom but splashing. Only a bit involving ravenous, circling army of ants has the requisite punch, and that’s because it’s full-scale gross-out horror. A bad guy’s head getting swiftly eaten down to the skull has a way of picking things up. (The FX fall short, though, when it comes to the elongated crystal skull: In design, it cannibalizes H.R. Giger; in execution it looks like Lucite filled with bubble wrap.)

Harrison Ford always knew how to lighten his clenched, pissed-off persona with goofy shrugs that said, “I can only go so far with this hero stuff.” But the years have dried him out, and I don’t mean physically. The breeziness is gone; he now seems like a peevish movie star who’s too self-centered to interact. When he’s supposed to realize that Marion is the lost love of his life, the moment has no emotional force — he looks as if he’s gritting his teeth just to kiss her. Allen, back from retirement, has a good, foul-mouthed entrance, then turns mushy and peripheral. And Blanchett — a great art object, her satin skin taut over those Asiatic cheekbones, a slash of black hair across her forehead — hits the same note with diminishing returns. How many variations of “We meet again, Dr. Jones” can there be?

Thematically, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is still a Spielberg film. The relationship between an absent father and a son is still central, but David Koepp’s script is stubbornly shallow — it even misses opportunities to show the father and son extending their conflict into the fight scenes. There’s another reason the movie has no urgency. All the computer-generated imagery muffles something vital in Spielberg’s technique: It removes the intangible element of gravity and depth of field that’s in that early warehouse sequence; it blands out his staging. And the state-of-the-art effects have a way of making the ages of the actors more, not less apparent. As this elderly crew (only LaBeouf is under the age of 56) rushes down a long stone staircase to escape a CGI rock slide, you can almost hear their joints creak. Or is that Spielberg, impatiently drumming his fingers?

Truly, Madly, DeeplyPhoto courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films

I stand by that opinion of those films but was wrong to finger Weinstein for pulling Minghella’s strings. Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere knew the director and said he liked living well and making high-profile pictures. The projects in question — none of them remotely formulaic — were initiated by Minghella or studios other than Miramax. Beyond that, the tone and timing of the piece stunk, especially given Weinstein’s close friendship with Minghella. Defamer’s Stu VanAirsdale wrote that I’d done the impossible: made people feel sorry for Harvey!

I want to be clear that no one ordered me to apologize. I had decided to eat shit even before Harvey called. Yes, he called — did you think he wouldn’t? He was the soul of politeness, believe it or not. He said he cried for hours when he got the news. He said Minghella came to him with most of the projects. He said despite his “Harvey Scissorhands” reputation, Minghella was not a man whose work you recut.

I told Harvey that as a critic, I reserve the right to make fun of him anytime I want, and that he can expect in the future to be regularly pissed off. But this time, I was over the line in so many ways. I apologize to him, to you, to Anthony Minghella.

Earlier: How (and Why) Anthony Minghella’s Talent Wasn’t Quite Fulfilled

Photo: FilmMagic

Do I have evidence? Peter Biskind’s chronicle of the indie movement, Down and Dirty Pictures, provides some. But I’m less interested in what happened behind the screen than in the compromises in front of it.

America called, waving money, and Minghella directed (but didn’t write) a negligible Hollywood comedy called Mr. Wonderful. Then, in 1995, came The English Patient, with its Michael Ondaatje pedigree and artfully fractured syntax and spectacular desert plane crash — the story of a tortured Hungarian mapmaker (Ralph Fiennes) who betrays his cause for love and dies a lingering death (with flashbacks). An impressive work, although somewhat distant… It took Seinfeld’s Elaine’s hilarious bewilderment amid scores of rapt viewers on Seinfeld to give many of us (I wasn’t reviewing at the time) the guts to say, “Um, I don’t really get it.” No matter. It was a big night at the Academy Awards for its shmompany, and Minghella (along with the Swedish Lasse Halstrom, another shmavorite) became the Boys of March.

The first thing to say about The Talented Mr. Ripley is that it’s a marvelous piece of storytelling with smashingly suspenseful set pieces. The second is that Minghella was a humanist with a penchant for characters who suffer mightily, and it wasn’t always clear what attracted him to Patricia Highsmith’s cold, cynical novel about a psychotically upwardly mobile chameleon who insinuates himself into a coterie of trust-funders. In vain, Minghella tried to deepen material that was resolutely shallow. In the lead, shmompany shmavorite Matt Damon gives an impressive performance of the wrong kind: a clammy loser, an anti-chameleon, so conscientiously dreary that he lets Jude Law’s bronzed rich boy act him off the screen.

Cold Mountain came next and was meant to be the big one: best-selling book, the Civil War, senseless carnage, unrequited love, tragedy, A-list leads, and a raft of guest-star hillbillies. It was Oscar bait at its most rarified. What happened? After a momentously traumatic opening battle, the film turns patchy and rhythmless, suggesting shmomeone had taken 40 whacks in the editing room. The connection between the impossibly pretty Jude Law and Nicole Kidman didn’t fully take hold (Kidman looked like such a skinny cover-girl that she didn’t seem equipped for the nineteenth century), and the novel’s trajectory and message were blunted. Coarsened by death and betrayal, the book’s protagonist becomes a killer. In the film he’s nothing more than a chivalric bystander. You can practically hear the shmory conference: “We can’t make him unsympathetic! The audience won’t like him!”

