The Oscar Nominations

I don't want to talk about the worst field of Best Picture nominees since I don't know when. I don't want to talk about all the love for Slumdog Millionaire, which I hate more every day. I don't want to talk about the 13 freaking nominations for the overlong and lackluster The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and I especially don't want to talk about rewarding Brad Pitt for the most boring performance of his career. Or about the utter lack of high-waisted pants in CCBB's mysteriously nominated costume design, or the fact that the makeup was never once right. Or the craptastic Original Song category, which managed to snub both the really good (no Bruce Springsteen?) and the really inventive (not one of the Forgetting Sarah Marshall songs?). Nope. Don't want to talk about these Oscar nominations.

Best I Saw in 2008: Actress

Sorry, ladies of 2008, you didn't have a chance in hell of cracking this lineup.

Vivien Leigh, Gone with the Wind (1939). It's the greatest Best Actress winning performance of all time, unless Leigh's turn in A Streetcar Named Desire deserved the title. Either way, this is earth-shaking acting. A chill just went up my back from remembering her "I'll never go hungry again" speech, but that kind of dramatic intensity is not even half of her performance.

Runners-up:

Kay Francis, One Way Passage (1932). How is it that she made this and Trouble in Paradise in the same year, but she's still largely unknown?

Janet Gaynor, Seventh Heaven (1927). Holy god, she also did Sunrise this year. The best single year of actressing in history? And I still have Street Angel to look forward to, the third film included in her historic Oscar win.

Patricia Neal, Hud (1963). It would be hard to compare to Paul Newman's smoldering sexpot, but Neal (along with Melvyn Douglas, who you'll be seeing on here shortly) even manages to outshine him at times.

Barbra Streisand, Funny Girl (1968). Stranded as she was in this ungainly mess of a movie, it's a shock that she's so great, so unafraid, and so deserving of the thousand-watt spotlight that's on her constantly.

It hurt to leave out: Claudette Colbert, Imitation of Life (1934); Mia Farrow, The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985); Jane Fonda, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969); Jean Harlow, Bombshell (1933); Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married (2008); Katharine Hepburn, Holiday (1938); Carole Lombard, To Be or Not to Be (1942); and Mary Tyler Moore, Ordinary People (1980).

Best I Saw in 2008: Actor

Since I saw so few new movies in 2008, my awards are going to encompass everything I saw, including new releases, revival house viewings, and rentals.

Henry Fonda, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Fonda doesn't look like Lincoln, and he doesn't make much effort to act like Lincoln might have acted, or speak like anyone other than Henry Fonda. His performance isn't imitation, but evocation—he turns on pieces of his own personality that summon the near-mythical Lincoln of American popular history. One of the finest male performances in American cinema.

Runners-up:

Jack Benny, To Be or Not to Be (1942). If Cagney hadn't deserved it a tiny bit more for Yankee Doodle Dandy, I'd give Benny the 1942 Best Actor Oscar.

Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight (2008). Nick and Nathaniel convinced me that he's a lead; Ledger still pops up in my nightmares sometimes.

Paul Newman, Hud (1963). What did I call it in the last post? "Pheromone-dripping-sex-panther of a star turn." Yep.

Donald Sutherland, Ordinary People (1980). The best performance, the anchor of the entire film, wasn't even nominated.

It hurt to leave out: Clark Gable, Gone with the Wind (1939); John Garfield, Force of Evil (1948); Cary Grant, Holiday (1938); Rene LeFevre, The Crime of Monsieur Lange (France, 1936); James Mason, Odd Man Out (1947); Sean Penn, Milk (2008); William Powell, One Way Passage (1932); and Will Rogers, Judge Priest (1934).

Best of 2008: Rentals and Revivals

Without any further ado (if a month-long silence can be considered ado), here are the top ten films I saw on my couch, on someone else's couch, or at a revival house in 2008.

10. Gone with the Wind (1939) proves that 1939 was one of the cinema's greatest years, since it wasn't even the best 1939 film I saw last year.

9. That would be Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which is John Ford at the peak of his mythmaking abilities, and Henry Fonda at the peak of screen acting.

8. The Crime of Monsieur Lange (France, 1936) is Renoir at his devious best, making a solid case for justifiable homicide and painting a glowing picture of prewar optimism. (But the real crime is that it's still not on DVD in the United States.)

7. If Hud (1963) were only Paul Newman's pheromone-dripping-sex-panther of a star turn, well, it would still be great; but there's more, like Patricia Neal in one of the handful of best Best Actress-winning performances and James Wong Howe's heartbreaking cinematography.

6. Punishment Park (1971) might not be so frighteningly effective the next time I watch it, but it was so terrifying that I may not ever watch it again.

5. Even if The Young Girls of Rochefort (France, 1967) is a lesser film than its less-traditional predecessor The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, they're both so astoundingly good that such distinctions don't mean much.

4. Judge Priest (1934) is equal parts jaw-droppingly racist and mind-blowingly great, one of the best depictions of the rhythms of small-town life in American cinema.

3. To Be or Not to Be (1942) is the funniest movie about Nazis ever made, and one of the funniest films of the 1940s all time. And the 1942 Oscars were much poorer than they should have been, since this deserved a nom, and in some cases a win, in many categories.

2. La Chute de la maison Usher (France, 1928) showed me that silent films can be scary as hell, and that Jean Epstein might be the best director I'd never heard of before this.

1. Nashville (1975) makes me want to make dramatic, perhaps even ridiculous statements, like "it contains everything great that the cinema is capable of producing!" But, you know, it might not be such a ridiculous statement. I gave it 473 goats after I saw it, and I stand by that rating.

Beautiful Losers: I watched so many great films at home or in revival houses that I had to ditch a whole heap of 4.5-goat films, and let me tell you, it hurt to cut these from my list, like cutting off a finger. (Since I had to cut sixteen of them, I finished off the fingers and started on the toes. I'm typing this with my elbows.) Each one of them is in my top ten films for its respective year. In alphabetical order: Ballad of a Soldier (USSR, 1959), Force of Evil (1948), Holiday (1938), Imitation of Life (1934), Lady Windermere's Fan (1925), The Long Day's Dying (1968), Movie Crazy (1932), Odd Man Out (1947), One Way Passage (1932) (this one hurt the worst), Playtime (France, 1967), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), The Southerner (1945), Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), Sunday at Six (Romania, 1965), Tess (1980), and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).

This might be the extent of my awards-giving this season, since I saw so few films in the theater that I don't feel comfortable naming any of them "the best." We'll see how I do playing catch-up in the next few weeks, but things are heating up over at CIMMfest, so I might not have much time for non-festival movie watching.