The Artist and The Descendants were the two big winners at the Golden Globes on Sunday night, taking home the Best Picture Comedy/Musical and Best Picture Drama respectively. Both leading men, Jean Dujardin for The Artist and George Clooney for The Descendants, won Best Actor in their respective categories. To top it off, The Artist also took home Best Original Score.

Christopher Plummer (Beginners) and Octavia Spencer (The Help) continued to solidify their places as the Supporting Actor and Actress front runners, while Martin Scorsese walked away with the Best Director trophy for Hugo.

The Golden Globes did little to clear up the Best Actress race, due largely in part to its separation into Comedy/Musical and Drama categories. Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn) nabbed the Comedy/Musical award, while the Drama trophy went to Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady).

A Separation, Iran’s Best Foreign Language Film nominee, seems to have taken its place at the head of the pack in that category, adding the Golden Globe win to its already lengthy list of accolades, which includes honors from the National Board of Review, the NYFCC, the Independent Spirit Awards, and several other awards and festivals.

I think it is fair to say that The Artist is still the film to place your money on for the Best Picture Oscar, but there is still a lot of time for the momentum to shift elsewhere. Historically, there is a strong correlation between Best Director and Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards, which could bode well for Hugo, if Scorsese continues to snag directing victories. Otherwise, I’m going to keep an eye on The Descendants and The Help to possibly make a move in the coming weeks.

You can check out the complete list of Golden Globe winners and nominees here.

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The National Board of Review has a long history of kicking off the awards season, setting trends and marking initial frontrunners. This year, Martin Scorsese’s 3D adventure Hugo has taken an early lead, much like The Social Network did last year, by being named Best Film by the NBR. Scorsese also won the Best Director award.

The Descendants was another notable winner, snagging Best Actor (George Clooney), Best Supporting Actress (Shailene Woodley) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash), as well as landing a place in the list of the year’s 10 Top Films.

The New York Film Critics Circle got a jump on the NBR this year by releasing its annual awards on Tuesday, but none of the winners match. The NYFCC handed out Best Picture to The Artist, while Brad Pitt grabbed Best Actor for Moneyball and The Tree of Life.

The Help received the Best Ensemble award from the NBR, but was conspicuously absent from all other categories, including the 10 Top Films. The Iron Lady, for which Meryl Streep nabbed the NYFCC’s Best Actress honors, was notably absent from the NBR’s awards, which considered Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin) this year’s Best Actress.

You can see the complete list of the National Board of Review’s awards here, and the NYFCC’s awards here.

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The teaser trailer for The Iron Lady only gave us a 10 second preview of Meryl Streep’s portrayal of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but in this new UK trailer for the biopic she’s present in nearly every scene. I think it’s safe to assume Streep will be attending some award ceremonies when they kick off early next year.

Watch the trailer below:

With The Weinstein Company (The King’s Speech) on-board there is a very likely chance Streep will be receiving her 17th Academy Award nomination. Streep came close to winning a Best Actress statue for her performance as Julia Child in Julie & Julia, so the Academy will eat up her portrayal of a controversial historical figure in British politics.

The film reunites Streep with Phyllida Lloyd who directed Mamma Mia!, and also stars Jim Broadbent (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood-Prince) as Thatcher’s husband, and Anthony Head (Buffy) as Thatcher’s longest-serving cabinet member, Geoffrey Howe.

The Iron Lady has a limited release on December 30th in the US, followed by a wide release in January. The UK release will be January 6th.

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We’ve seen how Meryl Streep has nailed the look of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and in this newly released teaser trailer we finally get to see the actress in action.

Watch below:

The Iron Lady is a biopic about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, portrayed by Meryl Streep. It’s early days yet, but with The Weinstein Company on-board there is a very likely chance Streep will be receiving her 17th Academy Award nomination. Streep came close to winning a Best Actress statue for her performance as Julia Child in Julie & Julia, so the Academy will eat up her portrayal of a controversial historical figure in British politics.

The film reunites Streep with Phyllida Lloyd who directed Mamma Mia!, and also stars Jim Broadbent (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood-Prince) as Thatcher’s husband, and Anthony Head (Buffy) as Thatcher’s longest-serving cabinet member, Geoffrey Howe.

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The Weinstein Company scored big earlier this year when The King’s Speech won 4 Oscars and went on to make over $400 million worldwide, and it looks like they’ll be counting on another British drama during the next awards season.

