Oscars Post-mortem, Part 2: Ranking the Numbers

I love me some musical numbers at the Oscars. I know not everybody does, but I've always considered it a vital part of the show. Even though three consecutive years of Craig Zadan and Neil Meron wore me down a bit (and ABC too, given how reigned in the musical moments have been these last two years), I never say 'no' to some song and dance on Hollywood's holy night. I even welcome time for the orchestra to perform the Best Original Score nominees, which used to occasionally earn a 3-4 minute spotlight, but have been largely relegated to 10-second soundbites lately.

While Sunday night's warbling was limited to a mere five performances, I treasure them all, and do soever much enjoy celebrating them through a quick (and mostly arbitrary) ranking:

One Category at a Time: Best Original Song

With little in the way of industry precursors to go by (The Golden Globe and Critics Choice are the only two that come to mind), trying to anticipate who wins Best Original Song at the Oscars can be a crap shoot. However, whenever those two precursors agree on a contender that's also Oscar-nominated, it tends to win.

My Award Nominations: Original Song

It promises to be a slow news week for awards watchers, with little to do but twiddle our thumbs while the number crunchers at PwC determine the nominees who will be announced next Tuesday. So now seems an apt time for me to start running through my own year-in-review rituals. I'll be listing nominations for my personal ballot periodically over the course of the next six weeks, culminating in my Top 20 and my selection of winners the Friday before the Oscars.

It was a stellar year for movie songs (pleasant U-turn from 2015's wasteland), especially thanks to three original musicals providing us with catchy new tunes. Theoretically, I could have filled all five of my Best Original Song slots using any one of them, but in the spirit of spreading the wealth, I made the executive decision to only select a single entry from each. It wouldn't be fair otherwise, especially to some non-musicals with worthy tracks to feast our ears upon.

Here are the final five I've settled on, followed by a longer-than-usual list of second tier contenders:

Top Five Pet Peeves of the 2015-16 Oscar Season

The Oscar derby has been dead and buried for over a week now, but as usual I still have a few nuggets to get off my chest before calling it a year. Read on, if you dare, and behold my final purge of negativity, after which I can say "Okay, I'm over it" (hopefully).

5. The Big Short's Adapted Screenplay sweep

I know I've been harping on Adam McKay and Charles Randolph's well-meaning housing crisis comedy for months, but I just don't see what made this such a unanimous choice for writing awards. Especially when the competition hasn't been this stacked in years. I mean, good God: Carol, Room, Brooklyn, The Martian, inexplicable snubbee Steve Jobs, and even the long shots from 45 Years to Mr. Holmes write circles around The Big Short's misguided gimmickry, which gets by on sounding a lot smarter than it truly is. The lone bone tossed to Aaron Sorkin by the Golden Globes is going to look very good ten years from now (Heck, it looked good the moment it happened). At least other season sweepers like Inside Out and Son of Saul can be justified on quality, but I'm not drinking the Koolaid on this one.

My Award Nominations: Original Song

Eesh.

That's all I have to say about the selection there was for Best Original Song.
Not every year can be vintage, but these five aren't bad (though I had to make a stretch or two).

One Category at a Time: Original Song

Not gonna lie: This doesn't promise to be an especially enjoyable Oscar telecast from a musical standpoint. These five tunes don't exactly form a chipper playlist. Only this time the music branch can't be blamed, as they were clearly starved for choice. On the one hand, it's guaranteed to keep me in suspense until the envelope is opened. On the other, it's also guaranteed to reveal a winner that I'm not all that excited about.

Early Oscar Predictions: Music

Obviously, it's impossible to judge a film's soundtrack before it's released, or even recorded which may be the case with many of this year's upcoming prospects. Thankfully for us obsessive prognosticators, the music branch has some old habits that can lay the foundation for early guesswork. For starters, they are notoriously insular, usually only choosing one or two first-time nominees per year in the Best Original Score category.

So who are some branch favourites with multiple irons in the fire this year?

Top Five Highlights of 2014-15 Oscar Season

Yesterday I unloaded most irksome bugaboos of the 2014-15 awards season in a flurry of list-ified rage. Venting is healthy, right? But if there's one thing healthier, it's accentuating the positive. So as my final word (I swear!) on the Oscar derby that ended almost a week ago, here are my five favourite treasures of the season:

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 4: Telecast Highlights

I always record the Oscars so I can go back and rewatch it later the same week.

It's practically a necessity since I'm often so distracted with my prediction lists and my agony and ecstasy over the winners and losers and whatnot, that I miss some of the little moments that make this whole meat parade worthwhile!

There are still glimmers of fun left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as awards season. So allow me to parse through the 3+hour telecast and highlight the diamonds in the rough. And believe me, it was rough.

Things didn't start off so bad, though. Rather than force host Neil Patrick Harris to struggle through an opening monologue, they fed him one solid joke and then he was off to the races with his song-and-dance routine, "Moving Pictures".

This show got 99 problems, but graphic design ain't one!

Lovely sets and animated title cards.

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 1: The Results

Happy New Year, everybody!

With the Oscars having come and gone (after three long hours at the end of three long months), it feels like 2014 is now officially over, and a new cinematic cycle has thankfully begun. But, since I, like most Oscar obsessives (or any kind of obsessive), have trouble letting go, it'll be about a week before I finally cease writing about 2014 in this space. Heed the lessons learned by Cheryl Strayed
(for whom they picked an awful Best Actress clip, btw); Closure takes time.
And so I must always allow myself several days to fully process the mad rush of euphoria and anguish that floods me before, during, and after this annual event.

My post-dated “live” blog of the Oscar telecast itself will arrive later this week, followed by my usual top ten of personal highs and lows of the 2014-15 awards season. But for today, its all about who won and who lost, and my immediate reactions to those, which I should document for posterity before my mind instinctively turns to 2015-16.

For starters, my own prediction results:

My Award Nominations: Best Original Song

There weren't that many films with good original songs this year (basically there was Begin Again and then everything else), but the songs that did I decide upon I rather like. Have a listen to my five Best Original Song nominees after the cut:

One Category at a Time: Original Song

It feels strange whenever there's a year in which the music branch doesn't do something outright embarrassing. I guess you could disparage the disqualification of Antonio Sanchez's percussive Birdman score, but that's not so much a fresh embarrassment as the branch simply continuing to follow their own foolish rules.

But in regards to their Best Original Song selections, we have nothing on the level of 'Alone-Yet-Not-Alone-gate' from last year, or the hilarious two-nominee field from 2011. The music branch mostly obeyed the rules, singling out the three main songs that most people expected to be nominated, plus shining a light on couple of lower-profile tunes without any embarrassment.

Or at least without any overt embarrassment.

Review - Selma

The image we're greeted with at the onset of Selma, staring directly at us, is the face of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But this is not the Dr. King we know from the sound bites and TV footage that immortalized him as a mighty orator with a famous dream. This Dr. King looks uncomfortable, restless and out of his element as he rehearses his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech in the privacy of his hotel suite.

The Dr. King he himself sees in the mirror is unfamiliar to him as well; All dressed up to accept an award for peace when he knows how much violence and struggle is yet to be endured in his campaign for civil rights. Just as he gazes at his reflection, contemplating how far he's come and how far he's still to go, so too does Selma hold a mirror up to modern America and ask its people to consider the same questions.

Director Ava DuVernay (working from her largely rewritten draft of an original script by Paul Webb) has no intention of taking the easy way around the story of the protest marches King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, or of dampering its echoes in the troubled racial politics of today. Though set in the summer of '65, it is a film very much about the here and now, told with a verve and vitality that historical docudramas often lack.

Sunday Top Ten: Pet peeves and highlights of the 2013-14 Oscar season

The big show is coming up on being only a week old, but it feels like ages ago, so I think it's high time for me to finally put the season to bed. 2014 is now here, with its own slate of hotly anticipated Oscar hopefuls in the pipeline, and it's time to get to work on scoping out those, but not before capping off the awards derby that was with my annual list of highs and lows.

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 2: Sweet closure

My full review of the Oscar telecast will be up sometime in the next few days, but there's one microcosm of the show I wanted to address while it's still fresh in my mind.

