LA LA LAND WINS OSCAR BEST PICTURE, UNTIL IT DOESN'T...

Um, so. Who gives a shit? There's a picture of Emma Stone, whose envelope made a double appearance and sent one of the biggest shockwaves through the Oscars...  ever? Your Best Picture winner is Moonlight, in one of the most extraordinary turns of events the Oscars has ever staged, and, um, it could never have been expected, and then it literally didn't even happen, and then... Emma's envelope. Your Oscar nominations are here, and your Oscar winners are below, and someone in the Academy is getting #fired.

Best Picture

Moonlight (Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Adele Romanski)

Best Directing

Damien Chazelle (La La Land)

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Emma Stone (La La Land)

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea)

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Viola Davis (Fences)

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Mahershala Ali (Moonlight)

Best Writing - Original Screenplay

Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea)

Best Writing - Adapted Screenplay

Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney (Moonlight)

Best Cinematography

Linus Sandgren (La La Land)

Best Film Editing

John Gilbert (Hacksaw Ridge)

Best Production Design

Sandy Reynolds-Wasco and David Wasco (La La Land)

Best Costume Design

Colleen Atwood (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them)

Best Sound Mixing

Peter Grace, Robert MacKenzie, Kevin O'Connell and Andy Wright (Hacksaw Ridge)

Best Sound Editing

Sylvain Bellemare (Arrival)

Best Visual Effects

Andrew R. Jones, Robert Legato, Dan Lemmon and Adam Valdez (The Jungle Book)

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Alessandro Bertolazzi, Giorgio Gregorini and Christopher Nelson (Suicide Squad)

Best Music (Original Score)

Justin Hurwitz (La La Land)

Best Music (Original Song)

Justin Hurwitz, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul - 'City Of Stars' (La La Land)

Best Animated Feature Film

Zootopia (Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Clark Spencer)

Best Documentary Feature

O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman and Caroline Waterlow)

Best Foreign Language Film

The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi) - Iran

Best Short Film (Live Action)

Sing (Kristof Deak and Anna Udvardi)

Best Short Film (Animated)

Piper (Alan Barillaro and Marc Sondheimer)

Best Documentary Short

The White Helmets (Joanna Natasegara and Orlando von Einsiedel)

LA LA LAND WINS PHOENIX FILM CRITICS SOCIETY BEST PICTURE AWARD

Once it was announced that La La Land had picked up 13 nominations for the Phoenix Film Critics Society awards, it was pretty much all over already. Seven of those noms were converted into award wins, including a Best Actress prize for Emma Stone, who's slowly picking up steam in that category after a peculiarly slow start to the season. Take a look at the full slate of awards below.

Best Picture

La La Land

Best Director

Damien Chazelle (La La Land)

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Emma Stone (La La Land)

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea)

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Viola Davis (Fences)

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water)

Best Original Screenplay

Hell or High Water

Best Screenplay Adapted from Other Material

Hacksaw Ridge

Best Cinematography

La La Land

Best Film Editing

Hacksaw Ridge

Best Production Design

La La Land

Best Costume Design

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Best Visual Effects

Doctor Strange

Best Original Score

La La Land

Best Original Song

'City of Stars' (La La Land)

Best Ensemble Acting

Hell or High Water

Best Animated Film

Zootopia

Best Documentary

Gleason

Best Foreign Language Film

Elle

Best Breakthrough Performance

Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch)

Best Performance by a Youth

Alex R. Hibbert (Moonlight)

Overlooked Film of the Year

Sing Street

LA LA LAND WINS FOUR AWARDS FROM DETROIT FILM CRITICS SOCIETY

Just another critics group, and just another triumph for Damien Chazelle's original musical La La Land. Four wins this time, from the Detroit Film Critics Society, including that most bizarrely elusive of prizes - a Best Actress win for Emma Stone! She's pretty damn good in a pretty damn bad film, so that's one win that I cannot begrudge the film. These awards are mostly business as usual, though a tie in Best Supporting Actress sees a surprise victory for Greta Gerwig in 20th Century Women. Peruse the DFCS' nominations here.

