Last week we predicted that Gravity’s Alfonso Cuarón would get the win for Best Director, so historically speaking that would mean Gravity should have a 73% chance of winning Best Picture because of how closely tied those categories are. However, we do not have to go back very far to see split category winners. Last year Ang Lee received Best Director for the visually impressive Life of Pi, while Ben Affleck’s historic thriller Argo was awarded Best Picture. This year has a very similar setup. Winning the award at the Director’s Guild of America puts Cuarón in good position for Best Director, however, his technical marvel Gravity may be edged out by Steve McQueen’s historical drama 12 Years a Slave. Last week’s BAFTA (British Oscar equivalent) win for 12 Years a Slave was a major victory for the film. But make no mistake, this is still a very close race between the two films.

Marketing departments for the rest of the field will not likely be upgrading their materials beyond “Best Picture Nominated”. While it is still a monumental honor just to be nominated, Spike Jonze and company should feel disheartened that Her is not in contention. Though they are probably just happy their futuristic love story did not fly over the heads of the Academy whose median age is 62.

Because 2013 was such solid year for film, there are plenty of titles that deserved to be nominated: Blue Is the Warmest Color, Blue Jasmine, The Place Beyond the Pines, Frances Ha, Before Midnight, and Fruitvale Station just to name a few. But my top pick for the film that did not receive a nomination that should have is Short Term 12. Destin Cretton’s film blasted on to everyone’s radar after rave reviews from critics at its SXSW premiere. It is unfortunate that the film’s marketing budget and small distribution are its biggest flaws, because the film will make you laugh, cry, and smile more than most films that actually did get nominated.

Category Predictions

Best Picture Nominees

American Hustle (review)

Captain Phillips

Dallas Buyers Club (review)

Gravity (review)

Her (review)

Nebraska (review)

Philomena (review)

12 Years a Slave (review)

The Wolf of Wall Street (review)

Previous Category Analysis

Best Shorts
Best Supporting Actress
Best Supporting Actor
Best Original Screenplay
Best Adapted Screenplay
Best Foreign Film
Best Documentary
Best Actress
Best Actor
Best Director

This morning the official announcement of nominations for the 2014 Oscars came in with Gravity and American Hustle on top with an impressive total of 10 nominations each. Not far behind was 12 Years A Slave which hauled in 9 nominations. The Best Picture race will almost certainly be between American Hustle and 12 Years A Slave with Gravity almost a lock to pick up several technical achievement awards. A pleasant surprise for me was to see the Academy’s love for Spike Jonze’s Her, which nabbed 5 nominations including Best Picture, while the Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis received nominations only for Best Cinematography and Best Sound Mixing.

Other surprises were Jonah Hill getting a Best Supporting nod for The Wolf of Wall Street, Saving Mr. Banks only receiving a single nomination for Best Original Score, despite many believing it had Best Actor and even Best Picture potential (though I agree with the Academy’s decision on this one). Another surprise were Blackfish and Stories We Tell getting nudged out of the Best Documentary category, as 20 Feet From Stardom slips in. The biggest disappointment for me was seeing Blue Is the Warmest Color getting snubbed in the Best Foreign Film category.

The 86th Academy Awards will air March 2, 2014 at 7 p.m. ET on ABC.

Full List of 2014 Oscar Nominations:

Best Picture:

American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Dallas Buyers Club
Gravity
Her
Nebraska
Philomena
12 Years a Slave
The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Director:

David O. Russell – American Hustle
Alfonso Cuarón – Gravity
Alexander Payne – Nebraska
Steve McQueen – 12 Years a Slave
Martin Scorsese – The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Actor:

Christian Bale – American Hustle
Bruce Dern – Nebraska
Leonardo DiCaprio – The Wolf of Wall Street
Chiwetel Ejiofor – 12 Years a Slave
Matthew McConaughey – Dallas Buyers Club

Best Actress:

Amy Adams – American Hustle
Cate Blanchett – Blue Jasmine
Sandra Bullock – Gravity
Judi Dench – Philomena
Meryl Streep – August: Osage County

Best Supporting Actor:

