Oscar Predictions

Long story short: Birdman has the momentum, but the Academy doesn't like comedies, much less black comedies, and Boyhood's got a lot of good will. Boyhood will take the major awards, with Birdman and Grand Budapest Hotel dividing a lot of the others. The Theory of Everything is a dark horse candidate for a lot of these, but despite its inconceivably strong Golden Globes showing, I can't imagine it walking away with much. The live action and documentary shorts I haven't seen and are a , crapshoot.

Those in the 'Should Win' category marked with an asterisk were not nominated. Seriously, Gone Girl got screwed.

BEST PICTURE
Will win: Boyhood
Should win: Boyhood

LEAD ACTOR
Will win: Eddie Redmayne
Should win: Michael Keaton, Timothy Spall*

LEAD ACTRESS
Will win: Julianne Moore
Should win: Rosamund Pike

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Will win: J.K. Simmons
Should win: Edward Norton, Ethan Hawke

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Will win: Patricia Arquette
Should win: Patricia Arquette

ANIMATED FEATURE
Will win: How to Train Your Dragon 2
Should win: The Lego Movie*

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Will win: Birdman
Should win: Birdman, Mr. Turner

COSTUME DESIGN
Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Should win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

DIRECTING
Will win: Boyhood
Should win: Boyhood

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Will win: Citizenfour
Should win: Citizenfour

DOCUMENTARY SHORT
Will win: Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1
Should win: Don't know

EDITING
Will win: Boyhood
Should win: Gone Girl*

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Will win: Ida
Should win: Don't know

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Should win: The Grand Budapest Hotel

ORIGINAL SCORE
Will win: The Theory of Everything
Should win: Interstellar, Gone Girl*

ORIGINAL SONG
Will win: "Glory" from Selma
Should win: "Glory" from Selma

PRODUCTION DESIGN
Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Should win: The Grand Budapest Hotel, Interstellar

ANIMATED SHORT
Will win: Feast
Should win: Feast

LIVE ACTION SHORT
Will win: Parvaneh
Should win: Don't know

SOUND EDITING
Will win: American Sniper
Should win: Interstellar

SOUND MIXING
Will win: American Sniper
Should win: Birdman

VISUAL EFFECTS
Will win: Interstellar
Should win: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Will win: The Theory of Everything
Should win: Gone Girl*

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Will win: Birdman
Should win: Birdman

A Brief History of Time-Spanning Biopics

The Oscar race this year is unusually heavy on biopics, with special attention being lavished on the most crushingly mediocre. It's worth unpacking, then, what exactly makes a good biopic, since there do seem to be so precious few of them.

To try to fit an entire life into a feature-length movie is impossible, so the question of how to deal with figures whose life stories are so well known becomes a matter of focus. There are, generally speaking, two extremes:

1. Focus on a single goal or event, to illustrate the essence of the figure in question, at least during the time depicted.

2. Try to get as many incidents and anecdotes in as possible, the better to illustrate the events that shaped the person into who she became.

The first approach is generally the more successful, as it is the approach taken to most non-biopic films: introduce the character, give him a goal, and make him work for it. All of the normal storytelling principles of character creation, cause-and-effect narrative, tension and release, are here observed. Selma sticks to this approach and is the better of most of its fellow contenders for it. By focusing on the events in its titular city over the course of a single summer, it allows us to see the nuts and bolts of Martin Luther King Jr.'s doctrine of non-violence: the background of the city and the country's racial conflict, the stakes involved, the planning and arguments and doubts, the setbacks, the eventual triumph. Through this we see many sides of King--brilliant orator, shrewd strategist, shamed adulterer--that are obscured in the popular imagination. They would certainly be obscured in a survey of his 'greatest hits' that the conventional biopic form would dictate.

