Once more unto the breach!

Presenting...the 2009 Golden Steve Awards.

Always six nominees, no connection to Oscars, bla bla bla...

And now, the worthy honorees:

Best Picture

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

The Secret in Their Eyes

A Serious Man

Summer Hours

The White Ribbon

Best Director

Olivier Assayas, Summer Hours

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Juan Jose Campanella, The Secret in Their Eyes

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, A Serious Man

Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Best Actor

Nicolas Cage, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Colin Firth, A Single Man

John Malkovich, Disgrace

Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Toni Servillo, Il Divo

Michael Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man

Best Actress

Kim Hye-ja, Mother

Yolande Moreau, Seraphine

Carey Mulligan, An Education

Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia

Tilda Swinton, Julia

Best Supporting Actor

Niels Arestrup, A Prophet

Guillermo Francella, The Secret in Their Eyes

Woody Harrelson, The Messenger

Christian McKay, Me and Orson Welles

Jeremie Renier, Lorna's Silence

Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress

Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

Jessica Haines, Disgrace

Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air

Alice Krige, Skin

Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds

Mo'Nique, Precious

Best Screenplay--Adapted

Disgrace (Anna Maria Monticelli)

An Education (Nick Hornby)

In the Loop (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche)

The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan Jose Campanella)

Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner)

Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers)

Best Screenplay--Original

The Hurt Locker (Mark Boal)

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)

Mother (Bong Joon-ho, Park Eun-kyo)

A Serious Man (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

Best Animated Feature

Coraline (Henry Selick)

Mary and Max (Adam Elliot)

Ponyo (Hayao Miyazaki)

The Princess and the Frog (Ron Clements, John Musker)

Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley)

Up (Pete Docter)

Best Non-Fiction Film

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (Sacha Gervasi)

The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda)

October Country (Donal Mosher, Michael Palmieri)

Of Time and the City (Terence Davies)

Tyson (James Toback)

The Way We Get By (Aron Gaudet)

Best Foreign Language Film

Lorna's Silence (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

Mother (Bong Joon-ho)

A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)

The Secret in Their Eyes (Juan Jose Campanella)

Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

Best Original Song

"Almost There," The Princess and the Frog (Randy Newman)

"Ayayayay," The Maid (Pedro Piedra)

"Friends on the Other Side," The Princess and the Frog (Randy Newman)

"Hideaway," Where the Wild Things Are (Karen O)

"Smoke Without Fire," An Education (Duffy, Bernard Butler)

"The Weary Kind," Crazy Heart

(Ryan Bingham, T-Bone Burnett)

Just what civilization needs...

Another weigh-in on the best films of the decade.

20 Honorable mentions, listed alphabetically:

Adaptation (Spike Jonze); Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe); Amores Perros (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu); Before Sunset (Richard Linklater); City of God (Fernando Meirelles); The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Piui); A History of Violence (David Cronenberg); The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow); Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino); Junebug (Phil Morrison); Kings & Queen (Arnaud Desplechin); Little Children (Todd Field); Once (John Carney); Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro); Ratatouille (Brad Bird); Safe Conduct (Bertrand Tavernier); A Serious Man (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen); United 93 (Paul Greengrass); Vera Drake (Mike Leigh); Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson)

25. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach)
24. The Fog of War (Errol Morris)
23. 25th Hour (Spike Lee)
22. Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel)
21. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)
20. The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana)
19. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki)
18. You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan)
17. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel)
16. No Country for Old Men (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)
15. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
14. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)
13. Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron)
12. Sideways (Alexander Payne)
11. Yi Yi (Edward Yang)
10. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)
9. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu)
8. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)
7. Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes)
6. Zodiac (David Fincher)
5. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar)
4. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai)
3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
2. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola)
1. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch)

"And when it's done, we'll both be free..."

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—I’m sure I’ve seen the film 20 times. It inspired the longest, thorniest paper of my academic career. And though I chafe at perfunctory rankings of art, my perennial fascination with the Master’s most self-expressive work assures its place on that desert island for which connoisseurs prepare in itemized fashion.

