So, largely thanks to Jennifer Lawrence practicing her hostage face this morning, the Oscar nominations are out!

What a shithole.

Shame, which I thought was an obvious awards contender for both quality and General Awardnesness, was utterly ignored. Drive has it even worse, with one piddly nomination for Sound Editing. (Shame at least got a nice clean cut direct; the Academy walked past Drive, turned around, came back, and flicked it right in the nose. That’s why Ryan Gosling’s face looks like that. That shit stings.)

In other news, we live in a world in which Puss in Boots is up for consideration for Best Anything, and Jonah Hill can now put “Oscar Nominee” in front of his name forever. Didn’t they understand what that means? You can’t take them back! No amount of 21 Jump Street can ever take that away! THE OSCARS INVITES YOU TO 21 JUMP STREET, OKAY? THAT IS WHERE WE LIVE NOW.

But that horror aside, the dual snub of two of the best films of the year seems especially cruel since the new 10-slot Best Picture slot had plenty of room for the appalling Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the Are You Kidding Me With This The Help, and the middling Midnight in Paris, and still had a slot left over. They only used nine out of ten, and STILL wouldn’t nominate Shame or Drive. That’s sort of when you know that you’ll be in for an evening of watching Steven Spielberg and/or Martin Scorsese repeatedly take the stage and pretend like either of their nominated movies is anywhere close to their best. And that’s if you’re lucky. (Also when you knew that: as soon as those movies were announced. Be real.)

Amid rare victories (If a Tree Falls gets rightly nominated for Best Doc), there are other small outrages (Rooney Mara and not Tilda Swinton? I see), and some all-around sighing (so, we can nominate actresses of color…as long as they’re playing maids, I see, yes, that is an excellent thing to reinforce, thank you, definitely we should have more of that), but honestly, the movie that annoys me most in terms of the accolades being showered upon it is The Artist, because seriously.

Here’s why; very vague spoilers under the cut. Continue reading

For a movie that doesn’t try to be anything more than solid, slightly pulpy fun, and that succeeds in the execution, there is a lot being said about Haywire. (Don’t all get surprised at once!)

That seems to be largely because its star is MMA all-star Gina Carano, who does her own stunts, and who is under the sort of scrutiny most male action stars never see. (Among some bizarre pearl-clutching about her fight scenes, her acting ability has been repeatedly questioned, which is strange, because I do not remember a lot of interviews asking Jean-Claude Van Damme how his workshops with Meryl Streep are going.)

We live in a world that makes it impossible to leave discourse at the door about this kind of thing, and means that the movie hits theatres under a lot of baggage it doesn’t deserve. But Haywire itself seems to be blithely unconcerned about it all. Instead, it focuses on turning in a slick action movie that can be boiled down to Vasquez: The Motion Picture, and is exactly as fun as that sounds.

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Hollywood’s Homecoming Dance was last night! I was pleased to see that my guess about the Stump Everybody theme is going strong, even though I spent a lot of my time with my hand propping up my dismayed face.

For the Golden Globes, many people decided to keep the baffle in the details, so mostly-lovely garments are supplanted by a single rogue element that was clearly designed to make my heart hurt.

And no one was immune from Baffle Fever. Not even Tilda Swinton. NOT EVEN TILDA.

I could not love 80% of this more – the shoulders, the sleeves, the tailoring, the silhouette of the skirt are all great. A case could even, maybe, be made for the color, though I would have liked to see it a greyer, less Easter Egg pale. But something about the skirt-matching sash disaster make her look like a mother of the bride from SyFy’s Children of Dune, and that is no place you want to be, Tilda. Trust me.

Other people’s attempts to baffle me with their outfits under the cut!
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It’s awards season again, which means it’s time for actresses playing The Game to start their three-grapes-a-day diet and start picking which designer’s dresses they’re going to be slipping into for respective red carpets as they pray that the right people nod and make notes on their casting charts.

Since it’s early days, everyone’s still warming up and trying their B-roll getups, and the theme of the season has yet to really coalesce. However, looking at an even dozen of these looks, I’m going to make an early call that this year’s Hollywood prom theme is Stump Everybody. I sort of dig it, except when I just can’t even.

First up, the People’s Choice Awards, where Jennifer Lawrence, wonderful actress and hilarious behind-the-scenes person who looks wonderful every time she’s on a talk show, continues her nearly unbroken streak of looking like a disaster on the red carpet. I’m not sure what the disconnect is, because her talk show outfits are always fine, and often cute! But you tell her it’s a to-do, and she chokes.

Jennifer, I love that you love color (and this one looks lovely on you). I love this silhouette. But Saloon Mermaid is not a good look on anyone, and you seem like you know that, so I have no idea what’s happened.

The cringing continues!

Nina Dobrev, who won an acting award diplomatically titled “Favorite Actress,” seems like a very nice person, and despite the fact that she looks like she’s riding out stormy seas underfoot, I actually like this dress. The sleeves are well done, and I appreciate the continuation of the detail down the bodice, which keeps the sleeves from looking tacked-on.

Speaking of:

Another seemingly-lovely person who cannot manage to leave the house without making a series of very determined and very unfortunate decisions about her clothing. It’s almost admirable that she didn’t stop at looking like a bad Barbie dress; she wanted to look like a bad Barbie dress an eighth-grader made by hand using the pattern that came with Fashion Dreams Skipper. (She’s the Chair of the Board of Stump Everybody.)

Speaking of:

Chloe Moretz, vying for Underage Starlet of the Year. The dress is actually cute, and I appreciate the minimal accessories, and at first I thought she was just about to sneeze when they took this picture, but the more pictures of her I saw, the more I realized this was her Sexy Face, and I didn’t even know what to do with that except close all the pictures with swiftness and make a Liz Lemon face for a second.

Speaking of:

Tine Fey did not appear. (Sorry, some segues just don’t work.) However, Lea Michele did, and as usual, she wants to make sure you know she did, so she wore the most diva outfit her stylist could find, because if flapper fringe on a dress is good, a dress made bafflingly and entirely of fringe is even better. Next year she’ll try to outdo herself by eating only ONE grape a day, and will show up in a dress made out of a single length of draped dental floss, looking even more carefully posed than she does right now.

Speaking of:

Even though it looks as though Cobie Smulders is in for a super-embarrassing time as soon as she sits down, this is on the verge of being a really great look. That necklace is a stunnah, and that’s three-quarters of the right dress for it!

And if the People’s Choice Awards seemed like a random red carpet, the Critics’ Choice Awards had an even more motley crew. Luckily, some of them were old hands at this, and managed to show up looking both Awesome, and Like Themselves. Exhibit A, as always in this division, Tilda Swinton:

She and Cate Blanchett are two of the best red-carpet dressers you can come by, I think. (In case you’re in the market for someone to walk a red carpet for you.)

However, many of the ladies who appeared on this red carpet seemed determined to bemuse all those who looked upon them, and they ran that shit like it was a Bafflement Contest.

Not Viola Davis, of course. Viola Davis knows better, and just decided to show up looking great instead. I love this color on her.

But Michelle Williams is in on it. Her styling from the shoulders up is really nice, the neckline is lovely, and I can get behind a retro-Hollywood wrap silhouette any day of the week. But did she put on a cocktail dress over an unrelated long black skirt? Honestly asking, because otherwise I don’t understand the decisions at work here, even though Michelle’s smile is taunting me to guess. Michelle, what do you know that I don’t know?!

I DO know what Elle Fanning might not have known: this dress might have looked lovely in, say, the initial ad campaign where it was shot in a wheat field with sunlight filtering through it, or on a model in a stark white studio with her hair askew and looking like an effigy for Free Love, but if you can’t control the light, you can’t control this dress. Points given for age-appropriateness, and immediately removed for tablecloth-resemblance. It’s a wash.

Chloe again! She’s dropped the Sexy Face (good news!), probably because she’s distracted by the Muppet pulling across her sleeves and choking her with her own collar (bad news!).

But the winner of this round of Bafflement Wars is clearly Kirsten Dunst:

It’s so confusing I sort of have to hand it to her. “Here, this dress has a layered skirt that’s sometimes opaque and sometimes not. And ribbons that look as though they were sewed on at random on a dare. Then I belted them. DID YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT.”

And no, I have not a word. You enjoy your award, Kirsten; you’ve earned it.

Pictures via Yahoo.com and the Hollywood Reporter, for anyone who wants some extracurricular bafflement.