Academy Awards 2009: Oscars in Review

How did you do in your Oscars pool? My guess is very well. Like the rest of us. I made predictions for every category except the short-film races, which I knew little or nothing about. Of the categories I predicted, I was correct on every race but two: Sound Mixing (I picked The Dark Knight, the winner was Slumdog Millionaire) and Foreign-Language Film (I picked France’s The Class, the winner was Japan’s Departures). Was the Oscar telecast predictable? Resoundingly so. Was it boring? No.

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Winners (Writing)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:
Nominees: Frozen River; Happy-Go-Lucky; In Bruges; Milk; WALL-E

Winner: Milk
A category with little suspense. Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay for Milk just won the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) Award. It’s the only WGA nominee also nominated for an Oscar. Most important, Milk is the only original screenplay this year nominated for Best Picture. If there is a dark horse, it’s WALL-E, which was ineligible for the original screenplay category at WGA. But despite several nominations this decade, no animated film has won an Oscar for writing, and if WALL-E couldn’t overcome Academy bias to get into Best Picture, it likely won’t prevail here.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
Nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Doubt; Frost/Nixon; The Reader; Slumdog Millionaire

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire
Almost a foregone conclusion. Slumdog seems to have unstoppable momentum in this Oscar race. It won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, and it was honored by the Producers’ Guild (PGA), Directors’ Guild (DGA), and Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Simon Beaufoy’s screenplay, based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, was awarded by WGA. It’s close to a slam dunk.

Academy Awards 2009: Notes on the Nominees

• We shoulda known: the Caped Crusader and the loveable robot got the cold shoulder from Oscar voters when it came to nominating the year’s five best pictures. Oscar’s choice instead was the stuffy Holocaust drama The Reader, which scored a lowly 58 on MetaCritic; that makes it the worst reviewed movie nominated for Best Picture this decade. The irony is that The Dark Knight and WALL-E both received more nominations: eight and six, respectively, compared to Reader’s five.

Academy Awards 2009: Predicting the Nominees

The Academy Award nominations are announced on January 22, two days from now, so it’s time for me to put my money where my mouth is. Here are my predictions for who will hear their names called on Thursday morning.

“Milk”

Dir. Gus Van Sant
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

I debated myself on the way home from Milk. I took notes full of stylistic criticisms and disappointments, and soon I was almost convinced I hadn’t seen a very good film. However, I knew I had seen a very good film, one that affected and galvanized me. Its story has an emotional power beyond any qualms about its aesthetics.