Oscar Night

Well folks, here we are again, watching one of the most meaningless and mesmerizing award ceremonies in American popular culture. The Oscars are only hours away and I’ve put this off long enough. Now, since the good people at Entertainment Weekly decided to only list all of the nominations for the most major categories, I will be making no predictions regarding awards such as best art direction, costume design, or sound mixing, which is a shame, since those are the only awards where deserving candidates actually win. However I am not the man to make those predictions, mainly because I’m too lazy to spend an hour searching the internet for all of the nominees. Here are my predictions for the eight major categories:

Best Acress: Reese Witherspoon
Look, I hate to say it, but who else in this category stands a chance? Charlize Theron already won for Monster, and North Country wasn’t quite what I would call an Oscar-worthy performance…in other words, she didn’t make herself ugly for that flick. Keira Knightly will do great things in her film career, but winning best acress at age twenty ain’t happening. Felicity Huffman stands a strong chance, but Witherspoon’s an industry favorite, even if she’s a vile bitch with god-awful taste.

Best Actor: Phillip Seymour Hoffman
His performance in Capote was hands-down the best we saw this year. David Strathairn gave a solid show in Good Night and Good Luck and the Walk the Line people are highly optimistic, but Hoffman is OWED this award by the academy. He’s too old and too fat for Hollywood to give him many more chances to shine as brightly as did this year. Ledger was great in Brokeback, but mumbling your lines so no one can tell you’re Australian does not an actor make.

Best Supporting Acress: Catherine Keener
I like Rachel Weisz for this award, but EW picked her, and I want to go against them on this one. McDormand was great as well, but she already got Best Actress for Fargo, and it’s an insult to take a step back by winning Supporting Actress after Best Actress. If Michelle Williams were black, I might expect her to win by getting fucked in the ass on camera, I’m picking Keener in support of my choice for Hoffman as Best Actor. They had great onscreen chemistry, so her performance was as vital as hers.

Best Supporting Actor: Paul Giamatti
Gyllenhaal’s still young and the Academy will take notice of what he does in the future, not to mention that his performance was less of a leap than Ledger’s. Clooney was great in Syriana, but Giamatti, like Hoffman, has been overlooked at every opportunity by this fucking Academy, especially after he gave two Oscar-worthy Best Actor performances in the past two years. Unfortunately he’s short and ugly and Hollywood doesn’t want us to believe that little ugly people can be the best at anything.

Damn, all these predictions are making me a little catty. I’ll try to tuck it back.

Best Director: Ang Lee
Is there any debate over this? We know the gay cowboys are a favorite, and it was a stellar, deserving flick. It’s unfortunate that there can only be one winner this year, because every nominee this year deserves an award, including Spielburg (sorry, I liked Munich). I hope Clooney chooses to direct again, however, because Good Night and Good Luck was one of the most underappreciated movies of the year.

Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain
See Above.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Brokeback Mountain
I had a feeling about this one about two frames after the fade out in Brokeback Mountain when I found Larry McMurtry’s name on the screenplay credits. I would have hoped A History of Violence just because of my soft spot for graphic novel adaptations, but maybe they’ll adapt The Watchmen in a few years and do it right.

Best Original Screenplay: Good Night and Good Luck
Like I said, it was underappreciated. This and Syriana were two of the most topical films to come out in the past few years (and making topical films is an achievement for obvious reasons). I picked Good Night because the movie is practically a modern day fairy tale combined with an indictment of modern-day journalism. This way Clooney still gets the feather in his cap and Ang Lee can still get some credibility following the debacle that was Hulk.

Those are my picks. Now, we wait.