Mon, February 19, 2007

This is the time of year that the entertainment industry throws itself a series of lavish parties, with fancy dresses, golden trophies, and much mutual congratulation. It culminates in the Oscars, which recognize the best of the best in each year's movies. By "the best" we mean the best Oscar campaign (with studio perks, special screenings, full page ads, and DVDs sent to Oscar voters); and by "the best" we certainly do not mean comedy or action. We mean "important, serious" films – even "necessary" films – and if you're having trouble recognizing those, look for sad music; desaturated colors; people dying, suffering, or struggling. If it takes place overseas, you're getting warm. And if it happened before 1960, you're almost definitely there.

So what? If studios want to game the system and shill for votes so they can boost DVD sales by printing "Oscar" on their covers, it's their right. If voters want to adopt a herd mentality that seems to award actors more for their ability to be cast in award-worthy films and less for their actual performance, who can stop them? And if filmmakers want to toe the line, retreading familiar maudlin themes with a new spate of "Oscar bait" movies each year, instead of making excellent films like The Silence of the Lambs or Unforgiven and forcing the Oscars to come to them – well, I have no right to complain. Each year, the Academy disappoints me with its nominations, then disappoints me further with its winners, but I keep tuning in (along with a shrinking TV audience) because I remember the days when as many as three or four Best Picture nominees were excellent, seminal films. And I keep hoping the Oscars will someday return to that glory.

More importantly, I'm participating in the annual onebee Oscar pool. It could just as easily be the onebee Super Bowl pool or the onebee GAO Federal Budget Assessment pool – it's just a chance for friends to play a game based on predicting some arbitrary, random events with scant bearing on our actual lives. Increasingly, the movies involved are films we haven't seen, wouldn't want to see, haven't heard of, or wouldn't really want to hear of. But the onebee Oscar pool was born back when a few of our favorite movies were still up for awards, and so it stuck. It gives us a reason to gather with friends and curse and howl at the awards while secretly enjoying the gaudy pageantry of an industry in rapid decline.

As such, how about some Oscar picks?

Best Picture: The Departed

(See below.)

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Departed

This is the year. At a certain point, Scorsese's Susan Lucci streak stops being a fun bit of trivia. Academy voters (thinking primarily of themselves, as usual) want to be part of the voting class that gives him his long-denied award. It'll make them feel "cool." I think they would have done it a few years back if The Aviator hadn't been soul-shittingly awful or if Gangs of New York had been marginally less weird. He's won the Golden Globe; this is the year. Can you give me a better example of Capital-D Directing than a giant visual motif plastered across the film's key scenes?

I see no reason why Best Picture won't follow – the man and the movie are essentially inseparable as I understand it. (Plus, these awards always go to the same movie unless it involves frenzied ass-ramming in a tent.)

Who Should Win: Of the group, I enjoyed Little Miss Sunshine the most, but I'll be satisfied with anything as long as Clint Eastwood and Iwo Jima go home empty-handed.

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker, The King of Scotland

I've been avoiding solemn third-world "downer" movies since Hotel Rwanda reminded me they only bum me out. I'm fine with serious movies, but I still prefer to be entertained if at all possible. (There goes my shot at ever becoming an Academy voter, or a mainstream movie critic.) But you don't need to see Whitaker's movie to know he'll win – nobody else has won a lead actor award this year. It's said his portrayal is eerily precise (so, did Idi Amin have that weird eye thing, too?) and, as EW points out, he made an interesting movie in 1988, and another in 1992. He's due!

Possible spoilers include Will Smith, because Academy voters are stupid, stupid people, and respond predictably to movies that are crafted to elicit a certain response from them. (No disrespect to Smith or his probably excellent performance, but come on.) Or, Leonardo DiCaprio, since people seem to think he should've been nominated for two leading roles this year, but the Academy doesn't allow that. (Their strict mandate: never do anything awesome.) So, conceivably people who liked him in The Departed or Blood Diamond could vote for him, giving him an edge over Whitaker, who failed to appear in either.

Who Should Win: The only performance I've seen is DiCaprio in The Departed, where he's better than anything I've ever seen him in. (And his wild-eyed scowl makes him look exactly like Johnny Knoxville.) But, that performance isn't even in this category. From what I've read, I assume Ryan Gosling's would have been my favorite.

Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen

Also the only person to win any award in her category this year. I have exactly the same amount of interest in Helen Mirren as I do in The Queen – I have heard of both. I'll say this: her physical transformation is staggering. Having seen plenty of glamour shots of her (even as the oldest winner in a decade, she's still sexy!) as well as production stills from the film, it looks like she inhabits the character very convincingly.

