Paul's Oscar Pix 2005

Oscar predictions have the power to make our souls sing and our dreams come to l—oh, screw it. Click here for this year's results.

Well, another year has gone by, and just like last year, I find myself in the position of having watched barely a handful of movies all year long. The difference is that last year, I felt kind of guilty about that. This year, not at all. And here’s why.

From msnbc.com, February 16, 2005:

It's just a picture. Don't bother trying to click on it.

Our choices for the most anticipated movie for the coming year, apparently, consist of the following:

Sequel.
Sequel.
Remake.
Remake.
Remake.
Remake.
Sequel.
TV show adaptation.
Comic book adaptation.
Sequel.

Given this, I believe, the only logical course for the true film lover in 2005 is to not set foot in a movie theater at all.

It’s been said before, but I think it’s really and truly undeniable now: Hollywood has completely, totally, and utterly run out of ideas. Back in the mid-90s the studios were pumping out repellent crap like Showgirls and Independence Day, and I really didn’t think it was going to get any worse, but that at least was original repellent crap, in the sense that the soulless untalented hacks who dreamed it up for the screen were not simply duplicating crap that had been thought up by other soulless untalented hacks years before. Now even that meager expectation of creativity has fallen by the wayside, in favor of whatever heat’n’serve screenplay pops out of the Licensed-Property-o-Tron 3000 this week to sully the reputations of all who come in contact with it, in the name of everybody’s favorite 21st century trend, corporate synergy. After all, why spend money on original ideas when you can just dust off some creaky property you already own? In a few years, it’ll be so cheap to make Scooby-Doo 8: Scrappy-Doo’s Revenge that even mid-level Warner executives will be filling their swimming pools with $100 bills and buying ruby-encrusted dildos for their trophy wives and the studio will still have enough money left over to commission a CGI double of Sarah Michelle Gellar so they can finish shooting the movie after she tragically overdoses on a cocktail of methamphetamine and horse tranquilizers. A brave new world, indeed, but totally worth the $11.50 we’ll each be paying to get in the door by then, wouldn’t you agree? Oh, and by the way, they’ll still be blasting us with 20 minutes of commercials before the show, too.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we still had an independent film industry in this country. To the untrained eye, it may appear that the indie revolution that began in earnest in the 1990s is still going strong, but look at the copyright notices of the pictures that please the audiences at Sundance and clean up at the Independent Spirit Awards and more often than not you’ll see that the pipsqueak “studios” releasing these things are in fact mere tentacles of giant entertainment conglomerates: Searchlight Pictures, which is owned by Fox; Fine Line Features, which is owned by Time Warner; Sony Pictures Classics and Paramount Classics, which are owned by... uh... I forget; Focus Features, which is owned by NBC Universal; and, of course, Miramax, about which I trust I don’t need to go into detail. Now, the fact that all the big studios have established specialty divisions to handle these small, director-centric films is not in itself a bad thing; on the contrary, it demonstrates that there is enough of a market for such movies that the majors feel comfortable devoting resources to it, and it’s nice to know there are people in Hollywood keeping an ear to the ground for the next great filmmaking sensation to come out of the hinterlands. Or that’s the theory, anyway. In reality, we’re not seeing a whole lot of dividends coming out of this system, are we? Look over any critic’s ten-best list this year and you’ll see a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the whole endeavor, with the likes of The Incredibles and Spider-Man 2 as likely to show up as Mary Full of Grace and Hotel Rwanda and nobody really knowing what to make of the whole thing. I guess it’s nice that the majors are still producing films that are worthy of our notice, but in any given year the indies and quasi-indies should be giving us a handful of pictures at minimum that honestly blow us away, and they just aren’t anymore.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to mourn the decline of independent cinema. The truth is, there’s more rock-bottom filmmaking now than there has ever been before, as the low cost of cameras like the Canon XL1 and the availability of powerful video editing software for midrange desktop computers has made it possible for maverick auteurs to fill the art houses with jittery, overlit digital video that makes everything look like amateur footage of your 6-year-old niece’s dance recital. It’s called cinematography, people. I know, I know; it’s a long word, lots of syllables, sounds like something the French would care about. But it’ll help you make better-looking movies that won’t give moviegoers splitting headaches. Just promise me you’ll look into it. Please. Don’t make me beg.

