The Academy Awards spectacular is only a few nights away, and the big question on everyone’s mind is: Who am I wearing? (That’s a secret between me and my wardrobe dude, Rodney.) What I can tell you is how to make a few jermajesties off the gala event.
Most of the categories are already decided. The Artist for Best Picture (-900). Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist) for Best Director (-600). Christopher Plummer for Best Supporting Actor (-4000). Octavia Spencer (-2000) for Best Supporting Actress. All are cost-prohibitive locks. But luckily I was able to find a handful of profitable opportunities that will fill your pockets with loot you can lose in a few weeks on the play-in game of the NCAA tournament. Have I ever steered you wrong? Nevermind. I miss football.
If I were feeling less generous and more cynical on this holiest of all Oscar-calendar mornings, I might say that to decipher this year’s Academy Awards contest, we need only look for inspiration to the GOP presidential race. The Artist is Mitt Romney — desperate to please, doesn’t stand for anything in particular, not especially popular with the general public, will eventually keep most of its money offshore, and, though dinged up and trash-talked, will probably cross the finish line first by default. The Descendants is Newt Gingrich (emotionally unsteady, hard on wives, doing better than expected, but probably can’t go all the way). Hugo is Rick Santorum (a little slow, doesn’t really like anything that changed in the culture in the last 80 years). And The Tree of Life is Jon Huntsman (believes in evolution, probably a little too classy for this field).
I’d like to thank the Academy for throwing an extra mystery at those of us who treat predicting the Oscars as something between a hobby and a blood sport: This year, we have to figure out not only which movies will be nominated, but how many. After concluding that the appropriate number of Best Picture contenders was five for 65 consecutive years, and then 10 for two consecutive years, what the Academy’s board of governors has now settled on is “from five to ten.” How can we narrow that down? Well, the Academy did offer one clue by revealing that when it experimentally retabulated the ballots from 2001 through 2008, the results yielded, in different years, five, six, seven, eight, and nine nominees — but never ten.
By Mark Harris at
Jason Merritt/Getty Images Jason Merritt/Getty Images
It’s over. No more surges or collapses, no more micro-measurements of momentum, no more fingers to the wind. Voting for the Oscar nominations has closed, and the results will be announced bright and early on Tuesday, January 24, so every day this week I’ll be rolling out my predictions. Take these to the bank! Actually, please don’t. It’s not easy trying to crystal-ball the collective, aggregated taste of Pedro Almodóvar and Ernest Borgnine and Peter Dinklage and Olivia de Havilland and the guy who shot The Wedding Planner and the costume designer of Vanilla Sky. Throw in more than 5,000 other voters and you have, at best, barely educated guesswork. With that in mind ...
The next month of the Oscar campaign — from today until January 13, when nomination balloting closes — is in some ways the most interesting phase of the process. There are no more tea leaves to read, no more wild cards, no more embargoes on the expression of opinion, no more “precursor” awards that could seriously reshape the race. As Hollywood shuts down for a vacation, thousands of Academy voters will watch the contenders — or, more importantly, decide which contenders they feel like watching. And the tectonic shifts that result can be so gradual that you won’t know anything has changed until you realize a couple of weeks from now that a particular movie has somehow lost momentum or pushed forward in the pack.
What a frenetically busy weekend it was in the handing out of shinies and sparklies and mantel-trinkets to chronically underappreciated movie people, who at other times of the year often have to survive for weeks without winning anything. Critics’ groups in Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco announced their honorees, as did online critics in New York; conclaves in Detroit and Houston revealed their lists; and the American Film Institute named its 10 best movies. That’s a lot of noise! All of these simultaneously live-tweeted prizelets are microtwitches in the Oscar race, and it’s true that come ballot time, no Oscar voter is going to find himself frozen in indecision, his pen hovering above his ballot as he frets, “But dare I go against Detroit?” However, it’s still possible to pull some larger trendlines from this surge of hyperbolic over-celebration of film achievement. And if it’s not, let’s pretend it is.
In thinking about the race for Best Picture this week I found myself drifting unhappily back to the 1980s, specifically to a stretch during which the Oscars reacted to an uncertain (i.e., post-Raging Bull) period in high-end American moviemaking by retreating to a safer, more virtuous and conservative definition of "prestige" films. In a period of just seven years, Best Picture Oscars were won by Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Amadeus, Out of Africa, and The Last Emperor. Some of those movies were good, and all of them had their virtues. But collectively, all they told us about the world and times in which they were made is that apparently nobody in 1980s Hollywood wanted to think about 1980s America.
