The 2018 Monsieur Oscars

Favourite Fiction Film

1. Widows
2. If Beale Street could Talk
3. Barbara
4. High Life
5. Scarred Hearts
6. First Reformed
7. Shoplifters
8. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
9. Leave No Trace
10. You Were Never Really Here
11. Sweet Country
12. The Guardians
13. BlacKkKlansman
14. Sorry Angel
15. Creed II

Favourite Non-Fiction Film

1. Black Mother
2. Your Face
3. Bisbee '17
4. Mr. Soul
5. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
6. Monrovia, Indiana
7. They Shall Not Grow Old
8. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
9. ¡Las Sandinistas!
10. Pass Over
11. Bobby Kennedy for President
12. King Cohen
13. Bixa Travesty
14. 12 Days
15. Shirkers

Favourite Avante-Garde Film

1. Piu Piu
2. 24 Frames 
3. The Image Book
4. Dark
5. Music For When The Lights Go Out
6. The Green Fog
7. Waiting for the Barbarians
8. Unrest
9. The Glass Note
10. Douvan Jou Ka Leve

Favourite Adapted Screenplay

1. If Beale Street Could Talk - Barry Jenkins
2. Leave No Trace - Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini
3. The Death of Stalin - Peter Fellows, Fabien Nury, Ian Martin, David Schneider & Armando Iannucci
4. BlacKkKlansman - Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee
5. Land of Steady Habits - Nicole Holofcener
6. A Very English Scandal - Russell T. Davies & John Preston
7. Creed II - Juel Taylor & Sylvester Stallone

8. The Predator - Shane Black & Fred Dekker

9. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich - S. Craig Zahler 

10. Cold Skin - Eron Sheean & Jesús Olmo
11. The Miseducation of Cameron Post - Cecilia Frugiuele & Desiree Akhavan
12. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot - Gus Van Sant
13. A Gentle Creature - Sergey Loznitsa
14. Love, Simon - Isaac Aptaker & Elizabeth Berger
15. Lean on Pete - Andrew Haigh 

Favourite Original Screenplay

1. Piu Piu - Naima Ramos-Chapman
2. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - Joel & Ethan Coen
3. The Endless - Justin Benson
4. First Reformed - Paul Schrader
5. Barbara - Philippe Di Folco & Mathieu Amalric
6. All Square - Timothy Brady
7. Shoplifters - Hirokazu Kore-eda 
8. Support the Girls - Andrew Bujalski
9. Sorry To Bother You - Boots Riley
10. Sweet Country - Steven McGregor & David Tranter
11. Blockers - Jim & Brian Kehoe
12. Waiting for the Barbarians - Eugène Green
13. Monday - Alejandro Montoya Marín
14. Early Man - Mark Burton & James Higginson
15. Ray Meets Helen - Alan Rudolph

