Oscar Predictions 2007
A bit last-minute, I know, but I'm back from my grandparents' at last, and I feel lucky to have got here even at this late hour.
I've just listened to - I think it's Peter Bradshaw, they're not saying - the film critic on Clive Anderson's Radio 2 show reviewing the new cinema and DVD releases, and I've found myself staring in utter bemusement at the radio quite a few times, as if challenging it to make more sense. Apparently The Prestige, which I recall receiving a fairly muted press reaction, actually received a groundswell of praise, while Volver and Red Road - surely the most slavishly, droolingly, uncritically praised movies among the critical fraternity this year - have had a "backlash" which they must be defended from. Have they really? I seem to remember both of those films ending up on most critics' best-of lists, but then, maybe it just seemed like that because I didn't like them, in the same way that Bradshaw's googly-eyed admiration for them makes him ultra-sensitive to any mild slight they may have received.
What I'm trying to say here is that it's not easy to work out what other people are enjoying; the relative levels of praise are hopelessly coloured by your own personal views on what's underrated and what's overrated. (The Oscars: as ever, a contrarian's dream) That said, the Academy have not overdosed on perversity this year. It's true that some early frontrunners (most obviously Flags of Our Fathers, though even that makes its presence felt through its companion fil Letters From Iwo Jima) are nowhere to be seen on this year's ballot, but compared with what it could have been, this is a very timid set of nominations.
Cast your mind back to November in the USA, and countless Oscar hopefuls were receiving a massed chorus of "Hmm, yeah, it's alright, I suppose" - a fate meted out to Babel, The History Boys, Bobby, The Good Shepherd and all the other films which got fairly good reviews, but hardly the unqualified raves needed to propel them to the Kodak Theater. Then there were those films for whom a lukewarm reaction seemed like the stuff of dreams - few one-time Oscar frontrunners can lay claim to an unambiguous kicking, but this year Fur, Running With Scissors, The Good German and All The King's Men can lay claim to be among the worst-reviewed dramatic features of the year.
Faced with this, the Academy could have turned over a new leaf; shitcan the carefully-engineered Important Cinema and go for the films which, despite their genre roots were embraced by almost every critic this year; Borat, say, or Children of Men, or even Casino Royale. As it happened, they didn't. Babel was brought out of cold storage to fill up most of the categories and the three above-mentioned films - all of which have positive ratings of ninety per cent or over on the Rotten Tomatoes website - were snubbed with minor awards, if any.
BEST PICTURE
Thanks to the above-mentioned promotion of tepidly-accepted films to movie sainthood, this is one of the toughest categories to call; there's very little here that anyone could claim to love. An additional complication is that the best film and the one with the surest Oscar pedigree is also, basically, a pulp gangster thriller - Martin Scorsese's The Departed is a brilliant, energizing work of genre art, but then so is Borat and that didn't help Sacha Baron-Cohen onto the podium. The Departed is unquestionably the popular choice, but it's hard to shake the feeling that the Academy only gave it a try because of the calibre of the cast and crew.
Assuming that Letters From Iwo Jima and The Queen are too marginal to sway a large portion of viewers, this category comes down to a choice between Little Miss Sunshine and Babel. Little Miss Sunshine is a fun enough film and it's nice to see a comedy get this kind of recognition, but I can't shake the feeling that its Best Picture nomination is overstating the case - was it funnier than Borat? More to the point, were its dramatic elements, which are probably what the Academy reacted to, more emotive than, say, Venus or United 93? In a year where the dramatic contingent of the Academy felt more secure with themselves, Little Miss Sunshine might well win; as it is, the fact that the new Bond film got better reviews than a Nicole Kidman biopic has probably got some of the more conservative Academy members sweating already about the barbarians at the gate. Safety and predictability will reign, and Babel will win Best Picture, overcoming the theoretically significant handicap of not really being particularly well-liked by anyone.
ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTING
And so, the longest Oscar soap opera comes to a probable close. With the recently- rewarded Clint Eastwood the only actor-director able to rally the considerable voting bloc of those two constituencies, Martin Scorsese will probably win the Oscar this year. Just as he was probably going to win it in 2004. And 2002. And 1991. And 1988. And... well, you get the basic picture.
Whereas you feel this farce cannot continue for too much longer, it has to be said that a win for The Departed might not have the rosiest effect on Martin Scorsese's directorial career. With the studio already talking about sequels, the public caricature of Scorsese as Mr. Gangster Movie can only be reinforced, and the result may be that this versatile, unpredictable filmmaker might find himself rather more hemmed in than he has been in the recent past, where he could move from curating a PBS series on the blues to a $100 million dollar historical epic to a documentary about Bob Dylan within the space of two years. I'd rather see Scorsese rewarded for his more personal, challenging Silence (pencilled in for release in 2008) and for Paul Greengrass to win this award for nimbly vaulting the hundreds of pitfalls inherent in producing a movie about 9/11, and making such a visceral, fascinating film in its own right. But again, I'm not optimistic here.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
As you read this, Judi Dench is in hospital. This is important, as the second Dame in this category has told her friends that, given her unavoidable absence from the ceremony, they may as well vote for Helen Mirren. And so, the only significant rival to our reigning monarch falls by the wayside; I actually thought Dench's embittered lesbian schoolmarm was a more exciting and rewarding performance than Mirren's... oh, look, do I have to tell you who Mirren played this year? But Dench so rarely surprises me these days, and Mirren is the Greatest Living Englishwoman, so I'm not crying foul.
There is the outside possibility that Meryl Streep might bag it for her icy fashion editor in The Devil Wears Prada; a token reward for a silly film, perhaps, but Streep has an underrated knack for droll comedy and you can never underestimate the Token American. (Ask Marisa Tomei or Helen Hunt) Elsewhere, Kate Winslet's performance in Little Children is up to this actress's usual terrifyingly gifted standard, but it's too low-key a film and performance to resonate with voters, while the moment where Patrick Wilson tells Winslet she's unattractive probably elicted more derisive snorts than any other film moment this year. Passing over the possibility that Penelope Cruz might win, in which case I will call for the United Nations to annex Hollywood until they recant this crime against humanity, it looks more or less dead certain that Helen Mirren will take this award home. As Roger Ebert noted, the level of self-possession necessary to get a film audience to believe you are the Queen of England is award-worthy in itself.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
A two-horse race this year, and it didn't have to be. Whereas the Best Actress category could perhaps be forgiven for failing to recognize Jodelle Fehrland's performance in Tideland or Gretchen Mol's turn as Bettie Page, only snobbery can explain the main excisions from this category. As Fametracker.com derisively noted, Daniel Craig's achievement in dragging the Bond franchise back from bad-joke status through sheer force of wit, physical presence and charisma is evidently less impressive than Will Smith's ability to put some grey flecks in his hair and cry in a bathroom, while what can possibly excuse the relentless, draining effort of Sacha Baron-Cohen's performance as Borat being overlooked? Can any of the five final nominees claim to remain in character even when shotgunning beer with a bunch of frat boys?
Well, maybe Peter O'Toole. And much as I love the man, his role in Venus was a component of a good film rather than a stand-out turn in its own right; not as revelatory and brilliant as his theatre run in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell or his (very, very) similar performance in My Favourite Year. Forest Whitaker transformed himself from cuddly second banana to nightmare-inducing mass murderer with such commitment that it takes a second for the audience to realize the archive footage of Idi Amin that closes The Last King of Scotland is not, in fact, Whitaker. Though O'Toole may pick up a sentimental vote, his inhabiting of the role of an aging alcoholic actor with an eye for the ladies is not exactly as much of a stretch.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
If we can dispatch with Babel's two nominees early - Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza did a lot of work to salvage their ridiculous characters, but not, I fear, enough - then there's a line of reasoning for and against the three front-runners this year. Abigail Breslin's performance in Little Miss Sunshine is undeniably a very impressive thing, not least because in its slower stretches the movie basically rests on her shoulders. But the Academy is not as child-friendly as some commentators assume; if Haley Joel Osment can't win for what was essentially the lead role in The Sixth Sense, what hope does Breslin, also an M Night Shyamalan discovery, have?
