Now I think I know how baseball fanatics feel, when they draw swords over steroid-inflated statistics, or exactly which of the umpty-ump scandals besmirching The Great American Pastime™ over the course of a century was the one that made it Lose Its Innocence™. When the field is ever-evolving, greatness becomes a moving target, and comparisons to history a trap. But oh, aren’t the arguments fun?
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threw one humdinger of a curveball when they announced that they would nominate ten films for the honor of Best Picture of 2009, instead of the field of five which has been traditional for over 65 years. This was not an arbitrary act; it was a calculated experiment to see if they could increase viewership for the Oscar telecast by strengthening the odds for nominees that Joe Popcorn Combo has actually seen. This was a bold counterstroke after last year’s snubbing of mainstream masterpieces The Dark Knight and WALL*E in favor of The Reader – a movie so prestigious hardly anyone had seen it at all.
What the Academy remembered is that for the non-industry viewer, suspense over the outcome is not on the shortlist of reasons to watch. The non-industry viewer has probably only seen two or three of the movies in contention, if that, and have only the exposure to, or interest in, the awards season horserace that they get from Entertainment Weekly. They don’t get lost in the weeds of the For Your Consideration ads. When a Best Picture front-runner is a popular, big-grossing movie – particularly if it is still in wide release – ratings consistently go up. I think this is because, for the average viewer, Oscar is coming into their living room to affirm their intelligence and taste, which they enjoy.
Now AMPAS cannot have known that James Cameron was already preparing to handle their visibility problem – his Avatar is already one of the biggest hits of all time, and is becoming the same sort of irresistible cultural black hole as his previous film, Titanic. That makes it a Day One frontrunner for the big prize, the inspiration for many potential blue-skin jokes on the night of the broadcast, and a guaranteed ratings draw.
So has the experience proved useless? I do not think it has. With every film critic, professional and otherwise, making a ritual out of a top 10 list, for Oscar to do the same hardly feels alien at all. And looking at the 10 they chose reveals not 10 movies whose greatness everyone necessarily agrees on, but 10 movies that represent a diverse spectrum of the many things the movie industry does well. We have science-fiction, inspiring drama, wicked social satire, contemporary stories and period stories, groundbreaking visual spectacle, rueful comedy, an inspired pulp war epic, and only the second animated feature in history to be in contention (more on that in a bit). There are still safe choices in there, but also some admirably daring ones. If we keep this up, we might even see a documentary in there someday.
Of course, the Academy is a consensus of voters, so maybe five movies just weren’t a big enough sample to produce good consensus results. Maybe this actually provides a little inoculation against some of the goofier inclusions and exclusions. Certainly you will find boosters disappointed that Invictus couldn’t even make a ten movie shortlist, or that Where the Wild Things Are was forgotten entirely. But aren’t the arguments fun?
Probably the most troubling argument has to do with the new normal of prestige in a Best Picture nomination. With twice as many handed out, are they now worth only half as much honor? And can’t we think of years when there just haven’t been ten truly outstanding films? With the graveyard of Oscar history already haunted by mediocre nominees, haven’t we just laid the groundwork for many, many more? These are all possibilities, and not likely to be solved by half-measures like a field of eight nominees. As the brilliant-but-mortal George Carlin once observed about the 10 Commandments: “10 sounds official. 10 sounds important.”
I don’t think you’re going to see this experiment go away after this year.
Beneath this major development, Nomination Tuesday wrote a few more historical footnotes. As mentioned above, Pixar’s Up became only the second animated feature in history to make the Best Picture cut, after 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. It’s valid to suggest that the creation of the Animated Feature category has held more than one worthy contender back – you can’t say that this honor makes Up an objectively better movie than past Pixar triumphs like WALL*E, Ratatouille, or Finding Nemo. We’ll never know how any of them would have fared in a field expanded to ten. But with feature animation in its current, competitively-thriving state, I can predict with confidence that it won’t be eighteen years before this happens for a third time.
Kathryn Bigelow became only the fourth female filmmaker, after Lina Wertmüller (1976’s Seven Beauties), Jane Campion (1993’s The Piano) and Sofia Coppola (2003’s Lost in Translation), to be nominated for Best Director. And Lee Daniels became only the second black director to appear in the same category, after John Singleton, nominated for 1991’s Boyz in the Hood right after his 24th birthday. Daniels’s film Precious: Based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire is the first film by a black director to compete for Best Picture, and somewhere between those two achievements of his, Spike Lee admirers have a lot to grouse about.
