31 January 2018

Skandies: #18



Picture: The Lost City of Z (55/7)
Director: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, The Unknown Girl (48/4)
Actress: Adèle Haenel, The Unknown Girl (49/5)
Actor: Adrien Titieni, Graduation (41/5)
S. Actor: O'Shea Jackson, Jr., Ingrid Goes West (41/4)
S. Actress: Rooney Mara, A Ghost Story (39/6)
Screenplay: Ronald Bronstein & Josh Safdie, Good Time (51/7)
Scene: Will Oldham monologue, A Ghost Story (39/2)



[Only found an official snippet online.]

HISTORY

The Dardennes haven't missed in Director since (ironically) Rosetta, though this is otherwise their weakest finish. They placed 15th for La Promesse (1997), 5th for The Son (2003), 5th again for L'Enfant (2006), 11th for Lorna's Silence (2008), 13th for The Kid With a Bike (2012), and 6th for Two Days, One Night (2014).

Mara won Best Actress for Carol two years ago, and also placed 15th in 2011 for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; her previous Supporting nods were at #20 (The Social Network, 2010) and #14 (Side Effects, 2014). The other three are new.

Bronstein and Safdie's previous collaboration on Heaven Knows What didn't make the cut in Screenplay, though the brothers placed in Director. (And Frownland's sole nod was for actor Dore Mann.)

18 comments:

Andrew R. said...

I thought even Ghost Story's fans (of which I am decidedly not one) acknowledged that the monologue was dreadful?

Good to see the Dardennes hang in there + Jackson Jr.

Jeff said...

Good job other voters for recognizing O'Shea Jackson, Jr.

Alex said...

Bad job me for forgetting O'Shea Jackson, Jr.

Anonymous said...

I am a fan of GHOST STORY and though I didn't vote for it, I didn't mind the scene at all. It is so clearly and totally and in every possible way different from the mood of the rest of the film, that it isn't an "off-key" moment, but a scene obviously played for contrast and as counterpoint.

Anonymous said...

And c'mon, now this HAS to mean that "Pie" (which I *did* vote for) finished among the Top 20 scenes.

Anonymous said...

New to the fold : what exactly does "Sallittism" signify. I feel like a doofus.

bentclouds said...

I really liked A GHOST STORY but didn't vote for Pie or Bonnie Described Eternity, although they both were in consideration until I hit submit. I'm also glad Adéle Haenel made the top 20, she's pretty great in THE UNKNOWN GIRL and I had to cut her at the last minute. Good save other people.

md'a said...

New to the fold : what exactly does "Sallittism" signify.

Not sure why you asked this here rather than in the previous comment thread where it was actually mentioned, but: Dan Sallitt is a critic/filmmaker (and Skandie voter) with very particular auteurist-based taste that rarely coincides with the larger critical consensus. Two other Skandie voters, Sky Hirschkron and Tony G. Huang, are in remarkable and to my mind not entirely credible lockstep with Dan's taste. (I would love to isolate the three for a year and see whether the correlation persists.) For example, this year those three, and only those three, voted for Hermia & Helena (in which Dan actually appears as an actor), How Heavy This Hammer, and Mister Universo. When this little bloc picks up an additional vote or two, as it did for Downsizing (another Sallittist favorite had a bunch of fellow travelers, myself included), it can sometimes make a dent in the #18-20 range.

I am not a robot, but it is possible that Sky and Tony may be Dan-created robots.

Private Joker said...

A GHOST STORY was my #1 but I didn't vote for the scene either - but like Victor I don't think it's a bad scene at all; my detailed thoughts on it are on Letterboxd. Basically it's just being taken too much on face value I think.

I kinda hated INGRID GOES WEST but I *was* one of the Jackson voters. Dude was straight up awesome in it.

Wish I could see what the rest of you saw in the Dardenne.

Anonymous said...

Ah, whoops, I actually did mean to leave this comment two blog posts ago, but then continued on to read the next two posts and autonomously just commented on the latest one :-x

But anyway, thanks for answering the question so thoroughly! Stumbled upon this Skandies stuff through Letterboxd and I'm looking forward to seeing the full results over the next ~17 days!

md'a said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
md'a said...

Anon (and any other newcomers): If you want to see the last 20+ years of results, you can find them here.

md'a said...

It belatedly occurs to me that this is the second Will Oldham monologue to place in Scene, following the one that gives Old Joy its title. At least I think that was primarily a monologue. Been a buncha years.

Anonymous said...

Oh dear, as if I didn't already have enough distractions. Thanks for that link, this is such a neat idea (and clearly you guys/gals have been at it much longer than I realized!) and I'll be unabashedly using these Top 20 List as a personal checklist for films I haven't-yet-seen-but-need-to. Thanks again!

md'a said...

Mostly guys, unfortunately, because that's mostly who was arguing movies on the Internet when I recruited the core group back in the mid-'90s. There have been a fair number of women over the years, but most of them have only lasted a few years before losing interest (a problem exacerbated by my decision a while back to stop recruiting professional critics, so as to avoid replicating the results of the big critics' polls, which didn't yet exist when I started this one). I may address this in my annual wrap post.

Dan Sallitt said...

Sky generally posts ratings on the nerd group before I see or react to the films, so a correlation of our ratings there would more or less eliminate my influence (though not his). Your practice of early viewing and publication seems a better explanation of the D'Angelo Affect than my tardy publication is of Sallittism.

md'a said...

Fair point. I suspect the primary influence that you and I have (in common with many others)—and this is as it should be—lies in which films people seek out. For every How Heavy This Hammer, there's a 4 Days in France (to name a film I suspect was more widely seen by the AVB because I championed it—didn't go over well with the Sallittists, though!). Feels different to me because there aren't two specific people whose opinions almost always closely match mine. It's more of a general thing.

It's true, of course, that you can wield no Crix Pix influence when you vote second. But my impression—which may well be erroneous—is that Sky often agrees with you when you vote first and only violently disagrees with you when he votes first. Would he have been CON on The Human Surge, for example, had he known going in that you liked it? That's what I sometimes wonder.

Dan Sallitt said...

Eh, I think you're leaving out the ways in which influence can be deeper. I was a teenage Sarrisite, and that correlation held pretty well for me for five years or so regardless of whether I knew his opinion in advance. If you read someone a lot or even follow their recommendations regularly, there can be a real philosophical influence as well as a superficial evaluative one. If I hated a film and Sarris liked it, I would certainly have considered it more carefully, and I think that's a good thing.