One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

Best Original Screenplay is just another in a long line of categories this year that really has me scratching my head. With the absence of any film that has a remote chance of winning Best Picture, the doors are pretty much wide open. Sure, we can sort of (but not completely) eliminate the two contenders without a nomination in the top category, but among the three that do, it's very much anyone's game.

One Category at a Time: Actor

The Best Actor race this year was at its most interesting and competitive before the nominations. The big question was which of the six leading men in the hunt would be left off the Academy's ballot. It was never a question of who would end up winning the whole thing, as that has been obvious for a couple of months now.

My Awards nominations: Actor

Guess I'd better get started on these. I was going to leave them for after the Oscars, but it sorta just dawned on me how much time we have to kill until then. I still have a handful of films to see, so I'll start out with some of the categories that I've already pretty much set in stone, such as today's category: Best Actor.

Gotta say, this was by far the toughest one for me to narrow down this year. There are at least ten or eleven absolutely terrific performances that would be welcome here, and the quality of this year's leading men is well represented by the Oscar lineup as well. But tough decisions have to be made, so the five that I chose are:

Review - Flight

Denzel Washington owns the screen in Robert Zemeckis' Flight, a “sobering” portrait of alcoholism and the agonizing journey towards making that all-important first step towards recovery: Admitting there's a problem.

Airline pilot 'Whip' Whitaker has such a drinking problem. We first meet him downing beers and snorting cocaine the morning of a passenger flight to Georgia. A mechanical malfunction (a frequently alluded to “act of God”) causes the jet to nosedive into the much talked about crash sequence that whitens knuckles and stretches physics. Even though he's bombed on vodka and cocaine, Whip manages – in a gambit only an intoxicated man would dare attempt – to invert the plane and glide it upside-down in order to restabilize in time for a crash landing. For the time being, Whip is a hero for saving 96 of the 102 souls on board, but when toxicology reports emerge indicating his drunk condition at the time of the crash, he becomes the subject of a criminal negligence investigation that drives him even further to the bottle.