The Golden Stans 2008

It’s that time of year again: it’s the Golden Stans, 52 weeks and 53 films after The Fountain controversially took three awards (Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Score).

2007 was tough to judge, but 2008 was a little easier – unfortunately – due to the large number of event pictures that disappointed. Thankfully the great films were diverse: animated (fiction and documentary), crowd pleasers, horror, intense character pieces, etc.

So, on to the first category: Original Score. This was a contest between the two composers who fought out 2007’s award - Clint Mansell and Clint Eastwood, nominated this time for The Wrestler and Changeling respectively - and The Dark Knight tag team of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Both Clints delivered appropriately haunting soundtracks, but the full scope of the Zimmer/Howard team's output and how they worked with the director swings the award their way.

The Best Cinematography Award features nominations for outstanding work from: Roger Deakins (In The Valley Of Elah); Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood); Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight); Tom Stern (Changeling); and Anthony Dod Mantle’s huge leap from Dogme lenser of choice (and all that entails) to embracing colour for colour’s sake on Slumdog Millionaire. However, there can be only one winner: and it’s Wally Pfister for his magisterial command of the IMAX format – and indeed the non-IMAX sequences – in The Dark Knight. This was jaw-dropping stuff.

The Best Adapted Screenplay Award also wings its way towards The Dark Knight as well, the brothers Nolan and David S Goyer pulling the very essence of Batman, The Joker and Harvey Dent from the very best – and numerous – sources to winning effect. Honourable mentions should go to Peter Morgan for Frost/Nixon and JMS for Changeling – both bringing considerable authority to their work.

The Best Original Screenplay Award features a fight between ridiculously scary The Orphanage, the surprisingly funny In Bruges, and the sublime Wall*E. However, the winner, if only for the central conceit is Wall*E.

Now on to the big six categories, starting with Best Supporting Actress; the nominations are:
Amy Adams in Charlie Wilson’s War
Laura Linney in The Other Man
Evan Rachel Wood in The Wrestler
Amy Ryan in Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead and Changeling
Charlize Theron in In The Valley Of Elah
Marisa Tomei in Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead and The Wrestler
And the winner is… Marisa Tomei.

The nominations for Best Supporting Actor are:
Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood
Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight
Anil Kapoor in Slumdog Millionaire
Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight
John Malkovich in Burn After Reading and Changeling
Sam Neill in Dean Spanley
All five would be worthy winners: Dano holding his own against Daniel Day-Lewis; Eckhart’s descent from white knight to hideous villain; Kapoor’s duplicitous, media-hungry gameshow host; Ledger’s savage and absolute burial of the memory of Jack Nicholson’s comical turn as The Joker; and Neill’s, er, twitching. But the winner is… Heath Ledger. I desperately wanted to give Sam Neill the nod for playing something he most definitely is not [I’m trying to avoid plot spoilers here!], but Ledger's Joker is a modern screen classic.

The nominations for Best Actress are:
Martina Gedeck in The Baader Meinhof Complex
Angelina Jolie in The Changeling
Melissa Leo in Frozen River
Belen Rueda in The Orphanage
Johanna Wokalek in The Baader Meinhof Complex
There’s a theme here: they’re all mothers who are forced to question the world around them and who all ultimately go down entirely unexpected roads that lead them to question some fundamental beliefs. They are also all stronger than the men that surround them. Picking a winner is exceedingly difficult, but a winner there must be and it is… Belen Rueda.

The nominations for Best Actor do not include Robert Downey Jnr’s immensely charismatic turn as Iron Man, nor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s diverse work in Charlie Wilson’s War, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead and Synecdoche, New York, nor Andy Lau and Jet Li in Warlords, nor the scary but theatrical ham of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Instead the best six are:
Josh Brolin in W.
Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon
Tommy Lee Jones in In The Valley Of Elah
Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler
Michael Sheen in Frost/Nixon
Benicio del Toro in Che
Ultimately this is a three-way fight between Langella’s impersonation of tricky Dicky, Rourke’s spotlight-hugging, tour de force comeback and Jones’ career-best turn.
A while back I described the winner’s performance thus: “[His] journey from stout, proud Vietnam veteran to painful realisation that he has failed as a father, and indirectly as a husband, is one of the great performances of American cinema. Hank Deerfield might well be the most finely drawn and observed character to emerge in American film for generations: his history is revealed in every gesture, every thought, every word.” Thus, the winner is… Tommy Lee Jones.

Best Director is another hard-fought category. Missing are the likes of Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler), Andrew Stanton (Wall*E) and Uli Edel (The Baader Meinhof Complex), but making the list are:
Juan Antonio Bayona for The Orphanage
Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire
Clint Eastwood for Changeling
Paul Haggis for In The Valley Of Elah
Christopher Nolan for The Dark Knight
Paul Thomas Anderson for There Will Be Blood
It's so very difficult to split Nolan and Haggis; I don't want to see either go unrewarded for their full realisations of their ambitions, and therefore I'm going to cheat: they can share the award!

And so finally, Best Film. There follow the 15 nominees in alphabetical order:
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
The Baader Meinhof Complex
Changeling
Dean Spanley
Frost/Nixon
In Bruges
In The Valley Of Elah
Iron Man
Religulous
Slumdog Millionaire
The Dark Knight
The Orphanage
The Wrestler
There Will Be Blood
Wall*E
Many on the list deal directly, indirectly or subliminally about America and its corrupt heart (Baader Meinhof, Changeling, Frost/Nixon, Elah, Iron Man, Religulous, Dark Knight and Blood). Thankfully there are also some truly uplifting humanist stories (Anvil, Dean Spanley and Wall*E) in there too.
Picking a winner was of course difficult. However, the films I reacted to the most during the year were Anvil, Changeling, Dean Spanley, Frost/Nixon, Elah, Religulous, Dark Knight, Orphanage, Wrestler and Wall*E, which at least makes it a 10-way battle!
There’s a lot of raw emotion and righteous anger in that list, which doesn’t help me come to any kind of rational decision. Ultimately, it’s a fight between Anvil, Frost/Nixon, Elah, Dark Knight and Wall*E.
So, for better or worse, the winner of the Golden Stan 2008 for Best Film is… The Dark Knight.

Roll on 2009!