Oscars Preview: Awards

Best Director:

• Damien Chazelle – La La Land
• Mel Gibson – Hacksaw Ridge
• Barry Jenkins – Moonlight
• Kenneth Lonergan – Manchester by the Sea
• Denis Villeneuve – Arrival

WILL WIN: Damien Chazelle

SHOULD WIN: Denzel Washington – Fences

BIGGEST SNUB: Denzel Washington – Fences – Mr. Washington paints his work with a number of unanticipated artistic brushstrokes that I’m still noodling over.

WORST NOMINATION: Reluctantly, Mr. Chazelle. So much of La La Land is elegantly constructed and shot with picturesque precision; no one could fault him for winning but an inveterate contrarian by nature. So I’ll state my case. One: he allowed himself to be talked into casting stars in roles that should have gone to the best broadway stars you’ve never heard of. Two: he has no idea how to stage and choreograph dance. The best thing I saw this year was a live performance of Kiss Me Kate put on by DC’s Shakespeare Theater Company. Musically, and in dance, it was everything that La La Land isn’t – bursting with raw talent and joy. It was so good that at another play 4 months later, everyone in the audience was still talking about it. Why is an off-Broadway theater troop blowing the prohibitive Oscar favorite out of the water?

Best Supporting Actress:

• Viola Davis – Fences
• Naomie Harris – Moonlight
• Nicole Kidman – Lion
• Octavia Spencer – Hidden Figures
• Michelle Williams – Manchester by the Sea

WILL WIN: Viola Davis

SHOULD WIN: Viola Davis – best ugly cry in the business

BIGGEST SNUB: Kate McKinnon – Ghostbusters. She walked into THE female comedienne movie to top all others and made her more famous colleagues look like the straight women. Once upon a Jack Palance time, the Oscars could at least countenance comedy in the Supporting actor awards. This was one of those performances. 

WORST NOMINATION: Octavia Spencer. I appreciate the strong bounceback from last year’s Oscars too white scandal, but this feels like a throwaway on a middling performance.

PSH Award for Best Supporting Actor:

• Mahershala Ali – Moonlight
• Dev Patel – Lion
• Jeff Bridges – Hell or High Water
• Michael Shannon – Nocturnal Animals
• Lucas Hedges – Manchester by the Sea

WILL WIN: Mahershala Ali

SHOULD WIN: Issey Ogata – Silence – easily my most memorable performance of the year

BIGGEST SNUB/WORST NOMINATION: This is usually the strongest category but this time you could replace almost all of the nominations comfortably and have a better list. Most notably: Woody Harrelson – Edge of Seventeen, Kevin Hart – The Secret Life of Pets, Issey Ogata – Silence, Glenn Powell – Everybody Wants Some, and Sunny Pawar – Lion. How could you put Dev Patel in over the cutest kid ever?

Cate Blanchett Award for Best Actress:

• Isabelle Huppert – Elle – I can only guess that this is a conspiracy of the wardrobe voters
• Ruth Negga – Loving – If ever there was a call for a stage name, it was here. Ms. N. stands out for soldiering on despite a dismal script, where the rest of the cast clearly gave up 30 minutes in.
• Natalie Portman – Jackie – Godmother Streep must have spiked the distribution on this film, which disappeared almost immediately from theaters and mysteriously will not be available for rental viewing prior to the awards. I can only assume she was too good for comfort.
• Emma Stone – She has a lot of subtlety within her relatively narrow range. 
• Meryl Streep – An obligatory vote, this performance was wholly undeserving. Not deliberately bad enough to be funny, not touching enough to be moving. She seems to have hired a lot of bad actors to surround her only to prop up her underwhelming work here.  

WILL WIN: Emma Stone

SHOULD WIN: Lena Headey – Game of Thrones. With the convergence of TV and film, and another embarrassing crop of niche-film-only female leads, I choose violence.

SNUB: Taraji Henson – While Ms. Spencer’s performance was forgettable, Ms. Henson’s was a welcome surprise. She deserves a chance to see what she can do with more big roles.

