#But non-naturalistic acting styles were trend

[thatscarletflycatcher]

"Isn't it great how much better acting is these days compared to older movies that were so exaggerated and theatrical?" I have news for you about art and naturalism being a style.

[the-film-bitch]

Oscars Predictions

Best Film and Best Director:

With a record-tying 14 nominations, Damien Chazelle’s all-singing, all-dancing La La Land is a cert for Best Picture. But with so much high calibre competition, less sure is the Directing category, which may well lean for a split-win (as it has in 3 of the last 6 years) and plump for a non-La La choice in order to honour the wealth of directing talent on display this year.

Best Director nominations commend Denis Villeneuve for his stunning philosophical sci-fi Arrival, Barry Jenkins for the phenomenal Moonlight and Kenneth Lonergan for his intricate grief-piece Manchester by the Sea, while this year’s crop also threatens to award Mel Gibson for his comeback-flick Hacksaw Ridge.

It would be comforting to think Villeneuve has a decent shot with Arrival, but given that it is the only Best Picture nom without a representative in the acting categories, it seems clear that the Academy are missing some of its brilliance. Lonergan has perhaps better odds for the well-respected Manchester, but separate Actor and Original Screenplay wins are much likelier.

Whether the Academy will split Best Picture and Directing is as much your guess as mine: if it does, it’ll be Barry Jenkins who takes home the helmer’s award, and if it doesn’t, the shock won’t kill you. If the pre-Oscars awards trend and majority opinion prevail, Moonlight hasn’t done enough to shake the Academy out of their post-coital daze with Chazelle. But it remains my favourite film of the year – so I’m sticking with Jenkins.

Best Actress:

In the 38 years since Meryl Streep’s first Oscars nod, she has been nominated a record 20 times – that’s about once every two years – so it’s not surprising to see her in this category again. She gives a characteristically moving performance as the eponymous aspiring singer in Florence Foster Jenkins, but she’s done much better work, so it’s unlikely this nomination will amount to anything. 

At the other end of the scale, this year sees the first nominations for Ruth Negga (Loving) and Isabelle Huppert (Elle). Neither of their films are nominated in any other category, but there’s no great sense of injustice here: Loving is a great film, but isn’t quite ambitious enough in its other areas to warrant nominations in its own right, while I found Elle, Paul Verhoeven’s French-language film, to be a strange, sadistic movie with the gall to style its ‘rape-myth’ plot as a refreshingly ‘post-feminist’ move – that is to say, it manipulatively insists that its horrific sexual ‘transgressions’ are merely meaningless, über-radical film-play, rather than a dangerously potent message to put out into the world. (You can read much more on why Elle is so deceiving here and here. Paragraphs 5 and 6 in Candice Frederick’s essay are particularly powerful). Nevertheless, both Huppert and Negga are their films’ chief strengths (with Negga in particular producing a stunning performance), so it’s great to see them recognised here.

In contrast, there was no chance Natalie Portman wasn’t going to be nominated for her role as the eponymous Mrs. JFK in Jackie, given the relative ease with which (admittedly good) biopic performances pick up nominations (Eddie Redmayne’s last two Oscars nominations come to mind here). Rightly or wrongly, there’s a tendency to view this type of role as Oscar-baiting: take on a true-story role, put in a good performance, and the character’s pre-existing mystique will do most of the publicity for you. Portman’s depiction of Jackie in the days following her husband’s assassination is certainly good, if a bit earnest, but I think this may well be a nomination earned more on the credit of Onassis Kennedy’s charisma than quality of performance.

On this note, it would be amiss not to point out someone who inexplicably hasn’t been recognised this year: despite her expert steering of the Arrival ship, Amy Adams has been shut out – a cruel move that I simply don’t understand, given the strength of her performance and the shining opportunity this could have been for her. Adams now holds the same number of nominations Leonardo DiCaprio did prior to his 2016 win, but the sympathetic uproar hasn’t really materialised here. While a monumental snub, there is one mitigating factor this year: she probably wouldn’t have won anyway, since it looks almost certain that La La Land’s Emma Stone will win in this category. Stone is the emotional heart of Damien Chazelle’s film, second only to the music, and its comic guard, too, lending the film her natural wit and girl-next-door likability, lest it be accused of self-seriousness. With an unbroken awards run so far, I think this one’s a sure-fire for Stone.

 Best Actor:

This is perhaps the only major category in which La La Land’s awards sweep is almost certain to be interrupted. Ryan Gosling is characteristically charming as jazz aficionado Sebastian, but ends up being outshined by Emma Stone as co-lead, making for a performance that I doubt will be authoritative enough to win here. Much stronger is Denzel Washington’s self-directed turn in Fences, his performance doing much to translate the idiosyncrasies of the late August Wilson’s excellent screenplay – it is at once naturalistic and theatrical – to the silver screen.

Elsewhere, Andrew Garfield gets a merited nod for one of two performances of devout Christians he has given this year (the other being in Martin Scorsese’s snubbed Silence) – this one is better, but only just – and Viggo Mortensen puts in an unexpected, but unobjectionable, appearance for Captain Fantastic, a film that doesn’t quite earn the ‘fantastic’ epithet of its title. No-one, though – not even Denzel – is likely to edge out Casey Affleck, who has cemented himself as a clear critics’ favourite with his career-defining performance as Lee Chandler in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. Worn down to a husk by grief, Affleck’s Lee is something of an aberration in this category: his is a performance entirely unrelenting in its sadness. Brief flashbacks show us the man that was to set apart the singular tragedy of the man that is, with Affleck’s performances as both giving us the same haunting appreciation of the extent of devastation as a then-and-now picture of the Great Barrier Reef might do. Despite audible backlash against his nomination, the 2010 accusations of Affleck sexually harassing colleagues (accusations which were settled out of court) don’t look likely to get in the way of his Oscars track – especially with Mel Gibson’s personal nomination having set the bar for the Oscars’ moral relativism this year.

Predictions for other categories, with preferences in brackets: 

Best Supporting Actress

 Viola Davis, Fences

Best Supporting Actor

 Mahershala Ali, Moonlight

Best Original Screenplay

 Manchester by the Sea

Best Adapted Screenplay

 Moonlight

Best Cinematography

 La La Land (although I prefer Moonlight)

Best Animated Feature Film

 Zootopia

Best Documentary (Feature)

13th

Best Foreign Language Film

 Toni Erdmann

Best Music (Original Score)

 La La Land

Best Music (Original Song)

 ‘City of Stars’, La La Land

Best Sound Editing

 Hacksaw Ridge (although I’d like Arrival to win here)

Best Sound Mixing

 La La Land

Best Costume Design

 Jackie

Best Makeup & Hairstyle

 Star Trek Beyond

 Best Production Design

 La La Land

 Best Film Editing

 La La Land