the 2022 jdb awards!

Happy Oscar weekend! Here goes my personal awards for 2022 film season.

Picture

BENEDICTION 

"Benediction is an expansive movie of loss, isolation, and horror; it’s an energizing and inspiring movie about the vanity of existence itself. The physical design of the film—its décor, its costumes, its settings—coalesces with the actors’ diction and gestures, as well as with the historical characters in Sassoon’s circle who populate the action, and with the memory of love and the exaltation of art. The film brings the past to life with a vividness and an immediacy that seem wrenched from [Terence] Davies’s very soul." - Richard Brody

nominees

AFTERSUN

ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED

CLOSE

EO

THE FABELMANS

LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS

LOST ILLUSIONS

TÁR

VORTEX

Director

Terence Davies, BENEDICTION 

"None of us can find redemption in other people or in other things. You have to find it yourself. At the end of his [Sassoon's] life, I think he was actually quite unfulfilled. That touched me enormously. All my films are about outsiders because I’m an outsider. I listened to everything because I’m the youngest of 10. I wasn’t aware of it at first, but as I got older I realized I’m not a participant in life. I observe it. And when you’re an outsider, you’re usually ignored." -Davies

nominees

Todd Field, TÁR

Jerzy Skolimowski, EO

Steven Spielberg, THE FABELMANS

Charlotte Wells, AFTERSUN

Actor

Paul Mescal, AFTERSUN

"I think he’s sitting in these feelings, and deeply confused and upset by why he’s not able to enjoy himself, or because everything else on paper is good. He’s with the person that he loves most in the world and he should be happier than he is, and that’s devastating." -Mescal

nominees

Colin Farrell, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Eden Dambrine, CLOSE 

Caleb Landry Jones, NITRAM

Jack Lowden, BENEDICTION

Actress

Cate Blanchett, TÁR 

"When I read it, I was so daunted by the ask of it — not just what was necessary to play the character, but also the depth of questioning in the screenplay and my relationship to it, which kept shifting depending on which scene we were shooting or which relationship we were focused on that day. When the cast started to come together, Nina Hoss elevated it yet again. Then Hildur Guðnadóttir got involved to do the music, and I thought it doesn’t get much better than this. My job was not just to rise to the occasion of the screenplay but the quality of the people I was working alongside." -Blanchett

nominees

Henriette Confurius, THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER

Frankie Corio, AFTERSUN

Mia Goth, PEARL / X

Michelle Yeoh, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Supporting Actor

Barry Keoghan, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN 

"I'm always looking for, what's the kind of... what is it that we're trying to do that we can get across, that is the most... makes the audience relates so much. Is it being raw? Is it being real? Is it being vulnerable? What is it? I'm trying to figure that out. Is it the behaving part? I'm always trying to figure that out. That's the beauty of it as well, is I'm always trying to learn from the craft and what it is that we do. How can we take it another level up? So I'm always watching. I'm always watching." -Keoghan

nominees

Johnny Flynn, THE OUTFIT

Brendan Gleeson, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Brian Tyree Henry, CAUSEWAY

Ke Huy Quan, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Supporting Actress

Judy Davis, NITRAM

"No one who sees Nitram will forget the way Davis’s defensive face and posture finally dissolve into a rare kind of tender bewilderment and love that has been so beaten down so many times but still somehow exists. In real life, the woman she is playing in Nitram has retreated into denial, because there comes a point for any human being when pressure becomes so intense that it can no longer be endured. In the last shot of Mum, she sits stiffly outside her home, cigarette in hand, her face unreadable in profile but likely doing minute calculations underneath." -Dan Callahan

nominees

Nina Hoss, TÁR

Dakota Johnson, CHA CHA REAL SMOOTH

Janelle Monáe, GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

Brittany Snow, X

Ensemble

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE 

"I think that we all really slipped into this family dynamic quite seamlessly, and chemistry is very real, and I think it’s just this sort of unspeakable magic that you can’t quite know why." -Stephanie Hsu

nominees

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

BENEDICTION

THE FABELMANS

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

Original Screenplay

Todd Field, TÁR 

nominees

Terence Davies, BENEDICTION

Tony Kushner & Steven Spielberg, THE FABELMANS

Martin McDonagh, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Ramon Zürcher & Silvan Zürcher, THE GIRL AND THE SPIDER

Adapted Screenplay

Xavier Giannoli & Jacques Fieschi, LOST ILLUSIONS 

nominees

Mathieu Amalric, HOLD ME TIGHT

Claire Denis, Léa Mysius, & Andrew Litvack, STARS AT NOON

Robert Eggers & Sjón, THE NORTHMAN

Rian Johnson, GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

International Film

EO 

nominees

CLOSE

LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS

LOST ILLUSIONS

VORTEX

 

Documentary

ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED 

nominees

ALL THAT BREATHES

DESCENDANT

A NIGHT OF KNOWING NOTHING

SR.