WORST NOMINATION: Meryl Streep.

DDL Award for Best Actor:

• Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea – Not so much acting as selecting roles that allow him to do the same thing over and over again.
• Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge – Kind of a year-long achievement award for both this and Silence. Who would have guessed that everyone’s Spiderman, Tobey Maguire, would be done, and Mr. Garfield would have a well-earned career in front of him?
• Ryan Gosling – La La Land – Ignore the singing and dancing issues and it’s amongst his best work
• Viggo Mortensen – Captain Fantastic – I watched this so you don’t have to. DO NOT WATCH THIS. 
• Denzel Washington – Fences – He’s bombed on enough roles now that I can’t put him in Daniel Day Lewis territory as the best actor of his generation…

WILL WIN: Denzel…but this felt like a career capstone fully meriting another trophy in all the ways that Training Day did not.

SHOULD WIN: Denzel

BIGGEST SNUB: Nate Parker, Birth of a Nation.

WORST NOMINATION: Viggo Mortensen

Best Picture:

• Arrival – My mom once worked as a telemarketer. She told me at one point that she had an idea for a movie, in which a telemarketer saved the world. Apparently a linguist had the same idea about themselves. Perhaps the most interesting question we could ask ourselves after Arrival is, how many of us don’t have a story in mind about our infinite willingness to use our trade to save the world in theory. Who are the people who don't dream of soaring heroism. Are they happier?
• Fences – The only literary work in this list.
• Hacksaw Ridge – A nice war movie which tracks very closely to the personal life of its troubled director, in which his alcoholic Opus Dei father dragged his family to Australia to avoid having them fight in Vietnam. In keeping with Arrival’s theme, in Mr. Gibson’s mind, then, perhaps what the lead character does in this film is the heroism he imagines he would have engaged in. That is, before coming home and getting arrested for an alcohol-induced anti-Semitic rant in which he referred to the arresting officer as “angel tits.” 
• Hell or High Water – The sort of airplane movie that you discover to your surprise a) exists and b) isn’t half bad. It has absolutely no business being nominated for anything.
• Hidden Figures – Belligerently manipulative and cloying in all the ways that Fences deliberately avoids. I ate it up along with the rest of America. 
• La La Land – Almost classic. Evocative of the Los Angeles I remember and fell in love with, but would never be a part of. Wonderful performances, and an aggressively un-Tinseltown but very Hollywood ending. The much-remarked upon problem is that neither Mr. Gosling nor Ms. Stone can sing or dance much better than half of the audience. Less remarked upon is that the company dance routines are little better. In fact, the most evocative musical performance throughout is the jazz. Which appears to be the director’s real interest, given that it’s the topic of both of his movies to date. Perhaps he has backed his way into a more insightful point on accident: the death of an art form, jazz, evoked by his failure to put together top-tier musical numbers, another dying art form.
• Lion – A powerful advertisement for Google Earth.
• Manchester by the Sea – I could not bring myself to see Casey Affleck return yet again to the greater Boston region to brood.
• Moonlight – Another film I did not get to, because NPR was too busy reporting this same story every time I called it up on the car stereo.

WILL WIN: La La Land. Hollywood loves nothing more than itself, in musical format. 

SHOULD WIN: Fences. My favorite idea in Fences is the conceit that segregation is a never-present character, that it turns everything in more standard fare like Hidden Figures on this topic its head, that it provides no cheap tears moments like Costner-knocks-the-racism-down-with-a-crowbar. Ultimately, it is a film more interested in ideas, in characters, than in politics. And hence it never stood a chance.

WORST NOMINATION: Hell or High Water

BIGGEST SNUB: Silence. The only other truly literary film I saw this year, Scorcese’s bleak missionary drama was too religious and too remote for voters to connect with.

Biggest Snub ALL OTHER CATEGORIES: Hardcore Henry

Pitched as a relentless POV video game single-shot, you are not likely to love this movie, but it is jaw-dropping that they pulled it off. Easily the most "how did they do that" moments of the year.