This time of year, there are a lot of Oscar predictions, but I don’t follow many other awards shows, nor do I keep up with a lot of the inside gossip.  I did read an interesting NY Times article describing the hysteria around the race for an Academy Award, but in the end I don’t really feel like making any predictions. I’ve tried in years past, what with Oscar pools and such, but every year I do dismally because I tend to predict with my heart instead of my brain.  I’ve recently heard that the average age of an Academy voter is 57, which means that more than half of the Academy is twice my age—I doubt we share the same taste in films…

So, instead of putting my Oscar pool picks here, I’m going to try to make a case for who (from the nominees) I think should win.  After all, I’ve seen 93% of the “main” nominees, so I should be able to weigh in, right?

First, let me explain what I mean by “main” nominees.   These are the nominees in every category except the five “shit” categories.  Categories with films that (usually) get no wide release.  In fact, these films are so hard to find, there are special screenings which Academy members must attend in order to vote in these categories.  So, there will be no discussion of the Foreign Language, Documentary Feature, or Documentary, Live Action & Animated Short films.

I do believe that all of the Live Action and Animated Shorts are on iTunes, but I didn’t feel like spending $19.90 to see these films.  I’ve only seen 1 out of the 25 nominees in these five categories, and that was the Documentary Feature Food, Inc.  This was an excellent doc looking at America’s corporate food companies and how much harm they’re doing to us.  I gave it but have no idea how it holds up against its competition.

Moving beyond these five categories, there are 19 “main” categories left.  From these 19 categories, there are 34 different films represented and 96 overall nominees.  Of these, I’ve seen 29 films and 89 nominees.  The only ones I’ve missed are

Il Divo (1 nom – Makeup)
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2 noms – Art Direction & Costume Design)
The Last Station (2 noms – Best Actress & Best Supporting Actor)
The Secret of Kells (1 nom – Animated Feature)
The White Ribbon (1 nom – Cinematography)

Let’s start with Best Animated Feature.  As I said, I haven’t seen The Secret of Kells, but then again I doubt many of the Academy voters have either.  Since this is a category you don’t need to see every film before voting, I’m going to take my knowledge of the other four nominees and chime in.  I wasn’t too impressed with Disney’s attempt to capture some of that old magic with their hand drawn The Princess and the Frog.  Pixar has yet to make a bad film, and Up is no exception.  I loved the opening montage and most of the characters, it’s just not their best work.  I saw Coraline twice in theaters and loved the story (Gaiman’s great) and the animation; there were just a few slow parts that’s keeping it behind my pick—Fantastic Mr. Fox.  A beautiful, campy, fun film which I also saw twice in theaters.  It was my 2nd Best Film of 2009, so it pretty much had this category locked up.

Best Makeup features only three nominees.  There’s Il Divo which I haven’t seen.  The Young Victoria seems out of place—if the film showed Emily Blunt turn into an old Victoria, I’d understand its nomination but I don’t really recall any significant hair or makeup work.  Star Trek is my favorite in this category—a lot of obvious makeup and prosthetics that were necessary for the film.

Best Sound Editing is a category where I’ve seen all five nominees, but since I don’t really understand all the intricacies of what “sound editing” is, it’s hard to make a pick.  Out of Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Star Trek & Up, I guess the two films that had the most memorable sound “edits” to me were Avatar and Star Trek, and if I had to choose one, I guess it’s heads… I mean Avatar.

Best Sound Mixing is another category where I really have no idea what makes a good “sound mixer.”  Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Star Trek & Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen fill out this category.  I think Avatar, Star Trek and (sadly) Transformers: RotF all rise above the others when it comes to (what I think is) sound mixing.  Respectively, you have jungle scenes with a lot of animal noises plus one final battle with a lot of effects, space battles, and robots clanging and crashing together.  I think my choice for best “mixing” (as I’m choosing to define it in my head) would actually be Transformers: RotF because the sounds of those robots changing was really one of the only good things I remember from that film.

Best Art Direction is yet another category where I’m not really sure what I should be judging the films on.  I believe art direction encompasses the design aspects not present in other categories—set design, set decoration, props, etc. I haven’t seen Dr. Parnassus so I can’t comment on that film’s art direction.  The Young Victoria has more memorable costumes than sets.  Nine used the stage to great effect, basically taking one set and redecorating it for each character’s song.  I did enjoy seeing an industrial-era London in Sherlock Holmes, but here I think Avatar really deserves the win as Pandora was a beautiful planet completely created from nothing.

