My (yearly) quarrel with the Oscars
Every year on the eve of the Academy Awards, I find there is always one stodgy Oscar favourite I want to deride and an Oscar snub I want to avenge. The King's Speech is modestly entertaining and forgettable. The Ghost Writer is supremely entertaining, and stays buzzing in your head long after you've seen it. The King's Speech notched up 12 nominations; The Ghost Writer's total is zero. Polanski's sharp, beautifully crafted political thriller figured on several critics' top 10 lists, and yet failed to find a nomination. The answer most likely has to do with Polanski's troubled past and his inability to attend the ceremony since he cannot enter America for fear of being arrested. But then again, maybe not. Maybe it's as simple as the Academy traditionally setting aside genre movies in favour of crowd-pleasing, ‘weighty, significant' cinema. But what can be so significant or weighty about a long-dead English king's struggle to overcome his stammer?
Best Film
My personal favourite is Black Swan , but as everyone knows the contest is strictly between The Social Network (terrible movie title, by the way) and The King’s Speech . If The Social Network wins, I could live with that. But now it seems the Facebook movie isn’t as invincible; The King’s Speech seems to be the sure thing. Is the Oscar race for best movie already over? I mean, come on, a movie about Facebook losing to a movie about a stuttering monarch? Only at the Oscars! The Social Network is far from the defining movie of the year (as many critics seem to feel), but its themes are quite layered, unlike the straightforward feel-good King’s Speech. Fincher’s movie is also about something that seems to have permeated most people’s lives. None of these films have the beauty or the artistry of Black Swan. Every element in Black Swan – editing, music, camera, performances – is note perfect. And somehow it manages to be languorous and taut, hallucinatory and hyper-real. You feel the pleasure and the seduction of cinema on your skin as Black Swan unfolds. If The King’s Speech wins, it will prove once again why the Oscars don’t matter – and never will – to people who care for good cinema.
Best Actress in a Leading Role
My vote is for Natalie Portman , and she just might win. Standing a bit in her way is Annette Bening as the lesbian mother in The Kids Are All Right . Bening has been wonderful all through her career, a superior talent who seldom gets the roles she deserves. She’s been better before, of course – and that’s another reason why it could be her over Portman: to make up for not giving it to her sooner. Natalie Portman, though, presents us with a performance that is so compelling, so completely lived in, so physically and psychically demanding as the dedicated, crazed ballerina in Black Swan that it demands more laurels than just an Oscar. The dark horse here is Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone as Ree Dolly, an intelligent, hardscrabble girl searching for her missing father.
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Colin Firth . For me, not so much for his performance in The King’s Speech as much as in recognition of the consistently good work he has done over several decades. He fully deserved it last year for Genoa and A Single Man , but it’s almost an Oscar cliché that you need a tick or two to make them feel you deserve it. Subtle, understated performances such as a quietly grieving gay school teacher are not the stuff of Oscar drama. (Firth’s richest performance is from a film that isn’t even available on video, a modest beauty called A Month in the Country about a shell-shocked and stuttering (someone from The King’s Speech casting team obviously has seen this) war veteran who comes to restore a crumbling fresco in a church). I also liked what Jesse Eisenberg and James Franco brought to their roles in The Social Network and 127 Hours .
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
I liked Melissa Leo in The Fighter . (She was terrific in Frozen River , but had to go away with just a nomination and not the statue.) And then there’s Hailee Steinfeld’s assured debut in True Grit (dreadful movie, by the way) as Mattie Ross, the feisty girl who wants to avenge her father’s murder. But will the Academy honour a debut performance over the work of pros like Melissa Leo and Amy Adams from The Fighter, who was also quite wonderful. I thought Jackie Weaver’s performance as the cold-blooded mother in the widely praised Australian crime drama, Animal Kingdom , was overrated. And what a pity the wonderful Lesley Manville from Mike Leigh’s Another Year didn’t get nominated.
