Best Picture

This will and should go to The Artist.  It’s a wonderful film that combines all the right elements.  The film that is selected as Best Picture should be something that if in the dictionary there was going to be only one example of what a great film is, would be an apt example.  The Artist is cinematography, directing, acting, music, and writing at its best.

Best Actor

I’m predicting that this will go to George Clooney (The Descendants), but I think it should go to Jean Dujardin (The Artist).  Clooney gives a great performance, playing a character whose emotional state is quite different than Clooney has played before.  He is believable and compelling as a husband that discovers his comatose wife was having an affair and his children are spiraling out of control.  It’s a deserving performance, but I was more impressed by Dujardin as silent movie actor George Valentin.  Working in a silent medium, Dujardin has to use every other resource available to him to tell his story.  His body language speaks volumes more than the dialogue would have.  Very impressive.

Best Actress

I’m predicting Viola Davis (The Help) but think that Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) gave the best performance.  Streep is beyond amazing in her portrayal as Margaret Thatcher.  There is no better actress.  But her performance is not supported by the film.  Viola Davis has a smaller performance, but a very real one that solicits great empathy, as a black maid in 1960s Mississippi.  She is also well supported by the rest of the film.  Viola Davis was nominated three years ago as supporting actress in Doubt.  She deserved it then, but didn’t win, so I think she’ll be getting some stronger support from the voters, this time.

Actor in a Supporting Role

This category is tough to pick because I haven’t seen all the performances.  Based on reading reviews, I’m predicting a win for Christopher Plummer (Beginners).  Add to the reviews the fact that he is a legendary actor, but at 82 has never won an Oscar.  I see this as being his lifetime achievement award.

Actress in a Supporting Roles

Octavia Spencer (The Help) is sweeping up awards this season and I’m predicting she’ll get this one.  It’s a good performance, but I didn’t like it as much as I liked Bérénice Bejo (The Artist) and Jessica Chastain (The Help).  Octavia is going to have to rack up some more big performances to make people forget the chocolate pie scene…

Animated Feature Film

I think it is an outrage that Tintin didn’t get a nomination.  I’m predicting Rango will win.

Art Direction

This has to go to Hugo.  Hugo is beautiful.  The team that made that train station look so appealing has to win for art direction.  Every door, window, flower, table, and sign makes one want to run off to France.

Cinematography

For the same reason I pick Hugo for cinematography.  It’s beautifully shot and uses 3D in an artistic way.

Costume Design

This is a tough one.  I don’t have the eye for fashion to understand the criteria that elevates a film for costume.  I’m going to guess that W.E. will get it because it has such a strong sense of style.

Directing 

Without doubt, this has to go to Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) for telling a wonderful story with such grace and style in a challenging way.

Music (Original Score)

I’m going with the charming score of The Artist.  I’m disappointed that Hanna didn’t get nominated for its very original and effective soundtrack.

Visual Effects

One of the most astounding performances this year was Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  Andy Serkis didn’t get nominated for doing the motion capture active, but the CGI special effects that made Caesar so believable have to win.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

The Descendants is beautifully written and engaging.  If it isn’t The Descendants, I’d go with Moneyball for making baseball interesting.

Writing (Original Screenplay)

I’m going with Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris as an original and quirky story about a writer visiting Paris and magically getting to meet great figures from the 1920s.

Turn on the television and you won’t have to wait long to see a story about the new magic drug or food.  America likes nothing better than a magic pill to solve whatever is wrong.  Odds are that the medical study praising the magic drug or food will in six months be pushed out of mind by another study saying the opposite.  The problem is that these studies and the media view the human body as simple.  It isn’t simple – it’s an incredibly complex suite of systems.  The same magic food that in abundance is shown to prevent cancer in one part of the body might be shown to cause cancer in another part of the body.

David Agus’s book, The End of Illness,  makes the argument that we need to accept the complexity of the body if we want to have long lived health.  Agus is an oncologist and a professor at the University of Southern California.  While Agus argues that the body is extremely complex, he also summarizes a lot of what he says into a simple point – many of the things that go wrong in our bodies can be traced to inflammation.  He says that we should “take charge of hidden, sneaky sources of chronic inflammation that can trigger illness and disease by wearing comfortable shoes daily, getting an annual flu vaccine, and asking your doctor why you’re not on a statin and baby aspirin if you’re over the age of forty.”

I love books that toss conventional wisdom on its head – and this book does that.

Here is a video of Dr. Agus being interviewed by Connie Chung:

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My first year at NASA, by fluke chance, I ended up sitting at the same table as John Glenn during lunch. He was preparing for his flight on the Space Shuttle. At that point he was 77 and set a new record as the oldest person to go into space.

He is a true hero.

