Summer review round-up: the good, the bad and the ugly

Summer review round-up: the good, the bad and the ugly

Mar 01

Way back in the beginning of December, in our first week of existence, I posted a list of the five most anticipated films of the summer. Now that it is officially autumn (even if the weather obstinately refuses to accept this incontravertible truth), it’s the perfect time to look back over the past three months and put the summer releases in perspective. There were a few surprises, some hits and some misses, and more than the usual number of disappointments.

First of all I’ll deal with the aforelinked list. Here movies I was looking forward to the most:

Sherlock Holmes: 83/100

Holmes turned out to be better than expected. Downey, Jr’s ludic performance combined with Guy Ritchie’s gritty direction made for a fun, fresh and interesting reboot of the old super-sleuth franchise.

The Lovely Bones: 18/100

Peter Jackson’s saggy, bloated, boring fantasy was mired in CGI quicksand, lacked any engaging characters, and failed to entertain for its lengthy 150-minute running time. Here’s hoping that Tintin doesn’t also suck.

Shutter Island: 27/100

Martin Scorsese manages to achieve the impossible and make a terrible film out of an interesting premise. The cast is great, the locations are fun, and the direction is snappy and engaging– but the plot is none of these, hamstringing the film beyond any reasonable semblance of entertainment.

Avatar: 48/100

Eye-popping visual effects can’t help a mind-bogglingly asinine story, nor can competent action scenes undo hours of misanthropic preachery. The movie is too long by half, a bit too silly for its own good, and far too blue. Oh, and it failed to sell the premise of 3D, too.

It’s Complicated: 52/100

It’s Complicated was indeed on my list of summer movies, but it was filed under “Top 5 summer movies that will almost certainly suck.” Irony kicked down the door, waltzed into the room and force-fed us all humble pie when the Meryl Streep / Steve Martin / Alec Baldwin rom-com got a better score than nearly all of the movies that were supposed to be good. Oh dear. Sure, 52/100 is nothing to be proud of, but I’d rather watch a mediocre movie than a downright awful one. 

The Hurt Locker: 80/100

If The Hurt Locker had had a solid release date at the time of writing, it surely would have made an appearance in the above article. As it stands, Hurt Locker is in my mind the best of the season, by a long way. I only caught it last night, but even on the last day of summer it’s still summer, so it counts. Contrary to Captain Howdy’s review of the flick, I didn’t find the script overly American in its discussion of warfare and the nature of humanity in the (typical of us) throes of violence and destruction; to me it was just a movie that pursues that most noble of enterprises in attempting to grapple that slippery thing somewhere in our skulls that apparently accounts for our bizarre cultural identity and unpredictable and oftentimes silly behaviour. The Hurt Locker was a wrenching, personal discussion of who we are framed with some of the most brutal, white-knuckle rollercoaster action scenes I’ve ever endured in a cinema, and for that it gets top nod from me: I’d give it 93/100, putting it right at the top of the two-dozen-odd movies of the past three months. If The Hurt Locker doesn’t win every single award at the Oscars, I will cry for days.

As you can see, I was wrong on nearly every count. This goes to show just how treacherous and misleading film advertising and critical hype can be, not to mention how terrible my skills at predetermination must be, but bear in mind that The Lovely Bones, Shutter Island, and Avatar should have been good — great directors were in charge of all three, and early trailers were promising – but they faltered on the home stretch and flopped lifeless and dull into cinemas.

Now that we’ve got the article recap out of the way, here’s a rundown of the films of the season, from worst to best (or at least the ones we managed to review):

New Moon: 01/100

Paranormal Activity: 12/100

The Lovely Bones: 18/100

Shutter Island: 27/100

Up In The Air: 28/100

The Wolf Man: 37/100

From Paris With Love: 39/100

Where The Wild Things Are: 46/100

Avatar: 48/100

Julie & Julia: (average)

It’s Complicated: 52/100

Bran Nue Dae: 55/100

2012: 62/100

The Road: 63/100

The Princess And The Frog: 70/100

Zombieland: 78/100

The Hurt Locker: 80/100

Sherlock Holmes: 83/100

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs: 84/100

Of course this list doesn’t include all of the other many, varied reviews we’ve been ransacking our DVD collections to write, or the hefty number of news article’s we’ve produced over the weeks.