And then the black-white color barrier has been left in such small and smashed pieces in the acting categories that it’s not even worth study. Unusually, all four acting categories arrive with clear Day One frontrunners, with only the Best Actress showdown between Sandra Bullock (for The Blind Side) and Meryl Streep (for Julie and Julia) showing any chances of mobility.
What is interesting to me in the acting area is something which is just becoming clear as a trend: no movie managed to achieve nominations for both Best Actor and Best Actress. One of the rarest Oscar achievements is the so-called Grand Slam, winning Best Picture, Director, Screenplay (in whichever appropriate category), Lead Actor, and Lead Actress. Only three movies have pulled off this trick – 1934’s It Happened One Night, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. No movie this year even qualifies to try for the Grand Slam – the last time we even had Best Actor and Best Actress nominees from the same film was for 2005’s Walk the Line, and the last film to have a chance at all five was 2004’s Million Dollar Baby, which claimed Picture, Director (Clint Eastwood), and Actress (Hilary Swank), but not Actor (Eastwood) or Adapted Screenplay (Paul Haggis).
What does it say that we now think there’s only room for one lead in even our biggest movies? Will we never again see powerhouse casts like the one in 1976’s Network, so stuffed with brilliant performers and great roles that it actually achieved five acting nominations, two of them competing for Best Actor? (In that duel, Peter Finch, in his best-remembered role as the “mad as hell” Howard Beale, posthumously took the prize over his co-star William Holden).
We have had a few strong multiple-actor contenders recently, like 2007’s Michael Clayton and 2008’s Doubt; and with three acting nods, Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air carries the standard this year. But did both the female nominees – Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick – really need to share space in the Supporting Actress category? The emotional journey undertaken by Kendrick’s character in particular could have merited a Best Actress push – although crowding in that category and her relative lack of fame would likely have left her squeezed out.
The choice of which category for which to push a performance is a fluid, and frequently political, decision. Christoph Walz won the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his tour-de-force performance in Quentin Tarantino’s eight-times-nominated Inglourious Basterds, but on Oscar night he will have the Supporting Actor category basically to himself, even though he is arguably as close to a central character as any of those in that tapestry. But if his all-but-assured win puts him in just the recent historical company of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight and Javier Bardem in 2007’s No Country For Old Men, that’s company I think he’ll be honored to keep, because his Hans Landa is just as iconic a villain.
Looking ahead to Awards Night, Avatar’s nine nominations put it in the pole position, which we’ll discuss below; and it will most likely be the first movie conceived of and filmed in 3-D to take the Best Cinematography prize. This area of competition continues to have its boundaries pressed and redefined at revolutionary pace, as more and more of the photographic art can be tweaked in post-production, and more and more of what is photographed exists only in computers.
The screenplay categories offer a rich bounty of viewing suggestions, from the multi-layered District 9 to the scabrously-witty In the Loop to the Coen Brothers’ pessimistic cosmic prank A Serious Man. The Animated Short category features the return of Nick Park’s beloved clay duo Wallace and Gromit in the fantastically-titled A Matter of Loaf or Death. And the Animated Feature category, expanded to five nominees because of a critical mass of qualifying films, provided an astounding breakthrough for underdog The Secret of Kells, which probably nudged out expected contender Ponyo from Japan’s master animator Hayao Miyazaki. Have a look at this preview for Kells, a stylized, Celtic-inspired fantasy-adventure not even released theatrically in the US. Think about how many more people might seek it out now that the Academy has recognized it.
These are the two hands of Oscar – proudly back-slapping the well-made mainstream efforts with one, and gathering some worthy lesser-known fare into their worldwide spotlight with the other. It’s a good job, and I’m glad they’re doing it.
Now for early handicapping of the major categories, along with personal choices for an extra contender I would sneak in if I had such a power.
Achievement in Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published)
District 9 Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
An Education Nick Hornby
In the Loop Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire Geoffrey Fletcher
Up in the Air Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner
Until Avatar opened, you could see some early front-runner mojo building behind Up in the Air, and part of the reason is that the screenplay seemed to capture contemporary American life with such wistfulness, humor, and self-questioning, while creating a splendid trio of main characters to tell its story. But the planet Pandora seems to have staked its claim on the biggest prizes, and filmmaker Jason Reitman will be twice a directing Oscar bridesmaid at the tender age of 32. He’ll be back in those major categories, but in the meantime, looks poised to snag a trophy here. District 9 – the year’s most unexpected piece of genre-bending, has carved out some potential spoiler territory; its surprise Best Picture nomination may have voters revisiting it between now and ballot-check time.
