Before we get to this week’s DVDs, The Academy Award nominations were announced last week, and as usual, there’s nothing surprising here. You’ve got your fine performance by a recently deceased actor (Heath Ledger, Best Supporting Actor, The Dark Knight), your film about a charmingly naive Southern man overcoming his disabilities to learn overwrought lessons about life and fatherhood (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Best Picture), your Costume Design-nominated period piece that no one will remember in three years (The Duchess), and, your Meryl Streep nomination (Best Leading Actress, Doubt).
Predicting the outcome of the Oscars is akin to predicting the outcome of a sports game. You do your research, try to determine which “team” has the right pieces (read: emotionally provocative death scenes), call your cousin in Vegas and have him put $1,000 on the Steelers (read: Milk), pick up a 12 pack of MGD (read: 30 pack, PBR), and enjoy the show. Here are my picks:
Best Actor in a Leading Role
For the acting categories, it’s always best to consider which role is the most daring, which requires the most capitalized Method. This puts Brad Pitt’s performance right out, as he’s a CG creature for most of Benjamin Button. I find Frank Langella unlikely because he’s Dracula, not a Method actor. And Mickey Rourke, while he won at the Golden Globes, is not going to win for playing a washed-up star with serious personal and health problems -— the Academy likes to see sacrifice, reinvention, and cartoonishly off-type portrayals, not actors who play themselves. For this, bet on Sean Penn for Milk, wherein he plays an honest, genuine, and important man to whom people actually listened, and a gay one at that. That’s a pretty big stretch for the Hollywood activist/one-time badboy, and the Academy’s going to respect Penn for “sacrificing” his “manhood” to play this character.
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Anne Hathaway hasn’t cut her teeth in enough Oscar bait films yet; Kate Winslet’s movie is getting middling reviews despite her nomination; I have a suspicion that Angelina is nominated for her paranoid “They took my son!” film because Hollywood wants to turn Brangelina into the second coming of Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn; and I have reservations about Melissa Leo, whose film Frozen River looked like a straightforward thriller, not a quality melodrama. That leaves Meryl Streep (right), nominated for the fifteenth time for Doubt, in which she plays “Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the strict head of a Bronx Catholic school who suspects that a new priest may be abusing one of her students.” Super topical child abuse? Strict Catholicism? Meryl Streep? I smell Oscar!
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
It’s too obvious, but smart money says Heath Ledger here. The award would allow for maximum Academy self-back-patting, and one of the recurring tropes of every Academy Awards ceremony is masturbatory pomp.
Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Of the five women nominated in this category, Taraji P. Henson is the more deserving contender, as Queenie in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. This category’s tough, though. I’d bet on Marisa Tomei for The Wrestler.
Best Director/Best Picture
It’s only happened a few times that the winner of Best Director didn’t direct the film that wins Best Picture, so we’ll bet these categories together. Benjamin Button is an obvious retread of Forrest Gump, though perhaps we shouldn’t underestimate the Academy’s love for the Robert Zemeckis brand of all-American nostalgia. Frost/Nixon is a filmed play — filmed by a Hollywood favorite, Ron Howard, but still not dynamic enough to win. A win for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire would allow the Academy to construct some sort of “underdog” story about the film which mirrors its own narrative and makes everything nice and neat, but with the passage of Proposition 8 a couple months ago, Academy voters are going to want to make a (daring!) statement about their solidarity with the gay movement. Milk and its director, Gus Van Sant, have these two categories locked up, if you ask me.
New Releases From the Box:
El Norte
Gregory Nava’s classic 1983 independent feature about the plight of illegal South American immigrants is finally on DVD (and Blu Ray, for all you fancy pantses)! And what a DVD it is, a 2-disc set with everything you could want to know about the film and its director. The film itself is as relevant today, perhaps more so, as it when it was made, especially with the increasing strain illegal immigration has been putting on the West’s health care costs.
Vicky Christina Barcelona
Reports of Woody Allen’s “comeback” may have been greatly exaggerated, but his most recent at least alternates between vibrant and dull, clever and flat. It is well worth the watch for Penelope Cruz’s eccentric role alone, which takes up little screen time — despite what the cover suggests, she is neither Vicky nor Christina. Actually, it is worth noting the relative obscurity Johansson and Cruz’s co-star Rebecca Hall has been confined to. Her performance and her character, Vicky, are ultimately much more endearing and believable than her counterpart, Christina (Johansson).
Next Week on From the Box:
Another Box Set from Joel, Mike and the robots on the Satellite of Love. Yes, Mystery Science Theater 3000 Volume XIV is out next week, with four more classic episodes! Kino International has also been putting together some newly remastered silent classics by Buster Keaton and F.W. Murnau we may have to look into! And…that’s pretty much it. Unless you want to see Madagascar 2 or a documentary about Friday the 13th.