Once Upon A Time in Hollywood… Ain’t that the truth.

Oscar Winners 2020

The Best Picture upset (most had it as a serious contender, but a long shot as a winner due to the dual nomination with Best International Feature and that one being in the bag) can only be a good thing for the ceremony, a further strike against predictability (whether or not it was a response to Green Book and the ongoing campaigning over representation among nominees). While some are grumbling about dual Best Picture category wins, anyone familiar with the BAFTAs is more than used to that sort of thing. Most of the rest of the biggies, director aside (although, not unexpected), were widely expected, so it also means that, in an era where the race is scrutinised to death, that it hasn’t exhausted itself long before the ceremony.

And the ceremony? I only caught the highlights, very fortunately by the look of some of those musical numbers. Some decent Chris Rock gags (“Jeff Bezos is so rich, he got divorced and he’s still the richest man in the world"; “Marty, I gotta tell you, I loved the first season of The Irishman”). Bring back the MC, though. Don’t act like you don’t want one. Be honest that no one has the cojones to brave the Twitter storm; picking the right one can mean ratings, apart from anything else.

I picked 14 of the winners this time, fairly par for my slack course since I started recording my guesswork in 2013 (they go: 11, 16, 16, 15, 14, 16, 15).

Best Picture

Winner: Parasite (Kwak Sin-ae and Bong Joon-ho)

I guessed: 1917

“We never imagined this to ever happen.” Nor did 90% of the Oscar pundits. I’m relieved it wasn’t 1917, which represents Hollywood at its most unremarkable and self-satisfied (technical achievements aside).

Best Director

Winner: Bong Joon-ho (Parasite)

I guessed: Sam Mendes (1917)

Result! It also underlines that there was enough solidarity behind the Best Picture that it wasn’t merely a flukey result of the preferential vote (I also think Bong’s a much better director than he is a writer, but that’s true of 99% of directors who are directors first).

Best Actor

Winner: Joaquin Phoenix (Joker)

I guessed: Joaquin Phoenix

What kind of medications is Joaquin on? Not ones you want to take just before you go up on stage. You certainly wouldn’t want to get into a staring match with him. That said, I can’t fault most of what he had to say.

Best Actress

Winner: Renee Zellweger (Judy)

I guessed: Renee Zellweger

Was Renee bored of all the awards by this point? She seemed to be forgetting her speech as she delivered it. One of those acting wins (others include Jeremy Irons, Jessica Lange, Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges) for a film no one bothered seeing.

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Brad Pitt (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)

I guessed: Brad Pitt

Inevitable. Brad’s speechwriters deserve an award for their work this season.

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Laura Dern (Marriage Story)

I guessed: Laura Dern

Gushing with the best of them (“Some say never meet your heroes, but I say, if you’re really blessed, you get them as your parents”), but mentioning Bruce in an acceptance speech is always a positive.

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Parasite ((Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won)

I guessed: Parasite

There’s discussion one whether Bong’s tally should count as equalling Walt’s (since International Feature goes to a country). I think it should. I mean, who’s taking the thing home?

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi)

I guessed: Little Women

I had the winner as my interesting choice, because Taika threw out the book, rather than because it’s a good screenplay (it stinks). So Waititi’s officially part of the establishment now. He didn’t even take the piss in his speech.

Best Animated Feature

Winner: Toy Story 4

I guessed: Klaus

Outrageous that this merely decent fourquel won when at least two others were far superior. I guessed a Pixar win, only in the wrong category.

Best Cinematography

Winner: 1917 (Roger Deakins)

I guessed: 1917

I don’t know, you go an eternity of nominations without a sniff of a win, and then the statuettes won’t stop coming.

Best Production Design

Winner: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Barbara Ling, Nancy Haigh)

I guessed: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

So Quentin’s film takes home two Oscars. Two more than Marty’s.

Best Costume Design

Winner: Little Women (Jacqueline Durran)

I guessed: Little Women

Greta has to make do with a win in the frocks department. Very gender-stereotyped, that.

Best Make Up and Hairstyling

Winner: Bombshell (Kazu Hiro, Anne Morgan and Vivian Baker)

I guessed: Bombshell

Let’s be clear: this was not for the work done on Nicole Kidman.

