Oscar picks and predictions

In a matter of weeks, this year's race for the Academy Awards has gone from an exciting wide-open contest to one of dull certainty.

"The King's Speech" has emerged as a strong frontrunner, and is setting up for a commanding sweep of the Oscars come Sunday. With "The Social Network," last fall's critical darling, fading quickly and "Speech" riding a box office wave almost unprecedented for a talkie historical film, the chance of any big surprises has been almost entirely drained from the proceedings.

I'm both heartened and dismayed by this development. On the one hand, there's no denying "The King's Speech" represents filmmaking for grown-ups -- the sort of mature, splendidly-crafted movie that critics complain there isn't enough of.

But "Speech" has a stale tang that's hard to deny, like a whiff of mothballs in a closet full of resplendent finery. A period piece about the trials and tribulations of the rich nobility, gilded with fine costumes and sets, and capped off by a conclusion that is as preordained as it is uplifting, "The King's Speech" seems to have been custom-made as Oscar bait.

I gave the film a very favorable review, while noting that it "lacks in novelty." But it did not make my Top 10 list for 2010, or receive an outpouring of adoration from critics.

Metacritic.com, which aggregates the opinions of the nation's highest-profile movie reviewers, lists only three who ranked "The King's Speech" as the best film of the year (compared with 22 for "The Social Network"), and it only ranked eighth in terms of total appearances on Top 10 lists.

One benefit of the "Speech" tidal wave: It makes prognosticating this year's Oscars a much easier affair.

Here then are my predictions of the winners, as well as my pick of who should win. I'll also highlight what I think are the Academy's snubs and flubs, by indicating an unworthy nominee and more deserving one.

BEST PICTURE

For reasons just outlined, "The King's Speech" will win, period. It has swept all the preliminary awards, with the exception of the Golden Globes, which are a joke. "The Social Network" has the only chance of an upset, however slim.

The list of 10 nominees is a mostly solid one, and I was pleased to see the tiny "Winter's Bone" get a nod. Though I found "Black Swan" to be pretentious drek.

Prediction: "The King's Speech"
Pick: "The Social Network"
Snubs & flubs: "Blue Valentine" instead of "Black Swan"

BEST DIRECTOR

This category is most notable for the absence of Christopher Nolan, whose "Inception" was the most original and audacious film of 2010. David Fincher of "Network" was considered a shoo-in, but Tom Hooper of "Speech" won the Director's Guild award, which nearly always predicts the winner.

Nolan's snub is vexing, but personally I thought Debra Granik of "Winter's Bone" had the finest touch behind the camera last year, and she also wasn't nominated.

Prediction: Tom Hooper, "The King's Speech"
Pick: David Fincher, "The Social Network"
Snubs & flubs: Debra Granik, "Winter's Bone" for Darren Aronofsky, "Black Swan"

BEST ACTRESS

It's between Annette Bening for "The Kids Are All Right" and Natalie Portman for "Black Swan." Despite my distaste for "Swan," Portman's strong, haunting performance is the only thing that gave that film any life. And she won the Screen Actors Guild award, a strong push.

Personally, I deemed Bening even better in the little-seen "Mother and Child." But 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence commanded the screen in "Winter's Bone," eclipsing them both.

Prediction: Natalie Portman, "Black Swan"
Pick: Jennifer Lawrence, "Winter's Bone"
Snubs & flubs: No complaints -- a solid list in an underwhelming year for lead female roles.

BEST ACTOR

Jeff Bridges, a nominee for "True Grit," was the winner last year because of the widespread feeling "it was his time." The same can be said this go-round for Colin Firth, who does give a magnificent, layered turn as the arrogant but self-doubting monarch in "The King's Speech."

For my money, James Franco gave the performance of the year -- he was emotionally vulnerable in a way few actors ever dare to expose themselves.

Tough to knock anybody off this list, though the absence of Ryan Gosling when his "Blue Valentine" partner Michelle Williams was nominated grates.

Prediction: Colin Firth, "The King's Speech"
Pick: James Franco, "127 Hours"
Snubs & flubs: Ryan Gosling, "Blue Valentine" for Jeff Bridges, "True Grit"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Nice to see some industry love for Melissa Leo, a fine character actress who broke out with "Frozen River" a couple years ago. Helena Bonham Carter was competent in a role of few challenges, while Dianne Wiest had a knockout scene in "Rabbit Hole."

Many think Hailee Steinfeld deserved a leading actress nomination for "True Grit" ... I don't. She was terrific, but it's a movie about Rooster Cogburn.

