You know what tonight is, right?



I write about those goofy statues enough that it's about time I got a logo to accompany a post, especially if it was pilfered from a highly unlikely source. As for this evening's edition of the Hollywood company picnic, I'll honor it by fulfilling a bit of a tradition 'round these here parts. The following twenty names are those I would have scratched into an actor's branch nominating ballot had one made its way to me. If, say, Andie MacDowell's mail got mixed up with mine.

( my ballot )

Another year, another batch of Oscar nominations.

Even though this year felt more tumultuous, with the Golden Globes and various Guild awards seeming to diverge more the usual once slots for the critically celebrated front-runners were handed out, the Oscar nominations didn't upend expectations. It sometimes seemed like this could be a year where the rug was forcibly tugged away when the Academy honor roll was read, but there was no jaw-dropper like last year's Dreamgirls omission. While I've griped about this sort of thing in the past, there's little to complain about here. Every Best Picture nominee is a worthy contender and even the performance that I'd currently tag as the weakest of the twenty nominated is of the showy sort that I can understand it's inclusion here.

As for the annual face-off between myself and soul_shear, my count has us tied, each correctly predicting 24 out of 30 (incidentally, the same number soul_shear got in besting me last year). As per usual, we had many of the same names and films on our respective lists. I outguessed him by including Ruby Dee in Best Supporting Actress and Laura Linney in Best Actress. My old radio cohort correctly included Saoirse Ronan (whose name I'm going to have to look up every damn time I have cause to use it) in Best Supporting Actress and Viggo Mortensen in Best Actor. We both got all five Best Picture nominees correct. Not bad, considering most other prognosticators had by now totally written off the title that got read first. And that other person who dove into our predicting scrum got 24 right her own self, including all five Best Picture nominees.

As for the nomination themselves, one of the only significant surprises among the major contenders is a happy one as Tommy Lee Jones exemplary work in In the Valley of Elah was recognized despite indications he had slipped out of the race entirely. Otherwise, the real fun is figuring out what the nominations tell us about potential ways the race for the trophies could shake out from here. Not many people figured on Jason Reitman as a Best Director nominee, but there he is for Juno. Does this mean that the building strength of that film, which still isn't likely to prevail in Picture or Director, could actually boost Ellen Page past early favorite Julie Christie in the Best Actress race? Or maybe that the votes get dissipated enough in that category that either Linney or Cotillard actually has a shot? Probably not, but the Christie win doesn't seem as locked now as it did before.

The really interesting wrinkle is Cate Blanchett as a double contender. The I'm Not There nomination in Supporting Actress was a given, but the nod for again playing Elizabeth I means the Academy voters cited her work in a film that was dismissed by critics and shunned by audiences. This could indicate that Cate has become the new Meryl, automatically considered worthy of inclusion in the Oscar roll call no matter how suspect the film. Or it may mean that Blanchett's splendid gender bend as Bob Dylan has impressed Academy members so much that they were excited to write her name in as many times as possible. It makes it that much less likely that Amy Ryan's impressive streak of awards season wins won't include a shiny golden man come February 24th.

Let's hope the the WGA strike gets cleared up. I think I'd like to see Helen Mirren hand Daniel Day-Lewis a trophy.

What do you do when you have a record of 0-17-1? Persevere, my friends. Persevere.

As has been noted in this space and others, soul_shear and I have been waging a little competition for several years to see who can do the best job of accurately predicting the Oscar nominations in the six biggest categories. Of course, me referring to myself as a competitors is a little like the Chicago Cubs touting themselves as World Series favorites. While we did once tie, I have never--as in never ever!--won in this yearly competition.

And so...once more into the breach as I present to you my latest sextet of quintets. I offer the comments section for soul_shear to, as he did last year, bestow his own prognostications. And, as I did last year, I'll concede defeat sometime next Tuesday morning after the nominations have been announced. Seriously, my loss is as predictable as a Javier Bardem Best Supporting Act...

Oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Without further tomfoolery...

