Best of 2013: Direction

Best Director

• Clio Barnard for The Selfish Giant, for working from an emotionally wrecking palette of hardscrabbling working-class dynamics and social realism, achieving bold depth of naturalism and narrative velocity, without The Arbor's oppressiveness.

• Ethan Coen & Joel Coen for Inside Llewyn Davis, for conceiving an ill-fated protagonist in a misanthropic hew but veining his hardships with an emotionally tender throughline, subtly invoking dusty, era-specific nostalgia and bruising, ornery cheekiness to do so.

• Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity, for being prodigious in scope, ambition and craft without feeling airless or mechanical in execution or style, achieving a limber braiding of intimacy, empathy and urgency in each of his marvelous sequence constructions.

• Claire Denis for Bastards, for setting up taut, shard-like frames, surfaces and insinuations while balancing sensuous and stoic approaches to confrontational material, and for linking the film's seedy undercurrents and social-political adroitness in ways that serve the story cogently.

• Steve McQueen for 12 Years a Slave, for seeing trickier, more truthful angles of observation in Solomon's story than I suspect Ridley's otherwise good script does, employing his distinctive strengths of elevated style to evoke a devastating ordeal.

Honorable Mentions begin with Joshua Oppenheimer for The Act of Killing, who immediately grabs our attention with the audacity of his conceit and, barring the one little quibble about insufficient context, keeps the novelty of it sobering, head-spinning and world-crushing; Sofia Coppola for The Bling Ring, whose gifts with mood and rhythms feel riskier than they usually and more adventurous when applied to its satirical bent; and Andrew Dosunmu for Mother of George, who manages to distribute cultural and familial unease across a bevy of memorable characters and bracing visual schemes.

The rest of the honorable mentions are filled out by (in alphabetical order): Noah Baumbach for Frances Ha; Xavier Dolan for I Killed My Mother; Spike Jonze for Her; Abbas Kiarostami for Like Someone in Love; Harmony Korrine for Spring Breakers; Terrence Malick for To the Wonder; Alexandre Moors for Blue Caprice; Kim Nguyen for War Witch; Ulrich Seidl for Paradise: Love

Best of 2013: Cinematography

The last of the technical categories! Only four more categories to go until we can put this year behind us.

Best Cinematography

• Emanuel Lubezki for Gravity, for taking this technology to bolder and more excitingly resourceful places than his effects-driven predecessors in the Oscar-equivalent category ever have, finding a rich distillation of light, space, lensing and action-specific mobility all within its green-screen confines.

• Bruno Delbonnel for Inside Llewyn Davis, for devising a frigid yet crystalline palette that serves key themes, settings and moods while demonstrating a remarkable sensitivity to faces and silhouettes, and for bouncing so deceptively off of the Coens' visual conceptions.

• Bradford Young for Mother of George, because beyond the fact that he's one of the few DPs working who can favorably light darker-complected actors, he's also tremendously adept at enriching emotions, tones and dramatic textures, finding vivid and engrossing observational angles to set the scene with.

• Benoit Debie for Spring Breakers, for integrating a hypnotic gallery of mobile lensing and neon, sun-kissed and sterile sources of light to relay a mystical yet deftly investigative glance into the spring break ethos, if only for its first 40-50 minutes alone.

• Emanuel Lubezki for To the Wonder, for sustaining Malick's familiar kinship with capturing crunchy, gold-leafed landscapes and ecstatic angles of natural light and allowing both to serve as a microcosm for the film's living and dying relationship at its core.

Honorable Mentions were tough to boil down in such a strong year, but I hated having to exclude the fabulous streetlight gleam of Bastards; the dreamy excess of The Bling Ring; the unflinching detail of 12 Years a Slave's camera; even more gliding beatification from Bradford Young with Ain't Them Bodies Saints; and the awe-inspiring mechanics behind

Leviathan's almost-literally-down-in-the-gears visual sculpting. These five would have made a worthy lineup all on their own, so consider them my extreme honorable mentions.

From a cinemtography perspective, I also liked (in alphabetical order): All is Lost, The Grandmaster, Her, Only God Forgives, Post Tenebras Lux, Prisoners, and The Selfish Giant. And no, I was not impressed by Nebraska's cinematography.

Best of 2013: Supporting Actress

Best Supporting Actress

• Amy Adams for Her, for eliciting the film's most generous and delicate gaze through which we view Theodore, assembling a sharp economy of warmth, sensitivity, communication and frustration and never once allowing any of these facets to box Amy in as the obvious alternative to Samantha.

