Oscars 2012: The Good, The Bad, The Overlooked and The Undeserving

After an absence of eight years, Billy Crystal is once again hosting the Oscars.  Not only does this guarantee we'll (finally!) get a reasonably entertaining show, it effectively underscores the overarching mentality behind this year's slate of nominees:  "Let's make 'em like we used to!"

How else to explain the plethora of nominations granted to a loving, old Hollywood tribute like The Artist, a star-studded social issues drama like The Help  or an old-fashioned throwback like War Horse -  while edgier, groundbreaking films like Melancholia, Drive and A Dangerous Method are shut out completely?  Every year has its sentimental favorites, but this year's lineup of nominees is almost entirely based on sentiment and nostalgia.

We can be grateful that the Academy chose to shower its greatest number of nominations this year (11) on Hugo, a film which manages to be both technically innovative and traditionally heart-warming or that they found room for Terence Malick and the flawed genius of his Tree of Life.  But overall, this year's Oscar nominees are a pale and incomplete reflection of the the richest, most rewarding cinema offered in the past year.

I've already written at length about the best films and performances of 2011. Nevertheless, I'm going to indulge in the annual parlor game of second-guessing the Academy.  Here goes:

Best Supporting Actress

Will win:  Octavia Spencer

Spencer pretty much has this category all locked up, and I have no real objections to that.  She made more of her role in The Help than I think was actually on the page, although any character who serves up a shit pie to a former employer is a character to be reckoned with.

Should win: Melissa McCarthy

I will qualify this choice by saying that I haven't yet seen Albert Nobbs, so can't fairly evaluate Janet McTeer's worthiness for the award (although I suspect she'd be a strong contender, at minimum).  Of the remaining four nominees, it was McCarthy's unhinged, lunatic performance in Bridesmaids that is most memorable to me.  She made me laugh out loud through three viewings, and that's no small achievement, even if Oscar rarely chooses to recognize it.

Overlooked: Charlotte Gainsbourg

There are lots of performers who I think have been overlooked in this year's awards season, but for purposes of this post, I decided to limit my Overlooked entries to those who actually had a reasonable chance of being nominated.  Gainsbourg is still a bit of a stretch, as her exceptional work in Melancholia has been largely ignored in favor of co-star Kirsten Dunst's showier role as her severely depressed sister. But Gainsbourg gave a honest and powerful performance as a woman devastated by the approaching end of days, and she deserves to be honored.

Best Supporting Actor

Will - and should! - win: Christopher Plummer

Yes, he will win because he's 82 years old and a sentimental favorite (he was Captain VonTrapp after all). But he should win because his beautifully calibrated performance in Beginners is the emotionally accessible heart and soul of an otherwise eccentric and uneven film.  If the award is also a bit of a Lifetime Achievement award for Plummer, I'm cool with that.  He has an impressive body of work for which to be honored.

Overlooked: Where do I even start?

Of all the acting categories at this year's Oscars, this is the most frustrating. Let's start with Jonah Hill. While it's great that he reigned it in for Moneyball, an Oscar nomination seems a bit premature.  If Oscar wanted to honor a funny man who stretched and surprised us all, a far better choice would be Patton Oswalt who was the best thing in Young Adult, matching and even outperforming Charlize Theron.  Or how about Albert Brooks, unnervingly funny and scary in a career-peak performance in Drive? Brooks' performance is the most universally decried omission in this category, and for good reason.

As for the others, Kenneth Branagh's Laurence Olivier impersonation in My Week with Marilyn was great fun, but given the high quality of other work done in suporting roles this year, I don't think it quite qualifies for the top five.  I can't comment on Nick Nolte's work in Warrior, nor on Max Von Sydow's work in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as I haven't seen either film (although I suspect in at least one of those cases, the actor is nominated because he's old, respected and - so far - Oscarless.)

