Oscars

To quote Steve Martin in Shopgirl, I suppose the only way to say this is to say it: I won’t be writing the Manifesto this year.

(Hold on, let me give everyone a moment to recover from the shock.)

O.K., let me clarify. Will I still write thousands of words examining this year’s Academy Awards, complete with random sports analogies and Harry Potter references? Of course I will. In fact, through the use of this fancy little blog – created for me by my friend Jamie as a specific result of last year’s Manifesto – I should be able to post commentary on a regular basis over the next few weeks. Indeed, the format will remain similar to the Manifesto of years past: For a given category, I’ll predict the winner (where I’m often wrong), declare which nominee I feel should win (where I’m always right), and highlight a few candidates that weren’t nominated but deserved consideration. So in that respect, nothing has changed. Read More

I’ll be honest: It could have been a lot worse.

I went into the nominations hoping to achieve an 80% success rate with my predictions, a goal my father accurately labeled “audacious”. I wound up at either 68% or 72% (27 or 28 of 40), depending on how you count (the ambiguity is courtesy of Kate Winslet, who complicated things as promised). Sure, I was hoping to do better, but I landed four out of five correct picks in three big categories (picture, director, and actor), plus I swept the Best Adapted Screenplay nods.

Could I have done better? Sure. I knew Best Original Screenplay would be tough, but I didn’t expect to butcher it the way I did, and I entirely misjudged the critical perception of Revolutionary Road. But if you’re expecting me to beat myself up, frankly I’m still more mad at myself for throwing away that inbounds pass in a corporate league basketball game two years ago. (Although frankly, it wasn’t my fault that nobody on the team knew how to set a cross-screen to break a press, but never mind.)

Anyway, here’s a recap as promised. Stay tuned to the blog over the next month, as the Manifesto picks the predicted Oscar winner of each category, as well as my personal preference and my thoughts on those who missed the cut. In the meantime, though, here’s how I did (incorrect predictions struck out in red and replaced with actual nominations): Read More

Every year, I attempt to predict the winner of each category of the Oscars. For all of the Manifesto’s bluster, this is its primary function, and frankly, it is a rather unoriginal one. People all around the country participate in haphazard Oscar pools (my sister even won one once, primarily because she went against my advice), and countless bloggers attempt to impress their readership with their powers of prognostication (though if I may say so, the Manifesto possesses a rather unique élan, but never mind). And in spite of the flamboyant touches I employ in an effort to distinguish the Manifesto from other commentaries of its ilk – the sports analogies, the base humor, the “are you fucking serious dude?” length – it remains at its core a simple handicapping system, much like any other.

As such, I need a challenge, something to put the Manifesto on the map, as it were. To wit: It seems to me that a more difficult undertaking than picking the winners of each category of the Oscars is to predict the nominations themselves. Of the hundreds (thousands?) of movies released in the world every year, only five merit a nomination in each category from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; correctly forecasting these selections is no easy task.

Yet such is my mission. Is it foolhardy of me to publish my predictions so brazenly, risking ridicule from my readers for years to come? Possibly. And yet if I am successful, glory shall be mine forevermore – I expect to be rewarded like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, with naked women feeding me grapes while Beethoven plays in the background. Or I can just brag about it to my Dad before we move on to discuss Mike Dunleavy’s latest exploits. Either way, the nominations will be announced Thursday, January 22, so stay tuned for news of my success or failure. (For the record, if I make four out of five correct picks in a category, I’ll be happy. Also, I’m only doing the top eight categories because after that, people get bored. Or so I’ve been told.)

And so, I now present the Manifesto’s predictions for the 81st Annual Academy Awards Nominations: Read More

Atonement

Juno

Michael Clayton

No Country for Old Men

There Will Be Blood

Will win: The consensus among pundits regarding this year’s Oscars is that, with the exceptions of the Best Actor and Supporting Actor categories, there are few prevailing favorites. Historically, this isn’t really anything new. There hasn’t been a true Secretariat at the Oscars since Return of the King pulled a ’72 Dolphins and went 11-for-11 in 2003. (Of course, it didn’t win Best Cinematography because it wasn’t even fucking nominated. And yes, I’m fairly sure I’m harboring more resentment about that than anyone involved in photographing the movie. Anyway.) Read More

Redemption, it turns out, is one elusive motherfucker.

See, last year was supposed to be my big comeback. The year before, at the 2005 Oscars (also known as The Oscars of Ignominy), the infantile Crash won Best Picture, against not only my staunchest (if utterly irrelevant) objections but also my most confident predictions. The Oscars of Ignominy left me in a state of disrepute, physically hobbled, with a tarnished spiritual core. For months I had that look on my face like Mel Gibson in Braveheart after he realized Robert the Bruce betrayed him at Falkirk – I was glassy-eyed, incapable of comprehending the world around me. I was like one of the Pod People from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, merely going through the motions of existence, never feeling, never thinking, never living.

But eventually, I snapped out of it. I’m not sure what it was precisely. It could have been receiving confirmation that Emma Watson was returning for the last two Harry Potter films, or watching old DVDs of “The Office” and learning the true meaning of love from Jim and Pam, or maybe just going to see Borat in the theatre and finding myself sitting next to an Asian supermodel who looked like a cross between Kristy Yamaguchi and Kobe Tai. Whatever it was, whatever restorative I drank, I began to follow the same path as that of Gandalf the Grey in The Two Towers: “It was not the end. I felt life in me again. I’ve been sent back until my task is done.”

Damn right I was back, and when the 2006 Oscar nominations were announced, my task was simple: to prove, for once in my shameful excuse for a life, that I knew what the fuck I was talking about.

It was a shaky proposition. Not only had Crash unhinged me in 2005, but in the Best Picture race the year before I’d backed The Aviator over Million Dollar Baby, even though at the time the Eastwood movie was hotter than Craig Hodges in the ’91 three-point shootout. Even worse, the field was incredibly difficult to handicap; not only was there no clear frontrunner, but there were not two but three legitimate contenders – Babel, The Departed, and Little Miss Sunshine. In the words of Han Solo, I had a bad feeling about this.

But I couldn’t turn back, because honestly, absent the Manifesto, what meaning does my life really possess? So I buckled down. I geared up. I weighed options, concocted scenarios, performed statistical analyses, prayed to various deities, and employed very expensive and possibly even illegal techniques to peer into the mind of the average voter of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. And then I scrapped everything and went with my gut, even though, to quote John Cusack in High Fidelity, my guts have shit for brains. I picked The Departed, not because I was convinced it would win but because I knew it should win; it was the best of the nominees, and they call the category Best Fucking Picture, do they not? So, calculating though I may often be, in an impulse of self-righteous fury I had pinned the hopes for my salvation on an emotional whim, a calling of the heart, a desperate plea for cinematic justice.

And then I waited. For my vindication or my disgrace, I did not know, but I waited. Like those poor saps in Casablanca looking for exit visas, I waited.

And oh, how the Academy taunted me, yes it did. You see, during the Oscars of Ignominy, it was Jack Nicholson who announced Crash as the Best Picture winner, Jack who cruelly ripped my life to shreds, Jack who spoke the fateful words and then just stood there smiling that demented smile and thinking to himself, “I am going to crush some of the young talent in here tonight,” unaware of the pain and humiliation he had just dispensed. So last year, to close the ceremony that would either revalidate my existence or forever incinerate my soul, the Academy had Jack make the announcement again, even though he was a lead in one of the movies in contention. Read More