ONCE UPON A TIME

Whose Hollywood fairy tales will come true at this year's Academy Awards?

You want Oscar predictions? How's this: when the Academy Awards are handed out this Sunday, winners in the top categories, excluding Actress nominees, will be white men.

Sure, some random female co-producers might swarm up in the production team accepting the Best Picture award. But (aside from Amy Pascal, solo producer of Little Women) you have to rappel down to the Screenplay categories before you even find another female nominee. And if not for this year's Korean phenom, Parasite, there would be few top nominees at all of any ethnicity other than Caucasian male.

(Just take a look at the posters for this year’s nine Best Picture nominees. Four feature only white men, two contain subordinate women alongside the men, and only two — Little Women (natch) and Marriage Story — feature women prominently. Only the Parasite poster bucks the trend, with three non-Caucasian men and two women — although one of the latter, appears to be, um, dead.)

Movies are being made from more diverse viewpoints — Us, Harriet, The Farewell, Hustlers, Waves — but the Academy has still hasn't gotten the memo. Can #OscarsSoWhiteMale be far off?

Of the movies that are anointed with Oscar nominations this year, the most hotly contested races are in the top two categories, Best Picture and Best Director. By contrast, all four acting winners are pretty much locked-in, after unanimous victories at all the other awards galas, so let's start with those.

SUPPORTING ACTRESS Laura Dern, Marriage Story. Dern has a lifetime of sterling film and TV credits, she plays a tough LA divorce lawyer (a character familiar to most Academy members), and is likely to score her first win with this, her third Oscar nomination.

SUPPORTING ACTOR Brad Pitt, Once Upon A Time . . . In Hollywood. Who doesn't want to see Pitt deliver another one of the droll acceptance speeches he's already given for this performance in this awards season?

BEST ACTRESS Renee Zellweger, Judy. Her gutsy performance is so close to the truth of Judy Garland's persona — wry wit, nervous mannerisms, and all — and Garland's effect on her fans, that we can forgive Zellweger doing her own singing. (Not bad, just not Judy.)

BEST ACTOR Joaquin Phoenix, Joker. He's already won everything else. It's chilling that Phoenix has tapped into some kind of grim cultural zeitgeist in this origin story of the pathetic failed comic fueled by psychosis to become the creepiest supervillain in the DC Comics universe. (Talk about art imitating life.) In a just, less traumatized world, the gold would go to Antonio Banderas in Pain And Glory, the performance of the year.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon A Time     . . . In Hollywood. Of the four nominees also contending for Best Picture, Hollywood has the snappiest dialogue, coupled with a typically nervy Tarantino wish-fulfillment plot. But don't rule out Parasite, whose savage satire on wealth and class makes it the likeliest spoiler of the evening.

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY Greta Gerwig, Little Women. In this notably guy-oriented field (The Irishman, The Two Popes, Joker, Jojo Rabbit), the Academy might offer Gerwig an olive branch after failing to nominate her for Best Director.

BEST DIRECTOR/BEST PICTURE These two categories used to be joined at the hip. But there have been recent upsets, now that there are so many more nominated films (nine, this year, each of which Academy voters are required to rate in order of preference), diffusing the likelihood of a clear front-runner. There are still only five directing nominees, however, encouraging more focused voting. (That's how Alfonso Cuaron won for directing Roma, last year, but the affable Green Book got more likes for Best Picture.)

So. Narrowing down the movies to the five with nominated directors, Todd Phillips' Joker is perceived as more of an actor's showcase, Hollywood will pick up its awards in other categories, and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman has lost its pre-season buzz. That leaves Sam Mendes' visually daring WWI epic, 1917 (constructed to look like it was shot in one, long take), and the upstart Parasite.

All in the family: Parasite

  1917 is sure to win in the Best Cinematography category for veteran lensman Roger Deakins. Just as certainly, Parasite will clinch the prize for Best International (formerly Foreign Language) Feature. But here's my prediction for the main event:

BEST PICTURE 1917. BEST DIRECTOR Bong Joon Ho, Parasite.

