César Award Nominations

BEST FILM
Les Combattans
Eastern Boys
Hippocrate
La Famille Bélier
Saint Laurent 
Sils Maria
Timbuktu

BEST DIRECTOR
Olivier Assayas, Sils Maria
Bertrand Bonello, Saint Laurent
Thomas Cailley, Les Combattants
Robin Campillo, Eastern Boys  
Thomas Lilti, Hippocrate
Céline Sciamma, Bande De Filles
Abderrahmane Sissako, Timbuktu

BEST ACTOR
Niels Arestru, Diplomatie
Guillaume Canet, La Prochaine Fois Je Viserai Le Coeur
François  Damiens, La Famille Bélier
Romain Duris, Une Nouvelle Amie
Vincent Lacoste, Hippocrate
Pierre Niney, Yves Saint Laurent 
Gaspard Ulliel, Saint Laurent 

BEST ACTRESS
Juliette Binoche, Sils Maria
Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night
Catherine Deneuve, Dans La Cour 
Emilie Dequenne, Pas Son Genre
Adéle Haenel, Les Combattant
Sandrine Kiberlain, Elle L'Adore
Karin Viard, La Famille Bélier

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Eric Elmosnino, La Famille Bélier
Guillume Gallienne, Yves Saint Laurent
Louis Garrel, Saint Laurent
Reda Kateb, Hippocrate
Jérémie Renier, Saint Laurent

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Marianne Denicourt, Hippocrate
Claude Gensac, Lulu Femme Nue
Izïa Higelin, Samba
Charlotte Le Bon, Yves Saint Laurent
Kristen Stewart, Sils Maria

Dublin Film Critics Circle

TOP TEN FILM

1. Boyhood
2. Under the Skin
3. Ida
4. The LEGO Movie
5. 12 Years a Slave
6. The Grand Budapest Hotel
7. Two Days, One Night
8. (TIE) Her; Leviathan
9. The Wolf of Wall Street
10. (TIE) Blue Ruin; The Lunch Box

BEST DIRECTOR

1. Richard Linklater, Boyhood
2. Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin
3. Pawel Pawlikowski, Ida
4. Spike Jonze, Her
5. Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest Hotel
6. Andrey Zvyagintsev, Leviathan
7. Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave
8. Yann Demange, '71
9. (TIE) Phil Lord, Chris Miller, The LEGO Movie; Jean Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, Two Days, One Night
10. Jennifer Kent, The Babadook

BEST ACTOR

1. Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler
2. Ralph Fiennes, The Grand Budapest Hotel
3. Jack O'Donnell, '71
4. Jack O'Donnell, Starred Up
5. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, A Most Wanted Man
6. Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game
7. (TIE) Chadwick Boseman, Get On Up; Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner
8. Michael Fassbender, Frank
9. Irrfan Khan, The Lunchbox
10. (TIE) Tom Hardy, Locke; Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave; Bill Hader, The Skeleton Twins

BEST ACTRESS

1. Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night
2. Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin
3. Essie Davis, The Babadook
4. Julianne Moore, Maps to the Stars
5. Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
6. Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
7. Kristen Wiig, The Skeleton Twins
8. Agata Kulesza, Ida
9. (TIE) Agata Trzebuckowska, Ida; Mia Wasikowski, Tracks
10. (TIE) Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle; Emmanuelle Devos, Violette

BEST IRISH FILM

1. Frank
2. Living in a Coded Land
3. Out of Here
4. Calvary
5. Run & Jump
6. One Million Dubliners
7. Gold
8. Standby
9. Noble
10. Unbreakable

BEST DOCUMENTARY

1. Finding Vivian Maier
2. One Million Dubliners
3. Citizenfour
4. Concerning Violence
5. 20 Feet from Stardom
6. The Known Unknown
7. (TIE) Night Will Fall; All This Mayhem
8. (TIE) Life Itself; Dinosaur 13
9. (TIE) 20,000 Days on Earth; Next Goal Wins; Living in a Coded Land
10. (TIE) The Missing Picture; The Overnighters; The Case Against 8; Showrunners

