The Award Season begins and thus flame the guestimates for the big-prize, Oscars'12

With the Academy already flipping some rocks (pre-nominated lists for Best Animated Feature, Best Documentary, Best Animated Short, Best Documentary Short have been made public), major independent Award Season festivals and the associations of critics are fueling up their rumble. As for every year, the decisions by these entities work as a blurry preview of what might happen at the Kodak Theater and stir the boiling oil in the pan for the prophets (I will myself try it).

It begun with the Gotham Awards and the New York Film Critics Awards, which foresee much of which has already been established as plausible or probable all over the Internet.

NEW YORK FILM CRITICS AWARDS

Best Picture
"The Artist" (Michel Hazanavicius)

Best Director
Michel Hazanavicius ("The Artist")

Best Screenplay
Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian ("Moneyball")

Best Actor
Brad Pitt – ("Moneyball" and "The Tree of Life")

Best Actress
Meryl Streep ("The Iron Lady")

Best Supporting Actor
Albert Brooks ("Drive")

Best Supporting Actress
Jessica Chastain ("The Tree of Life", "The Help", "Take Shelter")

Best Cinematography
Emmanuel Lubezki ("The Tree of Life")

Best Nonfiction Film
"Cave of Forgotten Dreams" (Werner Herzog)

Best Foreign Language Film
"A Separation" (Iran)

Best First Feature
"Margin Call" (J. C. Candor)


GOTHAM AWARDS

Best Film
“Beginners" (Mike Mills)
“The Tree of Life” (Terrence Malick)

Breakthrough Director
Dee Rees (“Pariah”)

Breakthrough Actor/Actress
Felicity Jones (“Like Crazy”)

Best Ensemble Performance
"Beginners"

Best Documentary
“Better This World” (Kelly Duane and Katie Galloway)

Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You
“Scenes of a Crime” (Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock)

Audience Award
“Girlfriend” (Justin Lerner)

Go to college and major in chocolate pancakes

Fine, so you like movies. Specially if you attend to film school, you may develop your passion about some of your favorite filmmakers, historical periods or stylistic establishments. But how insane would you accuse one to be if one craved to apply for Harry Potter and the Age of Illusion (Durham University), Philosophy and Star Trek (Georgetown University) or Feel the Force: How to Train in a Jedi Force (Queen's University Belfast) ?

Or Zombie Studies (University of Baltimore), where the only thing you had to do was to analyze classic zombie films and comics, shaping your skills into detailed storyboards and horror scripts instead of painful essays on Gilles Deleuze.

No excuses, henceforth.

Fado, Património Mundial da Humanidade

Numa altura de receios e crises de credibilidade, um triunfo para a identidade portuguesa.

We Have a Pope (2011)

A newly elected Pope that flees from the S. Peter's Basilica before waving his blessing to the believers and a psychoanalyst who becomes imprisoned inside it until the Holly Priest emerges on the balcony. Melville, the sincere and dense Michel Piccoli, is unexpectedly chosen on the third round and embodies all the doubts and fears the whole Concilium holds prior to the voting, going as far as making "acting" and "rehearsals" a metaphor for the Kingdom of God's best man. Professor Brezzi, the wit optimistic Nanni Moretti, is summoned to help him dealing with the shock but is hindered by the ultra-conservationism of the Cardinals, and stays to become the master of trivialization of the secrecy the priests ritually respect and because of which 100 million people suffer in anxiety. On the one side, the Father of the dogmas that cannot deal with them, withering into the nostalgia and existentialism of the common man, uncertain of what he has done and of what he has to do. On the other side, the bastion of science and progress, an enemy of the dogma, who not only is physically prisoner of the Conclave but who also is a prisoner of himself, his beliefs, his methods, just as his wife was. Two sides of the same coin, two layers of the human being, in an arrangement that, however the final discourse (change for the Church), transcends any religious beliefs. Picturing beautiful scenarios (amazing work at Cinecittá), lilting between fine detail and reactions and unexpected small set-pieces (dramatic: the theater; slapstick: the volleyball game), We Have a Pope is a whimsical but also profound essay on the Church as a system and on mankind as a species of enduring and underling beliefs.