( And the nominees will be... )

I was recently thinking about some of the silly Oscar parlor games we played last year and if there was some new variation worth tinkering with as award season ramps up again. The first (and, frankly, only) thing that came to mind was answering this question, "Now that the Academy has finally corrected its most glaring oversight, who is the thus far unrewarded filmmaker most deserving of a Best Director prize?" The drumbeat for Scorsese has been going on so long and so loudly that it's hard to figure out where to now turn those percussive energies. With Bob Altman gone, Scorsese was the last unhonored of the 1970's mavericks who continued making significant work after that fertile decade (although there's undoubtedly a contingent out there who would argue that Brian De Palma is deserving). Looking instead to filmmakers that debuted in the 1980's, I quickly settled on one name. No, make that two names: Joel and Ethan Coen.

Which brings us to this year's array of critic awards. As the accolades pile up, the Coens' latest, No Country For Old Men has won the best picture prize from Boston and Washington, D.C. critic organizations and, more significantly, both the National Board or Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. How much influence these groups actually have on the final outcome is highly debatable, but it's exciting to consider that the Coens could achieve the sort of Oscar night triumph they probably deserved about a decade ago.

Otherwise, these groups have been largely reinforcing potential nominees who've already got a strong shot at getting invited to the Kodak Theatre. Looking to the three major critics organizations (National Board of Review, NY Film Critics and LA Film Critics), Daniel Day-Lewis has won Best Actor twice and Julie Christie has scored equally in Best Actress. The other winners, George Clooney and Marion Cotillard were basically assured nominations before the scribes ever assembled around big tables to hash things out. Meanwhile the supporting actor awards have been spread around enough to be insignificant, but, as soul_shear alluded to yesterday, the biggest beneficiary thus far is Gone Baby Gone's Amy Ryan, who won from all three major organizations and is generally cleaning up across the board. In the span of a few days, she's gone from a pretty good shot at a nomination to a likely candidate to become the latest to go from relative obscurity to Oscar winner just like that.

All this potentially starts to change, though, when the Hollywood Foreign Press announces their Golden Globe nominations next week. They're always star-hungry and prone to more conservative choices so the course correction away from stark, magnificent bloodbath to literary war drama or big-budget, star-driven spectacle could very well begin there.

Okay, let's wrap up this end-of-the-year movie stuff once and for all. It's a little weird tracking through my top ten list two months after everyone else has weighed in. That's just the reality of living in a place where many of the best films of 2006 aren't even available for viewing until a decent interval into the next year. Besides, it feels fitting in a different way to fill the days leading up to the annual Hollywood pageant of regrettable choices with my own big-mouth proclamation of movieland excellence.

Along those lines, if I were given the chance to fill out the acting portions of an Oscar nominating ballot, here's the way I would do it.

( my ballot )

The Oscar nominations are out.

By my quick count, soul_shear correctly predicted 24 of the 30 nominees (or 24 and 1/2 if you give him partial credit for Leonardo DiCaprio in the wrong film). I correctly predicted 23 of the 30 nominees (or 23 and 1/2 if you give me partial credit for Leonardo DiCaprio in the wrong film).

Eighteen times he and I have traded prediction lists, and I still haven't won. Our lists were ultimately pretty similar. He correctly predicted Ryan Gosling getting a Best Actor nod for Half Nelson but I was right about Paul Greengrass slipping into the Best Director race with United 93. So the difference-maker was Rinko Kikuchi. He wins because he correctly predicted the inclusion of the nakedest Best Supporting Actress nominee in recent memory. I think he'll find that pleasantly amusing.

The biggest news of the morning is Dreamgirls left out of the Best Picture and Best Director races. This has been the prohibitive favorite for a long time, and it was actually the film that received the most nominations with eight, helped greatly in that tally by three Best Song nods. It may have happened in the early days of the Academy that the film with the most nominations was left out of Best Picture, but it's certainly been a long time since any film faced that particularly bittersweet twist of fate.

That also means the Best Picture race is suddenly more wide open than before. Unfortunately, I think that may lead to Babel picking up some momentum. If it does, that's a much harder film to reward without also celebrating its director, so Martin Scorsese's long-awaited Oscar triumph might be dashed again.

Then again, maybe it becomes a Departed night. One can dream.