Cate Blanchett's performance in Notes on a Scandal was one of the least embarrassed of the year, devoting a fearless energy to potentially humiliating tasks such as bouts of bad hippy dancing, or wiping a schoolboy's semen off her shirt. (I can't be alone in finding this hard to forget, surely?) Still, unless you're Judi Dench, it's hard to get two Academy Awards within five years, and even Judi Dench is finding that a bit of a bugger at the moment. Which leaves us with Jennifer Hudson, for whom the only strike against is that an ex-American Idol contestant winning Best Supporting Actress may cause the universe to implode. And who cares about the universe these days?
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
I'm going to go against conventional wisdom here because the frontrunner is said to be Eddie Murphy. I don't have anything against Murphy's performance in Dreamgirls, other than the fact that he's followed it up with Norbit, in which he hilariously plays a big fat black woman who talks sass and everything. If Murphy loses, after being in the lead for so long, then it can only be because of Norbit, and hopefully this might teach the rest of Hollywood a lesson about the reckless application of fat suits. The deserving winner would be Mark Wahlberg, for his transformative and nastily hilarious performance in The Departed, while Alan Arkin stands a good chance of bagging the sentimental vote. I just can't quite shake the feeling that this will be Djimon Hounsou's year.
Hounsou is a talented African actor who is very much in demand in Hollywood these days. The problem is the kind of parts he's in demand for - in Constantine he played a voodoo priest called Papa Midnite, while Jim Sheridan's In America saw him play a Magical Black Artist who Teaches White People How To Live while suffering from a case of period-appropriate AIDS, and I can't even begin to convey what's wrong with that. In Blood Diamond the set-up is that he acts as the moral conscience to Leonardo DiCaprio's amoral mercenary, except we're supposed to be sincerely rooting for DiCaprio to get it together with Jennifer Connelly's unfeasibly foxy war correspondent, while all of Hounsou's character's endless tragedies are just fuel for Whitey's inevitable redemption. The action sequences are telling; as soon as the bullets start flying, DiCaprio's supposed anti-hero becomes a quite unironic action hero, while Hounsou bugs his eyes, squeals and occasionally batters people crazily. It is not a bad performance in isolation, and I think Hounsou's ability to find humanity in the face of such an awful script and awful film might get him attention.
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Tricky. Cars was a commercial success but met with a more tepid critical reaction than can usually be expected for a Pixar Studios film, while Monster House's positive reviews didn't save it from underperforming at the box office. The only film that could score the double is Happy Feet, and even that underwent its own little backlash. I know that some will roll their eyes when I say this, but Hollywood is a town which knows it can't be seen to be too leftist - it's one thing for George Clooney to come out with the disgraceful, clearly anti-American viewpoint that genocide is, er, bad, but the right-wing media's repeated calling of the waaaaaahmbulance with regards to Hollywood's institutional "bias" makes it hard for them to pin their colours too specifically to a cause. Look at the Oscars in 2000, where movies about abortion (The Cider House Rules), transexuality (Boys Don't Cry) and dope-pushing (American Beauty) were rewarded. After six years of renewed "culture wars", can anyone imagine such a radical slate being approved again? No; this is the awards ceremony that now thinks Brokeback Mountain is "too controversial". Which brings us nicely to...
