I realized in a mild daze that Oscar nominations are tomorrow morning and for fuck's sake I need to stop delaying this. This was originally going to be two separate posts, but fuck it, man, I'm merging them.
I broke onto the blogging scene as an Oscar predictor, and I still make a point of doing it, mostly because I have friends who also do it and it's sort of fun. My grape of interest is now a raisin now, or a dead cat or something, and that has everything to do with Best Picture last year. Well, Crash had something to do with it, but I was still pretty enthusiastic the next two years, especially when The Departed (my second favorite of 2006 (at the time, (did The Proposition come in 2006? I think it had its American release in 2006, right?) but now it's third or fourth)! The best the Academy has done in years!) won Best Picture. 2008 was a pretty weak year. I saw a lot more movies that year and I only had three films I would have given a 10/10: The Dark Knight, Wall-E and In Bruges, and none of those received a nomination. In fact, they nominated The Reader over those films, which I haven't seen but reserve the right to insult. I didn't see it on purpose. I'm fucking done with holocaust movies. They had their chance, and if your genre peaked with Schindler's List, you underperformed. They're dreary and serious and unpleasant and trade in themes that have been mined into collapse, killing dozens of miners and trapping many more. Holocaust movies are for middle aged people who throw parties and sit around talking about how we should be sending Native Americans checks and how children are the future. Fuck holocaust movies.
Anyway, I was totally uninvested in last year's Oscars. My favorite Best Picture nominee was Frost/Nixon, but I still didn't feel particularly strong about it. I was angry that Danny Boyle won Best Director for some of his weakest, most uninteresting "Hollywood does Bollywood" work. I was furious that Sean Penn won an Oscar for a nice, but uninteresting role for the second time (okay, he was pretty good in Mystic River, but I think we can all agree that Johnny Depp deserved to win that year) when he did so much more interesting work in, say, Dead Man Walking and when Mickey Rourke gave the most ball-shattering performance of the year. I'm just as pissed about Crash as the next guy, but you don't have to give statues to the gays and take them away from more deserving people and create the same problem all over again, do you?
What am I talking about? It's the fucking Academy, of course they do.
So, to be clear, I have not seen enough movies this year to really predict the Oscars accurately, but I'm going to try because tradition is important.
BEST PICTURE
The Hurt Locker
Avatar
Up in the Air
Precious
Inglourious Basterds
Invictus
Up
An Education
A Serious Man
500 Days of Summer
500 Days of Summer is my No Guts, No Glory prediction here, for those of you who know what I mean. I played it safe, mostly, but I can see a lot of surprises popping up here. Either A Serious Man or 500 Days of Summer could easily be traded out for District 9 or Star Trek, but I think the Academy feels like they covered their asses post-Dark Knight with their Avatar nomination.
BEST DIRECTOR
Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker
James Cameron for Avatar
Jason Reitman for Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds
Lee Daniels for Precious
Director seems pretty sewed up right now and it seems pretty crazy to try and mess with this or Best Actor. I haven't seen Up in the Air or Precious, and I'm not Jason Reitman fan, but I'm happy to see my man Quentin in the race again, and with a maybe 5% chance of winning, I can live with that for now.
BEST ACTOR
Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart
Colin Firth for A Single Man
Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker
George Clooney for Up in the Air
Morgan Freeman for Invictus
There won't be any surprises here.
BEST ACTRESS
Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side
Carey Mulligan for An Education
Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia
Gabourey Sidibe for Precious
Zoe Saldana for Avatar
Okay, okay, we all know that last slot, and my next No Guts, No Glory is totally wishful thinking, but I'm hoping that Hollywood's groupie-like affection for James Cameron will get his actors some recognition. If they're serious about giving it Best Picture they will nominate Saldana. Historically a film with no acting nominations doesn't win Best Picture (tell that to Slumdog Millionaire, though) and James Cameron has always gotten great work out of his leading women. At this point I'm willing to bet that Bullock will win because fuck knows why. She won the SAG and the Globe, right? And she's one of the worst actors in Hollywood.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Chirstoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds
Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones
Matt Damon for Invictus
Woody Harrelson for The Messenger
Christopher Plumber for The Last Station
So we all know that Waltz is taking this, which is great, but it's left the remaining spots fair game. I basically chose four people who are great, respected actors but have either never been nominated for an acting Oscar or haven't been nominated in ages. Any one of those actors deserves to win an Oscar one year, but not this year.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Mo'Nique for Precious
Anna Kendrick for Up in the Air
Vera Farmiga for Up in the Air
Julianne Moore for A Single Man
Samantha Morton for The Messenger
Mo'Nique takes this in a cake walk, and the two Up in the Air chicks are going to make it. Julianne Moore is a perennial space-filler and Samantha Morton is a brilliant actress who should have won in 2002 for Minority Report.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds
Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker
The Coen Brothers for A Serious Man
Pete Docter and Bob Peterson for Up
Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber for 500 Days of Summer
Tarantino wins this, but it could go to Mark Boal. The Coen Brothers are becoming regulars, and thank Yahweh for that. New Pixar film? Give them a screenplay nomination and shut those damn animated films up. 500 Days of Summer's presence here is an extension of my bold choice to put it in Best Picture. And look at that, if this weren't the year that the Academy decided to pussy out, this would make a great Best Picture slate.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner for Up in the Air
Geoffery Fletcher for Precious
Nick Hornby for An Education
Neill Blomkamp for District 9
Scott Cooper for Crazy Heart
This lineup makes a lot of sense to me. When you run out of Best Picture hopefuls, the screenplay category becomes a runners-up list.
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Dion Beebe for Nine
Roger Deakins for A Serious Man
Mauro Fiore for Avatar
Robert Richardson for Inglourious Basterds
Bruno Delbonell for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
And that's it. We'll see how I did in a few hours. I mostly played it safe after my disastrous fuck-ups last year, but knowing my luck the Academy will go crazy and nominate Transformers (the first one) or something. Anyway, I think nominations are announced at 6am or something.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Overall, you did pretty well. I think Supporting Actress was the only category you missed more than one and several you were 5/5.
Still not a lot for me to get too excited about this year and this ten BP nominee rule is just absurd.
Best Picture Nominees:
*Avatar
*The Hurt Locker
*Inglorious Bastards
*Precious
*Up in the Air
The Special Olympics Nominees
*The Blind Side
*District 9
*An Education
*A Serious Man
*Up
None of my NGNG panned out, and we all should have seen the Blind Side coming. I nailed supporting actor where there were a lot of question marks, and I'm pretty proud of myself for hitting cinematography with Harry Potter. Most people had predicted The White Ribbon and I figured Nine was the favorite to win and The White Ribbon was the one with the biggest chance of falling off the wagon. I'm pretty surprised that it did in the end.
Now I feel like whatever will win Best Picture will also win cinematography, just like last year. Fucking cinematographers branch trying to have their own little Best Picture race.
And I told you Best Director would be a dead giveaway in finding the real five.
Yeah, you did, although usually there is one movie of the five that does not get a directing nomination and one of the directing nominees not in the BP race. Had they stuck with the five BP nominees I think this year would have been a five-five match up.
Oh yeah -- good call on the Harry Potter cinematography nomination. I've always wondered why the HP movies tend to get passed over in tech categories.
Post a Comment