Those Not-Quite-Predictable Oscar Noms

About three decades ago the hippie satirists known as Firesign Theater had an album called Everything You Know Is Wrong, stuffed with with bongloads of parody. (One track, evoking Orson Welles' 1938 radio Invasion from Mar" and prefiguring present-day, caught-it-on-my-camcorder films like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, was an audio narration of the Crumbhunger family's abduction by extraterrestrials as captured on their home video movie camera.)

The obverse of that album title comes to mind in considering this week's announcement of the Oscar nominees, who collectively seem to prove that (Almost) Every Guess You Made Was Right--"you" being not just most pundits, but the picks of many regular citizens. Thus the No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood juggernauts (for awards if not box office) were shoo-ins, and Michael Clayton came in the front door, fairly predictably. Even Atonement, after some critical chiding and considerable time out in the cold as it missed several guild nominations, got a second wind from the British academy's choices and emerged as a logical nominee. And thus Best Actor nominee George Clooney waltzed in with Clayton and Daniel Day Lewis with Blood, as Johnny Depp got the consolation prize for Sweeney Todd's general stiffing in the bigger categories.

Cate Blanchett, the Australian queen of British history and American cinema, notched `gimme' noms as Best Actress for Elizabeth and Best Supporting Actress for I'm Not There's while Julie Christie's wonderfully etched performance put her in the running with Away From Her. Directors Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel & Ethan Coen (frontrunnrs for a Directors Guild win Saturday night), and Tony Gilroy followed their Best Picture nominees into the race, and Julian Schnabel (who made paralysis heroic in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) ) followed up his Golden Globes win with a nomination.

Around the edges, however, the Academy had some fun with mild surprises. Juno was rewarded, as was young star Ellen Page, not so much for a shared youthful; energy, as for the nostalgia it created in Hollywood types for its old school virtues of snappy comic dialog and a wisecracking gamine. Laura Linney embodied other classic virtues in Savages--we like to watch her because she never asks to be liked--and won a place to compete with Amy Ryan, a discovery after years of solid work, in Gone Baby Gone (see post here).

On the male side, Tommy Lee Jones showed his inarguable, quiet finesse as a dad searching bitterly for a son the war has ripped away--a political statement devoid of preaching or sentimentality. I interviewed Jones for a SAG crowd who huzzah'ed him after watching In the Valley of Elah, and then spoke with him the next day privately regarding No Country For Old Men. And though there are times when you think you couldn't' fit a playing card between those tough cobs he plays in the two films a lot of people think there's room in there to justify a Supporting nomination for the latter film, had the Academy leaned that way. (SAG nominated him for No Country-- trailer here--up against his character's nemesis Javier Bardem. So, "Just call it--friend-o.")

Viggo Mortenson re-teamed with David Cronenberg (after their similarly gritty A History of Violence) ) for Eastern Promises, and wore the lurid tat's and the part like you could never laser either off of him. It wasn't hard to give props to that at the time of release, nor to Casey Affleck as he shared screen time with Amy Ryan in brother Ben's directing debut--though he was actually nominated for his supporting role in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (Some folks thought the voters short-shrifted not just Angelina Jolie, at once steely and heartbroken in A Mighty Heart, but also companion Brad Pitt for his brooding work opposite Affleck).
The original screenplay category was notable for its three women, including Nancy Oliver, whose Lars and The Real Girl was a springboard for a Ryan Gosling performance that SAG nominated.

Israel's entry Beaufort, discussed here, may have as good a chance at the Foreign language Oscar as the entry it controversially replaced, The Band's Visit. And American Gangster, so shot though with solid filmmaking virtues (see comments from editor Pietro Scalia here), may win the Art Direction statuette as a kind of consolation prize for its solid virtues. I would have touted it for Editing--Scalia and Ridley Scott worked the dovetailing stories into a kind of Chinese finger trap that enhanced each of them--but it's had to argue with the stellar quintet in that category. There's likely an urge among th voters to give The Bourne Ultimatum a nod as an unusually intelligent entertainment, and editing may be the spot. That said, Sean Penn's Into the Wild, a deserving and thoughtful effort that scored a quartet of acting noms from SAG (whose awards show airs Sunay night) but has come to be regarded as the unluckiest wanna-be excluded from Oscar's higher honors, could win the category here for its cat's-cradle approach to showing the central sad drama with interruptions for revelatory earlier moments in the hero's life.
Whether or not there's an Oscars ceremony in the traditional, televised sense--the smart money is saying there will be--this is a passel of films that comprise an exceptionally artful, if often bleak in tone, Oscar field, and they deserve as much recognition as we can collectively give them.

(Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah.)