One Category at a Time: Director

The Best Picture race is a dead heat this year, which is such a rare occurrence in this age of the preferential ballot (which famously failed to determine the PGA's preference), that for the first time in the years I've been following the Oscars, we have to consider the Best Director race apart and separate from the Best Picture race. Now I hear you exclaim, "But, Awards Prognosticator!... We had to do that last year when Argo won Best Picture and Ang Lee won Best Director!" This is true. But last year was an odd exception wherein the DGA vote came so late, that it was unable to influence the Academy's directors branch into even nominating the Best Picture winner for Best Director. This year, however, there is little doubt that whichever film wins Best Picture will be one of the contenders for Best Director as well, but we still have to analyze that contest separately from Best Picture due to the closeness of the race. We can't afford the luxury of simply assuming that whatever wins the top prize naturally wins for its director too. It may well be the case at the end of the day, but we can't assume that as we have in years past. This time, there's more nuance than that.

Firstly, the frontrunner...

DGA nominees

With four of the Academy's five Best Director slots seemingly sewn up by Steve McQueen, Alfonso Cuaron, David O. Russell, and Paul Greengrass, the only question going into today's Directors Guild of America nominations was who would occupy that fifth slot?

Turns out to be Martin Scorsese, whose Wolf of Wall Street has now hit all the major guilds except SAG (who may have not seen it in time). Now this doesn't necessarily mean Marty is a shoe-in for a Best Director nod from the Academy, whose directors branch is much smaller -- and more prone to left-field choices -- than the DGA. But this does bode well for the film's Best Picture chances. It was looking like a contender on the bubble for a while, but it seems to have caught on with the industry.

Review - Nebraska

How do you define the essence of a man who's no longer here? No longer here in a mental sense, that is. Alexander Payne and veteran character actor Bruce Dern venture to do just that in Nebraska. As a character study about a somewhat tragic figure nearing the end of life's journey, it is rife with fascinating nuance, although not without expense to the story it tells on the surface.

Woody Grant (Dern) is a millionaire. Or so he believes. The letter he received in the mail clearly tells him that he's a “winner”, and failing to recognize the blatant scam, he sets out on foot from his home in Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim his million dollars in person. Surely, any reasonable kin would agree that the time has come to put Woody in a home, but his son David (Will Forte) has other thoughts. Much to the chagrin of his harried mother (June Squibb) and his older brother (Bob Odenkirk), David plays along with his dad's delusion, agreeing to drive the stubborn codger to Lincoln until Woody accepts the reality of his quest. Stopping over in Woody's hometown – the depressed community of Hawthorne – gives some old family and friends a chance to catch up, but word about his money luck starts to get out of hand.

One Category at a Time: Director

The die has been cast in the Best Picture category for several months now, but it seems that every year pundits start pontificating the possibility of a Picture/Director split. Is it just boredom with the scent of inevitability?
Is it wishful thinking from the frontrunner's detractors?
Is it skepticism that a first-time nominee can win over more established, Oscarless filmmakers? Whatever the reason, every year some people seem to come up with some excuse to predict a split. But don't do it! Splits are rare and when they do occur there's no consistent rhyme or reason as to why.

One Category at a Time: Adapted Screenplay

As it is with Best Original Screenplay, the crop of Adapted Screenplay nominees this year includes the two legitimately best adapted screenplays of the year, but also a couple I could have done without. It's still a good lineup on the whole, and the race between the two frontrunners is just close enough for me to have an active rooting interest in this category.

LA Film Critics annoint The Descendants

It's been a busy day for critics awards, starting off with the Boston Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Online handing out their year-end accolades, and capping off with the renowned LA Film Critics Association. But while the BSFC and NYFCO were trend-following, handing top honours to current Oscar frontrunner The Artist, the LAFCA was going their own way, shutting out the crowd-pleasing silent film entirely in favour of some more offbeat choices.

Ultimately, however, it was Alexander Payne's overrated The Descendants coming out on top, but I absolutely dig the support shown for The Tree of Life, with Terrence Malick winning his first directing prize of the season, while Emmanuel Lubezki remains undefeated on the year for cinematography awards. In addition, I love that they gave Best Screenplay to Asghar Farhadi's brilliant Iranian drama A Separation, for which I will post a brief review sometime this week.