• Scarlett Johansson for Don Jon, for infusing full-flavored enthusiasm and lived-in personality into a regressive caricature, embracing her voice and voluptuous body language to embody a real person with real flaws/strengths and to engage with comedic and dramatic beats in significant ways.

• Lupita Nyong'o for 12 Years a Slave, for refurbishing the script's propensity for takes on character types with a distillation of angular forms of speech, amplified physicality, and an honest approach to a sympathetic character all of which make the idea of this girl a more potent concept than it is on paper.

• Léa Seydoux for Blue is the Warmest Color, for candidly suggesting what it is about Emma that attracts Adele's voracious gaze, hewing to a chewy, cerebral concept of her sexuality, and for the strands of composure, aggression, and desire that manifest in the break-up and post-break-up scenes.

• Emma Watson for The Bling Ring, for deceptively integrating Nikki into the middleground of the group and narrative curves and staying true to such a scabrous and tetchy satirical portrait when navigating a wide range of panic, petulance and repentance, slyly allowing all to play in her favor.

Honorable Mentions: These five ladies are so terrific (and if I'm being honest, were also the five nominees that I had the easiest time settling on) that I didn't even feel as bad as I usually do about leaving smaller, less high-regarded performers/performances out of the shortlist that would nevertheless make fine nominees on their own, like Ela Piplits in Museum Hours, who enters about halfway through the film for one guest lecture on Brueghel, flirting with deliberate didacticism while fully submerging herself as just one fascinating component of a bigger portrait; Julie Bataille in Bastards, who balances frazzled, petty and abrasive reactions to traumatizing news and piles even more layers to them when we find out information that only she was privy to; Sarah Paulson in 12 Years a Slave, who utilizes razor-sharp actorly instincts in vivifying this unnerving portrait of a slave-master's wife who turns out to be just as vicious as her husband; Angela McEwan in Nebraska, who sweeps in at just the right moment when the film is beginning to feel flabby and provides its most poignant and fully felt grace notes as Woody's former fling; and Mickey Sumner for Frances Ha, who is tasked with making Sophie the spitting spiritual image of the titular character (only with different hair) and then her foil, while managing to kindle a whole off-screen history behind their friendship.

Further honorable mentions are rounded out by Alfre Woodard in 12 Years a Slave; Verena Lehbauer in Paradise: Hope; Nadezhda Markina in In the Fog; Kristin Scott Thomas in Only God Forgives; Maggie Siff in Concussion; Suzanne Clement in I Killed My Mother; and Rebecca Jenkins in Stories We Tell.

Best of 2013: Costumes

Look at me being really close to finishing a project. And in such semi-consistent doses, too!

Best Costume Design

• Michael Wilkinson for American Hustle, for the too-many-to-count miracle-numbers worked on Adams, alone, as well as the constant button rearranging on Cooper's part-detective, part-disco hothead; nearly everyone looks like they're playing a role in the best way possible.

• Suzy Benzinger for Blue Jasmine, for her distinguished efforts in distilling the looks of wealthy New York socialites and California bohemians and making both familiar Allen tropes seem less generic and built more from a character than they have since Bullets Over Broadway.

• Stacey Battat for The Bling Ring, for terrifically rendered and appropriate choices for the characters as well as its easy-target satire, finding model-shoot-ready garments for both the celebrities' stolen fashion items and the "normal" clothes. Bonus points for the courtroom apparel.

• Francois Barbeau & Xavier Dolan for Laurence Anyways, for warmly suggesting real emotions, real complications, and real people beneath the (gorgeously designed) period-specific affectation, even though I wish a little more effort had gone into Laurence's overall look.

• Mabolaji Dawodu for Mother of George, for playing into the film's visual motifs so beautifully and preserving the tonal reticence from which its observations emerge, adding just as many richly arranged textures to its characters as its exquisite cinematography does.

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order): 12 Years a Slave, Behind the Candelabra, Blancanieves, Fill the Void, The Grandmaster, The Great Gatsby, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Lovelace, No

Missed: The Invisible Woman. *sniffle* Another great letdown of 2013 is that I never saw Oprah's track suit in Lee Daniels' The Butler.

Best of 2013: Ensemble Cast

Best Ensemble Cast

• Bale, Adams, Cooper, Lawrence, Renner, C.K., Rohm, et. al. for American Hustle, for capitalizing on sizably showy parts and Russell's stirring of star personas (even Lawrence benefits even though she looks out of place in that role), gaining momentum with the amount of actors on screen.

• Broussard, Chang, Watson, Farmiga, Julien, Mann, et. al. for The Bling Ring, for carving distinct personalities and quiet textures, even those who only have a handful of scenes to do so, nailing the tricky temperament of its central high-schoolers while spryly playing off of one another.

