Oscars 2010: Predictions and Other Observations

If I had more time/energy, I'd do a more complete retrospective on the year in film - I saw an unprecedented number of films within the calendar year. Here's my predictions for the Oscar ceremony tomorrow, with opinions where I feel sufficiently well-versed to offer them. I haven't seen any of the shorts or the documentaries - those are straight-up guesses.

Major Nominees I've Missed: The Last Station; Invictus; The Lovely Bones; The Messenger; Nine

Best Picture

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Bright Star; Fantastic Mr. Fox; A Single Man

Should Win: Inglourious Basterds

Will Win: Avatar

Popular wisdom says the race is truly between Basterds, Avatar and The Hurt Locker. While Locker's got a lot of buzz, I think the structure of preference voting gives it to Avatar. Due to its technological achievements, I think it's more likely than the other two to be placed high even on the lists of people who didn't necessarily like it.

Best Director

Should/Will Win: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

I don't think the Academy can resist the "history-making" narrative that's swept Bigelow along thus far. She deserves it, too; I think Locker is the best-executed and most focused of the five nominees here.

Best Actress

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Abbie Cornish, Bright Star; Emily Blunt, The Young Victoria

Should Win: Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Will Win: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side

I wish the younger nominees hadn't been overshadowed by Bullock and Meryl Streep - Sidibe and Carey Mulligan were truly MVPs of film in 2009.

Best Actor

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Sharlto Copley, District 9; Sam Rockwell, Moon

Should Win: Colin Firth, A Single Man

Will Win: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

I can't really argue with Bridges' "due" narrative - both he and Firth gave wonderful, vanity-free performances. For me Firth has the emotional edge in the rawness he brought to A Single Man.

Best Supporting Actress

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds; Julianne Moore, A Single Man; Diane Kruger, Inglourious Basterds; Paula Patton, Precious (One of this year's great underheralded performances, in my opinion)

Should/Will Win: Mo'Nique, Precious

Best Supporting Actor

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Paul Schneider, Bright Star (In an ideal world, "I failed John Keats!" would join "Who was gonna love me?" "That's a bingo!" and "My tombstone will have my real name" among the played-out nominee clips at this point in the film award season); Anthony Mackie, The Hurt Locker (The best instance of truly supporting the lead actor); Alfred Molina, An Education; Matthew Goode, A Single Man (Had more chemistry with Colin Firth in a few minutes than existed in the entire span of Crazy Heart between Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jeff Bridges)

Should/Will Win: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

It's my dream that Waltz and Mo'Nique show up with him wearing a cummerbund to match her dress, like prom dates. His speeches this award season have been practiced, but thoughtful. I'm eager to see what he's got for the crowd tomorrow.

Best Original Screenplay

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, (500) Days of Summer

Should Win: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Will Win: Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker

It's been called a toss-up, but I think Boal's got the momentum here.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, Fantastic Mr. Fox

Should Win: Actually, all five are good. My personal favorites are Nick Hornby for An Education and Armando Iannucci and team for In the Loop

Will Win: Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air

Up in the Air has lost most of its buzz in its other nominated categories. I think this is where they'll elect to honor Reitman. Have to give props to the Brits - An Education is another stellar example of Hornby's skill with narratives of people forced into growing up and In the Loop not only features an excellent compendium of conversational swearing but an incisive, knowing look at political culture.

Best Animated Film

Should Win: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Will Win: Up

It's probably not news to anyone here that I'm a Wes Anderson fan; the title "Accounting for Everything" comes directly from The Royal Tenenbaums. I will say that Fox is the first instance where I've enjoyed any of Noah Baumbach's work either with Anderson or alone. The medium of stop-motion is ideally suited to Anderson's meticulous attention to detail.

Best Foreign Language Film

Prediction: The White Ribbon

Best Cinematography

Prediction: Avatar

Best Documentary Feature

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Every Little Step

Prediction: The Cove

Best Documentary Short

Prediction: China's Unnatural Disaster

Best Live Action Short Film

Prediction: The Door

Best Animated Short Film

Prediction: A Matter of Loaf and Death

Best Film Editing

Prediction: The Hurt Locker

Best Art Direction

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Fantastic Mr. Fox; Coraline (At least one of the stop-motion films deserved recognition here); Inglourious Basterds

