Jeremy Beck

For someone who’s completely obsessive about the awards handed out at the Oscars, I’m somewhat indifferent about the actual Oscars themselves. That’s because the Academy Awards telecast, often dubbed the “Super Bowl for women”, is a showcase for high fashion (“you’re talking about fashion? you?”), banal stargazing, and inoffensive self-congratulation, absolutely none of which interests me. Don’t get me wrong, I still view the Oscars as the most important event of the year in terms of cinematic recognition; I just think the show itself is a bit of a bore.

That said, this year’s telecast has taken a relentless drubbing of criticism, and I’ll venture that it wasn’t that bad. Yes, James Franco was lifeless and disinterested, the original song performances remain a gigantic snooze, and most of the speeches were bland and uninspired. But the show had its share of moments, including Robert Downey, Jr.’s and Jude Law’s rat-a-tat chemistry, Kirk Douglas reaching back for a mid-90s fastball, Billy Crystal’s welcome cameo, and Jennifer Lawrence showing up in a stunning red dress and sending thousands of horny teenagers to their laptops to desperately Google “Jennifer Lawrence Esquire photo shoot”. Plus Anne Hathaway did her damnedest to compensate for Franco’s apathy with an abundance of boisterous energy, most memorably in an amusing rendition of Les Misérables’ “On My Own”. So while the 2010 Academy Awards telecast was hardly memorable, it was by no means a catastrophe. Read More

Last year, my friend K-Bails told me that she printed out all of my Oscar predictions and scrutinized them while watching the actual telecast. I have no idea why she did this; all I know is that when she told me, it was the proudest moment of my life since I made a game-winning over-the-shoulder catch in my first ever rec league softball game. Moments such as those are all too elusive – you have to treasure them.

Accordingly, I’m consolidating my 2010 predictions in this post for handy reference. Go nuts, K-Bails.

Also, in general, this is one of the more difficult Oscar slates in recent memory, as a number of races are incredibly close, while several others could go a number of ways. As such, I’m supplying a confidence level for each of my predictions, just to illustrate where I’m reasonably comfortable and where I’m completely grasping at straws. Of course, I’ll probably wind up drilling the difficult categories and whiffing on some of the easy ones, but I suppose that would only prove my point (sort of).

Here goes nothing. Categories are listed in order of least to most confident (as always, I’m omitting the shorts): Read More

For most of the Oscars’ history, the categories of Best Picture and Best Director were virtual redundancies, with the filmmaker of the former almost always being honored in the latter. Yet the Academy started spicing things around the turn of the century, and in the eight-year span from 1998 to 2005, four directors earned trophies for movies that failed to come away with the big prize.

The last four years, however, have signaled a return to the systematic overlap of the prior half-century. Will 2010 prove to be different? We can only hope.

BEST PICTURE

NOMINEES
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech
127 Hours
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone Read More

In his column detailing the 10 best movies of 2010, New York Times critic A.O. Scott – better known in some circles as “God with a typewriter” – delivered the following gem: “Only a great director can make a great movie, but a good actor can make a bad or mediocre or not-quite-great movie much better.” It’s a perfect truism, and it also buttresses my current assessment of contemporary cinema as a whole. I don’t see very many truly great movies these days, and that’s partly because there aren’t very many truly great directors operating behind the camera. But I do see plenty of good movies, and that’s substantially a result of the surfeit of talented actors currently practicing their craft. So while I always find plenty to grumble about come Oscar season, the only real complaint I can lodge against the lead acting categories is that they limit themselves to five nominees.

BEST ACTOR

NOMINEES
Javier Bardem – Biutiful
Jeff Bridges – True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg – The Social Network
Colin Firth – The King’s Speech
James Franco – 127 Hours

WILL WIN
Firth. Four months ago, Eisenberg may have had a shot, but that ship has long since sailed, and Bridges’ victory last year for Crazy Heart nullifies any chance at a lifetime achievement award for The Dude. And as perversely entertaining as it is that The King’s Speech was apparently shot on the same set as a gay porno called Snookered, that news didn’t surface until the day ballots were due, so it’s nothing more than a bizarre footnote. Read More

The prevailing trend of criticism among stuffy movie reviewers over the past few years (or decades, or millennia) is simple: Hollywood pictures are too rote. Scan the web for reviews of movies such as The A-Team, and you’ll invariably find cineastes grousing about how studios are recycling the same tired ideas over and over and how filmmakers are prioritizing action and star power over foundational elements like plot and character. Now, the Manifesto has always prided itself on steering clear of this haughty line of scholarly arrogance; I can’t say that I’ve never met a blockbuster I didn’t like, but I’ve never dismissed a movie solely because it made money.

Nevertheless, if we assume that these stodgy critics actually have a point (and, on occasion, they do), then perhaps no two Oscar categories are more important to modern cinema than the next two. Good movies begin with good scripts, so the celebration of top-tier screenplays is particularly noteworthy in the current era. In theory, an Oscar-winning screenplay could shape the contours of stellar screenwriting for years to come. Or it could be the script for Crash.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

NOMINEES
127 Hours – Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy
The Social Network – Aaron Sorkin
Toy Story 3 – Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich
True Grit – Joel & Ethan Coen
Winter’s Bone – Debra Granik, Anne Rosellini Read More