The impending triumph of La La Land

Every Oscar nomination list precipitates its single lead story, the apparently natural and irresistible emergence of a frontrunner. That of course this year is Damien Chazelle’s La La Land. This gorgeous romantic musical, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling and recalling the classic work of Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly or Jacques Demy, has a record-equalling 14 nods, matching the Academy nomination score for Titanic and All About Eve. It includes picture, director, actress, actor, screenplay, cinematography and even two entries in the Cinderella category of best song: City of Dreams and Audition.

La La Land equals record for most Oscar nominations Read more

Having swooned over this movie at its premiere in Venice last year and again for its UK release last month, I’m quite ready to watch it and faint dead away with pleasure for a third, a fourth or a fifth time. But I have to mention that La La Land has its detractors. It is a film which has been subjected to an annual media phenomenon which occurs about this time: the pundit backlash. Commentators get around to watching the films which they have been nagged beyond endurance to see by the jabbering chorus of critics and find themselves in no mood to go with the flow. La La Land has been criticised for the vocal quality of Gosling and Stone. I can’t agree with this, I think their voices are just fine, all the more human and charming for being not conventional professional singers. They are not the supercharged Broadway pipes that belt out, say, Let It Go in Frozen. But yes, I concede: perhaps my comments on the movie could have made it clearer that their realness is a distinct feature and value of the movie. I should also mention my colleague Hadley Freeman’s critique, laying out her mixed feelings about the conceited lead, played by Ryan Gosling, and exactly how much we are supposed to endorse the heroic integrity of the male jazz buff.

Moonlight, from Barry Jenkins (eight nominations) is a wonderful film: its intelligence and artistry are superb, as well as its ambition and scope. It is a kind of interior epic, tracking the existence of a gay black man at three stages of his life. There is something humane and wise about this film, and the way it sees that nothing is fixed, and any given moment is a way-station to something else. Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By the Sea (six nominations) is another film by a real movie artist: a study of grief and the ways in which it is denied and displaced into other human activities which in turn have their effects on other people. It is a rich and complex piece of work; and actually the same thing can be said about Denis Villeneuve’s terrifically good sci-fi contact drama Arrival which had the ideal star in Amy Adams: sympathetic, smart, emotionally open. I loved the heartfelt adoption drama Lion which has eight nominations, though was less impressed by Mel Gibson’s strident, macho but well acted true-life second world war drama Hacksaw Ridge. Denzel Washington’s forthright drama Fences and Theodore Melfi’s smart, invigorating and valuable Hidden Figures – about the unsung black women scientists at Nasa in the 1960s – invigorate the list with four nominations each.

The vexed question of Nocturnal Animals

Something has to get snubbed, of course: it looks as if I, Daniel Blake, Love & Friendship and American Honey have not captured the Academy’s imagination and, as we knew already but remains baffling, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle and Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta have not made it into the best foreign language list. Martin Scorsese’s religious epic Silence has not found much favour. Rebecca Hall deserved but didn’t get a nomination for her icy portrayal of the troubled news journalist Christine Chubbuck. But for me the dullest and most timid aspect of this year’s Oscar list is its almost ignoring Tom Ford’s brilliant, ruthlessly provocative thriller Nocturnal Animals, a double-narrative about an unhappy art dealer (Amy Adams) who gets the manuscript of an unpublished novel through the post from her estranged first husband (Jake Gyllenhaal), and the action of this explicit crime thriller is dramatised as she imagines it, with this very ex-husband pictured in the lead. It got a nomination for Michael Shannon’s great supporting performance as the deadpan Texan lawman.

Now, I love Nocturnal Animals. Not everyone does. My colleague Victoria Coren Mitchell in the Observer makes it entirely clear that in her view its portrayal of women is repulsive – and misogynist. I don’t agree. I argue that it is – at least partly – a movie about male violence, in both the obvious sense and the more insidious sense of an embittered ex-husband taking revenge on a successful woman with a narrative machine-tooled to cause upset and offence. It is bizarre, extreme, nightmarish, with a Damien Hirst sensibility. Coren Mitchell professes herself astonished that this movie gets top marks from me “right up there with Midnight Cowboy or Some Like It Hot”. Well, at the risk of getting bogged down in the issue of false comparison or false opposition … the two films I would mention are Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom or Tod Browning’s Freaks. Films with the darkest, strangest, most horrifying and incorrect scenes. And films which were hated and vehemently condemned at the time on stern moralistic grounds. But of course people should go and see Nocturnal Animals and decide for themselves.