Cinematography

Ben Bernhard, Riju Das, & Saumyananda Sahi, ALL THAT BREATHES 

nominees

Simone D'Arcangelo, THE TALE OF KING CRAB

Michał Dymek, EO

Ksusha Greenfield, A WOUNDED FAWN

Frédéric Noirhomme, PLAYGROUND

Film Editing

François Gédigier, HOLD ME TIGHT 

nominees

Agnieszka Glińska, EO

Blair McClendon, AFTERSUN

Brett Morgen, MOONAGE DAYDREAM

Paul Rogers, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Score

Howard Shore, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE 

nominees

Michael Giacchino, THE BATMAN

Paweł Mykietyn, EO

Tindersticks, STARS AT NOON

Dan Wool, MAD GOD

Song

“Stars At Noon,” STARS AT NOON 

nominees

“Hold My Hand,” TOP GUN: MAVERICK

“Keep Rising,” THE WOMAN KING

“Lift Me Up,” BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

“New Body Rhumba,” WHITE NOISE

Art Direction / Production Design

GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO 

nominees

ELVIS

THE HOUSE

LOST ILLUSIONS

MAD GOD

Costume Design

Catherine Martin, ELVIS

nominees

Jenny Beavan, MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS

Ruth E. Carter, BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

Pierre-Jean Laroque, LOST ILLUSIONS

Gersha Phillips, THE WOMAN KING

Make-Up & Hair

X 

nominees

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

NEPTUNE FROST

THE WOMAN KING

YOU WON’T BE ALONE

Sound Design

TÁR 

nominees

AFTERSUN

THE DREAM AND THE RADIO

EO

MOONAGE DAYDREAM

Visual Effects

MAD GOD 

nominees

AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER

GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO

THE HOUSE

NOPE

A look back at last year's winners & nominees. The Worst Person in the World won Picture, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor, and International Film. 

hold me tight

Sometimes a film can "hold you tight." Can you attempt to reach into a film, or a hyper-realist painting and almost feel it? There's a rigor and closeness to Mathieu Amalric's movie, which he ambitiously directed and adapted from a play by Claudine Galea. It's quite bewildering to even fathom this movie as a play, as the movie is so tactile and visual and close, hopping time periods, locales and textures. 

When watching Vicky Krieps' Clarisse in an early scene, it's was hard not to think of Meryl Streep’s Joanna in Robert Benton's Kramer vs. Kramer leaving her child behind. Clarisse wordlessly says goodbye to her children and slips out into the early morning. She pulls out of her copper-toned late-70s Pacer and listens to classical piano music. Later, as she's on the road, the disorientated husband and father Marc (Arieh Worthalter) ambles together breakfast. At first, it all feels very Kramer vs. Kramer (what are the moralities, ethics, the societal inferences of this situation?) and very 1979. Yet Amalric's film soon reveals it's up to something less straightforward and more tricky, confounding--kicking around with one's emotions themselves.

It's also a haunted house movie of sorts--the house being an unmissable character unto itself--a greyish, ancient, roomy two-story beauty filmed in Ganties. Its soft color palate walls are chipped and grimy--one bearing the penciled-in heights of the children. In some ways, as homes often are, it can be the centerpiece of the film as Clarisse's psychology and predicament becomes more floaty and tenuous. And even the house changes sometimes, with things being ripped from the wall (all of Clarisse's cluttering of beauty products)--the piano reverberating through rooms with the daughter's (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet and Juliette Benveniste) halting, then suddenly virtuosic playing (soon, she dresses up in a gray wig, attempting to embody Martha Argerich). Music ends up being a crucial crux of the picture--in its sense of physical movement, and also its senses of orientation and disorientation.

While Clarisse's scrambled thoughts (like the memory game of upside down Polaroids) of the present (?), past (?), future (?) are what molds this movie's fractured narrative journey, but the film never feels cutesy or too clever for its own good. Krieps admirably carries everything with verve and unending sensitivity--it's a quality that's difficult to describe because it's so indelible (one could say the same of Streep's turn in Kramer--another performance that shapes the movie as much as the movie attempts to shape the performer's character). She is also framed well with gorgeous, earthy cinematography by Christophe Beaucarne. The fluidity of the film is no doubt due to the remarkable editing job by François Gédigier. In a film full of many strengths, its editing is one of its most laudatory aspects. 

Ultimately the movie arrives to its thud of "reality." That situation didn't hit as hard as it seemed to want to--maybe since the film around it is so busily arranging the tactile tapestry of the might-have beens and the what-could-bes. Perhaps that's the point as well--unearthing and confronting the "reality" is less blunt to the spectator than than the continuous burying of it, fleeing from it, re-imagining of it. I was much more moved by and emotionally invested in the lingering sensualities and melancholic flourishes such as Krieps singing along to the lush J.J. Cale mid-70s Serge Gainsbourg-esque song "Cherry" in that brown vehicular spaceship (almost the contemporary arthouse grief-struck version of Doc Brown's DeLorean). ***

-Jeffery Berg