Widescreen Awards: The Winners

And here they are: my favorite performances and technical achievements of the year. Click on the images for the full-write ups. The nominees are presented in list format at the bottom of this post with a slightly amended (including one addition and one upgrade) Top 20 from the one I started out with.

The Top Twenty Films of 2010

20. "Cairo Time" (Canada, dir. Ruba Nadda)

19. "Black Swan" (USA, dir. Darren Aronofsky)

18. "Toy Story 3" (USA, dir. Lee Unkrich)

17. "Salt" (USA, dir. Phillip Noyce)

16. “The Fighter” (USA, dir. David O. Russell)

15. "Inception" (USA, dir. Christopher Nolan)

14. "The Chaser" (South Korea, dir. Na Hong-jin)

13. "Night Catches Us" (USA, dir. Tanya Hamilton)

12. "True Grit" (USA, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)

11. "Splice" (Canada, dir. Vincenzo Natali)

10. "I Am Love" (Italy, dir. Luca Guadagnino)

9. "Restrepo" (USA, dir. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger)

8. "Animal Kingdom" (Australia, dir. David Michôd)

7. "A Prophet" (France, dir. Jacques Audiard)

6. "That Evening Sun" (USA, dir. Scott Teems)

5. "Secret Sunshine" (South Korea, dir. Lee Chang-dong)

4. "Enter the Void" (France/Germany/Italy, dir. Gaspar Noé)

3. "Tokyo Sonata" (Japan, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

2. "Mother" (South Korea, dir. Bong Joon-ho)

1. "The Social Network" (USA, dir. David Fincher)

Best Director

Bong Joon-ho (Mother)

David Fincher (The Social Network)

Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Tokyo Sonata)

Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void)

Best Actor

Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network)

Hal Holbrook (That Evening Sun)

Teruyuki Kagawa (Tokyo Sonata)

Tahar Rahim (A Prophet)

Édgar Ramírez (Carlos)

Best Actress

Jeon Do-yeon (Secret Sunshine)

Kim Hye-ja (Mother)

Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone)

Natalie Portman (Black Swan)

Tilda Swinton (I Am Love)

Best Supporting Actor

Neils Arestrup (A Prophet)

Christian Bale (The Fighter)

Michael Fassbender (Fish Tank)

John Hawkes (Winter's Bone)

Ray McKinnon (That Evening Sun)

Best Supporting Actress

Melissa Leo (The Fighter)

Carrie Preston (That Evening Sun)

Charlotte Rampling (Life During Wartime)

Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit)

Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom)

Best Ensemble Performance

Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, Ciarán Hinds, Dylan Riley Snyder, Michael Lerner, Charlotte Rampling, Michael K. Williams, Paul Reubens, Rich Pecci (Life During Wartime)

Hal Holbrook, Raymond McKinnon, Carrie Preston, Mia Wasikowska, Walton Goggins, Barry Corbin, Dixie Carter (That Evening Sun)

Katie Jarvis, Kierston Wareing, Michael Fassbender and Rebecca Griffiths (Fish Tank)

Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyôko Koizumi, Yû Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki, Haruka Igawa and Kanji Tsuda (Tokyo Sonata)

Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Jamara Griffin, Wendell Pierce, Jamie Hector and Amari Cheatom (Night Catches Us)

Best Original Screenplay

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

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Max Mannix and Sachiko Tanaka (Tokyo Sonata)

David Michôd (Animal Kingdom)

Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor (Splice)

Todd Solondz (Life During Wartime)

Best Adapted Screenplay

Joel and Ethan Coen (True Grit)

Peter Craig, Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard (The Town)

John Curran (The Killer Inside Me)

Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network)

Scott Teems (That Evening Sun)

Best Cinematography

Jeff Cronenweth (The Social Network)

Benoît Debie (Enter the Void)

Hong Kyeong-pyo (Mother)

Yorick Le Saux (I Am Love)

Martin Ruhe (The American)

Best Editing

Stuart Baird and John Gilroy (Salt)

Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall (The Social Network)

Marc Boucrot and Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void)

Lee Smith (Inception)

Juliette Welfling (A Prophet)

Best Art Direction

Roshelle Berliner and Matteo De Cosmo (Life During Wartime)

Thérèse DePrez, David Stein and Tora Peterson (Black Swan)

Guy Dyas, Frank Walsh and Larry Dias (Agora)

Jess Gonchor, Christina Ann Wilson and Nancy Haigh (True Grit)

Albrecht Konrad, David Scheunemann and Bernhard Henrich (The Ghost Writer)

Best Musical Score

John Adams (I Am Love)

Lee Byung-woo (Mother)

Clint Mansell (Black Swan)

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network)

Hans Zimmer (Inception)

Best Sound Design

~ Enter the Void

~ Inception

~ The Social Network

Best Visual Effects

~ Enter the Void
~ Inception
~ The Social Network

Widescreen Awards: Director

For the second time in his relatively short career, Bong Joon-ho has taken a familiar genre and crafted a masterpiece (the other being 2005's serial killer drama "Memories of Murder"). Everything that he could possibly get right with Mother, he gets right. He even makes watching spilled water creep across the floor suspenseful. Bong is successful at balancing all the ingredients of his Hitchcockian stew — including truly funny character detail and a heartbreaking mother-son relationship — together for one of the most satisfying and unsettling films of 2010.