Best Film Editing

Winner: Ford v Ferrari (Andrew Buckland and Michael McCusker)

I guessed: Parasite

Can’t argue with that.

Best Sound Editing

Winner: Ford v Ferrari (Donald Sylvester)

I guessed: Ford v Ferrari

See above.

Best Sound Mixing

Winner: 1917 (Mark Taylor and Stuart Wilson)

I guessed: Ford v Ferrari

I had the 1917 sound award in the wrong category.

Best Visual Effects

Winner: 1917 (Guillaume Rocheron, Greg Butler and Dominic Tuohy)

I guessed: 1917

James Corden. James Corden. James Corden. Will that banish him?

Best Original Score

Winner: Joker (Hildur Guõnadóttir)

I guessed: Joker

All women are superheroes? Yeah, lap that nonsense up. Hildur had sure been prepped too.

Best Original Song

Winner: Rocketman (I’m Gonna) Love Me Again, Elton John

I guessed: Rocketman

Elton’s second Oscar.

Best International Feature

Winner: Parasite (South Korea)

I guessed: Parasite

Wouldn’t it have been funny if hadn’t won this but still won Best Picture? No? Okay, then.

Best Documentary Feature

Winner: American Factory (Steve Bognar, Julia and Jeff Reichert)

I guessed: Honeyland

Everyone was saying American Factory, but I just wasn’t having it. Netflix got two Oscars, then.

Best Animated Short

Winner: Hair Love (Matthew A Cherry & Karen Rupert Toliver)

I guessed: Kitbull

The mistake of thinking, because you didn’t think much of something, it surely won’t win (Jojo Rabbit syndrome). Still, a flawlessly on-message speech, that one.

Best Documentary Short

Winner: Learning to Skate in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) (Carol Dysinger and Elena Andreicheva)

I guessed: St. Louis Superman

I should have gone with the received wisdom there too.

Best Live Action Short

Winner: The Neighbors’ Window (Marshall Curry)

I guessed: Nefta Football Club

I wouldn’t call anything in this category an upset, but I don’t think The Neighbor’s Window was generally predicted.

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

Comments

How would Horatio Alger have handled this situation?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) (SPOILERS) Gilliam’s last great movie – The Zero Theorem (2013) is definitely underrated, but I don’t think it’s that underrated – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could easily have been too much. At times it is, but in such instances, intentionally so. The combination of a visual stylist and Hunter S Thompson’s embellished, propulsive turn of phrase turns out, for the most part, to be a cosmically aligned affair, embracing the anarchic abandon of Raoul Duke and Doctor Gonzo’s Las Vegas debauch while contriving to pull back at crucial junctures in order to engender a perspective on all this hedonism. Would Alex Cox, who exited stage left, making way for the Python, have produced something interesting? I suspect, ironically, he would have diluted Thompson in favour of whatever commentary preoccupied him at the time (indeed, Johnny Depp said as much: “ Cox had this great material to work with and he took it and he added his own stuff to it ”). Plus

No matter how innocent you are, or how hard you try, they’ll find you guilty.

The Wrong Man (1956) (SPOILERS) I hate to say it, but old Truffaut called it right on this one. More often than not showing obeisance to the might of Hitchcock during his career-spanning interview, the French critic turned director was surprisingly blunt when it came to The Wrong Man . He told Hitch “ your style, which has found its perfection in the fiction area, happens to be in total conflict with the aesthetics of the documentary and that contradiction is apparent throughout the picture ”. There’s also another, connected issue with this, one Hitch acknowledged: too much fidelity to the true story upon which the film is based.

He’s so persistent! He always gets his man.

Speed (1994) (SPOILERS) It must have been a couple of decades since I last viewed Speed all the way through, so it’s pleasing to confirm that it holds up. Sure, Jan de Bont’s debut as a director can’t compete with the work of John McTiernan, for whom he acted as cinematographer and who recommended de Bont when he passed on the picture, but he nevertheless does a more than competent work. Which makes his later turkeys all the more tragic. And Keanu and Sandra Bullock display the kind of effortless chemistry you can’t put a price tag on. And then there’s Dennis Hopper, having a great old sober-but-still-looning time.

You were a few blocks away? What’d you see it with, a telescope?