Where was I? Barely a handful of movies all year long, right. Anyway, the nominations came out and I began my by-now customary joyless February movie marathon. And let me tell you, gorging yourself on movies at Oscar time is not the way to behave if you’re trying to budget responsibly. Five or six movies crammed into a two- or three-week period × 9 bucks a pop = a lot of money spent on a bunch of movies that I didn’t really want to see to begin with. Even at matinee prices there’s still the issue of time. I’m a busy guy with a full-time job and a reasonably active social calendar, plus there were several important video games that came out toward the end of last year like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Knights of the Old Republic II that really require a fairly substantial time commitment to appreciate sufficiently, so on my down time from all of that stuff there were quite a few days when I had to choose between lounging here at home with a good book and maybe the occasional bubble bath, or trudging out alone after dark into the sodden Seattle winter for yet another anonymous movie at yet another soulless multiplex. But I went to see those movies, my friends, oh yes I did, and I did it all for you, because I love each and every one of you so gat-dang much that it’s all I can do to think about it without falling to my knees and bursting into tears of joy. Don’t ever forget that. Ever.

Anyway.

If you’ve forgotten how this works, or haven’t been here before, or are drunk, I make predictions in the eight “major” categories plus one bonus category, which this year is Best Documentary Feature for, like, the third time since I started doing this. I was going to go with Best Makeup to express my support for the makeup artists who managed to make Leonardo DiCaprio look vaguely like Howard Hughes toward the end of The Aviator, but then The Aviator didn’t even get nominated in that category (apparently the Academy felt that the guys who bought all the red food coloring and hamburger meat for Jim Caviezel’s back in The Passion of the Christ were more deserving of the nomination). So once again the documentary category is the only one left that I care about in which I’ve seen at least one of the nominated pictures. Along the way I also say who I’d prefer to see win the award if I were voting, which of course I’m not, and toward the end I usually try to wrap things up in some half-assed kind of way and end up in a vaguely irritated mood in which I castigate myself for not getting started with this thing earlier and halfheartedly resolve to spread out my movie watching a little more next year. Let the good times roll!

Last year I actually made it all the way to ten films for my list, which really surprised me. Maybe I’ll be able to do it again. Starting with my numero uno favorite film of the year, winning a tight race by a nose:

Hotel Rwanda - Boy, it’s true what they say about the Hotel Rwanda: you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Or maybe I’m thinking about something else. Whatever. Anyway, the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), a Hutu who sheltered 1200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the four-star hotel he ran in Kigali during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, is an amazing thing to watch and my pick for best film of the year. Rusesabagina shares a number of qualities with Oskar Schindler, with whom he is often compared, and watching Hotel Rwanda is like watching a compressed version of Schindler’s List: the Rwandan genocide lasted just three months (during which nearly 1 million people were massacred), compared to years for the Holocaust, and while Schindler was able to shelter his charges in relative safety for much of that time, the unauthorized guests at Rusesabagina’s Mille Collines Hotel seem perpetually minutes away from being discovered and shot, and Cheadle spends much of the film pulling rabbit after rabbit out of his hat to keep that from happening. English actress Sophie Okonedo is perfect as Rusesabagina’s Tutsi wife Tatiana, who inspires him to keep going, and Nick Nolte is nice to see, if a bit out of place, as the perpetually pissed-off Canadian colonel and United Nations peacekeeper who’s powerless to help due to decisions being made by politicians thousands of miles away.

The rest of the best, in no particular order:

Fahrenheit 9/11 - What are we to do with Michael Moore? The man has a seemingly unshakeable commitment to the idea that when strict accuracy comes into conflict with a tight narrative and compelling storyline, it is the accuracy that must be sacrificed. The title of his latest film is a rip-off of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which seemed clever for about a second and a half after I first heard it. He has a weight problem and a shitty beard, which gives right-wing bloggers something convenient to criticize him for in lieu of actual substantive disagreement. He will never, ever be able to undo the damage he did to the United States and the world by campaigning energetically for Ralph Nader in 2000. I want to hate him, and yet I ... just ... can’t, because just when I’m about ready to track him down and punch him in the face he emerges from the editing room with a film like Fahrenheit 9/11, which compiles into a single two-hour film (well over 90 percent of which is true!) all the horror, misery, and devastation that the worst presidential administration in U.S. history has wrought upon this nation and the world, in a prosecutorial case that makes one want to lift one’s face to the heavens and cry out in anger and shame, begging future generations and the right-thinking people of the world and even God himself to forgive us for what this wicked, incompetent, destructive administration has done in our name.