Favourite Performance by a Director

1. Lynne Ramsay - You Were Never Really Here

2. Khalik Allah - Black Mother 

3. Claire Denis - High Life

4. Mathieu Amalric - Barbara

5. Naima Ramos-Chapman - Piu Piu

6. Joel & Ethan Coen - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

7. Abbas Kiarostami - 24 Frames

8. Steve McQueen - Widows 

9. Phillippe Grandrieux - Unrest

10. Barry Jenkins - If Beale Street Could Talk

11. Xavier Beauvois - The Guardians

12. Steven Caple Jr. - Creed II

13. Paul Schrader - First Reformed & Dark

14. Spike Lee - BlacKkKlansman

15. Clint Eastwood - The 15:17 To Paris & The Mule

Best Performance by an Actor in a Lead Role

1. Keith Carradine - Ray Meets Helen

2. Nicolas Cage - Mom and Dad, Between Worlds & Dark

3. Ethan Hawke - First Reformed

4. Bryan Cranston - Isle of Dogs

5. Adam Horowitz - Golden Exits

6. Michael Kelly - All Square

7. Simon Russell Beale & Steve Buscemi - The Death of Stalin

8. Willem Dafoe - At Eternity's Gate

9. Hugh Grant - A Very English Scandal

10. Max Hubacher - The Captain

11. Robert Pattinson - High Life & Damsel

12. Jean-Pierre Leaud - The Lion Sleeps Tonight

13. Joaquin Phoenix - You Were Never Really Here

14. John Cena - Blockers

15. Dave Bautista - Final Score

16. Jason Momoa - Braven

17. Ben Mendelsohn - Land of Steady Habits

18. Ben Foster - Leave No Trace & Galveston

19. Stephan James - If Beale Street Could Talk

20. Jason Clarke - Winchester

Best Performance by an Actress in a Lead Role

1. Sandra Locke - Ray Meets Helen

2. Olivia Munn - The Predator

3. Lise Leplat Prudhomme - Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc

4. Olivia Colman - The Favourite

5. Melanie Lynskey & Sophia Mitri Schloss - Sadie

6. Thomasin McKenzie-Harcourt - Leave No Trace

7. Jamie Lee Curtis - Halloween

8. Michelle Pfeiffer - Where is Kyra?

9. Selma Blair - Mom and Dad

10. Isabelle Nelisse & Laura Dern - The Tale

11. Hailee Steinfeld - Bumblebee

12. Mary Kay Place - Diane

13. Ruth Wilson - Dark River

14. Regina Hall - Support the Girls

15. Florence Pugh - Little Drummer Girl

16. Kaniehtiio Horn - Mohawk

17. Zhe Gong - A Family Tour

18. Emma Thompson & Emily Watson - King Lear

19. Alicia Vikander - Tomb Raider

20. Madeleine Brewer - Cam

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

1. Jason Ritter - The Tale

2. Ronnie Gene Blevins - Death Wish
3. Michael B. Jordan & Andy Serkis - Black Panther

4. Rupert Friend - At Eternity's Gate & The Death of Stalin

5. Jason Isaacs - The Death of Stalin

6. Mathieu Amalric - Barbara & At Eternity's Gate

7. Anton Yelchin - Dark & Thoroughbreds

8. Jake Gyllenhaal - The Sisters Brothers
9. Tim Blake Nelson & Tom Waits - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

10. Dolph Lundgren - Creed II
11. Ike Barinholtz - Blockers
12. Sean Bean - Dark River
13. Nicolas Cage - Arsenal
14. Sterling K. Brown - The Predator
15. Brian Tyree Henry & Kevin J. O'Connor - Widows
16. Richard Brake - Mandy & The Death of Stalin
17. John Cho - Gemini
18. Corey Stoll, Brian Dennehy & John Tenney - The Seagull
19. Jesse Plemons - Game Night
20. Steven Yuen - Burning

21. Jonah Hill - Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot

22. Stephen Lang - Braven

23. Ray Stevenson - Cold Skin & Final Score

24. Cliff Curtis - The Meg

25. Ernie Hudson - Nappily Ever After

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

1. Tessa Thompson - Sorry to Bother You, Annihilation & Creed II
2. Andrea Martin - Diane
3. Haley Lu Richardson & Shayna McHayle - Support the Girls
4. Elizabeth Debicki - The Tale & Widows

5. Gina Rodriguez & Jennifer Jason Leigh - Annihilation

6. Michelle Rodriguez & Cynthia Erivo - Widows
7. Andrea Riseborough - The Death of Stalin

8. Ellen Burstyn - Nostalgia

9. Aura Garrido - Cold Skin
10. Zoe Kazan & Tyne Daly - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
11. Angela Winkler & Sylvie Testud - Suspiria
12. Nai An - A Family Tour
13. Florence Pugh - King Lear & Outlaw King
14. Eva Green - Based on a True Story
15. Pamela Adlon & Yeardley Smith - All Square
16. Candice Bergen & Jane Fonda - Book Club
17. Barbara Crampton - Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich

18. Sarah Vowell - Incredibles 2

19. Elisabeth Moss & Annette Bening - The Seagull

20. Isabela Moner - Sicario: Day of the Soldado

21. Dale Dickey - Leave No Trace

22. Isabelle Furhman - Down a Dark Hall
23. Rebecca Ferguson - Mission: Impossible: Fallout
24. Judy Greer - Halloween & The 15:17 To Paris
25. Franka Potente - Between Worlds

Best Performance by an Ensemble

1. Shoplifters
2. All Square

3. Nancy

4. Game Night

5. BlacKkKlansman

6. Land of Steady Habits

7. Bisbee '17

8. Support the Girls

9. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

10. The Predator

11. The Miseducation of Cameron Post

12. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot

13. The Death of Stalin

14. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc

15. Blockers

Achievement in Cinematography

1. Khalik Allah - Black Mother
2. Steven Soderbergh - Mosaic & Unrest
3. Bruno Delbonnel - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

4. Yorick Le Saux & Tomasz Naumiuk - High Life 
5. RaMell Ross - Hale County This Morning, This Evening
5. Chayse Irvin - BlacKkKlansman
6. Gökhan Tiryaki - The Wild Pear Tree

7. Ping Bin Lee - Endangered Species

8. Thomas Townend - You Were Never Really Here

9. Christophe Beaucarne - Barbara

10. Rob Hardy - Annihilation

11. Jarred Alterman - Bisbee '17

12. Daniel Pearl - Mom and Dad

13. Philippe Grandrieux - Unrest

14. Wyatt Garfield - Diane

15. Dylan River & Warwick Thornton - Sweet Country

16. Dariusz Wolski - Sicario: Day of the Soldado

17. Manuel Dacosse - Let The Corpses Tan

18. Pawel Edelman - Based on a True Story
19. Daniel Aranyó - The Crucifixion & Cold Skin
20. Martin Gschlacht - Alpha

Achievement in Editing

1. High Life
2. Sweet Country

3. Dark

4. You Were Never Really Here
5. The Commuter

6. Hale County This Morning, This Evening

7. The Crucifixion

8. Mom and Dad

9. The Green Fog

10. Bisbee '17

11. Unrest

12. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

13. Diane

14. Your Face

15. Mosaic

Achievement in Production Design 

1. Shadow

2. First Reformed

3. Incredibles 2

4. High Life

5. BlacKkKlansman

6. The Favourite

7. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

8. The Sisters Brothers

9. Based on a True Story

10. 7 Days in Entebbe

Achievement in Costume Design 

1. BlacKkKlansman

2. The Favourite

3. The Little Drummer Girl

4. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

5. Cold Skin

6. The Sisters Brothers

7. If Beale Street Could Talk
8. 7 Days in Entebbe
9. Sorry To Bother You
10. Shadow

Achievement in Art Direction

1. Scarred Hearts
2. Shadow

3. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

4. High Life

5. Incredibles 2

6. Cold Skin

7. BlacKkKlansman

8. Alpha

9. The Favourite

10. Sorry to Bother You

Favourite Original Score

1. Halloween

2. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

3. Incredibles 2

4. Your Face

5. High Life

6. Prospect

7. Damsel

8. Disobedience

9. Creed II

10. Between Worlds

11. Teen Titans Go To The Movies

12. Alpha

13. The Sisters Brothers

14. A Bread Factory

15. Paddington 2

Achievement in Sound Design

1. Piu Piu

2. Widows

3. Black Mother

4. Hale County This Morning, This Evening

5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

6. The Guilty

7. Barbara

8. Sorry To Bother You

10. Music For When The Lights Go Out

11. The Other Side of the Wind

12. If Beale Street Could Talk

13. First Reformed

14. Let The Corpses Tan

15. Blood Paradise

Achievement in Visual Effects

1. The Endless

2. Piu Piu

3. Gogol Viy

4. Tigers Are Not Afraid

5. 24 Frames

6. The Ritual

7. Annihilation

8. Possum

9. Prospect

10. Alpha

11. Unfriended: Dark Web

12. Transit

13. They Shall Not Grow Old