More than any film this year, The Social Network feels like it was conceived as one perfect whole. That's due in no small part to David Fincher. Many of his films have been flawlessly executed. Here, you can sense Fincher's fingerprints over every inch of film stock (or megapixel); and that's a good thing. It's one thing to have ratatattat dialogue (courtesy Aaron Sorkin); it's another to translate that into good cinema. All the while, Fincher holds onto the human element inside his story. It's not just about the birth of a new social network, but the new generation of people supporting that network.

Before I Am Love, Luca Guadagnino was a virtual unknown. As best I can tell, none of his previous films and documentaries have received U.S. distribution. Therefore, it's impossible to tell what he brought to the table previously, but "I Am Love" feels like the opening scene in a long and fruitful career. It's so full of life and vitality, and Guadagnino manages to extract natural performances from his actors while surrounding them in a preternaturally beautiful world.

Known foremost for his horror films ("Cure," "Pulse" and 2006's chilling "Retribution"), Kiyoshi Kurosawa has created one of the warmest, most rewarding films of the year with Tokyo Sonata. He's out-Capra'd Capra, but his happy ending is modulated by all the confusion and suffering that came before it. It's the kind of morality tale that only a horror director could conjure. And it works mostly because of how real the family at its center feels. The performances are so uniformly good that, by the time the melodrama kicks into high gear, the audience is too invested to question the strangeness of the film's final act. Finally, Kurosawa gets extra points for the piano recital, which sums up the point of the story with no words.

Eight years after his reprehensible (but awe-inspiring) "Irreversible," Gaspar Noé has returned to do the same thing all over again. This time, however, he (thankfully) upped the humanity quotient. Noé is a cinematic wizard. With Enter the Void, he stretches the bounds of what's possible in film while telling a captivating story. The audience is thrown into the worlds of both the living and the dead; and, like its main character, the viewer has no road map.

Honorable mention to Lee Chang-dong for the subtle beauty and compassion of Secret Sunshine; David Michôd for assembling an unexpectedly complex crime family in Animal Kingdom; and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger for putting their camera and their audience in the middle of the fight for Korengal Valley in Restrepo.

Tomorrow look for the Widescreen Awards wrap-up, with the winners announcement and links to some of the great films available on Netflix Instant.

Widescreen Awards: Cinematography

All of David Fincher’s films have had a distinct visual style, whether he’s working with Darius Khondji (“Se7en”) or Harris Savides (“Zodiac”). The same can be said of The Social Network, but Jeff Cronenweth has tempered the Fincher-isms with a real sense of the technocentric world we’re living in. From the orange gaze of Connecticut streetlights to the white-out offices of Facebook’s California headquarters, the cinematography adds to both the drama and the reality of what’s on screen.

Benoît Debie unleashes some truly awe-inspiring images in Enter the Void. Long, seamless tracking shots follow characters down stairwells and through Tokyo streets, and tiny apartments illuminated by vivid, pulsing neon lights. Although some of the most impressive shots in the film are the work of computer programmers and graphic artists, everything between the pixels is no less fantastic.

Hong Kyeong-pyo does a great job providing the requisite deep, dark shadows, but he's equally adept at capturing Mother's human drama. The surreal moments that bookend the film's central mystery — both of the protagonist dancing away her pain — are critical to the success of the film. The first, a meticulously framed and lit scene through a field of tall grass, and the second, a chaotic shot that loses its character amidst the other dancers, are executed perfectly.

It's one thing to capture beauty on film. It's another to have that beauty stand for something. In I Am Love, Yorick Le Saux uses everything in his toolbox to craft breathtaking scenes of rekindled passion. The impassive sculptures of industrial Milan serve as a striking counterpoint to the glowing warmth of Antonio's food and the source of his inspiration, the Italian countryside. There are two types of beauty in "I Am Love;" one that inspires and one that stifles. Le Saux expertly captures both.

