It’s Oscar season again and the films competing for this year’s statuettes are as wildly diverse a group as the Academy has seen this millennium. While all of the films in competition are deserving of recognition, category by category it is not all that hard, in most cases, to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Best Picture
Although the Canadian in me ought to be rooting for the quirky, homegrown comedy Juno – which frankly lacks the polish and the gravity to make a serious case for itself as the best picture of the year — I would love to see Joel and Ethan Coen take this one home for No Country For Old Men. Brutally violent and darkly humourous by turns, it is the essence of Coen Brothers filmmaking, hybridizing stock film noir sensibilities with familiar genre (in this case western) tropes, but incorporating a wide variety of offbeat characters and influences, confounding generic conventions at every turn.
Atonement brings to the table the ambitious scope and British class that Academy voters often favour, but after The Queen lost to Scorsese’s gritty, blood-drenched The Departed last year, it seems only fitting that another violent masterpiece should earn Best Picture. (No Country would furthermore be a fitting follow-up to the incredible Academy Awards success of 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, another movie centred firmly on a serial killer, which remains one of only three films in history to win an “Oscar grand slam,” taking home awards for best picture, best director, best actor, best actress, and best screenplay.)
On the subject of violence, one film which unexpectedly lacked it was the inaptly named There Will Be Blood, which well deserves Academy recognition for its actors’ performances, but is ultimately far too perplexing and self-absorbed to earn a golden statuette for its producer. Michael Clayton, the last contender, seems positively ancient given its October release date, and despite a widely positive reception by critics and audiences, has staled too much in the intervening months to offer serious competition for this award; even were it a more recent release, it lacks the gusto to compete with the likes of Atonement and No Country.
Best Actor
There Will Be Blood may be as bloated and ungainly a film as an Oliver Stone director’s cut re-release, but there is no question that Daniel Day-Lewis deserves to win Best Actor for his portrayal of a cold-hearted, relentlessly manipulative oil prospector at the turn of the twentieth century.
George Clooney’s star has faded too much in the last couple of years for his role in Michael Clayton, and while Johnny Depp gave a solid performance in Sweeney Todd, it’s simply too – how does one put this? – Johnny Depp! The Depp/Burton collaboration, although as exciting on the screen as ever, seems almost de rigueur at this point, and one can only expect Academy voters feel as blasé about the duo as the rest of us by now. Besides, after his totally unexpected, magnificently idiosyncratic turn as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean – an otherwise utterly underwhelming franchise, especially toward the end – Depp would hard-pressed to impress in anything other than an equally off-the-wall performance or, conversely, a wholly conventional dramatic role (cf. Finding Neverland).
Tommy Lee Jones seems unlikely to win for his role as a war veteran in Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, and despite an incredible amount of buzz about Viggo Mortensen’s brooding performance as a Russian mobster in Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, the quiet menace of his character was as overrated as it was outstanding.
Best Actress
The three serious contenders for the award for Best Actress are Julie Christie in Away From Her, Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and – perhaps a bit of wishful thinking – Ellen Page in Juno. Blanchett lost her 1998 nomination for the first Elizabeth film to Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love (and rightly so, as sap-laden as the bard’s movie may have been), and the Academy has not traditionally held sequels in high regard come awards season; moreover, Blanchett is also nominated this year for Best Supporting Actress for her turn in the Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There, an award for which she seems a shoo-in.
Best Actress, then, falls either to veteran performer Julie Christie for her performance in Canadian Sarah Polley’s poignant drama (co-starring another notable Canuck, Gordon Pinsent), or relative newcomer Ellen Page (yet another Canadian), for her role as Juno’s wisecracking, precocious titular character. It is impossible to say one is more deserving than the other, and even Academy Award precedent gives little indication which way the vote may fall. Christie already has three Best Actress nominations under her belt – one of them, for 1965’s Darling, a win – indicating her good standing with industry decision-makers. But historically, the Academy has shown no reluctance to favour actresses lacking storied careers provided they appeared in challenging roles.
Forced to pick between the greying and the green, I’d cast my vote with Page, just because she (like her character) is such a lovable underdog, and because the last Canadian to win Best Actress was Marie Dressler in 1931. It seems to me that a 77-year hiatus is long enough.
Best Director
Canadian Jason Reitman, now 31, is one of the youngest Best Director nominees in the history of the Oscars, but he is simply no match for the competition. Paul Thomas Anderson received high praise for his handling of There Will Be Blood, but the film may prove to have been too turgid and confounding for him to be honoured with an award for his direction. Julian Schnabel’s work on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on a French memoir by a paralyzed stroke victim, is notable, but does not seem likely to garner such a major award; and the same goes for Tony Gilroy regarding his direction of the legal thriller Michael Clayton.
That brings me back to No Country For Old Men, for which the Coen brothers certainly deserve their first Academy Award for direction. Over three years of Christmas Lord of the Rings releases, the Academy essentially saved all its Oscar recognition for The Return of the King, which swept the 2005 ceremony, winning 11 awards; it would seem fitting for a similar phenomenon to occur here, given that No Country has received the same four nominations as Fargo did back in 1996. That film, the “white noir,” has long been regarded as the pinnacle of the Coens’ filmmaking, an estimation challenged by the critical success and overall excellence of No Country, which has drawn widespread comparison to Fargo.
The Coens jointly won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Fargo, and Frances McDormand won Best Actress for her role. For Fargo, however, only Joel Coen was named in the directing nomination, and Ethan as producer in the nomination for Best Picture; this year, they are jointly nominated for all four awards, and if the Academy voters have any sense they will take this opportunity to reward a pair of talented filmmakers for a long and illustrious career which, with any luck, is nowhere near to petering out.
Other Awards
As much as I would love for No Country For Old Men to sweep the Oscars like The Return of the King, the award for Best Supporting Actor (which may well go to Javier Bardem for his anachronistically-hairstyled sociopathic killer in the Coens’ genre-bender) rightfully belongs to Casey Affleck for an intense, show-stealing performance alongside Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Paul Dano might have given him a run for his money for his devilishly earnest performance as both identical twin brothers Paul and Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood, but by some incredible oversight he was left off the ballot in this category.
Cate Blanchett, as mentioned already, seems a sure winner in the Best Supporting Actress category. Saoirse Ronan deserves mention for her role as a confused 12-year-old in Atonement, but just as similarly aged Haley Joel Osment was snubbed for his role in The Sixth Sense in favour of Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules, Ronan simply cannot compete against the older, more experienced, and frankly more deserving Blanchett.
The award for cinematography is a toss-up between No Country For Old Men, in which Roger Deakins (who also shot The Assassination of Jesse James and is up for another Oscar in the same category for that film) captured the bleakness of the American Southwest, and Atonement, for which Seamus McGarvey has already received recognition at the Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards.