Endy: Moonrise Kingdom

Oscar: Argo

This is a tougher choice than it looks, though Moonrise was my #1 film at the end of the year, I’d only seen it once, and all the other nominees were fresher in my mind. But I watched it again, and yeah, it’s great. Anderson’s dollhouse, DIY, 90 degree angle aesthetic is the ideal match for a children’s fantasy of adventure and escape. The need for the kids to create their own universe contrasts eloquently with the sad rigidity of the adults. Some of the other nominees are more mysterious, but no movie this year is more perfect.

Endy: Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom

Oscar: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

Endy: Denis Levant, Holy Motors

Oscar: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

This was the toughest category for me to choose. In the end, Levant’s versitility and centrality to the film edge out Phoenix’s remarkably physical, extreme-method performance, and Day-Lewis’s uncanny ability to breathe life into an impersonation, either of which would be more than worthy winners in any other year.

Endy: Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty

Oscar: Emmanuelle Riva, Amour

Another close call, but Chastain takes a character with no backstory, no personality, no apparent interests outside the plot and makes her feel like a fully-developed character, almost entirely with her eyes, body position and tone of voice. Her best scenes are when she gives her ‘action movie’ lines just the right amount of maniacal awkwardness. She doesn’t fit in, her certainty beyond that which she can prove makes her as dangerous to us as she is to bin Ladin. In a film that undermines and critiques much of what it presents, her performance is essential in pushing us to read beyond the surfaces.

Endy: Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master

Oscar: Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

Endy: Amy Adams, The Master

Oscar: Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables

Endy: Abbas Kiarostami, Like Someone in Love

Oscar: Mark Boal, Zero Dark Thirty

The seemingly innocuous structure of Kiarostami’s film, a series of apparently mundane conversations with wildly spinning depths that over time accumulate such weight, such possibility, that builds to a crescendo that is the year’s most shattering momentum, wins out over Boal’s screenplay that is more than just the effective distillation of a decade of history, but a radical (for Hollywood at least) rethinking of character and a fascinating, open-ended exploration of what counts as evidence and certainty in the post-Iraq War world.

Endy: Tony Kushner, Lincoln

Oscar: Chris Terrio, Argo

In a year with unusually great films about argument and reason, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, The Master, it’s Kushner’s screenplay that is the best. He had me as soon as the President explained the complexities of the Emancipation Proclamation’s post-Civil War legal status in three minutes or less. The later rhetorical flourishes are wonderful (Stevens’s ripostes to his interlocutors, Lincoln’s powerful clothing) but the trust and clarity and efficiency of Kushner’s exposition is truly remarkable.

Argo, on the other hand, represents the worst in Hollywood rhetoric. The kind of film where someone wins an argument by emoting loudly. Where two characters bond over a hamburger by talking about their (otherwise totally irrelevant but for “character building” box-checking) divorces, even though they said they were going out for tacos.

Endy: Like Someone in Love

Oscar: Amour

All year this had been In Another Country for me. But after rewatching it, while I still love it, it just doesn’t resonate as strongly as the more ambitious Kiarostami and Ruiz films. This might be my favorite Kiarostami movie.

Endy: Three Sisters

Oscar: Searching for Sugar Man

Endy: Brave

Oscar: Wreck-It Ralph

Endy: The Master

Oscar: Zero Dark Thirty

The hypnotic rhythms of The Master, perfectly synced with the film’s score and the dueling psyches of Phoenix and Hoffman win out over the masterful precision of Bigelow’s suspense sequences.

If Argo wins this award, it’ll be a bigger travesty than if it wins Best Picture. Its editing is almost incompetent. Continuity errors, needless choppiness, bizarre action mismatches. It’s a mess.

Endy: Mihai Malaimare Jr., The Master

Oscar: Roger Deakins, Skyfall

Using 70mm to film interiors and close-ups rather than, as was traditional, expansive vistas and landscapes was a stroke of genius. The Master‘s images just barely win out over the old school inventiveness of Night Across the Street‘s sepia tones and rear projections and Moonrise Kingdom‘s crystal-clear storybook aesthetic.

