ROY EDROSO

One of my many filthy secrets is that I follow the Academy Awards more closely than the nominees do. The dark recesses of my brain are packed tight with Oscar trivia. For example: Do you know who the only three-time acting award winners are? Katharine Hepburn (three Best Actresses), Jack Nicholson (two Best Actors, one Best Supporting Actor) and Walter Brennan (three Best Supporting Actors). And Brennan got there first. For The Westerner, Come and Get It, and Kentucky. Speaking of Best Actor/Best Supporting Actor crossovers, Barry Fitzgerald...

Enough. You don't have to know this. No one does. But a tiny bit of Oscar glitz does no harm and may even brighten your day. So I have taken a brief holiday from my duties as chief crank at Alicubi to special-correspond an analysis of this year's Academy Award nominations, announced on February 12th, and to pick likely winners.

My method is breathtakingly simple. I pick winners based entirely on instinct. I have seen very, very few of the nominated films. In many respects this is an advantage. One's judgement of a film's Oscar-worthiness can be clouded by any personal opinion of its merits. Like Presidential elections and Olympic figure-skating, Oscar winners are selected according to factors having nothing to do with their essential fitness; hype, popularity, and political and social aspirations far more strongly influence the voting. If you read Entertainment Weekly in the dentist's office, you are better suited to handicapping the Oscars than a projectionist with three jobs.

History also influences the Oscars. For one thing, the Academy's voting membership changes only slightly from year to year, so short-term patterns are easy to spot and slow to change. But even long-term patterns--to which trivia nerds like me are most sensitive--can give clues to the outcome, for there is such a thing as institutional memory, and at the Oscars--where the special award given to director and HUAC rat Elia Kazan three years ago drew protests from Academy members who were yet unborn during the Blacklist--memories run long and deep. As political pundits see the shadows of Ronald Reagan and Andrew Jackson when surveying modern electoral maps, so I lay a palimpsest of Oscars past over the present scene when making my picks.

So here is my chance to play Paul Krugman to Oscar's Enron: I will tell you who I think is going to win, and you can all laugh at me on March 24 when I get outwitted by Roger Ebert.

Best Picture: Lord of the Fucking Rings. The big surprise in this category is Gosford Park. If you'd told me last year that a Robert Altman movie would get seven Oscar nominations, I'd have laughed, perhaps even maniacally. What place has Altman's muzzy, talky films in the digital and dumb Hollywood of today? Prestige director plus English accents equals class, I guess. Still, I'll bet a lot of people will go see it on the strength of the Oscar nods and get pissed off because it isn't Murder on the Orient Express.

In the Bedroom is one of those "little" films with which Oscar sometimes adds depth to its field. These seldom win. Driving Miss Daisy beat weak competition in 1989, mainly because it was a racial object lesson, which always doubles Oscar's self-congratulation factor.

A Beautiful Mind has a lot going for it. It's uplifting! It's mildly challenging (but don't be scared, it has Russell Crowe in it)! It's based on a mostly true story! But history tells me (through the fillings in my teeth): look to the Best Picture biopics of yore. In the 1930s, The Life of Emile Zola was the model, and A Beautiful Mind largely conforms to it: great man, great obstacles, great actor. But by the 1980s, the model was Gandhi: great big screen, great sets, great thing to assign to high school history students in lieu of reading. I doubt the nutcake math whiz will make the grade.

Moulin Rouge has for its voting base the drugged-out young hipster contingent, which is like basing a Presidential campaign on an endorsement from NORML. It also carries no Best Director nomination, historically a big hurdle.

That leaves that big, foofy thing with the Hobbits and Gremlins or whatever the fuck they are.

BEST ACTOR: Sean Penn. Russell "Fuck You" Crowe is no Tom Hanks. No hat trick for you, says the Oscar Nazi! That leaves it wide open. But, when handicapping Oscar, never underestimate the power of handicapped characters! Cliff Robertson and Tom Hanks (retarded), Marlee Matlin (deaf), Holly Hunter (mute), Jane Wyman (deaf-mute), Geoffrey Rush, Anthony Hopkins, Ronald Colman, Olivia DeHavilland and Peter Finch (nuts), Henry Fonda (senile), Daniel-Day Lewis (all fucked up) and Roberto Begnini (just plain stupid) whisper to me across the vale of time that Penn, to whom voters are so attached they recently nominated him for an obscure Woody Allen movie, has the edge.