BREAKTHROUGH: Jack O'Connell, '71; Starred Up; Unbroken           

European Film Awards

EUROPEAN FILM: Ida
DIRECTOR: Pawel Pawlikowski, Ida
ACTOR: Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner
ACTRESS: Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night
SCREENWRITER: Pawel Pawlikowski, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Ida
ANIMATED FEATURE: The Art of Happiness
DOCUMENTARY: Master of the Universe
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Lukasz Zal, Ryszard Lenczewski, Ida
COSTUME DESIGNER: Natascha Curtius-Noss, The Dark Valley
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Claus-Rudolf Amler, The Dark Valley
EDITOR: Justine Wright, Locke
COMPOSER: Mica Levi, Under the Skin
SOUND DESIGNER: Joakim Sundström, Starred Up
SHORT FILM: The Chicken
EUROPEAN COMEDY FILM: The Mafia Only Kills In Summer- directed by Pierfrancesco Diliberto  
EUROPEAN DISCOVERY: The Tribe- directed by Miroslav Slaboshpitsky
EUROPEAN ACHIEVEMENT: Steve McQueen 
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: Agnés Varda
PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD: Ida

Boston Society of Film Critics

FILM: Boyhood (runner-up: Birdman)
DIRECTOR: Richard Linklater, Boyhood (runner-up: Clint Eastwood, American Sniper)
ACTOR: Michael Keaton, Birdman (runner-up: Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner)
ACTRESS: Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night and The Immigrant (runner-up: Hilary Swank, The Homesman)
SUPPORTING ACTOR: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash (runner-up: Edward Norton, Birdman)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Emma Stone, Birdman (runner-up: Laura Dern, Wild)
SCREENPLAY: (tie) Birdman and Boyhood (runner-up: Mr. Turner)
ANIMATED FAETURE: The Tale of The Princess Kaguya (runner-up: The LEGO Movie)
DOCUMENTARY: CitizenFour (runner-up: Jodorowsky's Dune)
FOREIGN FILM: Two Days, One Night (runner-up: Ida)
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Birdman- Emmanuel Lubezki (runner: Mr. Turner- Dick Pope)
FILM EDITING: Boyhood- Sandra Adair (runner-up: American Sniper- Joel Cox & Gary Roach)
NEW FILMMAKER: Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler (runner-up: Gillian Robespierre, Obvious Child)
USE OF MUSIC: Inherent Vice (runner-up: Whiplash)

Boston Online Film Critics Association

PICTURE: Snowpiercer

Top 10 of 2014:

1. Snowpiercer
2. Under the Skin
3. Boyhood
4. Only Lovers Left Alive
5. The Babadook
6. Two Days, One Night
7. Birdman
8. Calvary
9. Inherent Vice
10. Selma 

DIRECTOR: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman
ACTOR: Brendan Gleeson, Calvary
ACTRESS: Marion Cotillard, Two Days, One Night
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Edward Norton, Birdman
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Tilda Swinton, Snowpiercer
SCREENPLAY: Calvary- John Michael McDonagh
ANIMATED FEATURE: The LEGO Movie
DOCUMENTARY: Life Itself
FOREIGN FILM: Two Days, One Night
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Birdman- Emmanuel Lubezki
FILM EDITING: Edge of Tomorrow- James Herbert & Laura Jennings
ORIGINAL SCORE: Under the Skin- Mica Levi

New York Film Critics Circle

PICTURE: Boyhood
DIRECTOR: Richard Linklater, Boyhood
ACTOR: Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner
ACTRESS: Marion Cotillard, The Immigrant; Two Days, One Night
SUPPORTING ACTOR: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
SCREENPLAY: The Grand Budapest Hotel- Wes Anderson, Hugo Guinness
ANIMATED FEATURE: The LEGO Movie
FOREIGN FILM: Ida
NON-FICTION FILM: Citizenfour
CINEMATOGRAPHY: The Immigrant- Darius Khondji
FIRST FILM: Jennifer Kent, The Babadook
SPECIAL AWARD: Adrienne Mancia