Barkhad Abdi – Captain Phillips
Bradley Cooper – American Hustle
Michael Fassbender – 12 Years a Slave
Jonah Hill – The Wolf of Wall Street
Jared Leto – Dallas Buyers Club

Best Supporting Actress:

Sally Hawkins – Blue Jasmine
Jennifer Lawrence – American Hustle
Lupita Nyong’o – 12 Years a Slave
Julia Roberts – August: Osage County
June Squibb – Nebraska

Best Original Screenplay:

Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell – American Hustle
Woody Allen – Blue Jasmine
Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack – Dallas Buyers Club
Spike Jonze – Her
Bob Nelson – Nebraska

Best Adapted Screenplay:

Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke – Before Midnight
Billy Ray – Captain Phillips
Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope – Philomena
John Ridley – 12 Years a Slave
Terence Winter – The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Foreign Film:

The Broken Circle Breakdown
The Great Beauty
The Hunt
The Missing Picture
Omar

Best Cinematography:

Philippe Le Sourd – The Grandmaster
Emmanuel Lubezki – Gravity
Bruno Delbonnel – Inside Llewyn Davis
Phedon Papamichael – Nebraska
Roger A. Deakins – Prisoners

Best Animated Film:

The Croods
Despicable Me 2
Ernest & Celestine
Frozen
The Wind Rises

Best Documentary:

The Act of Killing
Cutie and the Boxer
Dirty Wars
The Square
20 Feet from Stardom

Best Film Editing:

Jay Cassidy, Crispin Struthers and Alan Baumgarten – American Hustle
Christopher Rouse – Captain Phillips
John Mac McMurphy and Martin Pensa – Dallas Buyers Club
Alfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger – Gravity
Joe Walker – 12 Years a Slave

Best Original Score:

John Williams – The Book Thief
Steven Price – Gravity
William Butler and Owen Pallett – Her
Alexandre Desplat – Philomena
Thomas Newman – Saving Mr. Banks

Best Original Song:

“Alone Yet Not Alone” – Alone Yet Not Alone
“Happy” – Despicable Me 2
“Let It Go” – Frozen
“The Moon Song” – Her
“Ordinary Love” – Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Best Production Design:

American Hustle
Gravity
The Great Gatsby
Her
12 Years a Slave

Best Costume Design:

American Hustle
The Grandmaster
The Great Gatsby
The Invisible Woman
12 Years a Slave

Best Makeup & Hairstyling:

Dallas Buyers Club
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
The Lone Ranger

Best Sound Editing:

All Is Lost
Captain Phillips
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Lone Survivor

Best Sound Mixing:

Captain Phillips
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Inside Llewyn Davis
Lone Survivor

Best Visual Effects:

Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Iron Man 3
The Lone Ranger
Star Trek Into Darkness

Best Short Film (Live Action):

Aquel No Era Yo
Avant Que De Tout Perdre
Helium
Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa?
The Voorman Problem

Best Visual Short Film (Animated):

Feral
Get a Horse!
Mr. Hublot
Possessions
Room on the Broom

Best Documentary (Short Subject):

CaveDigger
Facing Fear
Karama Has No Walls
The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall

Now that you have gotten a chance to read Way Too Indie’s Best Films of 2013, a cumulative list from our staff, check out the individual Top 10 Lists from the eight staff members that created the list. The differences between the cumulative site list and these individual ones are actually quite different. First of all, even though mathematically Gravity was our overall #1 film for 2013, it only appears in the #1 spot in one of the eight lists below. Also, because a film had to get at least two mentions to quality for our cumulative list, you’ll find quite a few different titles down below: Leviathan, Paradise: Love, Blackfish, A Hijacking, The Past, and many more.

Staff Top 10 Lists For 2013

Dustin’s Top 10

Jansen’s Top 10

Ananda’s Top 10

Bernard’s Top 10

Amy’s Top 10

Pavi’s Top 10

Blake’s Top 10

CJ’s Top 10

In light of Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips — in which Tom Hanks’ performance is the tip of an iceberg of Oscar winning collaborators involved in a terse, modern-day piracy movie — the far fewer-studded Danish thriller A Hijacking (Kapringen) has likely fallen by the wayside. My respect for Greengrass (despite Green Zone) aside, Captain Phillips draws few similarities to A Hijacking, even given the shared dramatic premise: white man’s (Danish, American) ship is hijacked by Somali pirates demanding obscene sums of money for hostages. Rather, what director Tobias Lindholm has achieved with A Hijacking seems counter to every trope from which more conventional Hollywood-backed thrillers (among which we can count Captain Phillips) are made.

