Blue Will Get Gold- 2010 Oscar Predictions

The nominations for the 82nd Academy Awards have been announced.

Not very many surprises in there, but here goes with my thoughts.


Avatar is a good blockbuster. It was the most enjoyable blockbuster of last year in my estimation, but is it an Oscar calibre film? No! I suspect the Academy disagrees, nominating it as they have for nine awards. It's tied only with The Hurt Locker for the most nominated film at this year's ceremony. The thing is, with its $2bn box office receipts and the massive hype surrounding it pre-release, people are determined to be polarised on the matter.

Internet message boards are full of fanboys who declare it to be the best film ever, and if you don't agree with that to the letter, you must hate it, and thus be blind in some way or other. And vice versa- if you don't despise the film, that makes you its biggest fan in certain quarters. It's an OK film, everyone! And it's OK that it's OK! Story-wise, it's certainly not perfect, and it does suffer from Cameron's seeming inability to cut the flab from the running time of his films. Hell, you can find my original review here. Most of what I said still holds true for me, except for one sentence in the last paragraph.

"It's probably not going to win an Oscar for Best Picture"

Sorry, past Mark, but you were wrong. That was a key case of me underestimating James Cameron's ability to dress Dances with Wolves up as a Direhorse and convince everyone that it the best film of the year. So sadly, with the voters blinded by the 3D-abetted box-office receipts instead of remembering they gave Best Picture to this very film 20 years ago, I predict that Avatar will win Best Picture on March 7th. Not because it's the best film nominated, but because that's what the Academy's like.


The only two films I haven't seen out of the other nine nominees are The Blind Side and Precious, both of which are yet to be released in the UK. Five of my top ten favourite films of last year made the shortlist, but I was most pleased to see A Serious Man, Up and District 9 in there. However, I can't see any of those films beating the sheer hype juggernaut of that blue-cat-people film. Let's just hope Kathryn Bigelow beats her ex-husband to Best Director for her excellent work on The Hurt Locker, which Kevin Smith says would be "a victory for ex-wives everywhere".

To the acting categories, I can't say an awful lot, because I haven't seen The Blind Side, Precious, The Last Station, Crazy Heart, A Single Man, Invictus, The Lovely Bones or The Messenger yet. The momentum seems to be in favour of Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart, Carey Mulligan for An Education, Mo'Nique for Precious and Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds, in their respective categories. A further Avatar related annoyance is in the fact that they didn't nominate the film in one of the categories they actually should have- Zoe Saldana for Best Actress, seemingly opting for old favourite Meryl Streep holding her nose and gurning through Julie & Julia.


As an aspiring writer, I was very interested in the screenplay categories, and was delighted to see In The Loop and A Serious Man get noticed. Up in the Air and Inglourious Basterds are both awards darlings this year, but both will likely be overshadowed in the other major categories by the Battle of the Exes. Expect them to win their respective screenplay categories, though I'd personally have said In The Loop for Best Adapted and A Serious Man for Best Original. But then I don't get to pick- there's probably a good reason for that.

To wrap up then- some of the overlooked films...


(500) Days of Summer
Should have been nominated: For Best Original Screenplay
Why for? It's the most original entry to its genre in years. Besides which, in amongst the bluster (blue-ster?) of Avatar, there wasn't another film this year like Juno or Little Miss Sunshine. Up in the Air was seemingly a de facto entry to that role, but I preferred this film. Good screenplay, well acted- shamefully overlooked.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Should have been nominated: For Best Animated Picture
Why for? Because Fantastic Mr. Fox was rubbish! I know it probably appeals massively to middle-aged voters, but it also excluded Roald Dahl's target audience completely. Also, Cloudy should be up there because it's a lot better than you'd think- a genuinely funny script with some great voice acting and no pretension about itself. It's a film by "a lot of people", not a vanity project for Wes Anderson.

Moon
Should have been nominated: For Best Actor (Sam Rockwell), Best Visual Effects and Best Picture
Why for? Sam Rockwell is amazing in Moon and this really should have been the role that got his consistently great work in supporting roles some kudos from the industry. It also used visual effects to less showy effect than Avatar and on a smaller budget. The Best Picture thing is probably a stretch, but in an enlarged category, it's a real shame this didn't make it into the top ten, in a year where the stigma against sci-fi has been dulled by the likes of District 9.

Me and Orson Welles
Should have been nominated: For Best Supporting Actor (Christian McKay) and Best Cinematography
Why for? Christian McKay is Welles in that film. Maybe they satisfied their real life figure quotient with Matt Damon in Invictus, but I think McKay brought to the screen all of what made Welles the imposing and legendary figure he is. More than that, this is one of the few films that makes you feel like you're in the theatre for reasons that aren't to do with poor pacing- it's down to the excellent cinematography.

A Serious Man
Should have been nominated: For Best Actor (Michael Stuhlbarg)
Why for? OK, so two nominations, one of those for Best Picture, is hardly a snub. On the other hand, Stuhlbarg hasn't been getting the love he very richly deserves for his breakout role as Larry Gopnik. The Coen brothers have enough gold on their mantle and won't lose too much sleep over losing to the prestige pictures. Stuhlbarg will hopefully go on to do more great things, but I'd really have liked to see him get nominated here.

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With that dirty business over for another year, the next bit of Oscars coverage will probably be on March 8th, the day after the ceremony. Maybe I'll don a tux and do my own bloggy awards. As far as reviews go, the next post will probably cover The Princess and the Frog and/or Youth in Revolt.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't give an Oscar to an anti-corporate film if it makes more money than Jesus feasibly could.

The Caine Scrutiny

Britain, Britain, Britain! It's been a pretty good time for British cinema, these last few years- we've had the excellent In Bruges and Is Anybody There? in very recent memory, and of course Oscar glory for Slumdog Millionaire back in February. This post covers the latest cinematic output to come charging into multiplexes, one of which looks likely to repeat Slumdog's Oscar success next year and the other being a bit more like a Daily Mail reader's wet-dream. This is Harry Brown and An Education. As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion on here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.


I'm starting with Harry Brown because what could be more British than that? It's got Michael Caine in it! As regular readers will know, Michael Caine is my all-time favourite actor and I've never seen him give a performance I didn't like. OK, he might have been in bad films, but he's always watchable, whether he's in On Deadly Ground or The Cider House Rules. Here he's the eponymous pensioner whose wife has recently died, leaving him alone living in a rough neighbourhood. So far, so Gran Torino, but when Harry's best friend Leonard is murdered while trying to defend himself from the estate's hellish yobs, Harry gets mad as hell and he ain't gonna take it anymore. So naturally, he gets hold of a gun and turns vigilante on the chavs.

It's sort of typical for a revenge movie that the main character will have slightly flimsy motivation, and that gorehounds will doze through the bloodless overture to a film and wake up when violence starts occurring. What such gorehounds should reckon on at this point is Michael Caine, whose performance is utterly believable and compelling throughout. Harry certainly doesn't start the film as a hardman- indeed, he's afraid to go into the underpass where the yobs hang out on his own, even when he gets a call from the hospital about his wife's condition worsening. We're then shown that his only remaining relationship is with Leonard, played briefly but memorably by David Bradley, and when Leonard's killed, it still takes a while for Harry to go completely out to lunch. This is a fine piece of tension building on director Daniel Barber's part, and Caine's performance matches the material excellently, but it's a shame that such subtlety isn't really employed with everything else in the film.


Once hoodies start turning up dead, a pair of CID officers get on the case, but these are very poorly developed characters. The usually reliable Emily Mortimer has little to work with and just proves slightly annoying. Moreover, the chavs are cartoonishly monstrous, which slightly undermines the social commentary angle of the violence. Alright, so I'm sure there are young people who really are as bad as Noel or Marky in this film, but at the same time, there are many who are pushed to do anti-social things because they're victims themselves- broken families, poor education etc. The film isn't entirely interested in showing that angle, so it actually becomes a chav-sploitation film, to some extent. Barber portrays a broken Britain that can be fixed by violence, so the message of the film becomes entirely too dubious.

It's probably easier to turn your brain off while watching Harry Brown if you're more right wing than I am in your political views. While there's no doubt that these characters deserve the treatment they get at Harry's hands, it's sure to proliferate quite sweeping generalisations about a sector of society that needs to be rehabilitated more effectively than it is at present. All context aside, it's a film that's similar to Gran Torino in more ways than one- a strong central performance makes it what it is, and the performances and supporting characters just let it down. This makes for much more uncomfortable viewing than that film too, but it's worth a look if you have a strong stomach and enjoy Michael Caine's films. If only the latter is true, then Is Anybody There? is still the best film he's made this year.


Harry Brown is Michael Caine's 110th film, and on the opposite end of the spectrum to this screen legend is Carey Mulligan, whose breakout performance in An Education has her being heralded as the Next Big Thing by the type of people who like to predict what the Next Big Thing is going to be. Most famous before this for playing Sally Sparrow in the Tennant-lite Doctor Who adventure Blink, Mulligan plays Jenny, a teenage girl who's utterly bored by the monotony of suburban London in the early 1960s, being pressed to work hard to go to Oxford by her father. Enter David, played by Peter Sarsgaard, a man more than twice Jenny's age who utterly bedazzles the young schoolgirl, seducing her away from her studies with his devil-may-care lifestyle and expensive gifts.

The words "coming of age tale" are bandied around a lot, and have rather bizarrely been attached to the likes of American Pie, a film which had two sequels (well, two that count, anyway) after which none of the characters had gotten any more mature. An Education is fundamentally a coming of age tale about a young girl who learns a hard lesson about the world. More than that, it's about all the things people aren't saying- be they secrets and lies, or the answers to valid questions about what we're doing in life. Jenny is naive and wide-eyed but she nevertheless holds a sharp cynicism about her prospects- her father desperately browbeats her into studying hard so she can go to Oxford, but once the prospect of marrying her off comes around, he encourages her to take a shortcut to the security he wants for her instead. As much as it contrasts with the more phoney coming of age films, it's never entirely po-faced, and screenwriter Nick Hornby gives the film a genial and enjoyable sense of humour.


That humour is best exemplified in Jenny's father, who is played extraordinarily well by Alfred Molina. The man is never more than a couple of seconds away from a rant about all the money he's spending on his daughter, and his narrow-sighted outlook provides for some of the film's funniest moments. But behind that, there's a beautiful moment where his soul is exposed and we can really believe he loves this girl, his daughter. The other standout performance is of course from Carey Mulligan. The rumblings of an Oscar for Best Actress are certainly not unwarranted, and Mulligan makes a remarkably convincing schoolgirl, given how she's actually in her 20s. Much easier to believe than Megan Fox, to say the very least. Her naivety is capitalised upon by Peter Sarsgaard's David, who's creepier in today's context than he perhaps might have been if this film had been released contemporaneously with the period it's actually set in. In the 21st century context, it would be easy to be freaked out from the off by David waiting around outside Jenny's school in his car, but Sarsgaard carries off a quite effortless charm in the role, which makes for excellent drama once his suave veneer wears away.

If there's an issue with seeing An Education in cinemas, it's that you have to go out of your way to see it, for an experience that isn't distinctly cinematic. It's a shame it's playing in so few cinemas, and most will wait until DVD to see this. The bottom line is that the DVD won't be out until next year, and I'm glad I got to see one of the best films of 2009 in 2009, rather than six months from now. Carey Mulligan really is going to be a star, and Alfred Molina joins my select club of great actors who simply aren't in enough films these days. It would be easier to dismiss the film's message as one from a simpler time, but it's a story about a girl who becomes a woman all too quickly. In this age of dubious female role models and teenage pregnancies, when else has it ever been more relevant? Funny, gripping and very watchable indeed.

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If I pair up 2012 and New Moon in the next post, it's possible that the entire blog will not only explode, but implode, with my rage, so perhaps it's best to keep those two separate. Nevertheless, you can be certain that one of those two will be coming up next, and that neither of them will be as good or as watchable as Harry Brown or An Education. So if you've seen the films discussed here, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.