Best Picture

La La Land

Best Director

Damien Chazelle (La La Land)

Best Actress

Emma Stone (La La Land)

Best Actor

Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea)

Best Supporting Actress

Viola Davis (Fences)

Greta Gerwig (20th Century Women)

Best Supporting Actor

Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water)

Best Screenplay

Damien Chazelle (La La Land)

Best Ensemble

20th Century Women

Best Documentary

O.J.: Made in America

Best Breakthrough

Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) - director / writer

LFF 2016 REVIEW - LA LA LAND (DAMIEN CHAZELLE)

Another day of sun, and another vacuous hipster expression of 'artistic integrity,' or, more accurately, the comical indecision of exactly what that entails. La La Land posits an argument about traditionalism vs. progression, though never seeks to resolve it, rather decorating each side of the discussion with hollow, borrowed devices and displays of flash and froth. This skin-deep approach may be sumptuous, but it's as vapid and as shallow as the culture it mistakenly mocks, while lifting one idea after another from it. Damien Chazelle is a forceful, decisive filmmaker, but there's little force to what he creates here, primarily due to the lack of actual creation. It's apparent from the very first image of a suited Ryan Gosling twiddling the radio knob in his vintage car, searching for some satisfactory jazz - this is nostalgia for its own sake, and indeed a false nostalgia, since it pines for times it knew not. La La Land intends to elicit joy in its audience, but what joy is there in such a strained, manufactured rehash of other artists' ideas? The inauthenticity is the sour aftertaste of the sweetness that pours out of the film, in sequences of real beauty and charm, and in Emma Stone's remarkable eyes. Aside from Chazelle's hypocrisy in the tributes his film purports to pay to fading art forms, there's an even more galling ignorance to La La Land, in its grand homage to a culture built upon the white identity, indeed at the expense of all else. The film unwittingly exposes a regressive attitude to its embrace of its various artistic influences, and places the white artist's desperate ennui at the futility of their obnoxious endeavours above all other concerns. Chazelle's land of dreams, city of stars, is as distant and ephemeral as those both, and uglier by far.

LFF 2016 PREVIEW: LA LA LAND

'An intimate masterpiece'

Diana Dabrowska, Cinema Scope

'You won't be able to stop yourself from falling helplessly in love with this over-the-top rom-com'

Tina Hassannia, Movie Mezzanine

'Both a love letter to a confounding and magical city and an ode to the idea of the might-have-been romance, in all its piercing sweetness'

Stephanie Zacharek, Time

Who'd have thought that Damien Chazelle's La La Land would turn up on the schedule for my London Film Festival visit this year. Not only this year, but this week: I fly over tomorrow, and Film #2 on Day #1 will be this original musical. Critics, especially the mainstream ones, have been knocked for six by the Whiplash director's new film starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, ever since its Venice premiere in August. Alongside winning Stone a Best Actress award there, it has since been to both Telluride and Toronto, where it won the Grolsch People's Choice award. Pundits are tipping this as the film to beat at the Oscars in February. Despite feeling a little cold on La La Land, based on any number of factors, attending the UK premiere of one of the year's most talked-about films was too good an opportunity to turn down! Out in limited release in the US on the 9th of December, with a wide expansion planned for the 16th, and in the UK on the 13th of January.

REVIEW - IRRATIONAL MAN (WOODY ALLEN)

Woody Allen's redundant rumination on reheated Dostoyevsky-esque themes, blatant to the point that he insists on namechecking the novelist for extra emphasis, is not merely underwhelming in its philosophical heft, it's unoriginal within Allen's own canon. Irrational Man is an excuse for a film, passable only to those unfamiliar with either Allen or Dostoyevsky, and unintelligent enough to subscribe to its characters' pseudo-profundity. Knowledge and notoriety are more tags than traits for these people, more of Allen's excuses: he uses them to sound off half-baked theories about morality and ethicality that are surely just soundbites, not the musings of a great artist - his temptation to interject the occasional comic quip serves Allen poorly here. Yet that's how Allen duly earned such a reputation as a great artist, one which he fittingly seems to employ as another excuse in Irrational Man to act as he pleases; no doubt that the artistry he was once able to indulge in with at least a small degree of relative innocence is wholly undermined by his repulsive attitude today toward young female characters. Two consecutive titles now Emma Stone has debased herself by submitting to this man's repellant gaze, his camera ogling her long, slim, college-age legs, realised through the perverted purview of Joaquin Phoenix's waste-of-space philosophy professor as the shot lingers on interminably. A scene set over a romantic dinner appears to frame Stone as classic films did their female leads, but the result is hollow in the icky context of Irrational Man.