Michael Keaton as "Riggan" and Edward Norton as "Mike" in BIRDMAN.Alison Rosa
If there were no Oscars, would the movie studios still cram so many of the year's best movies into the last three weeks? The usefulness of getting adult movies to fill theatres during the holidays and in the deep of winter may be commercial, but the practice has become as much a cultural as economic ritual. For many moviegoers, these are the few weeks of the movie year that excuse the rest of it.
One annoying aspect of the studios' promotional campaigns is that they tout movies that most audiences haven't seen – yet the movies are already being crowned as the critics' cream of the year's crop. There's a distortion in the system: Reviewers have the advantage of seeing advance screenings, previews that prove a fairly effective form of bribery, leading to occasional amnesia about the highly praised films that launched in the first 11 months of the year.
Thus the serious award contenders include three films that have yet to be released: Selma (opening Dec. 25) is a drama, starring English actor David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, about King's historic march in defence of voting rights; Unbroken (opening Dec. 25) is Angelina Jolie's chronicle of the life of former Olympic athlete and prisoner of war Louis Zamperini; and The Imitation Game, the drama with Benedict Cumberbatch playing code-breaker Alan Turing (it opens today). In yesterday's announcement of the Golden Globes nominations, The Imitation Game earned five nominations and Selma got four. (The Golden Globes ceremony, which will be broadcast on Jan. 11, serves as the industry's official starting gun for the awards season.)
That said, the leading film in critics' polls so far is a bit of an old story. The betting favourite for the Best Picture this year (running at 4-to-1 odds, as judged by 26 media "experts" at the awards-prediction site Gold Derby) is a film released in July, back in the heart of the summer blockbuster season. That's Richard Linklater's Boyhood, a drama that begins in 2002 and finishes in 2013. The film has won the top prize with critics groups in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Boston, and was picked as film of the year by 112 critics in Sight and Sound magazine.
Boyhood, an outlier in many ways, has the distinction of holding a 100-per-cent rating on the aggregate review site Metacritic and 99-per-cent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, in spite of one Las Vegas critic, who said she thought lettuce-picking was more interesting. Contrary to what the man with the chocolate-voiced baritone voice keeps telling you in the movie previews, the critics don't always agree. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association also offered a strong endorsement to another film from early in the year, Wes Anderson's eccentric Second World War comedy-drama The Grand Budapest Hotel (released on March 7), which was runner-up in L.A. to Boyhood in the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Editing categories, and won for best screenplay and best production design.
So is Budapest Hotel the film to beat? Maybe – Time magazine picked it as the year's No. 1 film ahead of Boyhood – but the "expert panel" at Gold Derby didn't even list it in the top 10. As of Dec. 11, the panel's ranking had Boyhood on top, followed by Selma, Birdman, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Unbroken, Whiplash, Gone Girl, Foxcatcher and Interstellar.
What's striking in the Gold Derby list is the intensity of the support for Selma, which earned top-picture votes from five of the 26 experts. The movie, directed by Ava DuVernay, is a timely tale of racial inequality that has some serious Hollywood weight behind it (Brad Pitt and Oprah Winfrey are producers). If topicality influences the Academy voters, another film squarely in the sights of American self-examination is Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, a biographical film starring Bradley Cooper as U.S. Navy Seal Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in American military history, in a film that looks at the personal cost of his public life.
Just to keep things confusing, another outside contender is A Most Violent Year, a 1981 New York-set drama about making it in America from J.C. Chandor (All Is Lost). The National Board of Review picked A Most Violent Year as the best movie of 2014, and its stars Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain as best actor and actress.
In the weeks leading to the Oscars on Feb. 22, and especially after the Oscar nominations are announced on Jan. 15, expect the critics to form more of a robust consensus. There's also a strong possibility that even the 99-per-cent fresh, low-budget Boyhood won't be quite as warmly embraced by the voting members of the movie industry. In any case, it's a good time of year for making lists, and for keeping amused between the entertainments on the big screens.