If you honk, I’ll spew.

Oscar Winners 2019

Not having a host this year meant it was much more difficult to find a decent quote line. I considered using an excerpt from Regina King’s acceptance speech, but quoting it ironically probably wouldn’t travel. So Mike Myers gets it by default, since it sums up the ceremony quite nicely (he and Dana Carvey really should have resisted dredging up Wayne and Garth under any circumstances, though, since their schtick had dated badly approximately six months after the release of the first film).

It felt like I got a fair few right this year at first glance, but I ended up picking a resolutely average fifteen correctly, down one on last time and pretty much my range most years. I should have stuck to my instincts and gone for more for Bohemian Rhapsody (I initially had it down for editing and both sounds) and stuck with Free Solo over RBG, but otherwise I was pretty clueless about the ones I missed.

Unlike the very vocal naysayers, I consider Green Book’s victory very healthy; the Oscars may yet have some kind of staying power if they can still manage to whip up a semblance of a controversy, rather than settling into middling, consensus, anodyne results no one can really object to. Did the best picture win? No, but a truly worthy best picture contender wasn’t even nominated this year, so that isn’t very surprising.

Best Picture

Winner: Green Book (Jim Burke, Charles B Wessler, Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly and Nick Vallelonga))

I guessed: Green Book

Immediately came the cries that this was as travesty as great – if not more so – than Crash winning in 2006. How could the Academy be so tone deaf as to reward a slick crowd pleaser (as Justin Chang’s LA Times article called it, amid eviscerating the decision)? It’s entirely feasible they did it just to piss off Spike Lee. And it worked!

Best Director

Winner: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)

I guessed: Alfonso Cuarón

Yawn.

Best Actor

Winner: Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)

I guessed: Rami Malek

All that schmoozing got Rami what he most wanted. And then he fell off the stage. He was under pressure, though.

Best Actress

Winner: Olivia Coleman (The Favourite)

I guessed: Glenn Close (The Wife)

Glenn goes home empty-handed and Olivia gets the Anthony Hopkins award for a lead performance barely in the movie itself. She made a big splash in it, though, and was humorously down-to-earth in accepting her statuette, so I guess that’s what counts.

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Mahershala Ali (Green Book)

I guessed: Mahershala Ali

A slightly boring choice, Ali sailing dangerously close to over-exposure in not that many roles really since Moonlight. I’d have paid good money to see Richard E Grant giving it a good gush.

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk)

I guessed: Regina King

A shoe-in, but then, so was Glenn. Regina had plenty of time to hone that nauseating acceptance speech, and it showed.

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Green Book (Nick Vellelonga, Brian Currie & Peter Farrelly)

I guessed: Green Book

Definitely the best of the nominations in this category, although one might argue it’s the screenplay itself, rather than the overall picture, that has caused all the ructions. Spike should have got out of his seat for this one, really.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: BlackKklansman (Charlie Wachtel & David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee

I guessed: BlackKklansman

Spike gets his Oscar, and still he isn’t happy. Credit where it’s due, though; “…every time somebody’s driving somebody, I lose” is a great quip. This one seemed fairly certain, so it’s a shame it isn’t a very good screenplay.

Best Animated Feature

Winner: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Perischetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller)

I guessed: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Much deserved, and the second time a Marvel movie has won a Best Picture. Will the charm be with live action?

Best Cinematography

Winner: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)

I guessed: Roma

Snooze.

Best Production Design

Winner: Hannah Beachler & Jay Hart (Black Panther)

I guessed: Black Panther

I suggested Panther would come away with (this) one, but it bagged a decisive three; imagine if not justmediocre (live-action) Marvel movies met with those kinds of rewards. Disney’s pulse would be racing.

Best Costume Design

Winner: Ruth E Carter (Black Panther)

I guessed: The Favourite

I’m not entirely convinced of the merit of this win, but neither am I of the regularly rewarded genius that purportedly goes with replicating period cossies year in year out. Did Sandy Powell cancel herself out?

Best Make Up and Hairstyling

Winner: Greg Cannom, Kate Biscoe and Patricia Dehaney (Vice)

I guessed: Vice

Fat bald Bale. You’d have thought he could manage that unassisted.

Best Film Editing

Winner: John Ottman (Bohemian Rhapsody)

I guessed: The Favourite

Ottmans’s editing made the back end of Rhapsody – and as a result the entire movie – work, so I think he deserved this. Not as flashy as several of the options, but that’s to its credit, not theirs.

Best Sound Editing

Winner: John Warhurst and Nina Hartstone (Bohemian Rhapsody)

I guessed: First Man

Sound editing in a musical biopic? Wouldn’t that be a medley?

Best Sound Mixing

Winner: Paul Massey Tim Cavagin and John Casali (Bohemian Rhapsody)

I guessed: Bohemian Rhapsody

It’s certainly got a lot of sound in it, that Bohemian Rhapsody, and some of it is certainly mixed (probably voters took notice of the publicity surrounding the blending of three voices for Freddie singing and took that as sufficient evidence of expertise).

Best Visual Effects

Winner: Paul Lambert, Ian Hunter, Tristan Myles and JD Schwalm (First Man)

I guessed: Avengers: Infinity War

I was rooting for First Man, but didn’t think it had a chance. Nice to see a picture with – to an extent – old school effects get rewarded.

Best Original Score

Winner: Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther)

I guessed: Mary Poppins Returns

I can’t really sneeze at this; it’s one of the better Marvel scores (not a high bar, I know) and Göransson, imminently in great demand, will doubtless be glad not to have to add another Death Wish to his resumé.

