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Your Oscar Picks For 2007

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opinionista:
Best Picture
No Country for Old Men

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood

Best Supporting Actor
Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men

Best Actress
Marion Cotillard for Môme, La
(Hoping! She was wonderful as Edith Piaf)

Best Supporting Actress
Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There.

Best Director
Ethan Coen, Joel Coen for No Country for Old Men

Best Foreign Language Film
I haven't seen any of the films nominated for this category

Best Adapted Screenplay
No Country for Old Men (2007): Joel Coen, Ethan Coen


Best Original Screenplay
Juno (2007): Diablo Cody


Best Animated Feature
Persepolis (2007): Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi

Kd5000:
If I was a betting man, I'd say the following will win...

Best Picture
No Country for Old Men (very very likely)  Not my favorite Coen brothers movie as I really liked FARGO much better.

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood (no doubt)

Best Supporting Actor
Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men (no doubt)

Best Actress
Julie Christie for Away from Her 
I think she might win. I do like Julie Chrisite and did like her performance. Portraying a character which raises social awareness of a disease tends to be a plus with the aging voters of the academy. Tom Hanks won for Philadelphia and it was considered very brave of Tom to take on the role so he was rewarded.


Best Supporting Actress
Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There. (very likely)
 

Best Director
Ethan Coen, Joel Coen for No Country for Old Men (very very likely)     P.T. Anderson will get his chance one day. He's very talented.

MaineWriter:
Best Picture

No Country for Old Men, which will make another year in which a movie wins best picture that I have no interest in seeing.

Best Actor

Daniel Day-Lewis, no doubt

Best Actress

Julie Christie

Best Supporting Actor

Javier Bardem

Best Supporting Actress

Cate Blanchett (I hope!) although I am a little worried about Ruby Dee on a sympathy vote

Best Director

The Coens, to match their best picture award. This year they won't be splitting the vote.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Atonement

Best Original Screenplay

Juno

Kd5000:
George Clooney on the front cover of Time Magazine coming out tomorrow titled The Last Movie Star claims he has never lost an Oscar pool.  I wonder if that means he bet CRASH would win. 

Here's a link to the full article
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1714996-1,00.html

and to his Oscar picks.
http://www.time.com/time/2008/clooney/

Everybody seems to be saying No Country For Old Men will win...

MaineWriter:
Tonight's the night! From the New York Times:


February 24, 2008

Are Oscars Worth All This Fuss?

By A. O. SCOTT

THERE is something of a consensus among critics — a disagreeable bunch, it should be noted — that 2007 was one of the best years for movies, American movies in particular, in recent memory. As a result the leading contenders for major Oscars have unusually solid aesthetic bona fides. Of course there are those who grouse about the endings of “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men,” who find “Juno” more grating than charming, who were baffled by “Michael Clayton” or who were bored by “Atonement,” but all in all it looks like an impressively strong field. Meanwhile the Writers Guild strike, which had threatened to encircle the Kodak Theater with picket lines and bury the Academy Awards in bad feelings, has been settled. The show will go on — Sunday night at 8 — and everybody’s happy.

Well, maybe not everybody. I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I found myself hoping that the strike would shut the Academy Awards down; that for once, in a year of such cinematic bounty and variety, appreciation for the best movies could be liberated from the pomp and tedium of Hollywood spectacle.

It’s not that I’m against the spectacle as such. I’m hardly immune to the tears, and political speeches, or low-cut dresses. I even hum along with the overproduced, underwhelming renditions of the nominated songs. And I genuinely love the film industry’s earnest tributes to its past: the lifetime achievement awards, the sentimental statuettes bestowed on venerated old-timers, the clips and stills of the recently departed.

Like anyone else I’m glad when my favorites win and dismayed when they fall short. So I am not against the Oscars, any more than I’m dismissive of the Salesman of the Year or the Employee of the Month, or opposed to lavish annual trade association conventions for actuaries or ophthalmologists. But I am nonetheless bothered by the disproportionate importance that the Academy Awards have taken on, and by the distorting influence they exercise over the way we make, market and see movies in this country. The Oscars themselves may be harmless fun, but the idea that they matter is as dangerous as it is ridiculous.

