Last week we started to publish old "If I Had a Ballot" companions to all of our old Oscar Viewing Ballot projects (for years we've already completed for the project). If you're new here, each Monday & Wednesday I profile a different Oscar race from years past that I've completed (I'm hoping to finish watching all of the feature-length, non-documentary Oscar nominees from every year), but I have decided to add on a companion piece where I also include whom I would've nominated (not just who would've won in the case of the Oscars); we'll be doing one each Thursday until I've caught up with my project. This week, we're going to go back to 2014. For a guide, here is what our final Oscar ballot for Best Picture looked like for the category (I've also included links to all of our other 2014 contests below). Below are whom I would've nominated in each category (and whom I would've given the trophy to outside the confines of Oscar's choices).
Birdman (or the Unexplained Virtue of Ignorance)
Boyhood
The Fault in Our Stars
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
The Lego Movie
Nightcrawler
Pride
Stranger by the Lake
Under the Skin
Wild
Gold: Few films in recent memory have blown my mind quite like Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which takes an almost documentary-style approach to filmmaking (combined with ace acting from Patricia Arquette & Ethan Hawke), and makes it sing onscreen across a full decade.
Silver: Joy is hard to find at the films, and it's even tougher to find in movies about hard-scrabble life and the gay experience. This is just one of several miracles teaming from Pride, a movie with a brilliant ensemble & ace timing.
Bronze: I can't quite explain why Wild had such a profound effect on me, but as Reese Witherspoon's Cheryl continued her journey, I felt like I'd been on it with her. A moving look at the human spirit.
Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler)
Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin)
Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake)
Richard Linklater (Boyhood)
Matthew Warchus (Pride)
Gold: It's hard to argue with Richard Linklater getting this trophy, and I wonder if the Academy would've joined me had they known they'd give Gonzelez Inarritu the trophy the following year as well. The rare movie where the ambition lives up to the final product.
Silver: Dan Gilroy's seamy look at the underbelly of the modern news cycle is jarring, creepy, and far-too-realistic (particularly in the post-Trump era). A triumph from start to finish.
Bronze: Jonathan Glazer rarely makes movies, but when he does they invite conversation & controversy. This movie had its detractors who didn't like its unfolding (and its ending), but I found its dreamlike fantasy-nightmare intoxicating.
Jennifer Aniston (Cake)
Scarlett Johansson (Under the Skin)
Julianne Moore (Still Alice)
Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl)
Reese Witherspoon (Wild)
Gold: This was the start of the Witherspoon Renaissance, as far as I'm concerned. Reese has always been good, but with Wild she began to demand the kind of projects that someone of her talent deserves, and it paid off with a moving look at motherhood, womanhood, & perseverance.
Silver: Rosamund Pike's career since Gone Girl has been filled with the occasional misses, as this chameleon-like actress tried to escape her Amazing Amy, but that's only because this role left such an impression-a disarming (and occasionally quite feminist) look at one woman's quest for satisfaction.
Bronze: Julianne Moore might have won this Oscar as a tribute to her full career, but that doesn't mean that she didn't truly deserve it. She finds angles in the unfairness of dementia, and shows us the scary reality of relying upon others to love us when we're "gone."
Ralph Fiennes (The Grand Budapest Hotel)
Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler)
Oscar Isaac (A Most Violent Year)
Michael Keaton (Birdman)
Channing Tatum (Foxcatcher)
Gold: Jake Gyllenhaal, like Reese Witherspoon, spent several years in the wilderness between his first critical run & his second, but boy did he know how to bring back the fire with this role, finding the cruel sociopath that the modern news media lusts for.
Silver: I think next we'll go with Channing Tatum, who gets the hardest part in Foxcatcher (it's always harder to play characters that are susceptible than those doing the seduction), and plays against type with the insight of a thespian.
Bronze: Ralph Fiennes is potentially my favorite working actor, so he shows up on these lists frequently. That said, he rarely gets to show off his comedic skills with such deft perfection as he does in Grand Budapest Hotel, a witty (and occasionally lonely) creation.
Patricia Arquette (Boyhood)
Jessica Chastain (A Most Violent Year)
Laura Dern (Wild)
Rene Russo (Nightcrawler)
Tilda Swinton (Snowpiercer)
Gold: Arquette has the tough job of creating a story arc for a character across a literal decade, re-inhabiting the same woman (and her lost dreams) while also showing her evolution. It's a perfect role for an actress that has often gone under-appreciated at the movies.
Silver: Speaking of actresses that have gone under-appreciated at the movies, few actresses had a quick flame & then get to just play Thor's mother more than Rene Russo, who has her take on the Faye Dunaway character in Network, but adds dimensions of fear, ambition, & vulnerability that rival even that titanic performance.
Bronze: Jessica Chastain's work as a mob wife who knows more (and encourages more) than she lets on publicly could've been cliche, but in her hands she makes it a full movie-star turn.
