|
Some suspense remains in Oscar race
2008-02-20
As usual in Hollywood, Oscar night looks like the same people will generally be collecting the same prizes. Yet some suspense remains for a few of the main awards. A look at the key categories: Muzi.com News 10061770-0 (muzi.com)BEST PICTURE Muzi.com News 10061770-1 (muzi.com) The Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men" is the odds-on favorite to claim best picture, winning top honors from guilds for directors, writers, producers and actors. Muzi.com News 10061770-2 (muzi.com) Despite an ending that some found unsatisfying or even baffling for its loose ends, the film has won universal acclaim and is the Coen brothers' biggest commercial success, with $60 million and climbing at the domestic box office. Muzi.com News 10061770-3 (muzi.com) Adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel, "No Country" is anchored by three truly great performances from Josh Brolin as a wily Texan on the run with a fortune in hijacked drug money, Tommy Lee Jones as an honorable sheriff mystified by the case's brutality, and Javier Bardem as an inhuman killer trying to retrieve the cash. Muzi.com News 10061770-4 (muzi.com) The Coens' chief worry was that Bardem's character might "come across as sort of like the terminator in a bad action movie. The implacable-killer cliche, the unstoppable killer," Joel Coen said. "The thing we knew about Javier is that whatever it is he did, it would not be that." Muzi.com News 10061770-5 (muzi.com) (See below for why Bardem is a shoo-in to win supporting actor.) Muzi.com News 10061770-6 (muzi.com) Strangely (perhaps fortuitously) for the Coens, whose career has been built on oddball pictures that normally aren't the stuff Oscar dreams are made of, "No Country" is up against an even weirder picture, Paul Thomas Anderson's oil-boom epic "There Will Be Blood." Muzi.com News 10061770-7 (muzi.com) "No Country" looks almost conventional next to "There Will Be Blood." A virtual silent film for the first 15 minutes, "Blood" then hurtles through a mythic struggle between commerce and Christianity, both equally greedy and underhanded. Muzi.com News 10061770-8 (muzi.com) "Atonement" is an all-around fine film but not one people feel passionate about (the two attractive and deserving leads, Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, didn't even earn acting nominations). Muzi.com News 10061770-9 (muzi.com) Despite the supreme charm of George Clooney in the title role, the legal drama "Michael Clayton" looks to be merely along for the best-picture ride. Likewise, the pregnancy comedy "Juno" seems a just-happy-to-be-nominated entry, much like another lighter nominee, "Little Miss Sunshine," was a year ago. Muzi.com News 10061770-10 (muzi.com) BEST ACTOR Muzi.com News 10061770-11 (muzi.com) Weird as it is, "There Will Be Blood" features a monumental performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, a best-actor winner for "My Left Foot" who seems certain to win again this time. Muzi.com News 10061770-12 (muzi.com) As a pioneering oil baron, Day-Lewis gives the sort of performance for which the phrase "larger than life" was invented. He's big and bad, callous and contemptuous, and riveting for every second he's on screen. Muzi.com News 10061770-13 (muzi.com) Where did all that diabolical energy come from? Muzi.com News 10061770-14 (muzi.com) "It was a fully imagined, fully understood world that Paul had already created on the page for me, therefore it was that world, in its entirety, that unleashed a curiosity that can take you, you just don't know where," Day-Lewis said. Muzi.com News 10061770-15 (muzi.com) If he did not already own an Oscar, past supporting-actor winner Clooney might have a better shot against Day-Lewis. Clooney is tremendous as an attorney rediscovering his conscience, which has gone south amid his work as a "fixer" of sordid problems. Muzi.com News 10061770-16 (muzi.com) "No Country" co-star Jones was a surprise nominee as an ex-military policeman looking into the death of his son in "In the Valley of Elah," a murder mystery set among returning Iraq veterans. A past Oscar recipient, Jones is unlikely to win again for a film generally dismissed by critics and awards watchers. Muzi.com News 10061770-17 (muzi.com) Johnny Depp is deliciously disturbed as the murderous title figure in "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," while Viggo Mortensen strikes a great balance between compassion and ferocity as a Russian mobster in "Eastern Promises." Muzi.com News 10061770-18 (muzi.com) But no one can touch Day-Lewis this year. Muzi.com News 10061770-19 (muzi.com) BEST ACTRESS Muzi.com News 10061770-20 (muzi.com) It took a lot of arm-twisting by director Sarah Polley before