The second method is more perilous, but also more often deployed. The fact of the characters being real, and real famous, tends to overwhelm the needs of the script, and so too often these movies become a bland series of Big Events that often bear little relation to each other. This happens, then that happens, for two hours or more. Development of characters tends to be thin, because their circumstances are changing so quickly that we don't have time to get a sense of who they are and what they are dealing with in any given moment. It's ultimately self-defeating--in an attempt to show us everything about a person's life, we learn little about who they are.

This is the damning problem with the wildly over-hyped The Theory of Everything: the movie crams into two hours Stephen Hawking's rise as a celebrated physicist; the deterioration of his motor facilities; and the beginning and end of the relationship with his first wife Jane Wilde, across several decades. None of these three subjects are explored in any real depth, nor are the characters: Stephen Hawking becomes a standard suffering genius, and Jane is flattened into a saintly doting wife (except when historical necessity requires she begin to have doubts and frustrations). The Imitation Game too subscribes to this model, with predictably disastrous results. Besides its condescending treatment of its subject's sexuality, one of its worst narrative sins is splitting the difference on the story it's trying to tell: World War II code-breaking on the hand, post-war persecution by the British government on the other, with a tragic boyhood romance thrown in for bad measure. None of it sticks, except for a sequence near the end that deals with the actual procedural details of cracking the Germans' code, and having to grapple with the cost in lives of not being able to reveal their discovery. More is less.

On a script level it's difficult-to-impossible to mitigate the drawbacks of the kitchen-sink approach, but it is possible for the direction of the movie to do so. A director can use the movie's mise en scene to depict the world as seen through the eyes of its famous subject. This is the tack taken by the criminally under-appreciated Mr. Turner, which marshals its gorgeous cinematography toward recreating the awesome English vistas that J.M.W. Turner painted. It also widely sidesteps the trap of trying to create a Lifelong Arc by both confining itself to the artist's later years, and also drifting through the years ala Boyhood. This allows us to see the man naturally, in a variety of often mundane everyday moments, rather than lashing together a number of plot points in service of a forcedly tidy narrative.

Selma has some formal audacity, albeit of a very different kind. It reinvigorates the tired device of superimposed titles used to tell the audience the when and where of a scene, by styling them as FBI surveillance notes. In doing so it illustrates the extent to which King was monitored, and also occasionally creates a dissonant note between what is presented and how it is described--the use of a term like "Negro agitator" speaks volumes about how the Civil Rights Movement was viewed. The movie also makes smart use of its music, juxtaposing cathartic African-American spirituals with the brutality of the police crackdowns depicted onscreen, and featuring an end credits song, "Glory," that draws explicit lines between the events of the film and the protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri during its production.

Whichever the approach taken, the question of accuracy will always hang over a biopic. Strict fidelity to the facts is ultimately a straightjacket: life is messy and redundant and full of too many peripheral figures to count; narratives, especially in a medium that with a fixed length like cinema, demand an economy not found in real life. Questions of absolute accuracy should come second to dramatic needs.

The key is to remain true to the spirit of the figure in question--portray them as the kind of person they were, in the kinds of situations they faced. One of Selma's weakest aspects is its one-dimensional portrayal of George Wallace as an unremarkably hissable old racist when he was in fact a cynical strategist, summoning the demon of Southern racism in a Faustian bid for votes. A less pernicious lie has Correta Scott King confronting her husband with an audio tape of him having sex with another woman, a tape furnished by the FBI. This never happened, but it is forgivable because of the broader truths it is illustrating: the FBI's invasive and illegal surveillance of King, and the marital strains, of his own making, which he faced. As the old maxim goes, never let facts get in the way of the truth.

Of all the prestige biopics to ignore this guideline, American Sniper is the most egregious. It portrays Chris Kyle as ambivalent about his 'Deadliest Sniper' reputation, not necessarily proud of what he does but grimly determined to see his work through to the end. The real Kyle was in fact proud of his distinction, going so far as to rack up a few extra kills in order to keep ahead of any would-be challengers. He was also wildly boastful, to the point that he invented stories about punching out Jesse Ventura and sniping looters from the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. American Sniper is solid if mostly unexceptional as a film, but by completely ignoring these fundamental aspects of his character--the contradictions of which would make for a fascinating story in themselves--it fails utterly as a biopic. For Clint Eastwood, the truth was an obstacle to his fiction.