Fahrenheit 9/11 will probably be remembered as Moore’s magnum opus, and what’s really amazing about it is the degree to which the famously egocentric filmmaker manages to restrain himself: he is present to a much lesser degree than he has been in his other films, and when he does appear in front of the camera he’s not the center of the action. Since 1989’s Roger and Me, Moore has consistently exhibited an almost unparalleled genius for using sound and music to create an emotional atmosphere so intense that it can be almost intolerable at times; to convey the enormity of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Moore eschews the by-now familiar video of the World Trade Center towers collapsing—images so horrifying they are almost mundane, as if our brains refuse to fully process them out of an instinct for self-preservation—and fades to black, presenting only the sounds of the attack. The speakers fill the darkened theater with sounds of jet engines, explosions, screams, sirens, frantic news broadcasts, and police walkie-talkies; as the audience takes in the devastation in this strange new way, Moore fades back in, not on the towers but on a sea of stricken faces looking skyward, as the soundtrack fades out and is replaced by a single tolling bell. We’ve seen it all before, but never in quite this way, and it would take a much harder (or much more right-wing) person than me to sit through it without being touched by the experience.

Kinsey - Kinsey got somewhat middling reviews when it came out, and I don’t understand why. Director Bill Condon’s even-handed biopic of the Indiana University biologist (Liam Neeson) who revolutionized America’s perception of human sexuality admirably performs the not-always-easy job of not only showing the audience why its subject was significant enough to warrant a biographical treatment, but also letting viewers feel it on a more fundamental level. The toxic sexual repression and ignorance of the times, which left millions of perfectly normal people convinced that they were sick or crazy or damned to hell, is an omnipresent substrate underlying the early parts of the film, and with Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, we can feel the ignorance breaking up, very slowly but all over the place at once, and it’s like the sun breaking through the clouds after a very long rain. We see the way Kinsey’s pioneering research into the sexual practices of ordinary Americans becomes a source of liberation even for the good doctor and his wife (Laura Linney), both virgins on their wedding night; as the old moral codes of a more ignorant civilization fade away and before new societal standards arise to replace them, Condon’s camera nonjudgmentally follows the Kinseys and their grad student researchers as they experiment with sexual libertinism themselves, then gradually abandon it, finding it hollow and unfulfilling. Is this narrative holding together at all? Probably not. It’s late. Anyway, good movie.

Super Size Me - Left-wingers who don’t understand why they always come off as humorless prigs need to buy the DVD of Super Size Me and watch it every day for at least a year. First-time director Morgan Spurlock’s offbeat documentary does more in 96 short minutes to educate people about the significant public health risk posed by America’s addition to fast food than a thousand yammering lefty scolds could accomplish in a decade. How does he do it? As luck would have it, I happen to know the answer to that question:

Spurlock has a gimmick. Roger and Me put Michael Moore on the map not because of its subject matter (the devastating effect General Motors’ plant closings has on the town of Flint, Mich.) but because he wrapped it up in a tight, high-concept narrative that appealed to moviegoers: his own efforts to track down and interview GM’s then-chairman, Roger Smith. Spurlock’s own “plotline”—he spends a month consuming nothing, not even water, that doesn’t come directly from a McDonald’s restaurant, and documents the effect it has on his health—came under fire from some quarters for being gimmicky, which misses the point entirely: Of course it’s gimmicky! It also makes for a great show, coming as it does from someone with a talent for entertainment, and you need to put asses in the seats before you can educate them. As it turns out, a month is more than enough time for Spurlock to interview nutritionists, public health professionals, and activists between trips to McDonald’s, and this footage ends up meaning a lot more because it’s coupled with an engaging personal narrative. It’s like Bill Cosby used to say before each episode of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids: if you’re not careful, you just might learn something before we’re done.
Spurlock is not an asshole. The biggest problem the left wing has in this country is that so many of them are, to put it simply, assholes. You know that asshole you went to college with who went to great lengths, every time someone peripherally mentioned some TV show, to proclaim that he didn’t watch television and you shouldn’t either? That’s the face of the modern Left. Morgan Spurlock, by contrast, comes across as more of a self-deprecating Everyman: he quite candidly admits that he chooses to conduct his experiment at McDonald’s, as opposed to some other fast food chain, because he likes McDonald’s food, and can’t really blame anyone else for liking it either. Spurlock’s frank acknowledgement of the seductiveness of high-fat, high-calorie foods puts him on a level with the viewers he hopes to reach, instead of having him preach the message from on high. In fact, one of the least appealing characters in the film is Spurlock’s own girlfriend, a vegetarian chef (she doesn’t rock the animal byproducts either, but I have little tolerance for anyone who’s not from either Las Vegas or a planet orbiting the star Vega describing themselves as “vegan”), who’s continually on his case to stop it already and can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be perfectly happy eating nothing but leaves for the rest of their lives like a goddamned rabbit. I’m exaggerating a little bit, but you get the picture. Nobody likes to be talked down to, and although talking down to people can be fun in itself it’s not the best way to change hearts and minds.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - Nutball screenwriter Charlie Kaufman returns with an achingly bittersweet story about the vitally necessary pain of heartbreak. I wouldn’t have thought Kaufman had it in him, but I guess Being John Malkovich and Adaptation had their share of pathos, too. He’s a sad clown. Poor guy.

The Incredibles - Okay, I’m starting to get really pissed off at Pixar, which every year makes me put a damned cartoon on my best films list. But what can I do? This year’s effort was helmed by Simpsons veteran Brad Bird, who also directed 1999’s underrated, Ted Hughes-inspired The Iron Giant, and was helped along by stellar voice performances from the likes of Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, and of all people, Sarah Vowell. Special thanks to the creators and animators of the Elastigirl character model, which gave me a woodrow every time. You guys rock.

Napoleon Dynamite - I was never a particularly popular kid when I was in school, but I was never at the very bottom either, and as I grew older I came to believe that there are just some kids who probably should be ostracized. Napoleon Dynamite, skulking through the halls of his high school in moon boots and honky ’fro, is definitely one of those kids; nonetheless, Jared Hess' strange little movie manages to send him, his hopeless delusions, and his outcast friends straight into the audience’s collective heart. Great work by the teenaged triumvirate of Jon Heder as the explosive emperor of the title; Efren Ramirez as Pedro, who will make all your wildest dreams come true if you vote for him; and Waterworld-moppet-turned-grownup-cutie Tina Majorino as Deb, the budding entrepreneur, shutterbug, and would-be love interest of the other two if they weren’t both too addled to realize it.

The Aviator - We follow Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) around as he makes films, romances several of Hollywood’s hottest actresses, builds the Spruce Goose, almost dies in a number of plane crashes, and goes crazy, all at the age, apparently, of 12. DiCaprio’s stubborn refusal to enter puberty notwithstanding, Martin Scorsese’s fine biopic may just win him the Oscar he’s been denied so many times before.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Yes, I am putting a Harry Potter movie on the list; don’t act so surprised. As recently as last year I was favorably comparing J.K. Rowling’s increasingly compelling series with the trilogy of Tolkien turdmuffins that’s infected our movie screens for the majority of the 21st century thus far, particularly in the areas of, y’know, character development and literary merit. This year, somehow, we apparently pleased the gods of cinema sufficiently that they wrested the reins of the Harry Potter series from the hands of hack director Chris Columbus and bestowed them upon Alfonso Cuarón, the Mexican filmmaker who’s directed both the NC-17-rated Y Tu Mamá También, one of the decade’s best films, and 1995’s Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation The Little Princess. Cuarón allowed the series to spread its wings a bit after two excessively literal-minded outings from Columbus, and the result was a warmer and more grown-up film that really did a great job of transforming Rowling’s novel into a complete filmed experience while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original. Cuarón also elicited impressive performances from the movie’s trio of young actors, who weren’t all that great in 2002’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, as well as the veterans and newcomers among the adult cast. Particularly impressive in the latter group were Michael Gambon, ably stepping into the late Richard Harris’ cavernous shoes as headmaster Albus Dumbledore, and David Thewlis, who brought a tattered dignity to the valiant but misunderstood Professor Remus Lupin. And yes, I have already pre-ordered Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince from Amazon.com. Shut up.