Outshining its palpable wonderments, in my view, is its capacity to reveal uncharted pockets of genius on each viewing. Sometimes it’s a quick shot, sometimes an extended set piece; regardless, you always come away with newfound reverence for Hitchcock’s twisted virtuosity. I had occasion to watch it recently in a venue that did full justice to its grandeur, and this time my attention was seized by a quiet interlude which before then seemed like little more than connective tissue. (This is where I urge you to stop reading if you’ve never seen Vertigo—and let your artistic compasses know they've failed you.)

I refer to the ten-minute sequence which begins after the inquest into Madeleine’s death, and ends with Scottie’s compulsion to enter Judy’s apartment. The parenthesis comprises the saddest, tenderest, most genuine treatment of grief and refusal to unfasten the shackles of lost love I have ever seen on film. Scottie drifts through days as though trapped in a lucid dream, unresponsive to stimuli except those that fuel his need to believe Madeleine is not really gone from him. He returns to familiar locales—the Elsters’ old residence, the bar at Ernie’s, the gallery where Carlotta’s portrait emblematizes past forfeitures to love—almost as if he believes Madeleine is hiding from him, teasingly and in plain sight. The faintest validation of his faith reengages him with the world, but the sting of each setback pushes him further into withdrawal. How tenaciously he questions the woman who would presume to drive Madeleine’s distinctive green car; how thoroughly he retreats upon learning she is the new owner.

The frenzied nightmare that triggers Scottie's breakdown is vintage Hitchcock—the specters of Gavin and Carlotta, the wary but purposeful march to the empty grave, the crime scene-esque silhouette of Scottie plummeting downward into worse things than death. But the compositions that follow are anomalous in the extreme, especially for a filmmaker often linked with sensation over emotion, with economy before patience. The long, slow pan across San Francisco’s skyline attests that all machinations, even Hitchcock’s, must sometimes cede their urgency, and Bernard Herrmann’s soaring soundscape, marked by a literalization of heartstrings, has the curious effect of rendering the passions on display even more shrouded and internalized.

I don’t mean to give the impression of narrative stasis within these scenes. Hitchcock uses the interval to prepare his canvas for the imminent sublimation of helplessness into tyranny; when the time comes, he has subtly groomed us to be revulsed but not confounded. He also exhibits his deft command of parallelism, as the fateful premonitions of Scottie’s dream remind us of Madeleine’s self-fulfilling prophesy, as dire interrogations prefigure unyielding demands, as Midge’s micromanagement of Scottie’s recovery anticipates the exactitude of Judy’s reinvention. But what registers most pronouncedly is the study of a shattered soul—of bereavement in something close to real time. Many handlings of the predicament hasten us through numbness into primal rage, sensual surrender and release. By lingering on the bargaining stage, Hitchcock reveals himself as the master of a different kind of suspense—the suspended animation of the lovelorn survivor.

Contemplation Row

Emerging from I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s kaleidoscopic portrait of Bob Dylan in all his mutability of image, one emphatic gentleman proclaimed it “a totally unnecessary movie.” More than a brusque dismissal, this observation doubtless typifies the majority response to the work. Haynes’s film audaciously renders a chameleonic character, making no attempt to reconcile his disparate facades, and further clouding the point by dividing the Dylan role among six actors with no clear commonalities.

For a middle-of-the-road moviegoer, this approach breeds chaos and confusion. What good is biography that sheds no light on its subject? That uses technique to augment his obscurity—to pronounce him unknowable without aiming for a semblance of understanding?

As Louis Armstrong said of jazz, if you have to ask you’ll never know. All Dylanites, and I count myself as one, admit that their hero defies definition. True disciples know it would indeed take a half dozen performers including a black boy and a woman to capture his myriad personae.

