LOVE AND HATE FOR UNCLE OSCAR********** Plus My Perfect World Oscar Picks and Nonscientific Predictions for Tomorrow's Oscar Nominations

Is it just me? Have I finally, after nearly 47 years, become completely jaded and unimpressed by the Oscars? It can’t be the movies, can it? Despite the usual claims that this year was more lackluster than not by the standards of any given movie year, 2006 seemed to me a pretty juicy one for movies, and it certainly helps stack the ratio of good to bad by having to be extra judicious in the theatrical releases I pay out of my own pocket to see—just like the Joe Moviegoer I am, I’m a whole lot less likely to bet my $11 on a movie that could go either way, and I tend to save titles with iffier expectations (Thank You For Smoking, The Devil Wears Prada) for DVD. Sometimes this process of elimination makes me end up wishing I’d seen the movie on the big screen (16 Blocks, Slither); and sometimes I’m made exceedingly glad for my reticence and a priori judgment calls (Clerks 2, Lucky Number Slevin). And even though I didn’t see everything I needed to see this year (yet), I know that there are plenty of movies in 2006 deserving of honor from the Academy.

So maybe it’s the fact that, in the dark shadow of the Directors Guild snubs of Clint Eastwood, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron, dear old, dotty Uncle Oscar looks poised to honor yet another contrived, good-for-you ensemble drama about man’s inability to communicate/connect with/tolerate his fellow man—after all, we’re all so much more tightly knit and understanding of each others’ foibles and prejudices as a nation of moviegoers after having been force-fed Crash; why not use the power of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to bring us all closer together as a bruised and battered humanity subject to the chronologically scrambled chaos theory of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel? (The models for these post-9/11 behavioral studies—the ensemble narratives of Robert Altman’s films—were never quite so morally tidy or relentlessly showy in their pessimism, and therefore routinely escaped Academy coronation.)

But it’s not all Babel’s fault. Any Oscar show that stands to be dominated by the uber-quirk of Little Miss Sunshine (a movie I liked) or the hype surrounding the glossy, insistently shallow Dreamgirls (a movie I sorta liked) promises to be less than fascinating. No less than absolutely assured is Helen Mirren’s ascendance to the Oscar throne, and good for her, by the way—she deserves it. The rewarding of this great performance is as tight a lock as any in Oscar history, even though it has yet to be officially nominated—the odds are more likely that the sun won’t rise on Tuesday morning, when the nominees are announced, than that Mirren will be left off the roster of honorees. However, though shoo-in status is sometimes directed toward the nominees that actually should win, they almost never serve to increase the amusement level for Oscar watchers on the big night. (Remember the feeling of that heavy blanket being dropped over the proceedings nine years ago when it became clear very early on that Titanic was going to dominate the awards even more than previously expected?)

And maybe my disinterest in this year’s awards can be traced to something as simple as my finally accepting, after nearly 40 years of resisting the idea, that the Oscars really don’t have much to do with what’s great, or even good, in any given year. There are just too many excellent, important movies floating through the halls of film history that never caught the gold man’s gaze to come to any other conclusion. Even film critics have admitted on occasion that movies they thought were brilliant and worthy of the highest praise have sometimes ended up looking a whole lot less worthy 10 or 20 years down the line. So why should the majority-vote conclusions of the Oscar voting body be any different? (All I have to do to drive home this point is think of how badly I ache to revisit the likes of Ordinary People, Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Out of Africa or Rainman.) And to be honest, even in years when films like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Million Dollar Baby held court at the Kodak Theater (both movies well deserving of the honors they received), I’ve had more fun poring over the individual observations of year-end critics top 10 lists and comparing them to my own observations and preferences than following the whimsies of Oscar leading up to his night of nights. And this is truer than ever when considering the movies of 2006.

To paraphrase the great popular romantic philosopher Peter Cetera (an Oscar nominee himself, by the way, for this), Oscar is a hard habit to break. I used to get up at 5:00 in the morning and watch the nominees announced by the bleary-eyed president of the Academy, last year’s Supporting Actress winner steadfastly by his side, keeping him from tipping over. I used to look forward to it with a ridiculous level of excitement. But this year, yesterday, as a matter of fact, my wife told me that Tuesday morning, January 23, was the big morning. Three days before the event, and it was news to me. If she hadn’t said anything, I feel sure I wouldn’t have been aware of it at all and would have been shocked out of my undies to see the announcement when I innocently clicked for my daily fix from the Internet Movie Database.