Woe is Cotillard

What does raven-haired French beauty need to do to be taken seriously?  Last year, around this exact time, critics were under the spell of her performance as the amputee in Jacques Audiard's Rust & Bone.  Many expected an award from the Cannes Film Festival to be nearly a done deal for the international actress.  And in beat-- it didn't happen.  No worries, the bar was raised when Sony Pictures Classics gave the darkly sensual film a prime awards bait release date.  At the very least the middlebrow mensches at the Academy would approach the skill, technique and tragedy that Cotillard was offering-- she had no legs, for crying out loud.  Nudges and murmurs and this is going to happen vibes started breaking when she earned Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for her work, and in a thud, the Academy didn't catch the bait.  No worries, she would up the ante with two films at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival-- one as a sign of solidarity to her Frenchman (and beau)-- Guillaume Canet's Blood Ties, which premiered out of competition-- and the other to finally grasp the throngs of Cannes victory that eluded her one year ago.  For in James Grey's The Immigrant, the ever-busy and industrious actress plays a Polish immigrant turned prostitute in 1920s Manhattan alongside Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner.  Period film, check.  Tragic backstory, check.  She even learned Polish for the part-- a French woman playing a Polish woman speaking English, she's trying to Meryl Streep her way into movie awards land.  Alas, wasn't meant to be.

It would be foolish to really feel to sorry for the talented and vibrant actress.  She already does have an Oscar to keep herself cozy, the one she won for her 2007 breakout film La Vie en Rose, becoming only the second woman in Academy history to win for a foreign language performance.  However, considering all that, that beauty and the certain ambition, the awards bodies haven't paid much attention to her since then.  Surprising for a post-American-ified career that's translated into Oscar-friendly territory and made her a favorite on Oscar watchdog lists ever since.  Since La Vie en Rose she played a gangster's moll in Michael Mann's Public Enemies (2009)-- too divisive for Oscars taste, okay...then came Nine (2009), for which see received best in show reviews for and a Golden Globe nomination-- the film was too terrible, got that, even though Penelope Cruz scored a bizarre afterglow nomination, okay...then Inception (2010), which earned multiple nominations, winning four awards-- the film was more a visual achievement, okay...then Midnight in Paris (2011), which earned a Best Picture nomination-- that one was a Woody Allen joint, not a performance piece, okay...Rust & Bone (2012), also-ran status.  In between she found time to join Steven Soderbergh's ensemble in Contagion (2011), cultivate a fanboy base with The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and star in a few movies from her native France.  What more does she have to do?  I fear she may become the female equivalent to Christian Bale if awards bodies don't honor her with something in the near future... 

Rust & Bone

The twirly melodrama of Rust & Bone, directed and co-written by Jacques Audiard, is fascinated by the severed limbs and broken psyches of it's main characters.  Audiard, through his last French hits A Prophet and The Beat That My Heart Skipped has emerged as one of the freshest and most direct of international auteurs with his swishy, yet fluid, nearing on poetic strikes with the camera-- coupled with a mature, yet even handed take on human drama.  Rust & Bone is notable mostly in its flourishes-- immerse but beautifully wrought camera work, the near fetishistic look at his actors pained and broken body parts, the silly bit of slight transcendence while a Katy Perry song plays in the background-- here's a case where you have a film, made with abundant sincerity, graced with actors willing and certainly capable of exposing nakedly personal portraits; a film unsentimental until it isn't, un-romantic until it isn't, bewitching but at arms length-- a bold cinematic curiosity that never quite reaches into ones soul.  What's left is a marvelously well-crafted and well performed film that never quite reaches the sum of its parts, perhaps because they weren't as well filled as they could have or should have been in the first place.

When the film debuted at last summer's Cannes Film Festival, it seemed to ignite a media firestorm for it's actress Marion Cotillard.  The Oscar-honored French beauty, the same who's nearly become a Hollywood movie star returning to her native land for a hard hitting film from one of her countryman's most newly respected.  The content of the film seemed secondary-- other than the fact that the famous lady was playing a whale trainer at a Sea World-like aquatic park who loses both her legs in a freak killer whale accident.  Behind that hubbub is a subtle and beguiling performance that holds because of what Cotillard keeps from us; that mystery and sense of wonder.  Aside from a few shrieks of "What has happened" shock, her Stephanie is creation of both the enchanting actress and the filmmakers is one that never asks nor pleas for sympathy and one that has no need for the typical rounds of disability anguish.  All dare to make her unlikable even at times, but mostly just human.