As with Man on the Moon, the like-minded but less flamboyant Andy Kaufman head-scratcher, I’m Not There presumes the futility of seeking closure. Dylan is enigma incarnate, a figure who concurrently shaped and reflected a cultural moment; to ask for precision and unity is a fool's errand. Haynes is more concerned with ambiance than cohesion, so escapists are advised to look elsewhere.

Among the six incarnations of the artist, not one bears the name Bob Dylan. That’s fitting, as the stage name is no more authentic to Robert Zimmerman than any of the monikers assumed by his surrogates in the film, most of which harbor nonetheless some connection to the man as well as the myth. We get Woody Guthrie and Arthur Rimbaud, named for creative influences. We meet Jude Quinn, perhaps an homage to “Quinn the Eskimo”—a folk rock piece composed by Dylan during the interval that character bridges. At last we encounter Cowboy Billy, whose presence calls to mind the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, for which Dylan composed his quixotic ballad “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin) is presented as a twelve-year-old African American, riding the rails and plucking populist tunes on his guitar like his namesake, despite the fact that Guthrie’s time had long since passed. The episode dates to 1959, and in a scene of great power and significance, Woody is rebuked for glamorizing the Depression-era plight of the hobo while civil rights crusades hover on the horizon. “Live your own time,” he is told, as if to quell the anachronism of the early Dylan recordings.

Having reinvented himself—in the first of many such instances—as a mouthpiece of the folk movement, Woody is replaced by Arthur (Ben Whishaw), a pastiche of anterior talents. The look of the picture changes accordingly. From the richly saturated hues of the wunderkind’s westward travels (echoing the palette employed by cinematographer Haskell Wexler in the 1976 Guthrie bio Bound for Glory), Haynes shifts to a gritty black and white—then back to less stylized color with the introduction of Jack (Christian Bale), a romantic Greenwich Village prodigy, and tinted green for our sojourn with Robbie (Heath Ledger), a Hollywood actor playing Jack in a meta-biopic.

The differentiation of texture between each sequence accomplishes a good deal more than helping us keep the stories straight. It evokes an array of memories (or impressions, for those of us too young to remember) of the media we associate with Dylan—the means of disseminating the man into the culture. This is most chillingly manifest in scenes depicting the embodiment called Jude (Cate Blanchett), culled directly from the touchstone of popular Dylan perception, D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back.

It’s within these scenes that lightning strikes. The remarkable Blanchett propels us through the legendary tour of England, the combative press junkets, and the infamous Newport Folk Festival where Dylan unleashed his new electric sound to the inestimable horror of his fan base. Here we see him at his most insufferable—cocky, dismissive, occasionally cruel, and reliant on chemicals to fulfill promises his body was ill-equipped to keep.

The miracle of Blanchett’s portrayal is her ability to capture both sides of the coin. We bristle as we recognize the narcissistic man-child who greets fans and biographers with abstract contempt. This is the Dylan recorded by Pennebaker four decades ago, from whom many fans remain alienated to this day. But we also glimpse the beleaguered, inexperienced songwriter from Minnesota who resented being dubbed the voice of his generation at an age when most people are assumed to know none of the answers. This more sympathetic Dylan was proffered by Martin Scorsese in his recent documentary No Direction Home.

Rounding out the collage—though in fact blurring its focus—is Billy (Richard Gere), hermitlike inhabitant of a folkloric town self-consciously named Riddle. As Billy rides his horse to the town square, all the villagers he passes are cloaked in Halloween attire and seem to be fortifying themselves for disaster. The elements of paranoia, camouflage and individualism suggest Dylan’s period of withdrawal after his mysterious motorcycle accident, followed by the release of his western-themed album John Wesley Harding. But the connection is shaky at best.

Ultimately these scenes are the film’s least successful. Shapeless and baffling, they supply unfortunate ammunition to critics of Haynes’s intrepid stylings. The word “pretentious,” while broadly applied to any feature aiming to sell ideas instead of popcorn, serves in its primary usage to critique works which “pretend” to function in ways they do not, or pretend to know what they’re doing when the opposite is plainly true. Whatever the Billy episode sought to achieve, it falls short, and must be classified as a pretentious supplement to a piece otherwise marked by assurance, not indulgence.

