Oscar Picks

I can't resist picking things and giving my opinions, as I say every year, on every possible occasion. I've lived for the Oscars forever, and I'll be glued to my television for this year's telecast, this year from my grandparents' house in Phoenix - a place I can't remember watching an Oscar broadcast from, but a place I once remember hiding from a painful dinner party to watch the 1992 Winter Olympics.

In any case, I can't remember a year I've cared less about the following races, virtually none of the performances and movies nominated stirred my biggest moviegoing passion, but some were, at the very least, very good.

Best Actor
Will Win: Forrest Whitaker The Last King of Scotland
Should Win: Ryan Gosling Half Nelson
All of my disdain for this year's Oscar season could probably be localized to this race. Here's why - I would fall out of my chair right now if a single moviegoer anywhere saw Peter O'Toole in Venus, Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness, Leonardo Dicaprio in Blood Diamond, or even Gosling, and especially Whitaker. The Last King Of Scotland was less than a blip of a movie, yet due to hype and goodwill towards Whitaker, it'll soon be an Oscar winner. And even as a major blockbuster, as The Pursuit of Happyness was, I can't name 5 people that've seen the thing. Gosling's work in Half Nelson - brave, lived-in, sympathetic in its ragged humanity - is my favorite by virtue of default, I haven't seen the other four movies. Why, I wonder, was Dicaprio not nominated for his frayed stress in The Departed? That question is for another year.

Best Actress
Will win: Helen Mirren The Queen
Should win: Kate Winslet Little Children
In the least contested Best Actress race since... well, last year, Helen Mirren is virtually guaranteed to win - not much of a shame, as her stalwart presence is the crux of The Queen, a competent enough movie that doesn't inspire much of anything but talks about its competence. The other nominees - Judi Dench in Notes on a Scandal, Penelope Cruz in Volver, Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada - were all wonderful, but its Kate Winslet in Little Children that truly transcended. Her Kathy is a mess of conflicted emotions, but one whose desire to live at all costs makes her boredom ferocious. Winslet's been working towards an Oscar it feels like forever now, and this is the first one she's deserved - even more than a slew of overlooked indy performers - more than Elizabeth Reeser of Sweet Land or Ashley Judd of Come Early Morning or Laura Dern of Inland Empire or Maggie Gyllenhaal of Sherrybaby. Winslet is, quite simply, the best.

Best Supporting Actor:
Will Win: Eddie Murphy Dreamgirls
Should Win: Jackie Earle Haley Little Children
I don't feel the same disconnect to this category as I did a year ago, when looking at George Clooney, Matt Dillon, and William Hurt performances I was supposed to love in movies I was supposed to like, I found myself ready to give up on the movie industry altogether. Then I wondered why couldn't the same forces that annointed a Clooney to Oscar-winning status have conveined around, say, Christian Bale in The New World or Scott Wilson in Junebug? This year, far more lackluster, I can't imagine anyone I'd like to win more than the surprise-beneficiary-of-hype Jackie Earle Haley, the former Bad News Bear whose disturbing emergence into registered sex offender Ronald McGorvey in Little Children is so successful, perhaps, because Haley looks the part - his tiny body and devil face gives the hope of good intentions beneath a veneer of antiseptic intentions. Murphy's work in Dreamgirls is ferocious and funny, sad and exciting, and very little injustice will be done when he wins the Oscar, but there will be some - just a little. With those two mentioned, I can't think of any comparably great performances - that Mark Wahlburg winds up being The Departed's only acting nomination should be a surprise to its leads, after all. In its dense cast, I wonder, was it just his foul-mouthed, credibility-stretching diatribes that got him noticed (come to think of it, that worked for Alan Arkin, nominated for Little Miss Sunshine, also)? They certainly didn't make him superior to his boss, Martin Sheen, who, buried beneath some huge performances, may have been just too small for anyone to even mention the subject. And I did not see Djimon Honsou in Blood Diamond, but I'm certain he's saintly in it.