So, three months in, how is our driving? We are vaguely aware of a regular audience of sorts that pops up to check out our posts, and we would very much like to hear from you. Do you enjoy current reviews, do you like chuckling at the hilarious witticisms we scribe while revealing new trailers or posters, or do you prefer the random old movies we dredge out to give a reel good inspection? Any and all feedback is appreciated, even if it boils down to “you are an idiot” or “my crippled blind dog with alzheimer’s can write better reviews than you.” As much as we love the sound of our own voices, we love the sound of our own voices yelling back at people in heated argument even better, so let fly your opinions and comments! What were your favourite movies of the past three months, summer or winter, depending on where you live? Were you disappointed by something you were sure would be awesome, or pleasantly surprised by something you thought would be awful? Let us know!

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE review: return to sender

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE review: return to sender

Feb 20

From Paris With Love reeks of squandered potential. Charlie Wax could have been an iconic, entertaining character in his own right, and John Travolta’s performance is desperately trying to push the character in the direction of success, but something about the film’s script and direction really drags the otherwise entertaining character into the inescapable realm of mediocrity. How does this happen, one wonders?

Well, the first problem is with Jonathon Rhys Meyers’ character, Reece. Reece is fundamentally boring to us, routine and safe, and he’s unfortunately burdened with the responsibility of being the film’s protagonist. Rhys Meyers himself is an odd choice for the role of wannabe super-spy, and his vaguely European features only serve to confuse the fact that he’s a yank working for the US government in France — he looks a great deal more French than most of the French people we meet in the movie, and this might be a bit bemusing for some viewers. The first twenty-ish minutes are spent with Reece alone, whose job is the spy equivalent of “shit-kicker:” we follow him on a couple of boring assignments, and then follow him home for an extended couple of scenes forcibly and at great length showing us his romance with local lady Caroline (Kasia Smutniak). We spend so long with this girlfriend, in fact, that alarm bells start ringing in our heads — why is the film bothering to spend so long establishing a fairly routine relationship like this? Oh. I get it. Don’t you hate it when films lazily spoil themselves early on in the narrative?

Another problem is the script’s awkward pacing and situations. Scenes introduce a sense of urgency — I have to go now, honey — and then drag on for another couple of the minutes while the protagonist slowly gets his shit together, says a few protracted goodbyes, and then finally leaves. Important plot information is dumped in moving cars while the heroes are chasing down bad-guys, throwing conventional pacing under the train and potentially de-railing it. Violence comes and goes without warning or reflection, just sort of flashing itself about in a routine way as if to say “no really, this is an action movie, for real.” And once Travolta’s Wax character is introduced, Reece takes a back seat and becomes even more boring than he was when he was switching license plates and planting bugs in offices, confusing the audience’s perception of just who the hell the main character’s supposed to be.

The movie goes to great lengths to avoid the romantic portrayal of its eponymous city (the Eiffel Tower is only seen twice!), showing us instead the slums and backstreets and Chinese restaurants and freeways and terrorist cells — wait, what? — that usually go ignored in films focusing on the classic town. An eyebrow-raising decision by the screenwriters sees all the bad-guys in the film rotate between various ethnic minorities. Wax kills a lot of guys during the course of the film (remorselessly, and without giving any reason), but none of them is white. First it’s Chinese drug-dealers, then Chinese street-gangs, then some more drug-dealers, and then some vaguely Middle-Eastern people who are apparently planning to blow something up somewhere at some point (see next paragraph); Wax ruthlessly guns them down and, because he’s introduced as a racist character, he does so without mercy. This might amuse some people, but I found it a little cringe-worthy; for a movie with the words “Paris” and “love” in the title, From Paris In Love is a visually- and ethically-ugly portrayal of the city, which is a tricky artistic decision to justify.