Julie Christie agreed to star in "Away From Her," a heartbreaking drama about a woman succumbing to Alzheimer's. Muzi.com News 10061770-21 (muzi.com) After Christie finally said yes, she went on to deliver a performance that beautifully bookends her Oscar-winning role 42 years earlier in "Darling" as a social-climber shallowly sleeping her way to the top. Muzi.com News 10061770-22 (muzi.com) In "Away From Her," Christie plays a woman with all her romantic slings and arrows behind her, who finally has arrived at a place of peace and companionship only to have it slip away as her memory fades. Muzi.com News 10061770-23 (muzi.com) The reclusive Christie understands why her performance has drawn so much attention. Everyone, Oscar voters included, loves a comeback. Muzi.com News 10061770-24 (muzi.com) "They love to see you're still alive, and not only still alive, but you're actually doing something. `Great, magnificent, you're alive and walking. Fantastic,'" Christie said. Muzi.com News 10061770-25 (muzi.com) Oscar voters also love fresh faces, and there are two potential spoilers for best actress: Marion Cotillard, who undergoes a remarkable transformation from dauntless teen to worldly chanteuse to frail has-been as singer Edith Piaf in "La Vie En Rose"; and Ellen Page as a whipsmart pregnant teen with a bag full of smart-alecky put-downs in "Juno." Muzi.com News 10061770-26 (muzi.com) Cate Blanchett is grandly showy as Britain's monarch in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," but it's a been-there, done-that sequel to the film that shot her to stardom. Plus she already has a supporting-actress Oscar. Muzi.com News 10061770-27 (muzi.com) Laura Linney, nominated for the sibling comic drama "The Savages," is great as usual, but with Christie, Cotillard and Page in the race, this is not her year. Muzi.com News 10061770-28 (muzi.com) SUPPORTING ACTOR Muzi.com News 10061770-29 (muzi.com) True evil is hard to embrace, but Javier Bardem cannot lose. His "No Country for Old Men" killer is a merciless terror out of your worst nightmares, yet Bardem imbues him with a twisted charm and tenacity that makes him irresistible and even perversely human, albeit from the depraved side of humanity. Muzi.com News 10061770-30 (muzi.com) "It's about playing somebody that is numb with any other people's feelings or even his own feelings," Bardem said. "He doesn't have any goal or any need or wish in doing what he does. He's about to bring fate to you in order for you to face it, whether you like it or not." Muzi.com News 10061770-31 (muzi.com) Turns out, everybody liked it. Bardem has dominated at earlier awards and is considered a lock to win in a category crowded with worthy performances: Casey Affleck as a jilted devotee who turns on his idol in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"; Hal Holbrook as a lonely widower who tries to become surrogate father to an idealistic wanderer in "Into the Wild"; past best-actor winner Philip Seymour Hoffman as a slovenly but capable CIA man in "Charlie Wilson's War"; and Tom Wilkinson as a brilliant but unstable attorney in "Michael Clayton." Muzi.com News 10061770-32 (muzi.com) In any other year, any one of them could win. Muzi.com News 10061770-33 (muzi.com) SUPPORTING ACTRESS Muzi.com News 10061770-34 (muzi.com) Here's the category that still holds real suspense. If Blanchett had not already won an Oscar, she'd be the likely pick to take the prize for her transgender brilliance in a spot-on incarnation of Bob Dylan in "I'm Not There." But the movie itself left viewers cold, and Blanchett's win as Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator" is fresh in Oscar voters' minds. Muzi.com News 10061770-35 (muzi.com) Child actors have fared best in the supporting-actress category, a potential plus for teenager Saoirse Ronan as a jealous girl in "Atonement" whose fib has devastating consequences for an older sister and her new lover. Muzi.com News 10061770-36 (muzi.com) On the other end is Ruby Dee, who has a fairly fleeting role as mother to a crime lord in "American Gangster" but may have sentiment on her side with her first Oscar nomination coming at age 83, after a venerable 60-year career. Muzi.com News 10061770-37 (muzi.com) "They didn't notice me till I got to be an old, old lady," Dee joked. Muzi.com News 10061770-38 (muzi.com) With "Michael Clayton" co-stars Clooney and Wilkinson facing seemingly insurmountable competition in their categories, Tilda Swinton could be the most likely performer from that movie to win for her role as an attorney who stops at nothing to achieve her ends. Next to Clooney and Wilkinson, though, Swinton's is the weakest performance of the movie's three principals. Muzi.com News 10061770-39 (muzi.com)
| 
