Phantom Thread - 6 nominations

Best Picture, JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson, Megan Ellison and Daniel Lupi

Actor in a Leading Role, Daniel Day-Lewis

Actress in a Supporting Role, Lesley Manville

Costume Design, Mark Bridges

Directing, Paul Thomas Anderson

Music (Original Score), Jonny Greenwood

Famous and successful fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock is a unique character.  His world is highly ordered for him, and his sister Cyril sees to it that nothing in his life disturbs him.  If his breakfast has one moment of strain, he is unable to put himself right for the rest of the day.  He is the ultimate in fussy.  Even when breaking up with a girlfriend, his sister takes care of notifying the young woman in question.  Woodcock meets and quickly takes up with a young waitress, Alma, who knows her own mind and though she adores him, she refuses to give up her will and subjugate herself to him completely.  Mind you, she puts up with a lot, but doesn't do so quietly.

Without giving away any spoilers, Phantom Thread was a very good film but took a weird turn three-quarters of the way through.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, Paul Thomas Anderson's unique directing lens is hit and miss for me. I loved Boogie Nights and hated The Master.  Of course the costume design is superb, and the original score is a true standout - I don't know yet if it's a contender for the big prize, but if it wins, it will have deserved it.  I couldn't stop commenting on how truly beautiful the score was.  Daniel Day-Lewis is remarkable as always, but Lesley Manville's performance stood out.  I can't claim to be familiar with all of her work, but I feel confident saying this is likely her best performance to date.

Overall, I do recommend the film, and the pacing is much faster and much more engaging than I was expecting from the previews.  Well done.

Beauty and the Beast - 2 nominations

Costume Design, Jacqueline Durran
Production Design, Sarah Greenwood (Production Design); Katie Spencer (Set Decoration)

Belle is a young, bright, creative, bookish woman who dreams of more than her provincial life in France with a community who just doesn't get her.  Meanwhile, Belle's father is captured by a beastly prince, and she goes to the castle to trade her life for her father's.  While at the castle, she discovers that the prince and all of his attendants have been transformed, he into a beast that no one could love, and they into objects like wardrobes and candlesticks and teapots.  (Disney has never explained why the people who work for the Prince must also be punished by the evil witch, as if they had any agency over themselves and their loyalties to the Prince, but I digress.)

This film is a very good adaptation from animation to live action.  The costumes and the production design are both very worthy of nomination, and one has to give Jacqueline Durran a huge tip of the hat for having been nominated for Costume Design in both this film and The Darkest Hour - she has two of the five nominations in this category this year. I tried to find out how many times this has happened before - for the acting categories, there have been 11 actors/actresses who were nominated in two different categories but never in the same category for two different films (i.e., Best Actress in a Leading Role for one film, and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for another film, to see the full list, click http://bit.ly/1RfnGcB).  On a hunch, I looked up John Williams and he has 5 years in which two of his Original Scores for different movies were nominated against each other.  In 1927, William Cameron Menzies was nominated for Production Design for two different films and in this category, it has happened a couple of times (mostly from what I can tell because there were like 10 guys doing all the production design for all the movies!). Suffice it to say, this isn't something that happens a lot and serious kudos to Durran.  (And would someone please get me out of this rabbit hole????  I could research this all day, and if I didn't have so many Oscars movies to see, I would!)

I'm always fascinated when film makers cast a fantastic actor with a decent voice (Emma Watson) for a musical, instead of a fantastic actor with a fantastic voice (Luke Evans, Josh Gad).  The thing that Emma Watson does accomplish is capturing the smart, strong, independent woman that is Belle, perhaps because we see time and time again that this captures who Emma Watson is in real life.

I think it's easy to enjoy this film when you don't overthink the plot too much.  We know that Gaston is the bad guy because he is only interested in Belle for her looks, but we also know that the happy ending doesn't exist for the Beast until he is good looking again.  There are a lot of these little justice problems that are easy to identify, but let's give Disney a "good on ya" for trying to make a film about a smart woman instead of just a pretty one.

Documentary Shorts - 5 nominees

Edith + Eddie, Laura Checkoway and Thomas Lee Wright
Edith and Eddie are newlyweds who got married at the ages of 95 and 96.  Their love story is adorable but their lives are interrupted by Edith's daughters who have fought over conservatorship of her.  The court assigns a legal guardian who never comes to meet Edith, but takes the daughter's side who wants to move Edith to Florida and she wants to sell Edith's home, all of which are against her own wishes.  She wants to stay with her husband Eddie, but the legal guardian who knows very little about her life has the power to make all of Edith's decisions.  Ultimately, this film is a love story with a very troubling (and brief) examination of elder rights in America.

Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405, Frank Stiefel

This is the compelling story of artist Mindy Alper, an examination of her troubled childhood with an emotionally abusive father and a distant mother, and how she has used her incredible art to deal with her emotions.  Mindy has been through a lot including a bucket full of medications and electroshock therapy, so it's occasionally difficult to understand her speech, but her deep humility and character shine through.  Ultimately, her work is the star of the film, as are the community of kind friends, teachers, and therapists who she has made into family.

Heroin(e), Elaine McMillion Sheldon and Kerrin Sheldon

This short film focuses in on Huntington, West Virginia, colloquially known as the overdose capitol of the United States.  The film follows three incredible women, all doing their best to make a difference, show compassion, and change the way that we view drug addition.  They are the first female fire station chief in the entire state of West Virginia, a drug court judge, and the head of "Brown Bag Ministry" who drives around once a week at night finding addicts and prostitutes, offers them meals and love, and assistance in getting into drug rehabilitation centers and even just places for them to sleep safely at night.  These three women never give up on people, even when they are saving addicts for the 50th time, sentencing them to prison, or just checking in to make sure they are alive and staying clean.  There are equal parts joy and despair in this film - we meet a former addict who was saved by the fire chief over 50 times and who is totally clean now, and, just as the ceremony honoring the former addicts graduating from drug court, the alarm goes off again with another overdose in town.  This film captures the devastating opioid crisis in America so effectively and it is available on Netflix.

Knife Skills, Thomas Lennon

Another short film available on Netflix (Netflix is killing it this year!), Knife Skills is an incredible movie about a restaurant in Ohio that aspires to be the best traditional French restaurant in America.  As if that is not a high enough goal, the restaurant is almost solely staffed by former convicts who must learn skills in 6 weeks to make the place a success.  The only people in the restaurant who are not former convicts are the head chef (a real French chef) and his sous chef.  Even the owner and proprietor of the restaurant is a former convict himself, and he is deeply committed to breaking the prison cycle for these trainees.  They learn to be chefs, to run the front of the house, to be bartenders and sommeliers, he even trains one of the staff members to be a fromager (cheese expert).  Not everyone graduates from the program, some people get back into trouble, some people haven't yet learned how to work with a boss, but those who do graduate are changed forever.  It's an incredibly powerful film.

Traffic Stop, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner

Traffic Stop was the hardest of the 5 nominees to watch.  A young African American woman with a masters degree who is an incredible elementary school teacher is pulled over for speeding.  Just over 100 pounds soaking wet, the camera footage captures how a police officer pulls her from the car and after an uncomfortable conversation, slams her into the ground, abuses her, and loses his mind because she is a little bit slow to follow his instructions.  Her story is so much more than the abuses she suffered.  It's easy to look at a moment by moment and say, "well, she was disrespectful" or "she didn't follow instructions fast enough," but we must be reminded too that as a young black woman, rightly or wrongly, she also was terrified of being the next victim of police abuse in America.  There is little question that the police officer started off in the right, but his escalation of the situation is mind boggling to watch and the epitome of poor training and abuse of power, and if you're not a little bit outraged, then you are perhaps not paying attention to what's happening in our world.  This woman is no thug (not that a "thug" would have deserved her treatment either), she is the epitome of the American dream having lifted herself up by the bootstraps, so why did the situation escalate so quickly?  It's a tough subject, but unbelievably important.

Blade Runner 2049 - 5 nominations

Cinematography, Roger A. Deakins

Production Design, Dennis Gassner (Production Design); Alessandra Querzola (Set Decoration)

Sound Editing, Mark Mangini and Theo Green

Sound Mixing, Ron Bartlett, Doug Hemphill and Mac Ruth

Visual Effects, John Nelson, Gerd Nefzer, Paul Lambert and Richard R. Hoover

Blade Runner 2049 is a hard one to explain and an easy one to enjoy.  As in the original Blade Runner, manufactured people called replicants were created as a slave class to serve humans.  A more obedient group of replicants have been invented, and so there are newer replicants whose job it is to go shut down/kill the older technology.  One of these replicant detectives, Officer K (Ryan Gosling) is sent to a farm to take out an old model replicant, when he discovers the remnants of a woman who died in childbirth - apparently a replicant herself, previously thought to be impossible.

Officer K, meanwhile, seems to have a childhood memory, which would be impossible for a replicant who had no childhood.  He goes seeking answers to the man who was likely the father of the baby, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford, who played Deckard in the original film). Answers to his many questions are found, even if they are not the answers that Officer K hoped for.

I'm definitely a sci fi lover, and this film is fantastic. I liked the original film and I was nervous that this would be a let down.  Other than Star Wars, I'm generally displeased with sequels that come long after the original films.  This one is truly an exception to that rule.  Visually, the movie is stunning and I predicted all five of this film's nominations as I left the theater.  The production design really took my breath away, and if I was an academy voter, this film would have my vote for this category.  It has a good chance but a tougher field for visual effects, as well.  Bottom line, this movie is long and worth every minute.  See it!

