Reggie Dunlop: What are you guys doing?
Steve Hanson: Puttin’ on the foil!
Jeff Hanson: Every game!
Jack Hanson: Yeah, you want some?

 

The cult classic, “Slapshot” came out today in 1977. They wouldn’t let you use half of the dialogue in the movie in today’s world.

In one of the most anticipated heavyweight boxing matches of all time, Cassius Clay upset champion Sonny Liston tonight in 1964. Liston, the Mike Tyson of his time, was a 7-1 favorite after knocking out the previous champion Floyd Patterson twice. Liston was as intimidating as it got and Clay later admitted to being scared before the fight. With everyone expecting Liston to knock out the 22-year old, Clay won when Liston couldn’t answer the bell for the 7th round. It was during the next week that Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Sports Illustrated named Ali/Liston I as the fourth greatest sports moment of the 20th century.

“The Passion of the Christ,” otherwise known as Mel Gibson’s tipping point, opened today in 2002.

“Songs From the Big Chair” came out today in 1985 and everyone thought Tears for Fears was going to be the next Duran Duran. Not quite, but “Shout,” “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and “Head Over Heels” were all radio staples.

Another band that seemed capable of big things dropped their big one today in 1997. Sister Hazel released, “Somewhere More Familiar,” and they sounded like a band that might be around for awhile. It was a great album and “All For You” became a smash single that summer. “Just Remember,” “Happy,” “Think About Me,” and “Cerilene” were all strong tunes.

“The Departed” won Best Picture today in 2007.

 

— Bill Hubbell

 

By Katie (that’s me doing my Renee Zelwegger imitation)

Well! The Oscars. Another Awards season come and gone, where does the time go? I’ve been addicted to these things since Jennifer Lawrence was but a twinkle in Jack Nicholson’s eye, kids.
I’m going to say right off the bat, I thought “We Saw Your Boobs” was hilarious. I thought the sock-puppet rendition of “Flight” was also hilarious. I thought the comment about how Denzel was in all those Nutty Professor movies was, you guessed it, hilarious. I thought the whole opening bit last night was great—Seth McFarlane was brave and stuck to what he thought was funny without being mean-spirited, and in my opinion, it worked.
Was the opener super long? Yes it was, and I wanted it to keep going because I found it all highly entertaining, almost as entertaining as all those frothing at the mouth at how sexist and offensive it  was. The best are the people (the flippin’ critic in our local paper!!) who actually thought the outraged reaction shots of Charlize Theron and Naomi Watts during the boob song were real. To them I say, “Look closely and you will see, none of those actresses were wearing the same dresses or had the same hairstyles.” It’s OK, I’m here to help.

And sexist? Can you deny all those boobs were seen? No you cannot. For all those angry because some of those actresses were portraying rape victims, guess what: they weren’t actually being raped. They were acting, and they were all paid handsomely. I saw Monster’s Ball, and if anything, I’m the one who got raped.
The whole show was so completely disjointed and weird, it was strangely awesome. Now, those who know me know, I always love the Oscars no matter what, even if Whoopie Goldberg is hosting. That is just my way. But last night was an all-timer; Jennifer Lawrence fell, Meryl Streep picked her fanny, the Avengers were so bad they made me feel glorious, Catherine Zeta Jones was so fantastic I didn’t even care she was lip-synching, Jennifer Hudson gave me chills, Barbra Streisand sang, some old man in a gold dress came out and bellowed the theme to Goldfinger (everyone acted like they knew who that was…well I didn’t. Sorry, I’m too busy not being 100) the whole show was inexplicably dedicated to musicals with a side of James Bond (???)…since when has Oscar night had a theme beyond just movies? Not just one, either, a theme with a minor.  I’m all for it. Here’s hoping next year it’s westerns with a splash of comedy or space movies with a soupcon of Quentin Tarantino… there could be a big number where the theater is awash with severed body parts and blood. Who produced this freaky joyride? Please come back next year, and bring Seth with you. And of course, Michelle Obama and her Zooey Daschanal bangs giving out the award for best picture. Absolutely bizarre.
All right, let’s talk about the stars. I thought for sure “Most Hammered” would go to Quentin Tarantino, but nope, it was a tie between Renee Zellwegger and Kristen Stewart. I didn’t expect much from Ms. Stewart, I’m not a fan and I can’t figure out why she keeps getting jobs. She looked her usual sweaty self, talent and personality free and sporting a fittingly ugly bruise on her upper arm. But Renee…what happened to you? You used to be my fave. You were actually swerving around on stage, looking like you were trying really hard to focus. You didn’t even bother to do your hair. Wow. If this keeps up, you’ll have to change your name to Kathleen Turner in about 2 years.