It must have been a grim day when Cold Mountain picked up few Oscar nominations. The good news was that Minghella began work on a more personal project called Breaking and Entering, which explored the guilt of a successful artist over having lost touch with the community in which he came up. It was the perfect subject — a way home. Alas, the hero was once again Jude Law — a good actor, but too much the movie star and too young for what was essentially a midlife-crisis picture. The film was also too artfully composed for its subject, and Minghella seemed more out of touch than his (autobiographical?) protagonist. Shmomeone played around with the December release date: Now it was Oscar bait, now it wasn’t. Without much love from critics, Breaking and Entering quickly dropped off the face of the earth.

I am not remotely suggesting here that Minghella sold out and became a Hollywood hack: Every one of his films was an attempt to merge his own bold, socially committed sensibilities with the insistent demands of his shmasters. But why did he complete only six films (counting one in the can) in the eighteen years between Truly, Madly, Deeply and his death? Where were the gutsy little modestly budgeted movies — good or bad or uneven — that could have kept him rooted?

Anthony Minghella was only 54 and might have had a quarter-century left to break new ground. His passing robs us of the movies he might have made and leaves behind a cautionary tale. It’s not that he was forced to make crap. It’s not that his movies were entirely mangled by big hairy paws. It’s that an artist who could have set an example for gutsy personal filmmaking surrendered his autonomy — as so many others have done — in the name of someone (or shmomeone) else’s ego.

Say, do you smell smoke?: Burning the Future: Coal in AmericaPhoto courtesy of Firefly Pix

The most entertaining sections are the mindlessly perky coal-industry propaganda ads that remind us how dependent we are — moms, dads, kiddies, and their big suburban homes full of large-screen TVs, computers, Nintendo Wiis, and washing machines — on the “stable, affordable” energy that coal provides. (The commercial featuring supermodels blacked-up as miners is an instant camp classic.) Bless Novack for giving industry spokesmen (including the governor, Joe Manchin, and his improbable hair) a chance to make the case for plundering the state. They assure us that (a) coal supplies West Virginia with jobs and pride, and (b) those mountains and the surrounding landscapes are lovingly restored once the coal is extracted. Why, in a few years you won’t even know our precious natural heritage was ever disturbed!

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Independent geologists — that is, people who know stuff and are not on the industry’s payroll — demonstrate (with accompanying footage) that if you dump dirt and rocks (“controlled gravity placement” in industry parlance) on hundreds of miles of rivers and streams and dot the landscape with “slurry” ponds (300 million gallons' worth) that leak into the ground water, you’re going to kill the aquatic life, disrupt the ecosystem for all time, and poison ordinary people and their kids (who are suddenly exposed to massive amounts of lead, arsenic, and manganese). Although I write this as a latte-drinking New York liberal, the victims — and budding activists — come from generations of coal miners. They’ve lost their forests, their mountains, and, in a shocking number of instances, their gallbladders. The Environmental Protection Agency is nowhere in sight. And here’s the punch line: For all the governor’s talk of keeping jobs in the state, an industry that once employed 125,000 has become so “efficient” that it’s down to 15,000 (albeit 15,000 flag-waving patriots who loudly denounce latte-drinking liberals).

Burning the Future ends with an apocalyptic montage: explosions, floods, George W. Bush — the end of one of the country’s most mysterious and enthralling terrains. By comparison, Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen is almost a feel-good movie. It’s set in Austin, where there are latte-drinking liberals, and in the nineties they actually kept a 4,500-acre development from going in a few miles above their beloved Barton Springs watering hole. They have Robert Redford, who grew up partly in Austin, speaking on their behalf! (Redford is a co-producer with Terrence Malick — a cinema poet of virgin springs.) But when George W. Bush (that name again) defeats Ann Richards as the governor of Texas, the City Council loses its power to keep the short-term profiteers from altering the landscape for all time.

The Unforeseen has three novel elements. Poet Wendell Berry intones his lamentations as the camera travels up and down the new superhighways and picks its way among the burgeoning suburban sprawl. Dunn devotes part of the film to a sympathetic portrait of Gary Bradley, a developer with too big dreams of seizing the future, tearing up the land, and making piles of money. Bradley is variously described as a visionary and a con man — and he’s both, as well as an American archetype. Finally, there is that cancer metaphor — or model, really. Development is presented as something that literally (not figuratively, not poetically) metastasizes and attacks the life-support system of the landscape. Those of us raised with the Hopi and Philip Glass–infused Koyaanisqatsi will be pleased to see it wasn’t all just New Age mumbo jumbo. It was grounded.

Both these films tell familiar stories, but both have such a rich sense of place that they rip you up in ways that other, less-rooted documentaries don’t. I cannot recommend them too highly, and while you’re waiting for them to begin, read Timothy Egan’s stunningly vivid The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl for a too little-known account of how tearing up the soil for short-term profit produced the worst natural catastrophe in this country’s history. (May it always be the worst.) Read my friend Bill McKibben’s eloquent Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, which makes a survivalist’s case against growth. Then go home and read your children Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax:

Plant a new Truffala. Treat it with care.
Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.
Then the Lorax
And all of his friends
May come back.

Photo: Getty Images

To: David Edelstein
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 3:11 PM
From: Lynda Obst
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear David,

There was some love and some surprises that kept the night from becoming an utter snooze-fest, with way too many clips threatening to become one long clip of Cary Grant morphing into Cuba Gooding Jr. There was no real evidence that the writers were back: Aside from Jon Stewart’s lines and Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen’s hilarious turn as Oscar perennials Halle Berry and Dame Judy Dench (next year Hillary Swank and Helen Mirren), the content was more spliced-together than it was written. At one point, the producer/chef/host of my party cried out, “These are the worst Oscars since I was born!”