The Academy attention showered on The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game, and American Sniper, and the snubbing of Selma and Mr. Turner, bespeaks not just a political and social conservatism, but aesthetic conservatism. The filmmaking of the former is reliable at best, tired and dull and misleading at worst; the two latter films are not perfect (Selma is occasionally hobbled by punch-you-on-the-nose dialogue, and Mr. Turner does run awfully long), but they, in their own ways, are doing pushing the medium in exciting directions and doing good by their subjects. For biopics that have aspirations beyond Oscar-bait they serve as excellent models.

Pale Imitation

I was expecting The Imitation Game to be anodyne Oscar-bait, but I wasn't expecting it to be irritating to the point of being offensive. But so it is, by treating Alan Turing's homosexuality as a mid-film plot twist and then acting like that constitutes psychological character exploration.

The movie acts coy about Turing being gay, with a cop at the beginning of the movie looking at the camera and saying, "I think Mister Turing has something to hide!" and then waiting until halfway through the movie to "reveal" that he's gay.  This is made worse by an obnoxious subplot that takes place in Turing's schoolboy years that makes his boy love abundantly clear and serves no other purpose but to do so. The movie spends half of its runtime on a bullshit 'prickly genius needs to learn how to get along with people' plot that was far more effectively done in The Social Network, comes alive for twenty minutes or so with some actual code-breaking and discussion about the ethics of keeping their knowledge a secret, and then, finally, gets into the British government's prosecution and persecution of him. But then it merely talks about his trial and conviction, and then glosses over his suicide with some end titles. This, after tossing in a rancid joke about cyanide--his method of suicide--in that awful opening scene.

The movie wants to make some big statement about how shoddily the British government treated a national hero based on his sexuality, but ends up treating his sexuality, and his heroism, shoddily in turn. I've heard of form fitting content, but this is fucking ridiculous. That it's being nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay is a travesty of art and gay politics.

Oscar Post-Mortem

11 for 24. Yikes.

I was surprised to see The Social Network win as much as it did--and slap-happy to see the scribe of "I want to fuck you like an animal" walk away with a statue for his incredible score work for it--as well as Academy's snubbing of Roger Deakins for Cinematography. I thought they might throw a bone to The Kids are Alright and really didn't think anyone cared about Alice in Wonderland even when it came out. I did nail Inception's technical wins, although that hardly even counts.

Ah, well. There's always next year.

Oscar Predictions

I've seen scant few of these movies--The Social Network, Inception, and True Grit--and my predictions last year were a fairly awful 12/24. But naval-gazing is even more fun when you don't know what you're talking about, so here I go again.

My take is vaguely informed by these predictions, which boil it down to a Social Network/King's Speech race that has a lot to do with the generation gap. Regardless, I'm still mostly pulling my guesses out of the ether. After last year's .5 batting average, why not flip coins?

Best Picture: The King's Speech
Directing: David Fincher, The Social Network
Actor in a Leading Role: Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Actor in a Supporting Role: Christian Bale, The Fighter
Actress in a Leading Role: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Actress in a Supporting Role: Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit
Animated Feature Film: Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich
Foreign Language Film: Dogtooth, Greece
Writing (Adapted Screenplay): Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Writing (Original Screenplay): Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumber, The Kids Are All Right
Short Film (Animated): Day & Night, Teddy Newton
Short Film (Live Action): God of Love, Luke Matheny
Art Direction: The King's Speech
Cinematography: Roger Deakins, True Grit
Costume Design: The King's Speech, Jenny Beavan
Documentary (Feature): Restrepo, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger
Documentary (Short Subject): The Warriors of Qiugang, Ruby Yang & Thomas Lennon
Film Editing: Black Swan , Andrew Weisblum
Makeup: Barney's Version, Adrien Morot
Music (Original Score): The King's Speech, Alexandre Desplat
Music (Original Song): "We Belong Together" from Toy Story 3, Music and Lyrics by Randy Newman
Sound Editing: Inception, Richard King
Sound Mixing: Inception
Visual Effects: Inception

The wonderful thing about Pessimism...

