Oscar Picks, 2011

Best Picture

Should win: 127 Hours
Will win: The King's Speech

The King shall reign supreme, even though Aron Ralston's epic one-man journey moved me more.

Best Director

Should win: David Fincher, The Social Network
Will win: Fincher

Many of the directors who made me excited about watching movies this year (Danny Boyle, Christopher Nolan, Derek Cianfrance) weren't nominated. Still, Fincher has been doing innovative work since the '80s, when he directed music videos for Aerosmith and Madonna. He deserves it.

Best Actor

Should win: Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Will win: Colin Firth, The King's Speech

Mark Zuckerberg may not think we deserve his full attention, but Eisenberg certainly had mine for every second he was onscreen. Too bad Firth is a shoo-in.

Best Actress

Should win: Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine
Will Win: Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right

Please, God: Make the Academy voters come to their senses. Don't let them give anything to Black Swan or Natalie Portman. How about Michelle Williams, who gave an almost uncomfortably revealing performance in Derek Cianfrance's amazing Blue Valentine? If not, then how about Annette Bening, even though she was way better in Mother and Child? Thanks, pal.

Best Supporting Actor

Should win: Christian Bale, The Fighter
Will win: Bale

I love every performance in this category, but when Christian Bale is good – like, American Psycho good – he can't be beat. I'm still not 100% convinced he wasn't actually on crack during the filming of this movie.

Best Supporting Actress

Should win: Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit
Will win: Steinfeld

The Academy wants to give something to the Coen Brothers' widely acclaimed Western, and Steinfeld presents the best opportunity. Her plucky, resourceful, deeply Protestant teenage avenger is one of the year's most riveting movie creations.

Best Original Screenplay

Should win: Mike Leigh, Another Year
Will win: Christopher Nolan, Inception

I think Nolan will pull a surprise upset, if only because the Academy wants all those fanboys to shut up about how he was robbed of directing noms this year and in 2008. But, forced to choose between Brits, I'll take Leigh over Nolan any day of the week.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Should win: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Will win: Sorkin

He wrote the following, generation-defining line: "As if every thought that tumbled through your head was so clever it would be a crime for it not to be shared." I rest my case.

Best Animated Feature

Toy Story 3

Best Foreign Language Film

In a Better World

Best Documentary Feature

Restrepo

Best Film Editing

The Social Network

Best Cinematography

Inception

Best Visual Effects

Inception

Best Art Direction

The King's Speech

Best Costume Design

I Am Love

Best Makeup

The Wolfman (click here to read more about this category)

Best Original Score

Inception

Best Original Song

"If I Rise," 127 Hours

Best Makeup: "The Wolfman"

The night before they filmed the famous murder-suicide scene, Stanley Kubrick told Vincent D’Onofrio on the set of Full Metal Jacket: “Just remember, it has to be big. It has to be, like, Lon Chaney big.”

You’ll get a good idea of what Kubrick was talking about when you watch Chaney’s memorably anguished performance in The Wolf Man (1941). Here’s a horror movie so romantic, scary and well made it took Hollywood nearly 70 years to screw it up.

The Wolfman (2010) stars Benicio Del Toro, an actor who in previous films has proven himself a worthy successor to Chaney. His performances as Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects, Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Jackie Boy in Sin City are so larger than life the screen can barely contain them. The director and screenwriters of Wolfman keep Del Toro on a very short leash. He spends most of his screen time either hidden behind makeup or delivering monosyllabic lines. The filming of this movie must have been a very frustrating experience for him.

Inexplicably written by two of Hollywood’s most talented scribes – Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en) and David Self (Road to Perdition) – the script makes numerous alterations to the original film, none of them for the better. The girl the Wolf Man pursues is now the fiancée of his dead brother, a change that has exactly one effect: to make his character an insensitive douchebag. The new film also adds an origin story that’s no less absurd than, say, "The Honking" – the Futurama episode in which an evil “were-car” kills people because it has the left turn signal from Charles Manson’s VW.

The filmmakers have pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of making a werewolf movie with no subtext. In the original, the Wolf Man was a genuinely tragic figure, an essentially decent but aloof man who ignored the warnings of the villagers who told him “even a man who is pure in heart… may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms.” There’s real poignancy when Chaney says, “I can’t help myself.” The film uses the werewolf as a metaphor for “the good and evil in every man’s soul.”

Exactly what is this new Wolfman about? Beats me. The werewolf has given the horror genre some of its most thematically rich movies. Ginger Snaps is a brilliant werewolf movie that puts a terrifying spin on the adolescent “growth spurt”. Even a B-movie cheapie like I Was a Teenage Werewolf gives us something to think about, as Stephen King notes in his epic 1986 novel, It, when Richie Tozier goes to see it:

“…the kid who turned into the werewolf was full of anger and bad feelings. Richie found himself wondering if there were many people in the world hiding bad feelings like that.”

The Teenage Werewolf is Richie’s worst nightmare. I can’t imagine The Wolfman keeping Richie Tozier or anyone else up at night. It had the opposite effect on me: I fell asleep watching it at the theater.

The movie has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Makeup, thus proving once and for all that you don’t have to make a good film to qualify in one of the technical categories. Thanks to modern visual effects, we get to see the transformation of the Wolf Man in real time. But I actually prefer the use of dissolves in the original film; you don’t stop and think, “I’m looking at a special effect.” I’m rooting for Barney’s Version to win in this category, but Wolfman is the more obvious choice. Rick Baker has won six Oscars for Best Makeup, and I’m guessing he’ll be collecting his seventh.