Far and away the most heartbreaking part of Sunday's ceremony, for me at least, was seeing Adele Dazeem (aka: Idina Menzel) struggle through her performance of the Oscar-winning power ballad "Let It Go" from Frozen. To say I was psyched for this moment would be an understatement. I fully hoped and expected it to be the musical highlight of the night. But much as I love Menzel -- and Lord knows she doesn't have to prove her talent to anybody at this point in her celebrated career -- I couldn't close my ears and pretend not to notice how nervous she sounded; A rushed half-beat ahead, voice quivering (not in commanding vibrato either), and you can definitely hear it cracking on that last high note. Her disappointed facial expression afterwards says it all. Was she distracted by John Travolta's dyslexic mispronunciation of her name? Was it the damp air from all that rain (maybe the cold DOES bother her anyway)? Whatever the cause, it was more than a little saddening.

But whatever. She's a stunning talent even on her off days, and there was never any question that she'd take the bitter with the better and rebound in no time. She, and fans of the song, can finally see her nail it live courtesy of Jimmy Fallon and the Roots, who accompanied her in this uber-cute rendition of the song played on classroom instruments. Watch it below:

My Award nominations: Original Song

As is the case every year, it's usually a bit of a struggle to find enough original songs that I feel significantly add to the films in which their used. But in the end, I always manage to cobble together five. Listen to my five favourite Original Songs of the year:

One Category at a Time: Original Song

Oh, where to begin with this category. Last year it looked like the music branch had maybe taken a step towards not embarrassing themselves on a yearly basis, having recently overhauled their voting system to yield five respectable (if not unanimously exceptional) nominees. Well, that streak was short-lived, as this year saw the suspicious nomination of the ultra-obscure Alone Yet Not Alone for music branch executive committee member Bruce Broughton, who apparently sent out emails soliciting votes. The Academy went and humiliated Mr. Broughton even further by revoking the nomination, but then decided not to replace it with another song, which is so sad and unfair for that sixth place song, whatever it may have been.

It's all a moot point anyhow. It's not as if Alone Yet Not Alone's disqualification has suddenly cleared the path for anything else to win, although the situation raises some questions about the where to draw the line on campaigning that merit discussion and possibly review. But now that the dust has settled, let's look at the four that remain:

"Alone Yet Not Alone" scandal yields yet more controversy...

In a surprising move that may be unprecedented (I trust you superior Oscar buffs will correct me if I'm wrong)*, the Academy has revoked a nomination! The recipient of this unusual penalty: Best Original Song ex-nominee Alone Yet Not Alone.

There was quite the dust-up on nomination day when this esoteric fringe movie that no one had ever heard of sprang from the lips of Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs as a nominee for its title hymn "Alone Yet Not Alone". A fervent investigation by every confused Oscar pundit on the web soon revealed that the song was written by former Academy governor and current music branch executive committee member Bruce Broughton, and suspicion immediately began to fly regarding the legitimacy of this obscure nomination.

Well, little less than two weeks after that announcement, Ms. Isaacs has something to add, and Broughton's not going to like it. The Board of Governors has rescinded the nomination after discovering that he had emailed music branch members during voting to make them aware of his Best Original Song candidate, which is a big no-no with upper Academy brass.

Unfortunately, they have no intention of naming a fifth nominee, which means just two years after revising the rules to guarantee five Original Song nominees, the music branch has already goofed up and given a slate of four! This branch just can't help embarrassing itself on a near annual basis.

*(I just remembered Nino Rota for The Godfather, but I'm sure there are other examples)

Review - Frozen

Casual moviegoers with kids to entertain for an hour or so can be forgiven for thinking that the latest animated effort from Walt Disney Studios is little more than a slapsticky romp about an impish snowman. That is, after all, the only clue they've been given by the TV ads and movie posters, but those only represent the tip of the proverbial ice berg. With Frozen, Disney actually makes as earnest an attempt as they have in the last 15 years to recapture the magic of their 1990s musical heyday, with a Broadway pedigree cast and not one, but two new Disney princesses front and centre.

The story, written by Shane Morris and co-directors Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck, is based very loosely on Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, although its vague Scandinavian setting seems to be all that was retained from Anderson's original 19^th century fable. This re-imagining tells of two princesses in the fictional land of Arendelle. Elsa, the eldest and therefore first in line to inherit the crown, was born with the magical ability to form ice and snow with the slightest gesture. Anna, the youngest, adores frolicking in the indoor winter wonderlands her sister can conjure, until a near-death accident convinces their parents that the girls should be separated and Elsa's powers kept under wraps.

Early Oscar predictions - Part 5

Here are the last four categories I have to run down before finalizing my early predictions: Score, Song, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing.