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Who will win, who should win and who could cause the biggest upset at this year's Academy Awards?
I'm not Nostradamus, but here are my picks.
Best Picture
- The nominees: Arrival, La La Land, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Lion, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight
- Who will win: La La Land
- Who should win: Moonlight
- Outside chance: Manchester by the Sea
Once upon a time Best Picture contenders were limited to a handful: five. Then, in 2009 the Academy doubled the number so that they could include more films with popular reach, like blockbusters. This year they should have gone back down to five films, because the selection is thin.
Hacksaw Ridge, Lion and Hidden Figures have no business in a list of best picture nominees. Neither does Fences, which is a filmed play and barely qualifies as cinema.
Then there's Arrival, a sci fi thriller which I don't see as a major work from Sicario director Canadian Denis Villeneuve. The strongest thing about it is Amy Adams' performance as a university linguistics professor recruited by the US government to decipher the hieroglyphic language of Alien visitors (smoke rings crossed with coffee mug stains), but she wasn't nominated this year.
As for Villeneuve, we'll see him again with bigger films in coming years, including his Blade Runner sequel and Dune remake.
David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water is an angry young man film straight from the mid 90s, when Tarantino was king of the kids and everyone was reading Cormac McCarthy (not in a good way). Chris Pine and Ben Foster play two Texan brothers who go on a bank robbing spree to avoid foreclosure on the family ranch, but really it's a film about the disenfranchised and disillusioned in the wake of the GFC, with muscle cars and wisecracks.
Manchester by the Sea, starring Casey Affleck, could have been made in the 1970s. It's about blue-collar white people, unspeakable tragedy and grief. And it's good, almost as good as the great humanist cinema it's inspired by (from Kazan to Cassavetes).
But La La Land, a film that could have been made in the 1950s, will probably attract more votes. It's a motion picture about the magic of movies that makes you feel good, and the Academy have a track record voting for these kinds of pictures (remember The Artist?).
Of course, if, like me, you find Ryan Gosling annoying and the story tepid, discount the "feel good" description. It has dominated the awards season so far (picking up Best Picture at the BAFTAS and best musical comedy at the Golden Globes) and is nominated for 14 Oscars: a record number only equalled by Titanic and All About Eve.
The only film that can beat La La Land is Moonlight, a drama about growing up a gay African-American man in a Miami ghetto. While there is a proud tradition of great films by African-American directors (from Spike Lee to Charles Burnett), it feels like a film that could only have been made now. It's beautiful, and it should win best picture.
But who am I kidding, La La Land will get it.
Best Director
- The nominees: Damien Chazelle (La La Land), Mel Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea), Denis Villeneuve (Arrival)
- My pick: Barry Jenkins
- Who should have been nominated: A woman
- Outside chance: Damien Chazelle
If there is any justice in the world, Mel Gibson is the man who deserves to win this the least. Not because he's a bad director or because, on occasion, he has behaved like a terrible human being, but because Hacksaw Ridge is far from his best. I'm not sure why it's nominated in so many categories, given Clint Eastwood's Sully — snubbed this year— was a far superior film, and better directed.
Denis Villeneuve, who is the greatest director of the bunch, also doesn't deserve to win this time. He's made better films than Arrival (Sicario, Prisoners) and he's got better films in him still.
Which leaves Kenneth Lonergan, a playwright turned director. Manchester by the Sea is a critics favourite, but Lonergan's strength is more in writing than formal craft. As a director he manages to get performances from his stars, but he doesn't pull out the kind of heart in your mouth set pieces that are most likely to attract the big voting numbers.
So it's down to La La Land's Damien Chazelle and Moonlight's Barry Jenkins. Chazelle has tried to channel much better directors — from Vincente Minelli to Jacques Demy — and the result is elegant but lacking innovation, like a kid on the X Factor who can sing The Wind Beneath My Wings perfectly. That said, the Directors Guild of America awarded him the Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film gong, and most of those winners go on to win Best Director.
So why am I going out on a limb here and picking Barry Jenkins for Moonlight? I think the #Oscarssowhite criticism of last year might have an impact and open the Academy's eyes to a smaller film about seldom-seen characters.