But indifference to the awards themselves aside, the ritual of watching on Oscar night still holds sway over my better instincts of taste and common sense. I almost always find the show a whole lot more interesting, and less boring, than do the insta-pundits whose evaluations, perhaps tapped out on BlackBerries just outside the doors of the Governor’s Ball or Elton John’s Vanity Fair after-party, are featured in the morning-after editions of the Los Angeles Times and other publications that love to dis their Oscar cake and eat it too. I’m in the minority of viewers, too, who still think that David Letterman’s appearance as emcee added up to one of the best Oscar shows I’ve ever seen. However uncomfortable he might have been, Letterman was clearly too smart and loose for the room that night. I’d like to think, now that the era of Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg seems, thankfully, to have passed and Jon Stewart’s sharp, irreverent performance has been hailed as a new standard, that Letterman might have a much more receptive audience were he ever to try the job again—Uma and Oprah might just get the joke this time.

So, yes, go ahead, Oscar, name Babel (which I will probably be shamed into seeing, despite my previous declaration of having no interest in it) as Best Picture of the Year; tell me Dreamgirls featured the year’s best editing, or Little Miss Sunshine the best original screenplay of 2006. I’ll grin and bear it, because even though you are an imperfect popularity contest insufficient to the task of actually honoring the best in movies regardless of public perception and/or box office performance, you’re still an excellent excuse for gathering about the TV (or the computer) and talking about the year’s movies one last time with friends and family. (So are the Independent Spirit Awards, for that matter, and this year Sarah Silverman is back! But the less said about the Golden Globes Awards, notwithstanding the acceptance speeches of Hugh Laurie and Sacha Baron Cohen, the better.) I will do my level best to be glad for the nominees that I like, especially if they win, and not worry about the absurdity of your inclusion of one or exclusion of another. I will try not to grind my teeth too intensely or roll my eyes more vigorously than my optometrist would recommend when a nominee I deem unworthy ends up reigning supreme. And I will struggle to remember that, as my wife constantly urges me at this time of the year, you, Oscar, mean virtually nothing except to those who win you and those who don’t. As a barometer for the quality of film culture, you are unreliable at best, blind and unforgiving at worst, and witheringly vulnerable to the overriding, prevailing wisdom of time. But as garishly enjoyable television, and as a peek into how the movie industry sees itself, through rose-colored contacts, as cosmetically and pharmaceutically and egotistically enhanced as any big-budget epic, you’re just about unmatchable.

Oscar, a lot of the movies of 2006 are too smart for you. Hell, I’m too smart for you. But you had me in 1969 with “And the winner is Midnight Cowboy” and you’ve got me 37 years later, for better and worse, with “And the Oscar goes to…” You are, at this point, for better and worse, an inextricable, though increasingly unimportant, element of the movies themselves for me. Your claims of devotion to the art of film are certainly no more laughable than the protestations of those who regally profess absolutely no interest in your ceremonial machinations. And I suspect we will continue this one-sided relationship until you do something really unforgivable, like name Rob Schneider best actor of the year, or bestow a lifetime achievement award upon someone like Uwe Boll or Dennis Dugan. Until that dark day comes, however, there will always be a place for you once a year on my living room television set, and room enough for a few words about you here.

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So, with an eye toward Tuesday morning, and a nod of acknowledgement toward the staff of critics at The New York Times, here’s a couple of lists to occupy your time (and, of course, mine) in the waning hours before the specifics of the Oscar race solidify. First, my Perfect World Oscar Nominations, a list of 10 categories populated only by the nominees I would choose, regardless of the likelihood they would ever be noticed by the Academy in the real world. Then, my last-minute, absolutely non-scientific, seat-of-my-sweat-pants guesses for what the list of actual nominees will look like in those same major categories. I profess no insight here, nor do I expect that my picks will be anywhere close to what will be announced on Tuesday—many far smarter, far more invested prognosticators than I will produce heavily considered guesses that are just as likely to have a mile-wide hole or two poked in them by the vicissitudes of Uncle Oscar’s tendency to throw in a monkey-wrench nomination here or there, just so we won’t think him too dotty or predictable. And that’s what I like best about the whole Oscar process—the ability of the Academy to set the likes of Sammy Rubin and George Pennacchio and Jillian Barberie all aflutter, the sleep barely blinked out of their eyes, as they chatter endlessly about “What were they thinking?” and how they just knew Ryan Philippe and Daniel Craig were locks for Best Actor nominations. Let the madness begin.

