2012 Oscar Predictions: wills, shoulds and should haves

It must have been the Oscar Dolly Parton was thinking about when she sang Here You Come Again. Just like an old flame that has disappointed us time and again in the past but that tantalizingly shows up in a party just when we were about to make it work without him, the golden boy comes every year full of promises and expectations only to leave us with a new letdown and a massive hangover the following morning. And let's be honest, for an 84-year-old statuette, he really looks better than a body has a right to.

Granted, this is as tacky a way to start this entry as any other, but then again, if you're really interested in checking out Oscar predictions, you might enjoy the Partonian intertextuality just as well.

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2012 Oscar Guide (Part II)

Following yesterday's entry, here's my second offering with my concise opinion and rating of some of the films nominated in the main categories at this year's Academy Awards. Final predictions will be published here tomorrow.

The Tree of Life (***1/2). D: Terrence Malick. Cast: Hunter McCracken, Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Laramie Eppler, Tye Sheridan, Fiona Shaw, Jessica Fuselier
Reflection about the origin of life and its meaning is overlong and demanding, but uniquely honest and affecting. Childhood has never been depicted with such sincerity on screen. McCracken is a revelation as the rebelious child and Pitt has never been better as the righteous father. Sean Penn and a couple of dinosaurs appear in equally unnecessary cameos. The cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki is breathtaking.

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Review: 'The Iron Lady', a film by Phyllida Lloyd (*1/2)

It is indicative of the The Iron Lady's own weaknesses and of the self-consciousness with which the film's creators approach its subject-matter that director Phyllida Lloyd and leading lady Meryl Streep have been announcing to all and sundry that their film is not a biopic of Margaret Thatcher. The statement is in itself highly questionable, for a film that revisits the life of a public person from their youth to old age must necessarily be a biopic, just as a film where the characters momentarily abandon the storyline to sing songs is a musical or an account of a young man's day on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944 is a war drama.

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Review: Voice Over, a short film by Martín Rosete

It is hard to predict at the beginning of Voice Over that the narrative of this formally exciting 10-minute film will take us from an unknown planet where an astronaut has crash landed his ship to a peacefully idyllic scene of first love with a French Eurovision Song Contest entry as background music, with intermediate stops in a WWI battle field and an undefined subaquatic landscape. Or maybe not, since the man at the helm of this project is the filmmaker that, for his award-winning 2002 film debut Revolución, chose to adapt a text by Sławomir Mrożek, the Polish author famous for the use of distortion, historical references and non-realistic elements in his work.

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2012 Golden Globe Predictions

A year older (literally, as of yesterday), but none the wiser, for here I am once again predicting those awards that are handed out in a ceremony that has (luckily) become a notorious one-man show courtesy of that comic genius called Ricky Gervais. Admittedly, the list of films in this year's selection does not include, for all its dull predictability, anything to make us throw up our hands in horror...or joy, depending on how seriously one takes these things. In other words, there's no The Tourist this year, although Angelina is back in the line-up at her most cosmopolitan: in the Foreign Language Film category, no less. I haven't seen In the Land of Blood of Honey yet, but rumour has it it might beat the Iranian masterpiece A Separation. After watching the trailer, I must confess Angelina's commendable effort looks like a heavily Balkan accented (if, unlike me, you have the time, please check out the language eligibility rules of this category in the Globes) war drama with a storyline that is cheaper than Jennifer Lopez's latest perfume. I might be wrong, though, and this is the Globes, so anything can happen.

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