True, I’m Not There strikes the occasional false note. Verbal asides inspired by (or meant to inspire) Dylan lyrics, like Jude’s off-the-cuff utterance “That’s just like a woman,” land with the thud of Forrest Gumpist contrivance. Insertions of pop cultural icons range in their effectiveness—Julianne Moore channels Joan Baez note-perfectly in her few scenes, but Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer and others not bothering with pseudonyms feel shoehorned in.

Nevertheless, Haynes leaves us with a fascinating proposition: that an identity as fluid as Dylan’s couldn’t possibly be pinned down by a single actor or mise-en-scene. And in thrusting us headlong through clashing compositions, feeding us prodigal imagery to make our heads spin, he tenders perhaps the only viable agency for grasping the man and his time—as a raging, roving, psychedelic whirlwind.

"Two Old Fashioneds. For two old-fashioned people."

What if I asked you which swath of the populace is most grievously neglected on film? Think it over. Consider quality of depiction as well as frequency. There’s no right answer, of course, but I’ll bet my answer differs from yours. And if that’s the case, I’ll wager it’s not because you think my party gets a fair shake, but because conditions are so inequitable it was never on the table to begin with.

I'm thinking of the elderly.

Meaning no offense, I believe that of all the “-isms” that fracture our society, ageism meets with the most unperturbed indifference. Nowhere on earth is this truer than in Hollywood, which (breaking news, I’m well aware) places such premiums on youth, frenetic life and glamorous death that people failing to evince those qualities are regarded as dead weight.

Maybe you’re thinking: Wait, I can name lots of actors in their seventies and they’re still going strong! Have you forgotten Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman? No, but I wish I could forget The Bucket List. Only the latest submission to an endless cycle of pernicious fairy tales (let’s call them Cocooners, after Ron Howard’s execrable prototype), the film purports that loneliness can be cured and vitality regained by jumping out of airplanes with newfound friends. Oh, but the two leads have terminal cancer. Do you imagine people with that prognosis are more apt to spend their last days: a) knocking around the Pyramids with formulaically mismatched sidekicks, or b) trying to stabilize their anesthesia so they’re lucid enough to enjoy the company of loved ones for as long as their escalating pain will permit?

Who wants to watch a film about torturous decline, you might ask—surely not old people! Well, who wants to watch a film about teenage prostitution, gang warfare or meth addiction? Lots of people! The key difference is that those movies end with deceptive catharses, whereas life in twilight can only end in death—and as heartfelt as that may be, it’s also messy, humiliating and sad. Sadder still in many cases are the preceding years, marked by solitude and degradation (not confined to the physical strain). Should you ever question your capacity to empathize with fellow human beings, watch the first twenty minutes of Bryan Forbes’s The Whisperers; they will serve as your litmus test. An Englishwoman of about eighty trudges to the welfare office to claim her subsistence check, then to church where she’s compelled to sing hymns for nourishment, then to the public library to warm her feet on the pipes. That act of indignity gets her expelled from the premises. In his initial review, Roger Ebert posed a question that society is too content to read as rhetorical: “What is it about the Puritan culture, in England and in this country, that makes it necessary for the old and the hungry to shame themselves in order to get the necessities of life?”

To further his inquiry, what is it about the commercial culture, in this country above all, that makes it necessary for the old and the weak to occupy positions of marginality? Death is everywhere in movies and we’re fine with it, just as long as it’s unplanned and unnatural. “Because we’ve come to see death as a failure to keep living, normal death is stripped of meaning, which renders it terrifying,” observes Pomona Prof. Lauri Mullens. But why should something as universal and inescapable as human mortality be terrifying?

