Some Pre-Oscar thoughts

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Best Supporting Actor:  Christolph Walz completely deserves to win Best Supporting Actor – and he will. Me and Orson Welles’ studio made a huge mistake and pushed Christian MacKay for Best Actor instead of Supporting for his amazing performance as Orson Welles; MacKay belongs among the nominees here. And the funniest performance as a Supporting Actor – maybe in the decade – is Fred Melamed as Sy Ableman in A Serious Man; Melamed creates a hilariously pompous and blatantly manipulative character as the guy who seduces the protagonist’s wife and then expects the hero to bend over backwards to make everything convenient for them; I’ve never seen such an earnestly self-entitled character. Woody Harrelson is also great in The Messenger.

Best Documentary: The Cove is nominated for Best Documentary, and I’ve heard that it is very, very good. But it’s been a strong year for documentaries. My favorite,
Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains, may actually be a 2008 release. But I think that Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 and Tyson are nomination-worthy. Other goods documentaries this year include Outrage, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, The September Issue, More Than a Game, The Way We Get By, It Might Get Loud, and Thrilla in Manilla.

Best Animated Feature:  Just saw The Secret of Kells, and I have no idea why it has a high Metacritic score or why it is nominated for Best Animated Feature.

Best Supporting Actress:  Penelope Cruz is nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Nine, but her better performance was in Broken Embraces.

Best Foreign Language Film: And why wasn’t Broken Embraces nominated for Best Foreign Language Film? It was one of my top five films of the year, and the Academy loves Almodovar. I am rooting against The White Ribbon – a brilliantly made film that tells a disappointingly shallow story. The White Ribbon is a depiction of a village in which every father is emotionally, physically and/or sexually abusive, all of the kids are very creepy and a mysterious someone is doing some very, very bad things. That could all work toward a good film, if the message were something a little deeper than “Germany’s WWII generation had very mean parents”.

The Most Fun Oscar Pool

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Here’s our Oscar Pool. If you’re worried about who’s going to win Best Sound Editing or Best Animated Short, you’re taking this too seriously.

1. Number of winners cut off by music.

2. Number of winners turning the wrong way to leave stage.

3. Number of winners who thank their parents.

4. Number of presenters/winners wearing dresses with very daring cleavage.

5. Number of presenters/winners wearing dresses that expose lower back.

6. Number of gawd-awful ugly dresses (by consensus of those in the room with you).

7. Number of references by Alec Baldwin to his nude scene in It’s Complicated.

8. Number of times that Jack Nicholson is on screen.

Tiebreaker #1: Total Oscars for Avatar.

Tiebreaker #2 (if necessary): Number of minutes the show goes over time.