Prediction: Melissa Leo, "The Fighter"
Pick: Hailee Steinfeld, "True Grit"
Snubs & flubs: Dianne Wiest, "Rabbit Hole" for Helena Bonham Carter, "The King's Speech"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Geoffrey Rush of "The King's Speech" seemed to have this category sewed up, but Christian Bale won the SAG award for "The Fighter." And it's a role unlike anything he's done before in his career, playing a guy who's a total trainwreck.

But I thought John Hawkes, a surprise nominee for "Winter's Bone," was better.

"Get Low" was touted as the Robert Duvall show, but Bill Murray stole scenes prodigiously.

Prediction: Christian Bale, "The Fighter"
Pick: John Hawkes, "Winter's Bone"
Snubs & flubs: Bill Murray, "Get Low" for Mark Ruffalo, "The Kids Are All Right"

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Christopher Nolan's best chance to get a golden statue for "Inception" will be in the screenplay category, traditionally a place for consolation prizes. If "The King's Speech" steamrolls, though, he may get shut out. The Writers Guild went for Nolan, but I fear it's not enough.

"Another Year" is a minor Mike Leigh work,while "Blue Valentine" deserved its status as Sundance darling.

Prediction: David Seidler, "The King's Speech"
Pick: Christopher Nolan, "Inception"
Snubs & flubs: "Blue Valentine" for "Another Year"

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

This is the one category "The Social Network" seems to have locked up. TV guy Aaron Sorkin wrote a masterful script blending truth, fiction and social commentary.

"Toy Story 3" got an unexpected script nod, but if you want to honor animated films, start with the best of 2010, "How to Train Your Dragon."

Prediction: Aaron Sorkin, "The Social Network"
Pick: Aaron Sorkin, "The Social Network"
Snubs & flubs: "How to Train Your Dragon" for "Toy Story 3"

BEST ANIMATED FILM

With other nods for Best Pic and screenplay, "Toy Story 3" is a mortal lock. "How to Train Your Dragon" was fresher and poignant.

The arbitrary decision to limit the nominees to three shut out the deserving "Tangled." I agree that neither "Megamind" or "Despicable Me" are worthy, but what's wrong with having four nominees?

Prediction: "Toy Story 3"
Pick: "How to Train Your Dragon"
Snubs & flubs: "Tangled"

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Prediction: "Waste Land"
Pick: "Exit Through the Gift Shop"
Snubs & flubs: "Freedom Riders" for "Gasland"

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT

Prediction: "Strangers No More"

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Prediction: "Incendies"
Pick: "Biutiful"
Snubs & flubs: "Lebanon" for "Outside the Law"

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Prediction: "The King's Speech"
Pick: "True Grit"
Snubs & flubs: "Winter's Bone" for "The Social Network"

MAKEUP

Prediction: "Barney's Version"

ART DIRECTION

Prediction: "The King's Speech"
Pick: "Alice in Wonderland"

COSTUME DESIGN

Prediction: "The King's Speech"
Pick: "Alice in Wonderland"


ANIMATED SHORT FILM

Prediction: "Day & Night"
Pick: "Madagascar, a Journey Diary"

LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM

Prediction: "Na Wewe"
Pick: "God of Love"

FILM EDITING

Prediction: "The King's Speech"
Pick: "127 Hours"
Snubs & flubs: "Inception" for "Black Swan"

SOUND MIXING

Prediction: "The King's Speech"
Pick: "Inception"

SOUND EDITING

Prediction: "Inception"
Pick: "Inception"

ORIGINAL SONG

Prediction: "We Belong Together" by Randy Newman, "Toy Story 3"
Pick: "If I Rise," A.R. Rahman, Dido and Rollo Armstrong, "127 Hours"

ORIGINAL SCORE

Prediction: "The King's Speech" by Alexandre Desplat
Pick: "How to Train Your Dragon" by John Powell

My Top 10 of '10

The year 2010 got off to a slow start cinematically, but picked up steam as we went along. By mid-June I was calling it the worst year for movies in at least a decade, but then late summer smiled on us with "Toy Story 3," "Inception" ... and even a "Twilight" movie that wasn't half bad.

A strong showing of Oscar-contending films in the latter months -- some of which won't hit local theaters until 2011 -- pushed the year into respectable territory.

Here are my picks for the best and worst of 2010.

THE WORST

First, the least.

In selecting the worst movies of the year, I should add the caveat that I haven't seen what are likely the absolute bottom of the barrel. A lot of the flicks that are truly awful, like the relentless annual issuing of a new "Saw" movie, are not screened in advance. It's a little game the studios and critics play: They know their movie stinks, so they don't show it to us, figuring no review is better than a bad review.

