The Front Page: The SEALS – The Short Ends and Leader Annual Film Awards

It’s bandwagon jumping time, and since Hollywood is about ready to hand out its own brand of bewildering backslapping, the seven month old SE&L figures it too can champion its own choices for award winners. Oscar might have the hoopla, the designer duds, and all that staggering star power, but what the newly christened SEALS have is something the Academy can never boast – artistic integrity. Granted, the gray hairs in the group sometimes get it right – can’t argue with all their choices, Shakespeare in Love aside – and it’s possible that these new prizes will clash with conventional thinking. But when it comes right down to it, if Blockbuster Video, MTV and The National Rolling (Down a Hill) Association can declare their preferences for the year’s trophy-deserving best, why can’t we?

That being said, we have to set up some guidelines. First and foremost, as joking Johnny-Come-Latelys, we will avoid the already nominated Academy entries. If it has already been pointed out by Oscar, we will let the Gold One have his glory and simply move on. After all, nothing smacks more of Tinsel Town tonsils to tushy than agreeing on who they feel deserves Best of Year recognition. Secondly, we will try to mine the ENTIRE previous 12 months in film. We won’t skip over efforts from January or March just because most of the cachet pictures wind up playing between November and December. And finally, this isn’t a competition. Other choices may be mentioned, but the SEALS don’t play the nomination game. Either you’re a winner, or you’re not.

So, without further ado, lame jokes from a PC host, or an interpretive dance number based around the choices for Best Song, here are the 2007 SEALS:

Best Film – The Prestige

This one is easy – it was SE&L’s favorite film of 2006 and remains, even with last minute entries like Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth, the greatest artistic triumph of the cinematic calendar year. Christopher Nolan may not have a lot of mantle candy to ogle when this awards season is over, and there are still those who dismiss this movie as an overcomplicated lament configuration, but here’s one filmmaker who can rest assured that, decades from now, his magician film will be a heralded motion picture masterpiece. Can any of Oscar’s current candidates claim that?

Best Director – Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men)

Here’s a head scratcher. In a medium that frequently loves to reward visionary filmmakers with aesthetics larger than their commercial counterparts, why was Cuarón’s work in Children of Men more or less marginalized? Perhaps it has something to do with the stigma of serious science fiction thrust upon this stunningly apocalyptic film. As an illustration of society in biological freefall, and a wounded allegory to the pointlessness of armed conflict/resistance, Cuarón does what all directors dealing with war typically avoid – he shows why life is more important.

Best Actor – Toby Jones (Infamous)

If Oscar had any brains, and being a small metal statue its fairly obvious that he doesn’t, it would have dropped any one of the five nominated non-entities selected and given British thespian Jones a toss. As Truman Capote – yes AGAIN, you have a problem with that??? – dealing with his mixed motives of career vs. comfort, this version of the famed writer gets to hobnob with the spoiled and snotty while finding the sympathetic heart inside a Cold Blood-ed killer. Capote may be more serious, but Infamous and Jones are more insightful…and iconic.

Best Actress – Jenna Fischer (Lollilove)

It’s the best film that no one has seen, and it features some of the best, most self-effacing acting in a mock documentary ever. Fisher, now famous for her role on NBC’s The Office, and her Hollywood screenwriter hubby James Gunn, brainstormed this under appreciated take on confused celebrity and their equally inept charitable causes. While the film’s format can allow for shameless mugging (right James?) it also gave Fisher a chance to play both serious and spoiled, clueless and cunning. She’s likeable and loathsome at the same time. Now that’s acting.

Best Supporting Actor – David Bowie (The Prestige)

He’s barely on screen long enough to register real potency, but there is something about Ziggy Stardust as the inventor of alternating current that seems so cosmically correct. Bowie, never one for spectacular acting turns, here seems like the grand old man of electricity, reduced to hiding from the monopoly minded Thomas Edison and his incandescent thugs. For his gorgeous accent alone, so clipped it cuts through conversations like a delicate little knife, the performance deserves rewarding.

Best Supporting Actress – Rosario Dawson (Clerks II)

How is this for an acting mission impossible? You are called in by Kevin Smith, creator of the glorified geek View Askew universe, asked to play the part of a fast food manager in love with a lumpy loser and – oh yeah – the project will be a sequel to the filmmaker’s first cinematic touchstone. That’s the requirements foisted upon this fascinating performer, and Ms. Dawson stands firm, outright stealing the movie from her wisecracking cast mates. She’s smart, funny and oh so sexy.

Best Script – Mike Judge and Etan Cohen (Idiocracy)

It takes balls the size of Branson to bite the hand that’s been signing your meal ticket for the last 15 years, but that’s exactly what Beavis and Butthead creator Judge did with this amazing social satire. One of the wickedest, most mean-spirited comedies every created – in a very good way – this story of an America dumbed down plays like an inverted 1984. Big Brother may be watching, but he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing.

Best Documentary – This Film is Not Yet Rated

Talk about your ironclad cajones! Kirby Dick more or less committed career suicide for taking on the MPAA and outing the ridiculous ratings board for the self-serving studio censorship committee they really are. Using anecdotal and empirical evidence (including a mindboggling montage of indie vs. mainstream movie edits) as well as the hiring of a private investigator to get the goods on these goons, Dick did something no other filmmaker dared. He not only challenged the board’s inferred integrity. He questioned its very reason for being.

Best Animated Film – A Scanner Darkly

Believe it or not, there was a time when animated films were geared mostly toward adults. It seems only director Richard Linklater remembers that commercial corollary. With this inventive version of the Philip K. Dick novel, and his previous computer penned pastiche, Waking Life, the man behind such stellar outsider efforts as Slacker and Dazed and Confused finds the proper balance between science fiction and technological fact, creating an alternative reality worthy of the genre’s most compelling author. Forget anthropomorphized creatures. Humans remain the most compelling cartoons.

Best Foreign Film – District B13

Leave it to the French to reinvent the action film. With the free running sport Parkour as the basis for the stunt work, and a futuristic flavor that mixes equal parts Escape from New York and the Mad Max films, first time director Pierre Morel delivers a stunning high octane treat. Certainly the acting can be a bit problematic, considering most in the cast were hired for their athleticism first and their performance chops second. But the amount of invention involved is hard to top. Apparently, it takes foreign eyes to rediscover the inherent motion picture magic in human physicality.

Best Guilty Pleasure – Crank

…and leave it to the Americans to take the genre back to its veiled post-modern video game roots. In a year that saw more than its fair share of big screen crap, no filmic feces was more ludicrously enjoyable than this cinematically steroided Grand Theft Auto attempt. With King of Tripwire Testosterone Jeremy Statham in the lead – no one does pumped up punkness better than this cauliflowered character actor from the UK – and a warts and all approach to straightforward storytelling, directing pair Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have created the first geek epic. Consider this schlock nerd more than satisfied.