My full, official predictions of the Academy Awards (finally) will be written up tomorrow, as early as possible. But, if they went my way, here's how I'd dictate it. And then you can compare it to my predictions tomorrow so that most of my likely wrong predictions can be faulted on bias.
My favorite of the Best Picture nominees would probably be Precious, for its blistering honesty and raw poetic filmmaking by Lee Daniels who also managed to lift out mindblowingly advanced performances out of newbies like Gabourey Sidibe and entertainment icons taken less seriously as actors like Mo'Nique and Mariah Carey. However, let's be real. it doesn't face a serious shot at winning here. The only thing that I really do see as a viable opponent to The Hurt Locker is Quentin Tarantino's blistering revisionist historical drama Inglourious Basterds; a film that blurs the lines between truth and fiction, heroism and terrorism, auterist arthouse cinema and box office blockbusters, drama and comedy and horror. Quentin Tarantino currently serves as the single most internationally recognizable of American auteurs in cinema who keeps passion in films alive to this day by delivering Best Picture worthy masterpieces like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction (for which he got pretty close), and the endlessly underrated installments of Kill Bill, in addition to two other brilliant pieces in Jackie Brown and the Death Proof segment of Grindhouse. Not only his bombastic return to critical and audience credibility that Basterds seems to have jolted his career with, but all the past gross lack of due recognition for his films would make a win for his potential masterpiece actually quite glorious.
But, if it's gonna take the perfectly marvelous filmmaking of The Hurt Locker to beat Avatar, then I'll support it wholeheartedly.
My personal nominees for Best Picture:
1. The White Ribbon
2. Precious
3. Inglorious Basterds
4. (500) Days of Summer
5. A Serious Man
6. A Single Man
7. The Hurt Locker
8. The Cove
9. Up
10. Up in the Air
Similarly as above, my favorite of the nominees here is quite easily Lee Daniels' work in Precious. The divisiveness over his visual imagery (you know, that helped enhanced the story cinematically which is what the medium of film should do in its truest essence but whatever) is a testament to the fulfillment of his goals with this picture. The montage that included the frying foods whenever Precious had horrifying flashbacks of abuse made me feel as perfectly disgusting and disgusted as I already was as Daniels challenged me with this imagery of a not so uncommon scene of child abuse while I sat in my cozy theater seat watching this for the first time at the New York Film Festival. He also perfectly captured the immersion of Precious into her own fantasies and her psychological associations with a certain set of images to the most dreadful of her memories. But maybe his work just hit a little too close to home for folks.
In any case, the lock here is Kathryn Bigelow, and I'll be perfectly pleased when she does so. She tackled her character study of an ugly war so unapologetically and forcefully that, on one level, I was a nervous wreck watching it as a piece of thrilling entertainment war cinema while at the same time pondering the themes of the film she characterizes through Jeremy Renner's character. It's not a film made with the grace of a woman or the grittiness of a man, but simply with the touch of Kathryn Bigelow herself. It's a career pinnacle in a movie more distinctly "her" than any other and she will have fully earned the Oscar statuette that she's going to earn for it.
My personal nominees for Best Director:
1. Lee Daniels - Precious
2. Michael Haneke - The White Ribbon
3. Quentin Tarantino - Inglorious Basterds
4. Katheryn Bigelow - The Hurt Locker
5. Tom Ford - A Single Man
Jeff Bridges is a foregone conclusion, and the man will have earned his so called "career" award well for a performance in Crazy Heart that seems to be his most emotionally vulnerable and graceful yet. But I can't make the concessions here that I've made so far. Colin Firth easily cashes in one of the greatest performances of the decade in A Single Man, going through bigger sudden emotional shifts in single takes than Jeff Bridges, the second best of the nominees, did throughout the entirety of Crazy Heart. The compliment of pure emotional vulnerability and delicacy that I'd assign to Bridges performance applies here tenfold. Firth seems to bravely throw all of himself onto this stage where he completely and utterly embodies this character while retaining his distinctively Firthian charm. My jaw dropped upon watching his performance unravel for the first time. He was a man so far on the edge of his rope with an unbroken facade of normalcy typical of his era yet so weighed down with the challenges of ignorance, others' stupidity, his own loneliness, longing and loss. We'd all feel for Jeff Bridges if he lost, but Firth seems to me the only right answer.
My personal nominees for Best Actor in a Leading Role:
1. Colin Firth - A Single Man
2. Michael Stuhlberg - A Serious Man
3. Joseph Gordon-Levitt - (500) Days of Summer
4. Jeff Bridges - Crazy Heart
5. George Clooney - Up in the Air
Another situation of the "only right choice," Gabourey Sidibe makes her screen debut in a role that's mindblowingly transformative yet seems completely natural. Hollywood has finally taken notice of her infectious enthusiasm and playful joy that does not come across one iota in this film. She's a newcomer to film but she gave the audience a character completely unique, unlike anyone you'll ever see, and develops her in a way that you never take notice of throughout the course of the film until, perhaps, the end, when she's nearly unrecognizable from the Precious we're introduced to at the start.