Tilda Swinton is the coolest, isn’t she? She was genuinely stunned, along with the crowd who shouldn’t have been stunned because they voted for her. Tough women in a man’s world are the hardest type to infuse with humanity (right, Howard Wolfson?) and are usually played as a cliché. Swinton, though, cannot play a cliché. She re-invents.

At our party we also groaned in agony when the young girl from "Falling Slowly" was hooked, and cheered when she resumed with her lovely speech. Do we think it was Jon Stewart who lobbied for her return?

One noteworthy thing was how many awards The Bourne Identity won. You couldn’t miss it at our party, where an old Oscar was pumped overhead by its exec producer, Pat Crowley, every time it beat No Country (in Editing, Sound editing, and Sound Mixing, for those of you who didn’t have those awards specially underscored). I remember wanting to vote for it as one of my five best pictures it was so damn good, but on an indie year like this one, that was one prize it would not take. There wasn’t enough of a theme, and even with great director elevating it to a sort of crackerjack perfection, it was still too potboiler. It was, in its own way, a contender.

But snooze-fest or not, I found a lot to celebrate in this damaged, much maligned industry’s victories last night. Let’s hear it for a night where a great producer won for a change — Scott Rudin, who uses his considerable power to protect the Coen brothers’ “little corner of the sandbox”; where the reclusive and iridescent Tilda Swinton, cast in a director’s debut and supported by a major studio (WB), upsets the Oscar race and thanks her agent above all others; where Marion Cotillard walks off the stage on the arm of Forest Whitaker; where Daniel Day-Lewis actually attends the awards and enjoys himself; where the movie everyone wanted to win, wins, and it isn’t a blockbuster. What’s there to be grumpy about? The grosses?

Here’s to the sandbox of life.

Love as always,
Lynda

Photo: Getty Images

To: Lynda Obst
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 9:08 AM
From: David Edelstein
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Hi Lynda,

Was that especially uneventful, Lynda, or will all Oscar ceremonies henceforth play as if they’d already happened once before in a galaxy far, far away? Not at all the Mardi Gras blowout I’d hoped for. Even Diablo Cody was simple, modest — everything her screenplay wasn’t. Is it that YouTube has made even exhibitionists more self-conscious in the knowledge that their gaffes will be replayed millions of times? I’m really reaching to say something of sociological interest … Maybe we should just blame producer Gil Cates, who makes the trains run on time at the expense of all spontaneity. It’s why I gave up on Saturday Night Live, the least “live” show imaginable, insofar as anyone who dares to depart from the script gets exiled to Siberia …

]]>New York magazine had a lively party at the Spotted Pig and it was really hard to concentrate on the screen(s). For awhile, Eddie Izzard was shushing people — he said he came to watch the Oscars, of all the silly things — but most of the other media celebs were drinking There Will Be Bloody Marys (wish I’d thought of that) and posing for one another’s picture-phones. Probably the most animated discussion came early on in regards to Jennifer Hudson’s twin inflatable life rafts (a “uniboob,” according to former Gawker enchantress Emily Gould), which made many of us avert our eyes in sadness. Who let that happen? (I’m told the metallic bolero was the brainstorm of Andre Leon Talley.)

Jon Stewart had brilliant lines: the Vanity Fair writers’ joke, the bit about there being a black or female president whenever an asteroid is about to hit, “thank God for teen pregnancy” — keepers. Watching Lawrence of Arabia on an iPod — the future, indeed. There was something uptight about him, though. Maybe it was the baleful influence of the man whose name starts with “G” and rhymes with “pill.” One of the three best moments of the evening was when he escorted that nice Czech Once girl back out to give her thank-you speech. It was like the kids standing on their desks at the end of Dead Poets Society. (When she was cut off, the third floor of the Spotted Pig let out a collective wail.)

Some notes: Elizabethan movies always win Oscars for costumes … I am not looking forward to Get Smart … Brad Bird telling a story about a teacher undermining his dream of making movies and thereby affirming the message of his work: the struggle of the Ayn Randian genius whom society will do everything to muzzle … Amy Adams’s cute demure little head dip when she was exiting after her (simple, lovely) performance.

You see Javier Bardem and you know why he is so beloved. Even with those black eyes and hair and that deep, oily voice, there’s a sprightliness about him. After he thanked his mother so beautifully in Spanish, he half-danced off the stage a few inches off the ground.

I had to remind myself when Tilda Swinton’s name was called that hers was my favorite of the nominated performances in that category … Some women I know were upset by the role, though (or at least the role after Swinton was cast): the powerful woman who needs to harden herself (and order a hit) so as not to appear weak in the eyes of her (male) bosses. As a powerful woman working for other powerful women, Lynda, you might have some insight here … not that you’d ever order a hit … I don’t think … In any case, Swinton overacted throughout Michael Clayton but less than any of the other nominees. And her speech, oh my! She was so surprised when she won — and then she went up there and babbled about the Oscar’s butt and told Tony Gilroy he rocks and all I could think was that only someone brought up rich could have been so gracious and so above it all.

Phony-baloney line of the night: “Some people ask me, why do we give out Oscars?” Uh, who asks you that? That’s like a kid at the Passover table spontaneously coming out with one of the four questions. I don’t usually recline, dip once, or question the existence of the Oscars.

Second best moment of the night: Cate Blanchett overacting like mad in a clip from the bombastic Elizabeth: The Golden Age — and then watching in the audience and grimacing in horror. Perhaps the most authentic note she has hit in years.

So: Marion Cotillard? Why? I wondered if it had something to do with Julie Christie’s rather high-strung, not-so-insouciant demeanor on the Hollywood cocktail circuit … That and the incredibly smart move of sending Cotillard out there and keeping her there so that everyone could see that she’s a young, beautiful woman who transformed herself completely. That and perhaps the fact that it’s a great performance — albeit in a mess of a movie.