Adam Lashinsky is an Editor at Large for FORTUNE magazine, where he has reported on silicon valley for more than a decade.  His new book, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works, reveals what it is really like to work at Apple.  It must have felt like a kick in the stomach for Lashinsky, when Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was released, because the two books cover a lot of similar ground.  But they approach it from different perspectives.  Isaacson, necessarily, focused on the CEO and founder, Jobs.  Lashinsky didn’t have the access Isaacson got and has to approach from multiple perspectives and usually lower on the totem pole.  Lashinsky’s book is more for learning about what it is like for the average engineer to work at Apple.

Also, being completed, and published, after the death of Steve Jobs, the book dedicates a lot of thought to what Apple will be like after Steve Jobs, by looking at the key figures at the company (Tim Cooke, Scott Forstall, and Jonathan Ive).

The book is very interesting and hard to put down.  It does suffer a little, in the reading, if the reader has already read Isaacson’s book, but the two do work well together, and I recommend reading both to gain a better understanding of Apple.

The Apple depicted in this book is unlike the picture often depicted of Silicon Valley companies like Google, where work seems like a party and employees are spoiled rotten.  Apple seems to be a place that is heaven for those that want nothing more than to be completely dedicated to their work.  It seems like a tough place to work, but a place where one can be part of things that make a difference.

Below is a inDay Speaker series interview of Adam Lashinsky, about the book:

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The Toxic Avenger

I honestly didn’t have the highest hopes for this show.  I didn’t know how the movie would translate and I’m not the biggest fan of musicals.  I was very pleasantly surprised.  The story works, the songs are funny, and the cast is a delight.  Although there are many characters, there are only five actors in the cast.  Three of the actors take on many roles.

It is the two ladies in the show that steal the most scenes.  Mara Davi is hilarious and gorgeous as Sarah, the blind librarian that draws Melvin’s affections.  Nancy Opel is great in the dual roles of Melvin’s mother and as the corrupt city mayor.  Of particular delight is the scene where the mother and the mayor have to confront each other, during the song called ”Bitch/Slut/Liar/Whore“.

I found it amusing that although the audience seemed to very much enjoy the show, the lines in the show that espouse a pro-environmental message elicited silence in a Houston audience, where the smell of oil and chemicals equals the smell of money.

The Toxic Avenger runs at the Alley Theatre through February 12, and then reportedly may get a Broadway run.

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Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a star of the silver screen during the heyday of silent film.  He’s established his own formula and plays a dashing hero in a series of adventure films. He views the introduction of “talkies” as a silly fad.  Bérénice Bejo plays Peppy Miller, an ingenue with a mile wide smiles and dancing skills.

The supporting cast is also fine.  Of particular greatness is Ugg, a Jack Russell Terrier that plays George’s best friend and constant companion.  John Goodman is picture perfect as the studio head.  Penelope Miller is George’s wife and James Cromwell is his assistant and chauffeur.  The film is directed by French director, Michel Hazanavicius.

It’s a simple story – he’s on the way down and she’s on the way up, and their lives intertwine.  The charm lies in the way it tells that story so clearly without dialogue using great acting, beautiful cinematography, and a great score by Ludovic Bource.

This is a must see for lovers of film.

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The Iron Lady

Meryl Streep is beyond brilliant in this film.  That is a sentence that could be cut and pasted into almost every film she does, but here so it is even more true because she is taking on the role of a real, larger that life figure that is recognizable to most of the audience.  She plays her across the full spectrum from idealistic naivete at the beginning of her career to the dominant presence in any room, to flinty exhaustion near the end of her career and finally as a frail and fading elderly figure.  It really is a tour de force.

Unfortunately the directing and script are not so much.  The constant flashing back and forth between key incidents and the present rob the story of a sense of timeline or narrative.  The flashbacks are often interspersed with news footage of events like riots and the war in the Falklands.  Several of those are backed with a punk music soundtrack, completely incongruous with what is supposed to be the reminisces of an elderly woman.  So much time is spent on scenes of Lady Thatcher packing away her deceased husband’s belongings – time that could have been spent with more scenes of her at her prime or maybe of her contemporaries providing their perspective of the events.

The film is no doubt controversial because of the political nature of the protagonist.  We live in a society where we seem to be split into two teams of idiots – each viewing the other as a monster.  The reality is that people such as Margaret Thatcher find themselves in situations where they have to make decisions the rest of us never have to face.  It would have been nice to see more of that expressed in the film.

The film is worth seeing for Meryl Streep’s performance alone, but if could have been so much more.