According to Deadline 5 minutes of footage from The Iron Lady was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, triggering a bidding war between the likes of Summit Entertainment, Relativity Media and Fox Searchlight. In the end The Weinstein Company won US distribution rights with a bid north of $6 million.

The Iron Lady is a biopic about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, portrayed by Meryl Streep. It’s early days yet, but with The Weinstein Company on-board there is a very likely chance Streep will be receiving her 17th Academy Award nomination. Streep came close to winning a Best Actress statue for her performance as Julia Child in Julie & Julia, so the Academy will eat up her portrayal of a controversial historical figure in British politics.

The film reunites Streep with Phyllida Lloyd who directed Mamma Mia!, and also stars Jim Broadbent (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood-Prince) as Thatcher’s husband, and Anthony Head (Buffy) as Thatcher’s longest-serving cabinet member, Geoffrey Howe.

Expect The Weinstein Company to set an Oscar-baiting release date soon.

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Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox might be my favorite Roald Dahl adaptation of all time. When I say that, I’m speaking of Roald Dahl adaptations like The Witches (1990), Matilda (’96), James and the Giant Peach (also ’96), and both versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005 with that title, 1971 as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). The stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr. Fox may not best the pure Dahl we were blessed to see in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, You Only Live Twice and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Dahl wrote screeplay drafts of the first two and provided stories for six episodes of the latter), but forms a hybrid Anderson/Dahl film that manages to enhance the creative force coming from each man without infringing upon the sensibilities of the other.

This fall has been a season for contemporary adaptations of children’s books from my past, with this opening relatively close to Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are, but where Jonze brought the story of Max and the Wild Things into my adulthood to remind me what it was like being a child, The Fantastic Mr Fox brought my childhood sense of wonder back from the past and let me stare lovingly at it for 87 minutes.

Wes Anderson has always exercised a great degree of control in his framing and composition, and being forced to create the entire world of Mr. Fox, right down to tiny pieces of silverware, has built an autumnal world where green doesn’t exist. Add in the “boiling” effect created when stop-motion animators work with real fur and the film seems like the end of an era. The visual look of the film takes about 5 minutes to get used to, but after the limitations have been set, Anderson doesn’t shy away from potentially problematic visuals like smoke, liquids and shots filled with moving parts sculpted in minute detail.

Anderson’s visual style and the screenplay by Anderson and The Squid and the Whale author Noel Baumbach adds depth to the story Dahl created without violating the bounds of the original story and the added elements find the perfect place between Dahl and Anderson to nestle in and become cannon. The story of the book concerns a debonair Fox (George Clooney) stealing food from three evil farmers – Boggis, Bunce and Bean (Bean voiced by Michael Gambon in the film) – only to see the same three farmers attempt to dig the Fox out of his home. The plot of the book takes up the middle of the film, with some Wes Anderson family dynamics adding most of the additional material, including Fox’s loner son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) and his attempts to impress his father. Where Dahl’s version is more about Fox’s mid-life crisis causing him to lose his home and endanger his friends, Anderson’s version has an additional storyline about being an outcast and how everyone’s differences are special.

Schwartzman does well in his first animated appearance, adding many of the repeat lines I keep rattling off to others who have seen the movie. Things like: “I don’t have a bandit hat, but I modified this tube sock,” and “I can fit through there, you want to know why? I’m tiny.” Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray and Eric Anderson (Wes’ brother who plays Kristofferson, the super athletic fox cousin) all turn in subtle but excellent voice work, even if Streep is criminally underused for only a handful of lines.

Overall, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is an easy film to break down into it’s various elements that elicit some sort of nostalgia, be it for Dahl, stop-motion animation or Wes Anderson before he went semi-crazy with The Darjeeling Limited. However, when the film starts rolling, all these outwardly obvious tropes become the gears that propel the mechanism into a working piece of family entertainment. Not just working, but one of my favorites all year. The Fantastic Mr. Fox isn’t long enough to let it’s wit and inherent coolness start to grate on its audience, and it ends in joyous dance.

In a year when most of our children’s films have either been pointless tripe (Monsters Vs. Aliens) or flicks that skew towards adults almost to a fault (Up and Where The Wild Things Are), it’s been the two stop-motion animated films, not the CGI masterpieces that have brought children’s entertainment into the fray of “family entertainment.” Both Coraline (Dir: Henry Selick, now on DVD!) and The Fantastic Mr. Fox never stop being entertaining or visually stunning, even though they are on the cutting edge of a dying art.

I’m looking forward to the debate when Up, Fox and Coraline go head to head for the Best Animated Feature Academy Award.

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