Prediction: Avatar

Best Visual Effects

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: Watchmen (I guess this film's lukewarm critical reception killed its chances here. I think, though, that even the people who question Zak Snyder's understanding of the Watchmen narrative couldn't argue with his visual recreation of the novel's world)

Prediction: Avatar

Best Sound Mixing

Prediction: The Hurt Locker

Best Sound Editing

Prediction: Avatar

Best Costume Design

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: An Education; A Single Man (I'm surprised that neither of the year's big sixties movies got a costume design nomination, especially the one guided by a major fashion designer); Precious (Evokes the eighties without resorting to cliche, which doesn't happen as often as it should); Inglourious Basterds

Should Win: Bright Star

Will Win: The Young Victoria

I have to pull for Bright Star here, since the movie deserves so much more attention than it got. I can't really argue with Victoria's presumptive win here - it makes wearing yards and yards of heavy fabric look positively luxurious.

Best Makeup

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: District 9

Prediction: Star Trek

I honestly have no idea how District 9 got snubbed here. The artistic categories are kind of a mystery to me, frankly.

Best Original Song

Nominees I'd Have Liked to See: "Satellite Heart," New Moon (It's almost certainly too hipster-y for the Academy, but it would've been nice to see at least one of New Moon's original songs recognized. Even haters love the soundtrack)

Prediction: "The Weary Kind," Crazy Heart

Best Original Score

Prediction: Up

Not only has Michael Giacchino done great work for Pixar, in 2009 he also created an awesome score for Star Trek.

Oscars 2010: Best Picture Thoughts

I've been trying to organize my thoughts about this year's Best Picture nominees since I finally accomplished the goal of viewing all ten. I thought I'd rank them (as the academy voters are supposed to do) and offer my take on each. I'm aiming for a full slate of predictions with brief thoughts later today.

Ultimately I think this is a pretty solid group - while I didn't love all of them, I didn't hate any of them. The shift from five to ten nominees worked about as well as the Academy could have hoped; they managed to include both blockbusters and indie fare, and there wasn't the usual December back-loading (half are already on DVD). Also, I have to give it up for an Oscar-disproportionate percentage of movies with female characters who are a) badass, b) complex, or c) otherwise not scenery.

10) The Blind Side

Well, this is kind of obviously the odd film out, right? Not that it's bad, necessarily, just getting a significant boost from a strong performance by Sandra Bullock. It wasn't as sunshiny about the complicated interpersonal dynamics at play as I thought it would be, particularly in depicting the Tuohys' obscene wealth and the NCAA's questioning of their motives in assisting Michael Oher (although I did feel that the NCAA rep was portrayed as a bit...evil...for someone who is asking entirely reasonable questions. But I digress.) Ultimately, I felt the film suffers, and opens itself up to valid criticisms of its depiction of race, by being entirely exterior to Oher; while it's understandable due to what most report as reticence to share on his side, descriptions of the book on which the film is based depict the work as more balanced. It's ostensibly Oher's story, but The Blind Side is not really about Oher in the end.

Three films I'd rather see nominated: Bright Star, which is so insanely beautiful and got shafted in multiple different categories; Fantastic Mr. Fox, which ideally served Wes Anderson's filmmaking style; A Single Man, which was styled within an inch of its life but was also heartbreaking and gorgeous.

9) A Serious Man

This was the last one of the ten I saw, partly because I was sure that I wouldn't like it - I can't say I was particularly into either Burn After Reading or No Country for Old Men. (I'm a little Coens-illiterate, having not seen some of their classics like Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski, but what films I have seen of theirs haven't put me in any big rush to get around to them.) However, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I'm sufficiently self-aware to recognize that a large part of that is the scenes that focus on academia; Larry's increasingly fraught meetings with the tenure committee representative (especially his tearful admission of having seen a Swedish art film and the rep then insisting that the tenure committee doesn't make moral judgements) constituted one of the more hilarious sequences of scenes I've seen this year. However, I couldn't help but feel that if it were made by someone less Academy-vetted than the Coens, this movie wouldn't have received the attention that it has.

8) Up

Look, I was as moved by the opening montage as anyone, okay? And I loved the rest of the movie - whichever Pixar employee came up with the concept of the talking dogs deserves a bonus. However, I don't feel like it's as strong an effort in terms of originality and heart as Wall-E, or even Ratatouille. It almost feels like they felt like the emotional wallop of the first ten minutes meant that they didn't have to try as hard through the rest of the film. I don't have a problem with it being nominated, but it's just Top-Ten rather than Top-Five in my opinion.

