Academy Awards Preview

I'm so excited for tomorrow's Academy Awards!  Here are my thoughts about some of the biggest categories.  The star icon denotes my predicted winner; the heart indicates the one I like the most.


Best Actor

• Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
• Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln ★
• Denzel Washington, Flight
• Hugh Jackman, Les Misérables
• Joaquin Phoenix, The Master ♥

Is the Academy ready to give a third Best Actor award to Daniel Day-Lewis?  His portrayal of Abraham Lincoln is perfection.  But no male actor has received three Best Actor Oscars, ever.  Arguably, the Academy would be crowning him the greatest male actor of all time (though he would still be behind Katherine Hepburn, with her four Best Actress trophies).

I think Day-Lewis will win anyway, not just on the strength of his performance but because the other four nominees all have problems.  Denzel Washington is great in Flight, but the movie as a whole is flat.  Joaquin Phoenix gives a truly fascinating performance in The Master, but some viewers found the movie to be difficult and overlong.  Bradley Cooper, until this year a comedic actor known more for his sex appeal than talent, surprised critics with his effective portrayal of a man with bipolar disorder.  But voters may want to see a few more weighty performances before rewarding him with more than a nomination.  Hugh Jackman, too, needs to expand his serious-role résumé.


Best Actress

• Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
• Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook ★
• Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
• Naomi Watts, The Impossible
• Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild ♥

Jessica Chastain is captivating as the driven CIA agent in Zero Dark Thirty.  Jennifer Lawrence, in a very different role, lights up the screen with her wild emotional shifts and boundless energy in Silver Linings Playbook. Academy voters like to reward actresses who are young, smart, and sexy.  Chastain gets two out of three in her ultra-serious role, but Lawrence hits the trifecta and will take home the gold. This is fine with me since I am really bothered by Chastain's repeated insistence to the press that the real-life agent she portrays is a hero.  This statement conflicts with director Kathryn Bigelow's statement that ZDT is not pro- or anti-CIA torture and is just presenting the facts to let the audience decide for themselves.

In Amour, Emmanuelle Riva sacrifices all vanity to portray the ravages of stroke-induced mental deterioration.  She is great, but I think her co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant (robbed of a Best Actor nomination) had the tougher role.  Naomi Watts is wonderful as a British survivor of a tsunami, but she too is outperformed by a co-star, Tom Holland, who portrays her eldest son.  Critics wonder whether the performance of young Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild reflects massive talent or just skillful handling by her director.  I'm not sure, but I do know that her fascinating, unique performance was the most exciting thing I saw on screen all year.


Best Adapted Screenplay

• Argo
• Beasts of the Southern Wild ♥
• Life of Pi
• Lincoln★
• Silver Linings Playbook

The Argo screenplay by Chris Terrio succeeds at the difficult task of building suspense in a story for which the audience already knows the ending.  The same can be said about Tony Kushner's Lincoln script.  Both are great, but I think the voters will want to reward the well-respected Kushner instead of the unknown Terrio.  The award could also go to David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook, which would make me scream--I hated that movie, particularly the irresponsible way the psychiatrist character is presented.  While Life of Pi is my favorite movie of the year overall, its ending is a bit cheesy, so my favorite in this category is the wondrous creation of writer-director Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild.


Best Director

• Ang Lee, Life of Pi★ ♥
• Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild
• David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
• Michael Haneke, Amour
• Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

I'm going out on a limb here and predicting an upset victory for Ang Lee.  It's true that Spielberg kept his tendency toward schmalz in check with Lincoln. But Life of Pi is an incredible directorial achievement, merging wildly creative special effects with a complex exploration of spirituality.  Benh Zeitlin wasn't able to maintain focus through all of Beasts, but he still deserves high praise for his unique film.  Haneke bravely refused to sugarcoat any aspect of old age in Amour.  The only nominee with no business being in this group is David O. Russell, who turned in his worst film yet with Silver Linings.  How the Academy decided to nominate Russell instead of Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master is baffling to me.


Best Original Screenplay

• Amour
• Django Unchained ★ ♥
• Flight
• Moonrise Kingdom
• Zero Dark Thirty

For me this category is a toss-up between Amour and Django Unchained.  The Amour screenplay is devastating and completely unsentimental.  I'm giving the slight edge to Django for being a bit easier to watch, even with its rough language and graphic violence.

I'm mystified by the screenplay nomination for Flight, a film that at times felt to me like a Lifetime Movie of the Week.  Moonrise Kingdom's greatest strength is its set design, not its screenplay.  As for the Zero Dark Thirty script, I find it difficult to be objective since I was so bothered by what I saw as its pro-torture bias, despite screenwriter Mark Boal's claims to the contrary.

In a just world, the Oscar in this category would go to Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master, shockingly not even nominated.


Best Picture

• Amour
• Argo
• Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Django Unchained
• Les Misérables
• Life of Pi ♥
• Lincoln ★
• Silver Linings Playbook
• Zero Dark Thirty

Argo has the buzz right now, and it could very well win, but I think that voters will embrace Lincoln as an instant classic.  The only other nominee with a real chance is Zero Dark Thirty.  I have a feeling that a lot of Academy members really liked ZDT but aren't comfortable saying so publicly because of the film's polarizing politics.  If I ran the world, Life of Pi would win, with honorable mention going to Beasts of the Southern Wild and the (sigh) not-nominated The Master.


Best Supporting Actress

• Amy Adams, The Master
• Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables★ ♥
• Helen Hunt, The Sessions
  
• Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook
• Sally Field, Lincoln

I'm a sucker for a devastating ballad sung in extreme close-up, and I think Academy voters are too, which means Anne Hathaway will win.  Adams is fierce in The Master; she is overdue for an Oscar, but this isn't her year.  I enjoyed Sally Field's performance as the kooky Mary Todd Lincoln, but I felt that her character's storyline was less interesting than the political wrangling over the 13th Amendment.  Jacki Weaver is fine in Silver Linings, but she never gets a scene with a big emotional payoff.

While I'm happy to see Helen Hunt back on the silver screen, I hated her character's arc in The Sessions.  She goes to great lengths to present her sex surrogate as a legitimate therapist, but then she breaks the cardinal rule of therapy by pursuing romance with her client. Meanwhile, where is the nomination for Pauline Collins, such a joy in Quartet? How about the brave performance of Ann Dowd in Compliance? 


Best Supporting Actor

• Alan Arkin, Argo
• Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
• Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master ♥
• Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook ★
• Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
  

This group of five nominees include only one Oscar-worthy performance: that of Philip Seymour Hoffman as the beleaguered head of a religious cult in The Master.  Waltz is charming in Django, but his character lacks the impact of the role that brought him gold in this category two years ago: Nazi officer Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. Alan Arkin is a hoot in Argo, but his part is too lightweight for him to be victorious.

That leaves De Niro and Jones, two once-great stars who give terrible performances that weigh down their respective films.  But De Niro has that crying scene, so I think he'll get the gold.  I would have booted everyone besides Hoffman and replaced them with Ezra Miller (The Perks of Being a Wallflower), Dwight Henry (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Tom Holland (The Impossible), and Samuel L. Jackson (Django Unchained).


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Enjoy the show!