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Al Gore. Obviously. It's just got a nice hail-the-conquering-hero tone. But with regards to what I've posted above, isn't An Inconvenient Truth the safe victor because you can easily say that global warming isn't a political issue, it's an issue which has unfortunately become politicised? You couldn't get away with that defence for two specifically anti-religious documentaries - the blood-chilling fundamentalist expose Jesus Camp and Deliver Us From Evil, about the Catholic child abuse scandals. Nor could you say it about Iraq in Fragments or the similarly-themed My Country, My Country. It's an odd state of affairs when a movie presented by a one-time Vice President is the safely apolitical choice, but then An Inconvenient Truth, from its calmly informative tone to its horrid 'inspirational' theme tune by Melissa Etheridge, is more about personal responsibility and education than anything else. And if its success prompts Gore to run again for the 2008 elections, then the cake is had and eaten.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
For some unfathomable reason, the Academy thinks that great comedy is all in the writing and never in the acting, so in recent years the Original Screenplay category has become a haven for the comedies whose viewpoints were too skewed to fit in the major categories. As it happens, this year's main comedy contender, Little Miss Sunshine, is in the main categories, but a victory in this one should be assured all the same. I'd like to see Peter Morgan get it for The Queen - though in some ways it was the least ambitious of his three (three!) screenplays this year, it's still a deft, confident, witty and assured piece of work.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
If - as may well happen - The Departed loses out in the main categories, its reward could come here, in recognition of William Monahan's expansion of both the narrative and emotional palette of its source material. Somehow I don't think so, though - the Directing award will suffice, and besides the Academy don't appear to think thrillers are written, they grow out of Petri dishes or something. The obvious other contender is Patrick Marber's funny, skillful and shrewd reworking of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal. Certainly Marber and Heller have campaigned well, and I'd love it if Marber became the first ex-The Day Today contributor to pick up an Oscar. Those who enjoy outside bets might wish to remember that Todd Field's Little Children certainly has its admirers.
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FEATURE
Despite its self-evident qualities, I'm not sure Pan's Labyrinth is the shoo-in most people seem to think it is; it is, after all, a special-effects-heavy fantasy/horror, and some members of the Academy may not be won over to such a movie by the addition of subtitles and political gravitas. It hasn't been noted enough that this is one of the liveliest foreign-language categories in many years - rather than the so-so chocolate-box entries we're fobbed off with most years, the German entry The Lives of Others and the French Indigines have been widely hailed as significant and serious achievements, while the Danish After the Wedding and Canadian Water have plenty of admirers too. I think that the subtle, insiduous political paranoia and unique subject matter of the East German Stasi thriller The Lives of Others will win out this year.
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Oh fuck, it's Melissa Etheridge.
I've just listened to - I think it's Peter Bradshaw, they're not saying - the film critic on Clive Anderson's Radio 2 show reviewing the new cinema and DVD releases, and I've found myself staring in utter bemusement at the radio quite a few times, as if challenging it to make more sense. Apparently The Prestige, which I recall receiving a fairly muted press reaction, actually received a groundswell of praise, while Volver and Red Road - surely the most slavishly, droolingly, uncritically praised movies among the critical fraternity this year - have had a "backlash" which they must be defended from. Have they really? I seem to remember both of those films ending up on most critics' best-of lists, but then, maybe it just seemed like that because I didn't like them, in the same way that Bradshaw's googly-eyed admiration for them makes him ultra-sensitive to any mild slight they may have received.
What I'm trying to say here is that it's not easy to work out what other people are enjoying; the relative levels of praise are hopelessly coloured by your own personal views on what's underrated and what's overrated. (The Oscars: as ever, a contrarian's dream) That said, the Academy have not overdosed on perversity this year. It's true that some early frontrunners (most obviously Flags of Our Fathers, though even that makes its presence felt through its companion fil Letters From Iwo Jima) are nowhere to be seen on this year's ballot, but compared with what it could have been, this is a very timid set of nominations.
Cast your mind back to November in the USA, and countless Oscar hopefuls were receiving a massed chorus of "Hmm, yeah, it's alright, I suppose" - a fate meted out to Babel, The History Boys, Bobby, The Good Shepherd and all the other films which got fairly good reviews, but hardly the unqualified raves needed to propel them to the Kodak Theater. Then there were those films for whom a lukewarm reaction seemed like the stuff of dreams - few one-time Oscar frontrunners can lay claim to an unambiguous kicking, but this year Fur, Running With Scissors, The Good German and All The King's Men can lay claim to be among the worst-reviewed dramatic features of the year.