When I’m 98, may I be seen in public with two gorgeous Amazons supporting me, and may I die sandwiched between their bodies. And if I have to speak, may I keep it short enough that people watching don’t fear I’m going to expire before their eyes.

My man Alex Gibney won. I say “my man” because I interviewed him over on the Bloggingheads site for about 45 minutes the other day (the chat is still up) and now feel proprietary. Even so, Taxi to the Dark Side is the best of the docs — a scathing yet devastatingly lucid exploration of how we have become what we once feared. Anyone who hasn’t seen this movie must now, and that includes you, Barack.

Helen Mirren (maybe the most stunning presenter — take that, Jessica Alba) fluffed a very bad joke in a very bad intro but then ushered in the best moment of the night: Daniel Day-Lewis accepting his Oscar by kneeling before her. Yes, she’d played The Queen, but the gesture went deeper than that: It was the sincere tribute of one brave acting soul to another — and it had a nice symmetry, since at the New York Film Critics Circle dinner, Day-Lewis presented an award to Javier Bardem, who got down on his knees and genuflected. If that doesn’t make your heart leap … Then Day-Lewis said the script “sprang like a golden sapling out of the mad, beautiful head of Paul Thomas Anderson” — and this time it was the sincere tribute of one beautiful madman to another.

No surprises after that, but I liked Joel Coen thanking the Academy for “letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox” because that’s what he and his kid brother really seem to do … fully absorbed but able to crack each other up. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad evening, even if Julian Schnabel and P.T. Anderson and Tamara Jenkins went home empty-handed.

Did you feel the love, Lynda?

Love,
David

To: David Edelstein
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2008 5:08 PM
From: Lynda Obst
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear David,

It is Oscar season after all: I saw George Clooney in the flesh and Harvey Weinstein in a suit that made him look like a villain in a Batman sequel, which was not pretty. George Clooney, though, was extraordinarily pretty. I don’t remember what he was wearing except for that smile, which should be patented. It dazzled more brightly than any lighting in Bryan Lourd’s packed atelier. George’s girlfriend patiently stood by as he complimented his admirers of each gender, as if he hadn’t had them at hello.

]]>Hollywood’s partiers, still recovering from the writers’ strike and starved for love and connectedness, clung to one another as if they needed a hug. Lourd, the renowned but low-profile host of the most coveted Friday-night Oscar celebration who was also one of the strike’s heroes, relentlessly scurrying between guild and mogul negotiators early in the crisis (he’s one of CAA’s top three honchos), was beaming. Former Paramount chairman and beloved figure Tom Freston was back from Burma and Afghanistan — his hotel having been blown up on the day after he left, he was especially relieved to be back in a restored Hollywood. I also saw the man who replaced Freston, Brad Grey, and Jennifer Aniston, who I believe no longer speak since The Break Up. Long story.

But the partiers were carefree. Every one had Oscars to celebrate. People were of two minds, either thinking that the Night Is a Snooze Because Everything Is a Lock, or Everything Is Up for Grabs Because of Potentially Split Votes. And so, onto my up-to-the-minute guesses.

Best Picture
No one would be surprised if: No Country for Old Men won. The betting pools have this as a lock, owing to overall excellence in craft and message and pitch-perfect performances and execution.

Some people would be shocked but not completely stunned if: There Will Be Blood won. They work for, are related to, or are in the adulatory fan club of the still-growing auteur Paul Thomas Anderson. But most of this club expects him, if he wins anything, to capture Best Director.

Everyone would be shocked if: Atonement won. What’s up with the BAFTAs? You can’t find anyone in the Academy who admits to loving this movie. What they like is its art direction. It has all the attributes of an Academy movie except for emotion.

Best Director
No one would be surprised if: The Coens win. It is their year, and not an instance of a director deserving the prize in general but not for the particular picture. Last week on a location scout, the crew's highbrows (production designer and director) loved Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing. The lowbrow (me) loves The Big Lebowski and Fargo. But everyone loved Raising Arizona — and No Country. (Friends of my parents in Palm Beach, meanwhile, ran from the theater in the first thirty minutes of No Country. This does not bode well for the hoped-for Oscar bump.)

People would be shocked but not stunned if: Paul Thomas Anderson, young adored auteur, won this award in a nod to the ambition and thrust of his epic Blood. Many would be angry, many would be cheering. This would be controversial and fun.

People would be stunned and yet think it was okay if: Julian Schnabel won for Diving Bell. Knowing Julian, the man himself might not be shocked. And why should he be? What does he know from the Academy? And the movie is so damn good.

Best Actress
People would be stunned and disappointed if: Julie Christie didn’t win. When you give a performance like hers (in Away From Her) and allow yourself look so damn old to boot, you win, damn it.

People would be disappointed but somehow charmed if: In an upset the prize went to Ellen Page. She is the girl of the year, Abigail Breslin as a teenage doppelganger. She has been lauded, has broken through to star roles, but the Academy tends to think in terms of ends of careers rather than beginnings.

People would be shocked though some would cheer (like a big gay contingent I heard from last night) if: Marie Cotillard won. It depends on the number of raving Francophiles in the Academy, a micro-trend that hasn’t been studied. (Send Marc Penn to Hollywood!)

Best Actor
No one, not even George Clooney, would be shocked if: Anyone but Daniel Day-Lewis won. This is the award to be won for Blood, and I think this is what Clooney meant when he compared himself to Hillary. (But he would look better and get more close-ups.)

Tommy Lee Jones would have had a shot if: Anyone had seen In the Valley of Elah.