Australia-based filmmaker Paul Cox understands that it needn’t be. His exquisite productions, Innocence and A Woman’s Tale, explore the jubilation of life and the weary, wistful sorrow of its passing. The greatest of all films on seniority—and among the greatest of all films—is Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, a trenchant reflection on the unwillingness of young people hurriedly leading their lives to make room for old people still (inconveniently) living theirs. Depressing in its allegations but exhilarating in its candor, Ozu’s masterpiece is brave enough to conclude with a casual expression of life’s disappointments, arriving in a manner both startling and overdue.

The U.S. Census Board reports that 13% of our population is 65 or above. What can that demographic expect from Hollywood? As I see it they’re dropped into three basic pigeonholes. First and foremost, the Cocooners—insidious works that mine the aged for pith and vinegar, shuffling them off-screen when it's time for the youngsters to Be Affected. We note a minor uptick of integrity in the second group, films that respect the elderly but can only envision them in conventional frameworks. These include whimsical human interest yarns like The Straight Story, geriatric buddy pictures (shall we say “crony pictures”) such as Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, and episodic character sketches like the undeniably charming Harry and Tonto.

As expected, the third array concerns treatment of corporeal/neurological failure. Unsentimental works of this type are rare enough, but they’re a dime a dozen compared to the paltry contingent of honest meditations on the emotional cost of longevity. Surviving your life partner or feeling ill at ease with technology and estranged from the younger generations tap into deep-seated cultural anxieties. If we fear one thing more than death, it’s obsolescence. There’s vicious irony in the volume of movies devoted to quarter-life turmoil. Restlessness we embrace, uselessness we scorn.

At last we reach the eternal argument for visibility at all costs. Yes, I prefer twinkly, garbage-mouthed Alan Arkin to no Arkin at all, but there should be a third avenue—one that confronts the winter of life with compassion, fidelity and truth. Is life disappointing? Undeniably. Can the plight be acknowledged? Why else do movies exist?

Spencer Tracy in The Last Hurrah

When it comes to Spencer Tracy, “the ultimate actor’s actor” is less a figure of speech than a matter of consensus. He was the favorite screen performer of legions of colleagues including Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Richard Widmark, and Sir Laurence Olivier claimed, “I’ve learned more about acting from watching Tracy than in any other way.” He was a truck salesman’s son from Milwaukee who, by his own account, flunked out of 15 or more grammar schools and considered the hallmarks of his profession to be “Know your lines, show up on time, and don’t bump into the furniture.” Yet he possessed an instinct for the nuances of screen acting that most performers can only envy.

Unlike Olivier, his technique was invisible; unlike Cagney and Bogart, he had no trademark mannerisms. “There’s nothing to imitate except his genius,” Cagney proclaimed, “and that can’t be mimicked.” His greatest talent was his ability to listen, not as an actor awaiting his cue, but as an inhabitant of the scene, absorbing information as it’s offered and responding with an immaculate air of spontaneity. “Effortless” is too glib a descriptor for Tracy’s style: it’s not that he appears to do nothing; it’s that he appears to do nothing planned. His reactions feel motivated not by plot necessity but by situational urgency.

Ironically, it’s that very naturalism which tends to keep him eclipsed in the pantheon of stars. As Cagney notes, a Tracy impression would consist of little more than intelligence and reserve—hardly nightclub fodder—and this may have cost him a personality cult. Hindsight being a sentimental bird, it’s likely that he’s best remembered for his nine pairings with Katharine Hepburn, grounding her New England dithering with his Midwestern pragmatism. Though he was always a great deal more than her foil, Tracy’s gifts were in fullest flower elsewhere—as the lynch mob survivor in Fury (1936), the Colonial militia leader in Northwest Passage (1940), the concentration camp escapee in The Seventh Cross (1944), the one-armed stranger in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), and perhaps above all, the bare knuckle politician in The Last Hurrah (1958).

The latter film is fascinating to watch during election season, as we are reminded just how much of campaigning is political theater. We don’t need director John Ford or screenwriter Frank Nugent to tell us that charisma counts for more than policy on the stump, but seeing a veteran actor take on the role of statesman affords a sense of balance in times when the inverse dominates the airwaves—and shows how actorly control (or calculated lack of it) undergirds every discerning campaign.