14. High Life

15. Cold Skin

16. Paddington 2

17. A Wrinkle In Time

18. Diamantino

19. The House That Jack Built
20. The Crucifixion 

Achievement in Make-up Effects

1. Piu Piu

2. Upgrade 

3. Boar

4. The House That Jack Built

5. What Keeps You Alive

6. Mohawk

7. Possum

8. Hurt

9. Satan's Slaves

10. Apostle

11. Cold Skin

12. You Were Never Really Here

13. First Reformed
14. Good Manners
15. The Night Comes For Us

A Time for Resurrection

There was a piece published a bit ago in the Washington Post about the death of a streaming service. Filmstruck offered a lot of canonical titles and a smattering of true, worthy rarities from the history of art cinema and classic studio filmmaking. I couldn't afford it because I'm a movie critic but I have some fond memories of watching movies on the service in other people's apartments. It was a public good. I was happier knowing it was out there even if I couldn't use it. I steal most of the films I watch anyway because it's one of the only ways I can see the movies I need to see in order to write about them and afford rent. Sue me. You won't get a dime because I don't have one to give. Because I love movies. I make nothing singing their praises, spend what little I have making them and seeing them. They've taken everything from me but believe me when I say I've still got more to give. 

I'll never forsake the medium because we're in the middle of a 30 year conversation I happen to enjoy, even though while we were talking a huge portion of my life left my body. But this is what I love so it doesn't feel like a loss. Film talks to me and the movies talk to each other and they let me listen. Hirokazu Kore-Eda's Shoplifters and Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Kings prop each other up, their tales of makeshift families on society's margins merge to form one giant family. How do you say no to that? Adds a year to your life. That's why I was most excited to see Orson Welles' newly restored and truly towering meta-diary entry The Other Side of the Wind come back to life. I knew what that film was going to be, but seeing it was still so important. The thing can be imagined forever but only seen once, if you catch my drift. Imagining a Welles decision just doesn't hold a candle to seeing one and experiencing that ecstatic melancholy that only his edits and close-ups provide. Not merely because he was a profoundly talented director, one of the finest, born with a camera in his mind, but because Welles is almost metonymic with stolen vision. He tried, time and again, to give us the gift of art, and moneymen, audiences and critics alike turned up their noses like they'd get another artist like him. As of 2018 we're still waiting. 

The Other Side of the Wind is a cacophonous journey towards death. The death of film, of many careers, of film appreciation, of the mystery of art, of its creator, its stars and its chances of being completed. A film about itself, failing to become real. It's also a log flume ride into a bottle of whiskey, one of the finest portrayals of professional alcoholics ever made - more interesting and surreal than Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart on roughly the same subjects. A man who staved off dysentery by accident because he only ever drank liquor playing a man who drank away every meaningful relationship he ever formed directed by a man who died penniless, knowing his legacy would be misused if we ever found it. This could only really have come out now (despite the fact that it could have come out literally decades ago if anyone with money had cared enough) because it happens to be a funhouse mirror with our image frozen in its cold glass surface. 

