Today in awards shows too numerous to keep track of, Argo wrapped up the last of the guild awards, taking home a WGA for screenwriting, after previously taking top honors in the PGA, DGA, and SAG, which all sound like complex euphemisms for handjobs to me. In a symbolic way, I suppose they are. I don’t like to brag, but the first line of the second paragraph of my Argo review was “this movie is going to clean up come awards season,” and I had Oscar in the headline. Basically, I’m the odds-on favorite to take home a Golden Toldja at this year’s bloggies, held in Harry Knowles’ boat shed.

Original Screenplay
Flight – John Gatins (Paramount Pictures)
Looper – Rian Johnson (TriStar Pictures)
The Master – Paul Thomas Anderson (The Weinstein Company)
Moonrise Kingdom – Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola (Focus Features)
Zero Dark Thirty – Mark Boal (Columbia Pictures) – WINNER

Adapted Screenplay
Argo – Chris Terrio (Warner Bros. Pictures) – WINNER
Life of Pi – David Magee (20th Century Fox)
Lincoln – Tony Kushner (DreamWorks Pictures)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky (Summit Entertainment)
Silver Linings Playbook – David O Russell (The Weinstein Company)

Documentary
The Central Park Five – Sarah Burns, David McMahon and Ken Burns (Sundance Selects)
The Invisible War – Kirby Dick (Cinedigm Entertainment Group)
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God – Alex Gibney (HBO Films)
Searching for Sugar Man – Malik Bendejelloul (Sony Pictures Classics) – WINNER
We Are Legion – Brian Knappenberger (Cinetic Media)
West of Memphis – Amy J. Berg and Billy McMillin (Sony Pictures Classics)

Searching for Sugar Man is similarly dominating the documentary category, adding a WGA to its Critic’s Choice Award, BAFTA, and Golden Globe.

But to be fair, you have to question the judgment of any organization that nominated Flight and Perks of Being a Wallflower for writing awards. Denzel’s already-cheesy, you-knew-this-was-coming turning point relied on his hardly believable and never-before-referenced need to honor a dead chick, and the way the film communicated to the audience that its protagonist had learned a lesson was to have him give a big speech about the lesson he learned. A lesson that could’ve been any speech at an AA meeting. It was one of the more clumsily-written movies of the year. Even Argo, which I mostly liked, had a tacked-on, overly dramatic ending that felt like someone taking a real, already-compelling story and trying to Hollywood-ify it. And no nominations for Tarantino or Magic Mike or The Sessions? Ar-go f*ck yourself.

TV awards below:

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It’s impossible to review Zero Dark Thirty without having to infiltrate a room full of political lasers like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment (much nicer metaphor than a mine field, isn’t it?). But you invite that when your movie screams “THIS IS TRUE” at the beginning, like Zero Dark Thirty does in its opening “real events” title card. You can’t just forgive everything in the guise of “but it’s a movie!” when the movie is so clearly telling you that it’s fact. Thus, whether Zero Dark Thirty correctly depicts torture isn’t nitpicking, it’s relevant. So is it “pro-torture,” as John McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and others have alleged? Mark Bowden, who wrote a book about the search for Bin Laden, says it’s not. Alex Gibney, who directed a movie about torture, doesn’t quite say Zero Dark Thirty is pro torture, but says it’s irresponsible.

To make a long story short and an answer predictable, they’re both right. Zero Dark Thirty is not immoral because it depicts torture as it was (something that happened, a context, a small part of the story but not a major player) without taking a particular stance. But it is a little amoral that it doesn’t seem to take any stance. It even omits key events to keep from having to. From an artistic standpoint, it doesn’t seem particularly concerned with humans. It feels like an attempt to create suspense with no soul. Bowden’s rule of thumb for dramatizing a true story responsibly is that you can invent, but you have to “color inside the lines” of the truth. That is, you create fictions within the unknowns without altering the shape of the facts. Zero Dark Thirty mostly does that, but it also omits big chunks of them (we’ll get to that). Artistically, another problem is, who is Jessica Chastain’s character? I watched the whole movie and I still know nothing about her. Zero Dark Thirty invents a character with no apparent personality to tell a story the broad strokes of which we already know. How does that help? It even makes the movie dull at times, like a dry and talky procedural. The lady next to me was snoring loudly.

The Hurt Locker, for all the massive liberties it takes with actual military tactics, had a compelling protagonist and a clear perspective. “War is a drug.” What’s Zero Dark Thirty‘s perspective? Redheads are smart? Incorrectly or not, people jumped to “torture is good” because there’s a vacuum of anything else.