I hate to bet against Judi Dench – a fantastic actress who is compelling in everything she does (even 007) – but you're not supposed to get sentimental about your Oscar picks (see "Amy Adams, Jameson Not Winning By More Points Because Of"). Kate Winslet has collected enough nominations to be an appealing choice, but I think the Academy will still wait for a year in which she deserves to win. She has a talent for picking good scripts, but I've yet to see her in a movie where I felt especially compelled by her performance. Give it time.

Who Should Win: Judi Dench is amazing in Notes on a Scandal, and I love her. Penélope Cruz is damned adorable, and should be encouraged to make fewer movies like Woman on Top. Though I haven't seen The Queen, I think Helen Mirren is probably the justified winner.

Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls

This year, we could see a lot of ballots invalidated because the votes are smudged by the tears of Academy voters laughing at the prospect of marking a box next to front-runner Eddie Murphy's name while Norbit clips are blaring from the TV across the room. With all the effort and expense of the modern Oscar campaign, it's amazing the Dreamgirls people couldn't push back Norbit's release date a few weeks. Each Norbit commercial an Academy voter sees would have to cancel out approximately six Dreamgirls screeners. Maybe it was just cheaper to send seven DVDs to everyone.

Anyway, it seems likely that voters will follow the SAG Awards and Golden Globes and give Eddie this award. They'd probably like to encourage him to play interesting parts in good movies that are worthy of his talent, rather than hooking up with tranny prostitutes and starring opposite talking guinea pigs. It's certainly a dynamic and captivating performance in a very good movie (that just happened to be too long by half). Plus, it's exactly what a good supporting performance should be. For better or worse, the story focuses on the bland amorality of the Jamie Foxx character and the selfish ennui of the Beyoncé character. Eddie props them up, steals some scenes, but doesn't make off with the movie or anything. (Much as that might have been an improvement.)

However, we can't ignore the possibility of an upset here in the form of Jackie Earle Haley, because of his heartwarming return-to-showbiz story. Actors love to think that no matter how bad their career gets (pizza deliveryman, Wal-Mart greeter, Robin Williams), they can rocket back to fame and adulation simply by playing a skeezy pervert. And actors are apparently a major Academy voting bloc (so says the prevailing theory about Crash's inexplicable Oscar win). If Haley does win, it'll be pervert season next year. Expect to see a lot more of Dakota Fanning getting raped, along with Abigail Breslin, Freddie Highmore, and, God willing, Suri Cruise.

Who Should Win: Frankly, I'm astonished there's room in this category for anyone who wasn't in The Departed. Alec Baldwin winning a Golden Globe for 30 Rock back-to-back with an Oscar for a film performance like this would be just about perfect. (There's always next year.)

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls

The Oscars are celebrating diversity this year – only 79 years late, but gaining fast! – and the entertainment press will not shut up about it. Hispanics! Blacks! Asians! Where's Lou Dobbs and his electrified fence when we need him? Anyway, nowhere is this diversity more apparent than the Supporting Actress category. Look, they're all women! That's quite a blow for equality – we should all be proud.

Despite speaking English as a first language, Jennifer Hudson is as close to a sure thing as you can get in Oscar season. Her award in this category has been foretold since at least March. Take that, Simon Cowell!

Who Should Win: Cate Blanchett is awfully fun to look at in Notes on a Scandal, but I think the strongest performance in this group comes from little Abigail.

Best Original Screenplay: Little Miss Sunshine

This is a tough category to call, but – like it or not – Little Miss Sunshine seems to have the kind of bouncy irreverence the Academy loves to award in this category (see "Quentin Tarantino, His Own Career Initially Being Not Just A Mockery Of"). About Schmidt and Lost in Translation also won screenplay awards for dry, funny scripts about quirky characters who charmed us and warmed our hearts. Plus, the story wizards at Pixar have given Arndt their stamp of approval.

But this is really anyone's game. Academy voters are also quite fond of miserable, charmless fuckwit Paul Haggis, who contributed to the development of Clint Eastwood's latest weepfest, Letters from Iwo Jima. Pan's Labyrinth is a deeply personal and imaginative script, whether or not it happened to put me to sleep. The Queen has won many awards. Babel is one of those chopped up multi-narrative type deals which requires a certain dexterity to keep many balls in the air at once. Some people go for that sort of thing, too.

Who Should Win: I pick Little Miss Sunshine for "who should win" with considerably greater confidence than "who will win."

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Departed

Of the five, Little Children and Children of Men made us the most sad, which is normally the way to judge a film's Oscar worthiness. However, there's support behind The Departed, which was certainly engrossing as well as peppered with sizzling dialogue (for which adapter William Monahan can take full credit, since the original Infernal Affairs was in Cantonese – although maybe Hong Kong has an expression for "How's your mother?" "She's tired from fucking my father." – I've never been).