Coco - 2 nominations

Animated Feature, Lee Unkrich and Darla K. Anderson
Original Song, "Remember Me," Music and Lyric by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez

What. A Beautiful. Movie.

Coco is the story of Dia de los Muertos and the legend of this special holiday that remembers the dead. A Mexican legend tells us that there are three deaths for all people - the day they cease to breathe, the day they are buried, and the day they are forgotten by the last member of the family who honors their memories.  On this single day of the dead, families set up "ofertas" with photographs of family members who are gone, and items that those people loved.  I heard an interview with the film makers, and they used the example that sometimes you'll see a bottle of soda that was their ancestor's favorite, or a kind of food that they particularly loved.

Miguel is part of a shoe-making family (what could possibly be wrong with that???), but he dreams of becoming a musician.  Sadly, and for reasons unknown to him, music is not even allowed in his family.  He is a talented singer and guitar player, but there is family history with an unnamed musician breaking the heart of an ancestor, and therefore it has been banned.  For complicated reasons, he decides to go to the land of the dead, which will allow him to pursue his goals.  If he can get the blessing of an ancestor, nobody in the land of the living will oppose his pursuit.  While there, he meets some crazy characters (starting at the Office of Family Reunification - it seems the one thing to survive the living is bureaucracy) and his long passed ancestors help him on his journey.  Some serious revelations about things that transpired in life are brought to light, and wrongs are made right both in the land of the dead and the living.

Remember Me, the Oscar nominated song from this story (brought to you by EGOTs Kirsten and Robert Lopez) is brilliant - it can be sung as a fast paced cantina style "to all the girls whose hearts I've broken" kind of song, or, it can be sung as a ballad to a child whose father must travel a lot and so he wants her to think fondly of him while he is gone.  There are sung versions of this song during the film that actually made me cry.  The nominated songs this year are all marvelous, and I would say this one is a serious contender.

SEE THIS MOVIE.  You will love it.  I did.

The Breadwinner - 1 nomination

Animated Feature - Nora Twomey and Anthony Leo

The Breadwinner is animated Yentl set in Afghanistan.  Just kidding, but only sort of.  Little Parvana lives with her family - her mother and one-legged father, her older sister, and her baby brother.  They are very poor and doing everything they can to make ends meet.  Parvana's father is a teacher, and he wants his daughter to learn, even though it is expressly forbidden by the Taliban.  He tells her stories and this world of imagination brings them close to each other.  

One day, the Taliban arrest Parvana's father, which means that the family has no man to go to the market, to earn a living; girls can't even go outside without male accompaniment.  So Parvana sees no choice but to transform herself into a "boy" so that she can run the errands of the household and try to earn some money to support her family.  She finds a close friend who has done the same.  To bolster her own resolve and to help encourage her friend and her family, she tells her father's tales of courage and resolve.

This story is lovely (though the movie is a little slow), and the animation is beautiful, particularly when Parvana is weaving her tales.  Visually, the movie has all of the color and drama that only animation can accomplish, and the most notable scenes are the ones where the story looms large and the colors and beauty of the animation loom larger.

Though I did like The Breadwinner, if you have limited time to see Oscar nominated films, this is one you could skip.

The Boss Baby - 1 nomination

Animated Feature - Tom McGrath and Ramsey Naito

The Boss Baby is nominated for an Academy Award.  Take that in for a second.  From now on, this film must be called "Oscar nominated film, The Boss Baby."  Now that you've wrapped your head around that, I'll tell you about the movie.

There are two kinds of babies.  Corporate executive babies and regular family babies.  (Stay with me.)  Corporate executive babies have determined that all babies are being undermined by Puppy Co in an attempt to usurp all cuteness factor to puppies alone, thereby displacing human babies in the process.  Now, I have a little niece named Leni, and when I tell you there is no puppy cuter than she is and so all babies need not worry, I'm telling you the key to undermining this film.  But I digress.

Meanwhile on earth, little Tim is having a great life with his parents.  Much to his chagrin, the boss baby (voiced ruthlessly and perfectly by Alec Baldwin) arrives in his home, stealing away much of his parents' valuable attention.  When he figures out that this baby is not like other babies, he sets out to prove that the boss baby is not who he appears to be.  Tim digs into the sibling rivalry, until the boss baby shares that he must ruin Puppy Co's evil plans in just two days at the Pet Convention.  Working together, they do more than they ever expected.

Much to my chagrin, I have to tell you the truth... I found this film to be delightful.  The premise is screwy, the idea is dumb, but there's something about a hard talkin' baby in a suit that is just irresistible.  Look for Oscar's host Jimmy Kimmel voicing the dad! What can I tell you?  Cookies are for closers.