John Huston plays a director going to his own funeral, the guests just don't know it yet. He drinks and smokes and gives flippant, evasive answers to every question fired at him. His hangers-on watch him trundle through life like the giant in N.C. Wyeth's painting of the same name (the second time I've had recourse to mention this work this year), painted with their backs to us, staring in wonder at a man ten thousand feet tall. Their identities are fashioned in his reflection, their art never discussed without his name on any critic's tongue. That exposure chafes bad. Journalists are stuck asking third-rate Cahier-du-cinema-style questions, old friends are stuck in his shadow, and he's stuck in skin he doesn't recognize. He drinks, his lips purse like a chimpanzee's (Huston was gifted one on the occasion of his wedding to Evelyn Keyes and it trashed his apartment - an ominous sign of things to come. Monkeys know), and out spills a cagey taunt to beloved and hated alike blanketed in cigar smoke. The silken black-and-white coffin in which he finds himself is perhaps the best a Welles-image has ever looked. Even better than the gorgeous and purposely dated faux-nioni film Huston is directing and trying to find money for. Art imitated life. Welles spent years trying to find a home for his film. No one bit. Spielberg bought the Rosebud sleigh instead. Little did he know it was one of 12. Even the myth was a disappointment. 

The film is thus about the pieces everyone tries to grab from an unknowable artist. The tragedy was Welles never hid. He told Bogdanovich a story once about D.W. Griffith washing dishes at the Brown Derby or some such place in the 40s. Anyone who wanted to know how to make films just had to know which joint he was cleaning and go ask him, but no one cared, even as Birth of a Nation and Intolerance became the yin and yang of silent cinema. I'm not positive Welles knew when he died. He had his own troubles. And for them, he wound up washing dishes of his own, narrating bunk documentaries about Nostradamus, playing generals and dying pimps and fat robots. He was trying to hand back his crown of thorns and no one would take it. He was right there, arms open, if anyone wanted him. 

There's another rosebud in the razor-wire genius of The Other Side of the Wind, the perfect surface in his film-within-a-film. Bob Random, the Canadian heart-throb eating Huston's director alive from the inside like a cancer, plays a rich cypher who lied about being poor to get cast in his work. And just as soon as he joined the circus, he ran off in the middle of making the movie. Random's own career isn't extremely dissimilar. He worked for a few decades and then vanished. I could see Welles projecting a thousand things onto him. The beauty that changed with the times. He looks like a zillion mumbling beauties who graced the screen around then. His look was almost a type in-and-of-itself, square jaw, pouty lips, sad eyes, long curly hair. Maybe it's my mind playing tricks on me but I don't think he says a word in the whole movie. He's Welles inner beauty, the beautiful star he only got to be for a little while. The man full of promise who can't possibly deliver (he did, but no one told Welles that).

Perhaps that's why it was so shocking to see him barking threats in Budd Boetticher's final fiction film, A Time For Dying. Boetticher had a career about diametrically opposed to Welles'. He was a studio director who made cheap b-movies (some of our very best cheap b-movies, it begs pronouncement) who found himself in a unique position to become a kind of cult figure. He, producer Harry Joe Brown and star Randolph Scott collaborated on some of the finest westerns ever made. Seven Men From Now, Westbound, The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, Buchanan Rides Alone, Commanche Station, lean, poetic things. All beauty and clenched courage. Westerns were in a sort of a golden age, and even among such tall company they stand out. Scott retired in 1962 after making Ride The High Country, rightly believing few people would know what to do with him and his enormous image after that. Times were changing. Scott looked a hundred years old when he threw in the towel, you'd never guess he lived another 25 years from looking at him. Boetticher hung in after his star quit on him, but either no one wanted him or he didn't know what to do with anyone who did. 

Then it's 1969 and he decides to try one last Western before tossing in the sweat-soaked towel. A Time For Dying can be thought of as Boetticher's Psycho. It's got TV-budget sets and actors, it's discursive and seemingly easily distracted, it's got no real heroes, and it's darker than compost. Random plays a kid who's hooked up with Jesse James. James is played by Audie Murphy in his final screen performance, though he's really only got one scene - what they called a Guest Star back in the day. Murphy only really stands out because he seems like a star. It's not that he's any better than the rest of the cast - Random's got him beat for charisma, no mistake. He's just got that bigness; he smiles and you want to grab sunglasses. Random looks like a surfer who got lost and stumbled onto the set. He's electrifying, but it helps that the leads of the film - Richard Lapp and Anne Randall - just sit there waiting for the end credits. Randall's a posable doll in gingham skirts and Lapp looks like clay waiting for the sculptor. He looks like the Quay Brothers tried to make Barry Keoghan, got reasonably close and called it quits to get drunk. Lapp and Randall wind up married through no real fault of their own and so he's got to woo her after the fact with a display of his shooting skills. James and his gang are impressed and offer him a spot on the crew, while his courage sweats out of his body. Pay close attention to that sweat, it comes back. 