BEST ACTRESS: Sissy Spacek. Halle Berry is the only other real contender. And I thought at first she might get it: after all, Sidney Poitier's getting mighty lonesome up there on the top-tier acting shelf. But I just saw some of BAPS on TV. And I still remember Ms. Berry as Storm in X-Men--no matter how much I drink, I still remember, dammit!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Ian McKellen. I love when old British actors dress up funny, don't you? Aw, come on, everyone does. Since I predict a shutout for Rings in the Directing and Screenplay categories, it needs another major statuette to give its Best Picture win more credibility.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Marisa Tomei. At first I thought Jennifer Connelly had it bagged. But how many long-suffering wives have won this award? Beatrice Straight in Network, but she had that big speech. Marcia Gay Harden, but she was Lee Krassner. Mercedes Ruehl, but she was the flashy, blowsy type of neglected wife, whereas I hear that Connelly was just tense and heroic (though I admit this may be one of those rare instances where it might do some good to actually see the movie). Thus I tip the scales to Tomei. Oscar wants to pay her back for the poison kiss they gave her in 1992 (think Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8), since which time she has labored in a number of stinkers, and this role qualifies as some sort of a comeback. Plus she's a terrorized ex-wife! Hey, I'm beginning to think this is a sure thing!

BEST DIRECTOR: Robert Altman. Big Bob has been bitching out Hollywood and U.S. foreign policy of late. If you don't think he's a genius for McCabe and Mrs. Miller, you should consider him one for this absolutely brilliant, reverse-psychological self-marketing. The longtime Hollywood outcast is screaming, Go ahead, I dare yuh, reject the greatest working American director and give your fucking piece of shit Oscar to Opie! Oscar, humbled, will go for it. As for Opie, there's always Apollo 13: After the Fall, which will follow the luckless astronauts as they descend into alcoholism and despair. There's a sure thing.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: The Royal Tenenbaums. The Altman curse in this category goes back to M*A*S*H. Altman and his merry band of improvisers and potheads substantially rewrote Ring Lardner Jr.'s script, and Lardner bitched about it to the Hollywood establishment. Lardner won an Oscar, Altman won a reputation as "difficult." (Did you know Otto Preminger's brother Ingo produced M*A*S*H? Small world.) I think Oscar looks upon all Altman scripts as suspect. Also, how embarrassing is it if Gosford Park takes best script and director, but not best picture? Maybe not very--Traffic did it last year. But what should be a sure thing looks shaky in this context. Let's see, says Oscar, to whom should we throw a bone? Shall we revert to the 60s strategy of rewarding literate scripts for small movies (e.g. The Producers, Father Goose) and foreign films (e.g. A Man and a Woman, Divorce Italian Style)? The former favors Memento, the latter Amelie. How about rewarding a famously precocious writer/director--Cameron Crowe, Quentin Tarantino--who will win nothing in the other categories?

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: A Beautiful Mind. Since Rings gets Best Pic, the logical runner-up gets the script prize. It is done, as they say, to have a Best Picture that misses both screenplay and director Awards if its ooh-ahh factor is high (e.g., Gladiator, The Greatest Show on Earth).

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Moulin Rouge. None of the DPs are old Hollywood hacks, so MR's flashy shooting will probably take the prize (though since Rings is an epic, there's some hope for it here--see The Last Emperor, et alia).

BEST FILM EDITING: Black Hawk Down. Oscar would like to be fun and free-spirited and give this one to Memento, which, with Ghost World, is the closest thing to an indie contender in the whole batch. (I think Oscar's slight love for indies was mostly discharged in its nominations for Moulin Rouge, which the voters identified with independent film because it has pop songs in it and makes no goddamn sense.) But Black Hawk Down is widely perceived to have been snubbed in the nominations, and so will receive this mercy Oscar.

BEST SOUND, BEST COSTUMES: Moulin Rouge, on the grounds that both the sound and costumes are loud and strident, which makes them easy for voters to remember.

BEST ART DIRECTION, BEST MAKEUP: Lord of the Rings.. Though it's a scandal that they aren't giving the latter to the guy who made Jon Voight's wig.

BEST SOUND EDITING: Pearl Harbor. Boom! Bam! Oscar like war noises!

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: A.I. Having won his Thalberg Award, Steven Spielberg can now become a big, bloated producer in earnest and, like Irwin Allen before him, walk away with a lone Visual Effects Oscar.

BEST CARTOON: Shrek.
BEST FOREIGN FILM: Amelie.

(Yawn. Gimme a hard one.)

BEST SONG: "Vanilla Sky." Oscar loves to give awards to pop stars so Sir Paul gets his second one--unless countervailed by geezer affection for Randy Newman and whatever piece of crap he burped up this year.

BEST SCORE: A Beautiful Mind. I sense that even Hollywood people are sick of Howard Shore and John Fucking Williams, and I understand James Horner has some kind of a rep. Randy Newman suffers from being the only song-score composer in this category (Oscar drops the separate Original Musical or Comedy Score category when contenders are at embarrassingly low levels). He also suffers from a hideously decayed talent, but that's another story.

The remaining categories I leave for actual insiders to pick, because I don't know which star's brother-in-law produced which short film. But I note with alarm that none of the BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE nominees are about the Holocaust! That means no aged concentration camp survivors dragged on stage for a round of applause (the sound of which seemed, to my eyes, to scare a few years off some of their lives)--another Oscar tradition, like Johnny Carson, I for one will miss.

For entertainment purposes only. Feel free to use these picks, but don't call me if you lose big in your office pool.