Sunday, March 04, 2018

2018 Oscar Predictions (last minute and incomplete)

Best Actor: Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in "Darkest Hour". Lacking any limey disease porn from Eddie Redmayne, this immersive impersonation of Britain's Wartime PM will have to do. It'd be tantamount to treason for the Academy's Famously United British Block of Voters to go anywhere else. The only counter scenario in play is a split in that block between Oldman and Daniel Day Lewis in "Phantom Thread" but so far that "BritBlock" has never split and likely won't with A Winston Churchill In Play. Just remember, this is a great historic impersonation, but so was Woody Harrelson in "L.B.J" and Woody is likely watching the broadcast from home tonight. Best Actress: Margot Robbie, this is personal prejudice on my part, Robbie made a champion catastrophe like Tonya Harding completely sympathetic to me, that is the essence of acting IMHO. Sally Hawkins may pull off an upset, but she was working mute in the world's first Kalju-Human Interspecies Love Story...that strikes me as a reach for the Academy. Frances McDormand has an outside shot but it's more on grounds of her overall "body of work" to date than anything else. Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer in "All The Money in the World", this is "Academy Politics" at work, voting for Plummer rebukes neatly the gruesome sexual escapades allegedly perpetrated by the film's original star Kevin Spacey. Moreover, Plummer is past eighty years of age, and reshot all those scenes in under six weeks...for stamina alone he deserves the Oscar. Best Supporting Actress: Allison Janney in "I, Tonya"...As good as Robbie's Tonya Harding is, the film reaches Grand Guignol like levels of nastiness whenever Allison Janney's "Skate Mom from Hell" heaves onto the Screen....Besides when is she ever gonna be in that room again? Best Picture: This one is tough, but I am thinking "Darkest Hour", that BritBlock is pretty hardcore, they could again split their vote with "Dunkirk", but the performances in that film were more akin to neorealism, no other acting nominations were derived from it. Thus I think the race may actually be between "Darkest Hour" & "“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”, the latter being more of a "message movie" suited to Academy Prejudices. "Get Out" is "The Stepford Wives" for African Americans, and as such will likely fall afoul of the Academy's default resistance of horror-sic-fi-fantasy driven material, something that will likely keep Sally Hawkins and Daniel Kaluuya off the podium entirely.