By the way, someone should tell these critics groups that they aren't doing Jessica Chastain any favours by giving her these blanket awards that encompass her entire 2011 filmography. They need to get behind ONE performance in order to help her to a nomination

Best Picture
The Descendants

Runner-up: The Tree of Life

Best Director
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life

(Runner-up: Martin Scorsese, Hugo)

National Board of Review annoints "Hugo"

Scorsese's venture into the realm of 3D family fantasy has yielded a somewhat surprising Best Picture and Best Director winner with the National Board of Review. I admit to being somewhat sceptical of it chances in the major Oscar categories, but maybe I've been underestimating it.

The other big winner, after being shut out by the NY Critics two days ago, was Alexander Payne's The Descendants, landing awards for George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, and its screenplay.

All winners after the cut.

Review - The Descendents

The Descendants, Alexander Payne's eagerly anticipated followup to Sideways, tells a sad, drawn out tale of grief and growth with a mellow Hawaiian flavour.

George Clooney plays Matt King, a landowner from Oahu whose wife is in a terminal coma following a boating accident. With his two daughters Alex and Scotty (Shailene Woodely and Amara Miller) struggling to cope in their own unique ways, and with a pending business transaction that would make Matt and his extended family very wealthy at a moral cost, the stress has already reached a smothering level. The discovery that his wife was cheating on him with a slick realtor is only the grain of salt that tips Matt's scale in the direction of (for once in life) taking action, setting him a personal mission to confront his wife's lover in the hopes of finding some kind of closure – or maybe something else entirely.

One Category at a Time: Best Adapted Screenplay

There look to be a lot of previous Oscar nominees (and winners) for screenwriting back in play this year for high profile adaptations. Certainly more than in the original field, but that doesn't make it that much easier to predict from a year out.

Alexander Payne won this category for his last feature film Sideways with his writing partner Jim Taylor. He's got two new collaborators in Nat Faxon and Jim Rash with whom he's adapted the Kaui Hart Hemmings novel The Descendants, which fits with Payne's style of balancing smart humour and real emotion. I'm looking forward to it.

Another past Oscar winner in this category is Christopher Hampton, who received his Oscar back in 1989 for Dangerous Liaisons which was based on his own play. For this year he's adapted another one of his own plays with the word ''dangerous'' in the title; A Dangerous Method, which explores the work of and relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud.

And yet another pair of previous Adapted Screenplay winners with a project in the race this year are Steve Zaillian (Schindler's List) and Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), who have teamed up to adapt Moneyball, Michael Lewis' nonfiction account of Billy Beane's computerized drafting system of MLB prospects, for the screen. I'll be interested to see where they can go with it.

George Clooney and Grant Heslov were nominated five years ago for writing Good Night and Good Luck, and are collaborating again to bring us their adaptation of Beau Willimon's play The Ides of March. Political dramas are never an unwise bet, and this one has enough star power to make it a big awards magnet for Clooney and Heslov.

Back in the realm of more traditional Oscar bait is Steven Spielberg's War Horse, based on Michael Morpurgo's novel which is also coming out as a Broadway play this year. Richard Curtis and Lee Hall have written the screenplay, which is sure to catch many an Academy member's fancy with its sentimental story and hefty WWI setting.




Predicted five:
A Dangerous Method
The Descendants
The Ides of March
Moneyball
War Horse

Also consider: Albert Nobbs, A Better Life, Coriolanus, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Iron Lady, The Help, The Skin That I Inhabit, Water for Elephants, We Bought a Zoo, We Need to Talk About Kevin.

One Category at a Time: Best Director

I think it's safe to say that the days of the lone Best Director nod are over. With ten nominees for Best Picture, your Directing nominees are going to be five of those ten. From my ten predicted Best Picture nominees, the five I'm guessing to land a Director nod are the ones who have been nominated there before.

The first, and most famous of whom, is Steven Spieberg. who was last nominated in 2006 for Munich. He looks to have a high-profile year with The Adventures of Tintin likely to make a big box-office impact and War Horse to tantalize awards-voting bodies at year's end. Spielberg has been one America's most important filmmakers since the 1970s, and assuming that he'll earn the Academy's attention is seldom far-fetched.

Also nominated in 2006 (for Capote) was Bennett Miller, directing this year's baseball-centred drama Moneyball. Some are quick to chalk his Capote nomination up as bit of a fluke in a weak year, but he's a sensible director who works well with actors. With Oscar-winning screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian handling the script and an impressive cast signed up, Miller has a good opportunity to make something really good out of this.

