As some of you know, Oscar-watching is one of my main, almost irrational, obsessions, right up there with cashmere, fried food, spa getaways, theater marathons, diva-offs, and anything involving Ryan Gosling. So this is a pretty big weekend for me, as the 82nd annual Academy Awards are announced on Sunday, March 7. For the second straight year, I am posting my predictions for all 24 categories, with detailed, sometimes erudite, sometimes catty, but overall insightful (if I may say so, ahem) commentary for the top six categories of Picture, Director, Lead Actor, Lead Actress, Supporting Actor, and Supporting Actress. And yes, I have seen close to 98% of the nominated films (I just couldn’t get myself to pay money to see Megan Fox wreck Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, nominated for Sound Mixing)
Best Supporting Actress
Are we even talking about anyone other than Mo’Nique to win Best Supporting Actress? No tsunami, no earthquake, no worldwide economic meltdown, no swine flu will get in the way of Ms. Mo’ being awarded a golden statue this Sunday. When I first saw Precious last Fall, I was gut-punched by her terrifying, unforgettably etched Mary Jones, the mother from Hell who made Joan Crawford look like a Carmelite nun. I wanted to scream: Stop the voting, FedEx her that Oscar already! It’s a brilliant, unnerving, boundaryless, multi-dimensional performance – one of the best I’ve seen in the past ten years. Only the two Up In the Air nominees, Vera Farmiga, wonderfully understated as a worldly business traveler, and Anna Kendrick, excellent as a wound-up young consultant with a heart, come close as worthy contenders in this category. The nominations of last year’s winner Penelope Cruz (dear Pe: I love you darling, but why did you sound like you were chowing down on some pork chicharones while singing one of my favorite numbers from Nine, the usually very witty, but now unintelligible, “Call from the Vatican”?) and Maggie Gyllenhaal in a pretty reactive performance from Crazy Heart, were as perplexing as a flash-sideways storyline from an episode of Lost.
Predicted Winner: Mo’Nique, Precious
Best Supporting Actor
Are we even talking about anyone other than Christoph Waltz to win Best Supporting Actor? No tsunami, no earthquake….ok, you get the picture. Waltz’s Oscar for a giddy, menacing, inventive, multi-lingual Nazi colonel in Inglourious Basterds would be one of the most richly deserved in a category that often has winners who win because the Academy thinks they’re going to croak soon or because some make-up/consolation prize had to be given. The only other competition (if you could call it that) is Woody Harrelson’s tour-de-force as a military officer tasked to inform the family of dead soldiers in The Messenger, a funny-sad, heartbreakingly authentic performance. I wasn’t exactly sure what got nominated in Matt Damon’s unmemorable rugby player in the equally undistinguished Invictus? His flawless Afrikaans accent? His obviously well-worked out thighs, which looked so deliriously sexy in those rugby player boy shorts? His perfect chest wax and classy blonde dye job that looked more expensive than Sandra Bullock’s in The Blind Side?
Predicted Winner: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Best Actress
What does Meryl Streep, now on her 16th nomination, the most of any performer in the 82-year history of the Academy Awards, have to do to finally win her third Oscar and second Best Actress trophy? Perform Lady Macbeth while Nordic skiing? Film a one-woman version of “War and Peace” while blasting off in a space shuttle? Replace Tobey Maguire in “Spiderman 4” and do her own stunts? Although I think Meryl’s Julia Child in Julie and Julia was a little too lightweight given all the other roles that she didn’t win an Oscar for, it was a wondrous, mesmerizing, incredibly detailed performance, very much worthy of a third nod. I am flabbergasted that many Oscar pundits have been pounding the Sandra Bullock drum since The Blind Side came out late last year. Really, SaBu as Best Actress? For a performance that was taken from the Julia Roberts/Erin Brockovich/miniskirt-high-heels-push-up-bra playbook? For acting that was so calculated you could almost see Bullock count to ten before she raised an eyebrow or flared a nostril? For a blonde dye job so heinous it made the Real Housewives of Orange County’s bleached big hairs look as natural as morning dew on a leaf? Although SaBu seems to be well-liked in Hollywood, let’s see if that Razzie nod for Worst Actress for All About Steve doesn’t wreck her chances. For my money, it’s Gabourey Sidibe, devastating and unforgettable as the abused Precious who actually gave the leading actress performance of the year.
