01 February 2017

Skandies: #18



Picture: Green Room (61/7)
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Creepy (51/5)
Actress: Zhao Tao, Mountains May Depart (47/6)
Actor: Russell Crowe, The Nice Guys (43/4)
S. Actor: Ralph Fiennes, Hail, Caesar! (63/7)
S. Actress: Naomie Harris, Moonlight (48/6)
Screenplay: James Schamus, Indignation (57/7)
Scene: Zev at Kurlander's house, Remember (34/3)


SK18 from Daniel Gemko on Vimeo.

(Contains virulent racism and semi-graphic violence.)

HISTORY:

To my initial surprise, this is the first time Kurosawa has ever placed in Director. When I looked at his filmography, though, I realized that most of his films have been ineligible; Bright Future and Tokyo Sonata were the only real possibilities (since almost nobody saw the four-hour TV miniseries Penance, released here as a film). Pulse won the undistributed poll for 2001, but there's no Best Director category there; he would surely have fared quite well had that film been released within our two-year window.

It's been nearly a decade for Russell Crowe, who was a Skandies mainstay from 1997–2007. Here's what that looked like:

1997: #4, L.A. Confidential
1999: #5, The Insider
2000: #4, Gladiator
2001: #9, A Beautiful Mind
2003: #9, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
2005: #20, Cinderella Man
2007: #20, 3:10 to Yuma

Ralph Fiennes, by contrast, won Best Actor only two years ago. I'm not gonna pretend his Bigger Splash performance isn't forthcoming (the only suspense there is whether he'll be one of our five "nominees"), so will note his full history at that time. Zhao placed 19th in Supporting for Jia's previous film, A Touch of Sin (2013). Harris is new.

Schamus' previous screenplays have all been for Ang Lee; he placed 4th for The Ice Storm (1997) and 10th as one of the three credited writers on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).

1 comment:

Private Joker said...

Good job fellow voters not putting Harris even higher, though I'll be sad if Monae doesn't place at all. She's so much better than Harris in MOONLIGHT that I've been continuously annoyed that the latter is getting all the awards attention. Harris is so affected and actor-y and try-hard with her crackhead mom cliches, while Monae is a subtly nuanced three-dimensional character in less screen time. Not that I ever have any idea what goes through other people's heads when we're all judging acting. Performance categories are always the hardest to predict for me because my ballots consistently share zilch with other people's.