My Personal Oscars 2007

Well, Oscar nominations are out, and for the first time ever, I've seen all five movies up for Best Picture, so I'm excited. Though I disagree with a few nominations, I'm going to accept them for now, except to say this: I really liked Michael Clayton, but I really don't see any way that it was a better movie than Into the Wild, or (I imagine because I haven't seen it) Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Atonement, I thought, was also not as good, but I'll let it slide because so many people think it was great.

Actor: Nominees are George Clooney, Daniel Day-Lewis, Johnny Depp, Tommy Lee Jones (In the Valley of Ellah) and Viggo Mortensen (Easter Promises). I've only seen Lewis and Clooney, but unless one of those other performances was out of this world (and Depp's might be I suppose), it has to be Day-Lewis.

Actress: Can't comment, as I've only seen Juno. Ellen Page was great, but I don't think Oscar-worthy. At least Keira Knightley didn't get nominated.

Supporting Actor: Nominees are Casey Affleck (Assasination of Jesse James), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Charlie Wilson's), Javier Bardem (No Country--Anton Suger), Hal Holbrook (Into the Wild--Ron Franz), and Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton). Bardem is probably going to win it, but I can't for the life of me understand what he did to deserve it. It's not that his performance was bad--it was more than competent. But how exactly is it hard to look calm, slightly deranged, and chillily pissed off for two hours?

I haven't seen The Assasination or Charlie Wilson's, but for me this is between Holbrook and Wilkinson, who were both phenomenal. Holbrook plays a sort of crotchety old war veteran who Wild's main character runs into along the way, and he captures beautifully the struggle of a man who has been alone and emotionally distant since his wife and son died in a car accident trying to open up in the presence of the son-figure that is Chris McCandless. Wilkinson is just about equally great as a manic-depressive but brilliant lawyer who finally turns on the big corporate interest he's been defending for years in an enormous class-action lawsuit. His opening monologue is particularly great. If pressed, I'll give a slight nod to Holbrook.

Supporting Actress: Again, can't really comment, but I bet Cate Blanchett wins a surprise victory for her protrayal of Bob Dylan, which seems to have a lot of the appropriate buzz. The Academy loves people stepping outside the box in an acting role like that--in the words of Kit Ramsey: "Did I ever get a nomination? No! You know why? Cause I hadn't played any of them slave roles, and get my ass whipped. That's how you get the nomination. A black dude who plays a slave that gets his ass whipped gets the nomination, a white guy who plays an idiot gets the Oscar. That's what I need, I need to play a retarded slave, then I'll get the Oscar."

Director: Nominees are the four Best Picture nominees minus Atonement and plus The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Unless the Diving Bell is absolutely amazing, I don't see any way that you can give this to anyone but the The Cohen Brothers for No Country, who gave the best performance, I think, of anyone in any of the major categories.

I'll skip the screenplays except to say Atonement was okay at best and Juno was great, but again, it had enough flaws that it would be kind of a weak winner (though I wouldn't be surprised if it did win, as it's really the only category, except actress, I suppose, that it has a real shot in).

Best Picture: In order:

5. Michael Clayton. I really enjoyed this movie, and everything about it is good, but except for Wilkinson, nothing is great, and it's also kind of a story that's been done many times before though maybe never so well. B.

4. Atonement. You probably know that I didn't think much of Atonement as an adaptation of a spectacular book, but it was competent enough to still be a good movie. When evaluating the movie as a whole, you can't try to remove the contributions of the book from the equation, and if you don't do that, it was solid. B.

3. There Will Be Blood. It didn't reach my unrealistically high expecations, but the more I've thought about it, the more I think it was a better than good film. Everything was good--even the ending, which I didn't personally like because of its extraordinary pessimism about money and the American Dream--and there were moments that were spectacular, like the scene with the oil derrick on fire. A lot of the points it loses are because it's so uninspiring, not because of faults in execution. That said, I thought the Johnny Greenwood (of Radiohead) score totally sucked. But that's just me. B+.

2. No Country for Old Men. I originally gave it a B+, and while I still think the characters were, while interesting, almost totally undeveloped, and the plot is average, the execution of it as a film was just so flawless that it deserves an A-. No Country will probably win, and I have no beef with that. A-.

1a (tie). Spiderman 3 and The Golden Compass. You would think it would be a bad idea to have three entirely separate villians in an hour and a half movie, or to have two of the most unlikely events in the history of mankind happen basically silmultaneously, or to totally chop up the plot of one of the world's most beloved stories, but you would be wrong. A++.

1. Juno. I've already talked about it a lot, and while it has its own flaws--the biggest one I think is how easy it makes giving up a child seem--it's so engrossing, bright, enjoyable, funny, deep and inspiring that it more than makes up for it. Juno has virtually no chance to bring home the shiny gold man, but it would be a worthy winner. A.