Gibney says ZDT is wrong because it doesn’t use its opportunity to argue against torture:

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Courtesy of Columbia Pictures, it’s the first trailer for Zero Dark Thirty, starring Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, and Mark Strong, and re-teaming the Hurt Locker’s writer-director team, Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow (the latter of whom also directed Point Break – NEVER FORGET). The hunt-for-Bin-Laden subject matter is already pretty fresh in our minds, and the trailer doesn’t show much beyond b-roll and graphics, so it’s hard to know quite what we’re looking at just yet. But hopefully it adheres closely to the facts of the case, because that’s going to be the most gloriously anti-climactic villain death since Pan’s Labyrinth.

“We tracked the fugitive for more than 10 years! He was the most wanted man in the world! We weren’t even sure he was still alive until we caught a break – his driver! We followed him for months until he led us right to him!”

“WOW! And then what happened?? Did you have to foil a high-tech security system? Drill through the vault from underneath? Rappel from the ceiling by wires to avoid setting off the motion censors?”

“Nah, we just kicked down the front door and shot him in the face while he was sitting on the couch. Then we left.”

“Oh. ”

Cue right-wing pundits claiming this was carefully orchestrated by the liberal Hollywood conspiracy to coincide with the election in 5… 4… 3… 2…

How my version of the Bin Laden movie would go

As if it weren’t already depressing enough that 15 members of Seal Team 6 were among the 30 soldiers killed in a Chinook crash in Afghanistan last week, now Hurt Locker filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s planned film about the Bin Laden assassination (Killing Bin Laden) is at the center of political fight (which are the gayest fights of all). In one of her typically long-winded columns of questionable import a few weeks ago, NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd (no one named ‘Maureen’ has ever said anything important – FACT) implied that Boal and Bigelow’s film was part of some perfectly-timed, Obama campaign PR push.

The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt [KEY PHRASE- Ed.] reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.
The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.
It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals. [NYTimes]

Naturally, all Republicans heard there was “Obama administration sells out US Patriots to look cool for Hollywood Jew libruls.” Republican congressman (and possible future New York Senatorial candidate) Peter King was the first to call for a CIA investigation into whether the administration leaked classified information to Boal and Bigelow. Which they of course deny:

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Capitalism, F*CK YEAH! With Bin Laden dead and everyone celebrating, obviously it’s time for Hollywood to get into the Bin Laden-is-dead business.  Luckily, it just so happens they already have a few Bin Laden projects in some stage of development.  It’s almost as if this has been ten years in the making.  Here’s the rundown from Deadline:

I’ve learned that Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow in recent weeks has been preparing and starting to cast an indie movie with the working title Kill Bin Laden, while another movie project about the hunt for the Al Queda terrorist leader at a major Hollywood studio stalled back in 2006.

Bigelow and Mark Boal, her collaborator on The Hurt Locker, have been mobilizing their film to go into production as their follow-up to that Best Picture Academy Award winner. Their movie as planned was based on an earlier unsuccessful mission [to kill Bin Laden]. Mind you, reps for Bigelow have told me previously that this movie isn’t specifically about the Al Qaeda leader. A lot of details about this film are stilll sketchy and secret, but I’ve heard that Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle chief Larry Ellison, is ready to fund it.

Meanwhile, back in 2006, Paramount Pictures optioned Jawbreaker, a book by U.S. intelligence operative Gary Berntsen about the December 2001 American-led military mission to hunt and kill Bin Laden right during the opening stages of the 9/11-prompted invasion of Afghanistan that the author as the CIA pointman had helped coordinate with Special Operations Forces. The heavily vetted book detailed how close those forces came to finding and executing Bin Laden in the rugged mountains of Tora Bora until they were pulled back after a decision was made to let Pakistan tribal leaders lead the search — a decision experts felt helped Bin Laden get away.

That last one was originally set to be directed by Oliver Stone, and who knows, it may have turned out every bit as incomprehensible and terrible as Wall Street 2, once his team of coked-up spider monkey screenwriters got a hold of it. Shame that’s not happening.  You’ll also notice, all these projects were once planned as downer, destined-to-bomb political stories like Fair Game or Lions for Lambs, but now execs everywhere are jizzing their pants because they have a happy, patriotic ending.  It’d be like if Valkyrie ended with Tom Cruise flying out of Germany with a jet pack, flipping the bird with both hands.