MovieManifesto

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

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

The Bourne Ultimatum – Christopher Rouse

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Juliette Welfling

Into the Wild – Jay Cassidy

No Country for Old Men – Ethan Coen, Joel Coen (as Roderick Jaynes)

There Will Be Blood – Dylan Tichenor

Will win: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly has an outside chance, but this is really about the big dogs facing off again. It should really be no contest; No Country for Old Men is paced so efficiently and edited with such precision that no other movie stands a chance. Throw in the fact that the far more purposeful There Will Be Blood runs two-and-a-half hours, and the Coens take home another one. Read More

American Gangster – Arthur Max, Beth A. Rubino

Atonement – Sarah Greenwood, Katie Spencer

The Golden Compass – Dennis Gassner, Anna Pinnock

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street – Dante Ferretti, Francesca Lo Schiavo

There Will Be Blood – Jack Fisk, Jim Erickson

Will win: For the record – and I sort of alluded to this earlier, but you, er, might have skipped over it – “art direction” is a fancy way of referring to a movie’s physical production design, namely its stages and sets. The award is also sometimes dubbed “art direction / set decoration”, just to make things extra confusing. Read More

Atonement – Dario Marianelli

The Kite Runner – Alberto Iglesias

Michael Clayton – James Newton Howard

Ratatouille – Michael Giacchino

3:10 to Yuma – Marco Beltrami

Will win: Musicals tend to rule in this category, but the Academy couldn’t find any it liked this year (given that Across the Universe just covers countless songs by the Beatles, it doesn’t qualify), so that gets us absolutely nowhere. What is informative, however, is that six of the past seven winners were also Best Picture nominees – using that logic, we’re narrowed to two choices. As fine a film as Michael Clayton is, I can’t recall anything about James Newton Howard’s music – it may have functioned admirably, but if so, it did its work in the background. Dario Marianelli’s score for Atonement, in contrast, exists almost as its own character, mirroring the movie’s broad range of emotions with wondrous sonic versatility. It is truly arresting music and should have firmly implanted itself into voters’ memories. Read More