Doggie Oscars

(Jaap Buitendijk / 35mm)

Dog News Daily, an online magazine for dog lovers and the companies that sell stuff to them, is sponsoring the first ever Golden Collar Awards,celebrating canine performances in the movies. Like most award shows, this one has had its share of scandal: the first list of Best Dog nominees excluded the Doberman, Blackie, who was featured in Hugo. Martin Scorsese didn't like that, so he wrote an op-ed in the LA Times complaining about it (he claimed prejudice against "anti-hero" dog performances). The Dog News people took notice and made Marty a deal: if Blackie could get 500 "write-in votes" (posts) on the Dog News Daily Facebook page, well, she was in.

You can't make this stuff up.

Blackie got the votes. On February 13, she will compete with the four legged stars of The Artist and Water for Elephants (same dog), 50/50, The Beginners, and Young Adult for Best Dog in a Theatrical Film. The event will be held at a hotel in Los Angeles, and there will be a red carpet and everything. Not sure how the interviews will go. Look for lots of press and television coverage of the event. It is said that the winner of the Golden Collar awards almost always goes on to win at the Oscars ... okay, I did make that up.

Young Adult

Paramount Pictures

Charlize Theron is a brilliant, and brave actress; she’s also beautiful, which is kind of the point in her latest film, Young Adult. She plays Mavis Gary, former prom queen and belle of the high school ball, currently facing middle age in a dismal messy apartment with only a fuzzy little dog and the occasional Internet date for company. She decides that the solution to her growing angst is to go back to her tiny hometown and drag her high school boyfriend out of the trap of family life. Never mind that he seems to be happily married and celebrating the birth of his new baby girl; Mavis is sure he wants out. “It’s like he’s a hostage,” she tells a friend, and she packs up her dog and motors out of the city to rescue him.

There is really nothing likeable about Mavis Gary; she’s crudely self-centered,  but Theron manages to show us the vulnerability in her, the desperation that leads her to decide that re-creating past glories is her best path to present day happiness. And while many actresses trade on their good looks, determined to look pretty under the most unlikely of film circumstances, here Theron allows herself to look scruffy and worn, wearing shapeless t-shirts, hair mussed, mascara runny. This could seem kind of sad and tragic, but Theron plays it like an ironic statement of toughness; as Mavis walks the streets of her former hometown in a Hello Kitty t-shirt, you get the impression that a smart person would not risk commenting on her disheveled appearance.

Young Adult is a comedy, a dark one, and the funniest scenes are the ones where Mavis meets up with Matt Frehauf, a high school classmate that she had nearly forgotten. As a teenager, Matt (played with perfect comic timing by Patton Oswalt) sustained life altering injuries at the hands of a bunch of football jocks who attacked him because they thought he was gay (he is not). Permanently disabled, he is cynical, funny, and sees right through Mavis’ pretensions; the two form an unlikely but extremely entertaining comic duo. The movie really brightens whenever they are both on screen. Young Adult is not an important film, it isn’t terribly weighty in its themes, but it is funny and a great showcase for the talents of Theron and Oswalt. Opening small this weekend in a few major cities, should go wide on 12/16. B+