Boetticher by this point hasn't done much to indicate he's awake back there. Film kind of looks like a painting someone forgot to start so he tosses a bucket of red just before calling "Action!" But then the fucking strangest thing happens. Ebert called the film the "damndest" western he'd ever seen and I was starting to wonder what he meant until the final reel. Lapp challenges Random to a duel in the street, reasoning if he can't kill Jesse James he could at least kill his youngest disciple, and that ought to prove his mettle. Here's where it becomes clear Boetticher's been playing possum. Why would this hideous kid with a gorgeous, loving paramour for an accidental wife need to prove anything to anyone? He's just some bumpkin. James and his gang ride into silver city to raise hell and rob their bank and for a minute it kinda sorta looks like Lapp's going to stop them. Which is absurd. The James gang fell on hard times but they weren't stopped by some lumpen pipsqueak. And then he calls Random out and they're in the street, the movie's got 8 minutes left. It's got to go one way, you think, but the guns slip out of Lapp's hand and Random fucking kills him. Shoots him twice and then goes back and finishes him off with a shotgun. When Randall wakes up she's in the town whorehouse about to be groomed, and you know she knows it because her eyes go wide with terror just before the edit, just as another gal just like her rides into town on the stage and every man in a town cleaned out and shamed by Jesse James (who just saw a kid gunned down in the street) walks in after her. The charitable thing to do would be to burn the cathouse down with all of them inside of it, but Boetticher just watches 'em file in. Roll credits. Welcome to Hell. The 70s started the minute that movie ended. The damndest western ever made.

Boetticher and Welles knew before we did that their time was up, that they'd be misplaced, their memories dry cleaned for whatever rich schmo needed to compare himself to someone dead. Steve Bannon infamously tried to insert himself into Welles' The Chimes at Midnight in the middle of Errol Morris' punch-pulling American Dharma. The rich always see themselves as aggrieved. Boetticher and Welles were at their mercy and at least had the tact to not whine like drunken derelicts when their fortunes dried up. It was over. Welles, to his last, put on a good face ("I get to play a whole planet!" he chortled as he took his last paycheck to grace the Transformers movie) even as he knew it was over. Movies, which Welles understood better than anyone alive at the time of his death in the mid-80s (can you imagine dying in 1985?), had taken it all away from him. He was no longer as handsome or thin, no longer praised, his genius no longer whispered about by sibilant industry goons, his friends no longer coming to him for work or advice. His nest was empty and so were his coffers. Boetticher at least had fans tracking him down, reminding him he had done great work and he'd gotten to roll a grenade into the genre he'd helped perfect before he stopped. That had to count for something. Welles left a dozen projects hanging in the wind, whichever side, and then couldn't hang onto life anymore. Everything caught up with him. 

Strangest goddamn thing is that when I look at pictures of Welles just as he was starting to age, I see myself. We have similar facial features, our hair grows the same way, he seems to be looking at me with a knowing sort of grin. Is there a phrase for a face that ages like your own? An inverse Dorian Gray? A roadmap to your mortality? Naturally I'd change some of the contours, but I guess it's good to make peace with what life and the cinema CAN do to someone, just in case they decide to. But until I find myself voicing Unicron the eater of planets, the last stop before death as foretold by Nostradamus in the ancient book of prophecy, old when the seas drank Atlantis, I'll keep having the conversation because I know film will always answer back.