Beyond the threadbare plot and low-key acting, the true star of The American is Martin Ruhe's cinematography. The film, very much like director Anton Corbijn's previous "Control" (also lensed by Ruhe), feels as if it were conceived as a series of still photographs. No surprise then that Corbijn started his career as a photographer. There's a depth and breadth to the imagery here that's difficult to top and, most importantly, contributes to the atmosphere Corbijn's tried to cultivate.

Widescreen Awards: Film Editing

Editing is quite possibly the most difficult aspect of film to judge, particularly from the perspective of a viewer. A good editor can pick up the slack from a bad director, who came into a project with a shaky vision. A bad editor can hack a good director's work unscrupulously. And, it would seem, editors are always at the mercy of the material they're given. If the production crew didn't shoot enough material, the editor will have a difficult time creating a rhythm or even choosing the best shots.

But here are the films that are, in my mind, the most smoothly "edited." Whether that's because of or despite the best or worst efforts of their editors, I will never know.

Angelina Jolie does a whole lot of running, jumping, leaping and tumbling in Salt, but the editing team of Stuart Baird and John Gilroy manage to keep the action sequences coherent. You always have a good idea where Jolie's super spy is going and how she's getting there.

The Social Network sustains a meticulously-crafted rhythm across a continent and its two-hour length. I have to imagine Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall had something to do with that, although with the reportedly OCD David Fincher in the director's chair, you can never be sure.

There are no wasted sequences in Enter the Void, which was edited by Marc Boucrot, with director Gaspar Noé doing double duty. Even the lulls in the plot, including one doozy of a trip, contribute to the whole. The editors knows when to look away, when to hold on a shot and how integrate the various special effects into the frame.

Christopher Nolan's new favorite editor Lee Smith (pictured) — they've been working together since 2005's "Batman Begins" — helps the master illusionist keep a lot of balls in the air in Inception. The final "kicks" sequence is as tightly constructed as any film this year.

Juliette Welfling, in her third collaboration with A Prophet director Jacques Audiard, achieves a measured pace across a number of years in the life of an burgeoning mafia kingpin. It's a testament to her skill at pacing and structure that so many great moments stay in your memory long after the 155 minutes are over.

Widescreen Awards: Sound Design

Sound design tends to be a difficult thing to wrap your head around. The Oscars split it into two categories — sound editing and sound mixing — but even the experts don't seem to really understand what they're rewarding. Sound editing, as I understand it, refers to the creation of sounds from scratch. Sound mixing refers to the assembling of many different sounds into a cohesive whole. Basically, the sound editors collect the sounds and the mixers put it all together. But so often it seems to come down to which films are either the loudest or which ones are Best Picture hopefuls looking to up their nomination tally.

With the caveat that I'm not an expert in what makes good sound editing or mixing, these are — to my ears — the best "designed" soundscapes of the year, with no attention paid to the differences between editing and mixing.

Spoilers, especially for Enter the Void, follow.

For a long stretch of Enter the Void, the viewer is trapped inside the skull of its expatriate protagonist. When his blood pressure spikes, we hear the thump of his pulse. When it plummets, we hear the ringing in his ears. But even after the camera leaves Oscar's body, the impressive soundscapes aren't over. As the camera glides over clouds and through buildings, the ambient sounds of the city and the silence are ever-present, with the low rattle and hum of Thomas Bangalter's (of Daft Punk) score just beneath the surface.

There's nothing altogether unique about the sound design in Inception, but it gets points for juggling so many different types of aural input without sacrificing clarity. The dream sounds are all heightened versions of real life — hear that exploding Paris street — that immerse your ears in the action. And the score, one of the most distinct features of the film, never completely overwhelms the soundtrack. Given the power of Hans Zimmer's bass, that's a feat in itself.

From the violinist on the Harvard commons to the thundering techno music of a San Francisco nightclub, The Social Network recreates a realistically stereophonic world. But what's most impressive is how crisp screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's dialogue is amid the chaos. Characters speak to, at and over each other in this film, and yet there's never any confusion about what's going on. There's an honesty to the staged conversations that would've been edited down to mush in anyone else's hands.

Widescreen Awards: Visual Effects

Now that Oscar has had his way with the wide world of cinema, it's my turn. For the next week or so, I'll be offering up what I viewed as the best performances in front, behind and inside the camera. Starting out, here are the best achievements in visual effects.

The striking visuals of Enter the Void play a very cunning game. When you're immersed within the film, all of it feels real. It's only after you think back — to the ghostly, wall-breaching camera and the soaring shots of the city — that you realize just how much trickery is involved. The real Tokyo beneath those glowing phosphorescent skies bears only passing resemblance to the one depicted here, but the film's purpose is not to present Tokyo as it really is. Nowhere seems normal when you're as detached — mentally, physically and metaphorically — as the drug-dealing protagonist Oscar is. BUF, the company behind the visual effects, has posted an impressive making-of gallery.

