Spirits were bright Wednesday night in West Hollywood when Fox Searchlight celebrated the season with their annual holiday party — really, just an excuse to fete Oscar candidates Win Win , Tree of Life , Shame , Martha Marcy May Marlene , and The Descendants like debs at a coming out ball. Movieline caught up with Fox Searchlight’s hopefuls at the early awards-season shindig.
Movies with multiple intersecting storylines aren’t exclusive to Los Angeles, but it’s a city for which they seem ideally suited, perhaps because it’s one in which incidental contact with the lives of strangers is less common and therefore more weighted with meaning. (Or maybe it’s just that L.A. has such an abundance of screenwriters sitting in coffee shops projecting potential narratives on passers-by.) Out of disparate threads we’re meant to draw common themes or emotional resonances, from Crash ‘s “everyone’s a little bit racist” to Magnolia ‘s ideas about loneliness and coming to terms with the past. Answers to Nothing , written and directed by Matthew Leutwyler ( Dead & Breakfast ), follows a group of linked lost souls navigating personal obstacles against the backdrop of a missing neighborhood girl, as they all come to discover that it’s OK to be an awful person, as long as you don’t tell anyone about it.