On Oscar night most of us in Israel will be watching the
Best Documentary category with the most anticipation, since two Israeli movies
are nominated. But whether or not either
The Gatekeepers or
5 Broken Cameras
wins, the 85th Academy Awards promises to be one of the most suspenseful in
years because there are no shoo-ins in many categories. It’s been an exciting
year for movies, and with any luck, it will be an exciting awards
show.
It will be broadcast live at 3:30 a.m. local time Monday on
the both the YES and HOT networks. If you are interested in streaming the
ceremony live online, the official Academy Awards website at
http://oscar.go.com/ has all the details, as well as an App you can download to
watch live backstage videos. For those interested in the ups and downs of the
competition, go to awardsdaily.com, the oldest Oscar website, and read up on
Oscar minutiae.
For the past few years, there have been up to 10 Best Picture Oscar nominees.
This was intended to intensify interest in the awards, but whether it has is
debatable. This year, there are nine Best Picture nominees. But there are
still only five Best Director nominees, and usually the five most serious
contenders in the Best Picture race are those films that have nominated
directors. But the biggest controversy so far this year is that Ben Affleck, the
director of one of the films that has emerged as a front runner for in the Best
Picture category –
Argo – did not receive a Best Director nomination. No movie
has won Best Picture without a Best Director nomination since
Driving Miss Daisy
in 1990. Could this be the year history repeats itself? Read on.
BEST PICTURE: Beasts of the Southern Wild, a beloved indie (with an Israeli-born
producer, Dan Janvey), and Michael Haneke’s Austrian drama Amour are nominated
but are just along for the ride.
Les Misérables is the kind of elaborate musical
that might have swept the Oscars a half-century ago. Quentin Tarantino’s
Django Unchained is a controversial movie that has offended some
African-Americans.
Life of Pi is a gorgeous snorefest, unlikely to snare the big
prize.
Zero Dark Thirty, about a female CIA agent tracking down Osama Bin Laden,
was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who took home the Oscar three years ago for
The
Hurt Locker and won’t get an award again yet. David O. Russell’s
Silver Linings
Playbook is an enjoyable rom-com with serious, emotional underpinnings, but
comedies and romances don’t win Best Picture. That leaves Affleck’s
Argo and
Steven Spielberg’s
Lincoln. The latter is a worthy and well-crafted look at
Lincoln’s final years, but it’s hard to get excited about. It’s the cinematic
equivalent of oat bran. On the other hand,
Argo, the fact-based drama about the
escape of six American hostages from Tehran in 1980, is a suspenseful movie that
mixes humor and drama. And, best of all, as far as the Oscars are concerned, its
plot turns on the fact that a schlock movie producer and a special-effects
makeup artist were involved in creating fictitious identities for the hostages,
who pretended to be the crew of a science-fiction epic. Hollywood insiders won’t
be able to resist this portrayal of two of their own as genuine
heroes.
Winner: ArgoBEST DIRECTOR: Just as in 1999, when Spielberg’s worthy
Saving Private Ryan lost
to John Madden’s more enjoyable
Shakespeare in Love for Best Picture, Spielberg
still walked away with the Best Director honor. That’s likely to happen again
this year.
Winner: Steven Spielberg,
Lincoln BEST ACTOR:
Daniel Day-Lewis
has two Oscars on his mantle, for
My Left Foot and
There Will Be Blood, and he
will add a third for
Lincoln. He can’t miss – he’s a Brit playing an American,
his character was a real person, and one of the most beloved figures in world
history to boot.
Winner: Daniel Day-Lewis,
LincolnBEST ACTRESS: This is probably the most interesting category this year. It
features the youngest and oldest Best Actress nominees ever, Quvenzhane
(pronounced Qui-ven-ZHEN-ay) Wallis, the cute-as a button nine-year old from
Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Emmanuelle Riva of
Amour, the hauntingly
gorgeous-for-her-age actress who will turn 86 on Oscar night. But the real
contest in this category is between two young beautiful relative newcomers:
Jennifer Lawrence in
Silver Linings Playbook and Jessica Chastain in
Zero Dark
Thirty. Both have already been nominated before, Lawrence for Best
Actress for
Winter’s Bone in 2010 and Chastain for Best Supporting Actress in
The Help last year. But this is Lawrence’s year.
Silver Linings Playbook
was an audience and critical favorite, and she gives an extremely appealing
performance. She also starred in
The Hunger Games and is probably the biggest female star in the world for the
under-20 set, that crucial youth demographic that the Academy hopes its films
and awards telecast will appeal to. Chastain is less of a star and more of an
actress, and
Zero Dark Thirty is a much less emotional film.
Winner:
Jennifer Lawrence,
Silver Linings Playbook
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: All the actors in this category have already won Oscars
at least once, and it’s shaping up as a face-off between Tommy Lee Jones, who
plays Thaddeus Stevens in
Lincoln, and Robert De Niro as a crusty, working-class
father suffering from OCD in
Silver Linings Playbook. Although De Niro has no
shortage of good performances on his resume, he has spent the bulk of the last
decade in dreck such as
Meet the Fockers. On the other hand,
Silver Linings
represents, if not a comeback (he never went away), then a return to form for
him. This one is close, though.
Winner: Robert De Niro,
Silver Linings
PlaybookBEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Never mind the rest: Anne Hathaway broke hearts with
her acting and singing in Les Miz.
Winner: Anne Hathaway,
Les Misérables
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: This one will be a contest between Argo and Lincoln,
too. Tony Kushner, the well-known playwright, wrote the Lincoln screenplay, but
Argo, written by Chris Terrio, won the Writer’s Guild Award, a good predictor of
the Oscars in this category.
Winner: Chris Terrio,
Argo BEST ORIGINAL
SCREENPLAY: Quentin Tarantino has a previous win in this category, and he’ll do
it again.
Winner: Quentin Tarantino,
Django Unchained BEST
FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM: This year, it’s simple. Michael Haneke’s dour drama,
Amour, about an elderly couple, received nominations in four other categories –
Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Actress. Translation: They really liked
it.
Winner: Amour
BEST DOCUMENTARY: The Israeli film industry is a big
winner in this category, since two of its films,
The Gatekeepers and
5 Broken
Cameras, received nominations. But it’s quite likely that they will split the
vote of those who are interested in the Middle East. Kirby Dick is a very
well-respected filmmaker, and his
The Invisible War details sexual abuse in the
US military. But there are an awful lot of films critical of the US
military out there. Newcomer David France’s
How to Survive a Plague, about the
AIDS epidemic, has won great acclaim. But people are raving about the least
overtly political film of the bunch,
Searching for Sugar Man, the story of a
mysterious musician who was a huge star in South Africa.
Winner:
Searching for Sugar Man