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

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.

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…

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.

Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honour – which is probably more than she ever did.

Duck Soup (1933)
(SPOILERS) Not for nothing is Duck Soup acclaimed as one of the greatest comedies ever, and while you’d never hold it against Marx Brothers movies for having little in the way of coherent plotting in – indeed, it’s pretty much essential to their approach – the presence of actual thematic content this time helps sharpen the edges of both their slapstick and their satire.

Afraid, me? A man who’s licked his weight in wild caterpillars? You bet I’m afraid.

Monkey Business (1931)
(SPOILERS) The Marx Brothers’ first feature possessed of a wholly original screenplay, Monkey Business is almost brazenly dismissive towards notions of coherence, just as long as it loosely supports their trademark antics. And it does so in spades, depositing them as stowaways bound for America who fall in with a couple of mutually antagonistic racketeers/ gangsters while attempting to avoid being cast in irons. There’s no Margaret Dumont this time out, but Groucho is more than matched by flirtation-interest Thelma Todd.

You killed my sandwich!

Birds of Prey (and the Fanatabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)
(SPOILERS) One has to wonder at Bird of Prey’s 79% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I mean, such things are to be taken with a pinch of salt at the best of times, but it would be easy, given the disparity between such evident approval and the actually quality of the movie, to suspect insincere motives on the part of critics, that they’re actually responding to its nominally progressive credentials – female protagonists in a superhero flick! – rather than its content. Which I’m quite sure couldn’t possibly be the case. Birds of Prey (and the Fanatabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) isn’t very good. The trailers did not lie, even if the positive reviews might have misled you into thinking they were misleading.

On account of you, I nearly heard the opera.

A Night at the Opera (1935)
(SPOILERS) The Marx Brothers head over to MGM, minus one Zeppo, and despite their variably citing A Night at the Opera as their best film, you can see – well, perhaps not instantly, but by about the half-hour mark – that something was undoubtedly lost along the way. It isn’t that there’s an absence of very funny material – there’s a strong contender for their best scene in the mix – but that there’s a lot else too. Added to which, the best of the very funny material can be found during the first half of the picture.

You’re a disgrace to the family name of Wagstaff, if such a thing is possible.

Horse Feathers (1932)
(SPOILERS) After a scenario that seemed feasible in Monkey Business – the brothers as stowaways – Horse Feathers opts for a massive stretch. Somehow, Groucho (Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff) has been appointed as the president of Huxley University, proceeding to offer the trustees and assembled throng a few suggestions on how he’ll run things (by way of anarchistic creed “Whatever it is, I’m against it”). There’s a reasonably coherent mission statement in this one, however, at least until inevitably it devolves into gleeful incoherence.

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…

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…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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