So these 10 films are the worst I saw in 2010, or at least that disappointed me the most.

1.   Yogi Bear -- I never thought I'd see a movie that made me look back fondly on "Garfield," but this aggressively awful CG-meets-live action romp sets a new high in low for kiddie fare.

2.    Machete -- Robert Rodriguez made a movie based on one of the fake trailers contained in the "Grindhouse" double feature from a few years ago. It's not nearly as much fun as it seems to think it is.

3.    Legendary -- WWE wrestler John Cena tackles a dramatic role in a movie about real high school wrestling. Tag this one out.

4.    Jonah Hex -- A silly comic adaptation of a bloody comic book, written by the guys who did those awful "Crank" movies.

5.    The Bounty Hunter -- Two likable stars, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler, in a cynical movie that manages to dredge up every cliché of both the romantic comedy and buddy cop genres.

6.   Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time -- This big-budget summer flick from Disney featured a bunch of Caucasian actors pretending to be Persians, and a plot that pretended to be coherent.

7.    Repo Men -- I give it credit for some bold ideas, but this strange movie about thugs who repossess bodily organs out of live people should've been recalled for a rewrite or five.

8.    The Wolfman -- Hollywood hasn't made a werewolf movie in ages. And after this howlingly bad effort, it probably won't again soon.

9.  The Book of Eli -- An admittedly great-looking movie set in a post-apocalyptic world in which everyone is looking for the last copy of the Bible. Audiences needed a lot of faith to make it through this one.

10.  Wild Grass -- This effort from celebrated filmmaker Alain Resnais is like a parody of every stereotype of European art films: Dense, impenetrable and deliberately off-putting.

 

THE BEST

10.  Tangled -- Some have dismissed it as just another Disney princess movie. If the house that Walt built can still make them this good, I have no problem with many, many more.

9.    Biutiful -- This lovely, dreary Spanish-language film from director Alejandro González Iñárritu is notable mostly for its strong performance by Javier Bardem as a street hustler burdened with a soul and a death sentence.

8.   Freedom Riders -- The best documentary I saw this year. Stanley Nelson's film takes what we think is a well-traversed piece of Civil Rights history, and continually surprises and enlightens us.

7.    True Grit -- Joel and Ethan Coen's oater of a Western is not so much a remake of the John Wayne film as an entirely new vision based on the same book. It's darker, more violent, and better.

6.    Blue Valentine -- A tragic romance story about two people falling in love, intermixed with the same couple's marriage dissolving several years later. Two amazing performances from Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams -- a Sundance Film Festival favorite, and now we know why.

5.   How to Train Your Dragon -- The best animated film of 2010, and it had some healthy competition. "Toy Story 3" will win the Oscar, but I deem this DreamWorks effort superior because it created a whole new world, and contained a sneaky theme about overcoming disability.

4.    Inception -- Truly the most audacious, original and innovative film of the year. Yes, the settings and world-within-a-world theme are reminiscent of other films ("Blade Runner," "The Matrix"). But Christopher Nolan's intricately-layered storytelling left audiences amazed and gasping.

3.   Winter's Bone -- Cold and sharp, this outstanding drama from co-writer/director Debra Granik is set among the cloistered confines of poor hill people, but never once does it look down upon them or treat them as a zoological exhibit. Terrific performances by Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes.

2.    127 Hours -- The cinematic performance of the year from James Franco, and another bravura directing job by Danny Boyle ("Slumdog Millionaire"). Forget the grisly details about a trapped mountain climber who cut off his own arm. This is the story of a lost soul who was saved by the boulder that pinned him.

1.    The Social Network -- The "Citizen Kane" for Generation Y. In its portrait of a New Media mogul, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, this film from director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin may have taken as many liberties with the facts as Orson Welles did with William Randolph Hearst. But it's a dizzyingly smart, verbose film that highlights how computer code is rewriting the way we communicate.

 

THE REST

Making lists of your favorite things is fun -- except for the anguish of having to leave deserving films off. Here are 15 more movies (in alphabetical order) that didn't make my Top 10, but vied for a spot:


The American
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Fighter
Get Him to the Greek
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Kick-Ass
The Kids Are All Right
The King's Speech
Morning Glory
Mother and Child
Rabbit Hole
Red Cliff
Salt
Splice
Toy Story 3

Video review: "Inception"

With a few months' distance, "Inception" is looking more and more like the most audacious movies -- and certainly one of the finest -- of 2010.