How many is that? Nine? Aw, crap. Okay, you can choose between Ray, Sideways, and I guess Spider-Man 2 for the tenth slot. Try rolling a die or something. Don’t bother telling me how it turns out. I have better things to do.

Mention: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Most years I have an “Honorable Mention” section here, and I often include a kind of dishonorable-mention section where I can rail on movies I hated, or movies that I didn’t see because I was pretty sure I’d hate them if I did (keep reading, sunshine), but this is the first time—maybe ever—that I have seen a movie that rates, simply, Mention. “I can’t recommend it,” Roger Ebert wrote of The Life Aquatic, “but I would not for one second discourage you from seeing it.” I think that pretty much sums it up. I immensely enjoyed Wes Anderson’s somewhat emotionally distant whimsy in Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, but this time it seemed to be more an end in itself than a means to an end, and to the extent that it makes him seem like a bit of a one-trick pony it sort of forces me to reevaluate his earlier films, which I don’t really want to do. Or maybe he just needs to get back together with Owen Wilson for his screenplays (Wilson starred in The Life Aquatic but didn’t collaborate with Anderson on the screenplay for the first time since they started working together, for reasons unknown to me). Or start working with Kumar Pallana again. Whatever it is, Wes, fix it.

Movies I Wish I’d Seen: The Ladykillers - How the hell did I manage to miss a Coen Brothers movie? That sucks; The Motorcycle Diaries - Yeah, I guess so; Maria Full of Grace, the Colombian film about a hot teenage girl with 200 grams of top-quality coke embedded in her colon; House of Flying Daggers - I don’t know what this movie is about, but apparently there are flying daggers in it, and that’s awesome; I ♥ Huckabee’s, because David O. Russell is a great director who deserves my support; Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which I really, really wanted to go see with my girlfriend when it was in theaters, but she went and saw it with someone else without telling me. We’re not together anymore, which I probably should have seen coming.

Movies I Didn’t See, and in All Likelihood Never Will: The Smashin’ of the Christ. What’s uplifting about spending in excess of two hours watching one of history’s greatest voices for love and compassion get pounded into a fine slurry? That’s just fucked up, man. And what’s with all these pentacostals and evangelicals who went to see it 10 times like it was 1975 and they were 14-year-old Jaws fanatics? Do they understand why the cross at the front of their church has no figure of Jesus on it, unlike the ones in Catholic churches? That so many 700 Club-watching red-staters filed into the theater to watch this film and didn’t march out denouncing it with their finest fire’n’brimstone as heretical Popery tells me that there are a lot of preachers out there who aren’t doing their jobs. It’s getting so you can’t even rely on Christian infighting anymore. Actually, I don’t think the Pope is doing his job either, as Mel Gibson and his crazy Holocaust-denying dad are both fringe wingnut schismatics who reject most of what the Roman Catholic Church has done since Vatican II, so if I were the Pope I’d excommunicate his ass and tell him to start his own damn religion where he could anoint himself Pope Melvin I and spend the rest of his life reflecting on his own glory, which is what he seems to want to do anyway. Not that it’s any of my business.

It’s the reason we’re all here: let’s get to the nominees.

Nominees:

Who Should Win: The Aviator

Even as I’m sitting here writing this I’m not sure The Aviator is really my favorite nominated film, which is either because the top three or four films all legitimately appealed to me about equally or because I don’t care enough to take the time to think about it critically and come up with a single definite answer. But I gotta pick one. As always, then, the nominees in decreasing order of irrationality:

Finding Neverland -Why, that was the most heartwarming show about a creepy child-obsessed weirdo I’ve seen since Martin Bashir’s interview with Michael Jackson! I actually walked out of this movie about a third of the way through, although to be fair that was primarily because I was tired and feeling sick that day and only secondarily because I hadn’t found it the least bit compelling. I may catch the rest of it on HBO some day, but that doesn’t seem very likely.