And would you look at this, another person who was last nominated in 2006 (for Goodnight and Good Luck), the multitalented George Clooney. His political drama The Ides of March, which he also wrote and produced with collaborator Grant Heslov, lands this year and is poised to be a force to be reckoned with on the circuit. Clooney has a terrific cast with lots of awards potential. Multiple acting nods is often good news for the director's chances.

Last nominated in 2005 for Sideways, Alexander Payne has not made a feature film since. Everyone's very excited to see him return this year with his take on the acclaimed novel The Descendants. Payne is adept at tackling drama and humour in balanced measure, and the story of a soon-to-be single father trying to reconcile with his two daughters may benefit from his sense of poignancy and levity.

Terrence Malick has only ever made one film the Academy really responded to (The Thin Red line for which he was nominated in 1999), but he's only ever made a handful of films anyway. His filmography is so small and spread out that fans of his are always hungering for his next feature, often forced to wait several years. It feels like we've been waiting for The Tree of Life forever, but now that it has a release planned this spring, we can finally see if it was worth the wait.

Predicted five:
George Clooney, The Ides of March
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Bennett Miller, Moneyball
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Steven Spielberg, War Horse

Also consider: J.J. Abrams Super 8, David Cronenberg A Dangerous Method, Cameron Crowe We Bought a Zoo, Drake Doremus Like Crazy, David Fincher The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Jodie Foster The Beaver, Phyllida Lloyd The Iron Lady, Jason Reitman Young Adult, Tate Taylor The Help.

One Category at a Time: Best Picture (part 1)

Now that the 2010/11 Oscar season is a comfortably distant memory, I suppose I'd better toss up some early guesses as to who the nominees will be for next year's awards. I must confess that I'm struggling to fill my ten Best Picture predictions somewhat. There only appears to be a handful of awards-bait projects lined up for a 2011 release, and I somehow doubt that we'll see an animated feature or summer blockbuster up for the big prize this year. I gladly invite tiny independent films to surprise me, because for the moment, I can't pretend I'm that excited about many titles this year.

But on to the predictions. The biopic has always been a decent threat for Oscar's crown, and one with potential is David Croneneberg's A Dangerous Method, starring Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen as pioneering psychiatrists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. The screenplay was adapted by Christopher Hampton from his own play, an approach which netted him an Oscar over 20 years ago for Dangerous Liaisons. It's period setting and focus on historical figures makes this project prime bait, but... with David Cronenberg at the helm? I'm actually a bit intrigued.

Alexander Payne hasn't made a feature film since winning his Oscar six years ago for Sideways. His long-awaited followup, The Descendants, headlines George Clooney as a powerful landowner in Hawaii who tries to bond with his two wild daughters in the wake of a tragic accident involving his wife. Sounds like a downer, right? Wrong. The novel on which the film is based has been praised by critics for its balance of audacious comedy with emotional heft, a style for which Payne has a proven talent.

Getting back to more traditional Oscar bait, it's hard to argue that Dreamworks' upcoming take on the popular novel The Help seems to fit the bill. Set in a 1960s Mississippi, it tells of an aspiring writer (Easy A's Emma Stone) who shocks her tightly-knit Southern community by interviewing African Americans who have spent their lives in servitude of the wealthy white. Gently rocking the boat on racism as appeased Oscar before (even as recently as 2009 with The Blind Side), and the film's formidable female ensemble sure looks enticing to me.

Besides The Descendants, George Clooney is involved in another potential awards pony this year called The Ides of March, in which he stars and directs. He also co-wrote and co-produced it with Grant Heslov, the man alongside whom he was nominated for Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). The film is a political drama also starring Ryan Gosling, Paul Giamatti, Marissa Tomei, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Max Minghella. Can you say, "SAG Ensemble award"?

Will Meryl Streep finally get that third Oscar this year? It's certainly a possibility given that she'll be staring as Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first – and heretofore, only – female Prime Minister, in The Iron Lady. Having the air of "Importance" is always helpful when courting Oscar, and this subject offers a plethora of such "Important" issues to touch on. Combine that with what many are anticipating will be yet another charismatic performance from Streep, and I'd say there's potential.

Five more Best Picture predictions coming Monday.