At the risk of joining the “Everything sucks” mindset that seems to define my generation, there’s no avoiding this fact: This year’s Academy Awards were an awful, miserable hellpit, an absurdly grotesque monument to self-commendation that seemed particularly terrible because these are the Oscars, and they are very often very bad, and they are always very self-aggrandizing, so for this ceremony to stand out as being dull, predictable and painful means this ceremony had to be really, really bad.

It says something that the biggest surprise of the night was Meryl Streep winning Best Actress. If Oscar Mascot Meryl Streep winning an Oscar is the most surprising and newsworthy part of your ceremony, your ceremony is probably pretty dull (and there’s also the issue of the films you nominated, but we’ll deal with that in a moment). That being said, the Streep win was actually interesting because — despite her longstanding status as the Greatest Living Actor* — she hasn’t won an Oscar in a generation. Continue reading →

The Oscars are on Sunday! I’ve already shared my complete and utter lack of enthusiasm, but I still want to have my say and show what I think will win and what won’t because if they’re going to have the damn things, no point in ignoring them, you know? Here are my picks:

Best Picture
Nominees: “The Artist,” ”The Descendants,” ”Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” ”Hugo,” ”Midnight in Paris,” ”The Help,” ”Moneyball,” ”War Horse” and ”The Tree of Life”

Should Win: None of the above? None of the above. I know that’s a stupid answer but whatever, it’s my list, and I don’t feel strongly about any one movie on this list being so much better than any other movie. Last year, I felt very strongly about “The Social Network,” “Toy Story 3″ and “Black Swan” being better than “The King’s Speech.” I could have passionately argued for “Inception” or “True Grit” or “Winter’s Bone.” The year before, I felt strongly about “Up” and “The Hurt Locker.” This year, while I really liked several of these movies, none of them make me feel that they deserve to win over the inevitable triumph of…

Will Win: “The Artist.” It’s a wonderfully made, technically brilliant ode to the heyday of cinema, and that combination of nostalgia and reverence for old-school Hollywood is way too powerful for Academy voters to resist. It’s a very good movie, and it’s also reliably inoffensive (unless you’re Kim Novak and therefore are easily offended). The damn thing isn’t “Crash” or anything; it’s a good movie in a weak year, and it’s also the perfect frontrunner for this year. And it’s charming! It’s thoroughly charming.

Dark Horse: I know it won’t win, but “The Tree of Life” is the most ambitious movie up there and a truly remarkable visual experience as well as a film from an auteur who doesn’t work all that much. It’s also a rambling, contemplative, plot-less movie, so again, I don’t expect it to win. If only.  Continue reading →

The Oscars are on Sunday! Can you feel the excitement? Can you feel the palpable sense of joy possessing the entire country — really, the entire world — at the chance we have to celebrate this year’s Oscar contenders? The movies that are up for the major Oscars must matter because they are the movies up for the major Oscars, ex post facto and so on and so forth.

Unless…not. Unless the movies up for this year’s Academy Awards are not the kinds of movies that get people fired up. Unless the Best Picture nominees this year are all fine and everything, they’re perfectly decent movies insofar as movies go, some of them are even excellent films worthy of discussion and multiple viewings, but none of them are the kinds of movies that really warrant arguing for or against in any meaningful way. Unless so many of the categories are foregone conclusions rewarding middling films. Unless the movies that connected with the general culture are, as usual, largely absent from the proceedings. And that would only happen if the Academy was some kind of hegemonic group that in no way represented the demographics, tastes or interests of the population, and if that were the case it would mean that the entire Academy Awards are nothing more then an overly-long, self-congratulatory-and-bordering-on-masturbatory ode to the tastes and and opinions of a select few (the One Percent, to use the current parlance) masquerading as the recognition of the very best in cinema in a given year. And that can’t be the case, or else why would we even care about the Oscars? Continue reading →

On Tuesday morning, the 84th Academy Awards nominations will be announced. We can parse the snubs, dissect the choices and generally act shocked and scandalized that one person or film was included over another, clearly superior person or film, because that’s what we do.

But not today! Today, we try to predict something that really defies proper predicting. I mean, anybody who has paid even a little attention to the Oscar race could predict 80 percent of the nominees. There are a few curveballs — the surprise nods, the fact that nobody knows how many nominees will land in the biggest category (for the the biggest awards show of the year, people) — but the majority of it is settled. The long, slow slog of the Oscar season gives shape to the race.

Whatever, this is all a long way of saying let’s discuss what we think we know and what we think we think we might think going into next week’s announcement of the nominations: Continue reading →