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Magazine
CINEMA
And the winner is …
SANDEEP BHADRA
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Who will sweep the Oscars this year? A look at the nominees and their chances.
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Who’ll take home the statue?: Clockwise from left: “Away from Her”, “Atonement”, “Sicko”, “Operation Homecoming”, “There Will Be Blood”, “Juno”.
Now that the writers (and sympathetic actors) picketing outside Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles have reached accord with the suits, we can expect that the red carpet leading in to the venue of the 80th Academy awards can be laid; and that the awards cer
emony will be nothing like the disappointment at the Golden Globes.
Consequently, we may attempt to peer into the collective mind of the Academy and place our bets about the Oscars. The Critics’ Choice awards by the Broadcast Film Critics Association has always been fairly accurate in predicting the nominees for the Academy awards, but that is not quite the same as predicting the winners. The polls closed on Tuesday, February 19 and so the decisions, much like the Democratic presidential nominations, are still quite open.
In the lead
“No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” are in the lead with eight nominations each. “No Country…”, a crime thriller set along the Texas-Mexico border, is the favourite for the Best Picture, having won the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice awards. Moreover, the Screen Actors Guild chose the film for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
In adapting Cormac McCarthy’s page-turner to film, the Coen brothers have admirably retained the rapidly shifting scenes and multiple narrative threads of the original. If the Critics’ Choice Awards are any indication, the Coen brothers stand to win the award for Best Director, even though both Cannes and the Golden Globes favoured Julian Schnabel for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”.
Finally, the other film shot in Texas, Paul Thomas-Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”, stands a good chance, making it a three-way battle for the Best Director award. Odds are that Daniel Day Lewis, having won the BAFTA, Golden Globe and the Screen Actor’s Guild awards, will take the Best Actor Oscars home for his role in “There Will be Blood”. There seem to be no other serious contenders for that award.
The Best Actress category is more likely to be an upset, as it pits two relatively unknown actresses for the golden statuette: Julie Christie for her touching portrayal of an Alzheimer’s patient reaching out for emotional closure after an incident of marital infidelity scars her perfect marriage, and Ellen Page for her impossibly sassy take on teenage pregnancy as the title character in “Juno”. Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times seems to have picked his winner – Page, but it may be argued that her performance owes its merit to the screenplay, for which “Juno” has been nominated as well.
Surprise omissions
Jean-Dominique Bauby’s adapted memoir, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is not an English language film. Director Julian Schnabel retained the French original in an effort to keep Bauby’s rich language, intact. Left almost entirely immobile after a stroke, Bauby, a former editor of Elle magazine, used his eyelids to blink and signal each alphabet in the book to his scribe. The film won the Golden Globes and the Critics’ Choice for the Best Foreign Language film, and was a nominee for the Golden Palm at Cannes. So, the film’s absence in the Best Foreign Language category is somewhat puzzling.
“Persepolis”, the other film from France, is also absent in the Foreign Language category. Instead, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up as a child in Tehran during the Islamic revolution and later estrangement from her family as a teenager in Vienna, now shares the nomination for Best Animated Film with “Ratatouille” and “Surf’s Up”. Marc Forster’s “The Kite Runner”, also shot almost entirely in Farsi is absent from the list of nominees for the Foreign Language category. Perhaps the only non-surprise in this category is the exclusion of India’s entry: “Eklavya”.
“Atonement”, adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel, is nominated for the Best Film and the Best Adapted Screenplay categories, but it shares nominations in both categories with “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” (adapted from Upton Sinclair’s Oil!) Moreover, it is quite likely that “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” will win out in the Adapted Screenplay category. The Original Screenplay nominations are considerably easier to predict: “Juno” stands head and shoulders above the other nominees (“Lars and the Real Girl”, “Michael Clayton”, “Ratatouille” and “The Savages”)
Javier Bardem, who plays the cold psychopath with a curious taste for murder weapons in “No Country for Old Men” took the Best Supporting Actor awards at both the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice awards; naturally, he is favoured to win the category at the Academy Awards as well. Philip Seymour Hoffman, the other nominee, bursts into the CIA assistant director’s office and onto the screen as a larger-than-life, Greek-American special agent in “Charlie Wilson’s War”.
Gender benders
John Travolta, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in the Golden Globes for playing a woman in “Hairspray” does not find mention in the list of nominees for the category in the Academy Awards.
However, the other gender bender, namely Cate Blanchett’s “representation” of Bob Dylan in “I’m Not Here” makes it to the Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars; Blanchett won the Golden Globe for the Best Supporting Actress. Thirteen year-old Saoirse Ronan, who plays the central character of the precocious young girl in “Atonement”, is among the youngest nominees ever for the same category.
In an election year, it would be remiss of us to ignore the Documentary category. War weighs heavily on the list: In addition to the very literally named “No End in Sight”, the Academy has also nominated “Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience” and “War/Dance”to the Documentary Feature category. It is a pity though, that “Sicko”, Michael Moore’s rather strident take on the American health care system is the only feature on the health care issue. While Hollywood is by no means the barometer of political sentiment in the U.S. — that distinction goes to little towns in swing states in middle America —- the list of nominations reflect the critical considerations in the presidential race: war and health care.
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