My personal nominees for Best Actress in a Leading Role:
1. Gabourey Sidibe - Precious
2. Meryl Streep - Julie & Julia
3. Zooey Deschannel - (500) Days of Summer
4. Abbie Cornish - Bright Star
5. Natalie Portman - Brothers
The supporting categories seem to be a case, this year, of the frontrunners being simply too good to ignore. Some might note that a Waltz win here would mark the third year in a row where a psychopathic villain has claimed this specific prize. However, this is hardly a performance reminiscent of the symbolically poetic Bardem in No Country for Old Men or ruthlessly and unabashedly over the top as Ledger in The Dark Knight. No, Waltz is evil. There's no question about that. He's indifferent to the Nazi cause and simply hunts after man, well, to get his thrills. However, Waltz manages to imbue this revolting opportunism with eminent likability and charm; charming us before trapping us into this box of unspeakable psychological horror, as if the audience is just another one of his victims in this film. He reads Tarantino's lines like Shakespeare, achieving the near impossible goal of lifting the character so much further out of how it was already written on the page and put his own spin on it (I've read all of Tarantino's scripts including that of this one, and I never would have dreamed of the interpretation Waltz spun Colonel Landa with). What makes his performance the crème de la crème exactly is how much he can communicate on a mental level. He speaks perfectly civilly, but his conversation cannot be mistaken as nothing more than the normal chitchat it sounds like on the surface — he's always playing a game. He always makes it known that he knows everything. And more. Just look at the one-on-one against Mélanie Laurent in the strudel scene — the best of the entire film. Just hear how Waltz delivers the "attendez la crème" line (and you don’t have to be fluent in French to pick this up) — how many times have you heard such a simple, unsuspecting sentence said so charmingly yet menacingly at the same time? These two actors are easily the standout performers in the entire film and they’re only seen together in this one scene. But Tarantino doesn’t direct them in confrontation, like many times you’ll see two acting heavyweights “duking it out” so to speak, but they dance with each other in this duet of perfectly poetic harmony. On one level, Waltz and Laurent put on this charade; but really the two are balancing this underlying second narrative of this psychological cat-and-mouse game that Col. Landa is taunting her with. They both know they’re faking it on the outside. They both know its an act, and neither want to give up their cards. Yet Laurent says so much in her devastatingly profound stare of blankness that shows a helplessness against Landa’s cruelty.
My personal nominees for Best Actor in a Supporting Role:
1. Christoph Waltz - Inglorious Basterds
2. Peter Capaldi - In the Loop
3. Christian McKay - Me and Orson Welles
4. Anthony Mackie - The Hurt Locker
5. Fred Melamed - A Serious Man
What can I really say about Mo'Nique's performance that hasn't already been said? She creates a woman that truly cannot even be described with the usual words. Monster, deluded, insane, misunderstood — these don't even begin to summarize her. And it's that precise failure to describe that makes Mo'Nique's performance a human triumph. She's communicated this woman to the point where we get her full sense of her flaws and where they come from, and it all emotionally makes sense to the spectator. It works on a viscerally human level where attempting to describe with words is simply futile. At first, we see her as a monstrous mother. She throws shit at her child, forces her to undergo terrible abuse, traps her in the prison of their home under the constant horror of her mental scrutiny and physical pain. The full brunt of her cruelty is seen from that now-famous monologue yelling up at Precious from the bottom of the stairs. Most quoted are the clips from the trailer, but that does not do justice to Mo'Nique's delivery. She gusts with the speed of the most turbulent hurricanes, throwing this thickly suffocating wall of insults and demeaning attacks upon her; starting out as scarily as we'd expect her to be but gradually escalating further and further up to a level of impossible tension that's finally released with her burst up the stairs. This implies the attack ended physically, but it's hard to reckon something being more painful than the things she said at the bottom of those steps and the way she said them. Horrors upon horrors occur, many at her bruising hands, before we get to that climactic scene at the social worker's office. The scene that blows everyone away. The single scene that I have never heard such audible crying from in a public audience. Her tears, her frailty, her whimper. Who was gonna love her? She finally explains herself through reasons that do not go close to justifying any of her mistreatment towards Precious throughout her life, but it comes across as so blisteringly honest in concerns that are too human. It's a jealousy, it's a need to feel loved, it's a resentment of the things that seem to you to have caused the former two to happen. You just cannot feel sympathetic to her knowing all that you do, but you just can't help to feel this pity. This understanding. No matter how shameful it makes you feel for doing so. It's all of Mo'Nique's doing, in her complicated puzzle she pieces together of this woman, despite all her inhumane actions, who is very much human.
My personal nominees for Best Actress in a Supporting Role:
1. Mo'Nique - Precious
2. Mélanie Laurent - Inglourious Basterds
3. Maggie Gyllenhaal - Crazy Heart
4. Vera Farmiga - Up in the Air
5. Carey Mulligan - Brothers
Now that I'm winded out from my explanations and seem to have gone through the main categories quite extensively, I'll just go on to list my favorites in the remaining categories.
Best Original Screenplay: Inglourious Basterds (actual winner: The White Ribbon)
Best Adapted Screenplay: Up in the Air
Best Cinematography: The White Ribbon
Best Editing: The Hurt Locker
Best Art Direction: Sherlock Holmes (actual winner: Inglourious Basterds)
Best Costume Design: The Young Victoria (actual winner: A Single Man)
Best Makeup: Il Divo (actual winner: A Single Man)
Best Original Score: Up
Best Original Song: "The Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart
Best Sound Mixing: The Hurt Locker
Best Sound Editing: Up
Best Visual Effects: District 9
Best Animated Feature Film: Up
Best Foreign Feature Film: The White Ribbon
Best Documentary Feature: The Cove
Best Short Film, Animated: The Lady and the Reaper (actual winner: The Kinematograph)
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