(The 92nd Academy Awards will be broadcast live, Sunday, February 9, 5pm, on ABC. Tune in to find out just how wrong I can be!)

IT'S A WRAP: MOVIES of 2019

For whatever reason, I fell behind on my movie viewing in 2019. I missed a lot of the most lauded mainstream movies, and I'm still too cranky to settle for watching big movies that barely appear in theaters at all on a home screen.


However, among the often small, weird and/or esoteric movies I did see, I have a few favorites. I wasn't quite able to stretch my list into the traditional Top Ten, and I certainly can't claim that these were in any way the Best of 2019. But if you're looking for something to stream on a cold winter's night, here are a few suggestions!


(FUN FACT: Five out of my eight favorites were directed by women! Wouldn't it be nice to see any of them appear among this year's Oscar nominees when they're announced tomorrow? If only. . . )



PAIN AND GLORY Pedro Almodovar directs this wonderful, semi-autobiographical movie about a Spanish filmmaker, looking back on his own life and career, and the people and events that shaped and inspired him. It's my favorite movie of the year! It may not look like much plot-wise, but the experience of watching this movie unfold onscreen is rapturous. And star Antonio Banderas is riveting in every single frame — you can’t take your eyes off him!

 
YESTERDAY In Danny Boyle's audacious what-if movie, The Beatles have disappeared from the collective memory of everyone except a struggling singer-songwriter named Jack (an engaging Himesh Patel) who finds himself poised to plunder their entire song catalogue. Detractors complain the movie misunderstands what made the Beatles popular, claiming as false “meritocracy” the notion that the songwriting would be hugely successful on its own, separated from the context of the band’s individual personalities and their era.

But here's why I (still) believe in Yesterday: It's not that the songs themselves are supposed to be the best ever written (although you could certainly make a case for some of them), but that there are so many of them, in so many diverse styles, that Jack is able to produce on the spot. The movie creates its own context for Jack’s popularity, a modest young person of color who produces song after song after song, seemingly out of the blue. That’s how he captures the public imagination — in much the same way the working-class lads from industrial Liverpool did with their cheeky attitude and funny haircuts, once upon a time. Boyle turns it into a sly morality play about fame, honor, and sacrifice, with a 4/4 beat and a larky sense of fun.

HARRIET Maybe the times have finally caught up to the amazing life of Harriet Tubman, a real-life superhero who fought for justice and won major victories in her lifelong battle to end slavery in the American South. An escaped slave herself, she led many others to freedom in the North, via the Underground Railroad, armed with little more than raw courage, and a flintlock pistol. Filmmaker Kasi Lemmons explores the woman behind the historical footnote, played with bristly moral conviction by Cynthia Erivo.

SWORD OF TRUST An aging hipster confronts the dark heart of extreme Southern yahooism in Lynn Shelton's very funny culture-clash comedy. Marc Maron is all dry wit and scruffy sarcasm as a pawn shop owner tasked to sell a Civil War sword that supposedly "proves" the Confederacy won the war. The twisty little surprises of the plot are delicious to discover along the way, and the sharp, funny conversations (largely improvised) had me laughing out loud.

THE MUSTANG Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre spins a tale of wild horses, regret, and redemption set in a high-security prison complex out in the middle of the Nevada desert. As part of their rehab, certain inmates are chosen to break and train wild mustangs for auction, and Matthias Schoenaerts delivers a towering, if taciturn performance (it's all in his eyes) as a prisoner who learns tenderness by bonding with his animal.

RAISE HELL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOLLY IVINS Unusual enough as a progressive in Texas, smart, savagely funny political journalist Molly Ivins stood six feet tall. Not gifted with conventional proportions, she felt entitled to hold outsized opinions expressed with outsized gusto. There's plenty to laugh at — and get riled up over — in this Janice Engel documentary, celebrating all the hell Ivins raised as a pioneering woman in a world and profession run by good ole boys. Through documentary footage, Ivins tells much of her own story in her own words, and it's the particular zing of her voice that makes this movie so irresistible.