Congrats, soul_shear. I remain the Chicago Cubs of the Oscar prognosticating game.

This coming Tuesday, January 23rd, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce the nominations for the 79th annual Academy Awards. Meanwhile, this will be the 18th time that my old on-air film reviewing cohort and I will challenge each other to see who can do a better job predicting the honorees in the "big six" categories--the four acting categories, best director and best picture. I would like to say that this is some sort of great rivalry, but I've congratulated him on victory in every year but one. That year we tied.

Still, whether it's masochism or foolhardy bravado, I'm prepared to step into the ring again. Because, through it all, you didn't get me down, Ray.

So I'm calling you out, soul_shear. I'm calling you out by name.

Okay, I'm calling you out by livejournal alias, but the principle is still the same.

If posting a response is impractical for soul_shear at this time, we can exchange ideas through the speaking telegraph or some other outdated mode of communication. I'll promise to be an accurate online reporter of my inevitable defeat. But I'll still post my predictions for debate and mass derision.

( And the nominees will be... )

After the Oscar-centric post the other day, my old critic colleague soul_shear suggested we try the same thing with Academy-honored performances from the past twenty year. I suspect he knew full well I wouldn't be able to resist the suggestion.

Bring on the second-guessing, with three simple reflective judgements.

For those who want a handy list of the eighty celebrated performances in question, I'm just dorky and obsessive enough as to have posted it. (Due credit: most of the work was already done by this guy.)

Best: Sticking with my previous Silence of the Lambs veneration, I was exceedinly pleased when Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster both won, each performance an atypical Oscar choice for different reasons. In particular, Hopkins spent so much of the 1990's as an awards show staple, that it's easy to forget he wasn't an especially acclaimed actor at the time. Silence was his follow-up to a dreadful remake that was part of the death rattle of Michael Cimino's career. Hell, the film that Hopkins had in theaters at the time of the Oscar nominations that year was Freejack. There are many other winning performances that I'm fond of (Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham, Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito), but the the victory that gave me the most satisfaction was Frances McDormand for Fargo. It's a comic marvel that's solidly grounded in genuine, recognizable emotion, one of the most blissfully enjoyable acting achievements of the past twenty years.

Worst: There's one Best Actor choice in the past two decades notable for an awfulness as as big as Jupiter. It's such a clear choice here that I'm just going to ignore it completely, like an horrid aberration that warps the whole study. Let's just say that if I could be present for any backstage moment in Oscar history, I would be onhand when Ian McKellan, Nick Nolte and Edward Norton retreated to the downstairs bar to commiserate about their shared defeat. Beyond that, there are few winners that really stir up animosity. Sure, the performance that actually won Pacino the Oscar may be pretty terrible, but who can argue with Al having a little golden man, no matter what the circumstances? I will say that I adamantly disliked Geoffrey's Rush's showy, fussy work in Shine, and I maintain that Kim Basinger may have the weakest filmography of any acting Oscar winner in history.

Overlooked: Here's the topic you could write forever on, beginning with Jeff Daniels for Something Wild back in 1986 and ending with, well, Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale last year. As many great underappreciated performers and performances as there may be, the most egregiously disregarded person is Michelle Pfeiffer. Back in 1989, she swept the four major critics' awards and won a Golden Globe in a once-in-a-career starmaking performance only to spend Oscar night applauding Jessica Tandy for the feat of surviving and getting work at the age of 81. Four years later, she turns in extraordinary, nuanced, deeply felt work in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and can't even get a nomination. I can list off five or six other award-worthy efforts that were similarly, unfairly ignored, but Age is the one that's most baffling.

Variety took a break from cooking up insane headlines to corral a few notable film critics to talk Oscars. Specifically, the critics were asked to look back at the last twenty years of Best Picture winners and name the most notable examples of the Academy getting it right or wrong.

Naturally, I couldn't resist chiming in.

Best: It's hard to argue against Schindler's List as Best Picture winner, but that was so clearly prime Oscar fodder that's it's not especially fun to stump for it here, either. A better, more daring and I think more enduring choice came two years earlier when the top honor was bestowed on Silence of the Lambs. Jonathan Demme's film is densely intelligent and awash in technique that is highly inventive without ever calling attention to itself. This is not the sort of lean, fierce moviemaking the Academy usually goes for, and Demme was a atypically idiosyncratic director to be celebrated in their yearly trophy ceremony. The uniqueness of the win just makes it that much more satisfying.

