"12 Years" and "Her" lead the Washington D.C. Film Critics Nominations

The Washington D.C. Film Critics Association released their nominations tonight, and will vote on their winners Monday. 12 Years leads the field with 11 nods, followed by Spike Jonze's Her (which is having a strong critical showing so far) with 9. I'm getting a little worried about the complete lack of attention for Captain Phillips in a lot of these critics groups- is it in danger of being totally overshadowed, or will the industry awards come in and save it next week, when SAG and the Golden Globes announce?

Best Film

• American Hustle
• Her
• Gravity
• Inside Llewyn Davis
• 12 Years a Slave

Best Director

• Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity)
• Spike Jonze (Her)
• Baz Luhrmann (The Great Gatsby)
• Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave)
• Martin Scorsese (The Wolf of Wall Street)

Best Actor

• Leonardo Dicaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street)
• Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave)
• Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club)
• Joaquin Phoenix (Her)
• Robert Redford (All is Lost)

Best Actress

• Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)
• Sandra Bullock (Gravity)
• Judi Dench (Philomena)
• Emma Thompson (Saving Mr. Banks)
• Meryl Streep (August: Osage County)

Best Supporting Actor

• Daniel Bruhl (Rush)
• Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave)
• James Franco (Spring Breakers)
• James Gandolfini (Enough Said)
• Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)

Best Supporting Actress

• Scarlett Johansson (Her)
• Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle)
• Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave)
• Octavia Spencer (Fruitvale Station)
• June Squibb (Nebraska)

Best Acting Ensemble

• American Hustle
• August: Osage County
• Prisoners
• 12 Years a Slave
• The Way, Way Back

Best Youth Performance

• Asa Butterfield (Ender's Game)
• Adele Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Color)
• Liam James (The Way, Way Back)
• Waad Mohammed (Wadjda)
• Tye Sheridan (Mud)

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Before Midnight
• Captain Phillips
• The Spectacular Now
• 12 Years a Slave
• The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Original Screenplay

• American Hustle
• Blue Jasmine
• Enough Said
• Her
• Inside Llewyn Davis

Best Animated Feature

• The Croods
• Despicable Me 2
• Frozen
• Monsters University
• The Wind Rises

Best Documentary

• The Act of Killing
• Blackfish
• Leviathan
• Stories We Tell
• 20 Feet From Stardom

Best Foreign Language Film

• Blue is the Warmest Color
• The Broken Circle Breakdown
• The Hunt
• The Past
• Wadjda

Best Art Direction

• Gravity
• The Great Gatsby
• Her
• Inside Llewyn Davis
• 12 Years a Slave

Best Cinematography

• Gravity
• The Great Gatsby
• Her
• Inside Llewyn Davis
• 12 Years a Slave

Best Editing

• Gravity
• Her
• Rush
• 12 Years a Slave
• The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Original Score

• Frozen
• Her
• Gravity
• Saving Mr. Banks
• 12 Years a Slave

The Joe Barber Award for Best Portrayal of Washington, D.C.

• Lee Daniels' The Butler
• The East
• Olympus Has Fallen
• Philomena
• White House Down

I love that award for best portrayal of Washington D.C., seeing as it was totally demolished in White House Down. Scarlett Johansson's voice performance in supporting is also a cool nomination, but there's no way that happens at any of the big awards. And it's interesting that American Hustle was nominated for Best Film but not Best Director (in favor of Baz Luhrmann!), while the opposite happened for Scorsese and The Wolf of Wall Street. There seems to be the beginning of a rivalry between those two films as they set out to compete against each other in a couple of weeks.

"12 Years a Slave" wins the Boston Online Film Critics

The very minor Boston Online Film Critics Association (they aren't even Boston's main critics, that's the Boston Society of Film Critics, which votes tomorrow), nonetheless has the distinction of being the first group to honor 12 Years a Slave with their big prize:

• Best Picture: 12 Years a Slave
• Best Director: Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave)
• Best Actor: Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave)
• Best Actress: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)
• Best Supporting Actor: Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)
• Best Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave)
• Best Screenplay: Before Midnight
• Best Foreign Language Film: Blue is the Warmest Color
• Best Documentary: The Act of Killing
• Best Animated Film: The Wind Rises and Frozen (tie)
• Best Cinematography: Inside Llewyn Davis
• Best Editing: 12 Years a Slave
• Best Original Score: 12 Years a Slave

12 Years didn't just win, it nearly swept, winning every eligible category except Screenplay (even score, which was frankly a pretty lazy effort from Hans Zimmer, who to my ears appears to have ripped off his exact score from Inception). The Boston Online critics also provide a top ten, which gives us a couple of cool, outside-the-box choices in The Spectacular Now, Spring Breakers and The World's End:

• 12 Year a Slave
• Inside Llewyn Davis
• The Wolf of Wall Street
• Gravity
• Before Midnight
• The Spectacular Now
• Blue is the Warmest Color
• Spring Breakers
• The World's End
• Fruitvale Station

Movie of the Day: "Invictus" (2009)

A special Movie of the Day to commemorate the passing of global icon Nelson Mandela yesterday at the age of 95. This film from 2009 stars Morgan Freeman as the South African leader, and he gives a terrific, Oscar-nominated performance in this behind the scenes true story about Mandela's early days in office after he was elected president. In a move to unite the country in the new post-Apartheid era, he worked to help the mostly white South African rugby team win the World Cup, which he was convinced would garner national pride and unity between black and white citizens in South Africa. It's a well acted, very moving story directed by Clint Eastwood in his typical understated manner, and leaves you feeling heartwarmed over the unlikely success. A perfect movie for today.