But mostly, it's because his achingly beautiful depiction of the three stages of life of a young, gay black man packs a huge punch in the final act. Jenkins is primarily responsible for making that emotional impact happen and the Academy aren't made of stone. Are they?
Best Actress
- The nominees: Isabelle Huppert, Ruth Negga, Natalie Portman, Emma Stone, Meryl Streep
- Who will win: Emma Stone
- Who should win: Isabelle Huppert
The veteran French actress Isabelle Huppert has never been bad in anything, but this year she's particularly amazing in a bold film: Paul Verhoeven's rape revenge mystery Elle. She deserves to win and has been spending a lot of time in the US lately, appearing at various awards ceremonies, giving the impression she's campaigning hard.
Meryl Streep is wondrous in Florence Foster Jenkins, a biopic about the New York socialite and philanthropist who became infamous for her tone deaf musical recitals. She's won this Oscar twice before (for Sophie's Choice and The Iron Lady) and been nominated more than any other performer. Her performance is witty and hovers delicately on the edge of farce and tragedy, but it isn't a role that screams "give her another one".
Natalie Portman is the centre of Pablo Larrain's underrated film about Jackie Kennedy in the days following the assassination of her husband. But her performance in this stylised and expressionistic film comes close to a breathy, camp caricature that won't be to everyone's palate.
Ruth Negga's is the only performance I've yet to see.
If track record is anything to go by this Awards season, La La Land's Emma Stone is probably going to go home with the trophy (she won the Screen Actor's Guild award and the BAFTA).
The film also doesn't have subtitles, so the Academy won't feel too weirded out. The last Best Actress award for a performance in a foreign language film was Marion Cotillard for La vie en Rose (2007), but a biopic of the much loved French chanteuse Edith Piaf is quite a different proposition to Verhoeven's wry, deliberately ambiguous sexual thriller.
And Stone is an actress who dazzles. She's young. She can sell movies from the cover of magazines for many years to come.
Best Actor
- The nominees: Casey Affleck, Andrew Garfield, Ryan Gosling, Viggo Mortensen, Denzel Washington
- My pick: Casey Affleck
The two frontrunners in the male category are Casey Affleck and Denzel Washington.
Ryan Gosling will win over my dead body, basically. He sings (not very well) and dances (quite well), but his laidback performance as an obsessive modern day jazz traditionalist and hopeless romantic is probably not going to steal the spotlight from some of the other nominees in this category.
Andrew Garfield is good in Hacksaw Ridge, an average at best film about a corn on the cob American Seventh Day Adventist pacifist and stretcher bearer who becomes a war hero in one of the bloodiest battles of World War Two. But that's just it. He's good. The film's average.
Viggo Mortensen has been in a lot of movies and he's been good in all of them. Captain Fantastic sees him play a political radical home schooling a brood of kids off the grid, and it could have been the worst hippy caricature ever. But it's not a film that has attracted any substantial awards momentum, and his nuanced performance will probably go unrewarded.
Denzel Washington is all surface bravado in Fences, as domineering alcoholics usually are, and he holds the film with some virtuosic monologues. It's up there with his best, which is saying something (he won this category for Training Day in 2001).
The trouble is that Fences is really not much of a film, it's more filmed theatre (based on August Wilson's Pulitzer prize winning play), and while he won best actor at the Screen Actors' Guild Awards, something tells me the Academy voters won't be won over.
For me, the award goes to Casey Affleck's grieving father in Manchester by the Sea. It's mostly a very interior performance, which is often (but not always) a sign of sophisticated screen acting, and he nails it. The film is also the best one in this category.
Best Supporting Actress
- The nominees: Viola Davis, Naomie Harris, Nicole Kidman, Octavia Spencer, Michelle Williams
- My pick: Viola Davis
Octavia Spencer, Nicole Kidman and Naomie Harris are very, very good in their roles. Spencer is at her finger wagging, sassy best as a civil rights era NASA mathematician fighting for recognition as a black woman in a white, male world. She brings dignity to a film full of broad brushstrokes and clichéd feel-good moments.
Kidman works wonders with her somewhat underwritten role as a white Australian woman whose two adopted Indian sons battle with questions of identity. And Naomie Harris is heart-wrenching as the single mum in a Miami ghetto who succumbs to the lure of drugs.
But two women stand out: Michelle Williams and Viola Davis.
