I Got Your Ballot. Right Here...

Best Ensemble Performance of the Year - The Kids are All Right
Five of these performers are mentioned below.

The nominees for the 83rd Annual Academy Awards have been announced. A full list of them can be found here. I'll comment more on them as the Oscars draw nearer. For now, just for fun. Here's what my ballot would have looked like for the six major categories (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress).

The Best Films of 2010: or The Year of the Woman

Could it be that the movies have finally figured out how to tell stories with fully realized female leads? Hollywood has a long and embarrassing history of portraying women either as cardboard cutouts or as completely disposable characters altogether, leaving the interesting personalities, heroics, and complications to male characters. But this year saw two lesbian mothers (Annette Benning and Julianne Moore in Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids are Alright") raise their two children and respond to life's obstacles with wit and wisdom and gravitas and without the help of men. A paranoid schizophrenic ballerina dancer (Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan"), in obsessive pursuit of the perfect performance, embodies all of the pains and trials and sacrifices of art, regardless of gender. 


A young girl in the Ozarks (Jennifer Lawrence in Debra Granik's "Winter's Bone") who, while caring for her two young siblings and vegetable mother, must track down her father, who listed the family's house for collateral on his bail and then no-showed at court. Another young girl (Hailee Steinfeld in Joel and Ethan Coen's "True Grit") sees the way the men of the West do business, and the way business should be done, and offers no compromise between the two. A CIA operative/Russian Spy/who-knows-anymore (Angelina Jolie in Phillip Noyce's "Salt") is allowed to make intelligent decisions provoked by emotion for what must be one of the first times in the history of the action movie. Raised for the sole purpose of donating her organs to those deemed more worthy of them, a young woman (Carrie Mulligan in Mark Romanek's "Never Let Me Go") maintains impossible posture as the love of her short life mistakenly buys into the seductions of an envious mutual friend.


And these are just American films. I could go on about the brilliant leads in Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank" (Katie Jarvis) and Martin Provost's "Seraphine" (Yolande Moreau), and already this year we've seen Isabelle Huppert's heroic performance in Claire Denis' "White Material" (already an early favorite for best of the year). Many of these women characters are weak, but none are shallow, and just as many are stalwart figures in emotional torrents. This shift toward an equal female psychology, and the speed and scope by which it occurred, may prove to make 2010 one of the most encouraging years for movies I've seen in my lifetime.


As it were, it was just a terrific year for movies in general. Here are the top 25 films of 2010, having seen theatrical release dates in the state of Nebraska within the year. (Note: a few of these films made the rounds on critics' lists at the end of 2009, but didn't make it out to the plains until early the next year, which would explain why some of these films may seem to be old news)

The Black Feather Needs No Shadow

Black Swan

Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Four Stars

By Rollan Schott

Here is what the movies are for. Here is what can be done in their world alone. What a grand and beautiful folly is Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan”, a film that casts aside expectations and conventions and sets off in wild search of the muse. Freed from restraint, unburdened with pretensions, and stripped of formality, here is a movie that loses itself thrillingly in a sustained act of psychological seduction. It is a brave and fearless film.

Yes, Keaton Was Great, But Keaton Didn't Make "The Circus"

Note: I sent this letter to Roger Ebert in response to his Great Movies essay about Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus" (1928). It has since been published in the "Letters" section of rogerebert.com. To see it on Ebert's own site is much more glorious, but here is the letter in full anyway.

From Rollan Schott in Lincoln, Neb. 

This is reactionary, vitriolic, and probably ill-advised. Please forgive me.

I was thrilled to find Chaplin’s “The Circus” added to your Great Movies canon. I think it’s one of his best (certainly better than “The Great Dictator”, but that’s an argument for another day). Having previously read your comprehensive column on “The Works of Buster Keaton”, I assumed that a similar piece on the works of his mustached rival master had not yet been written, and would not be written, because A) Chaplin’s films are more lovingly restored and much more readily available as independent works, and B) Every film Chaplin made between “The Kid” and “Modern Times” (as well as “Monsieur Verdoux”) is worthy of its own essay, an astonishing run that combined universal box office success and acclaim with enduring artistic achievement like nobody before or since. Most of Keaton’s works are also worthy if individual recognition, though I think we’d agree his are more of a whole.

The Pantheon (2010)

Jon's Picks
Rollie's Picks


1. The Third Man (-) Carol Reed, 1949
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (-) Stanley Kubrick, 1968
3. Citizen Kane (-) Orson Welles, 1944
4. City Lights (-) Charlie Chaplin, 1931
5. Taxi Driver (+2) Martin Scorsese, 1976
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (+12) Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928
7. Apocalypse Now (-2) Francis Ford Coppola, 1979
8. Rear Window (+1) Alfred Hitchcock, 1954
9. Vertigo (-1) Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
10. Magnolia (+4) P.T. Anderson, 1999

The Geometry of the Grey Matter

 Inception

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Three Stars

What we find in Christopher Nolan's "Inception", when we burrow our way tangibly into the landscape of the human dream, is not dormant emotions or suppressed memories or any other nakedness of the soul, but rather places. Surfaces. The cold, drab exteriors of modern architecture. Our subconscious populates these empty streets with meaningless faces, and when reality shifts, it is entirely literal. Buildings shift or explode, time slows, but the chronology of events remains strictly linear. "Inception" suggests a sterile dreamscape indeed. I am reminded of Stanley Kubrick, who over the course of his illustrious career created a body of work that suggested that the human soul, our desires, our memories, our very nature, could be deconstructed in such a way as to reveal a being as mechanical and clinical as turning gears (Consider "A Clockwork Orange", "Full Metal Jacket", "Barry Lyndon", and of course "2001: A Space Odyssey" among the rest of his work). Nolan however, has constructed for himself and for his film a set of intellectual rules that map the human psyche like layers in an onion, not so much for the exploration of the mind but simply for the purpose of creating an action thriller, and where Kubrick's films made bold assertions, Nolan merely ponders.

It's That Time of Year

Me and Jon are circling the drain of the annual Pantheon Draft, wherein we utilize a highly advanced and complicated system of back-and-forths, averaging, compromising, and eliminating to create a hybrid list of elite "favorite" movies. Last year's list can be found here. The lists, after probably the first five, will be radically different. This is not because the movies have so fluctuated in quality over the course of a single year, but because the term "favorite" is abstract and fluid and impossible to approach consistently. I think of Ebert's definition - which movie do I want to see again right now, right this very moment (in preferential order from one to a hundred)? I think of Jonathan Rosenbaum's definition - which great film is freshest in my mind, right now, right this very minute? Even the slightest variation in approach to our "favorite" movies can alter the substance of our list radically. More than a collection of great movies (indeed the greatest), Ghost on Screen's Pantheon is more an illustration of the way that our personal tastes develop, change, evolve and, again, fluctuate. Expect the new list to materialize sometime by the end of the month.