Trailer:

"Frozen" Leads the 2013 Annie Award Nominations

The Annies are run by the International Animated Film Society, and are the major industry awards for animation. Their nominees this year are led by the Disney hit Frozen with 10 nods, which could possibly be a juggernaut in the animated film category, although Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is looking to emerge as the critical favorite. The full list of Annie nominations is here, below are the major categories:

Animated Feature

• A Letter to Momo
• Despicable Me 2
• Ernest & Celestine
• Frozen
• Monsters University
• The Croods
• The Wind Rises

Annie Award for Best Animated Special Production

• Chipotle Scarecrow
• Listening is an Act of Love
• Room on the Broom
• Toy Story of Terror!

Animated Short Subject

• Despicable Me 2- Puppy
• Get a Horse!
• Gloria Victoria
• My Mom is an Airplane
• The Numberlys

Animated Effects in an Animated Production

• Epic
• Dragons: Defenders of Berk
• Monsters University
• The Croods
• Turbo

Directing in an Animated Feature Production

• The Croods
• Turbo
• Epic
• Ernest & Celestine
• Frozen

Writing in an Animated Feature Production

• Ernest & Celestine
• The Wind Rises
• Monsters University
• Frozen

In Theaters This Weekend 12/6

For a look at what's playing this weekend, this is a wrap-up of what's currently in theaters that isn't The Hunger Games or Frozen, two big releases that clearly don't need your attention. Other films in release however, could benefit from more of a spotlight.

First it's the Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis, which finally comes out this weekend, nearly six months after its debut at the Cannes film festival. This movie has been ecstatically reviewed and has already garnered attention from the early critics awards, taking the Best Picture Prize at the Gothams, as well as Cinematography from the NYCC, and Screenplay along with a place on the top ten of the National Board of Review. Look for a lot more to come, as I think it's almost guaranteed a nomination for Best Picture at the Oscars, and look for it playing in your area soon. Oscar Isaac in particular is a breakout performance in the title role, and this guy's going to be in a lot more movies in the near future.

"It may be the saddest, sweetest, most beautiful and most tragic work of art these great American filmmakers have crafted yet." (Salon)

"While the bleak, funny, exquisitely made 'Inside Llewyn Davis' echoes familiar themes and narrative journeys, it also goes its own way and it becomes a singular experience, one of their best yet." (LA Times)

In wide release this weekend is Out of the Furnace, the second feature from director Scott Copper, after 2009's Crazy Heart, and starring Christian Bale. The performances have been lauded, but the movie itself has gotten a mixed response from critics. Despite some saying it may be Bale's best ever performance, the movie is not expected to gain any traction in awards circles.

"A starkly powerful drama, that in some ways feels like an Iraq-era bookend to 'The Deer Hunter.'" (Variety)

"If the downbeat plot is depressingly familiar, it's partly savaged by the quality of the performances." (Globe and Mail)

Still in theaters and expanding is Alexander Payne's Nebraska, starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte, and a likely awards favorite in the coming weeks. It just won Best Actor and Supporting Actor from the NBR, a bit of a surprise in Forte's case especially. He remains an outsider for a Supporting Actor nod, and his chances are entirely dependent I think, on how passionate the love for Nebraska is. With so many great movies this year, it's hard to tell which ones will hit the voter's sweet spot.

"A desolate comedy-drama about fathers, sons, missed highways, and life's off ramps." (Boston Globe)

"'Nebraska' bears Payne's trademark combination of low-key humor, poignancy, and an overall feeling of Beckett-esque resignation." (Newsday)

Lastly, Philomena is still hanging around in limited release (although it's going wider than Nebraska), and remains the sentimental, feel-good favorite of the season. It was another well-reviewed movie and hinges on the shoulders of Judi Dench, who's a candidate for a seventh nomination. I thought just a few weeks ago that she was a virtual lock, but with new contenders like Amy Adams receiving some glowing notices for American Hustle, and Meryl Streep waiting in the wings for August: Osage County, I really am starting to think she could be vulnerable here. The category is so crowded this year (which is rare in the Best Actress race), and somebody will have to be left out.

David Ehrlich's Top 25

The critic David Ehrlich, senior editor for Film.com has released his top movies of the year in his annual video montage format. It's a really cool mash-up of the best movies of the year, set to various songs from the year:

REVIEW: "The World's End" (2013) Simon Pegg, Nick Frost. Dir. Edgar Wright

The World's End is the final chapter in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, following two of my favorite comedies, Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). I wish I could say this last entry lived up to the inventive hilarity of the first two, but for me this one is a bit too clever for its own good and short on the big laughs that have me on the floor every time I watch the others. But by no means does it have nothing to recommend it, and it's still a funny and somewhat sad rumination on childhood friendships and the way life doesn't turn out as you expected it to when you were young.