Adapted from Edwin O’Connor’s novel of the same name, The Last Hurrah marked Tracy’s first and only pairing with Ford since the star’s debut feature, Up the River (1930). He plays Frank Skeffington, a populist Irish-American mayor making a last bid for reelection, eschewing modern office-seeking methods for the same cocktail of speeches, rallies, and personal appearances that worked so well in the past—and with the same steadfast crew of Runyonesque ward heelers, portrayed by character actors extraordinaire (and fellow members of Tracy’s “Irish Mafia”) Pat O’Brien, James Gleason, and Edward Brophy. Skeffington knows the days of the old-style candidate are numbered, but the slum-born mayor seeks one final victory for self-made politicians against the city’s moneyed elite and the callow law school grads they endorse.

The superficially guileless star is an ideal choice for Skeffington, as shrewd a politico as Tracy was an actor. Skeffington works every angle clandestinely, listening with rapt attention, charming and manipulating all while feigning transparency—in both men’s discharge of their duties, five or six things are always happening beneath the surface. Most scenes consist of Tracy entering a room and effectuating a desired outcome, and the actor uses every aspect of his mien to make this plausible. His attentive eyes are always reading the crowd—sometimes literally, when his irises shift in thought as he contemplates his next move. Even the tilt of his head is communicative: bowed slightly, doubling his chin, to show sympathy or condescension (the latter sometimes taking the pose of the former), or even righteousness depending on the angle. Whimsy and melancholy coalesce in his tone as he speaks confidingly of his methods, punctuating his cadence with redolent pauses (“I speak in fight arenas…armories…street corners…anywhere I can gather a crowd…I even kiss babies!”) He finds the sly comedy in a scene where he blackmails a foe by making the man’s feckless son city fire commissioner. Overplaying by perhaps 10 percent so his aide will catch his drift, Tracy grandstands about “men of daring” and emphasizes the absurdity of words like “big red car,” nodding appreciatively at the fireman’s helmet as the young stooge laps it up. He affects the faintest brogue in the company of Irish constituents, and places his hand on the shoulders of those who need extra persuasion. But as he’s seducing them, he’s seducing the audience. However we feel about Frank Skeffington, Spencer Tracy knows how to win votes.

In a scene so pregnant with mawkish potential that perhaps only Ford and Tracy could make it work, Skeffington takes his nephew (Jeffrey Hunter) to an alleyway on skid row. “The Castle of Dramore,” a harp-laced Irish lullaby, plays on the soundtrack as a baby cries out from a second story apartment. Fedora cocked, Tracy climbs two steps of the fire escape, gazes up in the direction of the wailing and intones, “I was born here, Adam.” We’re inclined to read the screen as we would a book, the flow of time moving in a rightward, downward course, so Tracy’s gaze into the space beyond the northwest corner of the frame intimates he’s staring into his own past—the cries harking back to a time when his forum was not city hall but a ramshackle tenement. He strikes a match to show Hunter where he carved his initials on a wooden post, above those of the girl who would become his late wife. With most of his face shaded by the fedora, he has only the wrinkled smile illuminated by the tinder stick to express his feelings, and he manages a look of reverie and pain that sails past craft into the realm of the sublime.

Even when Tracy is shot from behind—shoulders square, hands concealed—he conveys intent. But despite its laid-back effect, it’s quite a busy performance; he’s forever pacing and coming to rest, modulating his rich, protean voice not just in volume and speed but in hardness. In his first scene with Hunter, he speaks almost continuously for three and a half minutes of politics as “the greatest spectator sport in the country today.” We are too entranced to be distracted by (and indeed we’re hardly are aware of) the blocking: Skeffington lights a cigarette, takes a seat, rises and walks to the window, doubles back and reclaims his chair, stubs out the cigarette, stands, picks a match from the floor, returns to the window, turns around, pitches the match (on the verbal cue “Last hoo-rah”), and thrusts his hand in his pocket. In his unassuming way, he makes even elaborate stage business seem organic.

