1. Best Picture:
I didn’t see an F1 nom in the cards, but congrats to Jerry Bruckheimer, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and the gang for pulling it off regardless. Bugonia, Frankenstein, The Secret Agent and Train Dreams simply aren’t good enough to warrant a Best Picture nom by any sort of classical standard, and deep down their producers know this. Bugonia really doesn’t belong in this fraternity — at best it’s a minor, mid-level Lanthimos. The truly serious contenders, of course, are OBAA, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value and Hamnet, and we all know that OBAA‘s win is in the bag, thanks in particular to the current ICE terror in Minnesota.
Which nominee should win on merit alone?: Marty Supreme or Sentimental Value…easily tbe best of the bunch.
Bugonia – Ed Guiney & Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, and Lars Knudsen, producers
F1 – Chad Oman, Brad Pitt, Lewis Hamilton, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Joseph Kosinski, and Jerry Bruckheimer, producers
Frankenstein – Guillermo del Toro, J. Miles Dale, and Scott Stuber, producers
Hamnet – Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris, Nicolas Gonda, Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, producers
Marty Supreme – Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush, Josh Safdie, Anthony Katagas and Timothée Chalamet, producers
One Battle After Another – Adam Somner, Sara Murphy and Paul Thomas Anderson, producers
The Secret Agent – Emilie Lesclaux, producer
Sentimental Value – Maria Ekerhovd and Andrea Berentsen Ottmar, producers
Sinners – Zinzi Coogler, Sev Ohanian, and Ryan Coogler, producers
Train Dreams – Marissa McMahon, Teddy Schwarzman, Will Janowitz, Ashley Schlaifer, and Michael Heimler, producers
2. Best Director
A consensus has formed that Paul Thomas Anderson will not only win for the high craft and political popularity of One Battle After Another (not to mention the heightened topicality), but that after plugging away for nearly 30 years and being in his 50s, he deserves a kind of Life Achievement Oscar. Can’t stop the dam waters.
Which nominees should win on merit alone?: Josh Sadie or Joachim Trier.
Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
Ryan Coogler, Sinners
3. Best Actor
Marty Supreme‘s Timothee Chalamet has this. A combination of hyper pogo-stick Marty plus his brilliant Bob Dylan in last year’s A Complete Unknown…locked.
Which nominees should win on merit alone?: Chalamet or Blue Moon‘s Ethan Hawke. Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent in OBAA, but he won ten years ago for The Revenant and he’s not as dynamically good as Chalamet.
Timothée Chalamet – Marty Supreme as Marty Mauser
Leonardo DiCaprio – One Battle After Another as Bob Ferguson / Pat Calhoun
Ethan Hawke – Blue Moon as Lorenz “Larry” Hart
Michael B. Jordan – Sinners as Elijah “Smoke” Moore / Elias “Stack” Moore
Wagner Moura – The Secret Agent as Armando Solimões / Marcelo Alves / Fernando Solimões
4. Best Actress
Congrats to Song Sung Blue‘s Kate Hudson for landing a coveted nom in this hard-to-crack category. She won’t win, of course — it was decided many weeks ago that Hamnet‘s Jessie Buckley totally has this…stuffed and gleaming in her Elizabethan kit bag. Why was Emma Stone even nomimated for Bugonia? Because she shaved her head? What kind of strangely obsessive Academy cabal is behind this odd, underwhelming film?
Which nominees should win on merit alone?: Buckley or Renate Reinsve.
Jessie Buckley – Hamnet as Agnes Shakespeare
Rose Byrne – If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as Linda
Kate Hudson – Song Sung Blue as Claire Sardina / Thunder
Renate Reinsve – Sentimental Value as Nora Borg
Emma Stone – Bugonia as Michelle Fuller
5. Best Supporting Actor
Sentimental Value‘s Stellan Skarsgard for the win. Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn will split the OBAA vote, of course. Why was Sinners‘ Delroy Lindo even nominated? Just swept along with the Sinners flash flood, I suppose. No one with a smidgen of taste was even thinking about Lindo as an Oscar contender.
Which nominee should win on merit alone?: Skarsgaard, not to mention the notion of this potentially being a special Life Achievement Oscar for Alexander’s dad.
Benicio Del Toro – One Battle After Another as Sergio St. Carlos
Jacob Elordi – Frankenstein as the Creature
Delroy Lindo – Sinners as Delta Slim
Sean Penn – One Battle After Another as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw
Stellan Skarsgård – Sentimental Value as Gustav Borg
6. Best Supporting Actress
Special congrats to Sentimental Value‘s highly deserving Elle Fanning for having nudged her way into this very tough category. Wunmi Mosaku (who?) being nominated tells us what a sweeping identity thing Sinners was/is among Academy members. If anyone is going to win for the identity factor, it’ll be OBAA‘s Teyana Taylor, whose Golden Globes acceptance speech emphasized this way of calibrating or judging or thinking.
Which nominees should win on merit alone?: Weapons‘ Amy Madigan or the Sentimental duo of Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who will probably lose due to vote-splitting.
Elle Fanning – Sentimental Value as Rachel Kemp
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas – Sentimental Value as Agnes Borg Pettersen
Amy Madigan – Weapons as Aunt Gladys
Wunmi Mosaku – Sinners as Annie
Teyana Taylor – One Battle After Another as Perfidia Beverly Hills
I haven’t time to fully suss out the other categories, but I’ll get there tonight or tomorrow.
HE’s Sinners brigade have been insisting for months that Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners script will take the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. He wins an Oscar for writing an allegorical cheeseball vampire drive-in film about Deep South racism, a film that Samuel Z. Arkoff would have loved to produce in the ’60s or ’70s…really?
I’m presuming that PTA’s One Battle After Another script, which makes no basic sense in terms of Sean Penn‘s wacked-out Colonel Lockjaw character, will win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
Sinners‘ Autumn Durald Arkapaw being nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar is a complete joke due to the simple fact that the lighting is atrocious during the noctural vampire attack section (i.e., the second half). Many of us (myself included) couldn’t even see what was going on.
Which cinematography nominees should win on merit alone? Marty Supreme‘s Darius Khondji (my personal choice) or OBAA‘s Michael Bauman — even those who have their doubts and complaints about Battle (like me) admire the lensing.