Now to the plot. I have no idea what happens in this movie, because the crucial information necessary to comprehension are withheld from the audience in a cheeky scene in which Reece is too chemically-inebriated to understand what Wax is telling him. Wax is talking through some pretty important stuff here, justifying their mission and explaining the stakes and goals and threat at hand, but poor Reece is too high to catch a word of what Wax says, and the audience, watching through Reece’s eyes, is similar deprived of this information. At first, the audience reacts with a short ”ha ha,” but it quickly turns into “but seriously, though, tell me what’s going on.” The script never deigns to let us mere mortals in on the grand design, and so the climax is hamstrung of any tension or stakes. We don’t know why the bad guys are doing what they’re doing, or why they’ve chosen these particular targets to attack, or even who the bad guys are working for. We don’t know what motivates the traitor (whose betrayal you can predict within 10 minutes of the film’s opening) to don a suicide-bomber’s jacket and attack a small group of low-level governmental delegates — there is the hint of a romance with a jihadist creep, and some implied connections to the Middle-Eastern folk Wax relentlessly kills for about half an hour, but this lack of concrete motivation really hurts the film’s momentum and emotional impact.

The film is also hard to follow geographically. At one point the two heroes split up to pursue separate targets, and they seem to be down the road from each other, but Wax is hooning down a freeway somewhere in the middle of the countryside while Reece appears to be in the heart of Paris. The highway chase scene is easily the best action scene in the movie, but there’s a constant scratching sound coming from the back of your skull wondering where the hell anyone is any more. This failure to set up geography also pervades some of the interior action scenes, especially in the wildly-disorienting early shootout in a Chinese restaurant and then the subsequent mannequin warehouse bloodbath. The good guys and the bad guys are all wearing black and leather, with various styles of facial hair and black weaponry, and the action’s all cut to pieces, resulting in a barely-comprehensible montage of gunshots and stuntmen falling over. On at least three separate occasions in the mannequin shootout I thought Reece had been shot, only to see him standing miraculously unharmed in the corner of the room at the end of the scene — would it kill you to throw some lights up and shave your extras? Later shootouts and chase scenes remedy this somewhat, but it’s a bad way to introduce us to the violence of the world.

Once again the film has undergone a slight desaturation in post-production. It’s not as bad as in some recent movies, but the slightly-off flesh tones and washed-out blacks really kill the filmic aesthetic they have going on — why not shoot on digital, if you’re just going to wash the colour out anyway? This jars even more after watching Shutter Island, which has rich, natural colours that are way more fun to watch than this greyish stuff. The cinematography is a little uninspired as well, going for fairly stock-standard coverage rather than the kind of arty thing you could’ve gotten away with in a film about the City of Love. At least the music is occasionally jazzy and classical, even if it is kind of perfunctory in a movie about explosions and ear-popping gunshots.

Easily the best thing about the film is Charlie Wax, as played by John Travolta. Every now and then, when Wax says a line that doesn’t quite get a laugh, or when a scene doesn’t quite feel right, you get the impression that poor old Travolta genuinely gets Wax and is pushing the character as best he can, with or without the help of director Pierre Morel. Wax gets all the funny lines the script can muster, and there are some unique and amusing action set-pieces for Wax to overcome. I’ve never seen a guy burn a man’s face with the sizzling barrel of his gun, and I’ve never seen cocaine pour through bulletholes in the roof before, so it’s fun to see original moments like this even if they’re not shot or cut or written all that well. Like I said above, the highway chase scene is the best of the film; it’s the only point in the whole 90-minute movie that you feel an inkling of tension or excitement. That’s the other thing worth praising about the film — it knows it’s obnoxious and shallow, so it doesn’t overstay its welcome. 92 minutes is lean, clean and brisk, and should be the required target length of all non-triple A Hollywood directors.

Overall, the script should have undergone a few more drafts, shuffling the main characters and central plot so that they make at least a modicum of sense, and allocating each character a bit more to chew on in terms of motivation and dimensionality. The action ideas here are good, fresh, and entertaining, but they’re squandered with lousy shots and hyperactive editing. The dialogue and direction are nearly always off the beat, so a little more script polish and rehearsal time would have gone a long way. The ethnic minorites should be swapped out for US special forces or something, someone worth shooting besides petty thugs and gangs; something more morally comprehensible, if not morally sound. But most importantly, Reece should be the upstart new character introduced in the second act, not the dopey, useless character in charge of our narrative; this should be Charlie Wax’s movie, and nobody else’s. Wax is an absolute hoot, and he should be running the show, calling the shots, meeting the challenges and smashing through them with his perfectly-shaved noggin, not showing up to fix Reece’s mundane problems. It’s hard to begrudge From Paris With Love‘s old-school action sensibility and politically-incorrect sense of humour, but it’s also hard to accept or overcome the film’s myriad technical problems, ultimately landing the flick square in that most unpopular category of entertainment smugly labelled “mediocre.”

From Paris With Love score

39/100

SHUTTER ISLAND review: let me off the island

SHUTTER ISLAND review: let me off the island

Feb 19

Shutter Island is a strange movie, but not in the way it intends to be: it’s strange because it’s bad. Martin Scorsese isn’t the critical and commercial king he is today because he makes movies that suck. But he’s managed the impossible here — he’s made a bad film. ”But the trailer is awesome,” you say, tears running down your trembling face in denial. Well, the trailer is not only violently spoilerific, it’s a tad misleading. For example, if you’re expecting, as implied in the trailer, an unpredictable, thrilling, mind-bending journey into the realm between sanity and bat-shit banananess, you’re going to be sorely let down. If, perhaps, you’re expecting a tightly-wound detective story wrapped around crazy criminal antics, you’re also going to be severely disappointed by the film’s total failure to be in any way ‘tight’ or compelling. And if you’re expecting brutal scenes of gut-wrenching violence or moral ambiguity, you’re going to snooze your way through this film from start to finish. I guess if you’ve never seen a single movie before in your entire life, Shutter Island might blow your mind, but that’s praise as faint as it comes.

The plot is, as I said, laid bare, bald and naked in the trailer. Leonardo DiCaprio plays  federal marshal (precisely what marshalling do these folk do — do they marshal herds of sheep, or armies, or justice, or what?) Ted Daniels, who is sent to investigate a mysterious patient breakout at an obviously-dodgy mental asylum situated somewhere in the stormy waters off Boston. All is not as it seems (surprise!), Ted might be crazier than he thought (no way!), there appears to be some federal-level conspiracy going on (really?), and worst of all, the asylum seems to be dredging up some of Ted’s disturbing memories of World War 2 (hmm). The trailer promises a twist, and if you’ve ever seen something like Fight Club or The Sixth Sense or even Hide And Seek you’ll smell the twist coming a mile away and be hideously disappointed when the curiously anticlimactic “revelation” scene rolls by with little to no fanfare. You’re probably thinking “aha! But Scorsese is a genius, he’ll take the twist and put a double-twist on it!” Well you’re wrong again, chump, and I wish you’d stop assuming things about movies you’ve obviously never seen. Let me take over.

The film starts off on a boat. Right off the bat Scorsese appears to be trying to make the audience feel ill at ease by making nearly every single cut in the scene noticeable. They’re all jarring, and ostensibly deliberately so. People standing in slightly different places, facing different angles when you cut from the wide to the close — it’s so frequent and sloppy that it couldn’t have happened by accident on a Scorsese set. So we’re left with the uneasy conclusion that he wants to jar us, to make us irritated and aware of the stitched-together nature of film. There are so many other ways to make an audience uneasy, to nudge and cajole and disturb them through canted angles, sinister performances, mismatched colours — anything – but to violate one of the most important, basic functions of films is super annoying. Well, it was annoying to this humble cinephile, and it doesn’t let up after the opening scene.

Needless to say, the cinematography and music are gorgeous. Scorsese’s eyes and ears appear to be functioning quite well despite the apparent failure of his common sense and drive of purpose. The island, once we get to it, is suitably brooding and sinister and violent in its own way. The score is borderline irritating, but manages to ride that thin line between mysterious, ominous, and ridiculous. Performances are all fundamentally fine as well; Ben Kingsley in particularly is a treat as Shutter Island’s head psychologist. He’s restrained, polite and remarkably charismatic in the role, and brings a sense of nobility and dignity to the potentially silly proceedings.

And silly the proceedings are. You get the distinct impression that everything in the first hour of the film is just one big red herring, and then you find out everything in the second hour is also nothing but a red herring (by which time you’re both annoyed and bored), and then the last ten-minute segment turns around, wiping a tear of laughter from its eye, and cries “you idiot, the first two hours were for nothing! Ha ha, oh wow, you are stupid for believing any of that.” I don’t understand how screenwriters still get a kick out of destroying every single scene they’ve meticulously built over the past two hours by throwing in bullshit revelations like “and then he woke up — it was all a dream!” or “and then John realised he was the demons” or “it turns out this primary character is just a figment of the protagonist’s imagination.” When a story betrays you like that, it sucks. And you know Shutter Island is probably going to do this from the outset, but you find yourself hoping the whole time that those last ten minutes will lead to another ten-minute segment where the twist gets re-twisted, or un-twisted, or somehow broken and bent in an unpredictable manner. Alas, Shutter Island ends exactly where you’d expect it to, and doesn’t provide any original or stimulating food for thought.

Another peculiar aspect of the film is how self-contained it is. It doesn’t speak to the times (the 1950s setting is seemingly arbitrary beyond aesthetic and technological expedience), it doesn’t tackle big, compelling themes (flashbacks that deal with the holocaust are somehow out of place and dull — how can you possibly fail to make the holocaust compelling?), and manages to make the most horrific crimes seem mundane and trivial (the drowning of children by a deluded wife appears to have been inspired by the real-life case of Andrea Yates — the wikipedia article on the actual murders is more compelling than the entire two hours of Shutter Island). The plot is pedestrian and the narrative muddled, but having something bigger to latch onto could have helped an audience through the lapses in coherence or fun, but we get no such breath of fresh air.

When I say the narrative is “muddled,” it’s deliberately so, ping-ponging back and forth between Ted’s investigation and some wacky dreams he gets on a disturbingly regular basis. The dreams are important and symbolically interesting, but they kind of kill the pace of the investigation plot. They’re vital come the “revelation” scene at the end, but before you know precisely what’s going on they’re just pretty and a tad boring.

Shutter Island is a strange, odd beast, simultaneously familiar and hard to come to terms with. The least predictable thing about it is that it is 100% predictable from start to finish. There are no flashes of wit or scenes of tension or portrayals of madness — just a lumbering, second-gear plot that takes its time on the long, bumpy road to nowhere. I find it hard to recommend to anyone besides hardcore DiCaprio or Scorsese fans, who will see it anyway “just because.” But the most mysterious thing about the whole affair is how such an esteemed, talented and experienced director as Martin Scorsese could drop the ball in such a spectacularly dull fashion, but that seems to be something of a trend lately. First Spielberg with Indiana Jones 4, then Peter Jackson with The Lovely Bones, and James Cameron with Avatar – add Shutter Island to the fast-growing list of duds spun out by otherwise brilliant men.

Shutter Island score

27/100

The Super Bowl movie TV spots of 2010

The Super Bowl movie TV spots of 2010

Feb 10

For an American-only event, the worldwide reception of the NFL Super Bowl, now in its 44th year, is remarkably impressive. This is thanks to the attention it receives reaching far beyond the game itself and into the spectacle that surrounds it, particularly the half-time entertainment and the lucrative advertising opportunities. If you have a few million sitting around and you have a product you want to push, the SuperBowl is a sure-fire way to guarantee millions of people are tuning in to see it. The event has a reputation for launching landmark advertisiments and the product campaigns they pushed.

Who has millions of dollars ready and waiting in advertising budgets? Hollywood studios. The Super Bowl is a great time for movie buffs to enjoy an onslaught of (usually) kickass trailers promoting films that will be coming out during the course of the year as Hollywood studios pounce on the guaranteed audience. Big players who had their films flashed before television audiences this year included Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Others included The Wolfman, The Crazies, Brookly’s Finest, The Back-up Plan and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

Notable popcorn blockbusters missing from the commercial onslaught included Iron Man 2 and Clash of the Titans. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see other upcoming flicks like Kick-Ass or The A-Team crop up during the game, but it wasn’t to be. I guess at over $2million for a 30 second grab, it’s understandable.

Anyway, for your pleasure (and in case you missed any during the week), here are the TV spots that aired during the Super Bowl in 2010. The New Orleans Saints won, by the way…

Shutter Island

The Last Airbender

Robin Hood

Alice in Wonderland

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

The Wolfman

The Crazies

Brooklyn’s Finest

The Back-up Plan

Keeping the 2010 Golden Globes in perspective

Keeping the 2010 Golden Globes in perspective

Jan 18

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that James Cameron and his 3D epic fantasy adventure film Avatar (or, as Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounced it, ‘Avada’) won some big ones at the Golden Globes this year. Given the worldwide box office and general-audience reaction to Avatar being so jaw-droppingly mammoth, it was to be expected. But I still had a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe it could miss out to other deserving films like Inglourious Basterds or The Hurt Locker… but no. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association felt it right to award the film currently sitting #2 on the worldwide all-time box office earnings list. Where’s their sense of dare?

To keep things in perspective, I watched the Golden Globes show from my laptop, sitting at my kitchen table, using breaks in the ceremony (or boring speeches) to feed my two youngsters, change nappies and check the cricket score on the telly. Nothing aligns the planets in your mind quicker than listening to Meryl Streep getting weepy about how much she appreciates life and everything she’s got while I stand and observe holding a shitty nappy in one hand and a half-eaten soggy banana sandwich in the other. Fittingly, Meryl won for her squeaky performance in Julie & Julia, which I reviewed last month.

The show itself was more of the same– just swap out the different handfuls of celebrities, films and television shows and you’ve got the same thing as every other year. From the poor teleprompter jokes to awkward cutaways of (usually) intoxicated celebrities, I found host Ricky Gervais to be a breath of fresh air against the otherwise predictable template. Even the Cecil B. DeMille Award to legendary director Martin Scorsese became strangely violated with sexual innuendo from presenter Robert DeNiro (who was joined by Leonardo DiCaprio). The featurette that played in honour of his films eventually morphed into a trailer for his upcoming film Shutter Island, which was perplexing given the circumstances. Still, it’s always nice to see a wonderful filmmaker being recognised for their talent, and even nicer when the recipient can deliver one of the most coherent thank you speeches of the night.

Besides Ricky Gervais making the show worthwhile, I was very impressed to see Christoph Waltz win Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for his role as The Jew Hunter in Inglourious Basterds (my favourite of 2009). Waltz completely steals that film and makes it his own in one of the most memorable performances in recent times. His speech was gracious and precise. I only wish Tarantino could have won Best Director or Best Screenplay. Not to be. Best Screenplay went to Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner for Up In The Air, and Best Director went to some guy who made Avada…

It was also nice to see ‘The Dude’ Jeff Bridges win for his lead role in Crazy Heart, a film I highly anticipate seeing this year. Robert Downey Jr. picked up a Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for his role as Sherlock Holmes (recently reviewed by Froley) and proceeded to deliver a change-of-pace speech where he refused to thank his collaborators, cleverly listing the people he refused to thank and thus actually thanking them… I look forward to him taking on more serious roles again sometime soon (please?).

Fellow Aussie Toni Collette received a Globe for her role as Tara in the television comedy United States of Tara, which was fantastic to see even though I was personally rooting for Tina Fey to win for 30 Rock.

My kids finally took a nap in time to enjoy the last few awards of the ceremony.  I thought the show was complete when Kate Winslet took my breath away as she presented the Best Actor award (she could have just stood there and twiddled her thumbs and I would have been impressed — that woman is flat out gorgeous and talented). Then Ricky Gervais wise-cracked that he “likes a drink as much as the next man, unless the next man is Mel Gibson” when he introduced the Aussie to present Best Director, and I figured that would definitely complete the show for me… and then Cameron won for directing Avatar… followed by Avatar winning Best Picture.

And the show went kaput. I’m still baffled.

Is Avatar‘s dominance at the Golden Globes a sign of things to come at the upcoming Oscars? I’m hoping the Academy gets it a little more accurate and looks past the visual effects and box office to recognise some real artistic integrity in other films this year.

Deep down inside, just quietly, I already know the truth.

Here’s a complete list of all the nominees and winners of the 67th Golden Globe Awards (2010):

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE

• Mo’Nique, Precious
• Penélope Cruz, Nine
• Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
• Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
• Julianne Moore, A Single Man

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A TELEVISION SERIES, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

• Toni Collette, United States of Tara
• Courteney Cox, Cougar Town
• Edie Falco, Nurse Jackie
• Tina Fey, 30 Rock
• Lea Michele, Glee

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A SERIES, MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

• John Lithgow, Dexter
• Michael Emerson, Lost
• Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother
• William Hurt, Damages
• Jeremy Piven, Entourage

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

• Up
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
• Coraline
• Fantastic Mr. Fox
• The Princess and the Frog

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A TELEVISION SERIES, DRAMA

• Michael C. Hall, Dexter
• Simon Baker, The Mentalist
• Jon Hamm, Mad Men
• Hugh Laurie, House
• Bill Paxton, Big Love

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A TELEVISION SERIES, DRAMA

• Glenn Close, Damages
• January Jones, Mad Men
• Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife
• Anna Paquin, True Blood
• Kyra Sedgwick, The Closer

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

• “The Weary Kind,” Music & Lyrics by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett (Crazy Heart)
• “Cinema Italiano,” Music & Lyrics by Maury Yeston (Nine)
• “I Want to Come Home,” Music & Lyrics by Paul McCartney (Everybody’s Fine)
• “I Will See You,” Music by James Horner, Simon Franglen; Lyrics by James Horner, Simon Franglen and Kuk Harrell (Avatar)
• “Winter,” Music by U2; Lyrics by Bono (Brothers)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

• Michael Giacchino, Up
• Marvin Hamlisch, The Informant!
• James Horner, Avatar
• Abel Korzeniowski, A Single Man
• Karen O and Carter Burwell, Where the Wild Things Are

BEST MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

• Grey Gardens
• Georgia O’Keefe
• Into the Storm
• Little Dorrit
• Taking Chance

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

• Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia
• Sandra Bullock, The Proposal
• Marion Cotillard, Nine
• Julia Roberts, Duplicity
• Meryl Streep, It’s Complicated

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

• Kevin Bacon, Taking Chance
• Kenneth Branagh, Wallander: One Step Behind
• Chiewetel Ejiofor, Endgame
• Brendan Gleeson, Into the Storm
• Jeremy Irons, Georgia O’Keefe

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

• Drew Barrymore, Grey Gardens
• Joan Allen, Georgia O’Keefe
• Jessica Lange, Grey Gardens
• Anna Paquin, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler
• Sigourney Weaver, Prayers for Bobby

BEST SCREENPLAY

• Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air
• Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, District 9
• Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker
• Nancy Meyers, It’s Complicated
• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

• The White Ribbon (Germany)
• Baaria (Italy)
• Broken Embraces (Spain)
• The Maid (Chile)
• A Prophet (France)

BEST TELEVISION SERIES, DRAMA

• Mad Men
• Big Love
• Dexter
• House
• True Blood

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A TELEVISION SERIES, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

• Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
• Steve Carell, The Office
• David Duchovny, Californication
• Thomas Jane, Hung
• Matthew Morrison, Glee

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A SERIES, MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION

• Chloë Sevigny, Big Love
• Jane Adams, Hung
• Rose Byrne, Damages
• Jane Lynch, Glee
• Janet McTeer, Into the Storm

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE

• Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
• Matt Damon, Invictus
• Woody Harrelson, The Messenger
• Christopher Plummer, The Last Station
• Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones

BEST DIRECTOR

• James Cameron, Avatar
• Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
• Clint Eastwood, Invictus
• Jason Reitman, Up in the Air
• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

BEST TELEVISION SERIES, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

• Glee
• 30 Rock
• Entourage
• Modern Family
• The Office

BEST MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

• The Hangover
• (500) Days of Summer
• It’s Complicated
• Julie & Julia
• Nine

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

• Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
• Emily Blunt, The Young Victoria
• Helen Mirren, The Last Station
• Carey Mulligan, An Education
• Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, COMEDY OR MUSICAL

• Robert Downey Jr., Sherlock Holmes
• Matt Damon, The Informant!
• Daniel Day-Lewis, Nine
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt, (500) Days of Summer
• Michael Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

• Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
• George Clooney, Up in the Air
• Colin Firth, A Single Man
• Morgan Freeman, Invictus
• Tobey Maguire, Brothers

BEST MOTION PICTURE, DRAMA

• Avatar
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds
• Precious
• Up in the Air