Here's a strange thing about the 90th Oscars -- it's either going to be one of the most predictable Academy Awards shows in history ... or the least.
The weirdness that went on last year with befuddled (but insanely confident) Faye Dunaway and bemused Warren Beatty and La La Land and Moonlight and those poor PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants who don't have jobs anymore (but went out with a bang)?
None of that's gonna happen this year.
Except ... don't rule anything out.
There's not even real consensus among prognosticators whether The Shape of Water will win Best Picture or Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, and let's be honest, there's not a ton of passion for either film. So, could the final envelope be opened and a shout of, say, Call Me By Your Name (be still, my heart!) actually happen?
Thanks to the preferential balloting system the Oscars uses, it's very possible. As the Los Angeles Times points out, the Oscars voting system basically gives Best Picture to the film that the least number of Oscar voters actively dislikes. Too many "anti-Three Billboards" or "anti-Shape of Water" votes could actually doom those films. The complex system is explained coherently by the Times' Glenn Whipp:
Here's why that ordering is important: When Rosas and fellow PwC accountants Kimberly Bourdon and Mark Lobel sort the best picture ballots, they place them in stacks based on members' No. 1 votes. They then eliminate the movie with the fewest first-place votes, giving those votes to each ballot's second-ranked film. The process continues -- smallest stacks eliminated, votes redistributed to the next choice down -- until one movie has more than 50% of the vote.
So, let's be clear: a lot of people hate Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri for a rather confounding number of reasons, none of which I understood at the time or understand now. The film got people talking all right, but in Hollywood a lot of them were talking about it for the wrong reasons.
The Shape of Water is a sweet and beautiful film, an ode to monster movies with a strong auteur director at the helm. But a huge number of Oscar voters are turned off by "genre" filmmaking (that is, sci-fi, horror, etc.), and other older, less liberal members may very well have turned the damn thing off when the deaf woman and the sea creature got it on.
Since the majority of Oscar voters don't see movies in a movie theater, they watch them at home on inferior-quality DVDs with absolutely no consistency in the presentation. It is infinitely easier to just say, "Oh, Helen, turn that stupid movie off" than it is to walk out of a screening. A lot of people liked but didn't love The Shape of Water's far-fetched story and its telegraphed plot.
So, there are potentially a large number of votes against the two front-runners. That leaves two movies about England's entry in to World War II -- Dunkirk and Darkest Hour -- which could cancel each other out; both have their ardent fans, both have their vocal detractors.
Get Out is the film that has the fewest "enemies," perhaps, but it's also unfairly been branded a low-budget horror film that capitalized on the #OscarsSoWhite movement of the last few years, which has been all but forgotten in a #MeToo era. What Get Out has going for it is that it's actually, genuinely one of the best movies of the year.
Phantom Thread and The Post are two "prestige" pictures that feel like holdovers from another era. They received the nominations because they were supposed to, not because of passionate supporters. (Let it be said, both are superb films.)
And then there are this year's two indies: Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name. Lady Bird has a passionate fan base, and the worst I've heard anyone say about it is that it felt more like a small TV film. Call Me By Your Name, my vote for best movie of the 2010s, maybe the last two decades, is viewed by many as "boring," and a distressing number of people seized upon the age difference between its two main characters as somehow representative of our #MeToo age of anti-predatory behavior. (To me, those people have as much of a point as do those who say Annie Hall is about a guy who has a problem with spiders.)
All of which leads me to wonder if the film whose title is announced might not actually end up being one of the longshots. Doubtful, but -- as Faye and Warren reminded us last year -- oh so tantalizingly possible!
Oh, and they're opening the envelope again this year.
So, here's my attempt to predict the winners of the 90th Academy Awards.
BEST PICTURE
WILL WIN : The Shape of Water SHOULD WIN : Call Me By Your Name
WHY? There's no clear consensus in this race, but there is a good chance that Academy voters have been won over by the incessant, omnipresent, in-your-face campaigning for The Shape of Water. Though the film has its supporters, I view it as this decade's version of Crash, a choice made out of sheer frustration with the nominees, and not because it's a great film. Its story meanders, its characters are all over the map, it's got the symbolism of a 10th grader's short story, and it's got some laughably bad scenes (like the pie guy in the diner). But it's extraordinarily self-important, and that turns the Academy on. The insidiously effective "You-Realize-a-Main-Character-is-a-Racist!" social media campaign against Three Billboards has all but doomed that film's chances, and thanks to the weird balloting system, I think there's an incredibly good chance that Get Out or Lady Bird or (yes, seriously) Call Me By Your Name could be announced, if only because the backstabbing against the others has reached insufferable levels.
