John Hawkes not nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role in The Sessions

I placed Hawkes’ performance, along with co-star Helen Hunt’s, as my top film work of the entire year, so this omission is a standout one. As a polio victim looking for physical with Hunt’s sex surrogate, Hawkes’ performance was demanding physically and emotionally, a triumph in each way. Making things more curious is that Joaquin Phoenix, who had not only not campaigned for his nomination but who had publicly decried the aggressive campaigning process, still got in – despite the lack of overall love for his film, The Master (co-stars Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman got supporting actor nominations, but there were no nods for Picture, Director, Screenplay, or amazing cinematography). That means Hunt really deserved her Supporting Actress nomination – apparently she was having sex with herself in the movie.

Neither Kathryn Bigelow nor Ben Affleck in the Best Director race

Did Argo peak too early? Did Zero Dark Thirty polarize too many people? Hard to say, because while the two early Best Picture favorites both made it into the category (which also includes seven other films this year), neither director did. This might be an especially hard blow to Affleck who was campaigning ultra-hard to be seen as a leading Hollywood director. The good news for them is that both still got nominated as producers. And oh yeah, they both already have statuettes on their mantles.

Ann Dowd, Compliance

Dowd was as perfect a performance as captured on celluloid this year. Alas, her film’s studio, citing budget restrictions, didn’t provide screeners to award nominators, allowing bigger stars with bigger representation to move right on in. I’m impressed by veteran Jacki Weaver – the character she played in Silver Linings was the emotional fulcrum of the novel but reduced to inexpressive wallpaper in the film. And still she got in over Dowd.

Ewan McGregor, The Impossible

Naomi Watts received a well-deserved Best Actress nom for tsunami story The Impossible, but in a more crowded Best Supporting Actor category, McGregor was dismissed. It’s a shame. Both carry equal halves of the demanding film, and McGregor had one scene, reconnecting with certain family members over the phone, that makes for a perfect “Oscar scene.” Making this category all the more yawn-worthy is that all five nominees have already won at least one Academy Award.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained

DiCaprio’s Django co-star, Waltz, is terrific and got nominated this year. But his role is really a lead. And DiCaprio demonstrated remarkable prowess, cultivating a comically nuanced Southern villain. Maybe if his upcoming Gatsby role doesn’t do the trick for a leading actor nomination, he can play a singing alcoholic president grappling with mental illness. Just as long as the character doesn’t have polio.

Michael Haneke and Benh Zeitlin in the Best Director race

The directors of Amour and Beasts, two of my big 2012 triumphs, got in – pushing the aforementioned Affleck and Bigelow out of their presumptive slots. One’s a veteran and one’s a newcomer, and I’m happy to see both recognized. I just wish Life of Pi’s Ang Lee or Silver Linings’ David O. Russell could have lost their slots to make room for Bigelow and Master’s Paul Thomas Anderson.

The Oscars will be handed out on February 24.

By Mark Peikert

Some film performances manage to be so memorable, so unexpected, that they render the less imaginative framework of the movie negligible. That’s certainly the case with Elizabeth Olsen and Martha Marcy May Marlene, a sexy movie about violence, group sex, commune cults and yuppie ambition.

All of those are apart from Elizabeth’s Martha, though. Escaping from an upstate New York farm where groups of young men and women are practically enslaved by the charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes, reprising his role from Winter’s Bone in a smilier key) to the tranquility of her estranged sister’s Connecticut vacation home, Martha finds the difference between memory and dreams beginning to dissolve. Her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and new brother-in-law Ted (Hugh Dancy) try to be supportive, but they are ultimately so disinterested in this feral young woman that their questions feel like cocktail conversation prompters. Neither of them wants to know the truth about the two years Martha was away, because neither of them wants to confront the possibility that she might have been in real danger. Far better to simply assume she was in a bad relationship for that period of time.

Of course, Martha was in a bad relationship, to some extent. Working and living in an environment where “cleansing” means being drugged and raped and women aren’t allowed to eat until men have, Martha—dubbed Marcy May by Patrick—begins to find the place where she belongs. Eventually, her sense of serenity is shattered when violence abruptly erupts (writer-director Sam Durkin is unable to confidently yoke the minor-key emotions of an indie film with the psychological suspense of a thriller),and she ends up at Lucy and Ted’s, walking around naked, crawling into bed with them while they have sex and generally acting like a neurasthenic.

Olsen makes every twitch, every sudden screaming fit seem both natural and inevitable; the world has become a dangerous place for Martha now and terror lurks around every corner. She knows what Patrick is capable of convincing his “family” to do (anyone who has ever read Helter Skelter will remain unsurprised by Durkin’s twists), and Lucy and Ted’s massive glass house offers slim protection.

Somehow, Olsen’s performance almost erases the massive leaps of faith that Durkin’s screenplay requires of the viewer. Would an 18-year-old girl, even one who has been subtly brainwashed for two years, ever forget that it’s inappropriate to climb into bed next to her fornicating sister? Would Martha really be so incapable of caring for herself that she hides her urine-stained dress under her mattress? Just months before she was caring for babies and hanging laundry out to dry on a farm, between working in the garden and learning how to shoot. And Durkin’s finale, a combination of the closing shot from Michael Clayton and the gotcha climax of every horror film of the last 40 years, cheapens what was, until that point, a slightly ludicrous but nonetheless absorbing look at returning to civilization from a cult and finding that civilization is little better as an option.

Elizabeth Olsen and Sarah Paulson are sisters in Martha Marcy May Marlene.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX SEARCHLIGHT