BEST PICTURE: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, Precious, The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, A Serious Man, Up, Up In The Air.
Well, first off the new game everybody has to play is “which five of these wouldn’t have gotten nominated if the Oscars hadn’t decided to super-size this category?” My guess is Up, District 9, An Education, The Blind Side and Inglorious Basterds. So that leaves Precious, The Hurt Locker, Up In The Air, A Serious Man and, yes, Avatar. Precious and A Serious Man have no chance. Up In The Air can play spoiler and potentially win, but I don’t think it quite has the support to do it. But really, this is about whether James Cameron making a zillion dollars impresses people more than the best war movie in years and a major artistic achievement.
BEST DIRECTOR: Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, James Cameron for Avatar, Lee Daniels for Precious, Jason Reitman for Up In The Air, Quentin Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds.
Basically I’m just gonna repeat my comments from Best Picture for this one: this is between Bigelow and Cameron. Bigelow has the DGA award, Cameron has the Golden Globe.
BEST ACTOR: Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart, George Clooney for Up In The Air, Colin Firth for A Single Man, Morgan Freeman for Invictus, Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker.
Renner’s nomination is a pleasant surprise – he got a couple of SAG noms and a lot of critics’ awards, but no Golden Globe nomination at all. I think he has an outside shot at it as a dark horse. That having been said, the award this year is primarily a two-way fight between Jeff Bridges for never having won an Oscar and George Clooney for never having won an Oscar. Freeman has two Oscars and isn’t going to win one for Invictus, which was kinda boring. Firth isn’t going to win for A Single Man because he’s had better odds with other things.
BEST ACTRESS: Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side, Helen Mirren for The Last Station, Carey Mulligan for An Education, Gabourey Sibibe for Precious, Carey Mulligan for An Education, Meryl Streep for Julie and Julia.
I’ve never even heard of The Last Station and Helen Mirren has an Oscar already so forget about that one. Carey Mulligan isn’t famous and beloved enough to win an Oscar in young-ingenue mode so she’s not gonna get it. Gabourey Sibibe has a shot, but I don’t think Oscar gives her a statue because A) her movie wasn’t that good and B) Oscar is still wary of the black people. So it comes down to whether Hollywood feels like giving Sandra Bullock an Oscar for making Hollywood so much money over the years, or whether they want to give Meryl Streep another award for being Meryl Streep, because Meryl Streep is probably about four or five Oscars short of her deserved total right now and everybody knows it. I’m pulling for Meryl Streep because she is fucking awesome.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Woody Harrelson for The Messenger, Matt Damon for Invictus, Christopher Plummer for The Last Station, Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones and Christoph Waltz for Inglorious Basterds.
Matt Damon was in a movie so dull that Hollywood actually didn’t give Clint Eastwood a directing nomination, so no. My high opinion of The Lovely Bones is an outlier and Tucci won’t win for it. (If he’d been nominated for Julie and Julia, he might actually have had a longshot chance.) Harrelson has made a lot of enemies in Hollywood and I don’t think even a truly great performance will get him the award. Christopher Plummer has a serious chance because he’s never won an Oscar and he’s quite old and everybody thinks he’s great, so he might get the proxy lifetime achievement award. But Christoph Waltz has to be considered the odds-on favourite.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Penelope Cruz for Nine, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick for Up In The Air, Maggie Gyllenhaal for Crazy Heart and Mo’Nique for Push.
Cruz is only here because she’s really popular with a lot of nominators; Nine was an overblown piece of crap and everybody knows it. The Up In The Air ladies will probably cancel each other out. Gyllenhaal has a good chance with her turn in Crazy Heart, but she’s young yet and will get more nominations in the future (or so goes the logic). Really, I would be shocked if Mo’Nique doesn’t win this.
BEST ANIMATED FILM: Coraline, Up, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells. There is some serious competition in this category this year so I’m mentioning it, although I think Up still squeaks out with the win.
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Clooney won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2005, so Bridges is the one without a little gold man of his own. It sounds like a win for The Wrestler: The Musical is in the bag.
Why does everbody think Christoph Waltz had only a supporting role?
I will actually be disappointed if Pixar wins the animation category this year, because FANTASTIC MR. FOX was so fucking good.
Actually, a better way to play “the game” pf which 5 wouldn’t have been nominated would be to look at the best director noms…which means A Serious Man would have been out.
Oh, and George Clooney has won an Oscar, for Syriana. I guess that puts Bridges in the lead…
I’d gladly get rid of Princess & The Frog to give Coraline the nomination. I’m really annoyed Coraline was totally overlooked!
Uh, J.H., Coraline is nominated.
I would suggest that A Serious Man is one of the “wouldn’t have been nominated” 5, and Inglourious Basterds would have taken its place. I loved Serious Man, but it’s not typical Oscar fodder–there’s no stars, it’s got the Coens’ typical challenging storytelling, and it’s just generally too quirky. Basterds is by a respected director with a big star, plus it’s a successful crowd-pleaser and it’s about WWII.
The one that blows my mind is that 9 by Shane Acker isn’t nominated for either an Oscar or an Annie in the best Animated Feature category.
Regardless, it was an amazing year for animation. We had Coraline, 9, Up, and Fantastic Mr Fox, Secret of Kells, all in my opinion amazing pieces of work. Then we had Princess and the Frog (really good traditional animation), as well as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Monsters Vs. Aliens. Just, wow.