Williams is unforgettable in Manchester by the Sea as a grieving mother. A harrowing scene where she reunites with her ex-husband (Casey Affleck) by chance on the street and bawls out an apology is unforgettable.
But Davis' powerhouse performance as the long-suffering wife of an alcoholic in Fences is the standout of the category. It's really a lead role, but I'm sure the studio thinks she has a better chance in the supporting category.
Also, much more that Denzel Washington in the same film, it's a performance of glances, body language and screen presence as much as it is an exercise in period dialogue (it's set in the early 1950s in the black working class suburbs of Pittsburgh).
Davis should win it. In any year.
Best Supporting Actor
- The nominees: Mahershala Ali, Jeff Bridges, Lucas Hedges, Michael Shannon, Dev Patel
- My pick: Mahershala Ali
- Dark horse: Dev Patel
If Mahershala Ali doesn't win this one for his role in Moonlight, there's something wrong.
That said, Jeff Bridges in Hell or High Water is fully deserving of the nod, as an old West Texas cop on the eve of retirement whose philosophical approach to life sits awkwardly with his politically incorrect sense of humour. He's an outside chance, because the film is not great.
Michael Shannon in Nocturnal Animals plays the kind of stony-faced psychopath/spectrum oddball/enigmatic maverick he does so well. But again his film is no classic, and has even less awards momentum than Hell or High Water.
Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea, meanwhile, does star in a strong film and is the definition of what a supporting actor must do. As the young, rebellious nephew to Casey Affleck's depressed, tired uncle, he's one half of the dramatic centre of the film. It's a pitch-perfect performance, though it perhaps lacks the intensity that can make the Academy sit up and take notice.
Dev Patel has that in spades in Lion, a film about an Australian man who tries to track down his biological family in India. The British actor won at the BAFTAs too. With a backer like producer Harvey Weinstein, always a savvy Oscars campaigner, he might be an outside chance. He's certainly Weinstein's best chance at Oscar glory in what has been a lacklustre year for the films of the Hollywood mogul.
But back to Mahershala Ali. He comes off a SAG win for this performance as a ghetto drug dealer who turns out to be a gentle mentor to a young boy from the neighbourhood. The character is a fascinating depiction of an African-American man forced by poverty and crime to become different and sometimes contradictory things to different people.
He's physically imposing but unexpectedly wistful, tough yet generous. Simply put, he plays the best role in the best film that's nominated here: it's complex and surprising, and he does it perfectly.
Best Adapted and Best Original Screenplay
- Adapted Screenplay nominees: Arrival, Fences, Hidden Figures, Lion, Moonlight
- Original Screenplay nominees: 20th Century Women, Hell or High Water, La La Land, The Lobster, Manchester by the Sea
- Who should win: Barry Jenkins for Moonlight and Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou for The Lobster
- Who will win: Barry Jenkins for Moonlight and Kenneth Lonergan for Manchester by the Sea
The Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay will go to Barry Jenkins for Moonlight, no question.
Fences, though affecting, is like watching filmed theatre, and the two halves of Lion squeeze the oxygen out of each other (yes it won the BAFTA, but bafflingly, the Brits nominated Moonlight as an original screenplay so the two movies didn't compete).
Arrival has a giant hole in the middle where Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner's sexual tension should be and Hidden Figures is like a newspaper article written so a 12-year-old could read it.
As for Best Original Screenplay, it should go to the Greek filmmakers Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou for their Kafkaesque dystopia about romance and coupledom, The Lobster. It is the kind of absurdist anti-naturalist foray that doesn't usually attract Oscar nominations, and it would be nice to see something from outside the Hollywood mainstream pick up an accolade.
But the Academy will either vote for Manchester by the Sea or La La Land. Because Chazelle's film will be amply rewarded elsewhere, I think playwright-turned-filmmaker Lonergan, a respected figure who had a terrible time battling the studio on his last film, Margaret, will get the nod (he won this category at the BAFTAS).
The film is a gruelling story of a family — and a marriage — torn apart by unspeakable tragedy, and a thoughtful, complex depiction of a man in the deepest pit of despair who doesn't give up.
Topics: film-movies, arts-and-entertainment, art-house, academy-awards-oscars, united-states
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