Faced with this, the Academy could have turned over a new leaf; shitcan the carefully-engineered Important Cinema and go for the films which, despite their genre roots were embraced by almost every critic this year; Borat, say, or Children of Men, or even Casino Royale. As it happened, they didn't. Babel was brought out of cold storage to fill up most of the categories and the three above-mentioned films - all of which have positive ratings of ninety per cent or over on the Rotten Tomatoes website - were snubbed with minor awards, if any.
BEST PICTURE
Thanks to the above-mentioned promotion of tepidly-accepted films to movie sainthood, this is one of the toughest categories to call; there's very little here that anyone could claim to love. An additional complication is that the best film and the one with the surest Oscar pedigree is also, basically, a pulp gangster thriller - Martin Scorsese's The Departed is a brilliant, energizing work of genre art, but then so is Borat and that didn't help Sacha Baron-Cohen onto the podium. The Departed is unquestionably the popular choice, but it's hard to shake the feeling that the Academy only gave it a try because of the calibre of the cast and crew.
Assuming that Letters From Iwo Jima and The Queen are too marginal to sway a large portion of viewers, this category comes down to a choice between Little Miss Sunshine and Babel. Little Miss Sunshine is a fun enough film and it's nice to see a comedy get this kind of recognition, but I can't shake the feeling that its Best Picture nomination is overstating the case - was it funnier than Borat? More to the point, were its dramatic elements, which are probably what the Academy reacted to, more emotive than, say, Venus or United 93? In a year where the dramatic contingent of the Academy felt more secure with themselves, Little Miss Sunshine might well win; as it is, the fact that the new Bond film got better reviews than a Nicole Kidman biopic has probably got some of the more conservative Academy members sweating already about the barbarians at the gate. Safety and predictability will reign, and Babel will win Best Picture, overcoming the theoretically significant handicap of not really being particularly well-liked by anyone.
ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTING
And so, the longest Oscar soap opera comes to a probable close. With the recently- rewarded Clint Eastwood the only actor-director able to rally the considerable voting bloc of those two constituencies, Martin Scorsese will probably win the Oscar this year. Just as he was probably going to win it in 2004. And 2002. And 1991. And 1988. And... well, you get the basic picture.
Whereas you feel this farce cannot continue for too much longer, it has to be said that a win for The Departed might not have the rosiest effect on Martin Scorsese's directorial career. With the studio already talking about sequels, the public caricature of Scorsese as Mr. Gangster Movie can only be reinforced, and the result may be that this versatile, unpredictable filmmaker might find himself rather more hemmed in than he has been in the recent past, where he could move from curating a PBS series on the blues to a $100 million dollar historical epic to a documentary about Bob Dylan within the space of two years. I'd rather see Scorsese rewarded for his more personal, challenging Silence (pencilled in for release in 2008) and for Paul Greengrass to win this award for nimbly vaulting the hundreds of pitfalls inherent in producing a movie about 9/11, and making such a visceral, fascinating film in its own right. But again, I'm not optimistic here.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
As you read this, Judi Dench is in hospital. This is important, as the second Dame in this category has told her friends that, given her unavoidable absence from the ceremony, they may as well vote for Helen Mirren. And so, the only significant rival to our reigning monarch falls by the wayside; I actually thought Dench's embittered lesbian schoolmarm was a more exciting and rewarding performance than Mirren's... oh, look, do I have to tell you who Mirren played this year? But Dench so rarely surprises me these days, and Mirren is the Greatest Living Englishwoman, so I'm not crying foul.