...is you get to be really happy when you're wrong. I don't think the best picture necessarily won, but Hurt Locker was without reservation the better of the two frontrunners, and so I congratulate those who underestimated the bad taste of the Academy. The King of the World has been dethroned.

Of course, I ended up right only half the time, 12 out of 24 times. Aside from the titanic upset (yeah, I went there) in the Best Director/Best Picture categories, my biggest surprise was Precious' win for Best Adapted Screenplay. Up in the Air got so much attention, and most of Precious' publicity was due to Sibibe and Mo'Nique. Hurt Locker's Best Original Screenplay win, which my friend Jordan (who last year correctly called the win for Slumdog after Penn took Best Actor, and whom I still owe a beer) keenly noted put it on good footing to win Best Picture, was another surprise, but I suppose the Academy thought they would give the gold to someone who hadn't already won before (I do think Basterds and A Serious Man had the better writing, but you know that already).

The wins I was happiest with were Christoph Waltz, and Up for Best Score. Waltz's multi-layered wickedness is something else, especially considering the past three years now have seen the Best Supporting Actor award go to villains. One would think it would be old hat by now, but the difference between Javier Bardem, Heath Ledger, and Waltz's characters and characterizations is striking. As for Up, I cannot stress enough how effective its music is. Again: the film's first ten minutes are all you need.

But yeah, so much for my predictive trends. There's always next year.

Oscar Update

Having now finally seen In the Loop, I can now pledge full-throated support for a Best Adapted Screenplay win. Putting aside its breathtakingly hilarious obscenities and insults, the reduction of international power relations to be petty one-upsmanship is probably truer than we would like to think.

Chad has to be one of my favorite characters I've come across in awhile.

My Oscar List

I'm a Basterd. What can I say?

Best Picture – Inglourious Basterds. Hurt Locker is good, and I would love to see Bigelow slay the Avatar behemoth, but it ended up being a movie that I respect more than I enjoy. I don't know. Maybe the critical hype inflated my expectations. This kind of movie is what this award should be about instead of being a popularity contest.

Basterds, on the other hand, is a delight, for its mix of maturity and fantastical irresponsibility, complexity of storytelling (the importance of language to key twists of the plot), its tension, impeccable music selection, Christoph Waltz, Bonjourno, and an audacious finale that had me yelling in delight and then reconsidering it after the fact. Eli Roth notwithstanding, the movie is just stunning top to bottom.

Best Director – Quentin Tarantino. The first fifteen minutes of the movie. The Morricone-scored build-up to the Nazi soldier’s death by Bear Jew and the way it fucks with our sympathies. The reunion of Hans Landa and Shoshanna. King Kong. “Cat People.” The face of Jewish revenge. So many perfect moments.

Best Actor - Jeff Bridges. Haven’t seen Crazy Heart, but it sounds like he delivers the goods. And after watching his photo gallery video on the Big Lebowski DVD, Bridges seems like one of the coolest guys in the world. After thinking it over and realizing how great Jeremy Renner is in The Hurt Locker, and how stupid it would be to favor a performance I haven't seen, I'm rooting for Renner.

Best Actress - Gabourey Sidibe, because she doesn’t really care.

Best Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz, because his Landa is endlessly fascinating.

Best Supporting Actress - Mo'Nique. I was hoping for one of the Basterdettes to be nominated, so in their absence I will demur to popular opinion.

Best Original Screenplay – A Serious Man. Since Basterds has gotten so much attention already, and in my perfect universe it would be getting best picture, I’d like this brilliant Coen Brothers oddity to get more attention than it has, the better for others to “Embrace the mystery.”

