Best Picture/Best Supporting Actor

Rack ‘em up, rack ‘em up, rack ‘em up.
Daniel Kenealy, January 17 2009

“I had a vision, of a world without Batman. The mob ground out a little profit and the police tried to shut them down, one block at a time. And it was so … boring.”
– The Joker

The race to secure one of the five Best Picture nominations at this years Academy Awards has been highly paradoxical. Consider: the frontrunner is a film featuring no major stars set in Mumbai; ‘The Dark Knight’ looks set to become the first comic book adaptation to win a Best Picture nomination; and films made by Danny Boyle, David Fincher, and Chris Nolan look set to dominate the nominations. This year has no right to be boring. But it is. It is so … boring.
Five films – ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, ‘Frost/Nixon’, ‘Milk’, and ‘The Dark Knight’ – have dominated the precursor season. The only hiccups were the omission of the final two films listed above by the Golden Globes and the snub, by the British Academy, of ‘The Dark Knight’. The PGA and DGA dialled in matching shortlists comprising the ‘consensus-five’ (or C-5 for short). The only thing that can be said to negate the boredom is that with such a seemingly settled line-up there is some serious upset potential.
Let me return to the quote in the epigraph of this article for a moment. There are some prognosticators who, perhaps feeling a need to inject some excitement in the final week, are suggesting that ‘The Dark Knight’ may fail to make the cut. Most are quick to point out that they feel the movie deserves a place on the shortlist but that the Academy’s bias against genre movies may result in a cruel snub. These commentators have a vision, of a Best Picture line-up without Batman. Such a line-up would not be boring but it would be hugely disappointing.

Was ‘The Dark Knight’ the best film of the year? By my reckoning no, not even close. But I don’t expect the Academy to name the five best films of the year. Martin Scorsese put it best some years ago when he tried to justify ‘Dances with Wolves’ triumphing over ‘Goodfellas’. His sentiment was that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences drew attention to the best films that appealed to general tastes; they were not supposed to produce shortlists that echoed Film Comment or the sort of films that come out on top in a poll of college professors in departments of film and media studies. I disagree with Marty insofar as ‘Goodfellas’ is a film that can appeal to the masses (he went further in his comments at the time and cited his films violence as a reason for its loss. The Academy he felt, should promote films that are as broadly accessible as possible) but his general sentiment is probably right.

Thus I do not expect Best Picture nominations for ‘Wendy and Lucy’, ‘A Christmas Tale’, or ‘Waltz with Bashir’ (incidentally, my three favourite films of the year). What I expect and demand is the best selection from those films that stay on the right side of some arbitrary populist/mass appeal line. Who knows where the line is? It’s tough to say. But clearly ‘Wendy and Lucy’ is on one side of it whilst ‘Milk’ is on the other.

Even more reason then for the Academy to nominate ‘The Dark Knight’. It ranked 21st in Film Comment’s end of year poll and has a rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Its commercial success is phenomenal at $531 million. But, more than that, ‘The Dark Knight’ offered us the most prestigious answer yet to the question: how far can idle entertainment be bent toward art without breaking? The film offered an incredibly multi-layered moral fabric that explores some of the biggest questions we grabble with as a society. What should the relative balance be between order and justice? How stable is our society in the face of anarchy? Are humans intrinsically Hobbesian or Lockeian? What is more, ‘The Dark Knight’ manages to explore these themes without ever seeming heavy-handed or using dialogue that would be at home in a lecture hall. If AMPAS are in the business of recognizing a specific fusion of entertainment and art then it has to nominate ‘The Dark Knight’.

The films being touted to fill the vacuum should voters shun the Caped Crusader are typically ‘The Reader’ and ‘Gran Torino’. Talk about adding insult to injury.
‘The Reader’ tackles that quintessential Academy theme: the Holocaust. And Kate Winslet delivers a brilliant performance but how the film can be considered a worthy Best Picture nominee escapes me. The film assembled a high-calibre team (Stephen Daldry, David Hare, Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, Chris Menges, Ann Roth and so forth) but the film was far less than the sum of its parts. Technically there was little to fault but I cannot imagine the Academy embracing a movie that re-imagines the question of Nazi war guilt in terms of a sentimental-erotic fantasy.
The film leaves many key questions unanswered and they form a haze of disappointment that hangs over the film for most of its second half. Those who have seen the film will likely understand (even if they do not agree with) my sentiment. The film is a shallow and somewhat obtuse treatment of the Holocaust and it leaves a very strange taste in the mouth. Furthermore, it has failed to find an audience and its box office receipts hover around $5 million.