Inception, on the other hand, is playing a different game entirely. Dreams are fantastical shades of real life, complete with surreal, wondrous spectacles that can only be make-believe. The visual spectacles here — mirrored walls, an exploding fortress and a cascading city by the sea — are awe-inspiring. But, what separates them from other effects excesses (such as the Laws-of-Physics-defying ones in "Iron Man 2"), is that they all operate under their own strict rules of logic. It may all be a dream, but the effects here never feel like a put-on.

If anyone knows how to use CGI, it's David Fincher. All of his films have made extensive use of it, but he never goes too far. What's so impressive about a film like The Social Network (and "Zodiac," which came before it) is how transparent the effects are. Unless you've seen the FX reels or read about Fincher's exploits elsewhere, you would never know that one of the Winklevii is actually an otherworldly doppleganger, the face of one actor transposed onto the body of another. Sure, it's not as boldly impressive as the reverse aging of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," but then again this flick has 10 times the heart of that syrupy confection.

Top 20 Films of 2010

With the year well and truly put to rest and Oscar nominations a scant day away, now is as good a time as any to count down what I saw as the best the cinema had to offer in 2010.

First, a note on inclusiveness. As ravenously as I devour films — by my count I watched 61 last year — it's simply impossible to see them all.

I tend to avoid films I know will be horrendously bad. A high school English teacher once told me life is too short to read bad books, and I believe the same applies to the movies. My "bottom 10" list would probably include innocuously mediocre fare such as "Shutter Island" and "Ondine," as well as absurdly entertaining stuff like the South Korean disaster epic "Tidal Wave." I have no qualms about recommending any of those films to the right person in the right mood to enjoy them. (FYI: "Tidal Wave" is available on Instant Netflix. Check it out.)

Because I don't live in an urban area, there are a lot of films each year that are impossible to find. If I would have had to hop a flight out to L.A. to see the movie, it's not going to show up here. I am, after all, a broke print journalist of the ol' Chevrolet Set.

But that also means films that were seen by the tastemakers last year — and one from as far back as 2007 — are fair game. Similarly, I don't exclude direct-to-video releases or documentaries. If the film fired the right synapses, it doesn't matter how it was created or where I saw it.

In brief, 2010 presented an embarrassment of riches, ranging from surprising summer blockbusters ("Inception," "Salt") to homegrown indies ("Night Catches Us", "That Evening Sun") and what very well may be the crest of the Korean New Wave. I'm not sure if any such movement actually exists in real life, but that country has presented a plethora of talented directors in the past decade, from almost-household-names Bong Joon-ho ("Memories of Murder," "The Host" and lastyear's "Mother") and Park Chan-wook ("Oldboy") to rising workmen Lee Chang-dong (last year's "Secret Sunshine" and the forthcoming "Poetry") and Kim Ji-woon ("A Tale of Two Sisters").

Before launching into the cream of the crop, here are some honorable mentions that just missed the cut: "The American" (USA, dir. Anton Corbijn); "Carlos" (France/Germany, dir. Olivier Assayas); "Fish Tank" (UK, dir. Andrea Arnold); "Life During Wartime" (USA, dir. Todd Solondz); and "The Town" (USA, dir. Ben Affleck).

For those keeping tally, the top 20 are as follows:

20. "Triangle" (UK/Australia, dir. Christopher Smith)

19. "Cairo Time" (Canada, dir. Ruba Nadda)

18. "Black Swan" (USA, dir. Darren Aronofsky)

17. "Toy Story 3" (USA, dir. Lee Unkrich)

16. "Salt" (USA, dir. Phillip Noyce)

15. "Inception" (USA, dir. Christopher Nolan)

14. "The Chaser" (South Korea, dir. Na Hong-jin)

13. "Night Catches Us" (USA, dir. Tanya Hamilton)

12. "True Grit" (USA, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)

11. "I Am Love" (Italy, dir. Luca Guadagnino)

10. "Restrepo" (USA, dir. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger)

9. "Splice" (Canada, dir. Vincenzo Natali)

8. "Animal Kingdom" (Australia, dir. David Michôd)

7. "A Prophet" (France, dir. Jacques Audiard)

6. "That Evening Sun" (USA, dir. Scott Teems)

5. "Secret Sunshine" (South Korea, dir. Lee Chang-dong)

4. "Enter the Void" (France/Germany/Italy, dir. Gaspar Noé)

3. "Tokyo Sonata" (Japan, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

2. "Mother" (South Korea, dir. Bong Joon-ho)

1. "The Social Network" (USA, dir. David Fincher)