Best Adapted Screenplay –In the Loop. I’m hoping to watch it in the next few days, which technically means I shouldn’t be judging it, but…. Yeah. I have no excuse.

Best Animated Feature – Coraline. Up affected me in ways movies rarely do, but Henry Sellick’s work here is uncanny and deserves more attention than it got in theaters, having been forced off 3D screens by the fucking Jonas Brothers.

Best Original Score - Up. Try to imagine the wordless montage at the beginning without the delicately shifting moods of the score. Try it.

Best Film Editing – Basterds. Again, I’m a Tarantino partisan. That first scene is paced immaculately, and the editing plays a huge role in winding up the tension in the subsequent chapters.

I have no problem with awarding Avatar the other technical awards I think it will win. The only reason to see it, in 3D, is the immersive experience it gives you, and so on that front it deserves all the plaudits it will get.

Likely Oscar Winners

Alrighty. Narratives are key to the pseudoscience of predicting the Oscars, I considered three possible Oscar narratives: an Avatar sweep, a Bigelow upset, and a Basterds left-fielder, listed in order of likelihood and reverse order of preference. I’ll explain below and in my personal picks in the next post.

Best Picture - Avatar. Four years ago the Academy snubbed the frontrunner, a love story, in favor of the feel-good issue movie. There followed a backlash which factored into last year's awards. Three years ago was Martin Scorsese's coronation. Two years ago the Academy awarded a film the mainstream public had barely heard of and probably would have hated by the end, which--along with a painfully boring awards show--probably turned off audiences. Last year they sidestepped the issue movie and awarded the (underdog) favorite, a feel-good love story. Lessons learned? Audience favorites, love stories, feel-good flicks, manifest destiny. Avatar's a box office colossus, features CG cat-people sex, and ends with the whole rabble holding hands and swaying, grooving with the planet; oh, and James Cameron is king of the world.

Avatar's box office momentum makes it un-fucking-stoppable, and as Christopher Orr points out, with the expanded field of nominees, the opposition is split too much to mount an upset. My mistake last year was in betting on the political angle of the Academy's cynicism. The fact of the matter is they want to maintain relevance with the public whose ratings they crave, and they're not going to do that by awarding Best Picture to the movie people were too busy seeing Transformers 2 to see.

Best Director - James Cameron, because they'll want to be consistent in their Best Picture selection.
Best Actor - Jeff Bridges. He's the favorite.
Best Actress - Gabourey Sidibe an unlikely favorite, but favorite all the same. Sandra Bullock's getting some serious attention, and some would like Meryl Streep to take another statue home, but Precious is said to basically hinge on Sidibe's performance. She's an underdog, and the Academy loves them plenty.
Best Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz, because people have been calling for it since Cannes.
Best Supporting Actress - Mo'Nique. Favorite once again.
Best Original Screenplay - Basterds. Not enough have heard of A Serious Man.
Best Adapted Screenplay - Up in the Air, because everyone's been talking about it, and it's gotta win something.
Best Animated Feature - Up, because Pixar always wins.
Best Foreign Language Film - The White Ribbon, because it's the only one of the nominees I've heard of, giving it a high profile.

Best Documentary Feature - Burma VJ – Anders Østergaard and Lise Lense-Møller. Because I read about it on the film-blogging site I read, and because Burma's (rightfully) a chic activist cause right now.
Best Documentary Short - China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province. Because everyone's scared about China.
Best Live Action Short - The New Tenants. Crapshoot.
Best Animated Short - A Matter of Loaf and Death. Because Nick Park always delivers the goods.
Best Original Score - Up. They're not going to give it to James Horner, are they? Even I’m not cynical enough to bet on that.
Best Original Song - "Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart. Favorite.
Best Sound Editing – Avatar, because 99% of its credits were computer programmers, and accordingly it’s going to sweep the technical awards.
Best Sound Mixing - Avatar
Best Art Direction - Avatar
Best Cinematography – Avatar
Best Makeup - Star Trek, because it makes us think of a time when William Shatner wasn’t price line negotiating.
Best Costume Design – Nine. With all that Golden Globe attention, it’s gotta win something.
Best Film Editing - The Hurt Locker. I think they’ll grant the importance of editing to establishing the movie’s sense of life out of balance.
Best Visual Effects – Avatar. Does this really require an explanation?