Who Should Win: In Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen showed us a masterpiece of improvisation, with new depths of commitment to a character, and exposed us to a thundering detonation of boundaries we've never seen before. As an improvised film, his performance is the script, and deserves this award. (And he might win in a shocking upset – after all, the Academy loves to look "cool" and "with it.")

From this point on, tradition dictates that we follow in lockstep with whatever "Entertainment Weekly" picks because, face it, they're devoting full-time to this stuff with an obsession none of us can match. We're squandering hours each day going to work or raising our families – we can't hope to compete with their depth of understanding. If I've got a strong hunch that contradicts their pick, I'll give you my reasoning.

Best Art Direction: Dreamgirls

On a shoestring budget, Guillermo del Toro and his Pan's Labyrinth team created a wildly imaginative world – but that world spent most of the movie off-screen. So the sprawling, decade-straddling, period-slash-showgirl sets of Dreamgirls should take the prize.

Best Cinematography: Children of Men

This is a tough pick, because none of this year's contenders takes place outside. I'd vote for Black Dahlia because it's Vilmos Zsigmond, for Christ's sake! It's high time the Academy started recognizing people who appeared in those dippy L.A. Times pre-feature ads at the movies. After his win, the creepy Eskimo stunt coordinator would be a shoo-in next year. But EW thinks Emmanuel Lubezki (the Polish "Webster"!) will get credit for the work the CG group did stitching multiple SteadiCam shots together. It won't win any other awards, so it might as well win here.

Best Film Editing: United 93

The liberal, blame-America Hollywood elite hate families and love the Taliban. "Throw open the doors to Gitmo!" they cry. "Osama for President!" (Obama, whatever; same difference.) But Americans are Americans – whether they're defending the country's values or working to poison them – so Academy voters can't deny their soft spot for this film's affirmation of the human spirit in the wake of 9/11. Also, it came out the same year as Oliver Stone's despicable tripe, allowing them to doff their hat to 9/11 families without honoring that shitheap. And it makes the FAA look kinda dumb; in lefty voters' pot-addled minds, fourteen levels of federal bureaucracy melt away, landing that failure squarely in the lap of George W. "My Pet Goat" Bush.

However, it wasn't a particularly thrilling movie (ending: somewhat predictable) and it lacked star power (most recognizable face: recurring crazy lawyer guy on Boston Legal). So it must settle for nominations in the technical fields, and this category was made for it. The film unfolds more or less in real time, and editing has something to do with that.

Best Original Score: The Queen

Apparently, the music in The Queen was pretty good, but mostly it benefits from a lack of competition. After all, everyone hates Philip Glass, and most of Babel's score was just rehashed from last year's winner, Brokeback Mountain. My real pick is whatever Andy picks, because he listens to a last-minute wrap-up from some guy at KCRW who seems to know what's what. (Even though Andy's only scored 5 points in this category over the past two years.)

Best Original Song: "I Need to Wake Up," An Inconvenient Truth

EW picks "Listen" from Dreamgirls, based on a lame-brained theory about multiple-song nominees always taking the prize. But they admit their worst track record is in this category, and I think it's because they're too dismissive of songs that make decent radio hits, like "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" and "Lose Yourself."

Hear me out; I'm certain Dreamgirls will lose this one. (Which is fun because nearly half the film's nominations are in this race, which people conveniently overlook when they wail that the most-nominated film is not up for Best Picture.) Why? Because you can't win an Original Song award with a musical adapted from the stage. (Look it up. It's never happened.) All the good songs are ineligible because they were already in the stage show. The new ones were dashed off during the development process to give Broadway tunesmiths a chance at an Oscar. It's a noble idea, but the song ideas they poured their souls into over years of creativity and revision are already written; you'll get nothing award-worthy by returning to that well for a quick fix. And, if there's one thing Dreamgirls didn't need, it's more songs. The film's three nominees just don't hold up – the split-vote issue won't even come into it.

So, it's down to just two – automatic category champion Randy Newman, with a song about taking the long road; and Melissa Etheridge, with a song about conservation (take the short road, and would it kill you to ride a bike?). As weird as it is to imagine a Best Song contender from a Best Documentary nominee, I think Hollywood will happily clap Etheridge and Al Gore on the back for their deeply personal work furthering the fiction that Earth was not designed for us to do whatever the fuck we want with no consequences.

Of course, the award should easily go to "Ordinary Miracle," performed by Sarah McLachlan for the end of Charlotte's Web. The poignant, handcrafted imagery and evocative music of the closing credits capture the spirit of the E.B. White book better than the overwrought CG spectacle and poop humor of the rest of the movie. Plus, it makes an elegant case why we don't need God – or worse, Intelligent Design. There's plenty of spiritual harmony and wonder to be found in the tireless cycles of nature. It's a travesty it's not nominated.

(You can watch the credits and hear the song online and see what I mean.)