With my extra slot, I would recognize Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers for their deeply-moving translation of Where the Wild Things Are into feature film form. Jonze’s direction and the work of the performers and designers may have realized their vision, but that vision of how to honor Sendak’s insight into childhood started on the printed page.
Achievement in Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen)
The Hurt Locker Mark Boal
Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino
The Messenger Allesandro Camon & Oren Moverman
A Serious Man Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Up Screenplay by Bob Petersen, Pete Doctor. Story by Bob Petersen, Pete Docter, Tom McCarthy
Tarantino has seasoned as a filmmaker, but he still plays the rebel role so well. His 1994 screenplay win for Pulp Fiction came in an era where the screenwriting statue often worked as a consolation prize for the indie masterpiece that was too hip for the studio-sponsored room (see also: 1992’s The Crying Game, 1995’s The Usual Suspects). Inglourious Basterds represents the kind of fearlessly vision-driven writing that truly honors the Original Screenplay category, and just as with his last night as a nominee back then, this looks poised to be where the Academy acknowledges his accomplishment.
This year provided a number of imaginative and dynamic original screenplays, enough that I could honor several, but to choose only one would lead me to Moon, written by Nathan Parker from a story by director Duncan Jones. It is one of the most intelligent, satisfying science fiction films I have seen in a long time, and not only puts over a mind-bending premise but continues to turn its screw until it has unearthed unexpected insights into human nature.
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Penelope Cruz as Carla in Nine
Vera Farmiga as Alex Goran in Up in the Air
Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean Craddock in Crazy Heart
Anna Kendrick as Natalie Keener in Up in the Air
Mo’Nique as Mary in Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Momentum has already gathered behind Mo’Nique for her fearlessly unsympathetic performance in Precious, and none of her four competitors’ performances, excellent though they were, had such an impact on audiences. The film has its best chance for a prize here, and will likely make the smart play and devote the necessary publicity resources to sew it up. If her quiveringly emotional acceptance speech at the Golden Globes was any preview, her time at the podium on Oscar Night is likely to be memorable.
I’d give my bonus nomination to Rachel Weisz in her role as the screwball heiress in The Brothers Bloom, a role that called on an extraordinary range of skills and an unanticipated amount of depth. The always-beguiling Weisz had already proven she could do much as an actress, this just showed she could do even more.
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar in Invictus
Woody Harrelson as Captain Tony Stone in The Messenger
Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station
Stanley Tucci as George Harvey in The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds
A nomination for Woody Harrelson acts as both a welcome show of support for the narrowly-distributed The Messenger, and a collective honor for a kind of comeback year that also saw him essaying a ridiculously-charismatic undead-slayer in Zombieland, and making the most of his expository doomsayer role in the financially-successful 2012. He even scored laughs as the yogurt-making “ex-punk” in the limited-release love story Management. Christopher Plummer joins Hal Holbrook (for Into the Wild) and Ruby Dee (for American Gangster) in the recent, welcome club of Octogenarian Oscar nominees, while Stanley Tucci’s performance in The Lovely Bones probably stood in even more frightening relief given how recently he’d played a much kinder role as Julia Child’s husband in Julie & Julia. None of it will matter a whit when it comes time to give Christoph Waltz the trophy he had already earned by the time he’d gripped our attention through that long first scene with the Dairy Farmer.
I considered recognizing In the Loop’s reality-re-writing government bureaucrat played by David Rasche, but in the category that has perhaps been kindest to comedic performances over the years, I decided instead it was more fitting to make room for Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover. In the Vegas setting of the year’s runaway comedy hit, Galifianakis is the scruffy, weird wild-card responsible for many of the movie’s biggest laughs, always operating by his own private metronome. His “Wolfpack of One” speech is already justly immortal.