Perhaps the other major surprise at first sight of Rust & Bone is that Cotillard's tale was merely one part, or perhaps even a little less than that if running time math matters any.  Before the accident, Stephanie meets Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a hulking brute, while she's teasing and inciting barroom fights as a local club where he is a bouncer.  Ali's bruises are first met as emotional, not that he will share them, as he along with his young, estranged son move in with his sister, of whom he has a contentious relationship with, until the once amateur boxer finds an easier source of income in kicking the crap out of guys in backyard melees.  Schoenaerts matches Cotillard round for round as the two take up an unlikely friendship, one that leads to emotional and spiritual healing, but not in the way one may expect.  Both characters are at odds with their lives, if not with each other-- the find a small salvage in the arms of one another perhaps if nothing else because they've both become stagnate and estranged in themselves.  Audiard puts aside any easily digestible sense of courtship as the two become bed mates, and invariably turned on their bruised bodies.  It's a movie still through and through-- legs or not and scenes with muted make-up, Cotillard is still breathless, and with bruises and black-eyes, Schoenaerts still a catch.

There's brief respites of the ethereal, especially when Ali takes Stephanie out in the ocean for the first time, and a gracious rapport between the actors, but their afflictions, as well as their emotions feel strangely aloof.  And as Rust & Bone edges on, the film becomes more improbable, reaching to an additional third act tragedy until it reaches an even more improbable glimpse of a happy ending.  Audiard's filmmaking is seductive, and alternately alluring and electric, but in the end there's precious little to linger on aside from the beauty of it's leading actors.  B 

Screen Actors Guild Nominations

Les Miserables nets SAG nominations for Ensemble, Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and Best Stunts!

ENSEMBLE CAST
Argo
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Les Miserables
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook 

ACTOR
Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
John Hawkes, The Sessions
Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables
Denzel Washington, Flight 

ACTRESS
Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
Marion Cotillard, Rust & Bone
Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
Helen Mirren, Hitchcock
Naomi Watts, The Impossible 

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Alan Arkin, Argo
Javier Bardem, Skyfall
Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln 

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Sally Field, Lincoln
Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
Helen Hunt, The Sessions
Nicole Kidman, The Paperboy
Maggie Smith, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

STUNT ENSEMBLE
The Amazing Spider-man
The Bourne Legacy
The Dark Knight Rises
Les Miserables
Skyfall

The biggest and most delightful surprise from the Screen Actors Guild comes in the form of recognizing the great performance of Nicole Kidman in the otherwise none so great The Paperboy.  While surely the sight and spectacle of the great actress and movie star to come to the ceremony might have been potential enough for the voting this singular creation, it still stands as a superior move on the part of actors appreciating great acting.  Kidman saunters and teases as a white trash tart in Lee Daniels' mess of a feature with such a confidence and stature and all consuming passion that there's little doubt with whom best of show honors rightfully belong to.  Alongside that, there was little surprises, aside from the Javier Bardem's inclusion for playing villain to James Bond in Skyfall and the prominence of this summer's octogenarian hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which netted Ensemble acting mentions alongside Supporting Actress Maggie Smith.  Joaquin Phoenix was shut out for The Master in a tough category, while Marion Cotillard, Naomi Watts and Helen Mirren skirted into the definitely in flux Best Actress category.  Whilst critical favorite Zero Dark Thirty just has Jessica Chastain to claim as nominee, and Django Unchained lies snubbed.  Thoughts?  How do you think they did?

London Film Festival Awards

BEST FILM AWARD
Rust & Bone- Jacques Audiard

GRIERSON AWARD FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God- Alex Gibney

SUTHERLAND AWARD FOR BEST FIRST FEATURE
Beasts of the Southern Wild- Benh Zeitlin

BEST BRITISH NEWCOMER
Sally El Hosaini, My Brother, The Devil

BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE FELLOWSHIP AWARD
Tim Burton, Helena Bonham Carter

Jacques Audiard won the top prize at the London Film Festival, the first filmmaker to win twice-- he won the top prize for 2009's A Prophet as well (this is only the fourth year the venerable film festival has given a top prize.)  His film, Rust & Bone, starring Marion Cotillard and Bullhead's Matthias Schoenarets debuted at Cannes earlier this year and is a gritty movie about the relationship between a Sea World-type whale trainer who is crippled from a tragic accident and a thug.  Sony Pictures Classics is mounting an Oscar campaign around Cotillard who will be honored at this years Gotham Awards.  Gibney is a documentarian vet in the Oscar running this year as well...he previously directed Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

Frankenweenie opened the fest.