Whether you find the Oscars infuriating, irritating, irrelevant or irreverent, no-one can resist the Academy Awards game at this time of year – simply guessing who is going to win. Try as you might to consider them a pointless love-in, or a display of how they always get the results wrong, you can’t help but be swept along by the glitter. Personally I took a sabbatical after the Best Actress gong went to Cher for Moonstruck in 1987 – I mean, come on! Cher? But in recent years there is some evidence that the Academy have actually started getting it right – No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Helen Mirren, The Counterfeiters, Crash and Million Dollar Baby were all clear winners, and no Cher or Driving Miss Daisy in sight. They still got the Best Actor wrong though – how did Mickey Rourke get beaten by Sean Penn?
This year I sense a shift. After a period of rewarding serious, independent, slightly left-field films, the Academy are clearly in the mood to get back to two things they love – blockbusters and money. Avatar, in other words. They have clearly expanded the Best Picture category from five to 10 nominees to include more commercial films, and it’s a strange-looking mixture of small indies (An Education) to worthies (District 9), a cartoon (Up) and what is effectively a cartoon (Avatar). Let’s come back to this category later and start off with a dead cert.
Actor in a Leading Role has some excellent performances, including our own Colin Firth in A Single Man. There was a time when playing Nelson Mandela would guarantee the award, especially if he’s played by Mr Gravitas himself, Morgan Freeman, but not this year. George Clooney plays himself, Jeremy Renner puts in an energised performance in The Hurt Locker but surely this is the year of Jeff Bridges. He could have won for any of his four previous nominations (for The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Starman and The Contender), and his turn as country singer Bad Blake in Crazy Heart is just the most recent of a string of outstanding performances. You can almost smell the whisky and fags, and he has no qualms about throwing up into a toilet dressed only in underpants. A truly sublime actor, he should get the Oscar he finally deserves.
Actress in a Leading Role is a little trickier. Surely we can count out Meryl Streep’s irritating turn in Julie and Julia, but the Academy do seem to love her, as they do Helen Mirren. Sandra Bullock is the favourite, but has she ‘done a Norbit’? Eddie Murphy should have won for Dreamgirls but when Norbit came out just before the Awards the Academy clearly realised they couldn’t give an Oscar to a man who had produced such a stinker. Bullock has just released All About Steve, a ‘comedy’ so dreadful that even the most die-hard Bullock fans stayed away. Could the Academy go left-field and pick a Gabourey Sidibe or a Carey Mulligan, both of whom are excellent? I’m going to go for Sandra Bullock, with extreme reluctance, for cheesy sports drama Blind Side, but really it should be Sidibe. Bullock is, to be fair, less annoying than usual, and even a little feisty, but it’s not really an Oscar role.
Actor in a Supporting Role is a little easier. Matt Damon for Invictus is the worthy vote but he won’t win, likewise Woody Harrelson for The Messenger and Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones. So that leaves Christopher Plummer for The Last Station and Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds. Plummer has never won (it only his first nomination), and while Waltz is clearly the better performance – and it the main reason for watching Basterds – it’s surely must be Christopher Plummer for his turn as Tolstoy. He does have gravitas and screen presence, and even cracks some jokes.
Actress in a Supporting Role has a clear winner. Penélope Cruz in Nine is fun, but Oscar material it ain’t, and she’s won recently for Vicky Christina Barcelona. Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick are both wonderful in Up in the Air but in paper-thin roles, while Maggie Gyllenhaal’s role in Crazy Heart is woefully under-written. The absolute powerhouse performance is from Mo'Nique in Precious as a violent, abusive mother. It’s an extraordinary portrayal of what appears to be a monstrous woman, but in the final scenes she cracks and reveals a person with the mind and mentality of a child. It’s far and away the best performance, and she’s almost a cert to win.
