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" The second annual Esquire Nominating Academy is a regular series in which we ask some of our favorite talent from the last year in movies to weigh in on what and whom they&amp;#039;d like to see honored this awards season. By his own admission, Mark Duplass is a &amp;quot;complete workaholic maniac.&amp;quot; This past year, he wrote and directed Jeff Who Lives at Home and The Do-Deca-Pentathalon with his brother Jay, produced and starred in Safety Not Guaranteed and Your Sister&amp;#039;s Sister, appeared in mom-bate Darling Companion and People Like Us, starred and guest-starred on sitcoms The League and The Mindy Project, respectively, and acted in sure-to-be-nominated Zero Dark Thirty. Oh, yeah, and he had a second child with The League co-star and wife Katie Aselton, whose sophomore film Black Rock he wrote and produced. We spoke to the maniac during what we believe to have been his only free twenty minutes in 2012 about his awards season picks for the Esquire Nominating Academy. The Master: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a big fan of Joaquin Phoenix, and I feel like he unfortunately took a little bit of a beating after I&amp;#039;m Still Here. I love that movie. And I think maybe he went a little crazy, too. I&amp;#039;ve been waiting for his return, and I just loved his physicality, the gnarled shoulders. He has that really brute sensitivity to him that I just really appreciated.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I went in headlong for The Master this year. As a filmmaker, I&amp;#039;m getting more and more picky about what I like, which is probably why I watch more documentaries than anything else. But there&amp;#039;s something about movies like The Master. I knew that movie wasn&amp;#039;t going to 100-percent add up. I expected this really inspired, almost tone poem of a movie with fantastic performances, and that&amp;#039;s exactly what I got out of it. The plotting was subordinated to the tone and the performances, which in general, I think, makes for a bad movie, but for some reason, in this case, I was like, Oh, this really works. It&amp;#039;s a true mood piece, and I just love it. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the antithesis of how I make movies, which is great. All I&amp;#039;m doing is trying to get an ugly-looking close-up. As long as that person is emoting and giving me something funny and sad at the same time, I&amp;#039;m happy. Literally paying zero attention to the picturesque beauty of the scene. &amp;quot;I am obsessed with Megan Ellison. She runs this company, Annapurna Pictures, and what she is doing for movies right now... She&amp;#039;s making true upscale adult dramas, which nobody&amp;#039;s doing anymore: Killing Them Softly and Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty and The Master. I&amp;#039;m very, very thankful for Annapurna Pictures this year. The Master is going to lose money, and she doesn&amp;#039;t give a shit. She&amp;#039;s going to make more movies like that. And that sort of punk-rock spirit with the power that she has is exactly what we need in cinema right now.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/interviews/a17852/2013-academy-nominations-mark-duplass/>