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) (SPOILERS) John Carpenter’s first serial-killer screenplay to get made, The Eyes of Laura Mars came out nearly three months before Halloween. You know, the movie that made the director’s name. And then some. He wasn’t best pleased with the results of The Eyes of Laura Mars, which ended up co-credited to David Zelag Goodman ( Straw Dogs , Logan’s Run ) as part of an attempt by producer Jon Peters to manufacture a star vehicle for then-belle Barbra Streisand: “ The original script was very good, I thought. But it got shat upon ”. Which isn’t sour grapes on Carpenter’s part. The finished movie bears ready evidence of such tampering, not least in the reveal of the killer (different in Carpenter’s conception). Its best features are the so-uncleanly-you-can-taste-it 70s New York milieu and the guest cast, but even as an early example of the sub-genre, it’s burdened by all the failings inherit with this kind of fare.

But everything is wonderful. We are in Paris.

Cold War (2018) (SPOILERS) Pawel Pawlikowski’s elliptical tale – you can’t discuss Cold War without saying “elliptical” at least once – of frustrated love charts a course that almost seems to be a caricature of a certain brand of self-congratulatorily tragic European cinema. It was, it seems “ loosely inspired ” by his parents (I suspect I see where the looseness comes in), but there’s a sense of calculation to the progression of this love story against an inescapable political backdrop that rather diminishes it.

To survive a war, you gotta become war.

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) (SPOILERS?) I’d like to say it’s mystifying that a film so bereft of merit as Rambo: First Blood Part II could have finished up the second biggest hit of 1985. It wouldn’t be as bad if it was, at minimum, a solid action movie, rather than an interminable bore. But the movie struck a chord somewhere, somehow. As much as the most successful picture of that year, Back to the Future , could be seen to suggest moviegoers do actually have really good taste, Rambo rather sends a message about how extensively regressive themes were embedding themselves in Reaganite, conservative ‘80s cinema (to be fair, this is something one can also read into Back to the Future ), be those ones of ill-conceived nostalgia or simple-minded jingoism, notional superiority and might. The difference between Stallone and Arnie movies starts right here; self-awareness. Audiences may have watched R ambo in the same way they would a Schwarzenegger picture, but I’m

The game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.

Hustlers (2019) (SPOILERS) Sold as a female Goodfellas – to the extent that the producers had Scorsese in mind – this strippers-and-crime tale is actually a big, glossy puff piece, closer to Todd Phillips as fashioned by Lorene Scarfia. There are some attractive performances in Hustlers, notably from Constance Wu, but for all its “progressive” women work male objectification to their advantage posturing, it’s incredibly traditional and conservative deep down.

What do they do, sing madrigals?

The Singing Detective (2003) Icon’s remake of the 1986 BBC serial, from a screenplay by Dennis Potter himself. The Singing Detective fares less well than Icon’s later adaptation of Edge of Darkness , even though it’s probably more faithful to Potter’s original. Perhaps the fault lies in the compression of six episodes into a feature running a quarter of that time, but the noir fantasy and childhood flashbacks fail to engage, and if the hospital reality scans better, it too suffers eventually.

One final thing I have to do, and then I’ll be free of the past.

Vertigo (1958) (SPOILERS) I’ll readily admit my Hitchcock tastes broadly tend to reflect the “consensus”, but Vertigo is one where I break ranks. To a degree. Not that I think it’s in any way a bad film, but I respect it rather than truly rate it. Certainly, I can’t get on board with Sight & Sound enthroning it as the best film ever made (in its 2012’s critics poll). That said, from a technical point of view, it is probably Hitch’s peak moment. And in that regard, certainly counts as one of his few colour pictures that can be placed alongside his black and white ones. It’s also clearly a personal undertaking, a medley of his voyeuristic obsessions (based on D’entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac).

You don’t know anything about this man, and he knows everything about you.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s two-decades-later remake of his British original. It’s undoubtedly the better-known version, but as I noted in my review of the 1934 film, it is very far from the “ far superior ” production Truffaut tried to sell the director on during their interviews. Hitchcock would only be drawn – in typically quotable style – that “ the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional ”. For which, read a young, creatively fired director versus one clinically going through the motions, occasionally inspired by a shot or sequence but mostly lacking the will or drive that made the first The Man Who Knew Too Much such a pleasure from beginning to end.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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