Releasing ambitious, serious films into theaters has become a brutal blood sport, while going to watch them has become, for the most part, a seasonal activity. From January through August the theaters are crowded with highly commercial franchise entertainment, most of it designed for the adolescent palate, with a sprinkling of alternatives for grown-up cinephiles. There follows in the last third of the year, roughly from the Toronto International Film Festival in September through Christmas, an avalanche of art. Movies arrive on autumn weekends by the dozen: tiny gems and aspiring masterpieces, heavy with significance or filigreed with nuance, all craning toward February, when their midsize budgets and grand ambitions will be validated like parking receipts at a shopping mall on Hollywood Boulevard.

And those that don’t make it — the ones that don’t meet the prerequisites of decent box office or glowing reviews — will bear the stigma of failure. The system is not exactly winner-take-all, but it does leave behind a distressingly high number of designated losers, among them some of the most interesting and daring films of the year. It should not make a difference that, say, “Into the Wild,” “Starting Out in the Evening” and “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” are barely represented in the Oscar sweepstakes. Your list of glaring omissions may be different, but if you’re among the passionate admirers of “Lust, Caution” or “We Own the Night” or “3:10 to Yuma,” you are similarly stuck savoring the sour grapes of your own good taste.

All of those movies, and dozens more, were sent to compete in a brutal Darwinian landscape. At a certain point in the season, usually when critics’ groups start handing out prizes in December, distributors start culling the herd. Some movies receive the extra push of an Oscar campaign — more screens, bigger advertisements, more puff pieces in the media — while others are allowed to languish and stumble.

Which is just business, I know. The number of nominees in each category has been fixed at five for as long as most of us can remember (it was 10 in the early years), and good movies have always been overlooked. But that, in a way, is precisely my point. In the past it was frequently safe to assume that any relationship between the Oscars and artistic quality was coincidental. The academy was never supposed to be hip, daring or responsive to what was newest and most risky in the world of cinema. It was just what its name implied: the mainstream, the establishment, the old guard. Sometimes, yes, the best picture prize would actually go to the best picture, but more often the academy’s neglect of a film was a reliable index of its merit. The good judgment not only of critics but, more important, of independent-minded, adventurous moviegoers has traditionally been measured by its distance from the consensus of the movie industry.

And that, it should not be forgotten, is what the Academy Awards represent: the self-assessment of a self-interested, self-involved professional clique. It can be argued that, over the past decade or so, this roughly 6,000-member club has become more discerning, more willing to confer its blessings on quasi-independent, medium-budget films instead of the lumbering, middlebrow prestige productions it used to favor. Nowadays the main divisions of the studios — Columbia, Paramount, Universal and the rest — specialize in big-ticket entertainment aimed at a global audience. Their art-house subdivisions — the Miramaxes, Searchlights and Vantages — have taken over the business of supplementing cash with cachet.

Connoisseurs may be satisfied with this arrangement — we can watch the broadcast without superciliousness or slumming — but a showbiz populist might complain that, in honoring the products of the studio specialty divisions, the academy has lost touch with the mass audience.

The top nominees often come into the ceremony with middling box office numbers. (This year “Juno,” the only PG-13 best picture nominee and the only one in which nobody dies a violent death, is also the only one to have topped $100 million in gross receipts.) A big victory on Oscar night is supposed to help make up the difference. And this, of course, explains the frenzied, overcrowded fall release calendar. The commercial fate of serious movies is now, to a disturbing extent, dependent on the Academy Awards.

In the old days it was more often the opposite: the academy would belatedly gild the lily of commercial success with a shiny finish of ersatz class. This vulgarity was the saving grace of the Oscars. It was not necessary for film lovers to take them seriously or for media outlets to cover them like presidential campaigns, with horse-race reporting, sober analysis and war room spin doctoring. A bit of perspective is needed. The wonderful thing about the Academy Awards is that they are fundamentally trivial. To pretend otherwise is to trivialize movies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/movies/awardsseason/24scot.html?pagewanted=print

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