89th Oscars: The Shorts

The nominees are:

Best Documentary Short Subject
4.1 Miles
Director: Daphne Matziaraki
Subject: A day in the life of a Coast Guard captain in Greece charged with saving thousands of refugees from drowning.

Director's Oscar History: first nomination

Review: Lion (2016)

* * *
Director: Garth Davis
Starring: Dev Patel, Nicole Kidman

Lion is the kind of movie that you leave feeling compelled to do some investigating because even if you can accept that its incredible premise is true, you have a hard time believing that it could actually have happened the way that the movie tells it. Yet it did. Real life is stranger than fiction can ever hope to be, and more heart-warming, too. That natural sense of awe that flows from the fact that the story is true ends up doing a fair bit of the heavy lifting in Lion, which is overall a fine film with great performances, but which is strangely uneven in its storytelling, getting off to a rollicking start, slowing way, way down in its second half, and then unfolding its finale at lightning speed. But man, what a finale that is.

Screen Actors Guild Award Winners

The winners are:

Best Performance by an Ensemble in a Motion Picture: Hidden Figures

Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role: Emma Stone, La La Land

Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role: Denzel Washington, Fences

Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role: Mahershala Ali, Moonlight

Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role: Viola Davis, Fences

Best Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture: Hacksaw Ridge

Producer's Guild Award Winners

The PGAs were given out last night. The winners for film:

Feature Film: La La Land

Documentary Feature: O.J.: Made in America

Animated Feature: Zootopia

21st Century Essentials: My Winnipeg (2008)

Director: Guy Maddin
Country: Canada

Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg isn't quite a documentary, nor is it entirely a fiction. Commissioned by the Documentary Channel, it's something like a magic realist memoir, an evocation of time and place filtered through nostalgia and fantasy and personal mythology. In certain respects, it's a film that's not even about Winnipeg at all, or even Guy Maddin despite the deeply personal way he approaches the city that he has called home for his entire life. Rather, it's about the sense of loss that comes from growing up, seeing the things that were so familiar to you during childhood change and modernize in your adulthood, and it's about the restlessness to leave one's place of origin, to break out and into something new. My Winnipeg is more about a feeling than it is about history, and so it's a story about anyone's hometown, really, which is probably why this absurdist and surreal love letter/Dear John letter to a city is so moving.