Final Best Picture deliberations

• email this story
• read comments (1)
• post a comment
• 
  
  

If the Best Picture choice of the majority is going to be/has been about selecting the film with the most accessible emotional current (i.e., one that fulfills and satisfies by affirming some commonly-shared realization about life as Academy members know it), then Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar tonight. "If," I say...

We all know that the statistics are against it with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris not having been nominated for Best Director and the film also not receiving a Best Editing nomination. I don't know how to calculate this...nobody knows. At the very least tonight's Oscar show is going to be the best in many years because of the Best Picture headscratcher factor. It's a real cliffhanger and a puzzler.

Repeating the basics: my personal preference is for The Departed to win because it throttled me in a richer, artier and more dazzling way than any other film. But I'd be perfectly delighted if Little Miss Sunshine takes it because it resonates thematically, it understands itself perfectly, and scene-for-scene and line-for-line it shoots one bulls-eye after another (except for the motorcycle cop-and-the porn magazine bit and the deux ex machina of the ex-boyfriend at the gas station).

One thing for sure (I think, I suspect...maybe) is that I was probably wrong in predicting Babel to win Best Picture. It's almost definitely going to be The Departed or Little Miss Sunshine, and I have to make a final, final call within the next few hours.