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side
Helen Mirren as Sofya Tolstoy in The Last Station
Carey Mulligan as Jenny in An Education
Gabourey Sidibe as Precious in Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Julie & Julia
Sandra Bullock has built up a lot of esteem in the Hollywood community since her breakthrough in Speed 15 years ago. Actors make up the largest voting bloc in the Academy, and I haven’t noticed many of them with an unkind word to say about “Sandy”. Her role as the saintly spitfire housewife caps off her most successful year ever, with a second blockbuster in The Proposal to go alongside The Blind Side’s grosses. She does a solid turn and she’s made a lot of people money, and they are likely to take this, their first and best opportunity, to reward her for all that. But she should not underestimate Meryl Streep, who after all, has to win another Oscar SOMEDAY, and had a pretty phenomenal year in her own right.
My bonus nod goes to Mélanie Laurent as the vengeance-seeking Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino needs extraordinary women to channel the ferocious alchemical mojo he conjures, and Laurent proves to be a most capable angel of fury, willful and electrifying.
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake in Crazy Heart
George Clooney as Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air
Colin Firth as George in A Single Man
Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in Invictus
Jeremy Renner as William James in The Hurt Locker
Jeremy Renner richly deserves this nomination after years spinning gold out of tiny roles, and Clooney is getting better and better with age. But when it comes to cashing-out a long-nurtured portfolio of esteem, nobody’s seeing a better return this year than Jeff Bridges for his captivating role in Crazy Heart. He has had this much talent, discipline, and screen naturalness for decades; and while technically the voter shouldn’t have that in their heart when filling in their ballot, it’s going to exert a mighty gravity all the same. Bad Blake is the kind of broken soul that thrives in this category, and Bridges gives him dignity while never blunting a single rough edge. From the first minutes to the last, you just plain believe him – and that’s the job.
I could stock an entire alternate Best Actor category with off-beat lead performances I loved this year – Robin Williams for his agony-behind-the-smile in World’s Greatest Dad, Robert Downey, Jr. for clearing the very high bar of re-interpreting Sherlock Holmes, Paul Rudd’s totally overlooked work tweaking at the nature of masculinity in the comedy I Love You, Man, Sam Rockwell’s trickier-than-you-know one-man-show in Moon, and Matt Damon’s oddball with the hidden layers in The Informant!. Finally I have to go with Damon, the hero in his own mind who cannot face also being his own worst enemy.
Achievement in Directing
James Cameron Avatar
Kathryn Bigelow The Hurt Locker
Quentin Tarantino Inglourious Basterds
Lee Daniels Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Jason Reitman Up in the Air
Best Picture of the Year
Avatar James Cameron, Jon Landau
The Blind Side Nominees TBD
District 9 Peter Jackson & Carolynne Cunningham
An Education Finola Dwyer & Amanda Posey
The Hurt Locker Nominees TBD
Inglourious Basterds Lawrence Bender
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness
A Serious Man Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Up Jonas Rivera
Up in the Air Daniel Dubiecka, Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman
For Picture and Director both I have to favor the work of Cameron, who is aiming to be the latter-day Cecil B. DeMille by growing the medium itself with the sheer spectacularness of his showmanship; and who, like DeMille, has plenty of appetite for Ham and Cheese. Avatar has generated a momentum for itself that goes far beyond the Oscar race – just look at the number of 2010-11 releases scrambling to position themselves as the “next” 3D epic. Criticize the story you may (oh, you may, you may), but it is unlikely to even check the velocity of the Pandora express. This movie smacked gobs around the world. They are likely to hand over the trophies before they even get their jaws back up to think about it.
This is not to say I think Avatar is the year’s best film, landmark though it undeniably is. My 10 Best list always waits a little longer while I catch up on a few contenders I missed, but I can tell you already that I saw films I liked better. This is not about what Should Win, but what Will Win, and at the start of the race, Avatar has a wide, wide lead.
If I could squeeze in one more director, I would actually make it two: Joel and Ethan Coen, whose A Serious Man ranks among their best work for both its perfection of technique and sureness of theme and tone. We may well see them around these parts this time next year, when their remake of Western classic True Grit (starring soon-to-be Academy Award-winner Jeff Bridges) has hit theatres and vies for nominations of its own.
And if a group of ten Best Picture nominees could accept an eleventh on my word alone, I’d ask it to take Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. Twice-nominated already for Best Foreign-Language film and for its hypnotic black-and-white photography, this work about the evil we can do that leaves a long-lasting impression. It tests and challenges you, refusing you easy moral satisfaction, and it is like no other film made this year.
As always, on the day of the ceremony I will reveal my revised predictions in all categories, and before then will share my top 10/bottom 10 list. In the meantime – there’s nominees to watch.