Best Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

The key to picking Oscar winners is to never, ever care who wins. But I can't help being emotionally invested in this category: the effects that brought Bill Nighy's Davy Jones to life were more spectacular than anything we've ever seen. I watched the whole movie without ever being quite sure how they did it, but betting on a hybrid of animatronics, prosthetics, and CG. Turns out it was all CG, built atop a streamlined, on-set version of motion capture (the only kind worth attempting!). Unbelievable. Plus they did a great job of integrating the subtlest of Nighy's performance tics – the effects actually enhance the performance and the story. (Somebody tell Peter Jackson about this!)

Fortunately, they're a lock to win, so this one "love pick" won't cost me. Certainly, the water simulation in Poseidon represents significant advancements by everyone from the programming geeks at ILM to the fluid dynamics geeks at Stanford; and Superman Returns brought us a bulletproof eyeball in such lovingly rendered detail it would make Buñuel proud. But this award is destined for the groundbreaking, stunning work in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

Best Sound Editing: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

I wonder, do distributors include a primer in their Oscar screener DVDs that explains the goddamn difference between Sound Editing and Sound Mixing to Academy voters? Because, if so, it really increases my interest in scoring one of those screeners off eBay. (If you were listening closely, you just heard the sound of a thousand MPAA lawyers shrieking and clawing out their eyeballs.)

Best Sound Mixing: Dreamgirls

I think the sound crew on Dreamgirls deserves this award solely for restraining themselves from inserting a comedy trumpet "wha-whaa" when Eddie Murphy's character got mixed up with drugs and his career bottomed out.

Best Costume Design: Marie Antoinette

Rather than Sound Mixing, I'd prefer Dreamgirls for Costume Design, because it mixes period dress with flashy, glamorous musical outfits, and we all know Oscar loves flashy, glamorous musical outfits. (Hey, maybe that explains Brokeback's Best Picture snub – "we like our gay people dazzling thank you very much!") However, the only thing I remember from the Marie Antoinette trailer is Kirsten Dunst's nude scene, and someone certainly deserves an award for that.

Best Makeup: Pan's Labyrinth

This is a process-of-elimination pick. The thought of Click winning an Academy Award is positively laughable. What's the deal with that? I assume they did some old-age makeup on Sandler and Beckinsale? Or maybe it was special prosthetics to hide that why-did-I-take-this-gig look from Christopher Walken's weary eyes?

Apocalypto could easily win an award for the sheer tonnage of makeup applied, but this one will go to Pan's Labyrinth for its rich and imaginative fantasy characters. (Maybe this is just me, but the whole movie, I couldn't stop noticing Pan's uncanny resemblance to the titular Pick of Destiny in this year's Tenacious D movie. This made it somewhat difficult to take seriously.)

Best Foreign Language Film: Pan's Labyrinth

If you're on the top of every single film critic's Top Ten list (and in some cases, in the second slot as well), you're guaranteed something, come Oscar time. Thank God this ended up in the Foreign Language race rather than Best Picture. This category has never been easier to pick.

Best Animated Feature: Cars

Cars is probably Pixar's weakest offering yet, and I actually liked Monster House quite a bit (and I'm sure most Academy voters don't turn up their noses at the mocap-based films as much as those in the animation industry do). But Cars still offers plenty of dazzling visuals and the trademark Lasseter charm, so we can assume Oscar will continue to give Pixar the gold.

Best Animated Short: Lifted

Since only a tiny subset of the stupid, misguided Academy membership can vote in the short categories, the usual assumptions about their wrongheaded voting decisions and herd mentality don't apply – making this a difficult category to predict. EW leans toward the heart-wrenching melancholy of The Little Matchgirl, Disney's first entry in this category in many years.

But, Rydstrom! How can you bet against Gary Rydstrom in his directorial debut? The man has worked behind the scenes at Pixar since its inception, long before most of its better known principals. He's a seven-time Oscar winner in the Sound categories; I'm betting voters will see his name and instinctively vote yes. (God knows I would!)

Best Documentary Feature: An Inconvenient Truth

My, Hollywood has plenty of opportunities to make its snarky, liberal statements in this category! Christians are creepy! Catholics are handsy! Iraq is a mess! Global warming is real! Fuck you, America! It'll be a hotly contested race, but I think the glam controversy of Al Gore on that construction lift will retain their hearts.

Best Documentary Short: Two Hands

Absent any evidence, let's stick with EW's pick here. I've certainly underestimated Oscar's appreciation of pianist stories in the past.

Best Live Action Short: Éramos Pocos (One Too Many)

I think the Oscar pool points in this category should go to whomever is still in the room when the winner is announced. Seriously, ABC: remember how NBC yanked the end of Last Comic Standing and just announced Alonzo Bodden's win online? This would work great for the three short categories: consider it.

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