• Gerwig, Sumner, Esper, Driver, Gummer, d'Amboise, et. al. for Frances Ha, for successfully etching a world outside of Frances's own navel-gazing through a conduit of various lively comic personas, all so crucial in telegraphing important character detail and sustaining its bitter humor.

• Metzger, Jasper, Purnell, Solano, Bumb, McDonald, et. al. for I Want Your Love, for stimulating the kind of casual sensitivity to camaraderie and romantic bonds that can only come from a troupe of unprofessional but incisive actors, landing subtle variations on the ways that friends/lovers interact.

• Bernal, Castro, Gnecco, Zegers, Montero, Vadell, et. al. for No, for earnestly selling the film's wavering tone of winking, tongue-in-cheek humor and urgent historical testimony, and for evoking the tangible hazards of pulling off this kind of project under Pinochet's rule.

Honorable Mentions (Alphabetic Order): Behind the Candelabra, Computer Chess, Fill the Void, A Hijacking, In the Fog, Mother of George, Paradise: Love, Prisoners, Something in the Air, The Spectacular Now

Hey, What About:  12 Years a Slave? Solid work from many key players, but not enough interplay with background characters if you ask me; August: Osage County? It's right with my disappointment that a sizable number of its terrific cast couldn't match Streep, Roberts, Cooper, Nicholson, or Shepard, resulting in the occasional out-of-synch sequence. Dallas Buyers Club? Which managed a SAG nomination with a script that neglects anyone that isn't Ron, Rayon or Eve, leaving its recognition there a little puzzling to me since it gives its side players so little to do as a result. Lee Daniels' The Butler? I unfortunately missed it, the combination of a busy semester, faltering Oscar buzz, and worrisome reactions ending in me failing to ever catch up with it. Which is sad, since I kind of loved The Paperboy (it probably would've been a contender for this category if I had ever gotten around to it last year).

Best of 2013: Sets

Best Art Direction/Production Design

• Adam Stockhausen, Alice Baker, et. al. for 12 Years a Slave, for finding perfect objects to strike McQueen's fascination with wrenching as much story detail and atmosphere out of a scene, like the makeshift pencil/ink or the gears of the boat, and for evoking the dramatic backdrop of the plantation.

• Andy Nicholson, Rosie Goodwin, Joanne Woollard, et. al. for Gravity, because every element of its story, barring the terrifically chaotic clouds of debris, is right there in its minimalist yet sweepingly interactive set; keeping us in constant stress over what will or won't work in Ryan's favor.

• K.K. Barrett, Gene Serdena, et. al. for Her, for avoiding the temptation to overtly futurize cityscapes, instead filling them with bold, primary colors, staying in tune with Jonze's airy atmosphere while composing a completely plausible evolution of technology.

• Unccredited for Museum Hours, for utilizing so many pre-existing locations that an art direction credit would feel redundant, allowing the museum's paintings and sculptures to pass back and forth between the still life depictions of city and character, existing within and mirroring one another.

• Jack Fisk, Jeanette Scott, et. al. for To the Wonder, for keying up Malick's relationship with nature and linking it to the film's contrasting of the pastoral romantic rapture of France and alluring but antiseptic Americana, and for the purely expressionistic but plausible details of the house.

Extreme Honorable Mentions begin with two animated films, the first being The Wind Rises, which earnestly evokes the dangers of its setting and injects it with the same bouts of whimsy we've come to expect from Miyazaki, and the second is the more flat-out fanciful, Ernest and Celestine, which does like to show off just a bit, but emerges with such genuine and loving ardor with its clever world-building. Speaking of show-offy, Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways starts at 11 with its production values and never quite dials it down during its nearly three-hour running time, from the disco to the house inhabited by the family of drag queens to the cloudbursts of clothing, each frameable image is a keeper, and Behind the Candelabra also gets a glamorous (albeit much more shimmery) treatment to its sets, but in ways that emit the nuance of the story and central romance, beautifully.

Further honorable mentions go to The Selfish Giant, for painting such a stirring, Kes-like portrait of an impoverished milieu; The Bling Ring, for going in a completely opposite direction and showing us a world outfitted by excessive shrines to people's own successes; The Great Beauty, for managing to at least thrill visually where its script doesn't, going all-in on the ridiculous constitutions of Art that its protagonist would be irritated by, even if  I wish the movie as a whole felt less cowed by the familiar techniques that they connote; Only God Forgives, for being unabashed formalistic erotica, even if merely acknowledging it makes me sick to my stomach (which, I'm sure, is exactly what Refn intended); Antiviral, for that amazing billboard of Hannah Geist, and its acerbic construction of a dystopian universe; Mother of George, for using the city, the apartments, and the places of worship to evoke a specific mood and psychology of its characters; and Saving Mr. Banks, for the complimentary Pooh Bear, and for other fun Disney-related product placements nods.

