Jake Gittes

Yeah, absolutely Bigelow. Un-fucking-forgivable. All of the five nominated directors have no business being in over her.Also, Cotillard (again, a better performance than anyone of the actual nominees gave, and I love Chastain and Lawrence's work), and, to a lesser extent, Perks in Adapted and MK in Picture. And while I admittedly haven't seen The Master yet, the cinematography and production design looked utterly spellbinding from the trailers.

Chastain deserves it, hopefully she gets the Oscar too.

Will this be streaming online? It's 6 AM here and I don't feel like sleeping at all tonight, so I might as well watch it to pass some time until afternoon.

It's arguably the main contender for cinematography and score.

5/5Zero Dark Thirty4/5ArgoSilver Linings Playbook3/5AmourLife of PiLincolnBeasts of the Southern Wildnot seen: Django, Les Mis

Best Director nominees are pretty unreal. No Hooper, no Affleck, AND no Bigelow. Whoda thunk.

I'll see Django on the 17th and vote then.

Scoot McNairy, too.

I sorta love the way BAFTA treats Tom Hooper, especially in comparison to DGA/Oscars. 2 years ago they awarded TKS best picture, but picked Fincher as best director. This time out they nominated Les Mis, but Hooper himself didn't even get a nom. Compare that to the blowjob he's been receiving in Hollywood.I'm at the point now when I want to look everyone nominating Arkin in the eyes and ask what the fuck they think they are doing. It's ridiculous. And frankly, after seeing Lincoln, I've no idea why TLJ is in this whole conversation, either. It's Tommy Lee Jones playing Tommy Lee Jones wearing a wig and insulting all the other characters. The best male supporting player in the movie is easily James Spader, and even he doesn't really do anything worthy of awards.

He was, actually - the Coens were not.

The scene of his killing in the movie is perfect. He shows himself, gets taken out in less than a second, and that's it. No slow-motion, no dramatic music, nothing. He was alive a second ago, now he's dead, just like any other person in his place would be.

Until I get to see Django Unchained and The Master, this is my favorite movie of 2012. Masterful direction, taut writing, perfect editing and not a false note in any of the performances - Jason Clarke, in particular, is going to get really sought after after this. There were times when I did think both the film and Chastain might have been going for a bit too much emotional distance, but then I was surprised how perfectly the very final scene landed. While the reviews led me to expect something very close to Zodiac (a film I absolutely love), it isn't quite that - Zodiac was much more about how the long and exhausting obsession of its three main characters nearly destroyed their lives, ultimately dissolving in time rather than getting a closure. Maya's obsession in ZDT has a very clear closure - her own personal Zodiac found and killed - but much more of an emphasis is placed on the aftermath. "Where do you want to go?", she is asked. All she could do in response is cry, helpless, in a state of (as I'm sure it was to her) terrifying uncertainty.I'm not entirely sure how ZDT will hold up on the second viewing, but for now it's a very, very impressive piece of work, especially considering I tend to get sceptical, not over-hyped, when I sit down to watch movies that received this kind of early praise. Zero Dark Thirty got me in its grip in its first minutes and didn't let go for the remaining 150.

"Enthralling for pre-schoolers" is certainly a great argument for the Academy members to watch it.

Lawless is an average movie overall, but it deserves to be seen for Guy Pearce alone.

It gets better

I must have missed something, when did Mama become a sure-fire bomb?

And it had Summit as its distributor...

Fight Club is the prime example of this. Advertising that film as a "fighting movie" during WWF broadcasts... not sure that can be topped.

I meant at the box office, of course

The more ZDT makes the better. 20 years after Point Break, it's about damn time Kathryn Bigelow directed another hit.

How about Zodiac, There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Assassination of Jesse James, Michael Clayton... that's just for starters?

5. Did it this summer with Cronenberg's Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly and Dead Ringers.

Yeah. Except I kinda love that part of it.

I thought it was a perfect film for its first 100 minutes or so, but the way it pretty much became a buddy cop movie in the end (with a two-against-twenty shoot-out that both protagonists manage to survive) kind of knocks it down from its "all-time masterpiece" pedestal. I also thought it needed a more tragic ending - Pierce shooting an "unarmed criminal" in the back in cold blood is brilliant, but the film needed to stay in that territory afterwards. At least they could have killed off Crowe - that would have let the film continue being its own thing, and given the ending a necessary amount of weight while allowing the film to stay a crowd-pleaser.

Horror of the year.