But most of all there’s the face, creased from a lifetime of battles, with an easy smile borne of confidence in his skill and sparkling, searching eyes. And in keeping with the plaintive tone of The Last Hurrah, as we canvass the latter-day denizens of Hollywood and Washington, we can permit ourselves the slightest pangs of nostalgia. Mister, we could use a man like Spencer Tracy again.

As the world holds its breath...

Presenting...the 2008 Golden Steve Awards.

Far and away the most coveted of motion picture accolades, Golden Steves are frequently described as the Oscars without the politics. Impervious to bribery, unreceptive to ballyhoo, disgusted by sentiment and riddled with integrity, this committee of one might legitimately be termed “fair-mindedness incarnate.” Over 100 of the year’s most acclaimed features were screened prior to the compilation of this ballot. First, a few caveats:

1) Owing to a lifelong suspicion of prime numbers, each category (save Best Animated Feature) is comprised of six nominees, not five.

2) Several of the works under scrutiny received international distribution before January 1, 2008. However, they were unavailable to American audiences and thus ineligible for Golden Steve consideration until now.

3) This list is in no way connected with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—a fact that should be apparent from its acumen. Please look elsewhere for Oscar predictions.

And now, the worthy honorees:

Best Picture

The Edge of Heaven

Gomorrah

Happy-Go-Lucky

Let the Right One In

My Winnipeg

The Wrestler

Best Director

Fatih Akin, The Edge of Heaven

Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In

Darren Aronofsky, The Wrestler

Matteo Garrone, Gomorrah

Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky

Guy Maddin, My Winnipeg

Best Actor

Michael Fassbender, Hunger

Brendan Gleeson, In Bruges

Richard Jenkins, The Visitor

Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon

Sean Penn, Milk

Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

Best Actress

Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married

Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky

Maria Heiskanen, Everlasting Moments

Melissa Leo, Frozen River

Kristin Scott Thomas, I've Loved You So Long

Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy

Best Supporting Actor

Michel Blanc, The Witnesses

Josh Brolin, Milk

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt

Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky

Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road

Best Supporting Actress

Penelope Cruz, Vicki Cristina Barcelona

Viola Davis, Doubt

Rosemarie DeWitt, Rachel Getting Married

Ann Savage, My Winnipeg

Hanna Schygulla, The Edge of Heaven

Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

Best Screenplay--Adapted

The Class (Francois Begaudeau, Robin Campillo, Laurent Cantet)

Doubt (John Patrick Shanley)

Everlasting Moments (Niklas Radstrom, Jan Troell, Agneta Ulfsater-Troell)

Frost/Nixon (Peter Morgan)

Gomorrah (Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio, Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, Roberto Saviano)

Let the Right One In (John Ajvide Lindqvist)

Best Screenplay--Original

The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin)

Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)

Milk (Dustin Lance Black)

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, George Toles)

Synechdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman)

The Wrestler (Robert Siegel)

Best Animated Feature

Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen)

$9.99 (Tatia Rosenthal)

WALL-E (Andrew Stanton)

Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman)

Best Non-Fiction Film

Bigger, Stronger, Faster (Chris Bell)

Chris and Don: A Love Story (Tina Mascara and Guido Santi)

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (Kurt Kuenne)

Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog)

Trouble the Water (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin)

Up the Yangtze (Yung Chang)

Best Foreign Language Film

The Class (Laurent Cantet)

The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin)

Everlasting Moments (Jan Troell)

Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone)

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson)

Revanche (Gotz Spielmann)

Best Original Song

"Dracula's Lament," Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Jason Segel)

"Little Person," Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, Jon Brion)

"Once in a Lifetime," Cadillac Records (Ian Dench, Amanda Ghost, Beyonce Knowles)

"Trouble the Water," Trouble the Water (Kimberly Rivers Roberts)

"Up to Our Nex," Rachel Getting Married (Robyn Hitchcock)

"The Wrestler," The Wrestler (Bruce Springsteen)