Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.
Post a Comment
Read more

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.
2 comments
Read more

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…
Post a Comment
Read more

It’s like an angry white man’s basement in here.

Bad Boys for Life (2020)
(SPOILERS) The reviews for Bad Boys for Life have, perhaps surprisingly, skewed positive, given that it seemed exactly the kind of beleaguered sequel to get slaughtered by critics. Particularly so since, while it’s a pleasure to see Will Smith and Martin Lawrence back together as Mike and Marcus, the attempts to validate this third outing as a more mature, reflective take on their buddy cops is somewhat overstated. Indeed, those moments of reflection or taking stock arguably tend to make the movie as a whole that much glibber, swiftly succeeded as they are by lashings of gleeful ultra-violence or humorous shtick. Under Michael Bay, who didn’t know the definition of a lull, these pictures scorned any opportunity to pause long enough to assess the damage, and were healthier, so to speak, for that. Without him, Bad Boys for Life’s beats often skew closer to standard 90s action fare.
Post a Comment
Read more

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…
2 comments
Read more

Welcome to the future. Life is good. But it can be better.

20 to See in 2020
Not all of these movies may find a release date in 2020, given Hollywood’s propensity for shunting around in the schedules along with the vagaries of post-production. Of my 21 to See in 2019, there’s still Fonzo, Benedetta, You Should Have Left, Boss Level and the scared-from-its-alloted-date The Hunt yet to see the light of day. I’ve re-included The French Dispatch here, however. I've yet to see Serenity and The Dead Don’t Die. Of the rest, none were wholly rewarding. Netflix gave us some disappointments, both low profile (Velvet Buzzsaw, In the Shadow of the Moon) and high (The Irishman), and a number of blockbusters underwhelmed to a greater or lesser extent (Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Terminator: Dark Fate, Gemini Man, Star Wars: The Rise of the Skywalker). Others (Knives Out, Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum) were interesting but flawed. Even the more potentially out there (Joker, Us, Glass, Rocketman) couldn…
Post a Comment
Read more

So the moral of the story is, better Red Riding Hood than dead Riding Hood. You read me?

The Fortune Cookie (1966)
(SPOILERS) Despite its pedigree – director and writer Billy Wilder reteaming with Jack Lemmon, the first teaming of Lemmon and Walter Matthau, a clutch of Oscar nominations – The Fortune Cookie isn’t up there with the best of Wilder’s Lemmon collaborations. Which were, at this point, in the past.
Post a Comment
Read more

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

1 comment
Read more

I think World War II was my favourite war.

Small Soldiers (1998)
An off-peak Joe Dante movie is still one chock-a-block full of satirical nuggets and comic inspiration, far beyond the facility of most filmmakers. Small Soldiers finds him back after a six-year big screen absence, taking delirious swipes at the veneration of the military, war movies, the toy industry, conglomerates and privatised defence forces. Dante’s take is so gleefully skewed, he even has big business win! The only problem with the picture (aside from an indistinct lead, surprising from a director with a strong track record for casting juveniles) is that this is all very familiar.

Dante acknowledged Small Soldiers was basically a riff on Gremlins, and it is. Something innocuous and playful turns mad, bad and dangerous. On one level it has something in common with Gremlins 2: The New Batch, in that the asides carry the picture. But Gremlins 2 was all about the asides, happy to wander off in any direction that suited it oblivious to whether the audience was on …
Post a Comment
Read more

You’re a slut with a snake in your mouth. Die!

Mickey One (1965)
(SPOILERS) Apparently this early – as in, two years before the one that made them both highly sought-after trailblazers of “New Hollywood” – teaming between Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn has undergone a re-evaluation since its initial commercial and critical drubbing. I’m not sure about all that. Mickey One still seems fatally half-cocked to me, with Penn making a meal of imitating the stylistic qualities that came relatively naturally – or at least, Gallically – to the New Wave.
Post a Comment
Read more