The Grey

Perceived reality has a habit of becoming actual reality when it comes to the Academy Awards. It was with that in mind that we decided to funnel whatever influence we may have into "We'd Like to Help the Academy," an online column launched last month in order to highlight the outliers that should be nominated rather than wonder aloud about which front-runners will.

We first drew attention to a screenplay worthy of recognition -- Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt's Oslo, August 31st. About a recovering drug addict named Anders on what may prove to be the last day of his life, the film's observational approach reveals an ear for naturalistic dialogue and deft use of voice-over. Oslo is seeped in memory and loss, but it's so sensitively written that its beauty resonates as much as (if not more than) its sadness.

"The world's been ending ever since it started and we've been dying ever since we were born."

The output of Abel Ferrara, a never-nominated New Yorker responsible for the likes of Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, may have been too superficially similar to that of Martin Scorsese for the most acclaimed stretch of his career to gain as much positive notice as it deserved. But as he's gotten more lo-fi and austere in recent years, Ferrara has also foregrounded the qualities that always made him a remarkable auteur: quietly intense attention to his troubled characters and a deceptively understated visual sense.

4:44 Last Day on Earth, his mostly-maligned take on our last night of existence centered around a boho couple played by Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh, was not only one of the best films of the year but also yet another showcase for its director's distinct skill behind the camera. Dealing in Skype conversations and introspection rather than the usual extinction-event accouterments, it's most memorable some nine months later for the calm with which it confronts the end of the world -- an inversion of a tired genre that few others would have handled with such restraint.

Beware of passion

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When I decided on Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea as my Best Actress pick for this column, her chances of getting similarly recognized elsewhere seemed slim. That changed considerably when she won the New York Film Critics Circle award and got nominated for a Golden Globe, but highlighting a performance I admired less just for the sake of going with an outlier felt somehow disingenuous. (Were I to do that, it would probably be Anne Marsen in Girl Walk // All Day.)

The point of this column is not merely to come up with a few out-there choices, but rather to highlight people and movies that a.) genuinely deserve them and b.) somehow fit into the Academy's own framework. This was true of Matthew McConaughey and Besedka Watson, it's true of my as-yet unpublished choices for Best Picture and Best Director, and it's true of Weisz.

Denis Lavant in Holy Motors

In February of this year, the Academy gave their Best Actor award to a Frenchman whose film was both a celebration of cinema and a lamentation if its bygone days (Jean Dujardin in The Artist). They'd do well to repeat that feat again, albeit with an entirely different performance: Denis Lavant in Holy Motors. An absolutely chameleonic disappearance into a character who has several different facets in and of himself -- Lavant is listed 11 different times in the end credits, just to give you an idea -- the actor's turn as the enigmatic Monsieur Oscar is both hilarious and disturbing, often within the same scene.

The film itself is Leos Carax's first feature in 13 years; watch it and you'll quickly get a sense of why it took so long to secure financing. An always bizarre, sometimes surreal tour through Paris, it follows our hero as he goes from one "appointment" to another in a stretch white limo. Sometimes he kills people, while on other occasions he merely engages in motion-capture sex. This is all as flat-out bonkers as it sounds, with Lavant serving as the main onscreen ringleader.

"You just gotta keep on strippin' man, S-T-R-I-P-P-I-N."

For a long time I thought of Matthew McConaughey as an actor whom I liked more than he deserved. He built some good faith with Dazed and Confused and other early roles, yes, but that had all but diminished by the time Fool's Gold, Failure to Launch, and others of their ilk cemented his status as the go-to guy for bland rom-coms.

But his bit part in the sporadically funny Tropic Thunder was a bright spot, not least because it was a reminder of how effective his natural charm and charisma can be when filtered through the proper channels. McConaughey next showed signs of life in last year's The Lincoln Lawyer before hitting the 2012 trifecta: Bernie, Killer Joe, and Magic Mike.

Finally, after years of me and a lot of others hoping he'd do it, the often shirtless Texan came into his own in a series of roles that both played to and transcended his strengths. (He was also in two movies that premiered at Cannes this year -- Lee Daniels's much-derided The Paperboy and Jeff Nichols's more warmly-received Mud -- but I've yet to see either.)

For your consideration: Oslo, August 31st

Perceived reality has a habit of becoming actual reality when it comes to the Academy Awards. Once enough people started talking about how much Oscar momentum Silver Linings Playbook gained after winning the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival two months ago, for instance, their prognosticating had the effect of creating said momentum. In attempting to keep up with the echo chamber, a lot of pundits end up becoming part of it. Rather than play into that, we've decided to funnel whatever influence we may have into our new column We'd Like to Help the Academy, highlighting the outliers that should be nominated rather than wonder aloud about which frontrunners will.

And why not? The Oscars are, after all, a meritocracy whose goal (at least in theory) is to reward the most worthwhile films of the year. In practice, they're more often like the SAT -- they don't really measure anything other than how well a given movie conforms to their own established standards -- but they do come through every once in a while. We want to believe in you, old white men of the Academy; give us reason to.

As it's true enough that every film begins with words on a page, it seems pertinent to start the proceedings with a screenplay worthy of recognition: Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt's Oslo, August 31st. Adapted from a novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and directed by Trier, the film follows a recovering drug addict named Anders on what may prove to be the last day of his life.