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Christian Bale , most likely. But it should be Geoffrey Rush , absolutely. I hope just because Rush has an Oscar for Shine , they won’t hold it against him. There’s no other nominee to touch his commanding performance as the irreverent speech therapist in The King’s English . Rush is the best reason to see this movie, raising the film above another muckraking expose of English royalty. Christian Bale is another superb actor waiting in the wings to step in and claim the prize for his role in The Fighter . However, though he makes his trademark method transformation of absolutely looking his character’s part, I didn’t think it was anywhere as good as his previous best. John Hawkes could be the surprise winner here. Awarding Hawkes’ quietly menacing performance is another way for the Academy voters to recognise how strong even an indie art house film like Winter’s Bone can be in the race. (The vivid presence of several indie films over studio films in the best picture race has been a surprising, sweet and invigorating trend recently.)
Best Director
David Fincher for The Social Network very possibly, though I’d like to see it go to Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan . (There’s the depressing possibility it will be Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech .) Lately, Fincher has departed from making those edgy thrillers ( Alien3,Se7ven,Fight Club ) to more artful mainstream dramas. He brings to these based-on-a-true- story-dramas ( Zodiac earlier, now The Social Network) absorbing, detailed narratives, richly crafted direction and ambiguous, open ended conclusions. In his new movie he takes a talky script about a fictional account of Facebook and its controversial founders and shapes it into gripping drama, crackling with atmosphere, suspense and style. To me, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan resembles the best work of Roman Polanksi not only in style (elegance and economy) but thematically (jealousy, paranoia, sexual repression, hysteria, insanity,) as well. Aronofsky brings a certain contemporary hipness to it, making this Polanski-ish movie more masterful and edgy.
Best Animated Feature Film
The Illusionist should get it, but Toy Story 3 will instead. Another marvellous anime that didn’t – surprisingly – get a nomination was My Dog Tulip . (It was too good for the Oscars anyway.)
Best Cinematography
Excellent work all around (the technical awards are always neck to neck in their impeccable quality), and you need only to pick your favourite – mine is Mathew Libatique’s swooping, deluxe handheld camera work for Black Swan .
Best Documentary
Perhaps the most difficult to predict since year after year now the non-fiction film has been superior to most fiction films. Docs have become a mainstream genre, often done with more skill and commitment than feature movies, and generating considerable box office mojo. The nominations this year, for instance, are so uniformly excellent that it doesn’t matter which wins. An audience and critic fave is Exit Through the Gift Shop . I liked Inside Job the most myself, while Oscar pundits have pointed to Gasland , (a doc about how “some communities have been affected by natural gas drilling, especially a method known as hydraulic fracturing”) as the winner for sheer topicality.
Best Foreign Film
Not having had a chance to see a single one of these films, I can’t really say. And there is no critical consensus on one or two films like there usually is most years (last year White Ribbon , A Prophet and The Secret in Their Eyes were all hot favourites to win), so all bets are off. Rather interestingly, the hot foreign flick this year didn’t get a nomination for technical reasons. Nearly everyone has sworn how amazing Oliver Assayas’ Carlos is: a movie about the fabled assassin played stunningly by Edgar Ramirez. But it is five and half hours long and was originally made for television, disqualifying itself in the race.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Either The Social Network or Winter’s Bone . As a fan of Aaron Sorkin’s talky, intelligent writing since the days of A Few Good Men (the play, not the movie) and Studio 60 on Sunset Strip (not West Wing), I’d plug for his whiplash dialogue work in The Social Network .
Best Original Screenplay
Personally, I would have recognised Mike Leigh for Another Year . But it will go to David Seidler for The King’s Speech – the film is just too much of a crowd-pleaser.
More Oscar Snubs
Actors, filmmakers and movies I felt were overlooked: Pierce Brosnan excellent as a Tony Blair-ish ex-prime minister in The Ghost Writer ; Keira Knightly in Never Let Me Go ; Barbara Hershy in Black Swan ; Mila Kunis in Black Swan ; Andrew Garfield in The Social Network ; Emma Stone in Easy A ; Zach Galifianakis in It’s A Funny Kind of Story ; Christopher Nolan , director, Inception ; Gaspar Noe ’s Enter the Void (in the tradition of trip movies like 2001 A Space Odyssey); And the Italian film, I am Love .