Endy: Moonrise Kingdom

Oscar: Anna Karenina

Endy: Moonrise Kingdom

Oscar: Anna Karenina

Endy: Holy Motors

Oscar: Les Misérables

Endy: Neighboring Sounds

Oscar: Les Misérables

Rarely is sound design more important to a modern movie than in Neighboring Sounds. It’s right there in the title. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Recife is connected not by spatial geography, but by the way sounds bleed together in an urban environment, trumping class and racial barriers.

Endy: Zero Dark Thirty

Oscar: Argo

Endy: Night Across the Street

Oscar: Life of Pi

Endy: Mekong Hotel

Oscar: Life of Pi

I really want to give this to Moonrise Kingdom, for Alexandre Desplat’s suite that complements and builds upon the Hank Williams and Benjamin Britten music on the soundtrack. But Chai Datana’s guitar score for Mekong Hotel, a meandering bluesy acoustic guitar melody that wanders and swirls and circles back on itself, is fundamental to that film’s evocation of life by a river, where past and present, myth and reality fuse.

Endy: Something in the Air

Yesterday I announced the nominations for this year’s Endy Awards.  Here’s a brief look at some of the nominees, in anticipation of tomorrow’s big announcement.

Films ranked by number of nominations:

10 – The Master

9 – Moonrise Kingdom

8 – Night Across the Street

7 – In Another Country

6 – Like Someone in Love & Zero Dark Thirty

5 – Django Unchained & Holy Motors

4 – Lincoln

3 – Mekong Hotel, Something in the Air & Tabu

2 – Nine films

1 – Five Films

Of the five Best Picture/Director nominees, four are directors who have previously won Endies:

Abbas Kiarostami in 1997 for Taste of Cherry (Film Editing), 1999 for The Wind Will Carry Us (Foreign Language Film) and 2010 for Certified Copy (Best Picture, Foreign Language Film).

Paul Thomas Anderson in 1997 for Boogie Nights (Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay), 1999 for Magnolia (Original Screenplay), 2002 for Punch-Drunk Love (Best Picture) and in 2007 for There Will Be Blood (Adapted Screenplay)

Wes Anderson in 2001 for The Royal Tenenbaums (Best Original Screenplay) and 2009 for Fantastic Mr. Fox (Adapted Screenplay and Animated Feature)

Hong Sangsoo in 2010 for Oki’s Movie and Hahaha (Best Original Screenplay).

If I ever get around to revising these awards (most of which I handed out back in 2008, four and a half long years worth of movie-watching ago), the fifth nominee, Raúl Ruiz, will likely pick up an award or two for his 2010 film Mysteries of Lisbon.

So, will this year see the first Best Picture win after several award-winning screenplays for Wes Anderson? Will Hong Sangsoo become the first Korean filmmaker to win Picture or Director? Will Abbas Kiarostami accomplish the rare feat of winning Best Picture with back-to-back films, something only Terrence Malick (with The New World and Tree of Life), Alfred Hitchcock (North by Northwest and Psycho) and Powell & Pressburger (Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes) have done before? Or will longtime Endy favorite Paul Thomas Anderson pick up his third Best Picture Endy, making him the most decorated filmmaker of his generation? Tune in tomorrow morning to find out.

Reviving a tradition I had to abandon last year after spending the second half of 2011 in a baby-induced movie-free zone, it’s time to nominate some movies for some end of the year awards.  I’ll list the nominees in each category here, and then on Saturday publish the winners, along with my predictions for the winners of that other set of awards. As always when assigning dates here at The End, movies are categorized based on their imdb date, which means that a number of films that would be Endy favorites (Damsels in Distress, Margaret, The Deep Blue Sea, etc) are not eligible for this year while several films that won’t open theatrically in the US until 2013 are eligilbe.

Best Picture:

1. In Another Country

2. Like Someone in Love

3. The Master

4. Moonrise Kingdom
5. Night Across the Street