There is the outside possibility that Meryl Streep might bag it for her icy fashion editor in The Devil Wears Prada; a token reward for a silly film, perhaps, but Streep has an underrated knack for droll comedy and you can never underestimate the Token American. (Ask Marisa Tomei or Helen Hunt) Elsewhere, Kate Winslet's performance in Little Children is up to this actress's usual terrifyingly gifted standard, but it's too low-key a film and performance to resonate with voters, while the moment where Patrick Wilson tells Winslet she's unattractive probably elicted more derisive snorts than any other film moment this year. Passing over the possibility that Penelope Cruz might win, in which case I will call for the United Nations to annex Hollywood until they recant this crime against humanity, it looks more or less dead certain that Helen Mirren will take this award home. As Roger Ebert noted, the level of self-possession necessary to get a film audience to believe you are the Queen of England is award-worthy in itself.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
A two-horse race this year, and it didn't have to be. Whereas the Best Actress category could perhaps be forgiven for failing to recognize Jodelle Fehrland's performance in Tideland or Gretchen Mol's turn as Bettie Page, only snobbery can explain the main excisions from this category. As Fametracker.com derisively noted, Daniel Craig's achievement in dragging the Bond franchise back from bad-joke status through sheer force of wit, physical presence and charisma is evidently less impressive than Will Smith's ability to put some grey flecks in his hair and cry in a bathroom, while what can possibly excuse the relentless, draining effort of Sacha Baron-Cohen's performance as Borat being overlooked? Can any of the five final nominees claim to remain in character even when shotgunning beer with a bunch of frat boys?
Well, maybe Peter O'Toole. And much as I love the man, his role in Venus was a component of a good film rather than a stand-out turn in its own right; not as revelatory and brilliant as his theatre run in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell or his (very, very) similar performance in My Favourite Year. Forest Whitaker transformed himself from cuddly second banana to nightmare-inducing mass murderer with such commitment that it takes a second for the audience to realize the archive footage of Idi Amin that closes The Last King of Scotland is not, in fact, Whitaker. Though O'Toole may pick up a sentimental vote, his inhabiting of the role of an aging alcoholic actor with an eye for the ladies is not exactly as much of a stretch.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
If we can dispatch with Babel's two nominees early - Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza did a lot of work to salvage their ridiculous characters, but not, I fear, enough - then there's a line of reasoning for and against the three front-runners this year. Abigail Breslin's performance in Little Miss Sunshine is undeniably a very impressive thing, not least because in its slower stretches the movie basically rests on her shoulders. But the Academy is not as child-friendly as some commentators assume; if Haley Joel Osment can't win for what was essentially the lead role in The Sixth Sense, what hope does Breslin, also an M Night Shyamalan discovery, have?
Cate Blanchett's performance in Notes on a Scandal was one of the least embarrassed of the year, devoting a fearless energy to potentially humiliating tasks such as bouts of bad hippy dancing, or wiping a schoolboy's semen off her shirt. (I can't be alone in finding this hard to forget, surely?) Still, unless you're Judi Dench, it's hard to get two Academy Awards within five years, and even Judi Dench is finding that a bit of a bugger at the moment. Which leaves us with Jennifer Hudson, for whom the only strike against is that an ex-American Idol contestant winning Best Supporting Actress may cause the universe to implode. And who cares about the universe these days?
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
I'm going to go against conventional wisdom here because the frontrunner is said to be Eddie Murphy. I don't have anything against Murphy's performance in Dreamgirls, other than the fact that he's followed it up with Norbit, in which he hilariously plays a big fat black woman who talks sass and everything. If Murphy loses, after being in the lead for so long, then it can only be because of Norbit, and hopefully this might teach the rest of Hollywood a lesson about the reckless application of fat suits. The deserving winner would be Mark Wahlberg, for his transformative and nastily hilarious performance in The Departed, while Alan Arkin stands a good chance of bagging the sentimental vote. I just can't quite shake the feeling that this will be Djimon Hounsou's year.
Hounsou is a talented African actor who is very much in demand in Hollywood these days. The problem is the kind of parts he's in demand for - in Constantine he played a voodoo priest called Papa Midnite, while Jim Sheridan's In America saw him play a Magical Black Artist who Teaches White People How To Live while suffering from a case of period-appropriate AIDS, and I can't even begin to convey what's wrong with that. In Blood Diamond the set-up is that he acts as the moral conscience to Leonardo DiCaprio's amoral mercenary, except we're supposed to be sincerely rooting for DiCaprio to get it together with Jennifer Connelly's unfeasibly foxy war correspondent, while all of Hounsou's character's endless tragedies are just fuel for Whitey's inevitable redemption. The action sequences are telling; as soon as the bullets start flying, DiCaprio's supposed anti-hero becomes a quite unironic action hero, while Hounsou bugs his eyes, squeals and occasionally batters people crazily. It is not a bad performance in isolation, and I think Hounsou's ability to find humanity in the face of such an awful script and awful film might get him attention.