Isn’t Up automatically Best Animated Picture by virtue of being the only one nominated for Best Picture? This happens every once in a while with Best Foreign, too (Life is Beautiful, probably something else).
Also: it’s a damn travesty that District 9 did Avatar better than Avatar in about half the time, yet Cameron gets all the buzz.
Well, there was the year Pan’s Labyrinth won in a whole bunch of categories but didn’t actually win Best Foreign Film, so you can’t necessarily count on that rule applying. But yeah, Pixar pretty much owns the academy at this point.
Avatar didn’t get nominated for Best Animated?
Pan’s Labyrinth was a costume/effects bonanza, though.
…A depressing, scary bonanza.
Prankster, that logic doesn’t really hold true. I can think of a lot of movies with great set design, editing, sound mixing, and special effects that weren’t necessarily great pictures. Best Foreign and Best Animated, like Best Picture, both ostensibly look at the movie as a whole. If another animated movie were really the Best Animated Feature, shouldn’t it have gotten the Best Picture nod over Up?
What are you talking about, Lance? Pan’s Labyrinth totally had a happy ending. You just got to look at it with the other eye.
I saw Up in the Air and enjoyed it, but I guess I didn’t “get” it at the level that you (and apparently the Academy) seem to. Yes, the acting was great, but a lot of elements in the story felt cliched to me.
P.S. Has anyone seen A Single Man? Is it as good as it sounds?
I wasn’t really impressed with Up. Pixar has done way better, and part of me feels like the whole movie was just a chance to experiment with 3D. I know I’m in the minority on this, but I just plain didn’t care for it much.
Out of the five, the only other one I’ve seen is Coraline, which I liked much better than Up. I’m hoping to see Mr. Fox soon, since I hear that’s awesome. I’ll be sad if Up wins the animated category.
You dismiss Mulligan in the description, but put her twice in the list of nominations?
On Best Animated, voters might decide to choose something else for animated because Up got the best picture…
You know, I get what they were trying to do with widening the Best Picture field, but it’s inherently stupid. Because everyone’s just going to knock five off immediately. Like anyone in this world thinks the Blind Side or District 9 belongs in The Hurt Locker’s company, or in the Best Picture race to begin with?
I fear this is going to Avatar. James Cameron knows how to manipulate audiences, I’ll give him that. But it feels like corporate tyranny to me that he might win for ANOTHER Highest-Grossing Film of All Time. Especially when neither film was any good. People are way too willing to be crushed under the bootheel of spectacle.
@Chris Russell: I can actually think of an exception to your rule, if not an Oscar one. At last year’s Eisners, Monster was nominated for Best Ongoing but still lost the Best Japanese (to Tezuka’s Dororo).
I think it’s funny to see James Cameron and Kate Bigelow up against each other for an Oscar. They were married for a while there.
Plus they’ve worked together on projects before: Aliens and Near Dark.
I actually loved Up. Easily the most emotional film of the year for it. Ms. Supergp and I got all kinds of misty-eyed during it.
Actually, until she becomes Mrs. Supergp, I’m not sure what to call her on here. She-Supergp? Supergp-Woman?
It’s been a while since I read the rules, but I think Avatar is eligable for Animated Feature.
It’s hard to believe we could live in a world where Beerfest features preformances by two supporting actress winners. But then I didn’t think the first time I saw Predator that I was watching to future Governors in action.
John: And three future Gubernatorial candidates!
Also, I ignored your obvious typo. Because I am a benevolent god. Or benevolent, at the very least.
Well, until just then.
With five nominations in animation, how did 9 not get one of them? I don’t think it should win, mind you, but seriously?
“Why does everbody think Christoph Waltz had only a supporting role?”
Because he was? He was the villain, for one, and they’re almost never the lead. IB doesn’t really have a lead actor. Admittedly, these categories can be somewhat fluid (Anthony Hopkins in “Silence of the Lambs”, for instance, was in the movie for about 20 minutes), but Waltz fits best into the supporting category.
Corrections:
- George Clooney has an Oscar already (as others have noted).
- Morgan Freeman has one Oscar (for “Million Dollar Baby”), not two.
Describing the Oscars as still being “wary of the black people” strikes me as a bit unfair. There’s been quite a good number of black nominees this decade, and several winners; black actors won Best Actor three of the last nine times.
“Inglourious Basterds” would have made Best Picture with five slots, not “A Serious Man”; the latter would have been one of the lowest-ranked nominees in the ten system (it has little else in the way of nominations, and few nominations/wins in previous awards organizations).
@The Stark: Yup. Cameron actually made a sweet comment at the DGAs that he wouldn’t mind losing to Bigelow (which he did), and he’s supposedly rooting for her for Best Director. To which I say: Aw. But it does not make me feel any friendlier towards the Avatar Best Picture nom.
@KnowsNothingAboutPopCulture: Because it was such an ensemble movies, and probably because everyone can’t forget how they were led to believe that Brad Pitt was the star before they even saw the movie. I’ve read many comments where people were surprised that Brad Pitt was in the movie for much shorter than they expected.
I think the only “lead”ish actor in the movie was Melanie Laurent (Shoshanna). It’s hard to explain precisely — maybe it’s because she seems to have the fullest story arc.
I wonder if anyone is going to find this blog by googling the phrase “wary of black people”.