Adam Driver (This is Where I Leave You)
Ethan Hawke (Boyhood)
Logan Lerman (Fury)
Ian McKellen (The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies)
Ben Schnetzer (Pride)
Gold: I waver between the two (this is a case where I'm picking someone different than I did in 2014), but I'd go with Hawke upon retrospect for this win, as he does all of the things Arquette does, but does so while also trying to mine his former matinee idol status for all of its lost potential.
Silver: Schnetzer gets the best role in Pride, and he does marvelous things with it, giving us a man who knows that his clock is ticking but won't let on to the world his fears, just trying to live as vibrantly as possible.
Bronze: If you ever want tangible proof to the answer of "is Adam Driver sexy?" you need to watch This is Where I Leave You, where he plays a charming cad & the quintessential youngest child in a family of disfunction.
Birdman
Boyhood
Nightcrawler
Pride
Stranger by the Lake
Gold: We're going to continue to honor Boyhood (I'm just now realizing it has yet to lose a trophy...and I don't entirely know if that changes), as writing a film that feels cogent & like it's planned across a full decade is an impossible accomplishment.
Silver: Nightcrawler is the kind of movie that sticks in your gut long after you see it largely because it is so full of ugly truth. Gilroy's screenplay never shies away from the monsters that it's uncovering.
Bronze: Dying is Easy. Comedy is Hard. Making a movie about a tragic period of two groups of people's lives into an uplifting, beautiful, but never dismissive experience is the real miracle though, and that's what comes in Pride.
Gone Girl
The Lego Movie
Under the Skin
Wild
Winter Sleep
Gold: I'll start out with Wild for this trophy, as it has a difficult book to adapt into a movie, and does a great job of making a woman who is attempting to live in the present feel like she's authentically looking back at the past.
Silver: Close behind it would be Gone Girl, which Gillian Flynn adapted from her own work. Gone Girl needs to function like a movie that makes sense when you know how it's going to end, and Flynn does that without ever revealing its secrets.
Bronze: I don't always buy into a movie just being a "director's triumph" as you can't make a decent film without at least some semblance of a good screenplay. That's the case for Under the Skin, which is another movie that has to meander through its secrets.
The Boxtrolls
The Lego Movie
Song of the Sea
Gold: I'm going three-wide as per usual in this category (which it's questionable if it needs to exist at all), but particularly in 2014 as this was one of the weaker years for animation this decade. That said, The Lego Movie could've been a giant commercial & instead it finds comedy & heart with Chris Pratt's best film performance to date (I'm sorry, I know the internet hates him, but I can't deny he's well-cast here).
Silver: Laika would've never missed when it comes to my personal animation ballots, and that's born out here with The Box Trolls' well-structured plot and fantastic art direction.
Bronze: Tomm Moore's movies don't always feel like their scripts live up to the hype of the actual movie at-hand, but they are always a feast for the eyes, and that's surely the case with Song of the Sea, a gorgeous cascade of indigo & white.
Birdman
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Under the Skin
Wild
Gold: Under the Skin is obviously an alien feature, but it's one that uses sound to underline the otherworldly nature of the film. Bonus points for the way the sound from some of the residents of the city is almost spoken as if from another planet, perfectly melding with the movie's motif.
Silver: Few films capture the percussive beats of Manhattan better than Birdman, which finds a beautiful echo to the St. James Theater & highlights the sharp, rapid dialogue onstage of all of these on-edge thespians.
Bronze: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has the difficult task of making conversations between walking apes (who are of course figures in CGI) and humans feel authentic & within the same universe. It does that exactly.
The Babadook
Captain America: Winter Soldier
Fury
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Unbroken
Gold: Unlike Oscar in most years, I can tell the difference between Mixing/Editing (hence why there's only one film repeated here). I also can tell when a Marvel film is going above-and-beyond with its tech categories, as Captain America does (that Toby Jones narration/missile strike sequence alone earns this trophy).
Silver: Unbroken truly stands apart from many other wartime dramas in the way it uses surround sound to underline the urgency of the men onscreen, held captive by a whirl of bullets at their ears.
Bronze: The Babadook is a difficult movie for me to love, it was almost painful to watch it frightened me so much in certain scenes. But I cannot deny that the sound work, and the shrieking jumps, hit an artistry few horror films approach with their aural capacities.
Fury
The Imitation Game
Interstellar
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Under the Skin
Gold: Mica Levi's score to Jackie two years later would win her an Oscar nomination, but she should have gotten the trophy outright in 2014 for her gorgeous, noir-inspired odes in Under the Skin.
Silver: I'm aware that I'm a sucker for such things (I love a robust, epic score), but Howard Shore's work throughout the Hobbit series finds playful newness to go with motifs we already know by heart, and that's more difficult than you'd imagine.
