Oscars

The Manifesto’s dynasty is about to end.

O.K., to call it a “dynasty” is a bit excessive. Yes, my utter dominance in predicting the recent Oscar nominations has undoubtedly been awe-inspiring to pundits everywhere, but I’ve only been forecasting the actual nominations for two years (I’ve been officially predicting winners – often badly – for 10); it’s not as if I’m rivaling Bill Russell’s Celtics for championship durability here. Still, my success made me feel invincible, and I figured I’d glide off into the sunset and spend the rest of my days reclining luxuriously on the beach while sipping mojitos like Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. Then things got complicated.

Alright, so we all know by now that two years ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – in its infinite wisdom – expanded its list of Best Picture nominations from five to 10 in an effort to broaden its appeal to a mass audience. Though that maneuver predictably incited a firestorm of controversy among purists about the quality of the films nominated (“Dear God, we’re watering down the Oscars!”), it didn’t make the actual prediction business that much more difficult, as evidenced by my 10-for-10 showing a year ago.

This year, however, the Academy has added a new wrinkle (possibly as a result of Academy president Tom Sherak waking up one day and muttering to himself, “Shit, did we really nominate The Blind Side for Best Picture?”). Rather than mandating exactly 10 nominations, the Best Picture field will now feature up to 10 selections, with a minimum of five. So for those of us who make a living hobby out of prognosticating the Oscars, we not only have to guess which movies will be selected, but we also have to estimate how many will make the cut.

To make things even more difficult, the specific process for sussing out the Chosen Handful is, shall we say, complex. I won’t go into details; suffice it to say that you basically need to be in a room with Microsoft Excel, an abacus, and Stephen Hawking in order to sift through the ballots and determine which movies have earned enough votes for a nomination. But there’s one key element in play that’s worth emphasizing: The balloting process places a heavy premium on first-place votes. That is, when Academy members fill out their ballots and rank their top five (yes, five – don’t ask) Best Picture contenders, a first-place ranking is dramatically more significant than a second- or third-place ranking. Thus, the process places a movie that is generally well-liked by many but perhaps not adored (like, say, War Horse) in a less favorable position than a movie that has a smaller but more ardent following (like, say, The Tree of Life).

What does all of that mean? I have no idea. And that, of course, is the problem. Just bear that in mind when I only hit on three of nine Best Picture nominations and you see me two days later wandering around Boulder taking swigs from a carton of milk.

Alright, enough preemptive pessimism. Let’s get to the predictions. Also, I’m expanding the categories in which I’m predicting the nominations to 13 total fields, up from eight in years past. I’m not interested in covering the remaining categories right now, partly because I don’t want to bore my readers, and partly because I don’t feel like spending three hours analyzing the chances of Transformers: Dark of the Moon earning a Best Sound Mixing nomination. As always, upcoming posts will predict the actual winner of all 21 categories (shorts excluded), but for now, you’ll have to settle for this baker’s dozen.

BEST PICTURE
The Artist
The Descendants
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
The Tree of Life

Comments: If nothing else, we can be absolutely certain that The Artist and The Descendants will be here, and I’m reasonably confident in Hugo as well. And that, sadly, is where my confidence ends. Gulp.

It breaks my heart not to include War Horse, but its pulse has been ebbing significantly over the past several weeks, and I think the lack of a nomination for Spielberg from the Directors’ Guild constituted the moment it officially flat-lined. Read More

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