Best Supporting Actress
Will Win: Jennifer Hudson Dreamgirls
Should Win: Jennifer Hudson Dreamgirls
Well that's what I call an uninspiring list of nominees: Sure Abigail Breslin's adorable Olive of Little Miss Sunshine is the strongest person in her cast, but save for a killer "Superfreak" dance number, she's just a pretty solid beaming 10-year-old. Sure, Cate Blanchett, one of the world's best actresses, gives her flightiness real human vulnerability in Notes On A Scandal, but her part fails to rescue the movie from sensationalism the way Judi Dench's extraordinary performance does. Sure, Babel puts Adriana Barraza through hell, and she can certainly cry well, but her part is such saintly torture, I'd rather wander the California desert myself than watch it again. Babel's other nominee, Rinko Kikuchi, is as brave a study in loneliness and isolation as any this year, but please, next to Jennifer Hudson? Her iconic "I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" would earn an Oscar all by itself, but it's not simply that she sings the hell out of the song, it's that she lives it, inhabits its desperation as much as its will. In fact, she does it the second she shows up on screen - her song numbers are more than musical breaks, they're visions of life. There were a number of other great supporting female performances this year - none more glaring an omission than Catherine O'Hara's brave to-the-bone tragicomedy in For Your Consideration - but Hudson's is a moment of star perfection.

Best Original Screenplay:
Will Win: Babel
Should Win: Pan's Labyrinth
Pan's Labyrinth is a true original: a greusome fairy tale that masks, interweaves, and finally reveals a greusome reality. It's images are so powerful, so jolting and suprising, it's easy to pass the movie off as a technical revelation, but its revelation begins in a conceptualized zen, it's a movie structually conceived, and that is a written triumph. Plus, Babel is a joke passed off as a structured "statement," The Queen certainly hears British dullness correctly, and Little Miss Sunshine should apply for the sitcom writing Emmy next year. Letters From Iwo Jima, enlivened as it is by wartime formula, is still written in formula - it's triumph is Clint Eastwood's, not Iris Yamashita's.

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Will Win: The Departed
Should Win: Little Children
Here's what I like - a book adaptation turned into a screen adaptation and, although preserved with narration, it becomes its own visual work based on how it transfers from one to the other. You wonder if Todd Field and Tom Perotta did as much work as, say, Children of Men's five writers, but there's no denying the writing is superior. Borat's nomination is a sort of throw-the-maverick-a-bone nomination (Borat's appeal is certainly not in what was scripted beforehand), but it at least embraces creativity. Notes On A Scandal is an acting success, The Departed a directing one, and that's partly because both are limited by their writing.

Best Director:
Will Win: Martin Scorcese The Departed
Should Win: Paul Greengrass United 93
I don't want to be the one to say that Martin Scorcese doesn't deserve an Oscar, but Martin Scorcese doesn't deserve an Oscar this year. Give Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu credit for helming the ambitious chaos of Babel, but his movie is terrible. Give Stephen Frears credit for, well, capturing Helen Mirren, but his movie is... well, it's The Queen. There's a case to be made for giving Clint Eastwood his third directing Oscar - Letters From Iwo Jima is what Saving Private Ryan attempted, but with arguably more at stake. However, Greengrass is the real artist of the bunch, monitoring the exact pitch of tension United 93 needed, rendering accuracy in our darkest voyeuristic needs.

Best Picture:
Will Win: Letters From Iwo Jima
Should Win: Letters From Iwo Jima
As this is the first race in memory with a real 5 (well, 4 - there is simply no way to muster passion over The Queen) way possibility, I want to take a chance to say that this year, unlike last... and the year before that... the quality picture will win. Letters From Iwo Jima seems the perfect chance for voters to exercise discerning tastes over hype- it's nomination over Dreamgirls already affirms that that's a possibility. The conventional wisdom holds that Little Miss Sunshine, which I found false and obnoxious, has the edge, but it's sort of like letting Yes, Dear win an Emmy over The Sopranos. Babel is a mess, and a mean-spirited, incoherent-on-investigation mess at that. The Departed, for all it does right, is autopilot Scorcese, hammy at times, and collapsed by its concluding bluntness, and, truthfully, by Jack Nicholson's Scarface-was-for-pansies hamminess. Where, I wonder, was the support for a better piece of intrigue, Robert DeNiro's murky, unnerving The Good Shepherd? Where, I wonder, was the support for the virtually unheard of magic of Sweet Land? The DV breakthrough of Bubble? Or even Best Picture support for Little Children? These things were not even possibilities as far as I could tell, and perhaps any of them would deserve to lose to Letters From Iwo Jima, but its worth pointing out that great films, however absurd their "chance" are worth mentioning in the Best Picture category.

