Questions... and Answers?

Welcome to The Oscar Grouch!

Let me start off by saying that it’s ridiculously early to be prognosticating the year’s Academy Award nominees. At this point, with most of the likely pool of movies yet to be released, we can only hypothesize based on how these projects look on paper. If Oscar-watching history has taught us anything, it’s that projects that on paper look like sure bets often blow up before nominations are announced – projects like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Pay it Forward, The Shipping News and The Life of David Gale (not to mention non-starters that don’t star Kevin Spacey like The Age of Innocence, Heat, Ghosts of Mississippi, Casino, Nixon, Evita, Marvin’s Room, Jackie Brown, Amistad, Beloved, Eyes Wide Shut, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Hurricane, Almost Famous, The Majestic, Ali, The Royal Tenenbaums, Vanilla Sky, About Schmidt, The Human Stain, The Last Samurai, Love Actually and Cold Mountain). Meanwhile, low-on-the-radar fall movies, unthinkable of as serious nominees before Labor Day, have snuck into the top five – movies like Beauty and the Beast, The Crying Game, Secrets & Lies, Jerry Maguire, Life is Beautiful, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, In the Bedroom, Gosford Park, The Pianist and Lost in Translation. And in the acting categories, there have been even more unpredictable surprises – in August 2000, who in the U.S. even knew the name of Javier Bardem?

The point of all this is, there’s no way to accurately guess the short lists before all the eligible films have been screened. But since everyone else is doing it (in the hopes of attaining bragging rights as the only one to call some shocking nominee), I’ll throw in my two cents.

But before I get to my predictions, there are a few big questions I have about the 2004 Academy Awards:

Will there be a comedy in the Best Picture race?

While it’s a dangerous game to try and apply rules and statistics to a non-united body of 5,739 voters as though they are some kind of machine, and though there are exceptions to every rule, there are some undeniable trends that can guide the prediction process. In the last decade, 1999 was the only year without a comedy in the top five.

And yet, looking at this year’s lineup, I don’t see any comedies leaping out as strong contenders. However, the token comedy nominees are often the ones that emerge as legitimate front-runners for a nomination late in the race (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Babe, Il Postino, Jerry Maguire, The Full Monty, As Good As It Gets, Chocolat, Gosford Park and Lost in Translation).

The comedies that seem likely to be considered this year are: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I [Heart] Huckabee’s, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Sideways, Spanglish and Synergy. As much as I loved Eternal Sunshine and am looking forward to all the others, I just can’t imagine any of them being taken seriously. I know a lot of people are already putting The Life Aquatic on their shortlists, but this movie seems less Academy-friendly than The Royal Tenenbaums, and all that masterpiece could garner was a single nomination for Best Original Screenplay. And while Academy history would suggest that it’s a bad idea to bet against James L. Brooks (75% of his movies have been nominated for Best Picture), there’s that nagging Adam Sandler thing. I was all ready to go out on a limb and suggest that Synergy would emerge as the leading comedy choice, but the mediocre reviews on Ain’t It Cool News last week (along with its way late release date) made me think twice. So now I’m at a loss, but if I have to name one of these comedies as most likely to succeed, I guess I’ll go with The Life Aquatic.

Will there be any pre-September releases in the Best Picture race?

Again, history says yes, but this year’s release schedule says no.

Before 2002, the last time that there were no pre-September releases in the top five was 1988 (coincidentally, in both 1988 and 2002, all five Best Picture nominees were December releases). So statistics are on the side of one of the movies we’ve already seen making it – but which one?

The Dreamers? The Passion of The Christ? Eternal Sunshine? The Ladykillers? Troy? The Terminal? Fahrenheit 9/11? Before Sunset? Maria Full of Grace? The Manchurian Candidate? The Village? Collateral? We Don’t Live Here Anymore?

None of these seem all that likely now, but also as with the comedies, the pre-September movies that make it into the elite five are often far from sure things before Labor Day. When they were released, would anybody have put real money on The Silence of the Lambs, The Fugitive, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Braveheart, Il Postino, Babe, The Full Monty, The Sixth Sense, Erin Brockovich, Gladiator, Moulin Rouge! or Seabiscuit? I wouldn’t have.

So out of this year’s batch, the only two that have anything close to a shot (depending on how the fall movies stack up) would appear to be The Passion of The Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 – two movies that have a lot of the same positives and handicaps, if not many overlapping fans. It’ll be an uphill battle for both crusaders. The good news for both of them (if I understand at all the complicated math of the Oscars’ voting procedures), is that they only need somewhere around ten to fifteen percent of the Academy to mark them down as their first choice. And since the people who love these two movies really love them, that just may be do-able. The Passion’s fortunes will depend on how many hard-core Christians there are in Hollywood, while Fahrenheit’s fortunes may depend on the outcome of the other election (though I’m not sure yet which outcome would help it more). Pitting Christians against Lefties in Hollywood may seem like a(nother) bloodbath for the Christians, but I give the edge to Mel Gibson

Will there be too much vote splitting?

Will the dueling bio-pics (The Aviator, Ray, Alexander, Finding Neverland, Kinsey, Beyond the Sea, The Sea Within, The Motorcycle Diaries, The Passion of The Christ) and intimate, stagey dramas (Proof, Closer, We Don’t Live Here Anymore) and cross-over foreign language films (The Sea Within, The Motorcycle Diaries, The Passion of The Christ, Bad Education, A Very Long Engagement, House of Flying Daggers) start to cancel each other out? If so, what movies would that leave?

It’s not unheard of to have similarly-themed movies going head to head in the Best Picture race. In 1998, there were three WWII flicks and two Elizabethan indies. In 1990 The Godfather, Part III and Goodfellas had a turf war. And in 1978, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter covered similar territory.

The bio-pics don’t seem like they’ll have too much thematic overlap to worry about, and as David Poland observes, “it is hard to imagine that there will be more than one or two Best Picture slots, if that, that go to non-bio-pics.” But there’s a good chance that serious contenders Proof & Closer and The Motorcycle Diaries & The Sea Within will cannibalize each other, resulting in either one or both of each match-up missing the final cut.

Will there be three repeats from last year in the Best Actor category?

Has this ever happened before? I haven’t done the research yet, but I know it’s at the very least rare, and there’s a good chance that it could happen this year. Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Bill Murray are all being floated as serious contenders this year, lending this category a sense of déjà vu more reminiscent of The Emmys than The Academy Awards.


That's all for now. I’ll be back with my ridiculously early Oscar predictions soon!