Best Makeup: "The Way Back"

Peter Weir’s new World War II adventure movie, The Way Back, is being presented by National Geographic Entertainment. That seems appropriate, because the movie is loaded with awe-inspiring scenery. It has an all-star cast and an absorbing narrative, but it never fully engages our emotions.

Jim Sturgess, the gifted young British actor from Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, plays Janusz, a Polish prisoner of war who’s convicted of espionage and sentenced to 20 years hard labor in a Soviet camp. There, he meets an American named Mr. Smith (Ed Harris) and a Russian hood named Valka (Colin Ferrell). The men escape and make a seemingly impossible journey through the snows of Siberia, over the Himalayas and into India. Did I mention they walk the whole way?

The movie is pictorially riveting, especially the early scenes in the labor camp. The men huddle together in the mines and in cramped living spaces, their shaved heads glimmering in the dark. The movie loses some of its spark during the initial stretch of the journey. Most cinematic odysseys (like Cold Mountain and Into the Wild) rely on the introduction of new characters, but the escaped inmates in The Way Back are walking from, uh, Siberia. Not a lot of people to meet out there (or so I’ve heard).

The story finally comes to life again when the men meet Irena (Saoirse Ronan), a spirited teenage runaway. “Don’t you talk to each other?” Irena asks her less-than-loquacious comrades. “In the camps,” Mr. Smith answers, “you learn to speak as little as possible.” While that’s probably true, it doesn’t make for very compelling characters. The script tends to sacrifice drama on the altar of realism.

One of Australia’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Weir has made movies that have basically haunted me all my life (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dead Poets Society, Fearless, The Truman Show). He failed to move me with this one. His previous effort, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, showed a similar flair for exacting verisimilitude. But it also gave us a captivating human drama to get caught up in, bringing Captain Jack Aubrey and his naturalist friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, to vivid life.

Admittedly, I have a bias against these kinds of Westernized international pictures. They always feature nonsensical performances like the one by Colin Farrell, an Irish actor playing a Russian criminal speaking in broken English (“I know about survive – all my life”). There’s only so much slack you can give to a movie like this.

The movie’s sole Oscar nomination is for Best Makeup. Hair and makeup artists Edouard F. Henriques, Gregory Funk and Yolanda Toussieng do a remarkable job of showing us the physical effects of the journey, in the form of chapped lips, swollen feet and bruised faces. Henriques and Toussieng were nominated for Master and Commander but lost to The Return of the King. I think this year’s winner will also be a movie in the sci-fi & fantasy genre. I’ll discuss it in my next post.

Best Makeup: "Barney's Version"

This is the first in a series of posts about the 83rd Academy Awards; the winners will be announced Feb. 27.

In addition to my Oscar predictions, I thought it might be fun to review each of the nominees in a particular category. I’m too lazy to review all 10 Best Picture nominees (or all five Best Actor nominees, for that matter). That leaves Best Animated Feature and Best Makeup; each category honors three movies. Frankly, I’m too upset that Tangled didn’t get nominated to even look at Best Animated Feature, so Best Makeup it is.

An American Werewolf in London won the first Best Makeup Oscar in 1981. Since then, some extraordinary films have been honored: Peter Bogdanovich’s Mask, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and Eddie Murphy’s Norbit. Okay, some are more extraordinary than others. Like costume designers and FX wizards, makeup artists can be like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the G.I. Joe movie, spinning gold from lousy material.

The 2010 nominees for Best Makeup are (drum roll, please): Barney’s Version, The Way Back and The Wolfman. My personal favorite is Barney’s Version. It stars Paul Giamatti as Barney Panofsky, the producer of a ridiculous Canadian soap opera called Constable O’Malley of the North. The movie’s storyline spans 25 years, covering relationships with friends and family, as well as a drunken fight that may or may not have ended in Barney killing a guy.

Like nominees in previous years (Amadeus, A Beautiful Mind, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), this is one of those movies where actors age through cosmetics. We see Barney and friends when they were all young and beautiful and living in Rome, and later when he’s stricken with Alzheimer’s disease. Makeup supervisor Adrien Morot does a fantastic job; Giamatti’s transformation is especially convincing.

I’m rooting for Barney’s Version to win this year’s Academy Award for Best Makeup because it tells the best story, and Morot’s make-up work enriches the storytelling. Without cosmetic enhancement, the final scene between Barney and his dad (played to wry perfection by Dustin Hoffman) wouldn’t have quite the same impact. It’s one of the truest, funniest, most heartbreaking scenes I’ve seen in a movie theater in the past year.

I’ll review the other nominees for Best Makeup in my next two posts.

ManBearPig

This is one of the more striking images from True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen’s acclaimed adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel. Set in post-Civil War Arkansas, the movie stars Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl who hires a bounty hunter after Dick Cheney shoots her father in the face. Oops, I mean after Tom Chaney shoots her father in the back. I spent a lot of time imitating Chaney’s accent after I saw this movie, which features spectacular performances by Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and less prominent actors like Domhnall Gleeson and Ed Corbin (pictured above). This morning, Mo’Nique announced the film had been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress. To read a full list of nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards, click here.