But the most egregious omission for my tastes is that of Viggo Mortensen's canny, clever portrayal of Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method. That David Cronenberg's film was completely shut out of so many award slates altogether is baffling enough, but the lack of recognition for Mortensen's stellar work is an indefensible slight.

Best Actress

Will  - and should! - win: Viola Davis

Davis is a wonderful actress whom you never catch acting.  There's a authentic core and a groundedness to her performances that shames the more histrionic performers who sometimes surround her.  That's true in The Help, as it was also true in the film for which Davis was previously nominated, Doubt.  Meryl Streep was the early favorite in this category, but her performance in The Iron Lady was not her best portrayal of an actual person (that'd be Julia Child), and it will give me great pleasure to see Davis kick Streep's butt in this category, just as she did onscreen three years ago, quietly outshining Streep's annoying "Master Thespian" turn in Doubt.  I have to qualify my choice here by admitting that I haven't yet seen Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs, nor Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, but the chance that either of them outperformed Viola Davis are very slim.  Michelle Williams' take on the legendary Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn runs a pretty close second to Davis here. 

Overlooked:  Saoirse Ronan

Ronan was astonishing as the wild-child/trained assassin on the run in Joe Wright's nutty but underrated thriller Hanna.  She may be very young, but Ronan already has one well-deserved Oscar nomination under her belt (for 2007's Atonement) and she's a gifted performer who consistently chooses surprising and challenging roles. I sincerely hope we'll see her actually nominated in this category before too many more years pass.

Best Actor

Will win: George Clooney (maybe?)

This category is a dead heat between Clooney's grieving, cuckolded husband in The Descsendants and Jean Durardin's declining matinee idol in The Artist, and I'm likely to change my prediction again in the next 24 hours.  For now, I'm going with Clooney who's been stretching onscreen in recent years in ways that the Academy traditionally likes to reward.  His stalwart facade first began to crack in 2009's Up in the Air; with his tearful farewell to a comatose wife in The Descendants he entered fully into Sensitive Guy territory, and that's the stuff that Oscar voters traditionally tend to eat up with a spoon.  All of which sounds more cynical than I intend. Clooney really is good in The Descendants, but its the subtle trajectory of his entire performance that is most impressive, not just the celebrated deathbed scene.

Should Win:  Jean Dujardin

This was the toughest category to call.  I've seen all five of the nominated performances, and I can make a case for any one of them taking home the Oscar.  Brad Pitt turned in some seriously fine work, both in Moneyball and The Tree of Life this year; he almost makes it look too easy. Gary Oldman's watchful, inscrutable George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was almost too inscrutable, to the point where you sometimes wondered if he still had a pulse; nonetheless, I'd still be thrilled to see him get the trophy if only as well-deserved kind of lifetime achievement award.  Demian Bechir's portrayal of a struggling Latino immigrant in A Better Life steered far clear of easy pathos, but was all the more moving for its eloquent understatment.  And, as previously noted, George Clooney was terrific in The Descendants, doing some of his best work to date.

But I think Jean Durjardin has it all over these other guys.  In The Artist,  his fading silent film star is is effortlessly charming, funny, and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same moment.  Silent film acting has a reputation for being hammy, and it's not entirely undeserved.  But Dujardin gives a silent performance that feels contemporary in nearly every respect, yet he puts the big emotions over in a way that simultaneously feels true to the period. It's a beautiful piece of acting that richly deserves the prize.

Overlooked:  Michaeal Fassbender

Although I have no quibbles with this year's Best Actor slate, it'd still have been nice to see Michael Fassbender somewhere in the lineup. Fassbender got a lot of early awards season attention for his portrayal of a sex addict in Shame, a film I haven't yet had an opportunity to see.  I'm not surprised the NC-17-rated Shame was shut out of this year's Oscars, but Fassbender's portrayals of Carl Jung in A Dangerous Mehod and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre were also Oscar-worthy.

