Inessentials

Every year there are a few surprises at the Academy Awards that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Here’s your chance to wow your party guests by yelling out a surprise correct pick just before the names are read. This is your guide to Oscar night upsets.

Best Picture: Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, A Serious Man, Up, Up in the Air

Conventional wisdom says this is Avatar‘s race to lose, but if it loses it will lose to The Hurt Locker. There’s also been a little speculation recently that Inglourious Basterds is making a late push and could pull a dark horse upset. While Avatar is still the best bet in this category, I think it is worth considering how the method of Oscar voting for Best Picture could lead to an upset here. Academy members rank the nominees from 1-10. In counting the ballots, all ballots are stacked by their first place vote. If one picture has 50%, the counting is over. If not (which is much more likely), the film with the lowest total is eliminated, and those ballots’ second place votes are counted. This process continues, eliminating one picture at a time, until there is a film with 50% of the ballots. What does this mean? It means that a film could have only a medium-range number of first place votes, but if it has a lot of second- and third-place votes, it could win Best Picture. And this seems pretty likely. The films most likely to be eliminated first (A Serious Man, An Education) seem more likely to have The Hurt Locker ranked higher than Avatar. So unless Avatar begins with a very sizeable lead (say 25% of first-place votes with nothing else over 10%), I think it is very likely that The Hurt Locker or Inglourious Basterds wins. Also, the Academy loves violent films (No Country for Old Men, The Departed, LOTR: Return of the King, Gladiator), which favors The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds. Also, a science fiction film has never one; Avatar (or District 9) would be the first.

Best Director: James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, Quentin Tarantino, Lee Daniels, Jason Reitman

Everyone has handed over this award to Kathryn Bigelow already. Since no woman has ever won Best Director, many assume now is the time. But of course, that’s as much a reason to say Bigelow won’t win as that she will. That logic could also work with Lee Daniels, since he is only the second African-American to be nominated. (The first, John Singleton, didn’t win for Boyz n the Hood.) Remarkably, QT has only been nominated once before; if IB picks up some technical awards early in the night, he could pull an upset here. But I think the real upset will be Cameron defeating his ex-wife Bigelow. The Academy loves traditionalist men who command large epics. For the last six years, Best Picture and Best Director have gone together, so it’s hard to believe that the Academy will go for Bigelow for directing and Avatar for film. If there is a split, expect it to be the reverse, due to the voting procedures.

Best Original Screenplay: Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), Alessandro Camon & Oren Moverman (The Messenger), Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (A Serious Man), Bob Peterson & Pete Docter (Up)

This category usually goes to the most inventive or innovative script and rarely aligns with Best Picture. Going by innovation, QT is the winner here. But the Academy has recently been leaning toward first-time writers (Dustin Lance Black, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola), which could favor Mark Boal. Oddly, if Hurt Locker gets shut out of the other major awards, expect a win here; if it does well elsewhere, then this one is for Tarantino.

Best Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz, Vera Farmiga, Maggie Gyllenhall, Anna Kendrick, Mo’Nique

There is nearly universal consensus that Mo’Nique will run away with this award. But that runs against a strong precedent. This is the award that Hollywood gives to some pretty young thing like a glistening tiara in a beauty pageant. Cruz, Weisz, Blanchett, Zellweger(!), Zeta-Jones, Connelly, Jolie, Sorvino, Tomei… the last 15 years have almost always gone to some under-35 up-and-comer. (Sorry, Carey Mulligan, but you need a fake accent or heavy make-up to win Best Actress like Witherspoon, Theron, or Kidman.) Reasoning that Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga will split the votes of Up in the Air fans, this award goes to Gyllenhall. But don’t be too surprised if Up in the Air snags one or two acting wins, and this is the place to do it.

Best Actor: Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Colin Firth, Morgan Freeman, Jeremy Renner

Bridges has this one locked up, the experts say. But will enough people have seen Crazy Heart to give it to Bridges? He hasn’t been nominated in 25 years, but don’t give too much attention to an actor’s being “due.” Freeman could win simply because the Academy so loves bio pics (Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jamie Foxx). But everybody loves them some Clooney, and who wouldn’t like to see Firth win? Especially since, like Hoffman and Penn, he is playing a gay man. I have trouble seeing how Renner wins this, but since no one is talking about anyone but Bridges, let’s at least mention his name, too.

Best Actress: Sandra Bullock, Helen Mirren, Carey Mulligan, Gabourey Sibide, Meryl Streep

This is being pitched as a heavy-weight fight of Bullock vs. Streep. Recently, Streep has only been the bridesmaid and never the bride, while Bullock has (understandably) never been nominated before. I can see an Erin Brockovitch-type win here, but that film had Steven Soderbergh’s pedigree behind it. This award never goes to a performance in a Best Picture winner, but that doesn’t seem to be a concern here. (Mulligan’s and Sibide’s films are nominated, but are very longshots.) Let’s call this one for Bullock because she used an accent and because we know she’ll squander the Oscar love on terrible films, just like Halle Berry.

So those are the categories where there’s a stand-out favorite, but why there could be an upset.

Still not enough to impress your friends? Tell them Up in the Air has no shot because only one comedy in the last 30 years has won Best Picture (Shakespeare in Love, during Miramax’s heyday). The Hurt Locker would be the lowest grossing film to ever win Best Picture. (Obviously, Avatar would be the highest.) When Christoph Waltz wins best Supporting Actor, tell them that Tarantino had given up on making Basterds until he found Waltz to play the multi-lingual Col. Landa. Tell your friends that you think Michael Giacchino should win Best Original Score for Up, and that you love his work with J.J. Abrams on television (Lost, Fringe, Alias) as well has his film scores for Abrams and for Pixar (The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Star Trek).

Spoilers for The Proposal (but nothing you couldn’t figure out from the trailer)

The problem with romantic comedies today is that they are neither romantic nor comedic.

That’s the attention grabber, the obvious joke, the easy jab. But it’s not quite true.

Of course there are truly unromantic films with no chemistry between the leads that pass as romantic comedies. And of course there are truly unfunny films with stale jokes and unwatchable delivery. After all, Jessica Alba and Dane Cook still find work.

But let me suggest that the single largest problem with the genre of Hollywood romantic comedy is not lack of charisma (Clive Owen, George Clooney, Paul Rudd, and apparently Bradley Cooper; Julia Roberts, Amy Adams, and, given the opportunity, Anna Faris). It’s not that the romantic comedy has been supplanted by the man-as-boy comedy (the Judd Apatow and Adam McKay/Will Ferrell films) or the bromance (I Love You, Man, The Hangover), although that has taken its toll. The biggest problem with the romantic comedy is that it has become mired in a genre convention that it surely doesn’t need: the humorless resolution.

Watching the passable exercise that is The Proposal earlier this summer, I was struck by how few jokes arrived in the final 45 minutes of the film. The first 45 minutes gave us Sandra Bullock (who I find immensely cold and irritating, so her role as a cold and irritating boss was welcome) and Ryan Reynolds (carving out a nice niche for himself with above-expectation rom-coms) getting engaged so she doesn’t get deported. (Don’t worry, she’s Canadian! = Not a terrorist!) Predictably, they have to sell this to Reynolds’ family, who had higher hopes for him. Hilarity (or a passable, low-fat alternative) ensues. With sexy results.

I’m not giving much away to say they end up falling in love (but how will they ever admit it to each other … and themselves?). What was surprising was that the film managed to have a light tone, some funny even though predictable bits, and a not terrible laugh-to-sigh ratio. So why did I leave the film with a sour taste in my mouth? There was absolutely nothing funny about the last 30 minutes, in which we are supposed to be carried along by nothing more than our desire to see these two can’t-admit-it-but-they’re-love-birds make it. We don’t care. We are given no reason to care. But even if we were, why do the jokes have to stop? Where is it written that the comedy has to stop when the romance starts? William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles didn’t need to stop the jokes when they moved to the bedroom. That’s where the best stuff happens. Cary Grant, Carole Lombard … name your favorite classic Hollywood comedian who could play a romantic lead and every one of their successes was built upon their continuing the jokes even after they realize they’re in love. When Cary Grant is convincing His Girl Friday that she is still in love with him and not her fiance, the film is just beginning, not ending.

Romantic comedies have too fine a pedigree for us to allow these current incarnations to continue telling us that romance begins when the joking stops. Romantic comedies work when there is romancing through comedy, not romance usurping comedy.