Best of 2013: Screenplays

Best Original Screenplay

• Jean-Pol Fargeau & Claire Denis for Bastards, for slipping into so many cryptically rattled heads while concealing their sawtoothed secrets and motives, ingeniously operating within and testing the formal limits of noir/mystery storytelling mechanics.

• Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig for Frances Ha, for conceiving such a slinky and apropos refusal of a more rigid structure and a specific, tragically funny portrait of one of the most daunting protagonists to come from the often perfunctory American indie trend of late-20s ennui.

• Ethan Coen & Joel Coen for Inside Llewyn Davis, for layering in deliberate steps instead of simply piling on static, misanthropic oddities, supplying sad, ambiguous, tender-hearted, and tragicomic edges to a story haunted by unspoken grief.

• Abbas Kiarostami for Like Someone in Love, for imbuing his knack for mystery, intimacy and elliptical characterization into a delicate and concise polygon of the types of love (and their implications) that constantly shapeshift with the roles that the two protagonists play.

• Darci Piccoult for Mother of George, for adorning a semi-commonplace story with peculiar notes and risky insights into the culture and practices of the family at its core, withholding enough information to keep it from feeling too on the nose.

Honorable Mentions kick off with a trio of scripts that the Academy sprung for, but ultimately brought one too many reservations for me to embrace quite as fully as their cohorts, starting with Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke for Before Midnight (I know some, including the Academy, consider it adapted, but I think it belongs here), who craft some stellar sequences like the hotel argument or the Byzantine-era church conversation that come very close to matching the incisiveness of their predecessors while infusing the glowing personal attachment of the trilogy's protagonists and our own investment in their possibly crumbling relationship. But, especially with return visits, the film as a whole shows its stress marks from the weight of audience expectation, forcing awkward, desperate-to-please exposition and thematic foreshadowing in its first 30 minutes or so, which I think is most evident during the film's choppiest scene in which it actually literalizes these concerns as Jesse is having a very long conversation with his writer friend about the large expectations held in regards to his third novel. We then move to Eric Warren Singer & David O. Russell who present American Hustle as a vertiginous amalgam of Russell's typically bristly showcase of character/actor personalities and loopy, caper-soaked plot tropes that aligns so smoothly with the director's sensibilities that it's easy to dismiss how the script isn't entirely up to the tasks laid out by its modest ambitions, focusing a little too intensely on the con by the last act while letting the initially spiny entanglements of its characters fall slightly to the wayside. But some of the script's most bracing moments are a result of the way it's narrative is sculpted, so it's hard to complain too much. Meanwhile, the script that walked away with the whole thing, Spike Jonze's Her, spins a tale from the director's highest concept yet (give or take Being John Malkovich) and takes a distinct and achingly tender-hearted swerve into an emotionally honest adult parable. My only wish is that it would have taken a somewhat subtler approach to its themes to balance the softness of Jonze's tones, and that it could've been about 15 minutes shorter, but, like Hustle, there's just too much to savor here to fixate on the negatives. With my recent second screening of Hustle fresh in my mind, I still think that I'd be a Her voter, though I find a lot of merits in both. There were admirable aspects in the remaining Original Screenplay nominees (the vivid father-son bonds of Nebraska, the tight past and present weavings of Blue Jasmine, and the impassioned but ambiguous relationship between Ron's rancid politics in Dallas Buyers Club), but others that unfortunately rankle (like Nebraska's flat jokes and reliance on stereotypes, Blue Jasmine's generic and unconvincing conceptions, or Dallas Buyers Club's clunkier emotional devices). While I don't revile any of these scripts, it's still hard for me to accept that all three managed to sneak in over Inside Llewyn Davis (or any of my other favorites, for that matter, not that they actually had a chance).