Predicted Winner: Meryl Streep, Julie and Julia
Best Actor
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that Jeff Bridges will get his Lifetime Achievement Award masquerading as an Oscar Best Actor statuette this Sunday. I love Jeff Bridges (hey, he’s The Dude, for crying out loud!), but his drunken, puking, slurring, gut-exposing, sweaty-armpit, broken down country singer in Crazy Heart is a serviceable performance. Ok, he was touching in some scenes, he did his own singing, and yes, he bravely agreed to look like he didn’t use conditioner, deodorant, or a nose hair trimmer, but there were three other superlative performances in this category. I’ve never been a big George Clooney fan, but his melancholy, touchingly resonant Ryan Bingham in Up In the Air was a masterpiece of lived-in acting. I thought Jeremy Renner’s Sgt. James in The Hurt Locker was layered, intense, emotionally powerful. I especially loved Colin Firth’s beautifully wrought and delicately nuanced lonely, suicidal, gay professor in A Single Man (that scene at the beginning of the movie when he first heard about his boyfriend’s accidental death was heartbreakingly great).
Predicted Winner: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Best Director
I am quietly savoring the fact that one word will describe the Best Director category on March 7, and that is “Historic”. For the first time in the 82 year history of the Oscars, I’m pretty confident that a female will win Best Director, the last bastion of exclusive white-male privilege (no African-American or Hispanic director has ever won, and only one Asian, Ang Lee, for Brokeback Mountain, has). I think it’s a significant milestone, definitely, but I think it’s also undeniable that Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was the best directed film of the year. It was gripping, harrowing, heartbreaking, with a great story, fantastic technical work (the editing alone is unbelievably stunning) and exceptional performances; the best film about the incomprehensibility of war that I have seen since Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Yes, Jim Cameron might have broken cinematic ground with all his technical hoo-hah in Avatar but it was, ultimately, a run-of-the- mill film with a barely-there storyline hiding behind all the technological razzle-dazzle. In my book, a director needs to be able to tell an engaging, articulate narrative, and Cameron failed to do that with his Wii-game disguised as a three hour movie.
Predicted Winner: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Best Picture
The Academy’s decision to increase the Best Picture nominees from five to ten this year is up there in inanity toxic levels as high as The Bachelor Jake’s decision to propose to Vienna over Tenley. What did having ten nominees actually accomplish? Well, it got the kind of movie that NRA members and Christian conservatives love, The Blind Side, a Best Picture nomination. Sigh…Moving on…I actually think that this is a two-horse race, what many Oscar pundits have dubbed David vs. Goliath, small indie vs. most profitable movie ever made. The Hurt Locker was the best film of the year for me – it brought to very vivid, uncompromising life a world that I was unfamiliar with and struggling to understand, the psychological, physical, and emotional life of soldiers in Iraq. It was provocative, intelligent filmmaking that was also viscerally exciting, the trademark of the best cinematic experiences. I think it’s a deserving Best Picture winner, and I have faith that the majority of Academy voters will think it is….but then there’s, ummm, Avatar.
If Avatar is the future of film as many critics and fans have said, then I actually would be better off going into a cloistered Tibetan monastery and never seeing a film again in my entire life. Sure, the technology and visual effects were literally out-of-this world, and Jim Cameron should be commended for his risk-taking and vision. But technology doesn’t make cinema, it enhances and complements it, and overwhelm it. Film is, ultimately, about stories, and Avatar told a clichéd, one-dimensional, appealing-to-the-least-common-denominator story (that Na’Vi birthing ritual/forest rave scene, for one, was execrable!). It’s a movie that refused to allow its audiences to think and process – it’s like watching COPS but with better visual effects.
Predicted Winner: The Hurt Locker
Other Categories
Adapted Screenplay: Up In the Air
Original Screenplay: The Hurt Locker
Cinematography: The Hurt Locker
Film Editing: The Hurt Locker
Art Direction: Avatar
Costume Design: The Young Victoria
Original Musical Score: Up
Original Song: “The Weary Heart” from Crazy Heart
Sound Editing: The Hurt Locker
Sound Mixing: Avatar
Visual Effects: Avatar
Make-Up: Star Trek
Foreign Language Film: El Secreto de sus Ojos (Argentina)
Animated Feature: Up
Documentary Feature: The Cove
Documentary Short Subject: The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant
Animated Short Film: A Matter of Loaf and Death
Live Action Short Film: Kavi
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