Yet here are two remarkably gripping and effective movies that are unlikely to escape comparisons to one another, in spite of their vastly different formal and performative sensibilities. This is not a think-piece espousing upon a pious white hat-black hat division with regard to correct or incorrect filmmaking styles. I’m hoping instead to look at their differences as contributing factors to similarly white-knuckle viewing experiences: both have in common highly contemporary presentations of the medium, but in many respects the ways in which the stories are told form a kind of unmissable and inherent flag-waving for the aesthetic, moral and emotional values of their makers and subjects.

We can’t rush these people. Time is a Western thing. It means nothing to them.

A Hijacking

The titular act of hijacking in A Hijacking is never shown: the first clue that director Lindholm has other priorities. The importance is not in reliving the ordeal that young father and Cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek) and crew endured when their cargo ship was taken upon, but the fact that—cut—here they are, suddenly in a situation nobody expected and fewer are prepared for.

Back home in Copenhagen, CEO Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling) is busy caught between expert hostage-scenario negotiators, headed by frankly-speaking Brit Connor Julian (Gary Skjoldmose Porter), and a board of advisors within the company growing increasingly finicky about the political ramifications for their business as the situation grows increasingly — and unapologetically, with Lindholm’s dispassive tally of chronological title-carding through not days, but weeks and months — drawn out.

With a stoic, subdued but no less impressive performance for its restraint, Malling plays a man-in-charge in too far above his head, incapable and unwilling to let anyone see it. Advised by the experts to let the experts do the talking, Peter insists on negotiating with the pirates personally, feeling a responsibility and accountability for his men that is both heroic and, in a moment of both knowing and dread for the audience, foolhardy.

In extraordinary circumstances where human lives — their families and livelihoods — are reduced to seemingly meaningless numbers of dollars, the common gut reaction is to just give them what they want. That the expert negotiators insist on playing the riskiest hardball (a figure of millions demanded by the pirates is retorted by a nominal increase of tens of thousands to a base of mere hundreds of thousands, for example) is not a tactic driven by profits or money-saving, but a strategy of psychological chess-boarding that more emotionally-attached men like Peter struggle with. In numerous instances, Peter must hang up on a member of his crew begging for their life, offering a curt, dismissive “I will not discuss this with you,” when we can feel he is seeking nothing more than his own redemption through their safe release. Scenes showing Peter alone, before and after these calls, highlight the incredible toll they take and elicit genuine sympathy for the corporate bigwig in a suit. Lindholm understands, and makes us understand, that negotiations of this sort benefit little from bombastic threats or rash decisions: that sometimes silence speaks louder than words, even in the most extraordinary cases.

Onboard, the bargaining on behalf of the Somali pirates falls to interpretor Omar, in a chilling and terrific turn by Abdihakin Asgar both sympathetic and, on a whim, frightening. Omar insists, persistently, to Mikkel and crew that though he speaks their language and speaks for them, he is not one of them. In one scene in particular Mikkel crosses this line, a phone call to his wife dramatically turning into perhaps the most psychologically harrowing moment of the picture. It’s a reminder from Lindholm that regardless of the surface-level formality and sense of ordered, polite transactions he so effectively and unflashily portrays, A Hijacking is dealing with complex, subtextual exchanges of power; where every word selection, every second delayed in response, carries with it communicative consequences that impact the final negotiation.

The turn of events that lead to the resolution of conflicts may well be hardwired into the fact that the pirates understand humanity. But the undercutting of this moment, the closest A Hijacking comes to traditional sentimentality, in the coda brilliantly and daringly underscores that this is a film that remains attuned to the immeasurable and finally unpredictable chaos of the modern world.