Where is Amy Adams?

I hardly dare return to the controversial issue of Nocturnal Animals but for Amy Adams not to get a nomination for her brilliant performance in this and her equally outstanding performance in Arrival is very disappointing. She should be one of the stars of this award season and she is a no-show. That’s a real gap. Otherwise this could be a very exciting moment for Irish star Ruth Negga, who gives an excellent, quietly conceived and subtle performance in the race drama Loving. But she faces formidable opposition from Natalie Portman whose impersonation of Jackie Kennedy in Pablo Larraín’s Jackie has been widely hailed. I think it is a tremendously accomplished work, although I can’t quite join in with the extravagant praise. Isabelle Huppert might well pinch it for her entirely outrageous and imperious performance – does she give any other sort? – in the Paul Verhoeven’s daring rape-revenge comedy Elle, which has conquered the festival circuit worldwide. There is Emma Stone of course, but also Meryl Streep, who gives one of her ripest, richest, gamiest and maddest performances (something like her Maggie Thatcher tribute act in The Iron Lady) as the off-key society warbler in Florence Foster Jenkins. If she wins she will give a great speech. But my will-win money is on Natalie Portman, and the should-win punt is Ruth Negga. In the supporting list, Octavia Spencer could well win it for her performance in Hidden Figures, but I think Naomie Harris has it for the drug-addicted mother in Moonlight, a characterisation which calls for her to deteriorate, but subtly, and with well-observed distinctions. Michelle Williams is a longer shot for Manchester By the Sea.

Jeff Bridges v Michael Shannon is a Texas lawman-off!

My feeling is that Casey Affleck will now almost certainly have the best actor award in the bag for his very moving portrayal, in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By the Sea, of a man who is convulsed by grief, guilt, anxiety and rage. It is a performance which is at once very demonstrative and revealing, and yet paradoxically very closed off and hemmed in. Andrew Garfield also gets a nomination for his portrayal of the wartime conscientious objector Desmond Doss, and I have to say that this movie is a major leap forward for Garfield – his best work yet, and actually considerably more impressive than his contribution to Martin Scorsese’s Silence. But I am less enamoured of that film. Ryan Gosling and Denzel Washington get uncontroversial nods for their performances in La La Land and Fences but at the risk of being churlish I am yet again baffled that Viggo Mortensen gets a nomination for his supremely supercilious performance in the vacuous and overpraised Captain Fantastic. (Adam Driver should be in there instead for Paterson.) In the best supporting actor list, Dev Patel gets a thoroughly deserved nod for his excellent and heartfelt turn in Lion. Mahershala Ali is probably the frontrunner for his excellent and almost luminous performance in Moonlight, and Lucas Hedges is outstanding as the troubled teen in Manchester By the Sea. But my favourite part of the whole ceremony in some ways is that the best supporting actor list has what can only be described as a Texas lawman-off. Both Jeff Bridges and Michael Shannon are playing deadpan, hooded-eyes cops who have seen it all.

Deserving writers go missing

Actor-turned-screenwriter Taylor Sheridan is enjoying a fairytale career right now: his script for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario was much admired, now he has a nomination for his complex and seductive screenplay for Hell or High Water. It is very impressive stuff, and the adapted section also has Arrival’s Eric Heisserer for his daring version of Story of Your Life by SF author Ted Chiang. But here I think the Academy missed a trick. Surely Melissa Mathison deserved a posthumous nomination for her work on that lovely children’s film The BFG, directed by Steven Spielberg. In fact, the screenplay nomination lists were a chance to give a pat on the back to some more people who could have done with some more love: Shane Black for The Nice Guys and indeed Whit Stillman for his elegant work on Love & Friendship. But you can’t have everything.