If you are a nominee tonight who isn’t making history, shame on you.

Oscar Winners 2018

As predicted, the most predictable thing about this year’s Oscars, aside from the de rigueur virtue signalling, was the predictability of the votes. Meaning, I figured a stunning 16 out of 24 of them right. That’s good… for me. The only way to give the ceremony a kick in the ass is to make it less pompous (virtually impossible) get in someone to host who really doesn’t give a shit (the organisers are too frightened to do that, as memories of Letterman still cause some to wake up in cold sweats) or move the whole shebang forward, such that it isn’t a fait accompli at the end of an exhausted season. That one’s probably more likely, certainly given that viewing figures have hit an all-time low (the reasons for which are doubtless varied, including reflecting TV trends generally, but probably include the starchy nature of the event, disenchantment with star power itself, and a basic disinterest in a ceremony increasingly seen to shun populist fare).

Jimmy Kimmel went down agreeably (as in, inoffensively to those who counted, and with just enough pith directed at those who didn’t) and included a decent jet ski running gag (going to the winner with the shortest acceptance speech) while Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway didn’t cock up the Best Picture announcement (I know, I know, it wasn’t their fault). They failed to muster even a glimmer of interest in their presence either, however. But if Kimmel was hoping for unpredictability, it was in short supply.

Best Picture

Winner: The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, J Miles Dale)

I guessed: The Shape of Water

It’s been the most-likely for a while. One wonders how it will affect del Toro’s cachet and clout. Will he finally get At the Mountains of Madness made? But then, there’s that nagging concern that, the bigger his movies are, the less distinctive, idiosyncratic and just plain good the results. Some are calling this a first as a science fiction movie Best Picture winner, but of all the genre medleys in this one’s fish soup, I’d say that’s the least of them.

Best Director

Winner: Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water)

I guessed: Guillermo del Toro

Definitely deserved, and the dual Picture/Director win has become an increasing rarity in recent years; since there was a run of double-duty years pre-2012, only Birdman in 2015 has done the same. It’s become easy to forget it was once a relative rarity.

Best Actor

Winner: Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour)

I guessed: Gary Oldman

“Obviously, I’m not going to win the ski.” Well done, Gaz’s PR team.

Best Actress

Winner: Frances McDormand (Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri)

I guessed: Frances McDormand

No complaints here. Although, I was rooting for Sally Hawkins. It’s always nice to have a repeat winner you actually rate, even if McDormand’s rallying cry to sister actors everywhere (and those who were her fellow nominees) is exactly the kind of empowerment posturing Hollywood wishes they could have on tap (ie, faintly nauseating).

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri)

I guessed: Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project)

They went for the field-leader throughout the entire season, which is fair enough. Rather earmarks Martin McDonagh as an actors’ director, not that thesps weren’t queueing up for him anyway; anyone with a vaguely Coens-esque facility with dialogue is in great demand.

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Allison Janney (I, Tonya)

I guessed: Allison Janney

No surprises there. But it’s not all going Janney’s way; she doesn’t have a new season of Roseanne coming out.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: James Ivory (Call Me By Your Name)

I guessed: Call Me By Your Name

No surprises there, although at 89 you might be forgiven for thinking Ivory has few creative innings left in him; he actually has a directing gig of Richard II lined up. Eat that, Clint.

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Jordan Peele (Get Out)

I guessed: Get Out

The closest to a surprise in the major categories, except that Get Out eclipsing the early favourite Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri had been on the cards for some time. There’s always a danger that first-time feting can lead to sophomore blues – well, if you ignore Keanu – but I doubt that will be the case for Peele.

Best Animated Feature

Winner: Coco (Lee Unkrich and Daria K Anderson)

I guessed: Coco

Not the most outrageous win by Coco…

Best Cinematography

Winner: Roger Deakins (Blade Runner 2049)

I guessed: Blade Runner 2049

Genuine, bona fide science fiction winner! And Roger Deakins finally gets his Oscar! A result all round. As has been noted, the first non-Best Picture nominee to win since Memoirs of a Geisha (Road to Perdition, Legends of the Fall, A River Runs Through It, Glory, Days of Heaven, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Ryan’s Daughter are the others in the last fifty years).

Best Production Design

Winner: Paul Denham Austerberry, Shane Vieau & Jeff Melvin (The Shape of Water)

I guessed: The Shape of Water

Like Titanic, or rather, not like Titanic much at all, del Toro had to make do with tech categories for the rest of his minor haul.

Best Costume Design

Winner: Mark Bridges (Phantom Thread)

I guessed: Phantom Thread

Winner of the jet ski.

Best Make Up and Hairstyling

Winner: Kazuhiro Tsuji, David Malinowski & Lucy Sibbick (Darkest Hour)

I guessed: Darkest Hour

No surprises there. Fat suits rock with voters.

Best Film Editing

Winner: Lee Smith (Dunkirk)

I guessed: Dunkirk

Smith’s first Oscar. He’s come a long way from inauspicious beginnings on Howling III (he’s now the go-to guy for both Nolan and Peter Weir, the latter when he actually makes a movie, that is).

Best Sound Mixing

Winner: Mark Weingarten, Gregg Landaker & Gary A Rizzo (Dunkirk)

I guessed: Baby Driver

Weingarten’s first win, but Landaker’s fourth (the others are, eclectically, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Speed) and Rizzo’s second (Inception being the first).

Best Sound Editing

Winner: Richard King & Alex Gibson (Dunkirk)

I guessed: Dunkirk

Fourth win for King (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, The Dark Knight and Inception) and the first for Gibson.

Best Visual Effects

Winner: John Nelson, Gerd Nefzer, Paul Lambert and Richard R Hoover (Blade Runner 2049)

I guessed: War for the Planet of the Apes

I didn’t want those damn, pixelated apes to win, so I’m chuffed with this one. Nelson has one win (Gladiator). Nefzer, Lambert and Hoover their first.

Best Original Score

Winner: Alexandre Desplat (The Shape of Water)

I guessed: The Shape of Water

A second win for Desplat, for a score I liked but isn’t in the same league as his previous Oscar (The Grand Budapest Hotel).

Best Original Song

Winner: Kristin Anderson-Lopez & Robert Lopez – Remember Me (Coco)

I guessed: This Is Me (The Greatest Showman)

Mawkish Mouse House crud rulez.

Best Foreign Language

Winner: A Fantastic Woman (directed by Sebastiàn Lelio)

I guessed: The Square

I ignored the favourite to my peril; as Academy members have agreed, trans is so hot right now.

Best Documentary Feature

Winner: Icarus (by Bryan Fogel and Dan Cogen)

I guessed: Faces Places

These shorts and docs categories are the only ones where you could toss a coin these days. Socking it to Putin gives Netflix their first feature victory.

Best Animated Short

Winner: Dear Basketball (Glen Keane and Kobe Bryant)

I guessed: Lou

Basketball, shmasketball.

Best Documentary Short

Winner: Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405 (Frank Stiefel)

I guessed: Edith + Eddie

I have nothing.

Best Live Action Short

Winner: The Silent Child (Chris Overton & Rachel Shenton)

I guessed: The Silent Child

Wow! I got one of these rights. I won’t let it go to my head.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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