Last year I somehow stumbled upon what the ballot actually looked like, and while I didn't see a similar image floating around the internets this season, I don't think it was too difficult to recreate on my own. As a result, what you see there to the left, to me, doesn't look too dramatically different from the style last year. If I come across a legitimate copy of the ballot in the next couple days, maybe I'll change it, but I don't really see what difference it would make.
Anyway, I suppose that my cynical view of this year would be that no film really jumped out at me as the one I just flat-out loved immediately after viewing it. However, I did once again enjoy a majority of the movies—and unlike last year, at least this season we didn't have a nominee as wretchedly awful as The Blind Side. So once again, the 10 nominees are all, at the very least, worthwhile films—which is rather amazing when I think back to how often there were only five nominees and I inevitably found at least one's nomination every year to be rather baffling.
Again, this is not meant to be a prediction in any sense, just a matter of how I would rank the films if given the chance. Feel free to offer up your own rankings of the 10 films in the comments section if you're so inclined. Below the jump, I'll offer up links to my reviews and shed a little insight into how I ended up with the order I did—which was based mostly on the hypothetical situation being that all 10 DVDs were laid out in front of me and the order in which I'd put them in the player:
1. The Kids Are All Right — It wasn't just Mark Ruffalo that was reminiscent of You Can Count on Me. Lisa Cholodenko's entire film is the nominee that just seems bound to be my most revisited of the bunch, and like that Kenneth Lonergan movie, it's equally well-acted, funny and moving.
2. The Fighter — As filmed by David O. Russell, the actual fights are certainly quite thrilling, but it's the drama outside the ring that's just as well done and thus makes The Fighter more than "just another boxing movie."
3. The Social Network — Superbly acted and written, the usual complaints about factual inaccuracies don't detract from its overall craftsmanship. Now if only the real Facebook could feel as exhilarating.
4. Black Swan — Far from being my favorite Darren Aronofsky effort and occasionally bordering on a little corny, but still another overall trippy piece of entertainment that ultimately delivers all the same.
5. 127 Hours — A testament to Danny Boyle's ability when he can keep an audience riveted for 90 minutes by featuring a character stuck in the same setting for almost the entire running time.
6. The King's Speech — There's never really much doubt about how things will turn out, but the journey along the way is carried by strong performances from both Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush and it's about as polished a period piece as there is.
7. True Grit — It's not what we've come to expect from the Coens, but that's not neccesarily a bad thing. To call it the "best Western" in years seems to be almost damning with faint praise since the genre hasn't seemed to get a serious effort since Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven almost two decades ago.
8. Inception — A lot of jaw-dropping special-effects, an admirable multi-tiered series of storylines, but little or no heart.
9. Toy Story 3 — Doesn't compete with the greatness of the first two, although that's setting the bar almost impossibly high.
10. Winter's Bone — The closest I came to developing a negative opinion of a nominee this year, it's one of the rare critical darlings where the rave reviews ultimately led to higher expectations and inevitable disappointment
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