Oscars

Sobering note: In the extraordinarily unlikely scenario in which all of my predictions are accurate, then the actual Oscar winner will match up with my chosen winner in only seven categories. But I can hardly expect the Academy’s collective taste to match with my own personal preferences, so perhaps it isn’t all that sobering. Besides, if they agreed with me all the time, then I’d have nothing to complain about.

In any event, here you have it: the Manifesto’s complete 2011 Oscar predictions, condensed into a single post for maximum convenience. Predictions are listed in order from least confident to most confident (as always, I’m omitting the shorts). Read More

Fact #1: The Manifesto has correctly predicted each of the past five Best Picture winners.

Fact #2: The Manifesto has correctly predicted each of the past eight Best Director winners.

Am I gloating? Not at all. Perhaps it’s due to the rise of the Internet era – in which every news nugget, every minor awards’ ceremony, every incident that could possibly impact the Oscars is immediately devoured, over-scrutinized, and spat back out by the blogosphere – but there hasn’t been a truly suspenseful Best Picture race since 2006, when The Departed held off a late charge from Little Miss Sunshine that would have sent Martin Scorsese on a murderous rampage, not to mention caused my father to have a heart attack. (For the record, I got that one right. My last miss was the year before, in the Oscar Race That Shall Not Be Named.) This year, the procession has been even more formulaic than normal, and tonight’s opening of the envelope feels less like a suspenseful announcement than a dutiful, long-awaited coronation. Read More

Is there an industry in America right now experiencing a bigger talent boom than the acting trade? Pick a movie playing at your local multiplex, and regardless of its overall quality – which is typically dependent on the talents of the director and the screenwriter – it’ll invariably be headlined by highly talented lead performers, whether they’re in-their-prime movie stars, chameleonic character actors, ageless veterans who can still reach 95 with their fastball, or frighteningly self-assured up-and-comers. Throw in a preposterously deep pool of imported talent, and English-language actors are on a “UCLA in the ’60s and ’70s” run right now.

Don’t believe me? I’ll break it down for you: Read More

Sometimes I worry that the rationale behind awarding Oscars for screenplays is utterly fraudulent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not denigrating the importance of writing in today’s cinematic climate, not least when high-brow critics constantly grumble about how “Scripts don’t matter anymore” and “Young people are too attention-addled to appreciate a proper art film” and “What the hell is Twitter, anyway?”. My real concern is that, of all of the prizes awarded at the Academy Awards, the screenplay is the one category that voters can’t actually see. For Best Costume Design, they can judge a film’s wardrobe; for Best Cinematography, they can follow the camera movements and lighting; for the acting fields, they can watch the performer. You get the idea.

But a screenplay? Hell, a screenplay is just a few hundred typewritten pages that might have been drafted years ago and were lying in a dusty desk drawer underneath some old Superman comics until a director miraculously came along and decided to turn them into a movie. Of course, it rarely works that way (though Clint Eastwood apparently sat on the Oscar-nominated script for Unforgiven for 15 years until he was old enough to play the lead), but I nevertheless wonder if we can accurately judge a screenplay on its own merits rather than as a mere stepping stone to a finished film.

But so it goes. Besides, these are two of the categories in which the Academy regularly exhibits a certain degree of bravery (“The Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” always has a nice ring to it), so I suppose I shouldn’t be staring into the mouths of gift horses. Read More