To the left, to the left

As I work around middle schoolers, and, perhaps more than that, have a job that requires me to drive and wander around the bedrooms and common areas of middle schoolers, I have, like few other times in my life, a direct pipeline into the trends of current pop radio. As is perhaps well known to anyone whose heard any type of radio these past few (five? ten? fifteen?) years, top 40 radio, dictated by market shares and contractual obligations to play the same certain popular songs repeatedly within an hour placate to the needs of teen audiences, as teen audiences are the only subset of the population willing to hear the same certain popular songs repeatedly withan an hour.

This week, Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right" ends a ten week run at #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 by Beyonce's "Irreplaceable." Things weren't looking great for Beyonce 6 months ago - her B'Day album, successful enough, wasn't taking off the way Dangerously In Love was. "Deja Vu" and "Ring The Alarm" were top 20 singles, but the first was forgettable and the second, as daring as mainstream radio gets, must've freaked out listeners with all that yelling. Then comes "Irreplaceable." Beyonce herself called it her "secret weapon."

Every so often, a single comes along that isn't just successful because people can't get it out of their heads, but also because a certain sensation strikes - in each instance the song pops up, which is quite frequently, a listener finds him/herself reluctant to change the channel. The listener finds him/herself singing the song and not feeling embarassed about it. The listener finds him/herself downloading the thing or even buying the record. The listener, it seems, turns out to really like the popular song, only escalating its popularity.

Songs like these play all the time, as any popular song, but you find yourself not objecting so much, and even enjoying its ubiquity for a while. These songs are rare, but what they have the power to do is to, briefly, register excitement at radio - to hear a song and be thrilled at the capabilites of music, to remind listeners why they started to hear music in the first place. To say this is rare in pop music is an understatement. I can think of only a handful of examples from the past ten years - Outkast's "Hey Ya," for one, or Moby's "Southside," or Nelly's "Hot in Herre," or even Beyonce's first #1 "Crazy In Love." Billboard points out that Beyonce's ten week run with "Irreplaceable" was the longest of any single since Kanye West's "Gold Digger." I guess that was the last one.

Take a look at that group of songs - each song has in common that it spurred that excitement and that that excitement spurred its popularity. Yet even though that excitement was present once upon a time, it's also true that each of those songs despite holding off the sledge and anger of overplaying for much longer than would be expected, each eventually wore its listeners down into distaste. For West, he nearly ruined any goodwill I had towards Jamie Foxx. For Moby, since the popularity of "South Side," I seem to have never ceased finding the little guy an annoying munchkin of chest-pounding dullness. Perhaps "Hey Ya," a song that will be a top contender for the best of the decade - if not simply as one of the most memorable in the history of rap music - fares better, but, as my praise might indicate, not every song is a "Hey Ya."

When a song like "Irreplaceable" becomes that popular, though, it takes on a unique trajectory, as its biggest fanst tend to be under 18 (not its only fans though, certainly). Spending half my time around teenage boys for work, I've had plenty of time to monitor their reactions to the song - the inability to quit singing it, the sudden cessation of that singing when its clear people are noticing that a teenage boy singing Beyonce, the ad hoc caveat of "Damn, Beyonce's so hot."

I love Nelly Furtado's "Say It Right," a sensual chunk of electro-hip hop that acts like a sad complement to her mega-hit "Promiscuous," but it doesn't have that quality that made "Irreplaceable" so difficult to dislike, and what now makes it so difficult to not find annoying when the "to the left"s start up at, seemingly, every turn. That radio remains a wasteland is so accepted these days it can begin to sound like griping to mom about how she makes her mac & cheese. Still, the other songs I hear endlessly in a day's work - say, Ludacris and Mary J. Blige's "Runaway Love," whose alternate title must have been "poor people are sad," or, anything by Akon - lead to that other old feeling of listening to the radio, the one of frustration and cynicism. That the excitement of an "Irreplaceable" can get dulled down into that frustration I take as a good sign - that it's only more real in its changing nature, like a love affair deadened in the day to day.