Best Visual Effects has only three nominees—Star Trek is a great film, but not because of the visual effects.  They’re good but not great.  District 9 in any other year would have been my vote (probably a snub in the Best Makeup category also, now that I think of it), but this year nothing can beat Avatar since it’s literally going to change the way we look at visual effects from now on.  James Cameron and his team of designers really have raised the bar for what can be done with computer generated effects (with some help from Peter Jackson and others before him).  I didn’t love the film, but the effects were truly amazing.

Best Original Song is once again getting pulled from the broadcast, which is a real shame because these songs deserve a little more recognition.  Randy Newman gets two nominations for his work on The Princess and the Frog.  Sadly, the movie didn’t really stick with me as past Disney musicals (e.g. Aladdin or The Lion King) have, so I barely recall “Almost There” or “Down in New Orleans.” Maury Yeston’s addition of “Take it All” to Nine was good, but I preferred the more catchy “Cinema Italiano,” which was one of the best parts of that largely disappointing film.  Paris 36‘s “Loin de Paname” is a beautiful song, but I saw this film back in June and I can’t really recall how it fits into the story.  My pick is easily Ryan Bingham & T-Bone Burnett’s  “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” which is a hauntingly fantastic piece of music that stuck with me long after the film ended.

Best Score is a fun category because I’ve just started listening to scores in the past few years.  I’ll admit, I’m still not as aware of a score when I’m watching a film unless it’s very excellent, so I thought this year’s choice would be easy.  Unfortunately, two of the most memorable scores (for me) aren’t even nominated!  So, while I’d like to say The Informant! should win this prize, it’s not even among the nominees.  Instead, I have to pick from Avatar, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Hurt Locker, Sherlock Holmes and Up. From these, the two I remember most are Alexandre Desplat’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Michael Giacchino’s Up, the latter of which just barely wins out over the former due to that magical opening montage with no dialogue and only score.  Desplat’s score to FMF is great and really fits the mood well—just listening to some excerpts of these songs puts me down underground with Mr. Fox and his friends.   But Giacchino’s score is soaring and flying and fits the movie so well.

Best Film Editing contains an interesting mix of films and the nominees come from such different styles of film, it’s difficult for me to pick just one.  Precious contained some interesting edits of real life mixed with fantasy, but otherwise the editing wasn’t all that showy.  Avatar pretty much succeeded beyond compare in every technical level.  District 9 somehow transformed from cinéma vérité to a blockbuster action film pretty seamlessly.  Inglourious Basterds has that Tarantino choppy writing style, but not once did the film feel clunky or confusing.  But I think my pick has to be The Hurt Locker, as it used its edits to really make the story more intense and suspenseful.

Best Costume Design almost always goes to the period pieces–corsets and large dresses seem to make the Academy members excited.  The Young Victoria is obviously going for that vote this year, but I wasn’t too impressed with the costumes here.  Again, I’ve missed Dr. Parnassus, but from what I’ve seen in its  trailer, the costumes were pretty outlandish.  Nine is a stage musical thrown in front of cameras, and the designers did well bringing each character to life with clothes.  But this race really comes down to two.  Coco Before Chanel is about the early life of famed fashion designer Coco Chanel and Bright Star tells the story of the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, here shown to be a budding clothing designer.  While I enjoyed Coco Before Chanel much more than Bright Star, I thing the design in the latter is a little more interesting.

Best Cinematography is the final category before we get to the “Big Eight.”  I’m a fan of good cinematography, but I’ve noticed the Oscar rarely goes to who I feel is most deserving.  I haven’t seen The White Ribbon, so I can’t say much about the black & white camera work here.  Avatar has interesting camera set ups and moves, but it feels almost like cheating since I can’t tell what was done with the cameras and what was done with the computers.  The Hurt Locker has some very tense moments, and the camera work helped induce some of that feeling of dread.  Which again brings me down to two.  I recall several times during Inglourious Basterds where I noticed the skillful camera, which is impressive because the directing, writing and acting were so good, the camerawork must have been great to get noticed above the rest.  I’m thinking specifically of the overhead shot in the opening scene, panning down across the floor and the final setpiece “Revenge of the Giant Face.”  But, I was impressed more often by Bruno Delbonnel’s work in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  The film opens with the camera zooming around London as Death Eaters destroy the Millennium Bridge and eventually crash into Diagon Alley.  Harry later shows up at The Burrow, and the camera playfully looks up the broken and bent staircase as members of the house peek out and down upon their new guest.  The entire cave sequence near the end is just beautiful to watch.  I doubt a Harry Potter film will win any Oscars before HPatDH:PII comes out, but this one deserves it (in my opinion).