I thought Anne Hathaway was a lock for most annoying (for the record, I considered launching a backlash to the backlash against her—I really believe she deserved to win and that she is incredibly talented) but that distinction goes to Kristin Chenoweth. She has got to stop with the “Wookit me I’m just a wittle teeny person” schtick. This is now the second awards show in a row where she has asked someone to pick her up cuz she’s so wittle!

Anne Hathaway wins most beautiful. You simply can’t deny it. And her dress was killer. And yes, I wanted to pull my eyes out and scratch at my neck during her gasping-for-air-I’m-so-overwhelmed-I’ve-never-heard-of-cake-before speech*. I almost cried during the Les Mis song, it was just beautiful, and the horribly snubbed Sara Barker had on the best dress of the night.

Jennifer Lawrence—love her! So glad she won. It’s been eons since there’s been a really great, genuinely talented and funny young actress—I know, there are a lot of great actresses out there, but they’re all at least in their 30’s. Every time I watch When Harry Met Sally, I ask myself what 20-something actress could pull that off nowadays, and until Jennifer L showed up, I kept coming up empty. Maybe Anne Hathaway, but that annoying factor…Jen L is the full package.

Charlize Theron looked a lot like Brigitte Neilson from back in the 80’s. She’s super beautiful, but she looked  like she was about to wrestle an alligator.

Melissa McCarthy…look, I feel terrible about what that jerky old jerkstore reject Rex Reed said about you, but you looked like Mrs. Poole. Jessica Chastain rocked pretty much the same look as last year, and Jennifer Aniston…no. The dress, yes, the hair, seriously, stop it. You are wearing a ball gown, not going to the beach. Change it up, Goldie Hawn. Someone wore a gray dress. I can’t remember who it was, because they wore a gray dress. To the Oscars. Nothing came close to Gwyneth P’s white Tom Ford from last year.

 

OK, I need to go eat lunch, so I’ll leave you with this final thought: everyone is harping on how Seth Mc was offensive and horrible; well, think about this before you bathe in any more outrage: The most offensive thing I saw all night was the guy who won the Oscar for special effects, getting cut off by Jaws music halfway through his speech…where he was tearfully explaining how his entire firm went bankrupt and everyone lost their jobs. Huh? What about that, offense-takers? We Saw Your Boobs, indeed.

* Jim Gaffigan

Here comes the dreaded spoiler alert: I’ll be discussing Zero Dark Thirty, so if you have yet to see the film and plan on doing so, you may not want to read this. You may not want to read it anyway, and you may be asking yourself, Why am I on this site? How DID I GET HERE? In that case, you are David Byrne and I really cannot help you.

The first scene. A determined, idealistic, youthful female federal investigator — in a pants suit –enters a cell in which a prisoner who likely has crucial information about a serial killer is being detained. The investigator is chaperoned by an older male colleague who, while more experienced, will fail to obtain the information he seeks. Possibly because, in part, he does not understand the difference between abusive and persuasive.

Where have I seen this movie before?

Oh, yes, in 1991. Jodie Foster (“I’m 29!”) and Anthony Hopkins in “The Silence of the Lambs” which, for me, was a perfect film. Or as close to perfect as films get. Anyway, as engrossing a film as ZDT (that’s what we insiders call it, you know) was, at a certain point in its two-plus hours I began actively searching for related moments between the two movies. Such as…

 

— In the opening half hour of “TSOTL”, Clarice Starling twice visits Hannibal Lecter in his cell and develops a relationship of empathy and trust with him. In the opening half hour of ZDT, Mya twice visits the Al Qaida detainee in his cell and he turns to her for compassion.

— Clarice, with the FBI, and Mya, with the CIA, are both headstrong, obsessed workaholics whose male superiors don’t quite know how to lasso them, but who are at least smart enough to realize how valuable they are.

— Midway through the film, a planned encounter between goverment officials and a material witness goes horribly awry. In TSOTL a few police officers and a paramedic or two are gruesomely murdered as Dr. Lecter escapes from his makeshift jail in Nashville. Lecter was only there because he had promised to give the senator key information about the disappearance of her daughter. In ZDT, seven CIA officials are killed when a suicide bomber, posing as an Al Qaida turncoat, infiltrates their base in Afghanistan. You could see that rendezvous going horribly wrong from before that dusty old car appeared over the horizon (that scene also brought back memories of “Seven” for me).

— The scene in which our young heroine finds herself in a roomful of men and has to remind them that she belongs. In TSOTL it’s the moment at the funeral parlor in which Clarice, not quite yet sure of herself, orders the local cops to clear out so that she can examine the corpse. In ZDT it’s the moment in the CIA briefing room in which Mya tells Tony Soprano, “I’m the motherf*$*@ that found this place, sir.”

–The movie’s climax involves hunting down the serial killer in his own home, in complete darkness, with night vision goggles playing a key role. Also, the serial killer takes a bullet to the head. Between that scene and the movie’s opening scene, the bookending of it all, how do you not draw the parallel?
Also, there’s one final denoument moment in which we realize that our heroine is not joyous but almost lost. As if to recognize, now that there’s no bogeyman to chase, what do I do now?

Pants suits, monastic devotion to their cases, and red-to-auburn hair aside, Clarice and Mya are quite different people. We don’t know what drives Mya personally, only that she is precociously brilliant (the CIA recruited her out of high school). We did know what drove Clarice: the screaming of the lambs. Mya is far more demonstrative and confident than Clarice, who even as she enters the home of Buffalo Bill appears piss-your-pants terrified.

Still, the symmetry between the two films, one a classic and the latter in whatever category falls just below that, was astounding. There came a moment where I was hoping that director Kathryn Bigelow would toss in a snippet of a Tom Petty tune just as a way of winking to her audience as if to say, “Yes, I noticed it, too.”

Our friend Chris Corbellini provides his daily recommended allowance of C.C.’s on the Oscars. Yesterday, he provided us with his picks on the big awards. Today he gives us those on the lesser awards, you know, the ones that were given out a week earlier at a hotel ballroom in Santa Monica and hosted by an actress who used to be someone. Without further (Depar)dieu…

 

 

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Anna Karenina, Seamus McGarvey

Django Unchained, Robert Richardson

Life of Pi, Claudio Miranda

Lincoln, Januz Kaminski

Skyfall, Roger Deakins

 

SCOUTING REPORT: The working filmmaker’s favorite category. Sit in a darkened theater with an experienced director or producer and inevitably they’ll whisper: “ooh, nice shot.” So this one carries a lot of weight behind the scenes. It’s a three-cameraman race: No one shoots sunlight slipping through windows like Januz Kaminski. Roger Deakins has been the Coen Brothers secret weapon forever. And Claudio Miranda transformed what read like an un-shootable story into a beauty.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Miranda, Life of Pi. Deakins deserves it because every shot seemed dipped in awesome juice – far better than the source material deserved (the fireworks outside the Shanghai casino scene, Bond falling into a cold, deep Scottish pond). But it’s a Bond movie.

 

FILM EDITING

Argo, William Goldenberg

Life of Pi, Tim Squyres

Lincoln, Michael Kahn

Silver Linings Playbook, Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers

Zero Dark Thirty, Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg

 

SCOUTING REPORT: William Goldenberg had a memorable 2012. He has a 2-in-5 chance of winning in this category, and I think those two are the favorites. It comes down to the final 20 minutes in each case. Both had life-or-death stakes, so which one was more intense?

 

WHO WILL WIN: Argo. The only film last year where I gripped the armrest in the theater. When you know how a story plays out already yet remain caught up in the drama, editing has something to do with it.

 

VISUAL EFFECTS

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Life of Pi

Marvel’s The Avengers

Prometheus

Snow White and the Huntsman

 

SCOUTING REPORT: VE is a collaborative process with plenty of chefs in front of the mixing bowl, so I didn’t mention names in this category. The Hobbit looked like Super Mario Bros. at times, and a clunky version at that. Snow White and the Huntsman is best known for breaking up Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, so I could see the granddaughters of Academy voters trying to convince them to award the movie something. The Avengers? Looked fantastic, but it simply made too much money to win such a prestigious trophy.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Life of Pi. The best 3-D movie so far. More immersive than even Avatar, which won in this category three years ago.

 

SOUND EDITING

Argo, Erik Aandahl and Ethan Van der Ryn

Django Unchained, Wylie Stateman

Life of Pi, Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton

Skyfall, Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers

Zero Dark Thirty, Paul N.J. Ottosson

 

SCOUTING REPORT: I remember Zero Dark Thirty for the silence (the quiet helicopters, the slow march into the compound with sporadic gunfire) so that would be an unconventional choice. The Academy would be honoring the sound editor’s subtlety in a movie that could have been louder. Meanwhile, there’s a whole lotta ‘splosions in Skyfall. Life of Pi showcased a ship sinking and the screams of animals amidst the waves in one long prolonged shot – a horror grab bag of sound was needed to go with eye-bulging visuals.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Life of Pi. Skyfall could steal this one though, for the train crashing into the tunnel sequence.

 

SOUND MIXING

Argo, John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff and Jose Antonio Garcia

Les Miserables, Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson and Simon Hayes

Life of Pi, Ron Bartlett, D.M. Hemphill and Drew Kunin

Lincoln, Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom and Ronald Judkins

Skyfall, Scott Millan, Greg P. Russell and Stuart Wilson

 

SCOUTING REPORT: If a film adaptation of a world-famous musical doesn’t win this one, it’s not a musical, it’s a cautionary tale.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Les Miserables. All those actors performed their songs live during filming. Like a Hollywood hairstylist who knows how to hide bald spots, those mixers helped make everyone in the production sound like a passable pro or better.

 

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Amour, Austria

Kon-Tiki, Norway

No, Chile

A Royal Affair, Denmark

War Witch, Canada

 

SCOUTING REPORT: Yeah, No might have a shot here, but I can’t shake the muffled chuckles from a Lincoln Center theater crowd while watching its trailer due to the simplistic title. America … we are so obnoxious.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Amour. A consolation prize, as it won’t win Best Picture.

 

ANIMATED FEATURE

Brave, Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman.

Frankenweenie, Tim Burton

ParaNorman, Sam Fell and Chris Butler

The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Peter Lord

Wreck-It Ralph, Rich Moore

 

SCOUTING REPORT: Not the best year for Pixar. It wasn’t Cars or Cars 2,  but Brave got a lot of shrugs.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Wreck-It Ralph. With all due respect to Rich Moore, I’d like to see Sarah Silverman or Jane Lynch step up to the podium to accept this award and spout Sarah Silverman and Jane Lynch things.

 

ORIGINAL SCORE

Anna Karenina, Dario Marianelli

Argo, Alexandre Desplat

Life of Pi, Mychael Danna

Lincoln, John Williams

Skyfall, Thomas Newman

 

SCOUTING REPORT: I collect movie soundtracks, and nothing here brushed my hair back. Since Life of Pi’s score fit neatly with each of the different locales (India at the start, for example), it is awarded points for mood lighting with music.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Life of Pi. John Williams uses spare Oscars as toothbrush holders at this point, so he doesn’t need another one.

 

ORIGINAL SONG

Before My Time, Chasing Ice

Everybody Needs a Best Friend, Ted

Pi’s Lullaby, Life of Pi

Skyfall, Skyfall

Suddenly, Les Miserables

 

SCOUTING REPORT: When a song becomes a hit on iTunes before the movie is released, you stand a good chance of winning here. Take a bow, Adele. You made me want to slip on a tuxedo and order a vodka martini.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Skyfall. Here’s hoping Oscar host Seth MacFarlane spews more venom during the broadcast after losing in this category.

MAKEUP

Hitchcock, Howard Berger, Peter Montagna and Martin Samuel

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Peter Swords King, Rick Findlater and Tami Lane

Les Miserables, Lisa Westcott and Julie Dartnell

 

SCOUTING REPORT: I’m conflicted about the fact that a guy named Swords worked on a Tolkien fantasy adventure and is not going to win an Oscar. And how do you not refer to him as Swords on set? I doubt many Academy voters actually saw Hitchcock either, so that film is out in this category or any category.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Les Miserables. Everyone looked appropriately dusty or ragged.

 

 

PRODUCTION DESIGN

Anna Karenina

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Les Miserables

Life of Pi

Lincoln

 

SCOUTING REPORT: Another collaborative award that stretches well beyond the names on the list, so I kept them off. Every extra without dialogue and every throw pillow on a bed is part of the production design. That would suggest the Hobbit wins by a landslide here, but the Academy has already honored the Lord of the Rings trilogy and director Peter Jackson and his crew already knew how to stage the material. Life of Pi was the greatest logistical and aesthetic challenge of all of these films.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Life of Pi. Granted half the story is a boy and a tiger on a raft, but the design of the living island made the movie. Note: I came back to this one an hour after writing it and wondered if Lincoln or Les Mis could steal this statue. This is a competitive category.

 

COSTUME DESIGN

Anna Karenina, Jacqueline Durran

Les Miserables, Paco Delgado

Lincoln, Joanna Johnston

Mirror Mirror, Elko Ishioka

Snow White and the Huntsman, Colleen Atwood

 

SCOUTING REPORT: Is it your lifelong dream to get nominated for best costume and walk the red carpet in an outfit of your own devising? Make sure you get attached to a period piece or a fairy tale. Not one but two stories about Snow White made this list. Neither will win it.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s literary monster and Oprah book club Hall of Famer goes 1-for-4 on Oscar night.

 

Our friend and former colleague, NFL expert Chris Corbellini, is as passionate about the red carpet as he is about the red zone. He ardently sends in his Oscar picks.

First, some qualifications are in order: I spent over six years either in front of an Avid machine or a sound stage at a motion picture production house. This gives me a puncher’s chance of accurately predicting the technical categories no one cares about. The rest is personal preference to wildly-varied and entertaining pieces of art. I also watched “The Master.”

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

Alan Arkin, Argo

Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook

Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master

Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

Christop Waltz, Django Unchained

 

SCOUTING REPORT: Here are the No. 2-3 hitters in any Hollywood lineup, capable of setting the table for other performers or blasting one to the left-center bleachers. Every nominee already has an Oscar in his trophy room. De Niro is a solid choice and word-of-mouth praise could help, but will the Academy reward him for getting his heart rate up on one occasion after coasting all these years? Contender Christop Waltz never takes a line of dialogue off and has a stately air about him, but Leonardo DiCaprio, bloody hand and all, was a tornado in Django and outshines him a bit as a supporting performer.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Tommy Lee Jones. Gruff. Noble. In love. Lincoln begins to snowball now on Oscar night.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Amy Adams, The Master

Sally Field, Lincoln

Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables

Helen Hunt, The Sessions

Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook

 

SCOUTING REPORT: Not an especially deep field this year. It felt like the Academy had a tough time filling out this bracket. Jacki Weaver was a strong presence in the Silver Linings Playbook household with just a few lines, and it was nice to see the movie reveals she was pulling a lot of the strings for her son’s happiness. A mother’s love could be enough. Then again, she doesn’t sing.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Anne Hathaway. The movie star of the group. Bonus points for her portrayal of herself wearing “Ketel One” perfume on Funny or Die’s Between Two Ferns series.

 

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:

Amour, Michael Haneke

Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino

Flight, John Gatins

Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola

Zero Dark Thirty, Mark Boal

 

SCOUTING REPORT: A two-writer race between Boal and Tarantino. QT won an Oscar for scripting Pulp Fiction, and Django Unchained is not in the same class. But the Academy generally has no sense of legacy (see: Forrest Gump over IMDB.com’s No. 1 movie of all-time, The Shawshank Redemption, which every Oscar blogger and journalist is obligated to mention) unless it concerns race. I also have a theory that Hollywood can’t stand Kathryn Bigelow behind the scenes, so after begrudgingly awarding her Oscar for The Hurt Locker, the Academy is going to ignore Zero Dark Thirty this go-around. Sorry Mark. You are collateral damage.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Tarantino. There is no single line of dialogue that you’ll remember for the ages,  but QT did create a spectacularly evil character for Samuel L. Jackson.

 

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

Argo, Chris Terrio

Beasts of the Southern Wild, Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin

Life of Pi, David Magee

Lincoln, Tony Kushner

Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell

 

SCOUTING REPORT: Argo had the best line: “Somebody’s responsible when things happen, Jack. I’m responsible. I’m taking them through.” Silver Linings Playbook was a time-capsule movie for 2012, and sharply and warmly written from start to credits. Those scripts deserve a split national title. Neither will win it outright. In the words of Terrio: “Argo f-ck yourself.”

 

WHO WILL WIN: Kushner. Thought process: “Didn’t Kushner write Angels in America? That was important. So is Lincoln. I’ll vote for him.”

 

BEST ACTOR:

Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook

Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables

Joaquin Phoenix, The Master

Denzel Washington, Flight

 

SCOUTING REPORT: The easiest pick on the board. Hollywood is always looking for a bankable male lead for the next 10 years and George Clooney and Brad Pitt can’t last forever, so Cooper may get some consideration for the future of the business. Still, this one was over from the first Lincoln trailer.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Day-Lewis. If Broadway recreated the film as a play, it would sell out as long as he performed the title role.

 

BEST ACTRESS:

Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty

Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook

Emmanuelle Riva, Amour

Quvenzhane Walls, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Naomi Watts, The Impossible

 

SCOUTING REPORT: Chastain and Lawrence. In Jessica’s case you are celebrating obsessiveness, which is tricky. Instead of the white whale sinking the ship, which is the message of so many stories, she triumphs. If Chastain stepped out of that tent at the end, stared out into the desert and then fell over and died from exhaustion, it would not have surprised me. Her chief competitor had more to do. She had to be funny, warm, more than a little off her rocker, dress down Robert De Niro with a speech about sports, and then nail the final dance number.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Lawrence. When she hissed “You’re killing me! You’re killing me!” to her sister before the big dance, the movie was hers. The happiest person during the after-parties will be her agent. Lawrence is already a star after the Hunger Games, and just 22 years young.

 

BEST DIRECTOR:

Michael Haneke, Amour

Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Ang Lee, Life of Pi

Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook

 

SCOUTING REPORT: Ben Affleck deserves this one, and Kathryn Bigelow would be a better choice than most in this group. Let’s work with what we have. Zeitlin’s challenge was to create a different world in the Louisiana bayou – immediately following the BP disaster – and use a baker from New Orleans and a 6-year-old girl with no acting experience to be a family and carry the story.  Shooting on water, a backbreaker throughout motion picture history, would also be heavily involved. If directing means pulling the most out of a cast and being the decision maker for every element of the picture to final cut, he should win this. But Sir Steven Spielberg is the safe, traditional choice.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Spielberg. Strange because it’s so un-Spielberg, with very little in the way of spectacular set pieces beside the opening battle. This was a small picture done on the cheap, relatively speaking, with performances in darkened rooms by the fire and political halls.

 

BEST PICTURE:

Amour

Argo

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Django Unchained

Les Miserables

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Silver Linings Playbook

Zero Dark Thirty

 

SCOUTING REPORT: There are enough nominees here to fill out a baseball lineup. I enjoyed Silver Linings Playbook the most of this group, and wondered how Beasts of the Southern Wild lifted something special out of a muddy, garbage-strewn swamp. Life of Pi was pretty to look at and should win the technical categories. Amour and Lincoln may be sentimental choices. Django celebrates Westerns; Les Miserables, musicals. None of them have the all-around greatness for the gold medal. So it’s Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, then. Of the two, Zero Dark Thirty creeps slowly and steadily to that tense finish. Argo is tense from the opening shot until the plane is the air.

 

WHO WILL WIN: Argo. Affleck’s comeback is complete. Like Eric Clapton once sang: “Everyone wants to be your long, lost friend.”