Oscars

Juno – Diablo Cody

Lars and the Real Girl – Nancy Oliver

Michael Clayton – Tony Gilroy

Ratatouille – Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco

The Savages – Tamara Jenkins

Will win: Strange group, huh? Usually the two screenplay categories combine to include the five Best Picture nominees, as well as five more movies that are essentially the second tier of Best Picture nominees – call it the Academy’s way of constructing a Top 10 list. But while the Ratatouille nod makes perfect sense – the movie tells a resolutely original story – I’m baffled by the nominations for Lars and the Real Girl (for which screenplay is its only selection) and The Savages (which also has Laura Linney, but that’s it). If I had to rationalize the Lars and the Real Girl pick, I guess you could argue that its most distinctive quality is its wacky premise, which is obviously screenplay-related. But The Savages? No clue. Regardless, if either of those movies wins, then I’m a huge Lars von Trier fan. Read More

Atonement – Christopher Hampton

Away from Her – Sarah Polley

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Ronald Harwood

No Country for Old Men – Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

There Will Be Blood – Paul Thomas Anderson

Will win: Yikes. This one’s a mess. We can eliminate Away from Her without second thought, but the rest are all legitimate contenders. The pitfall here is that a movie’s overall buzz doesn’t necessarily equate to its odds of winning in the screenplay categories. The Academy, believe it or not, actually seems to focus on a movie’s writing when appraising screenplays, rather than just conforming with the Best Picture favorite. This is noble – after all, each individual category is supposed to be evaluated independently, not in a relative context, although that’s rarely the case – but it also makes handicapping more difficult. And yes, I know I’m complaining. Read More

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Roger Deakins

Atonement – Seamus McGarvey

No Country for Old Men – Roger Deakins

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Janusz Kaminski

There Will Be Blood – Robert Elswit

Will win: Yikes. And I thought adapted screenplay was tough. Ordinarily I’d go through the list and try to eliminate one nominee at a time, but that won’t work here because absolutely none of them can easily be eliminated. Assassination of Jesse James is a mythic Western with classically gorgeous sunsets and long silhouetted figures. Atonement has The Dunkirk Shot. No Country for Old Men is so elegantly made that every frame seems painstakingly composed. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has that unique style placing us in its hero’s perspective, plus that amazing scene where Bauby’s eye gets stitched up and it’s almost as if the doctor is stitching up the camera’s lens as well, plus Kaminski is Spielberg’s longtime cinematographer (major currency there). And There Will Be Blood has that flaming oil derrick, its message of greed and corruption and the loss of innocence billowing out across the night sky. Read More

Beaufort (Israel)*

The Counterfeiters (Austria)*

Katyn (Poland)*

Mongol (Kazakhstan)*

12 (Russia)*

Will win: It isn’t unusual for me not to have seen any of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. What is unusual is for me to never have heard of any of them. Usually there are at least one or two high-profile foreign releases, and there were in 2007 – they just aren’t nominated. Read More

The Golden Compass – Michael L. Fink, Bill Westenhofer, Ben Morris, Trevor Wood

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – John Knoll, Hal T. Hickel, Charlie Gibson,      John Frazier

Transformers – Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Russell Earl, John Frazier

Will win: I rail about this category annually, so this year, in a feeble protest, I’m shifting it to an earlier position in the sequence of categories (‘cause, like, now it has to be noticed, right?). Anyway, winning an Academy Award is the highest honor a film can receive (at least from the American media), but obviously not all Oscars are created equal. While publicists might try to make a movie like Memoirs of a Geisha sound impressive by proclaiming that it won three Oscars, that quantitative accomplishment becomes less meaningful when you learn that those three wins were for cinematography, art direction, and costume design. You know what other movie won exactly three Academy Awards? The Godfather. I look forward to the Gregg Easterbrook column debating which was the better film. Read More