And now, we come to the Big Eight.  I had really hoped to see all the nominees before tonight’s broadcast, but sadly the first local screening of The Last Station was sold out yesterday and I have too much other stuff going on to see it before the big show.   But still, seeing 18 of the 19 films and 43 of the 45 nominations in these last eight categories is pretty impressive… right?

Best Adapted Screenplay is a category that has the “It wasn’t as good as the book” stigma on it already.  Luckily, I haven’t read any of the original materials here, so I don’t have that in the back of my mind.  Nominees include District 9, An Education, In the Loop, Precious & Up in the Air.  District 9 and Up in the Air are really well-written, and it’s coming down between those two and In the Loop.  In the end, I’m choosing the comedy because I believe comedy is probably 100x harder to write than drama.  This also has the problem of “How much of it was improvised?” but I’ve heard an interview with the writers, and they say very little of what was on the screen wasn’t in their script.  That’s the sign of really great writing—when you think it’s too funny to have been written beforehand and it must have been improvised on the set.

Best Original Screenplay features five fantastic original stories.  Up is another great film from Pixar—I don’t know how they keep coming up with such great stories, but its ending is a little off.  The Messenger was a great war film because it wasn’t about the war, but it could have gone further.  A Serious Man was a thought-provoking film, but I had to see it twice because I just didn’t get it the first time through (good thing or bad thing, I’m not sure).  Which again brings me down to two.  I love Quentin Tarantino, and his imagination made Inglourious Basterds one of my favorite films of the year.  The story and characters and dialogue are all great, but what else would you expect from QT?  But Mark Boal put together a war film that actually didn’t suck.  The Hurt Locker is a gripping story featuring a division of soldiers I had known little about.  The plot doesn’t feel manipulative or crazy, and yet looking back at what happened it seemed like it very easily could have.  I think both are very well-written, but in the end I have to go fanboy and choose Quentin Tarantino

Best Supporting Actress should go to Mo’Nique.

Best Supporting Actor should go to Christoph Waltz.

There’s little else to say about these two categories.  Both actors blew away their competition.

Best Actress is probably the toughest category for me.  I haven’t seen The Last Station so I don’t know how good Helen Mirren is.  My biggest complaint with An Education was that Carey Mulligan played the role too old, running some of the story.  Gabourey Sidibe did fine in Precious but considering this is her first ever role, I don’t know how much was her and how much was acting.  Plus, her character spent much of the time in silence, looking down and sad—not that difficult.  Which leaves Streep in Julie & Julia or Bullock in The Blind Side.  I know I’m probably alone here, but I wasn’t impressed by Streep as Julia Child—I saw Streep doing Child, rather than just Child on screen.  So I guess my choice has to be Sandra Bullock, but that’s only by default.  I think there are definitely some scenes where she’s overacting (e.g. “I’m not changing his life. He’s changing mine.”) but I’ll admit she did do a decent job with this character (who I’ve heard is actually pretty similar to the real life woman).

Best Actor would have to go to Jeff Bridges for his work in Crazy Heart.  Not only did he deserve an Oscar before now (the Academy loves handing out Lifetime Recognition awards), but his work here actually deserves the award on its own.  He is fantastic as the drunk, washed up signer Bad Blake and really outshines his other competition.  Colin Firth is probably a close second for his portrayal of a day in the life of a professor who recently lost his lover in A Single Man—very touching indeed.

Best Director is a tough category to choose.  It’s hard to remember how much the director does.  This category isn’t about which film I thought was best, but which film was most craftily constructed.  I think it comes down to Kathryn Bigelow for her work on The Hurt Locker and Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds.  Both films are wonderfully put together, but I’m giving the edge to Bigelow because QT does seem to get in his own way at times, plus Bigelow does what so few have been able to—direct a critically successful war movie.

Which just leaves Best Picture.  There are ten nominees this year, which is an interesting change.  Unlike the actual Oscars, there’s very little build-up to the final category here, because I’m not trying to predict what will win, but rather say what I think should win… If we’re talking Best Picture, we have to look at my Best Films of 2009 list, and the nominee that’s closest to #1 is Inglourious Basterds.

Well, hope you enjoyed my little analysis on what I enjoyed and wish could win tonight.  Wanted to get this out there before the broadcast, so I’ve furiously written it last night and this morning.  Don’t have time to go back for a re-read or edit, so I’m sorry for any long-winded sections or typos.  Feel free to leave a comment about any films or performances you feel deserve the win.