Worst: There have been triumphant mediocrities (Driving Miss Daisy, Gladiator) and embarrassing misjudgments (Dances With Wolves over GoodFellas, Crash over Brokeback Mountain), but I have zero hesitation is saying that the actual worst Best Picture winner was 2001's A Beautiful Mind. It's the worst sort of Hollywood hackery, full of trumped up emotionalism, clunky dialogue and the reduction of intellectual endeavors to parlor tricks. Worst of all, it positions mental illness as something that be overcome by simply choosing to get better. Just ignore the imaginary people that follow you around all the time and you'll be fine. It's unbearably rotten.

Overlooked: This seems like a pretty good spot to bring up GoodFellas again. It would have been nearly as nice to see Sideways or Fargo or Pulp Fiction win. At least all those films got invited to the show. Hoop Dreams was a genuinely astonishing accomplishment, a vivid articulation of the American struggle, the dreams that sustain us and the questionable priorities that hold us back encapsulated in a three-hour documentary of two Chicago youths playing high school basketball. It should have been a Best Picture nominee. The Academy didn't even nominate it for Best Documentary Feature.

Some of the key Oscar buzz indicators are all packed into a small period of time. In the past several days the National Board of Review, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle have all weighed in with their annual awards. So have a bunch of other folks, ranging from the ignored to the really ignored, but the three critics groups I specifically note here are the ones that have traditionally have the most clout. The National Society of Film Critics is the only other similar organization of any importance that needs to weigh in, and they do it so late in the awards cycle that they may no longer matter that much anyway.

The three groups have spread the Best Picture honor around with Letters From Iwo Jima, The Queen and United 93 all claiming a top prize. But in the top two acting categories, there's been remarkable agreement. Helen Mirren has won all three Best Actress awards for The Queen and Forest Whitaker has won (or, in one instance, shared victory with another actor) all three Best Actor awards for The Last King of Scotland. There was a time when this sort of sweeping consensus was a rarity, when the critics' organizations seemed to pride themselves on selecting a diverse slate of honorees. Fifteen years ago, in 1991, actor winners were River Phoenix, Warren Beatty, Anthony Hopkins and Nick Nolte. The actress winners were Jodie Foster, Mercedes Ruehl, Alison Steadman and the tandem of Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis.

Granted, this shift may have something to do with this particular year. The crop of films and performances may be relatively weak, and the best work may just be that clearly delineated from the rest. (Although, Phillip Seymour Hoffman was similarly strong across the board for Capote last year.) I think there may be something different going on, though. It's not the whacked-out methodologies these critics use when they get together either. Instead it's something that cuts to the reason why Oscar season isn't as interesting now as it was even a few years ago. I think the various organizations have thrown off their role influencing the eventual Academy Award choices and become more concerned with being seen as accurate predictors of filmdom's highest honors. Taking nothing away from the refined power of her performance, Helen Mirren has been the clear favorite for this year's Oscar for so long that these award announcements seem less like declarations of excellence than ratifications of the inevitable.

There was a time when even the expected Oscar wins had the satisfying thrill of freshness. Back in 1991, it wasn't especially surprising that Foster or Ruehl (reassigned to the supporting category) won Oscars, but there was only the hard-to-find Golden Globes awards to offer televised dress rehearsals for their Oscar speeches. Between the slew of newer awards shows--most notably the Screen Actors Guild Awards, announcing their 13th set of nominees in a few weeks--and all the smaller side awards elevated in exposure, it feels like there's little tension left in Oscar night anymore, at least when it comes to the acting awards. Maybe the recent goofiness in the Best Picture and Best Director categories is a little bit a reaction to that.

In short, if the past several days have told us anything it's that we'll be seeing Helen Mirren give a lot of gracious speeches between now and February 25th.

(Note: The link associated with the phrase "whacked-out methodologies" above may only be interesting to soul_shear, but he's going to love it.)