Supporting Actress
A few would be more surprised than I figured if: Cate Blanchett won. I learned last night that not everyone in the Academy has seen the Dylan movie. (Dylan? Played by how many actors? Whaa?) But many would not be surprised: She’s getting great roles and doing unusual things with them. Two nominations are worthy of note.

Some would be surprised but not stunned if: Amy Ryan won. Her performance was loved by many and she is an up-and-comer much respected by her peers.

People would be stunned and thrilled if: Tilda Swinton won. She is a truly astonishing talent who is simply not in enough American movies. Bravo, Tony Gilroy, for casting her.

Best Supporting Actor
People would be stunned and befuddled if: Anyone but Javier took this, but we both already said this. When he walks through a room now, people get out of his way. Just in case.

Cinematography
No one would be surprised if: Roger Deakins won for No Country, which would probably be part of a sweep.

No one would be surprised if: Blood won for the gorgeous anamorphic work.

I also could see: Diving Bell or Atonement winning, and no one being surprised.

All of these movies looked great. It depends on if it’s sweep night or split-ticket night. Votes for Diving Bell or Atonement would be the Academy’s way of showing respect for the impeccable craftsmanship of these films (editing and art direction prizes can do that as well). I pick Deakins, having proudly worked with him on the Siege. And call sweep night.

Screenplays
Everyone would be stunned if: Anything but Juno won for Original Screenplay. The campaign has been on for months, and the walking, talking soundbite that is Diablo Cody will win. It is the screenplay that made the girl that made the movie that made the phenomenon. Like it or not.

Adapted Screenplay
No one would be that surprised if: No Country wins — sweeps the awards, the night, then turns into our very own national Ambien, giving the Coens’ parents a night to remember. In fact, I call it.

No one would be surprised if No Country wins, sweeps the awards, and gives the Coen brothers' parents, at least, a night to remember. In fact, I call it.

Some great screenplays that many would be happy if if utterly shocked to see win, if this deserved sweep does not happen: Ronald Harwood’s unadaptable Diving Bell or Sarah Polley’s magnificent and tender Away from Her.

As for the rest of the night, yes to Ratatouille and probably on Michael Moore, for both his celebrity and impeccable timing — health care is the issue of the year.

I think the big issue for the industry, David — aside, of course, from when we can declare this primary season over and start taking on McCain — is whether we can get anyone to stay excited through the evening’s telecast and then go to these cinephile movies once they’ve won.

Even though No Country was my favorite movie of the year, there’s nothing more boring than a sweep. That’s why I was thrilled last night when one of the smartest people in Hollywood, James Schamus (the president of Focus Films, screenwriter of The Ice Storm, and Ang Lee collaborator) confounded all my predictions. “So it’s a lock,” I said. “Oh, no. I think it’s wide open and any movie can win.” “Really?” “Yes. Even Michael Clayton.” So if Clayton wins, everyone will be shocked except James Schamus.

Oh, and overheard by my date, was the most astounding prediction: Owen Wilson was asked what he thought would win Best Picture. “Obama!” he answered. Obama? “Yeah,” he answered, “Obama.” “He’s FREAKIN’ HUGE!”

Here’s to a fun night, David — some upsets, but not the wrong ones, and none from superdelegates.

Hugs,
Lynda

Josh Brolin didn't manage to blow away the Academy, either.Photo courtesy of Miramax

To: Lynda Obst
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 9:08 AM
From: David Edelstein
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear Lynda,

Your evocative post of Tuesday last — which suggested that you and your Hollywood colleagues have not recovered emotionally from the writers’ strike — bodes well for No Country for Old Men, which in another year might only have been the first choice of suicidal depressives. You also shamed me. Having had my critical say on the nominated films in this magazine, I was eager to talk Oscar politics and to snigger at Academy voters’ middlebrow taste, while you — the big-studio producer — insisted on addressing many of the nominees’ artistic merits and reminding me that there is, in fact, little difference this year between the critics’ favorites and the industry’s. Sure, I thought Atonement was weak tea and would have liked a little Best Picture love for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But even there the directing nod for Julian Schnabel suggests the votes were close. And Diving Bell is in French, and no one could tolerate a French picture (even with an American director and a Brit screenwriter) taking home the grand prize. (Has that ever happened?) I apologize for my condescension.

We haven’t speculated about the show itself. My heart sank when I heard Gil Cates was back in the producer’s chair. Still, it’s possible that even under Cates’s iron grip, this year’s Oscars will have a Mardi Gras feel. My advice to people who plan to drink every time someone mentions the writers’ strike is stick to beer.

I trust you’ve had a chance to scope things out since your last post for your up-to-the-minute “I wouldn’t be surprised if…” predix. Mine are as follows and you’ll notice I’m playing it very safe. Picture: No Country. Actor: Day-Lewis. Actress: Christie. S. Actor: Bardem. S. Actress: Blanchett (too bad). Director: the Coens. Original screenplay: The Person Who Calls Herself Diablo. Adapted screenplay: PT Anderson (I think consolation prize). Cinematography: Deakins, No Country. Animation: Ratatouille. Documentary: No End in Sight. (I’m really not sure here, because Taxi to the Dark Side is so powerful and Michael Moore’s celebrity looms large.)

Whatever happens, let’s be thankful we have the Oscars this year to kick around. Have fun, pace yourself, talk to you Monday in the wee hours.

