Jeremy Beck, Author at MovieManifesto

Oscars 2014: Best Supporting Actor and Actress

February 19, 2015June 30, 2021 Jeremy BeckOscars

After starting our Oscar predictions yesterday with the technical categories, both big and small, we now get to the good stuff. Unfortunately, there isn’t much suspense to either of this year’s supporting awards, but there are still plenty of terrific performances to cover.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

NOMINEES
Robert Duvall—The Judge
Ethan Hawke—Boyhood
Edward Norton—Birdman
Mark Ruffalo—Foxcatcher
J.K. Simmons—Whiplash

WILL WIN
Simmons. He’s already won pretty much everything else, sweeping the Holy Acting Trinity of the BAFTAs, Golden Globes, and Screen Actors’ Guild, not to mention twenty-nine other awards as recognized by IMDb. Seriously, the guy’s won everywhere from Austin to Vancouver. The only remotely theoretical challenger is Norton in the event of a Birdman sweep, but that’s just not happening. Mark this one in ink.

Oscars 2014: The Big Techies (Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and more)

February 18, 2015June 30, 2021 Jeremy BeckOscars

Tony Revolori and Saoirse Ronan in The Grand Budapest Hotel

We’ve already ripped through eight less significant (in this viewer’s opinion) technical categories. Now it’s time to get to the big guns. Not only are these categories independently intriguing, but their winners could also foreshadow some of the night’s more high-profile awards.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

NOMINEES
Birdman—Emmanuel Lubezki
The Grand Budapest Hotel—Robert D. Yeoman
Ida—Lukasz Zal, Ryszard Lynzewski
Mr. Turner—Dick Pope
Unbroken—Roger Deakins

WILL WIN
Birdman. Lubezki is on a heater right now after winning for Gravity last year, and besides, the entire movie looks like it was shot on one freaking take. Call that technique facile if you want, but Academy voters are going to respond to it.

Oscars 2014: The Little Techies (Best Animated Feature, Best Costume Design, and more)

February 18, 2015June 30, 2021 Jeremy BeckOscars

With the Oscars airing on Sunday, and with the Manifesto having finally wrapped up its rankings of every 2014 release, it’s time to get down to brass tacks and analyze the 21 feature categories. We’ll begin with the technical categories. This post will cover “the little guys”—the fields you probably don’t care that much about but that nevertheless recognize important contributions to a movie’s overall worth.

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

NOMINEES
Big Hero 6
The Boxtrolls
How to Train Your Dragon 2
Song of the Sea
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

WILL WIN
The LEGO Movie. Guh. But with the year’s most critically and commercially successful animated film mysteriously missing the cut, there’s a bit of intrigue to be found here. The Boxtrolls has its admirers, but in all likelihood, this will come down to a battle between two studio-backed heavy hitters in Fox’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Disney’s (not Pixar’s, as my friend Katie chastised me last month) Big Hero 6. The former is arguably at a disadvantage because it’s a sequel, whereas the latter is an original production (in case you’re confused, Big Hero 6 is not the sixth installment in the “Big Hero” franchise). In the brief 13-year history of this category, the only retread to win the award is Toy Story 3 (defeating the original How to Train Your Dragon, in point of fact), and that was also a Best Picture nominee—How to Train Your Dragon 2 isn’t operating with that level of cachet. Still, it’s a more classically beautifully and stirring film than the fun but familiar Big Hero 6, and I’m guessing voters will respond to its childlike sense of wonder. How to Train Your Dragon 2 takes it.

Ranking Every Movie of 2014: The Complete List

February 17, 2015June 30, 2021 Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists

Back in January, the Manifesto resolved to rank every movie we watched in 2014. A month and a half later, that exhaustive and exhausting exercise is now complete. For recordkeeping purposes, what follows is the full list in its final form. If you’re interested in reading my thoughts on a particular movie, the hyperlink will take you to the post featuring that film’s review (ranging, depending on the quality of the movie, from 100 words to 1,000-plus). As with the individual posts, I’m providing the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings for context, as well as the name of the film’s director.

And so, here lies the Manifesto’s complete list of all 2014 movies, ranked in descending order of preference:

The Best Movies of 2014, Nos. 2 & 1: Edge of Tomorrow; Whiplash

February 17, 2015June 30, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

And at long last, we come to the two best movies of 2014. If you missed the Manifesto’s previous installments in this series, you can find them at the links below:

Nos. 10 & 9: Locke; The LEGO Movie
Nos. 8 & 7: Nightcrawler; Boyhood
Nos. 6 & 5: Guardians of the Galaxy; The Imitation Game
Nos. 4 & 3: Interstellar; Gone Girl

2. Edge of Tomorrow (directed by Doug Liman, 90% Rotten Tomatoes, 71 Metacritic). Licking its wounds after Edge of Tomorrow barely scratched out $100 million at the domestic box office, Warner Bros. rebranded the movie Live Die Repeat for its home video release. It was a savvy marketing maneuver that also subtly tapped in to the film’s structural brilliance. Groundhog Day for the blockbuster age, Edge of Tomorrow is, in essence, the most ingenious videogame ever filmed. Its hero comes upon a particular level and loses countless times, constantly honing his technique and refining his strategy in the process, before ultimately achieving victory and moving on to the next level. It’s proudly (if originally) formulaic, but within this fundamentally blocky layout is a movie of remarkable surprise and wit, one that continually reshapes its identity and locates clever crannies of intrigue and humor. It repeats itself over and over again, and yet it always feels fresh and new. Read More