Best Picture

The nominees are..

♦ Birdman or (The Unexpected
Virtue of Ignorance)
♦ Boyhood
♦ Ida
♦ Inherent Vice
♦ Mr. Turner
♦ Only Lovers Left Alive
♦ The Grand Budapest Hotel
♦ Whiplash

Boyhood lives for the small moments. As we watch Mason (Ellar Coltrane) grow up over a 12-year period, his adolescence is depicted in episodes which seem unimportant at the time, but later glow in recollection. By taking on the rhythm of everyday life and honoring the natural changes of body and face, we see a family that breathes with the humanity we know. In cinema, time is typically relative and given to manipulation. Here, though, time is made apparent, and because of its incompleteness, its fleeting nature, it’s made all the more momentous.

Best Actor

The nominees are..

♦ Ralph Feinnes, The Grand Budapest
Hotel
♦ David Oyelowo, Selma
♦Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler
♦ Michael Keaton, Birdman
♦ Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner

In Birdman, Keaton represents a character trapped with the dread of irrelevancy who simultaneously restrains himself from the repulsive limelight. It’s a weighty performance, packed with humor, vanity, pathos, and a constant paranoia which teases itself naturally, until it bursts in fiery madness.

Best Actress

The nominees are..

♦ Agata Trzebuchowska, Ida
♦ Emily Blunt, Into the Woods
♦ Marion Cotillard, The Immigrant
♦ Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
♦ Tilda Swinton, Only Lovers Left Alive

With Gone Girl, Pike creates a femme fatale of great complexity. Once a cool Manhattan socialite, then a trapped housewife, and eventually a vengeful demon, Pike plays several roles throughout, constantly shifting her personality to confound and excite. Never content with simple villainy, though, Pike always holds a strong grasp on her motivations.

Best Director

The nominees are..

♦ Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Birdman
♦ Mike Leigh, Mr. Turner
♦ Richard Linklater, Boyhood
♦ Pawel Pawlikowski, Ida
♦Wes Anderson, The Grand Budapest
Hotel

In a career full of ambitious and personal cinematic expressions, this is Linklater’s purest and most piercing. With such a grand experiment, it’d be easy to draw attention to oneself by nudging the viewer and engaging in melodrama, but Linklater doesn’t. Instead, he proves himself a master of patience, as he allows characters to find themselves and to reveal their many strengths and foibles organically. It is Linklater’s humane filmmaking that guides this unassuming gem of feeling and authenticity.

Best Original Screenplay

The nominees are..

♦Jim Jarmusch, Only Lovers Left Alive
♦Justin Simien, Dear White People
♦Mike Leigh, Mr. Turner
♦Richard Linklater, Boyhood
♦Wes Anderson and Hugo Guiness,
The Grand Budapest Hotel

With Mr. Turner, Leigh creates a script devoid of the spoon-feeding and immortalizing that so frequently pervades cinema’s Great Man biopics. Instead, by subtly pulling the genius from the ordinary and exploring the brutishness as well as the supreme eloquence of the man, we experience a film all the more revealing and resonant.