Million Dollar Baby - I can’t decide whether to be angry at this movie for being emotionally manipulative or to like it for inspiring the emotions that it manipulated me into having. At worst, the film depended on two-dimensional characters and a pretty contrived plotline to provide most of its impact. And yet, Clint Eastwood’s directing and Hilary Swank’s performance were so good that I’m inclined to forget all of that.

Ray - This is one I wasn’t expecting to like very much, but I ended up liking it a lot. I suspect I’m overlooking a number of flaws in the film because I was so taken with Jamie Foxx’s sheer joy at inhabiting the character of Ray Charles. It was all about the music, man! Like the transcendent scene where Ray, all twisted up on heroin, spontaneously invents “What’d I Say” live on stage because his set had come in 20 minutes short, his band and backup singers staring at each other in disbelief before falling into perfect harmony. Surely it didn’t really happen like that, but who cares? It made me want to leap out of my seat and start dancing like an idiot, and any movie that can do that is okay in my book.

Sideways - Over the years, no one has sung the praises of Alexander Payne more often or loudly than me. Payne’s Election was my favorite movie of 1999, itself one of the best years for movies since I’ve been alive, and I loved both Citizen Ruth and About Schmidt. With Sideways he’s finally enjoying a measure of mainstream success, and I’m happy to see him get the Best Picture and Best Director nominations he’s deserved before but never gotten.

And yet...

And yet I can’t help but think: Sideways felt like pretty much the same movie as Wonder Boys, which I didn’t particularly care for, in part because it’s hard to watch people squander their gifts and screw up their lives because they should’ve taken affirmative steps to grow the hell up about twenty years ago but didn’t. (Hits a little close to home, perhaps.) I also lost my patience with all the wine snobbery stuff, which I know was supposed to be mostly humorous but ultimately wasn’t interesting enough to not be irritating. Still, great acting from all the principals, especially Paul Giamatti who didn’t get an Oscar nomination for it.

The Aviator - A year or two ago I spent a very large part of my life reading Empire, Donald Bartlett and James Steele’s critically acclaimed, 1000-page biography of Howard Hughes, and for the most part The Aviator seems to do his story justice. I pick on Leonardo DiCaprio a lot, and for good reason, but I have to give him credit for carrying off Hughes’ most interesting and puzzling personality trait—that, for such a larger-than-life figure, he was unusually introverted and uncomfortable around other people—and for so effectively capturing and conveying the industrialist’s terrible awareness of his own encroaching mental illness, which in time would come to dominate his life completely. It is to the credit of both DiCaprio and Scorsese that The Aviator was about the shortest three-hour movie I’ve ever seen; when it was over I refused to believe that three hours had elapsed, and impatiently wanted more.

Who Will Win: The Aviator

The oddsmakers seem to have The Aviator as a clear, though hardly prohibitive, favorite. I guess that’s a good a bet as any, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sideways or Million Dollar Baby sneak in either.

Nominees:

Who Should Win: Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda

Hotel managers and concierges, I am convinced, will take over the world someday. They spend their whole careers being polite and deferential to the richest and most influential people on Earth, anticipating and providing for their every need, drawing on near-limitless resources to support their seemingly magical ability to get anything for anybody, and remaining the soul of discretion about the many, many things they see. You are already beginning to understand, I assume, how their talent for getting close to powerful people could come in handy if they ever decide to band together and mount a silent revolution. In Hotel Rwanda, Don Cheadle’s Paul Rusesabagina has to exercise all his considerable talents at bribing corrupt government and military officials, soothing weary executives and journalists, and buttering up repellent people to save the 1200 Tutsi refugees who’ve sought sanctuary in his hotel. What’s really great about Cheadle’s performance is that he does it exactly as you’d expect a real hotel manager to do it, so much so that you begin to wonder if the actor owns a hotel himself. When he’s not rounding up graft for the corrupt general whose cooperation he desperately needs, he’s pretending to enjoy spending time with a bloodthirsty Hutu supplier or pleading over the phone with the Brussels-based president of the company that owns the hotel (an uncredited Jean Reno) to send any help he possibly can. He’s like a juggler with ten balls who never drops one. It’s an amazing performance.

Who Will Win: Jamie Foxx, Ray

Foxx, who has come a long way since his days as the weakest cast member on In Living Color, is the runaway favorite here, and will almost certainly be given the statue by an Academy intent on proving that they’re “hip” and “down with the shizzle” and “not at all responsible for a patronizingly racist Hollywood system that throws actors of color a bone at an awards show every few years in a feeble attempt to make up for pigeonholing them into ‘urban’-targeted pictures and otherwise stereotyping them as buffoons or Noble Savages most of the rest of the time.”

Missing: Paul Giamatti, Sideways

My friend Cat is really pig-biting mad that Paul Giamatti wasn’t nominated this year. I don’t remember her being this upset when he was passed over for American Splendor last year, which is odd because she’s the one who turned me on to Harvey Pekar in the first place.

Whoa. The Associated Press says Hunter S. Thompson just blew his head off. That was unexpected.

Nominees:

Who Should Win: Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby

Hilary Swank projects this subterranean aura of vulnerability that makes you want to rush up and give her a hug. I thought she was unfairly overlooked a few years ago for her performance as a young police officer in Insomnia, which itself was pretty damn unfairly overlooked by a lot of people, but that’s a rant for another day. This was another great role for her and I hope she wins.

Who Will Win: Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby

It’s Oscar time for Hilary Swank—a very pretty and feminine lady in real life—whenever she plays a character who spends most of her time doing something really unfeminine, like boxing or, um, being a dude. I’m looking forward to her next picture, which will probably be called Look At Me, I’m a Big Ol’ Bull Dyke or something like that. Cha-ching!

Nominees:

Who Should Win: The Guy From Wings, Sideways

This one is actually pretty hard for me. A big part of me wants to go with Alan Alda, who I’m glad to see is still doing it after all these years, but I’ve seen a truly amazing amount of M*A*S*H in my life and picked right up on Alda’s “Hawkeye” mannerisms when they manifested in the film, which was very distracting. (I guess I could be charitable and assume that Alda’s occasional squinty, toothy tics are actually Maine mannerisms, as both Hawkeye Pierce and Sen. Ralph Owen Brewster are from Maine, but that seems kind of farfetched. Anyway, my personal Maine stereotype is of an old man in a yellow Gorton’s Seafood-style rain slicker saying “Storm’s a’brewin’!” in a barely comprehensible accent, and I don’t want to ruin that.)

Instead, I have to go with The Guy From Wings, who brought just the right tone to that character of Jack, the aging horndog and has-been soap star out for one final week of debauchery before his wedding. I’ve thought The Guy From Wings was a gifted comic actor ever since he was The Guy From That One Episode Of Cheers, and he really shows his range here with a character whose laid-back SoCal demeanor masks his true feelings of desperation and fear.

Who Will Win: The Guy From Wings, Sideways

The oddsmakers think some guy named “Clive”—the chicks really like him, apparently—has a strong chance of winning here, but I think it’s going to go to The Guy From Wings. Jamie Foxx won’t win it because he’s going to take Best Actor home for Ray and the Academy is going to want to spread the love around a bit. Morgan Freeman isn’t going to win it because he played pretty much the same Magical Negro character he’s been playing for the past 15 years. Alan Alda isn’t going to win it because Hawkeye will never win an Oscar. That Clive guy isn’t going to win it because chicks do not make up a majority of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. That leaves The Guy From Wings. I’m pretty sure about this.

Nominees:

Who Should Win: Laura Linney, Kinsey

I want Laura Linney to marry me and bear my children; there, I said it. I am completely, hopelessly in love with this terrific actress who always plays women who don’t deserve the rotten things that happen to them in their lives. (Also, her father is an acclaimed playwright named “Romulus,” and how freakin’ cool is that?) Until you hear differently, you can assume that I want Laura Linney to win whenever she’s nominated for an Oscar, which I am sure will happen many times over the next several decades, just as I am sure she will never, ever win.