Best Original Song

Winner: Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando and Andrew Wyatt for Shallow (A Star is Born)

I guessed: Shallow

It’s a good song, well sung. You can’t ask much better than that of a category often filled with barely adequate dross. That said, the win should be revoked for Gaga’s entirely phoney tearful acceptance speech.

Best Foreign Language Feature

Winner: Roma

I guessed: Roma

Probably the deadest cert of all the season’s dead certs. Some quality, unexpected ‘r’ rolling in announcing it wasn’t anticipated, however.

Best Documentary Feature

Winner: Free Solo (Elizabeth Chai Vaserhelyi, Jimy Chin, Evan Hayes and Shannon Dill)

I guessed: RBG

The popular pick got picked, the Academy opting to ease off on the politics, perversely, when it came to the generally more cerebral world of docs.

Best Animated Short

Winner: Bao (Domee Shi and Becky Neimann-Cobb)

I guessed: Bao

Pixar wins again. They do nothing but compete.

Best Documentary Short

Winner: Period. End of Sentence (Raya Zehtabchi and Melissa Berton)

I guessed: Black Sheep

The title’s clever, I’ll give it that.

Best Live Action Short

Winner: Skin (Guy Nattiv and Jaime Ray Newman)

I guessed: Marguerite

Next stop: the full-length feature version.

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

Comments

We live in a twilight world.

Tenet (2020)
(SPOILERS) I’ve endured a fair few confusingly-executed action sequences in movies – more than enough, actually – but I don’t think I’ve previously had the odd experience of being on the edge of my seat during one while simultaneously failing to understand its objectives and how those objectives are being attempted. Which happened a few times during Tenet. If I stroll over to the Wiki page and read the plot synopsis, it is fairly explicable (fairly) but as a first dive into this Christopher Nolan film, I frequently found it, if not impenetrable, then most definitely opaque.

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You can’t climb a ladder, no. But you can skip like a goat into a bar.

Juno and the Paycock (1930)
(SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s second sound feature. Such was the lustre of this technological advance that a wordy play was picked. By Sean O’Casey, upon whom Hitchcock based the prophet of doom at the end of The Birds. Juno and the Paycock, set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, begins as a broad comedy of domestic manners, but by the end has descended into full-blown Greek (or Catholic) tragedy. As such, it’s an uneven but still watchable affair, even if Hitch does nothing to disguise its stage origins.

Anything can happen in Little Storping. Anything at all.

The Avengers 2.22: Murdersville
Brian Clemens' witty take on village life gone bad is one of the highlights of the fifth season. Inspired by Bad Day at Black Rock, one wonders how much Murdersville's premise of unsettling impulses lurking beneath an idyllic surface were set to influence both Straw Dogs and The Wicker Mana few years later (one could also suggest it premeditates the brand of backwoods horrors soon to be found in American cinema from the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper).

The protocol actually says that most Tersies will say this has to be a dream.

Jupiter Ascending (2015)
(SPOILERS) The Wachowski siblings’ wildly patchy career continues apace. They bespoiled a great thing with The Matrix sequels (I liked the first, not the second), misfired with Speed Racer (bubble-gum visuals aside, hijinks and comedy ain’t their forte) and recently delivered the Marmite Sense8 for Netflix (I was somewhere in between on it). Their only slam-dunk since The Matrix put them on the movie map is Cloud Atlas, and even that’s a case of rising above its limitations (mostly prosthetic-based). Jupiter Ascending, their latest cinema outing and first stab at space opera, elevates their lesser works by default, however. It manages to be tone deaf in all the areas that count, and sadly fetches up at the bottom of their filmography pile.

This is a case where the roundly damning verdicts have sadly been largely on the ball. What’s most baffling about the picture is that, after a reasonably engaging set-up, it determinedly bores the pants off you. I haven’t enco…

Seems silly, doesn't it? A wedding. Given everything that's going on.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (2010)
(SPOILERS) What’s good in the first part of the dubiously split (of course it was done for the art) final instalment in the Harry Potter saga is very good, let down somewhat by decisions to include material that would otherwise have been rightly excised and the sometimes-meandering travelogue. Even there, aspects of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I can be quite rewarding, taking on the tone of an apocalyptic ‘70s aftermath movie or episode of Survivors (the original version), as our teenage heroes (some now twentysomethings) sleep rough, squabble, and try to salvage a plan. The main problem is that the frequently strong material requires a robust structure to get the best from it.

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

When I barked, I was enormous.

Dean Spanley (2008)
(SPOILERS) There is such a profusion of average, respectable – but immaculately made – British period drama held up for instant adulation, it’s hardly surprising that, when something truly worthy of acclaim comes along, it should be singularly ignored. To be fair, Dean Spanleywas well liked by critics upon its release, but its subsequent impact has proved disappointingly slight. Based on Lord Dunsany’s 1939 novella, My Talks with Dean Spanley, our narrator relates how the titular Dean’s imbibification of a moderate quantity of Imperial Tokay (“too syrupy”, is the conclusion reached by both members of the Fisk family regarding this Hungarian wine) precludes his recollection of a past life as a dog.

Inevitably, reviews pounced on the chance to reference Dean Spanley as a literal shaggy dog story, so I shall get that out of the way now. While the phrase is more than fitting, it serves to underrepresent how affecting the picture is when it has cause to be, as does any re…

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s Jaws, there’s Star Wars, and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy, to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “mainly boring”.

Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the system when Burton did it (even…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog