“Only two legitimate national holidays remain. By ‘legitimate’ holidays, I mean this: holidays with a specific, naturally evolved meaning, the celebration which we find refreshing and correct, and in the celebration of which we, as a people, are united. Those holidays are the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards.” – David Mamet
Chances are if you’ve already had your Super Bowl party, you’re not going to have an Oscar party, too. What playwright Mamet’s observance seems to miss is that people usually celebrate one of these holidays at the exclusion of the other. But for those of you who engage in the annual rite of running out in January and seeing as many of the films on the Oscar ballot as possible, this is for you. It may not give you all the answers you seek-I am afraid to make outright predictions, but I can offer some rules of thumb for placing your bets on who will win the all important races, and more importantly, why some people will lose.
Guidelines:
In my experience, when picking winners, it’s best not to root too hard for a particular film. There is an inverse relationship between your particular wish and the likelihood of your horse winning.
Keep in mind that the ‘Academy’ is a mysterious group of industry insiders, who like to reward their friends endlessly (see Jack Nicholson, Tom Hanks), and leave those who refuse to play the game (à la Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick) out of the loop. Remember, the Academy is like a massive, super-exclusive club. You need to have been both eminently likable in your career, and have made the industry lots and lots of money (refer to Ron Howard’s Oscar for a Beautiful Mind). Academy voters also skew on the older side, so that extremely cool art-house film you saw the other day is not likely to make waves in the world of Oscar.
The other thing to note is that Academy voters don’t see everything. That’s why for the past four months, full-page ads in Variety have been asking voters to consider performances in really bad films (e.g. “For your consideration: Joel Schumacher for his direction in The Phantom of the Opera”) and some good ones. Miramax’s corporate ethos is to sway Academy voters with lavish parties, and it has reaped rewards in the form of Oscars for The English Patient and the enduring career of director Lasse Hallstrom.
So who will win?
Having gone through all the outside factors, we now come to the nearly impossible task of picking winners. I’m sure this sounds like a cop-out, but critics are like weathermen when it comes to predicting Oscars-it’s always rain. So here are my best guesses for what will unfold Sunday night.
BEST PICTURE:
This is often harder to predict than Best Director, but as I see it, like the rest of the ceremonies, this is a two-way battle between Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood. Everyone knows that Scorsese deserves an Oscar, and I think that this year everyone was perfectly prepared to give him one. His film The Aviator is the kind of epic story (a biopic, no less) about the glory years of Hollywood. However, when Million Dollar Baby arrived on the scene, things got a lot more complicated. Eastwood’s masterful character piece about people overcoming great odds in sport and life is what we all hope movies should be. I give the slight edge to Baby-as Eastwood’s second assured effort (last year’s Mystic River undoubtedly still lingers in Academy voters’ heads) in the past two years, it beats Scorsese’s so-so record in recent memory.
BEST DIRECTOR:
It’s possible that voters could hand it to Scorsese just to give him an Oscar, but here again, the Eastwood card trumps everything. If the Academy likes to reward its solid players over the years, they can do no better than Eastwood, who in addition to directing over 50 films, is also an American icon to boot. No one else has a chance in this category.
BEST ACTOR:
Jamie Foxx would seem to have the lock here. And, as the recent Grammy Awards attest to, there is a groundswell of support for the late, great Ray Charles. The only person who could unseat Foxx would be, once again (I realize I’m getting redundant here) Eastwood-if he doesn’t win Best Director.
BEST ACTRESS:
To read the trade mags, this is a re-match between Annette Bening and Hilary Swank, and in this case, I give the edge to Swank, simply because Being Julia tanked at the box office (did you see it?), and Hollywood loves a hard-luck story like Swank’s: poor girl wins an Oscar, casting directors don’t know how to cast her for years, and then she finds that dream role again. Imelda Staunton does more work than either of these actresses in Vera Drake, but she’s British and therefore a largely unknown factor in Hollywood.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
I’m going to give this one to Morgan Freeman outright. His solid narration of Million Dollar Baby adds that ‘Shawshank Redemption factor’ to the film. Tends to be a more substantial award, as opposed to our next category.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
This category is always a throwaway. It seems as though the Academy as a whole agrees to either award the youngest actress (Anna Paquin – The Piano, Keisha Castle-Hughes – Whale Rider, Jodie Foster – Taxi Driver, or Tatum O’ Neal for Paper Moon) or the woman with the most exotic name of the bunch (Shohreh Agdhashloo – The House of Sand and Fog). Following this logic (picking the most obscure actress in the smallest film), Sophie Okonedo of Hotel Rwanda is a lock.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:
I think this one would have to go to Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although the film is formally skewed, it’s certainly the most accessible of his scripts. Keep in mind that Best Screenplay winners can often be your favorite ‘quirky’ film of the year (former winners include Lost in Translation, Pulp Fiction, etc…), never a serious contender for Best Picture, ever, it’s kind of like a “Yeah, we notice you, now shut up and take your prize” category.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
Because I don’t think that Sideways is a serious contender in any of the other categories (note the lack of a nomination for the film’s lead, Paul Giamatti), it’ll probably take this award handily, despite being up against several other strong candidates.
And that’s all, folks:
I refuse to engage in discussions about other categories, because chances are if I don’t care about Best Sound Design, I kind of doubt you will, either. Happy viewing. Try not to throw things at the screen when some producer thanks a higher power or some badly dressed starlet starts sobbing.