The Nominees Are In

The Best Picture nominees are...

Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

I guessed seven of them correctly, six if you leave out A Serious Man, which I thought might be tossed in to spice things up but wasn't big enough for surefire inclusion. I don't know anything about The Blind Side or An Education, but District 9 is an honest surprise. It doesn't have a chance in hell, but it was an excellent science fiction pic--a rarity these days--that did very well for itself, well enough that its name recognition was able to overcome what would normally be its off-putting sci-fi-ness (for an example of a similar, and from what I hear similarly good, sci-fi film that didn't have the box office mojo to get it out of the genre ghetto, see Moon). The omission of Clint Eastwood's Mandela biopic is pretty surprising, Nine a bit less so; I included it mostly out of cynicism about this whole enterprise. Crazy Heart is supposed to be pretty damned excellent, and so it's disappointing not to see it on this list.

Of course, quality is secondary when it comes to this list. We would do well to heed Manohla Dargis' wisdom:

Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.

Addendum: Original Sin of Omission, and My Picks

On the Curveball list, I neglected to mention Lars von Trier's Antichrist. It's the longest shot possible, since the Academy resolutely wants to avoid the psycho-sexual controversy baggage this film carries with it, but it's not entirely beyond imagination.

As for what I think should be recognized: I don't get to see terribly many movies in the theater to begin with, and even on DVD I'm hopelessly behind. I therefore don't have much to recommend, in the same way I don't have much to not recommend But I did get to see more movies than usual this year (largely because I no longer have a courseload breathing down my neck, a situation that will hopefully remain true for only eight more months), and since I go based on reputation (life is short), most of these were already on the list. But anyway:

Coraline
Up
Inglourious Basterds
A Serious Man

are all most excellent, though Coraline's third act is awfully video-gamey. I'm gunning for Inglourious Basterds, for the sheer range of emotions it elicited and often subverted (Brad Pitt's character, for instance, is funny the first go-around, but is much more obviously monstrous when you're not caught up in the novelty of his goofiness); its audacity; and the love of film it engenders and represents.

Too bad it's almost certain to lose to Avatar.

Best Picture Nomination Predictions

How's this for navel gazing? The real list is supposed to come out tomorrow. Big news this year is they expanded the list up to ten in order to drum up interest and competition (ha!), and, ideally, to give exposure to more obscure films that don't get the attention they deserve (HA!). Perusing the list of movies that came out in 09, and based on reputation and visibility I predict:

Obvious Nominees

Avatar
Up
Up in the Air
Precious
Inglourious Basterds
The Hurt Locker
Crazy Heart

Movies I Had Forgotten About But Are Likely

Invictus
The Messenger
Nine (even though everybody seems to have hated it; call it this year's Benjamin Button)

These are all no-brainers, but there's always the chance the Academy will throw in a few curveballs to spice things up. These are still decidedly mainstream, as I don't think they have any interest in the indies.

Curveballs

A Serious Man
Fantastic Mr. Fox
A Single Man

That said, I think the main ten are pretty likely. If they really wanted to scramble things they would leave out Avatar, but Titanic's domination of 1997's Oscars and Avatar's grossly inappropriate Golden Globe win makes its selection, if not its coronation, a near certainty. But we'll find out tomorrow, won't we?

Hate to Say I Told You So...

...and I can't anyway, so I won't.

Penn's win surprised the hell out me, not the least because he's won so many times already. My friend Jordan (whom I owe a beer) probably had it right: "In the eyes of the Academy, the gays are now placated." Especially after that speech! It made a nice counterpoint to Dustin Lance Black's speech, which was so very moving.

And yet I thought that since they rained on Rourke's parade they might do the same to Slumdog. But no. I am happy, though. I haven't seen Milk and can't judge it, but Slumdog was a great film, and Danny Boyle a great director.

Besides those two upsets (and Penelope Cruz, which I figured a toss-up), though, I ended up nailing most of the secondary categories outside of the wild guesses (short films and foreign film). "Jai Ho" won (I thought "O Saya" was much more emblematic of the film), and the only real surprise was sound mixing, which Slumdog got.

But that's neither here nor there; with 15 out of 24 guessed correctly, I tied at the Oscar party I was at for most guesses, and took home the Wall-E DVD! I got runner-up last year in a contest and won a mini-Oscar statuette, a Sasquatch Gang T-Shirt (which I sold to a co-worker for $15), and some Semi-Pro socks, so this is setting a good trend.

The Oscars

The Academy Awards have always been about politics and creating a narrative; The Departed was far from being the best picture of '06, but hey, Scorsese needed an Oscar. So here are my attempts to (second-)guess this year's winners.

Best Picture - The momentum is on Slumdog Millionaire's side, but I'm betting the farm (and a beer) on Milk. The 2005 snubbing of Brokeback Mountain was a minor scandal, and Hollywood is going to want to make amends with the gay community, who are especially wounded now after the passage of Proposition 8 (which might not have happened if this movie had come out before the election). This would be the third Best Picture in a row where the main character dies in the end, and maybe the Academy has learned its lesson about fighting a wave of goodwill and publicity, but in the end these things come down to internecine politics, and Milk is the safe choice. How far has America come when we can say that about a film depicting the rise and assassination of a gay icon?

Lead Actor - Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler - Because no one thought Mickey Rourke would be great again. This will be the climax of his comeback, with which the movie itself is inextricably linked.

Supporting Actor - Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight - Because he will never be great again (leaving aside the unfinished shooting of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) Plus, he should have gotten it for Brokeback, and he really did do a damned terrifying Joker.

Lead Actress - Kate Winslet, The Reader - Because she's never won, despite multiple nominations, of which she will remind you, at length.

Supporting Actress - Not really sure what to make of this one, but Taraji P. Henson in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is one I've heard most about, so I'll chalk this up to quality, for once.

Animated Film - WALL-E. No animated movie has gotten this much love in a long time, and there's no reason for the Academy to differ.

From here it becomes more of a crapshoot, with biases towards films with a higher profile. I think Benjamin Button is going to take a lot of the technical categories for making Brad Pit old-young, and if they're going to upset the Slumdog momentum, they're going to probably do it by chipping some of the smaller awards away while still acknowledging its overall greatness. That way they can still make Milk look like a surprise upset at the end.

If Slumdog sweeps all of its early nominations, though, then like Return of the King it will have Best Picture in the bag (except ROTK was also political, since they waited until the Lord of the Rings trilogy was over before showering it with love).

Art Direction - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Cinematography - Slumdog Millionaire
Costume Design - The Duchess
Directing - Slumdog Millionaire
Documentary - Man on Wire (it pulls off the trick of making us feel good about the twin towers by telling the story of an equally marvelous feat)
Short Documentary - The Conscience of Nhem En
Editing - Slumdog Millionaire
Foreign Language - Waltz with Bashir (this had a pretty high profile in London, but like all the others on the list, I never heard about it here)
Makeup - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (a no-brainer, though it was nice to see Hellboy II included)
Original Score - Slumdog Millionaire (I hear Benjamin Button is most deserving, though)
Original Song -"O Saya" from Slumdog Millionaire
Animated Short - Lavatory - Lovestory
Live Action Short - New Boy"
Sound Editing - The Dark Knight (remember that frayed, one-note Joker theme?)
Sound Mixing - The Dark Knight
Visual Effects - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Adapted Screenplay - Slumdog Millionaire
Original screenplay - Milk