Tag: The Arbor

The Anti-Oscars

In “The Anti-Oscars,” I make a list of the Best Movies and Performances of the Year that don’t stand a chance at getting nominated.

This article will not help you win your Oscar pool.

On this Oscar Nomination ballot, you will not find any Streeps, Clooneys, Plummers or Spielbergs.

No, this is the Anti-Oscars! This is the opposite of what will happen when nominations are announced on Tuesday, January 24.

I’ve made picks in five of the six major categories, but while these certainly don’t reflect what will happen, they aren’t even necessarily what I think should happen. The Academy gets some things right some of the time.

Rather this list is my personal ballot dedicated to the not-even-out-of-the-gate contenders that were marvelous in 2011 but for whatever reason will not receive the attention they deserve at the biggest award ceremony of the year.

I’ll also use this space to discuss why they are not in the race and what that means for the actual contenders. So if any of these names are in your predictions, rethink your decisions now, and watch me eat my words when I predict the real ballot next week.

 

Best Picture

  • Drive
  • Beginners
  • Super 8
  • Incendies
  • The Skin I Live In
  • Certified Copy
  • Weekend
  • Melancholia

If there’s one thing the Best Picture hopeful lineup is missing, it’s a good dose of darkness. Is “Moneyball” really the darkest movie this year’s Oscars have to offer? My list, which conveniently resembles all eight films in my Top 10 list not solid contenders for nomination (the other two being “Midnight in Paris” and “Hugo”), shows a much more even split of heavy and lighter entertainment. Continue reading “The Anti-Oscars”

The Arbor

“The Arbor” is an experimental documentary by Clio Barnard about playwright Andrea Dunbar.

I complained about the subtitles in “The Arbor” as soon as I saw them. I wrote off subtitles for an English language movie as one more obnoxious gimmick in an already experimental British documentary that from the start tests our understanding of what a documentary is.

But before long, I was glad to have them. There’s no substitution for this thick Yorkshire dialect in creating the most authentic version of this story, and they allowed me to hang on every word of this compelling and fascinating experiment in filmmaking.

“The Arbor” tells the life story of the playwright Andrea Dunbar, a woman who saw success on stage as young as the age of 15, but then gave birth to three children each from different fathers and died from a drug overdose at 29.

We hear it through the voices of her children, lovers, parents, neighbors and Andrea herself, but we see it through the eyes of actors. Clio Barnard has made a film that teeters the line between documentary and biographical fiction by casting actors to lip sync to the vocal testimonial of the actual subjects.

This gives Barnard the freedom to stage her actors in social tableaux settings as they deliver harrowing testimonial directly to the camera. It’s a unique cinematic style that is not only constantly visually stimulating but one that redefines the way a documentary could be filmed. Continue reading “The Arbor”