The movie as always, stars Simon Pegg in the lead role and Nick Frost as his sidekick, and co-writer Pegg deserves credit, along with Wright, for figuring out how not to have him play the same character in any of the three films. Here Pegg turns it upside down again as Gary King, a middle-aged drug addict and alcoholic who's no more responsible or mature than he was at 18 years old, when he and his loyal buddies first attempted the "Golden Mile," a pub crawl that includes twelve pubs in their hometown of Newton Haven. At the time, the guys never completed the crawl, and Gary, in the beginning of a mid-life crisis, decides at once to round up the gang to finish what they started twenty years earlier. He goes about it one by one, assembling his old pals, all of whom are now either married or settled, and all of whom have grown up and are reluctant to join in Gary's ultimate quest, especially Frost as Andy, who was once the victim of his and Gary's youthful and reckless antics, and decidedly not eager to relive it.

Nonetheless, for reasons none of them quite seem to know themselves, they do gather together again and travel back to Newton Haven, only to find that the town and the people in it are changed, somehow. The movie is actually quite serious for  the majority of the first section of the film, content to make some rather astute observations about how childhood friendships change and as adults we can never quite recapture the past, and as a result the film fails to establish its comedic rhythms early, making us think we're going to be experiencing a much more poignant, almost dramatic reunion of old friends. But of course, things take a sudden left turn at the halfway point, as we begin to see that the town actually, literally has changed, and been inhabited by robots/pod people who are out to homogenize Newton Haven along with the rest of the world.

When the guys realize it's a kind of apocalypse, the comedy gets a bit more raucous, but always swerves back to make its points about the failure and disappointments of Gary's adult life in particular. Because of this, the tone is a bit uneven throughout the film (even though the start of the apocalypse does bring the movie's biggest laughs in an outrageous bathroom brawl sequence), and in an even crazier left turn (or maybe at this point it's right), the climactic ending piles on a wildly complicated sci-fi twist that threatens to wipe out all the movie's poignant seriousness from the first half. The last twists in particular were unnecessary for me, as the sudden tonal change makes the movie feel like it wasn't quite sure what it wanted to be, but the cast is very good and still make the movie worth seeing, especially if you're a fan of the first two films in the trilogy. Nick Frost in particular is very effective in this, both in his usual physical comedy and surprisingly in the dramatic moments as well. Pegg and Frost always have the kind of chemistry that comes across as old and fast friends, and that timing and affection that exists between them carries every moment they're paired together. It's a collaboration you'd like to see go on, even outside the Cornetto trilogy, and I hope it will. I'd see anything they do together.

* * 1/2

Visual Effects Shortlist Announced

The Oscar nominees for visual effects will come from the following list of ten movies. The biggest snub seems to be Man of Steel, which I'll admit makes me happy in a petty sort of way (although I'll go ahead and admit the effects were much better than World War Z):

• Elysium
• Gravity
• The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug
• Iron Man 3
• The Lone Ranger
• Oblivion
• Pacific Rim
• Star Trek Into Darkness
• Thor: The Dark World
• World War Z

Out of those, what's your best guess for the five nominees? I'm thinking Gravity, Hobbit, Pacific Rim, Star Trek Into Darkness and maybe Iron Man 3? I don't think there's a lot of suspense over the win in this category though- Gravity takes it in a walk.

VIDEO: "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"

The latest Hobbit production diary is out, which shows us some of the secrets of the making of part 2 of the trilogy, out Dec. 13th. I'm getting more and more excited for this one, since the early word on it is that it's very good, much better than the first film and closer to the original LoTR trilogy.

Rolling Stone Top 10

Peter Travers' top 10 list is out. He has un uncanny knack for predicting the Best Picture nominees, with nine of his top 10 choices last year making the cut:

1. 12 Years a Slave
2. Gravity
3. The Wolf of Wall Street
4. Before Midnight
5. Her
6. American Hustle
7. Captain Phillips
8. Nebraska
9. Blue Jasmine
10. Inside Llewyn Davis

It looks to me like he's probably hit the mark again, more or less. My guess is all of these make it into the Best Picture lineup except Blue Jasmine and Before Midnight. That would leave one open slot for something else, probably Saving Mr. Banks.

TRAILER #3: "The Monuments Men"

The latest trailer for Monuments Men brings back the comedic tone, as the movie is now coming out in February and safely nestled away from Oscar season. Now coming out February 7th, 2014.

Time Magazine Top 10

Time has the honor of being the first publication to reveal its top 10 list for the year. From their film critic Richard Corliss:

1. Gravity
2. The Great Beauty
3. American Hustle
4. Her
5. The Grandmaster
6. Furious 6
7. Frozen
8. The Act of Killing
9. 12 Years a Slave
10. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Ok, first of all, Furious 6? Really? But apparently Corliss has a thing for the whole Fast & Furious series in general. And I have to say this makes me a lot more curious about The Hobbit, which he describes as "a splendid achievement, close to the grandeur of Jackson's Lord of the Rings films." Here's hoping!