Writer/director Christopher Nolan's ("The Dark Knight") fever dream of a sci-fi thriller puts together a team of thieves who steal into their victim's subconscious. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), the best in the business, has spent so much time in "dreamspace" that he has trouble discerning it from reality -- especially a projected image of his wife, who has the nasty habit of showing up to sabotage his missions.

Then Cobb receives the ultimate challenge: Tapping into the dreams of a multinational corporation CEO (Cillian Murphy) not to pilfer information, but to plant an idea that he'll think is his own. It's called inception, and it's dangerous and, most experts deem, impossible.

Yes, "Inception" has a plot so labyrinthine that it may require multiple viewings to make sense of it all -- which is why it's the type of movie that's a perfect fit with home video.

As Dom and his crew navigate twisty constructed realities -- lavishly rendered via computer animation -- the stakes keep getting higher the deeper they go.
What a thrill ride for the intellect.

Extra features are a bit scarce in the DVD version, but upgrade considerably with Blu-ray.
The DVD contains just four featurettes on the making of the film, mostly having to do with production design issues like creating the Japanese castle seen in the opening sequence.

The centerpiece of the Blu-ray features is "Extraction Mode" -- a pop-up feature with about 50 minutes of video covering many aspects of production.

Also interesting is "Dreams: Cinema of the Subconscious," a 44-minute documentary hosted by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt talking to scientists specializing in dreams. One expert even likens dreaming to the everyday state of psychotic patients.

Other goodies: Art galleries, a 14-minute motion-comic prologue, a digital copy of the film, and the complete musical score by Hans Zimmer.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3.5 stars

Review: "Inception"

Here's why I think "Inception" is going to make a boatload of money, beyond the fact that it's one of the most original screen visions we've had this year: Most people who buy tickets will want to watch it again to see if they can figure the thing out.

Mind-blowing, sometimes bewildering, always engrossing, breathtakingly ambitious -- the new reality-bending mystery/thriller from writer/director Christopher Nolan is like a multi-faceted Chinese finger trap. As soon as you think you've got the puzzle worked out, it reveals another layer of complexity to baffle and astound you.

The level of intricacy in Nolan's storytelling is so dense, it makes the alternate-reality world of "The Matrix" -- or even the fevered amnesiac's dream of Nolan's own "Memento" -- seem like a child's toy.

All I know is I was completely caught up in the film for every moment of its 2½ hours.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) leads an elite team of "extractors" who can enter another person's mind while they dream, with the help of a special device housed in a steel briefcase. He's essentially a mind thief, stealing into the darker recesses of consciousness to pilfer corporate secrets for their rivals.

As the story opens, Cobb and his crew are trying to tap the mind of Saito (Ken Watanabe), head of a multinational corporation. The virtual heist fails, but leads to a much bigger job: Inception.

Inception is different from extraction in that you're not stealing information, but implanting it. The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), son of an ultra-powerful businessman, who is on his deathbed and about to pass on the mantle. They want to implant an idea in the son's dream that will clear the way for the competition, while making him think it was his own.

As you might guess, inception is dangerous; in fact, as far as most people in the know are concerned, it's merely theoretical. But Cobb, who's been down in the limbo of "dreamspace" deeper and longer than anyone, has some tricks up his sleeve.

He sets about recruiting a dream team of dream-tappers. Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is his right-hand man and enforcer. Yusuf (Dileep Rao) keeps the dreamers safely sedated. Eames (Tom Hardy) is the forger who impersonates others in the dreamscape.
The newest addition is Ariadne (Ellen Page), an "architect" -- she's the one who constructs the fake worlds where the dreamers interact.

Ariadne's a newbie, but she soon figures out that Cobb has personal issues that will imperil their mission. His wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) keeps appearing in his dreams as a projection of his subconscious -- as are all the other people populating these imaginary worlds. For reasons I can't share without spoiling, Mal, or at least Cobb's vision of her, keeps sabotaging his missions.

The film is filled with astonishing scenes of CG-assisted hallucinations. In Ariadne's training session, Cobb shows her how to rearrange entire city blocks at will, flipping them like Lego pieces. But there are rules to be followed, tricks that must not be attempted, lest the dreamer fall into a well of chaos from which they may never emerge.

In another memorable sequence, Gordon-Levitt has a series of fights where the laws of gravity are constantly in flux, so the ceiling becomes the floor which becomes the wall, and so forth.

Sound freaky? Well, I haven't even told you about the fact that the best extractors can put themselves to sleep inside the dream, creating whole new levels of constructed reality.

Though "Inception" may not add up to anything beyond a ripping yarn that will keep people talking and arguing, this audacious blend of science fiction and jaunt through the layers of consciousness certainly never fails to grip the audience.

3.5 stars out of four