BEST DIRECTOR
WILL WIN : Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of WaterSHOULD WIN : Jordan Peele for Get Out
WHY? Del Toro wins because he is a master showman who doesn't just know how to play the system, he loves playing it. Other than a child's birthday party, I can hardly think of any significant event lately in L.A. at which he has not appeared -- and he always spins a wonderfully compelling story about how he made the film to pay homage to the movies he loved as a child. Oh, Hollywood loves that self-reflexivity. Peele should be taking home this award, though, for his stylish, intricately designed, impeccably composed, beautifully shot and perfectly cast thriller that, by the way, also pays tribute to a lot of other Hollywood greats, but much more subtle ways.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
WILL WIN : Sam Rockwell for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, MissouriSHOULD WIN : Willem Dafoe for The Florida Project
WHY? "But he's a racist! The Oscar will go to someone for playing a racist character! It's disgusting!" No, it's acting. And writing, and directing. Three Billboards is about finding the grace and humanity underneath the outward appearance and behavior of truly despicable people, the kind of people who get mocked for wanting prayer and guns in schools, and for voting for Trump. Three Billboards takes some awful people, like Sam Rockwell's cop, and makes them real, makes us understand them. Rockwell never ever redeems his character, but he does try to make better choices. Rockwell accomplishes one of acting's hardest feats: He keeps a character awful, but makes us like him anyway. Yet, there's Willem Dafoe doing the opposite in the shamefully overlooked The Florida Project, one of the very best movies of the year. Dafoe creates a character unlike any we've ever seen him play: There's not a hint of Dafoe's trademark craziness, just genuine compassion, love, even pain as he wishes he could help provide a better life for the people who live in his rundown motel. As the closest thing to an audience surrogate in The Florida Project, Dafoe allows us to see a world almost all of us have only overlooked.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
WILL WIN : Allison Janney for I, TonyaSHOULD WIN : Laurie Metcalf for Lady Bird
WHY? It's possible I'm the only person who saw Janney's work as caricature. I never saw an actual person behind the de-glammed makeup, big glasses, oxygen cannula and chain-smoking. I saw everything people have seen in Three Billboards: Disdain for this "kind" of person, for "white trash." In Janney's defense, she plays it with fierce and unrepenting anger. But the character, like the movie, left me feeling depressed, not inspired. While Janney is almost a foregone conclusion, she can't nail the moment Metcalfe delivers the year's finest supporting performance. When her daughter Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) sighs, "What if this is the best version of me?" Metcalfe's weary response turns her into the most wonderfully relatable parent on screen this year. She nails humanity, resilience, strength, weakness, desperation, pride, disappointment, hope, fear, optimism ... all of it in one almost throwaway moment, capturing perfectly how a parent can love a child even if she sometimes doesn't like the kid.
BEST ACTOR
WILL WIN : Gary Oldman for Darkest HourSHOULD WIN : Timothée Chalamet for Call Me By Your Name
WHY? There's certainly nothing wrong with Oldman winning the Oscar -- his performance is undeniable Oscar bait, endlessly entertaining, and a perfect blend of acting craft and makeup work. Is it the best performance of the year by an actor? You watch the last four minutes of Call Me By Your Name, then tell me. The consensus is, "Chalamet has plenty of time." That's about the most ageist thing I've heard in a while.
BEST ACTRESS
WILL WIN : Frances McDormand, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, MissouriSHOULD WIN : Meryl Streep, The Post
WHY? McDormand would have had my vote for her fierce, genuine performance of a grieving woman who knows neither subtlety nor reason. Then I saw The Post, and say what you will about a "token" Streep nominee, but she did so much more than deliver a caricature. Her performance as Katharine Graham is a revelation: Streep plays her as something Streep is not used to playing lately, a woman who is unsure of herself, who has to find her own voice, her own courage to face down the establishment. Wavering, tremulous, anxious yet confident and brave, Streep is at her best in The Post, which is a film that is destined to be rediscovered in years to come.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
WILL WIN : Call Me By Your NameSHOULD WIN : Call Me By Your Name
WHY? It's everything an adaptation should be. In a time of slavish "filmizations" of novels, James Ivory's screenplay dares to keep the same basic story and structure and turn it from an internal, first-person narrative into a film with two main characters (and two key supporting characters) so finely crafted that they have their own internal lives, and a logic and reason that are only theirs to understand. Far from being a simple "coming-of-age story," Call Me By Your Name is a multi-layered film filled with nuance and discovery, all the hallmarks of the author who turned a tremulous, quivering moment between middle-aged Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson into a sighing, swoonable romantic milestone in his adaptation of The Remains of the Day. This is even more exquisite.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
WILL WIN : SHOULD WIN : Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
WHY? A lovely fairy tale turned into a symbolic mishmash of repressed desires, there's little really genuinely memorable about The Shape of Water other than its sumptuous physicality, which is not what a screenplay is. (Though I did like the bit about the gills.) Even the knee-jerk, misses-the-point, it's-racist backlash against Three Billboards can't hide its wonderful way with words, its remarkable ability to change tones convincingly even within a scene ("It's a gag"), and a story that is getting under peoples' skin precisely because it dares to reflect one person's view of humanity. It's a screenplay with a definite perspective to it, it's shocking, it's angry, it's sad, and it's terrific. A lot of people hate Three Billboards ... and isn't that kind of the point of a movie like this?
ADDITIONAL CATEGORIES
Best Animated Film: Coco
Best Foreign Language Film: A Fantastic Woman
Best Documentary Feature:
Best Documentary Short Subject:
Best Costume Design: Phantom Thread
Best Film Editing: Dunkirk
Best Makeup/Hair Styling: Darkest Hour
Best Original Score: The Shape of Water
Best Original Song:
Best Sound Editing: Dunkirk
Best Sound Mixing: Dunkirk
Best Visual Effects:
Best Production Design: The Shape of Water
Best Animated Short Film: Dear Basketball
Best Live Action Short Film:
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