David

Marion Cotillard in the “under-frog” film La Vie en Rose.Photo courtesy of TFM Distribution

To: David Edelstein
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 12:38 PM
From: Lynda Obst
Subject: RE: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear David,

To say it’s been the winter of our discontent doesn’t overstate the despair that has gripped Hollywood since late October — as you know, having shared in the Hollywood bummer that was the writers' strike. Now that it’s over — having suffered through a party-less, drama-less, impoverished Globes season, not to mention that eight-week strike, which cost the local economy some $3 billion — we have arrived at something to celebrate. And what this town needs is a good bash: Half the place seems in the mood to get gussied up and let bygones by bygones, while the other half probably still feels like throwing a few back in a crew bar and having it out with their local studio head/agent/ producer/writer. Still, even Graydon Carter canceled his big party in favor of Chinese food in bed. The only option is to start the betting pool and declare it Pajama Oscar year.

For cinematography, I am prejudiced in favor of Roger Deakins, a genius whose craft is more subtle and technical than that represented by the huge, ejaculating oil wells in the anamorphic Blood. I would have voted for No Country’s simple, impeccable art direction — which, not being very flashy, was not nominated. Its brilliant, minimalist sound (almost un-sound) was noted, however, and I think it will win.

Yes, I think Javier is a lock. His is such a memorable and defining performance: It shows us the face of the existential other, the one that can neither be caught nor beaten. And for Cate Blanchett, the mere feat of having been nominated for two awards — a Kate Winslet–Forest Whitaker–like accomplishment — may in itself convince the Academy give her and the fascinating, actor-rich I’m Not There the supporting nod. Her competition as of now seems to be Marion Cotillard of La Vie en Rose, who is enjoying a healthy Academy campaign, for an “under-frog” film.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Julie Christie, of course, are also heavily favored, if not locks … who are we kidding? If there is such a thing, Daniel is a lock. Julie Christie made me weep, and despair for the vagaries of time and mind I am now living through in my own family. Daniel’s performance was so strong that he shattered the second half of the movie for me: Paul Dano strained to keep up and then cracked, harming the end of the epic. (It’s one of your faves, David, I know.)

Let’s pick up at the end of the week once I find an editor for the comedy we’re shooting in Boston. As for Wisconsin, my heart’s in my mouth.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,
Lynda

Edelstein: Who Will Drink Whose Milkshake?

Screw it. He's gonna smoke your pipe tobacco, too.Photo courtesy of Paramount Vantage

To: Lynda Obst
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 12:38 PM
From: David Edelstein
Subject: No Country for Good Cheer

Dear Lynda:

Well, well, well, we do get to talk about the Academy Awards this year. Despite the cancellation of the Golden Globes ceremony (quel agony!), there was no way that Hollywood could have gone without its annual orgy of self-congratulation — the best incentive from a public-relations standpoint to settle the strike. For moviegoers, a year without Oscar is unimaginable. So little in our culture has value on its own terms: Without the opening of the envelope, there is no climax, no catharsis.

Yet this is a year in which so much has gone to shit. There is a sense among the enlightened that our way of life is about to change radically, that our economic system will collapse, our suburbs will fall, our environment will exact its revenge. With all the downbeat Iraq movies DOA at the box office (what a lesson was there!), No Country might be the best way for Academy voters to signal that it’s not show business as usual.

Unless … unless … No Country and There Will Be Blood split the nihilist-horror vote and little old edgy feel-good smash hit Juno sneaks in. As one of the few critics to dislike Juno, I would be devastated — but weirder things have happened in these silly awards. Or is the Juno backlash too strong? Or is there, as my New York colleagues have suggested, a backlash against the backlash?

It’s a testament to how weak Atonement is that an absolute natural for Best Picture has no chance. It’s a difficult narrative, but in the novel, in the hands of Ian McEwan, it has an emotional wallop. The film, on the other hand, is at arm's length — reflected in the fact that its director, Joe Wright, wasn’t nominated. My guess is that Atonement will win the prize for Best Score because the composer, Dario Marianelli, weaves typewriter clacks into otherwise romantic music — the kind of gimmick that gets you noticed. It could also win for Best Cinematography for that impressive but ridiculous extended battlefield shot that stops the narrative cold. (What’s your guess on the Cinematography front? Robert Elswit’s work in Blood has mythic beauty and horror — but so does Roger Deakins’s in No Country, and Deakins is overdue. Or could Janusz Kaminski sneak in for the Schnabelific imagery in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?)

For the record, my favorite movie of the year was Diving Bell, followed closely by There Will Be Blood. Neither will win much, with the obvious exception of Daniel Day-Lewis, who bestrides the Academy like a colossus. I loved Frank Langella in the indie drama Starting Out in the Evening and think that if he’d been nominated — forcing voters to see the film — he’d have had a dark-horse shot. Now Day-Lewis will drink the others’ milkshake.

Is Javier Bardem a lock as well? It would seem so. Complaints that he’s the lead are absurd — he’s not, although Casey Affleck unquestionably is the lead in The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford. (I don’t think Affleck has a chance — the film is so painfully self-conscious that I doubt most Academy voters made it to the end of their DVD screeners.) Hal Holbrook? Never discount the fogey vote. But again, it’s a matter of making it to the end of the screener. Am I too cynical? No, I am not cynical enough.

Julie Christie is luminous in Away From Her and has won many of the critics’ prizes. But what if she and Marion Cotillard split the fogey vote and the scarily self-possessed Ellen Page walks off with the award? Any chance? Christie is high-strung on the awards and party circuit — no Ruby Dee. Laura Linney is too good and natural (you can’t see the acting), and Blanchett’s nomination for the catastrophic Elizabeth sequel is a joke — more a sign of voters’ loathing for Helena Bonham-Carter’s singing than anything else.