7) Up in the Air

I liked Up in the Air when I saw it, but reflecting on the field of ten has made me realize that it didn't really stick with me. Jason Reitman did one of the better recent jobs of placing George Clooney in a role that plays off of his public persona (as did Wes Anderson in Fantastic Mr. Fox) but the movie doesn't seem to know how (or whether) it wants to redeem Ryan and kind of loses its focus after the wedding scene. I can recognize that ambiguity is the point there, but it felt more scattered than purposeful. Well acted, timely, etc. It just ultimately didn't feel "great" to me. I hope Anna Kendrick will get an industry boost from UitA's hype - her performance here plus her hilarious post-zombie-movie monologue in New Moon were delightful.

6) District 9

I was really pleasantly surprised by how much I liked District 9 - it's one of the only movies I've ever seen where I felt myself actively desiring a sequel upon its conclusion. To some extent, I have more respect for the technical work shown in District 9 than I do for that of Avatar. The director of Terminator and Titanic, working with millions upon millions of dollars in his budget, should turn out a visually stunning film. It's more impressive, in my opinion, to see a relative newcomer present such a fully realized fictionalized world. (I will say that when I was watching the BAFTAs, I felt like there was an air of relief in the acceptance speeches from Avatar's tech people. Like, maybe a few years back they had some days where Cameron was all, "Yes! Yes! I SEE YOU!" and they were secretly like, "Oh, Lord. What if this is the biggest flop of all time?") District 9 also gets props for featuring one of the year's most astonishing debut performances in Sharlto Copley.

5) An Education

An Education's coming-of-age narrative is not necessarily novel, but it is rescued from the jaws of cliche by a great screenplay and a uniformly excellent cast. High marks for execution, if you will. Carey Mulligan in this film is like Ellen Page in Juno to me; they are not necessarily the only actors who could have played their respective roles, but what they bring to the character is totally unique and deserving of recognition. If you've seen the film (or don't mind spoilers), I have to recommend Lynn Barber's piece on her experiences that are dramatized in An Education.

4) Avatar

I'd place this lower, but I can't argue with the technological accomplishments of this film, even if it is one of the cheesiest things I've seen in quite some time; it's really a very unique feeling to frequently roll one's eyes while wearing 3-D glasses. Gorgeous visuals, played-out storyline. I'd probably feel more strongly about this if the film had received an undeserved screenplay nomination; Giovanni Ribisi's dialogue in his various scenes may as well have been "Evil Plans, Evil Plans, Evil Plans!" The film's general lack of originality has been combed through elsewhere. My major criticism is this: the film has no postcolonial sensibility. The battle scenes clearly wear their inversion of the cowboys-and-indians paradigm, but I frequently found myself distracted wondering what kind of world the humans had left behind them. Watching the scene where the crazy military dude hypes up the crowd to go indigenous-population-hunting, my eyes focused on the brown faces in that crowd as I thought "Are you supposed to come from where I come from? What are your histories?" District 9 isn't a perfect film (pointless demonization of Nigerians, anyone?), but it is clearly rooted in South Africa's postcolonial history and the recent fallout from apartheid. Avatar shows no such thematic clarity. Additionally, while it's done an insanely good business in theaters I can't help but feel that it will suffer in the transition to home entertainment, and it's truly too soon to say how significant it will ultimately be in the annals of film.

3) The Hurt Locker

A very good film, and I'm glad that the awards season prompted me to seek it out as I'm generally not a big watcher of war movies. Its set pieces work together and flow in and out of each other like the well-calibrated moving parts of a machine and the trio of Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty was the year's best small ensemble. While it's not my absolute favorite, I wouldn't be disappointed if The Hurt Locker won Best Picture.

2) Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

If this makes any sense, Precious was so good at telling its story that I don't know whether I could bear to watch it again. There were times when the force of the film was so visceral and powerful that it felt like the whole entire film could break through the fourth wall and I felt myself shrinking back into my seat. (I read something within the past few days where apparently Martin Scorsese was arguing that any film genre could translate to 3-D, citing Precious as an example. I thought to myself, "If Precious had been in 3-D, I would have ended up watching it peering up from under my seat.") "Harrowing" is the word that kept popping up in my mind, hours after I left the theater. Lee Daniels got great, lived-in performances from all his actors, de-glammed pop stars, comedians and unknowns alike. As much as the praise surrounding Mo'Nique's performance feels hyperbolic, it's also entirely deserved.