Foreign Language Film has been the strongest category for the past few Oscars – remember Lives Of Others beating Pan’s Labyrinth, Water, Days Of Glory and After The Wedding, or last year Departures surprising fans of The Class and Waltz With Bashir? All superb films. This year it’s a battle of two titles, with Michael Haneke basically being nominated for his past work rather than White Ribbon in particular, up against A Prophet, which is clearly the more approachable and finer crafted film. After a coin toss, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet it is – about time France won again.
In the Writing (Adapted Screenplay) category, Brits feature in the form of Nick Hornby for An Education and Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci and Tony Roche for In The Loop. The thought of a Gooner winning an Oscar turns my stomach, Loop won’t win many fans in the US, and Up In The Air is a barely-there script, so it’s down to District 9 written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell and Precious by Geoffrey Fletcher. My hunch is that Precious won’t take many other awards, so it will take this one. However don’t count out Up In The Air, because in the past the Academy has shown a desire to give at least one award to films that have received a lot of nominations, and it could be they plump for giving Jason Reitman’s film this award and nothing else.
The best Original Screenplay is probably A Serious Man, a film which manages to be absolutely hilarious and utterly depressing at the same time, but it’s probably too downbeat to win, and the Coens have also picked up a Screenplay gong recently for No Country For Old Men. The Hurt Locker by Mark Boal pushes all the right buttons, it’s tight, taut and gripping, and deserves to win something.
As we all know by now, a woman has never won Best Director, so the Academy has teed it up nicely for Kathryn Bigelow to win for the Hurt Locker, ex-husband James Cameron to win Best Picture for Avatar, and the two of them to have an on-stage fight. Whatever you think of the politics of The Hurt Locker it’s a superbly put together piece of work, tense, involving and beautifully shot, and Bigelow is a genuine talent.
I actually think the Best Picture selection this year is pretty weak, but is it poor enough for a cartoon about blue aliens to win Best Film? Sadly, it probably is, so that will be the end of my love affair with the Oscars for, ooh, at least 12 months. And if Up doesn’t win Animated Film I’ll give up predicting anything.
MIKE MARTIN
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Tim Isaac’s Overly Long Note On The Best Picture Category: As an aside to Mike’s prediction, it’s worth mentioning that it’s not only more difficult to predict the Best Picture winner than normal because of the increase from five 10 nominees, but also because they’re using a new voting system. For the first time, rather than just a first past the post system (i.e. whoever gets the most votes wins), they’re doing preferential voting for the Best Picture Oscar.
This means voters rank the nominees in order of preference from one to 10. Then, in the first round, their first choices are counted. If no movie has more than 50% of the vote at that point, the lowest scoring movie is eliminated, and a second round is held where the votes for the eliminated film are redistributed amongst the remaining movies according to those voters’ second choice. So, for example, if your first choice was An Education, if that got the least amount of votes in the first round, it would be eliminated. Your vote would then be transferred to your second choice film. If that movie then got eliminated, your third choice vote would count. The lowest rated film will keep being eliminated in each round until one movie has 50% or more of the entire vote.
Although an accepted voting method, this preferential system could cause an upset, with many whispers going around now saying Inglourious Basterds might now sneak in and win. Although unlikely to get the most first choice votes (and would therefore almost certainly lose if this was a first past the post vote), Basterds is one of the few titles to appeal to both the arty and mainstream sides of the Academy and as a result it could well be an awful lot of people’s second choice movie. This increases its chance of winning significantly in a preferential vote, especially as there’s no outright favourite this year. It’s also true that it won Best Ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild Award, and actors are the largest section of the Academy.
While The Hurt Locker and Avatar are the Best Picture frontrunners, there’s a decent chance those films will split the vote, and if Inglourious Basterds is a popular second and third choice, it could sneak in and win, causing a major upset. The buzz around Hollywood is suggesting this is more likely than it might seem, with Basterd’s producer Harvey Weinstein telling people he’s done the math and reckons he’s got the Best Picture gong in the bag. I still reckon it’s unlikely, but if Inglourious Basterds does win, at least you’ll now know why.
We'll know for sure which films have won when the ceremony takes place on Sunday March 7th.