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MY PERFECT WORLD 2006 OSCAR NOMINATIONS

BEST PICTURE
Children of Men
Letters from Iwo Jima
Pan’s Labyrinth
A Prairie Home Companion
Three Times

BEST DIRECTOR
Robert Altman, A Prairie Home Companion
Alfonso Cuaron, Children of Men
Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labryinth
Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima
Hou Hsiao-hsien, Three Times

BEST ACTRESS
Ivana Baquero, Pan’s Labyrinth
Gong Li, Curse of the Golden Flower
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Gretchen Mol, The Notorious Bettie Page
Shu Qui, Three Times

BEST ACTOR
Jack Black, Nacho Libre
Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan
Clive Owen, Children of Men
Ken Watanabe, Letters from Iwo Jima
Bruce Willis, 16 Blocks

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Gong Li, Miami Vice
Julia Stiles, The Omen 666
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
Meryl Streep, A Prairie Home Companion

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Sacha Baron Cohen, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Mos Def, 16 Blocks
Paul Giamatti, The Illusionist
Kazunari Ninomiya, Letters from Iwo Jima
Mark Wahlberg, The Departed

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Nick Cave, The Proposition
Mike Judge, Etan Cohen, Idiocracy
Peter Morgan, The Queen
Kevin Willmott, The Confederate States of America
Iris Yamashita, Letters from Iwo Jima

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby,
Children of Men
Susannah Grant, Karey Kirkpatrick, Charlotte’s Web
William Monahan, The Departed
Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Paul Haggis, Casino Royale
Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt, Old Joy

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Ping Bing Lee, Three Times
Emmanuel Lubiezki, Children of Men
Guillermo Navarro, Pan’s Labyrinth
Wally Pfister, The Prestige
Tom Stern, Letters from Iwo Jima

BEST FILM EDITING
Joel Cox, Gary Roach, Letters from Iwo Jima
Alfonso Cuaron, Alex Rodriguez, Children of Men
William, Goldenberg, Paul Rubell, Miami Vice
Steve Mirkovich, 16 Blocks
Bernat Vilaplana, Pan’s Labyrinth

MY REAL WORLD 2006 OSCAR NOMINATION PICKS



BEST PICTURE
Babel
The Departed
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen
United 93

BEST DIRECTOR
Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine
Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima
Paul Greengrass, United 93
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Babel
Martin Scorsese, The Departed

BEST ACTRESS
Penelope Cruz, Volver
Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Gretchen Mol, The Notorious Bettie Page
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada

BEST ACTOR
Leonardo Di Caprio, The Departed
Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
Peter O’Toole, Venus
Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine
Emily Blunt, The Devil Wears Prada
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel
Catherine O’Hara, For Your Consideration

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine
Adam beach, Flags of Our Fathers
Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children
Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls
Jack Nicholson, The Departed

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Pedro Almodovar, Volver
Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine
Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden, Half Nelson
Peter Morgan, The Queen
Iris Yamashita, Letters from Iwo Jima

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
William Broyles Jr., Paul Haggis, Flags of Our Fathers
Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata,
Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Children of Men
Bill Condon, Dreamgirls
Todd Field, Tom Perrotta, Little Children
William Monahan, The Departed

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Speaking of love and hate and Uncle Oscar, Edward Copeland has the results of his survey of the Best and Worst BEST ACTRESS winners in Oscar history. Make a sandwich or two, pour a big mug of coffee, perhaps a Big Gulp, or whatever beverage you prefer, block off no less than an entire evening, and enjoy the bounty of data Edward has served up for this year’s survey.

The Top 10 Worst Best Actresses

Some Actresses Not Quite Bad Enough To Make The Final List

Worst Performances Ranked By Ballot

12 Winning Best Actress Performances That Got Through The Voting Process Without Picking Up A Single “Worst” Vote

The Untouchable Actress Whose Performance Gathered Neither a Single “Worst” Nor a Single “Best” Vote

A Summary of the Survey Results (Part 1)

The Top 10 BEST Best Actress Winners

Performances That Weren’t Good Enough to Make the Top 10 BEST Best Actresses

The BEST Best Actresses Ranked By Ballot

18 Performances That Didn’t Get a Single Vote for BEST Best Actress

A Summary of the Survey Results (Part 2)

Whew! What an incredible survey. I can’t wait to dig into it myself! Edward, you have raised the bar for the Oscar obsessive, and I love ya for it!

More on the Oscars over the next month, to be sure, including a look at Ennio Morricone, who will be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Oscar ceremony. Stay tuned.