1) Inglourious Basterds

I can pinpoint the moment I fell totally in love with Inglourious Basterds - in the first segment in which the Basterds appear, when Raine introduces Hugo Stiglitz to the German they've captured. The retro font that blasts his name across the screen, the introductory riff from "Slaughter" - the "ex-German-solider as rock star/badass" intro is so quintessentially Tarantino and exemplifies the movie's mash-up of period and genre. (Side note: How many professional athletes do you think have now tried to make that their song for opening lineups?) I would never argue that Basterds is a perfect movie, but I think that what it lacks in focus it makes up for in great performances and sheer originality. Having done a lot of dense, oft-tedious "but what is history?" work in recent months, this film's audacious revisionism felt liberatory to me.

Skate Love

I thought about writing a (lengthier) post about how I've rediscovered my love of figure skating this year, but for now I'll just leave it with this routine, which I'm totally in love with.

LOVE.

Ta-Dah!

It may never happen again. I'm enjoying the achievement while it lasts.

A Classic Film Interlude

Today I put on That's Entertainment to watch while I sorted clothes and folded laundry. I love That's Entertainment for both its collection of clips from MGM musicals and its 1974-set framing narrative. It was made at the perfect time - the studio era was effectively over, as illustrated by the general disrepair of MGM's backlot in the narrator scenes, but that era was still recent enough that stars like Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire were still around to act as the film's tour guides. The numbers chosen for That's Entertainment - Astaire's coatrack dance from Royal Wedding, the cast-of-hundreds numbers choreographed by Busby Berkeley, the selections from Esther Williams' water-based musicals - somehow make today's movies feel so flat and unimaginative. Sure, you can create whole worlds with a computer, but the tactile realities of old-school song and dance just feel more impressive to me.

"Good Morning" doesn't appear in That's Entertainment - it's in the sequel - but it still illustrates what to me is so unique and essential about classic musicals. The quality of the dance is simply unmatched today; you can see the hard work involved in making it appear easy. To me, the moment at the end when all three come up and over the couch in perfect unison is transcendent.

Speaking of classic film, a few days ago I made a film-related impulse purchase on Etsy. Definitely excited to share once it arrives...

Valentine's Day Playlist

Around Valentine's Day every year, I get this impulse to comb my music collection and construct a multitude of playlists. Bouncy, poppy love songs, crazy desperate breakup songs - romance is a fruitful topic for musicians and lyricists. This year, I hit on a previously unrealized subgenre that is actually ideal for the holiday: show tunes. Musicals are one place where wearing one's emotions on their sleeve is a necessity, and some fabulous love songs have been created for them. Here are some of my favorites:

A couple of years ago, I watched a documentary on Broadway musicals where they discussed Oscar Hammerstein's skill with what they described as the "speculative love song" - it allows the writers to place a love song for the romantic leads in the first act by talking about it as non-real. (I don't know, I thought it was interesting.) Anyway, here's some of my favorite Rodgers and Hammerstein selections.

"If I Loved You" from Carousel

"People Will Say We're in Love" from Oklahoma

"Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?" from Cinderella

"Ten Minutes Ago" from Cinderella

Let's just take a moment to bask in the very concept of a musical created specifically for television. The original version, from the 1950s and starring Julie Andrews, was filmed live. Live! A live original musical on television! When the fairy godmother gives Cinderella her new gown for the ball, they just sort of pushed Julie Andrews out of camera range and changed her clothes super-fast! It just makes Glee seem like they're not really trying very hard, doesn't it? The sixties version (with Leslie Ann Warren, up top) is the one I watched to death as a kid before misplacing the tape, the nineties version (with Brandy) resurrected the show in my mind, and the fifties version is the one for which I have the soundtrack. Really, I love all three because of songs like these.

"Make Believe" from Show Boat

This is actually Jerome Kern, not Richard Rodgers, but it still fits the whole Hammerstein speculative song thing. Oh, Show Boat. So deeply problematic, so academically intruiging.

And from other writers and shows:

"One Boy" from Bye Bye Birdie

Hugo is kind of a lame character (that whole super-chaste kiss sequence in the middle of this scene cracks me up), but I love how Bobby Rydell's voice sounds in this song. It makes early-sixties conformity sound so appealing.

