What's an Oscar columnist to do?
I write about the movies, and I've been known to give my opinions on what I like and what I don’t, so it makes sense to finish out the year with a Top 10 list.
But I also tend to cover everything through the prism of Oscar, and I've got this AMPAS Best Picture ballot that I can't return to PriceWaterhouseCoopers because they'd throw it straight into the trash. (They're sticklers about the fact that you actually have to be an Academy member to vote.)
So here, for the second year in a row, is my solution -- This is my 2010 Oscar ballot, filled out the way I'd fill it out if I had a vote. But since I don't have a vote, it's my 2010 Top 10 list.
1. "Biutiful"
This one snuck up on me. The first time I saw it, in September, I found it dark and haunting, and thought Javier Bardem was pretty great. The second time, in November, I more fully embraced Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's search for beauty in the darkness, and Bardem's utterly magnificent performance as a man grasping at life in the face of death. The third time, in December, I realized that this crushing tone poem ("sordid poetry," Werner Herzog called it) moved me like nothing else released this year.
2. "Black Swan"
The most exhilarating movie experience I had all year came at 9 a.m. on a chilly Toronto morning when, after a week of not enough sleep and an hour in a rush line on the cold sidewalk, I was jolted awake by Darren Aronofsky's gloriously overheated fever dream about identity and madness and obsession. And its final half-hour – a crazy, weird, ludicrous, magnificently over-the-top crescendo of blood and paranoia and melodrama and Tchaikovsky – sent me back out onto that sidewalk muttering (and texting) "holy crap."
3. "Carlos"
This choice is something of a cheat, because I wouldn't really be allowed put it on an Oscar ballot. These three films, which together last five-and-a-half-hours and make up one of the richest, densest, most panoramic theatrical experiences I had in 2010, debuted on French television and aren't eligible for the Oscars. But Olivier Assayas' bracing look at the rise and fall of a notorious terrorist is eligible for greatness, and a Top 10 list can say to hell with Oscar rules.
4. "Animal Kingdom"
Succinct where "Carlos" is sprawling, David Michod's quiet, tense Australian drama is the other great crime story of the year: "Goodfellas" meets "A Prophet," with Jacki Weaver as the scariest matriarch since Joan Crawford.
5.
