Best Picture: Juno, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, Michael Clayton, Atonement. A much better year than average for nominees in this category, with everything being either very good or pretty damned good; where is my standard Academy embarrassment nomination? Where is the Ghost, the Crash? Anyway, this is basically a two-horse race between P.T. Anderson and the Coens, maybe with Juno being a dark horse, this year’s Little Miss Sunshine except less annoying.
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood, Johnny Depp for Sweeney Todd, George Clooney for Michael Clayton, Tommy Lee Jones for In The Valley Of Elah, Viggo Mortensen for Eastern Promises. Again, all very solid performances, although Jones is in a movie that was kind of iffy on the whole, and Depp isn’t going to win an Oscar until he trims his hair and starts being a nice respectable person in a movie about lawyers or businessmen finding their inner child or something. I think it’s DDL’s to lose, frankly, because his performance (while excellent) is the showy, big-turn performance the Academy fucking loves.
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Ellen Page for Juno, Julie Christie for Away From Her, Laura Linney for The Savages, Marion Cotillard for La Môme. This one’s interesting, because we have the first major embarrassment nom (Cate Blanchett, who had a bad performance in a worse movie that was designed as cynical Oscar bait), the first serious unknown (Cotillard, completely off my radar and everybody else’s), and then two very small-scale turns (Linney and Christie), rounded out by a young’un in Page. My gut says Linney, but I think there’s a shot for Ellen Page or Julie Christie as well.
Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman for Charlie Wilson’s War, Javier Bardem for No Country For Old Men, Casey Affleck for The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Hal Holbrook for Into The Wild, Tom Wilkinson for Michael Clayton. Traditionally the “give the award to the old fart who’s paid his dues” award, and in that regard you have to look to Tom Wilkinson as an old fart who has, most verily, paid his dues. On the other hand, you have excellent performances from pretty much everybody, Hal Holbrook as a lesser-known old fart who has a lot of dues paid as well, and Bardem, who created a classic movie villain, and this is also the category where villains do well. Tough call.
Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett for I’m Not There, Ruby Dee for American Gangster, Saorise Royan for Atonement, Amy Ryan for Gone Baby Gone, Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton. I never have any idea about this category and almost always get it wrong. That having been said, I am rooting for Tilda Swinton and hope that Cate Blanchett doesn’t get a win for the pretentiously shitty “it’s Bob Dylan but not” movie that I strongly disliked.
Best Director: The Coens for No Country For Old Men, P.T. Anderson for There Will Be Blood, Tony Gilroy for Michael Clayton, Jason Reitman for Juno, Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Again no bad nominations, although I think this is again a two-horse race between the Coens and Anderson, as the Academy finally recognizes one or the other as the master director/directing team that they are.
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I never get why, every year, there’s one movie nominated for best picture but not best director (and, thus, also vice versa). Since most Academy voters couldn’t show you a well directed bad movie or a poorly directed good move (N.B. I certainly can’t), shouldn’t these always match? Or just be the same award? They almost always both go to the same film.
(the notable exception was Crash winning best picture but Ang Lee taking best director, but lots of people think Brokeback Mountain should have won, as do I.)
I thought Brokeback AND Crash were quite poor myself.
I’m happily surprised by Jason Reitman’s nom for director for Juno. I know he won’t win, (c’mon Coens!) but it’s still nice.
Dude, I can’t say anything more except add dittomarks.
Yeah, we’ll have to do an Oscar pool this year, except this year seems easier than most.
Marion Cotillard was superb in La Mome (is that what it was called in the US? over here it was called La Vie En Rose). Absolutely spellbinding. I don’t know what her chances are, though — Page and Christie are strong contenders, and have the advantage of Not Being Foreign.
I’m disappointed that Cronenberg wasn’t nominated. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.
For Best Actress, I was surprised that Knightley didn’t get a nom, based purely on the previous awards nominations (I haven’t seen the movie yet; hasn’t come to Charlottetown).
Of that competition, I think it’s between Christie, Page, and maybe Cotillard; you’ve got the old veteran (won some 40 years ago; that would have to be something close to a record for the most time between wins, wouldn’t it?) in a movie almost no one saw; Cotillard, in a foreign film almost no one in America saw; and Page, the talented starlet in the only movie seen by large numbers of people.
Evan, I liked Eastern Promises too, but it’s not groundbreaking or brilliant or anything. It’s just a really good flick, a four-out-of-five stars sort of a deal. Some years that would be good enough, but I honestly can’t say it’s better than any of the BP nominees, nor Diving Bell.
Well, I’d say four-and-a-half- but I did think it was better than JUNO (which wasn’t bad, but felt like a B+ to me). Plus I think the guy’s just had it coming since VIDEODROME and this was probably the best shot he had.
That said, either way, I think it’s the Coens’ year. They’ve had it coming for longest, and PTA always struck me as a bit more polarizing- some people like what he does (myself included), some people utterly despise it. Then again, TWBB is a grittier and slightly more naturalistic work than MAGNOLIA was, so that may win people over.
If Hoffman doesn’t win for Charlie Wilson’s War, I will be very, very sad.
juno was so so so bad. 🙁
I agree that it was a little less annoying and cliched than Little Miss Sunshine though. But still both those things.
I’m going to freely admit that of all these films? American Gangster is the only one I saw. I was a bad movie goer this year. A very bad one.