Blanchett in I’m Not There reminded me of Chuck Barris, but her Katharine Hepburn impersonation won her an Academy Award and maybe her Dylan one will, too. Is she the favorite? I thought Amy Ryan also overacted like mad, but she’s such a lovely presence (her work in The Wire was terrific) that I’m pulling for her. The Atonement girl is a long shot, and who can spell her name? And Ruby Dee? For one scene? Could happen, I guess. Sentimental favorite … long and honorable career despite the odds … Ossie beaming down from heaven …

Are the Coens a Best Director lock? It would seem so. They have managed to make difficult movies without selling out or sucking up or becoming players. (I said hello to them at the recent New York Film Critics ceremony, and Ethan could barely conceal his contempt … I didn’t take it too personally. I think they’re good guys who only give a shit about critics and awards insofar as it will ensure that no one bothers them.) They will probably win the adapted-screenwriting prize, although that would be a way of sending Paul Thomas Anderson home with something … I’ve resigned myself to the person–who–calls–herself–Diablo Cody’s inevitable win, although if Tamara Jenkins somehow beats her out, you’ll hear me whooping way out in L.A.

Ratatouille is a lock for the feature-animation prize, cementing Brad Bird's reputation as both our leading mainstream animator and our most influential Ayn Randian. Art direction and costumes belong to Sweeney Todd, but as these prizes tend to go to more conventional period pieces, I wouldn't be surprised if Atonement wins in at least one of those categories. I’ve seen only two of the foreign-language films, and the award is shamed by the absence of the Romanian 4 Weeks, 3 Months, 2 Days — so I have no opinion. In the documentary category, I’d hate to have to vote between No End in Sight and Taxi to the Dark Side, smart and disciplined films that do a stellar job demolishing the U.S. strategy in Iraq on both a macro and micro level. If they split the vote, Michael Moore could win for his excellent Sicko. Hollywood might relish the chance to see him say, “I told you so.” By the same token, perhaps the prizes for No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood will be seen as the final verdict on the reign of King George the Venal.

The above, of course, has nothing to do with artistic merit and is purely political punditry. (Let's hope we're less clueless than the actual political pundits this year.) I know you’re shooting a Ricky Gervais movie in Boston, Lynda, but trust you have a finger to the West Coast winds.

Now — can Obama take Wisconsin?

David

Frank Langella in Starting Out in the Evening: Robbed! Robbed!Photo: Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

Will there be a ceremony? I have no clue. Most of the talent will not cross a picket line, which would mean an Academy Award ceremony very much like the one in The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, hosted by Pia Zadora. (I suspect that O.J. would be available, too.) Can Hollywood possibly do without its annual ritual of self-pleasuring?

It should be said that Ellen Page stands an excellent chance of winning the Oscar if Julie Christie and Marion Cotillard split the fogey vote. I think they might: Christie has peaked (and is not exactly a charmer on the publicity circuit); Cotillard is foreign and La Vie en Rose isn’t all it could have been; Cate Blanchett in the god-awful Elizabeth sequel is a joke; and Laura Linney is simply too natural to convince enough voters that she’s ACTING. That leaves La Page, who will inspire screenwriters all over town to overwrite like mad.

The biggest omission is Frank Langella for Starting Out in the Evening — proof, if any were needed, that the Academy Awards is not a meritocracy. Langella had no big studio behind him, so it hardly counted that he gave the performance of a lifetime — and was probably the only actor who, if nominated, could have stolen the Best Actor prize from the now-inevitable Daniel Day-Lewis. Other omissions: Ashley Judd in Bug, a mismarketed movie that flopped so badly it has become — despite generally great reviews when it opened — a bad joke. (When I cast a vote for Judd at a critics’ meeting, it was met with snickers.) Critics who turned cartwheels over Juno and Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There had no use for Grace Is Gone either, a film of raw emotion and stunning immediacy that made (no joke) $37,000 in a radically curtailed release. (It was a Weinstein film.) The movie was deemed “too Sundance.” One critic complained it was “predictable” — and how could it not be? The story centers on a father (John Cusack) who can’t bring himself to tell his two young daughters that their mother has been killed in Iraq. Either he finally tells them or he doesn’t and he can’t not tell them. Duhhhhhhh. What happens in between, though, is anything but predictable: There are more moments of revelation in any one scene of Grace Is Gone than in all of Juno or I’m Not There — a reductionist vision masquerading as an expansive cultural epic.

Meanwhile, how about the lack of a nomination for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days? Despite a would-be kingmaking rave from A.O. Scott (who named the film the best of the year even though it hadn’t opened in New York) and Best Foreign Language Film nods from the L.A. Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, this wasn’t Romania’s year. Four of the five nominated docs are anti-Bush — what will nonfiction filmmakers do without him? I wouldn’t know how to choose between the great No End in Sight and Taxi to the Dark Side. Maybe the latter, which is about this administration’s corruption and incompetence and something larger: the human capacity for cruelty in the absence of moral authority.

What of the rest? The Academy went with the critics in giving No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood its love, but my hunch is that neither has many enthusiastic supporters among the voters and will split the vote anyway. Too grim, too weird. Atonement would have been perfect Oscar bait if it had been any good. Michael Clayton is terrific — but is it too conventional a conversion melodrama? Could Juno squeak through? Diablo Cody might be one doodle that can’t be undid.

"Great! Now it's flicking cigarette butts at us!"Courtesy of Paramount

Nothing can be scarier than something, though. The Blair Witch Project, shot with one video camera from the point of view of the character holding it, proved that when you eliminate the omniscient perspective — when you show the audience only what a single character sees and no more — you introduce a note of irrational terror that millions of dollars of computer-generated effects can’t touch. But Blair Witch was a ghost story, a genre in which less is always more. What, asked writer Drew Goddard, if you used the same singular, disoriented vantage for a giant-monster picture, a spectacle: Godzilla through the eyes — or lens — of a sap way down below trying not to get stomped?