‘Gran Torino’ has risen up to the rank of potential usurper – leapfrogging ‘Revolutionary Road’ (too ugly and depressing), ‘Wall-E’ (too catered for in its ghetto category), ‘Doubt’ (too small), and ‘The Wrestler’ (too late out of the gate) – through a combination of two factors. First, it has the ‘Clint-factor’ and that is something Oscar prognosticators have learnt never to underestimate. Second, and a result of the ‘Clint-factor’, it has gained admirable momentum since its release with $30 million in takings at the U.S. box office. But there is a huge difference between not underestimating and overestimating and I feel that those who are making waves about ‘Gran Torino’s prospects for Best Picture are falling victim to the latter. Yes ‘Million Dollar Baby’ scored big with the Academy on the back of a similar slow-burn release strategy. And yes, ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’ hit the top categories after a late season release. But both of those nominations were suggested by the precursors to one degree or another. A nomination for ‘Gran Torino’ would be both out of the blue and thoroughly undeserved (something it is harder to say about the two aforementioned films).

It would be out of the blue given ‚ÄòGran Torino‚Äôs failure to score any significant precursor nominations (top 10 placements with the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute accepted). And it would be undeserved because it is, in a word, ‘hokey’. If ‚ÄòThe Dark Knight‚Äô is testament to how far you can stretch entertainment towards art, ‚ÄòGran Torino‚Äô is the opposite. It might have been better staying on the side of entertainment because when the ‚Äòmessage portion‚Äô of the movie arrived, I was ready for the credits. Clint has deconstructed the man with a gun archetype several times in his career but the sophistication present in past attempts (led by the sterling ‚ÄòUnforgiven‚Äô) is tossed out here.

Clint’s performance is respectable enough and I object to the argument that he should not be recognized because he’s playing himself. Walt Kowolski is a character shot through with parody but that fact does not, in itself, detract from the performance.

In short, nominations for the two finest attributes of ‘The Reader’ and ‘Gran Torino’ (Winslet and Eastwood respectively), are palatable. But the prospect of either stealing a Best Picture nomination is not.

Given the difficult in squeezing predictions for all Oscar categories into one column I will use this column to serve as my announcement of predictions for Best Picture. I see little mileage in being bold and opting for a no guts, no glory prediction in this category.

To round off the column let me announce my predictions in one further category that I feel settled on, best supporting actor. Heath Ledger is cruising towards the Oscar and for no other reason than he delivered the best performance of the year by a supporting actor. Re-watching ‘The Dark Knight’ recently I think he collected the Oscar in his second scene where he confronts the mob. Despite playing category fraud Philip Seymour Hoffman also looks secure, as does Josh Brolin after a stellar couple of years. Robert Downey, Jr. looks likely as recognition for a strong, an entertaining year. The fifth slot was quite open for a while but I am settled on Dev Patel following his SAG nomination. Ralph Fiennes’ and Tom Cruise’s Globe nominations seem anomalous and I doubt whether ‘Milk’ has the level of support needed to double-up here with a nomination for James Franco. I continue to believe that Michael Shannon stands the best chance of upsetting the field with his brilliant performance in ‘Revolutionary Road’. He was nominated at Chicago and if the Academy has any sentiment for the movie at all, this might be where it materializes. But, that being said, ‘Slumdog’ has such momentum, is such a crowd-pleaser, and Patel’s quasi-lead status will only help him in this category. Sometimes these things just feel written.

Running predictions tally:

BEST PICTURE
‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’
‘The Dark Knight’
‘Frost/Nixon’
‘Milk’
‘Slumdog Millionaire’

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Josh Brolin (‘Milk’)
Robert Downey, Jr. (‘Tropic Thunder’)
Philip Seymour Hoffman (‘Doubt’)
Heath Ledger (‘The Dark Knight’)
Dev Patel (‘Slumdog Millionaire’)