This year’s Best Picture contest is starting to feel afflicted by a similar sense of what I would call belligerent nostalgia. The two movies to win high-profile prizes so far, The Artist and Hugo, are both being hailed as odes to the early days of cinema. But really, they’re not. The Artist tells you everything it knows about the painful transition from silents to talkies in its first 10 minutes: It’s an undeniably charming but extremely slight comedy-drama that mimics the most basic elements of silents (They were black-and-white! The screen wasn’t wide!), but seems more engaged by their poignant quaintness than by the visual language, wit, beauty, complexity, or psychological richness of the movies it purports to honor. And as enchanting as it can be to enter the glittering, hermetically sealed but vividly three-dimensional toy chest/train station universe that Martin Scorsese has created in Hugo, there is something slightly self-adoring about the story it tells. Hugo is not a valentine to the dawn of movies — it’s a valentine to people who send those valentines, a halo placed lovingly atop the heads of cinephiles and film preservationists. (And, not incidentally, film critics and Oscar voters.)
There are many ways of looking at a Best Actor Oscar race. You can ask yourself who gave the year’s strongest performances. You can think about who’s overdue, who’s surprising, who works the circuit effectively, who exceeds expectations, who elevates his movie the most by his presence in it. But ultimately, the question that decides the nominations is always this one: Who do actors want to vote for?
This year, that may be tough to answer, since Best Actor is shaping up to be an extremely unusual race. In Column A, we have three Goliaths: George Clooney for The Descendants, Leonardo DiCaprio for J. Edgar, and Brad Pitt for Moneyball. And in Column B, we have a whole bunch of Davids. The problem for the Davids is that they’re not Goliaths. The problem for the Goliaths is that voting for Davids is usually a lot more fun.
The book isn’t out and the man is still being mourned, but nothing can stop Hollywood from its business of moviemaking. Over the weekend, news leaked that Sony Pictures was nearing a seven figure deal to option Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography, Steve Jobs, with the goal of bringing the Mac messiah’s life to the screen as soon as possible. On its own merits, a film about Jobs is a no-brainer — and hell, Noah Wyle has a ton of free time these days. Besides, both The Social Network and Moneyball proved that compelling films can come from narrative-challenged business stories. No, what’s curious isn’t the subject, it’s the studio: Sony.
It’s a tough time for screen villains these days. Russians are out, unless they’re billionaire tycoons hiding their motives behind basketballs. Terrorists? Sharks? Alan Rickman? Passé, passé, passé. That’s why we’re thrilled to note the recent emergence of a new and nefarious threat to Hollywood heroes everywhere: the dreaded daughter.
There is no official beginning to the fall Oscar race, but if there were, the arrival of Moneyball last week would be the equivalent of the starter pistol. Reviews for the movie — which, appropriately, opened on the first day of autumn — might be falling just a hair short of the zeitgeist-invoking ecstasies that greeted last year’s The Social Network, with which it shares a studio, a producer, a screenwriter, and a willingness to play fast and loose with its source material. But the critical reception has been more than good enough to put the movie on everybody’s long list for best picture, director (Bennett Miller), actor (Brad Pitt), supporting actor (Jonah Hill), and adapted screenplay (Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin), at least until the rest of this year’s contenders open. I say long list, not short list, because right now, there’s no such thing as an Oscars short list. The best a potential nominee can do is to secure a spot atop a big roster of “maybes” and then hope that, over the next three crowded months, five more appealing candidates don’t materialize.
If you've read any Baseball People's reactions to Moneyball, Bennett "The Good Capote One" Miller's film adaptation of the Michael Lewis bestseller Moneybeane: One Handsome Rageoholic's Quest to Buy a Playoff Ticket With a Fistful of Loose Change, you now are probably aware that the movie takes certain liberties with the facts of the real-life story of the 2002 Oakland A's. For example: Jeremy Giambi was not signed to help fill the gaping statistical hole left by the departure of his MVP-caliber brother Jason, he was already on the team; the A's were comprised of more than just three or four oddball, superficially flawed players; and so on. Though I am loath to point them out because an auteur should have near-total freedom to manipulate reality in the name of compelling storytelling, here are some other inconsistencies you may miss if you're not a baseball fanatic watching with an eagle eye.
After years in Hollywood hell, the movie adaptation of Michael Lewis' Moneyball stepped into the on-deck circle today with the release of its first trailer. Plaguing the three directors (David Frankel, Steven Soderbergh, and, finally, Bennett Miller) and screenwriters (Steven Zaillian, Stan Chervin, and, finally, Aaron Sorkin) who took turns developing Moneyball was the problem of translating the book's more advanced concepts — sabremetrics, traditional versus progressive front-office models, the budgets of baseball franchises, the minutiae of player contracts — into a story that made sense even to baseball illiterates. Their solution: Turning the Oakland A's into Hickory High and Billy Beane into Norman Dale.