The film, helmed by Felicity director Matt Reeves (talk about going outside the genre), centers on a bunch of attractive twentysomethings at a going-away party in a Tribeca loft. The gathering’s for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who’s taking a job in Japan and leaving behind Beth (Odette Yustman), the old friend he can’t bring himself to tell he adores. To document the festivities, Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and Jason’s girlfriend, Lily (Jessica Lucas), thrust a digital-video camera into the hands of Hud (T.J. Miller), a likable loser with a crush on Marlena (Lizzy Caplan), a dark-eyed cutie who couldn’t find him less compelling. Hud walks around for a long time sticking his camera in people’s faces and we wait, and wait, and wait, semi-bored but with tingling sense of anticipation, listening beyond the party chatter for sounds of oncoming catastrophe. Was that little boomlet the monster’s first stirrings? (Popcorn to mouth.) Is it coming now? (Sip of soda, popcorn to mouth.) Now?

When it comes — BOOM! — the partygoers gather in front of the TV set, on which no one knows anything either. And so it goes, as the head of the Statue of Liberty is hurled into the street with the inexplicable ferocity of a Roger Clemens broken bat, as skyscrapers crash down, as fires turn the sky a malignant yellow. “What is it?” someone screams. “It’s eating people!” sobs Marlena. “I have to get to midtown and find Beth!” declares Rob.

Weaving soap-opera trials in and out of apocalyptic carnage is always a challenge for a filmmaker, as the tin-eared director Roland Emmerich proved in his Godzilla remake and The Day After Tomorrow — in which the population of Manhattan froze to death while Jake Gyllenhaal tried to summon the courage to tell Emmy Rossum that he, you know, liked her. But even if such problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, we wouldn’t be glued to Casablanca without Bogie and Bergman’s beans. Cloverfield mostly gets by because the personal can’t not be in the foreground. Taking seriously his responsibility to document the crisis, Hud follows Rob and Marlena and Lily and Jason on their mission to save Beth from her apartment in a skyscraper that has tipped into another one. Although I wish Beth gave us more of a reason to want to see her rescued than a pair of great stems, it wouldn’t be much of a movie if Rob and the others fled Manhattan at the outset. (Rob is so determined to get to Beth he acquires geographical superpowers, reaching 59th and Lex from Spring Street via a subway tunnel in a few short — albeit tumultuous — minutes.)

We see the beast for only brief instants via the swerving, un-Hollywood-like camera, which means our imagination fills in the rest — great. The thing appears to be just as disoriented as the people running from it, only a lot more pissed off. To make matters worse, it didn’t come alone. It shakes off spiderlike parasites that rip people up and infect the survivors with something deeply icky. You almost forget that Hud picking up his camera after a bloody attack on the group is more improbable than a giant monster stomping Manhattan.

The devastation of New York City inevitably invokes 9/11, the limited vantage a facile way for the filmmakers to exploit our newly stoked imaginations of disaster without bothering about context. So Cloverfield is a shallow exercise. The kid in you might crave a more objective view of the creature — not to mention the catharsis that comes from watching science and the military collaborate to bring the monster down, etc. That said, we’ve sat through that kind of movie again and again, but we’ve never sat through anything with Cloverfield’s subjective sting. You’d have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.

Showtimes & Tickets

Earlier: Vulture’s Cloverfield coverage
Related: The Ten Best Movie Destructions of New York City
Ten Other Cities We’d Like to See Hollywood Destroy [Vulture]

No. 1 film: The Diving Bell and Butterfly.Photo: Courtesy of Miramax

Enough commentary. Time for list-making.

1. The Diving Bell and Butterfly
2. Away From Her
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Sweeney Todd
5. The Savages
6. No Country for Old Men
7. No End in Sight
8. Michael Clayton
9. Ratatouille and Persepolis (Tie)
10. Grace Is Gone

Sticklers can stop here. Others should go on.

Also: Black Book, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Knocked Up, King of Kong, For the Bible Tells Me So, Crazy Love, Maxed Out, Zoo, Day Night Day Night, The Lives of Others, Charlie Wilson’s War, and, yes, watch out, The Mist.

Kudos to Darjeeling Limited, Romance & Cigarettes, and I’m Not There for their daring.

Best Actors
Frank Langella, Starting Out in the Evening
Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Savages
John Cusack, Grace Is Gone
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Joaquin Phoenix, We Own the Night
Mathieu Amaric, Diving Bell and the Butterfly
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Gordon Pinsent, Away From Her
Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah

Best Actresses
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Ashley Judd, Bug
Laura Linney, The Savages
Fiona Gordon, L’Iceberg
Helena Bonham-Carter, Sweeney Todd
Sienna Miller, Interview
Carice van Houten, Black Book
Martina Hands, Lady Chatterley

Best Supporting Actors
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton
Philip Bosco, The Savages
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War
Ed Harris, Gone Baby Gone
Irfan Khan, The Namesake
McLovin, Superbad
Paul Schneider, Lars and the Real Girl

Best Supporting Actresses
Shelan O’Keefe, Grace Is Gone
Leslie Mann, Knocked Up
Lauren Ambrose, Starting Out in the Evening
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton
Marcia Gay Harden, The Mist
Patricia Clarkson, Lars and the Real Girl
Emily Mortimer, Lars and the Real Girl
Bianca, Lars and the Real Girl

Please note: The above is a supplement to the Best of the Year column here and should only be read in conjunction with the aforesaid. That is all.