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Steven King’s 11/22/63 asks those very questions.  On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by, we believe, Lee Harvey Oswald – an angry nobody that had never been of any significance before that point.  How many events spun out of that tragic day?  Would the Vietnam war have happened if Kennedy had lived to serve another term?  Would his brother Robert have been assassinated?  Would Martin Luther King Jr have been assassinated?  Without that shocking event in 1963, would the counterculture revolutions of the 60′s have happened?  The brutal assassination of a young vibrant President has burned itself into our collective consciousness as an event that shouldn’t have happened.  Many fictional works have examined it – often from the perspective of how would things be different if it hadn’t happened? and occasionally from the perspective of could it be prevented?  This novel predominantly focuses on the latter (with a brief look at the former).

Jake Epping is an English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine.  Recent changes in his life have left him with little attachments, making him susceptible to the request that one day comes from a friend.  The friend has discovered a portal to the past on his property, but he’s too sick to do the job himself.

A dominant theme in the story is that the past doesn’t want to be changed.  As Jake repeatedly says, throughout the book, “the past is obdurate.”  This is where the real drama comes into play and where the story starts to feel more like a Steven King story.  It doesn’t matter how well Jake prepares, the past will rebel and try to stop him from changing it.

There is also the complication that there is uncertainty surrounding Oswald.  Jake can’t just find Oswald in 1958 and kill him.  What if there were others involved?  Killing Oswald might do nothing.  Or what if Oswald was really a patsy?  Jake has to put Oswald under surveillance and try to put the pieces together.

The story would feel too contrived if the portal opened up to a few days before the assassination.  It would also make it to easy to just keep trying until it worked.  King needed to create a greater space between the two points.  The complication with that is that five years is a long time and a lot happens in five years, making it difficult to keep the story focused on the primary objective.  The positive side of that is that five years gives King enough time to examine other themes, like love and learning.  The book is certainly the better for the space that allows it to examine those other themes, but an argument could be made that a bit more editing would have helped.  There were four or five places in the book where I felt the pacing become too slow.  Those places become less common the further one gets into the book, in fact the last 50 or so pages are told at a frantic pace.

King certainly did his research and creates a vivid rendering of the late 1950s – early 1960s.  If I have a complaint, though, it is that Steven King puts a little too much of himself into the story.  By that I mean it was occasionally distracting in that I was pulled out of the story whenever I would spot something that felt like it was about King.  Portions of the story are set in Maine, where King lives half the time.  Portions of the story are set in Florida, where King lives half the time.  A major character experiences an incident where he receives injuries similar in description to those King experienced when he was hit by a van in 1999.  Jake Epping is an teacher that writes.  King was a teacher and writes.  King loves music and music plays an important role in the story.  There are even mentions of characters from other King books.

The story shines in its characters, though.  Jake is an easy hero with which to identify.  The people of Derry, Maine and Jodie, Texas all feel real, even though the personas of the two towns are complete opposites.  The love story is so well told that it started to become more important to me than the hunt for Oswald.

At around 850 pages, it’s a big book, but reads quickly – like me, you might experience it as three quite late nights in a row.

The content is pretty good, but unfortunately it suffers from the engineers being design blind – there are random font changes throughout the site, giving it an amateur look.

Click here to visit the site.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

This film is a gorgeous CGI film made using motion-capture performances from an impressive cast, that includes Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis, Jamie Bell, and Simon Pegg and directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson.

CGI motion-capture has come a long way since Polar Express – a good film, but often criticized for the soulless eyes of the CGI characters.  Every emotion is projected through the eyes of the characters in Tintin.  Although the animators have been wise enough to make some features, such as the noses, cartoony enough to not draw suspicion, the characters feel very real.  Captain Haddock, in particular, feels real – and that’s no surprise because Andy Serkis portrayed Captain Haddock.  Serkis is the most accomplished motion capture actor, with roles including Gollum from Lord of the Rings and Caesar from Planet of the Apes.  Tintin is played by Jamie Bell, who became famous for playing young dancer Billy Elliot.  His physical acting skills are put on great display, here.

Even more impressive than the characters is the world in which the story is set.  Tintin crosses the globe from Europe to the Middle East, and with its approximately 1940 setting, direction from Steven Spielberg, and score from John Williams, it was easy to make comparisons to the Indiana Jones movies and to wonder – what if the next Indiana Jones movie was to be made fully in CGI?  With Harrison Ford animated and de-aged?

If there is a complaint to make about the film, it is that some of the action scenes go on a little too long.  This film is Steven Spielberg’s first time directing an animated movie and it just feels like he was having so much fun doing action scenes and camera shots that he could never afford to pull off in a live action film.

Without giving much away, the basic plot is that Tintin comes into possession of part of a treasure map.  As a roving reporter, he’s more interested in the story of the treasure than the treasure itself and he wants to know why someone is willing to kill to get the full map.  Along the way he teams up with a drunken Captain Haddock, whom is attached to the treasure by ancestry.

Tintin is in 3D and uses the technology well.  The viewer is immersed into every scene.

I so hope that Americans will give this film a chance and get to meet such a fun character.

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