Bronze: I'll pick the wondrous whirl of The Imitation Game here, one of the few elements in the film that I felt rose above its relatively formulaic look at the life of Alan Turing.
"Everything is Awesome," The Lego Movie
"Glory," Selma
"I'm Not Gonna Miss You," Glen Campbell...I'll Be Me
"The Last Goodbye," The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
"Lost Stars," Begin Again
Gold: Begin Again itself never lives up to Once, but the soundtrack can occasionally rival it, most of all with "Lost Stars," which always makes me feel youthful & as if I, too, am starting a new life chapter.
Silver: Glen Campbell's ode to his dementia (and how he's "not gonna miss you") got harder after his death, and is the sort of song that as you watch the people you love start to fade, echoes alongside his most meaningful work.
Bronze: Of all of the songs in the Hobbit franchise, few rival "The Last Goodbye," lovingly sung by Billy Boyd (who comes back to say goodbye to this franchise). The movies were never as beloved as their predecessors, but the wellspring of emotion you get from this would beg to differ.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Mr. Turner
A Most Violent Year
Snowpiercer
Gold: Mr. Turner is glorious, the kind of movie that you could almost watch on silent it's so marvelous to encounter, and while the cinematography (rightfully) got its due here, I can't deny that the sets, brimming with details & stuff (oh the stuff) to give character to every corner is breathtaking.
Silver: Surely Snowpiercer deserved recognition from Oscar at least here, right? The movie is a long train track ode to production design, giving each cart its own little chapter in this world.
Bronze: The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of those nominations that is largely due to one giant set-piece (this enormous hotel), but it brings such personality & life to the film that who am I to not include it?
Belle
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Pride
Selma
Mr. Turner
Gold: Again, there's little denying the genius going on in the tech categories for Mr. Turner, which feels both period and like clothing that was actually worn during the period, a worn realism in the fabric that is hard to come by in movies of this era.
Silver: Genius Milena Canonero does breathtaking work, particularly in the way she costumes each character to tell us more about themselves, while never abandoning the elevated reality of Wes Anderson's universe.
Bronze: Selma is not a movie that you'd think on first glance is a costuming film, but watch the way that the entire cast gives us authenticity with their clothes, and how you slowly are able to find fashionable characters (who reflect their personality). Love that detailing.
Birdman
The Homesman
Ida
Interstellar
Mr. Turner
Gold: The perfection at work with Mr. Turner truly comes to a head with its Cinematography. The way that Dick Pope somehow makes the movie recreate the actual paintings of JMW Turner was jaw-dropping (I literally gasped at parts).
Silver: The "uncut" camerawork that Emmanuel Lubezki brings to Birdman is insane. This was his second of three consecutive nominations, and it's hard to deny him his due...just a titanic achievement.
Bronze: I'm going to go with Ida, which does have the obvious calling card of being in black-and-white, but its more pertinent lensing is in the liberal way it features our lead character in closeup...always upfront, eternally unknowable.
Birdman
Boyhood
Nightcrawler
Stranger by the Lake
Under the Skin
Gold: Boyhood would've been impossible to achieve without flawless editing, and that's what we get here. A story told over a full decade that comes together, unrelenting but always cogent.
Silver: Birdman is obviously meant to be seen as a cinematographer's achievement, since the camera never ends, but in reality it's an editor that is helping Lubezki achieve that effect, and I still can't quite comprehend how this didn't get Oscar nominated from people who should've known better.
Bronze: Again, Nightcrawler might have some legs up as a result of editing trickery (that extended car crash at the end is phenomenal), but that doesn't mean what comes out isn't pure (horrifying) magic.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Godzilla
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Interstellar
Under the Skin
Gold: Rewatching Avatar recently, I was struck by the fact that while that film has outreach to our modern blockbusters, it's really the Apes films that have become the gold standard when it comes for CGI-figures onscreen...this is the best of the trilogy.
Silver: It would have made this list for the giant planet of water trick alone, but Interstellar proves that even when Christopher Nolan is on shaky ground with his plot, he can always make what you're seeing unbelievable.
Bronze: We've been here before, but the giant effects of The Hobbit can't just be dismissed because the bar is so high. Particularly the final icy battles with Thorin standout as a triumph.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
A Most Violent Year
Selma
Snowpiercer
Gold: It says something when you have one of the most iconic stars in modern cinema onscreen & she's so transformed that you spend half the movie saying "is that Tilda Swinton?" Such is the case for the residents of the Grand Budapest Hotel.
Silver: It was the year of Tilda in this category as her gender blind villain heads off Snowpiercer, a movie brimming with realistic (and occasionally grotesque) makeup work.
Bronze: Some of what we've seen in the Hobbit we've been to before, but the introduction of whole creature armies, combined with Middle Earth's most realistic battle scenes makes for riveting drama in the final chapter of Peter Jackson's tale.
Also in 2014: Picture, Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Documentary Short, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Previously in 2014