Taking a significant step away from the movies on Oscar's list we'll now turn our attention to scripts that were nowhere near their radar, like Kim Nguyen's familiarly textured but unexpectedly subversive script for his coming-of-age child-soldier drama, War Witch; Ulrich Seidl & Veronika Franz's best entry into the Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Love, which is relentlessly austere, yes, but is counterbalanced by a richly realized protagonist and surprising swerves into empathy; Jem Cohen's spatially complex and involving world-building of Museum Hours, which balances just the right amount of humor, intellectualism and specificity to keep it on its feet; Travis Matthews' revealing and concise, I Want Your Love, which steadily unfolds the relations and details of its tightly-knit queer community with warmth, laughs and introspection; Xavier Dolan's bravely messy debut script, I Killed My Mother, which somehow manages to be the young filmmaker's crowning achievement of jagged, multilateral perspectives on relationships, whether romantic or familial (haven't seen Tom at the Farm or Mommy as of yet, though, not that the opportunity to do so has arisen in the states); Brandon Cronenberg's (yes, that Cronenberg) vicious and tightly-wound body horror-as-satire, Antiviral, which grows wittier and tougher in its conceptions and plotting the further it goes; and Stacie Passon's modest but candidly detailed character study, Concussion, which can feel contrived and just a smidge judgmental but stokes real compassion and tough-edged convictions.

Best Adapted Screenplay

• John Ridley for 12 Years a Slave, for overriding some overly florid dialogue that, I imagine, feels more awkward actually spoken than it does on the page with powerful construction, historical insight, emotional investment, and subjective POV, treating the subject of slavery with unflinching honesty.

• Sofia Coppola for The Bling Ring, for acclimating her laconic and diaphanous gifts to an acerbic and unusually witty stranger-than-fiction satire, painting characters, loyalties, celebrities, commodities, and chains of events in a deliciously detached fashion.

• Sergei Loznitsa for In the Fog, for imposing a workable, patiently-structured narrative onto the bones of the livid, nonlinear dreamscape of his previous film, still probing his own concerns regarding Russian society and leading us to predatory places no one else would go.

• Pedro Peirano for No, for balancing the tricky trigonometry of political tensions in Pinochet-era Chile and of the allegiances held by its central characters, sliding nimbly between the beats of its Unbelievable True Story conceit without sacrificing context or spirit.

• Clio Barnard for The Selfish Giant, for starting with Oscar Wilde's four-page, allegorical children's fairy tale and erupting into a bustling story of childhood, friendship and social realism, gracing its disparate narrative with thematic parallels that pay crushing emotional dividends.

Honorable Mentions do not include Captain Phillips, Short Term 12, The Wolf of Wall Street, or Phiilomena, all of which inspired their ardent devotees. I like Captain Phillips' script the most, which lends surprising complexity to the Somalians, but gets a hefty amount of assistance from Greengrass's direction and its actors. It was close, but not quite Honorable Mention-worthy. The next two on the other hand had some intriguing moments,  particularly those catered to their leads, but were ultimately too inconsistent to benefit from any of them. The Wolf of Wall Street's script especially feels undone by its director's commitment to ornate but colorless scenarios and by flabby improvisations that abstract any sense of the full-veined characters that many of its fans seemed to find it chock-full of. As previously mentioned, I never saw Philomena.

It wasn't exactly a banner year for this category, but there were a few scripts that I was sad to exclude from the shortlist, like Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck, Shane Morris & Dean Wellins' spiffy and progressive repackaging of Disney formula with Frozen's moving story and convincing characters, retaining the sweetness and beguiling innocence of its kid-friendly core; Abdellatif Kechiche & Ghalia Lacroix's sprawling and multi-layered portrait of Blue is the Warmest Color's protagonist and the relationship explored between she and her beloved; Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber's funny, engaging and sympathetic teen dramedy, The Spectacular Now, which has more interesting things to say about blooming young love and misplaced affection than their (500) Days of Summer script; Richard LaGravenese's smartly proportioned breakdown of Behind the Candelabra's romance of convenience that turns into one of tetchy necessity, landing empathetic tenderness and playful flamboyance even through its appropriately bittersweet final images; and Hayao Miyazaki's unapologetically sentimental adaptation of his own comic, The Wind Rises, which coaxes his typical fondness for odd and lovely flights of visual fancy and fairy tale-ish conceits, but shows him chasing thornier ideas than he has in years.

I gave some thought to showing Tracy Letts some love in the Honorable Mentions, if only for August: Osage County's best moments, like Barbara taking control of the house during the raiding of Violet's drug supplies or the dinner and fish lunch scenes. But, as easy and justifiable as it is to blame John Wells and Weinstein interference (Jesus, that ending) on the overall film being underwhelming, I'm not so sure that Letts's script is doing the film that many favors either, despite a few compelling scenes. As much as Wells fails to deliver on Letts's acrid dramatic spark, the script itself never feels distinctively reformatted for its shift in medium while its best scenes alternate with stale, self-satisfied calculations about its characters, half of which only click as much as they do because of its MVP actors.