If they find you, remember—you know this ship, they don’t.

Captain Phillips

For a director known for his ability to bring a frenetic urgency to action filmmaking, yet do so in a way that the viewer remains oriented and aware of the stakes, Captain Phillips must rate as one of Paul Greengrass’ most accomplished achievements. He showed with the cathartically powerful United 93 (2006) and in the more conventionally thrilling The Bourne Ultimatum (2007’s franchise high) a brand of you-are-there cinematography and rapid-fire editing that has become his signature, but equally found him detractors.

Greengrass’ is a cinema of seemingly mundane scenarios repeatedly revisited and cross-cut amidst a melange of other mundane scenarios, acutely aware and across all the tiny little details that are unraveling a greater narrative tension slowly building. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but regardless of whether you want to allow it to, it works. No filmmaker is better at depicting a good day gone bad than Greengrass, and Captain Phillips captures a good day gone particularly bad indeed for Richard Phillips (the inimitable Tom Hanks).

Working from a script by Billy Ray from Phillips’ own memoir, the witnessing of the buildup and inevitable hijacking of Maersk Alabama, the US Cargo ship sailing the Somali Coast, is paramount. It’s a partly dramatic and partly political directorial decision to provide such emphasis on the event: two skiffs approaching fast, one with a more motivated band of pirates than the other, dissuaded as the latter are by the perimeter of high-speed water jets brought up to defend the oncoming attack. Where the Europeans were content with a mere smash-cut to the sticky situation, Greengrass is here purposefully trying to provide an elongated context for Phillips’ heroism beyond whatever even he deemed himself capable: that here is a man who has worked his way to the top through a disciplined study of process and protocol, but that despite his best preparations the ship’s resources — and by extension the institutions that provided them — have failed him; that here is an instance where a man should be able to just reach for a fucking gun. But as marine regulations of the time (circa 2009) dictated all Cargo ships were to sail unarmed, Phillips is left to rely on his own resourcefulness and personality to try and reach a resolution in his interactions with Muse (impressive first-timer Barkhad Adbi), his Somali counterpart.

There is a gleeful sense of schadenfreude when Muse and his crew learn they’ve boarded an American ship, as if they’ve struck some kind of moral jackpot in doing so. Muse makes a habit of mocking Phillips’ Irish heritage, even as they grow to understand each other over the standoff; one of many knowingly cynical jabs at the status of the United States as a much-touted land of opportunity. When things invariably escalate to a point where both Phillips and Muse are backed into their corners, a desperation emerges in each that takes remarkably different forms. Muse finds himself in a life or death scenario: literally on a sinking, claustrophobic lifeboat, his hostage his only bargaining chip, his rag-tag band of pirates variously injured or frustratingly inept, losing hope but seeing no way forward but to commit to a fight he can’t win. Across the boat, we see in Phillips’ eyes the startling realisation that Muse is realising exactly this. As the almost cartoonishly Yankee-sounding S.E.A.L ‘negotiator’ cooly disseminates radio instruction with unfailingly exact protocol, syntax and procedure, we feel the weight of a land with seemingly infinite resources flexing its muscle, but doing so only as and when provoked in the appropriate manner. If the Somalis question the American Dream for non-Americans, there is no questioning this—the finality of the end, and the restoration, however momentary, of order to the modern world.

That we have so deeply related to Phillips is testament to the effortless niceness and rounded comprehensibility of Hanks as a presence and a performer. For all his brave and Big (pun intended) performances in the past, his Phillips resonates because he seems, this time, to be trying so very little; and similarly for all the prevailing America, Fuck Yeah! that can be felt in the inevitable third act, Greengrass too manages to make something subversive by dialing back the largess of the patriotic sentiment. Are our emphatic responses to the clinical efficiency of the Marines not motivated by the same impulses that caused a cackle when the Somalis realised they’d jumped an American ship? In Captain Phillips‘ understated, but unexpectedly moving final scene, Hanks unravels with a kind of ‘un’-acting acting that brandishes any semblance of method, technique, or studied process, and which brings the film to a thematic and experiential converging: we are right there, with him, like him, not knowing where we are — or where we stand.