Who Will Win: Cate Blanchett, The Aviator

I can’t really tell if I’m swimming against the tide here or not. I feel like Blanchett has been the favorite for a while but that Madsen has come up strong on the outside over the past few weeks. My thoughts: Virginia Madsen played a complex, low-key character in a moody, introspective film. Cate Blanchett played Katherine Hepburn, the awesomest actress in the history of show business. There’s no contest here. I guarantee you that every last one of the actresses in the Academy, and a goodly number of the men (siddown and shuddup, Martin Short), wish they could get a chance to play Katherine Hepburn in a film, although most of them probably don’t believe they could ever do it as well as Cate Blanchett has. It would be wrong to consider this a close race, I think.

Nominees:

Who Should Win: Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby

An odd choice for me, perhaps, but I felt like a great part of what was good about Million Dollar Baby came from Eastwood’s direction, which did a terrific job of setting the mood and bringing us into its world. The man’s a hell of a director.

Who Will Win: Martin Scorsese, The Aviator

Personally, I’d rather see the accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers break into Kevin Costner’s house, steal the 1990 Best Director Oscar, and retroactively award it to Scorsese for Goodfellas, but failing that I would have no problem seeing Marty pick up this year’s trophy, finally. Better it should be for The Aviator than for, say, Bringing Out the Dead.

Nominees:

Who Should Win: Terry George, Keir Pearson, Hotel Rwanda

Every year you could take the five or so nominees from the two screenplay categories that weren’t nominated for Best Picture and on average they’re a lot better than the screenplay nominees that were nominated for Best Picture. Nominees in the screenwriting categories are decided by the members of the screenwriting branch of the Academy: each branch gets to choose the nominees for its category or categories, and then the entire Academy votes on the nominees to choose the winners. (The entire Academy chooses both the nominees and winners in the Best Picture category.) This suggests that the screenwriters can recognize good writing, but choose not to produce much of it in order to appeal to the more cretinous people in the industry upon whom they depend for work. I’m pretty happy with all the nominees in this category; I haven’t seen Vera Drake, although now that it’s been nominated for Best Original Screenplay but not Best Picture, I want to.

Who Will Win: John Logan, The Aviator

This is the category I’m probably least sure of this year. The way I’ve made these predictions I sort of have The Aviator running away with the evening, and it doesn’t really feel like that kind of year. Still, The Aviator is the only film here that was nominated for Best Picture, so who the hell else is it going to be?

Nominees:

Who Should Win: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor, Sideways

It’s not his best film, but I’d really like to see Alexander Payne win an Oscar, and it might as well happen this year, before he goes and commits some horrible train wreck of a career move, like making a concert film or something.

Who Will Win: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor, Sideways

...and they’d damn well better win, too, because the day the Academy gives awards to both Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke in a single horrifying instant is the day I shave my head and renounce all worldly pursuits. Of course, I was talking that way before the election, too, and I didn’t do anything about it. I’m a big talker.

Nominees:

Who Should Win: Super Size Me

I hope Morgan Spurlock wins and then dumps his hectoring vegematarian girlfriend, who then spends the rest of her life lamenting everything she missed out on because she couldn’t stop being such a judgmental hippie freak. Not that I’m bitter about women right now! Because I’m not! At all!

Who Will Win: The Story of the Weeping Camel

This one looked like a crowd pleaser, although I didn’t see it so I guess I don’t really know. The docco branch of the academy seems to have dialed back the suck factor a bit in recent years, so who knows, maybe I’ll actually be right.

Not Missing: Fahrenheit 9/11

It’s not missing because Michael Moore withdrew it from consideration in the documentary category in hopes that it would increase his chance at a best picture nomination, which it didn’t get—proving once again that Moore is both (a) a vitally necessary voice in today’s political landscape and (b) also kind of a dick.

Well, that was fairly unpleasant; let’s hope 2005 brings some decent movies, or at least that some of those sequels turn out to be halfway watchable. Go watch the broadcast on your local ABC affiliate Sunday, February 27, starting at 5pm Pacific, then report back here. Peace out.

—Paul
February 24, 2005

“Let us sleep, my wife. Let us sleep.”
—Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), Hotel Rwanda

2005

Paul's Oscar Pix

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