And the Oscar Goes To...

I'm on hiatus from the blog for a few weeks as I prepare for a top-secret venture I can only reveal in a few weeks' time. But the Oscars are less than 24 hours away, so I am compelled to offer up my thoughts. It was a particularly astonishing year of film-making - all nine Best Picture nominees are movies I enjoyed and which thoroughly deserve to be nominated. There are many categories where it feels genuinely unfair to pit such great work against each other and the only equitable result would be a five-way tie. But someone has to
emerge the victor, so here are my picks and predictions.

Best Picture & Best Director: Ordinarily, one would assume the director of the Best Picture should also win Best Director. But the Best Picture category is expanded to include nine movies, whereas only five directors get nominated. The Oscars are always a battle between movies that offered a cinematic spectacle versus movies that delivered a powerful social message. This year, that battle is being fought between 12 Years a Slave and Gravity. Therefore, I predict (and hope) that 12 Years a Slave will take Best Picture, but Alfonso Cuarón will be honored for his masterful direction of Gravity. It's the only fair way to honor two very different but equally powerful movies that made a lasting impact on audiences this year.

Best Actress and Actor in a Leading Role: Cate Blanchett and Matthew McConaughey are almost certain to win for their intelligent, nuanced, and compelling performances in Blue Jasmine and Dallas Buyers Club. These actors understand and inhabit their characters and unflinchingly bring them to life. I don't begrudge their many accolades, but I do wish they could share with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Amy Adams. Ejiofor is simply mesmerizing as Solomon Northup, a man who endures so much pain yet relentlessly continues to hope for freedom in 12 Years a Slave. This is his first nomination and I hope that his second won't be far behind. And Adams, who is long overdue for an Oscar for her fantastic work over the years, is fierce and brilliant in American Hustle. Another overdue actor is Leonardo DiCaprio, who is excellent and funnier than I ever expected in The Wolf of Wall Street. But comedy never wins at the Oscars - that's what the Golden Globes are for.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Lupita Nyong'o and Jennifer Lawrence are the main contenders for their respective performances in 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle. Nyong'o absolutely has to win: she is impossibly brilliant in this movie, and if she loses to Jennifer Lawrence, there will be riots. I adore Lawrence, but she already won last year, and it is ridiculous to pit that neurotic and comedic performance in American Hustle against the heartbreaking agony undergone by Nyong'o's character in 12 Years a Slave. Comedy versus drama is always a challenge at the Oscars, where drama almost invariably wins out, but if I could orchestrate a tie, it would be between Nyong'o and June Squibb, whose hilarious and acerbic performance in Nebraska truly elevated that film. This is the 84-year old Squibb's first Oscar nomination after a long career in film, TV, and theater, which is in perfect contrast to the 31-year old Nyong'o who is nominated for her very first cinematic performance. Shouldn't both these first-timers be rewarded?

Best Actor in a Supporting Role: This is almost a lock for Jared Leto's performance as a trans* woman in Dallas Buyers Club. It's a compassionate portrayal and a great performance, but Leto's rather thoughtless acceptance speeches make me less enthusiastic about him winning for what is a fairly stereotypical Oscar-baiting role. Instead, I would love to see the statue go to Barkhad Abdi for his scintillating work in Captain Phillips. Here's a man who was working as a limo driver before being cast in a movie opposite Tom Hanks, and he completely holds his own throughout the film. He is both brutal and sympathetic as a fierce, desperate Somali pirate and he fully deserves this award. His acceptance speech would be wondrous, but for now we need to just hope Leto will keep his foot out of his mouth and accept his award gracefully.

Best Original Screenplay: I demand that Spike Jonze win for Her. That movie is a revelation, the most inventive, intricately realized piece of imagination you will witness in theaters all year. You may or may not love the movie, but you cannot deny that Jonze has created an eerily realistic world that is both familiar and bizarre. His main rival will be David O. Russell, who has yet to win an Oscar and might get one for writing American Hustle since that film seems certain to be shut out in every other category. I'm all for rewarding people who are long overdue, but this is no category for sentimentality. All the words are on the page and the best writer should win. Interestingly, Russell and Jonze are friends and advised each other on their scripts. So can we just accept that a win for Her is a win for both writers and move on?

Best Adapted Screenplay: Conventional wisdom points to John Ridley for 12 Years a Slave, though the Writers Guild rewarded Billy Ray for Captain Phillips instead. However, I am torn between two completely different nominees - Philomena and Before Midnight. The Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy is a work of art that is fueled solely by the dialogue crafted by writer-director Richard Linklater and his two stars, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. I would love to see their work rewarded in some fashion and this is the only category they are ever nominated in. However, I have been fascinated with Steve Coogan ever since I saw him in The Trip, and he and co-writer Jeff Pope have danced on a razor's edge with their script for Philomena. Blending comedy and deep tragedy in unimaginably clever ways, they make you laugh and cry and fully immerse yourself in this remarkable story. For that, they completely deserve to win an Oscar. Plus, they're British - their acceptance speech would be self-deprecating and hilarious.

Those are all the categories I feel strongly about. The rest are technical awards on which I can't take any authoritative stance, or the documentaries, foreign films, and shorts, none of which, I'm sorry to say, I have seen. I hope to remedy this eventually, perhaps when the documentaries all end up on PBS' Independent Lens. But for tomorrow night, I hope there are some upsets to liven up the otherwise stodgy proceedings. It will be hard to complain about any of the winners, but some winners will certainly make me happier than others.