Best Picture

Will win:  The Artist

My comments about The Artist, both here and in comments threads around the blogosphere have been a bit acerbic, so let me set the record straight: there actually is a lot to like, even love, about The Artist.  Besides the wonderful, aforementioned performance of Jean Dujardin, there's a heartfelt sincerity in its paeans to great films of the past, even though it appropriates the theme music from Hitchcock's Vertigo  to strange effect in a chase scene. It's sweet, funny and sad, and the black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous.

Having said all that, I'm still not rejoicing to see this as the front runner for the Best Picture nod, not in a year when there were so many films with more substance, daring, richness and nerve.  But I won't be throwing anything at my TV screen when it's name is announced.  Last year it was The King's Speech, this year The Artist.  Nostalgia reigns in Hollywood, and that isn't likely to change soon.

Should win:  Hugo

Given the slate of nominees to choose from, as well as the Academy's obvious desire to look backwards, Hugo is easily the best choice of the nine Best Picture nominees.  (At least I think so; as previously noted, I've managed to avoid Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and hope to continue that avoidance for years to come.)

Let's review:

The Tree of Life is a very close second to Hugo for me, but I just didn't love it the way I loved Hugo.

I liked Moneyball far better than I ever expected to, given that I hate statistics and have little interest in baseball.  If I gave the Oscars, Bennett Miller would likely have gotten a Best Director nomination instead of Woody Allen.  But it's not the best of year by a wide margin.

Midnight in Paris improved considerably for me on a second viewing, but still feels like mid-tier Woody Allen at best.  It doesn't belong here, and neither does the candy-colored, feel-good-film-for white liberals, The Help.

War Horse surpassed my initially very low expectations, but still felt a little gassy and sloggy. (If there were acting Oscars for animals, however, the horses in this one would take them all.)

The Descendants had some lovely acting, but ultimately felt slight and undercooked.  I haven't thought about it once since I saw it, and for an Alexander Payne film, that's unusual.

So it comes down to Hugo, a film both technically accomplished and emotionally rich, which also pays a beautiful tribute to George Melies and other pioneers of cinema.  The film feels enormously personal for director Martin Scorsese, who creates a whimsical and magical Parisian milieu and uses 3-D technology to brilliant effect.  I'd be thrilled to see it win the Oscar and to see Scorsese get a very richly deserved Best Director trophy.  But it feels like The Artist's year.

Overlooked: Oh Dear God, don't get me started....

This year's slate of Best Picture nominess is one of the weakest in memory. If you want to know how I feel about things, just go check out my Ten Best list for 2011, on which only two of the nine Best Picture nominees appear.  I could bitch and moan for days, but since I'm focusing my Overlooked choices on films that actually had a chance of being nominated...

... where the hell in Drive on this year's list? Nicholas Windig Refn's visually stunning and seamlessly thrilling crime drama?  I can only surmise that its cool, existential vibe and burts of shocking, graphic violence were at odds with the Academy's old-fashioned, feel-great vibe for the year. We've already talked about the shocking omission of a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Albert Brooks, but Ryan Gosling was worthy of Best Actor consideration as well. My Ten Best list was compiled before I'd had the chance to see Drive; if I were publishing an amended list today, it'd unseat Bridesmaids from that list, and possibly rank even higher.

And while we're at it , where is A Dangerous Method?  David Cronenberg's dramatic look at Freud, Jung and the patient-turned-doctor, Sabina Spielrein, who influences and divides them, was a talky, sophisticated and decidedly adult film that took on sexuality in a cool and intelligent manner.  There was a time when the Academy would have fallen all over a film like this, but in its current cuddly/nostalgic mode, a film like A Dangerous Method is far too hot to handle.

Come tomorrow night, we'll find out how many of my predictions are right and how many are wrong.  I'm planning to finally rev up my mostly dormant Twitter account, and "live tweet" the proceedings, so click on the button at the upper right of the page if you'd like to follow.