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Tricky. Cars was a commercial success but met with a more tepid critical reaction than can usually be expected for a Pixar Studios film, while Monster House's positive reviews didn't save it from underperforming at the box office. The only film that could score the double is Happy Feet, and even that underwent its own little backlash. I know that some will roll their eyes when I say this, but Hollywood is a town which knows it can't be seen to be too leftist - it's one thing for George Clooney to come out with the disgraceful, clearly anti-American viewpoint that genocide is, er, bad, but the right-wing media's repeated calling of the waaaaaahmbulance with regards to Hollywood's institutional "bias" makes it hard for them to pin their colours too specifically to a cause. Look at the Oscars in 2000, where movies about abortion (The Cider House Rules), transexuality (Boys Don't Cry) and dope-pushing (American Beauty) were rewarded. After six years of renewed "culture wars", can anyone imagine such a radical slate being approved again? No; this is the awards ceremony that now thinks Brokeback Mountain is "too controversial". Which brings us nicely to...
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Al Gore. Obviously. It's just got a nice hail-the-conquering-hero tone. But with regards to what I've posted above, isn't An Inconvenient Truth the safe victor because you can easily say that global warming isn't a political issue, it's an issue which has unfortunately become politicised? You couldn't get away with that defence for two specifically anti-religious documentaries - the blood-chilling fundamentalist expose Jesus Camp and Deliver Us From Evil, about the Catholic child abuse scandals. Nor could you say it about Iraq in Fragments or the similarly-themed My Country, My Country. It's an odd state of affairs when a movie presented by a one-time Vice President is the safely apolitical choice, but then An Inconvenient Truth, from its calmly informative tone to its horrid 'inspirational' theme tune by Melissa Etheridge, is more about personal responsibility and education than anything else. And if its success prompts Gore to run again for the 2008 elections, then the cake is had and eaten.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
For some unfathomable reason, the Academy thinks that great comedy is all in the writing and never in the acting, so in recent years the Original Screenplay category has become a haven for the comedies whose viewpoints were too skewed to fit in the major categories. As it happens, this year's main comedy contender, Little Miss Sunshine, is in the main categories, but a victory in this one should be assured all the same. I'd like to see Peter Morgan get it for The Queen - though in some ways it was the least ambitious of his three (three!) screenplays this year, it's still a deft, confident, witty and assured piece of work.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
If - as may well happen - The Departed loses out in the main categories, its reward could come here, in recognition of William Monahan's expansion of both the narrative and emotional palette of its source material. Somehow I don't think so, though - the Directing award will suffice, and besides the Academy don't appear to think thrillers are written, they grow out of Petri dishes or something. The obvious other contender is Patrick Marber's funny, skillful and shrewd reworking of Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal. Certainly Marber and Heller have campaigned well, and I'd love it if Marber became the first ex-The Day Today contributor to pick up an Oscar. Those who enjoy outside bets might wish to remember that Todd Field's Little Children certainly has its admirers.
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FEATURE
Despite its self-evident qualities, I'm not sure Pan's Labyrinth is the shoo-in most people seem to think it is; it is, after all, a special-effects-heavy fantasy/horror, and some members of the Academy may not be won over to such a movie by the addition of subtitles and political gravitas. It hasn't been noted enough that this is one of the liveliest foreign-language categories in many years - rather than the so-so chocolate-box entries we're fobbed off with most years, the German entry The Lives of Others and the French Indigines have been widely hailed as significant and serious achievements, while the Danish After the Wedding and Canadian Water have plenty of admirers too. I think that the subtle, insiduous political paranoia and unique subject matter of the East German Stasi thriller The Lives of Others will win out this year.
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Oh fuck, it's Melissa Etheridge.