"Someone is Waiting" from Company

Having had groups of close male friends, the whole conceit of wishing to pick and choose everyone's best parts to create someone ideal is so terribly spot-on.

"I Can Hear the Bells" from Hairspray

Hairspray always manages to have just the right amount of edge and humor in its songs, which acts as a buffer against what can be saccharine about them.

"Tonight" from West Side Story

Just so wonderfully swoon-y. I love "Somewhere," too, but this is my favorite.

Baking: 1-2-3-4 Cake

So I baked this cake on Sunday, and had plans to frost it and bring it in so my friends in my program could enjoy it, but I cannot for the life of me find the energy within me to find and execute a decent frosting recipe. The ones I've made before have felt really work intensive and by the time I'm home and have anywhere approaching enough time to work on it, I just feel like I'd rather take a nap instead. I'd also rather not use frosting out of a can for sharing with others. However, I wanted to discuss the cake anyway, since the recipe came from an interesting place. Maybe I'll still bring it in, maybe I'll just keep it to practice decorating techniques on (and to eat, of course).

One of the cooler things about going to an old school is that you can find some neat old books in the library just wandering through the stacks. (Also, old magazines, but that's another story entirely.) One day I came across The Ebony Cookbook from 1962:

In case you had any doubts that this came from the sixties, here's the endpaper:

And the photo accompanying the "Desserts" chapter:

I liked the idea of baking something from the cookbook as a sort of Black History Month celebration. It's a sort of artifact of the intra-United States Black diaspora; Ebony readers sent in recipes to construct a compendium of African-American foods. There's a chapter specifically devoted to "Creole Dishes," which culminates in a recipe for Stewed Turtle. Where does one even find turtle meat these days?

So I decided to make the "Old-Fashioned 1-2-3-4 Cake." I used my new turn-crank handled sifter for the first time! It's a pretty basic yellow cake; the name comes from the ingredients:

One cup of butter

Two cups of sugar

Three cups of flour (I used cake flour, which is superfine. Sifting it can end up leaving a fine layer of powder all over the kitchen, which makes me feel like I'm in Debi Mazar's apartment in Goodfellas.)

Four eggs

I love the concept of the name corresponding with the recipe; for me, it conjures an image of passage from one generation to the next as a means of teaching kids to remember the recipe easily. Here's the finished product on Sunday:

And still unfrosted today:

If I end up doing something fancy decoration-wise, I'll post that too. Otherwise, I'll just move on to Valentine's Day stuff (I got a heart-shaped cake pan! I'm excited!)

Mood Music XXVII

For some reason, I feel like Gold Diggers of 2010 is a remake I could get behind.

Mood Music XXVI

I'm bummed to hear the news about Fall Out Boy breaking up, but crazy thrilled about the accompanying news of Patrick Stump putting out a solo album.

Patrick Stump from Patrick Stump on Vimeo.

I've mused on my love of Stump's voice before, but this looks like an entirely new level of awesomeness. (And if I may be permitted a detour into shallowness, he looks good, too.) He's worked as a producer on some of my favorite non-FOB Decaydance albums (The Hush Sound's Like Vines and The Cab's Whisper War) and I can't wait to see how this endeavor shakes out.

Best of the 00s: Odds and Ends

In reading all the various final season retrospectives on Lost, I realized that I had forgotten yet another favorite music moment, this one from the show's second season premiere.

By now, it's become old hat that Lost's writers end their seasons with insane cliffhangers then pick up the next in a completely different place; in fact, the season three and five openers also begin with new or previously unstudied characters waking up and selecting music. This may have been the most shocking simply due to the novelty of it all - the then-unfamiliar retro Dharma aesthetic paired with the show's flashback structure up until that point made the setting maddeningly oblique up until that final pan up the hatch. Frankly, I don't think I'll ever stop being creeped out by the progression of daily chores culminating in the shot in the arm. The music is perfect, too; I sought out "Make Your Own Kind of Music" soon after this originally aired - Cass Elliot's voice makes the song somehow less silly than it could be with a more soprano singer - and the way Michael Giacchino's always haunting score comes in after the explosion is eerie as ever.

The first four minutes of Tuesday's premiere have apparently leaked online, but watching the opening moments of the other premieres makes it seem more than likely that no substantive information would be available to spoiler-seekers anyway. Personally, I'd like to think that Lindelof and Cuse have another retro track in store, but that's just me.