Jeffrey Wells The Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, presented by James McAvoy and Josh Brolin, is presented to Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men. They’re going to win Best Director also (of course), and of course Best Picture. (Right?) Three Oscars for sure. Those dark horse notions about Clayton or Juno…forget ’em. I think.
Alan Arkin handing out the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Cate Blanchett should get it for I’m Not There, but I’ll be at peace with Michael Clayton‘s Tilda Swinton taking it. And Swinton wins! As predicted over the last four or five days! She didn’t expect it, obviously. Beautiful acceptance speech. Unexpectedly moving. Tony Gilroy‘s eyes were watering over.
The Best Best Live-Action Oscar should go The Substitute, which I’ve seen and praised. But the Oscar has gone to Le Mozart de Pickpockets, the most sentimental of the bunch. Sap sentiment! The Best Animated Short Oscar should go to I Met The Walrus, I believe, and the winner is…Peter and the Wolf! I give up.
Javier Bardem, naturally, universally expected, wins the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for No Country for Old Men. Loved his expression when he heard his name called. He was on edge, wasn’t sure. I loved his Spanish-spoken words for his mom, which a friend just translated.
Sweeney Todd wins Best Art Direction Oscar, which I had on my sheet. Deserved. Dante Ferreti‘s soft, delicate Italian accent.
Dwayne Johnson delivering the Best Visual Effects Oscar, which moves me not. The cool effects are the ones you don’t notice. The team behind The Golden Compass, the bomb that rocked New Line Cinema, wins. Who cares? Nobody. Not me anyway. I hate blatant CGI.
Late start with live-blog (indecision at the liquor store), but the makeup Oscar going to the La Vie En Rose guys is a favorable indication of Marion Cotillard winning Best Actress….no?
I’ve never understood the difference between sound editing and sound mixing, even if someone writes in and explains it all in Jack-and-Jill terms, like I’m an idiot. I’ll certainly never understand things in a way that will help me decide which No Country For Old Men sound nomination to mark on my ballot — Skip Lievsay for Sound Editing, or Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland for Sound Mixing. And don’t tell me I’m slow or stupid. Nobody understand this stuff.
Among Nikki Finke‘s list of tips about the content of tonight’s Oscar show: “Queen Latifah, one of the scheduled presenters, had a family emergency and had to drop out.”
That’s an uptick in my book. I respect the fact that downmarket award presenters tend to raise viewership levels, but Queen Latifah fans are probably among that broad sector of the public that wouldn’t watch There Will Be Blood at the point of a knife so who needs’ em?
Sooner or later it’s going to sink in among Academy officials and Oscar producers that more and more this show is attracting a sizable, profitable (in terms of ad dollars) but diminished viewership. The chances of the ratings being at March 1998 levels (when Titanic was the big winner) are slim to none. Those days are over. Most people out there are too thick to get with the program — it’s a fact. Cut ’em loose, I say. Life is short.
“The Oscars maintain the capacity to surprise,” N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr reminded this morning. “This year it is writ that No Country will win best picture, that Javier Bardem is a lock for best supporting actor and that Daniel Day-Lewis‘s name will be announced when they open the envelope for best actor. But chances are, at least one of those things won’t happen.
“Two years ago we were all humming the Brokeback Mountain music at the end of the show when Jack Nicholson surprised everyone, including himself, by saying the word Crash. It is that moment we all wait for.”
Last licks — what will the big surprises be this evening? Is it fair at this stage to call Michael Clayton‘s Tilda Swinton winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar a surprise? Are we far enough along in this game to call Swinton not winning tonight a surprise?
If the charming Ellen Page, a first-rate actress, wins the Best Actress Oscar for Juno it won’t be as bad as if Eddie Murphy had won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year for Dreamgirls, but it sure won’t be cause for celebration. What it will be, plain and simple, will be “wrong.” If it happens, I will light a candle for Marion Cotillard, and my soul will become a living embodiment of Mudville.
I checked the entertainment and movies section of today’s New York Post for my piece about how the revolutionary Best Picture lineup of 1967 (the story of which is richly told in Mark Harris‘s just-published Pictures at a Revolution) to no avail.
I assumed they’d killed it because it was too dense or thinky or whatever. (I tried to write it like a borough guy but there’s a limit to such contortions.) Then my editor wrote back and said no, it’s in the paper — in the Opinion section.
What was I thinking? A totally reported piece about Hollywood then and now, zero opinion, running on Oscar Sunday with no links in the Movie Section. I guess it wouldn’t have made sense to run it in the Classifieds.
It’s called Year of the Brat with a subhead that reads “In 1967, the Young Turks Took Over Hollywood — And Invented ‘Indie’ Film.” Even if all they accomplished in ’67 — and this was no small potatoes — was to get themselves a solid foothold in a business that would continue to be stodgy and erratic and status-quo-minded in its constant attempts to kowtow to the chumps.
The best quote in the piece comes from Michael Clayton director-writer Tony Gilroy: “All those films and filmmakers [behind edgy 1967 nominees Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate] were jumping off the cliff. They didn’t know what was happening next.
“I think in the last 40 years, it’s become hard to see where the cliff is anymore,” Gilroy states. “There’s been a fundamental shift in what constitutes revolutionary. We’ve been through so much over the years [that] we’ve seen over the abyss. I think movies are less about astronomy today than quantum mechanics. They’re about going in rather than going out.”
On second thought, it’ll be kind of agreeable if Michael Clayton steals the Best Picture Oscar tonight. Quantum mechanics!