WAVES This gripping domestic drama from Trey Edward Shults encompasses euphoria, tragedy, and every conceivable emotion in between depicting a middle-class black family in South Florida sliding in and out of crisis. Some incidents seem torn from screaming headlines, yet Shults humanizes everything with careful attention to the personal relationships that guide our lives — between parents and children, between siblings, and between couples, both young and long-established.

LITTLE WOMEN In her entertaining, feminist update of the beloved novel, filmmaker Greta Gerwig combines the adventures of Louisa May Alcott's fictional March sisters with the journey of Alcott herself in getting her story published. Through Alcott's surrogate, Jo (Saoirse Ronan, who is absolutely wonderful), Gerwig inserts the author's early writing career and her tribulations with her patronizing male publisher. Timothée Chalamet is coltish, handsome, and mischievous as Laurie, and if the elliptical time frame becomes confusing toward the end, the movie exudes exuberant and heartfelt goodwill, building to a satisfying girl-power crescendo that surely would have pleased Alcott herself.

OSCAR SHAPES UP

Frances McDormand, 3 Billboards: blackly comic

Mavericks to duke it out at 90th Academy Awards

After the OscarSoWhite hashtag movement a couple of years ago, the Motion Picture Academy's demographics have altered.

With membership now opened up to a younger, more diverse crowd of film pros, you might expect this year's nominees to feature a few plucky mavericks vs. the mainstream favorites.

But — surprise! Almost none of the nominees qualify as "mainstream," including the two top contenders: Guillermo del Toro's eerie, romantic fantasy, The Shape of Water, and Martin McDonagh's blackly comic morality play Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Guillermo del Toro in the (Best) Director seat

While the predictive winners in all four acting categories are pretty much set in stone (results have been uniform throughout the awards season), there's still plenty of room to stir up trouble!

Here's what I think will happen:

BEST PICTURE Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri Usually, if you subtract the four (out of nine) nominees whose directors didn't get a nomination in their category, that narrows the field to five serious contenders.

But even though McDonagh wasn't nominated for directing Three Billboards, it's already won a Golden Globe for Drama, and the Screen Actors Guild Ensemble award. The Shape of Water is my favorite movie of the year, but I think it will rack up its Oscars elsewhere.

Gerwig directed herself and star Saoirse Ronan to Oscar nominations

Or it could be that The Shape Of Water has just gotten so much buzzier even since those early awards were issued to Three Billboards that it might just bubble up to the top here, as well.

The Post was a favorite going into the season, with its timely tale of crusading journalists standing up for the truth, but here, the lack of a nomination for director Steven Spielberg suggests it's run out of steam since then.

Less likely (but not impossible) upsets might by Greta Gerwig's smart, beloved indie comedy, Lady Bird, or Jordan Peele's darkly subversive racial-politics horror movie Get Out (Gerwig and Peele both scored directing nominations).

Jordan Peele directs star Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out

BEST DIRECTOR  Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water He's already won every award there is in this category — in compensation for Three Billboards walking off with most of the Best Picture prizes — but mostly because Del Toro's irrepressible, iconoclastic personality infuses every frame of this rapturous movie.

Gerwig won a Golden Globe in the comedy category, and Peele earned a Best First Feature nod from the Directors Guild on America (although Del Toro won Best Director from the DGA). So anything is possible.

BEST ACTRESS Frances McDormand, Three Billboards  Bet the rent; name an award in this category, and she's already won it. And deservedly so.

BEST ACTOR Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour Another shoo-in, like all four favored acting nominees. Besides, there has to be some kind of recognition for a guy who started out playing Sid Vicious tackling the role of Winston Churchill.

Rockwell, McDormand, 3 Billboards: Winners

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Allison Janney, I, Tonya  She doesn't just "disappear" into the role of Tonya Harding's cold, heartless mom; Janney plays her in a trance-like state of viperish perversity.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards He's got all the buzz, as the hot-headed deputy dragged kicking and screaming to a kind of redemption. I thought his co-star, Woody Harrelson (also nominated) was just as good in this category.

But I'd have liked to see a shout-out for Doug Jones in The Shape of Water. A longtime Del Toro co-conspirator (he played Fauno/Pan in Pan's Labyrinth, and was recently seen as the impossibly elongated alien First Officer Saru in Star Trek: Discovery), Jones' poignant Amphibian Man romancing Sally Hawkins gives the movie its heart and soul.

Doug Jones, Amphibian Man: Romantic

OTHER Here's where those new Academy members may prevail with an Original Screenplay award to Peele for Get Out, beating out Del Toro and McDonagh (Although the latter has scored some pre-Oscar awards for Three Billboards). Veteran director James Ivory looks poised to win the Adapted Screenplay award for Call Me By Your Name.

Expect Blade Runner 2049 to score gold for Cinematography, while Phantom Thread wins in the Costume department. (Although, for a movie about the fashion industry, I found the clothes as lackluster as everything else in Phantom Thread.)

Meanwhile, The Shape of Water should swim to victory for its atmospheric sea-green Production Design, and its expressive Original Score by Alexandre Desplat.

(The 90th Annual Academy Awards will be broadcast Sunday, March 4, at 5pm on ABC.)

TIME'S UP

Not exactly a "woman's picture"

Hands up, everybody who remembers when the Academy Awards declared 1992 the "Year of the Woman." Hah! I thought not.

(No wonder. Clint Eastwood's guy-friendly western Unforgiven won four Oscars that year, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Revival Of A Macho Genre Previously Considered Stone Dead.

The most talked-about female role of the year was actually played by a man—Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game.)

It's taken 26 years for Hollywood to catch up — even though it's had to be dragged kicking and screaming toward enlightenment by a sisterhood of industry professionals who have launched the #MeToo and Time's Up movements.

What might this unexpected and organic movement portend for this year's Oscars? Let's take a look at what's been going on in the awards season so far.

Black Power: Hollywood celebs and their social justice activist dates at the Globes

The flow tide of black gowns and black-on-black tuxes on the red carpet at this year's Golden Globes were worn in solidarity with the above mentioned movements.

(Although I wonder if black was  the best color choice to associate with the group announcing the end of the culture of sexual harassment and gender inequality. If Time's Up (at last!) for the old boys club that perpetrated it for generations, why should people dress in mourning?)

McDormand: Year of the Rampaging Woman

(Still, everybody was rocking the look, and many of the black gowns and tuxes will be auctioned off on eBay this month to raise money for the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund.)

Meanwhile, it was a bad night for movies about men. Odds-on favorite, The Post (directed by Steven Spielberg, with Meryl Streep's Katharine Graham playing den mother to a bunch of male reporters) got shut out, along with Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, and the boy-meets-boy coming of age love story, Call Me By Your Name.

Frances McDormand as a rampaging working-class mom demanding justice for her raped and murdered daughter won the Best (Dramatic) Actress award, as expected, but it was a surprise that the movie devoted to her character, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, also won for Best Picture/Drama.

Gerwig (with Ronan) directs herself to a DGA nomination

The other big winner was Lady Bird, about a loving, if volatile, mother-daughter relationship, which scored a Best Actress /Comedy nod for star Saoirse Ronan, and Best Picture in the Musical-or-Comedy category — ensuring a trip to the podium for producer Greta Gerwig, who also wrote and directed.

Not that this is quite yet a juggernaut, but it is interesting that the recently announced Directors Guild of America (DGA) Awards include first-timer Gerwig on its hallowed list of nominees. It's rare enough for a woman to get nominated, and a coup in itself — suggesting how many folks in the industry have taken the small, wry, femme-o-centric Lady Bird to their hearts.

But she shouldn't start clearing a place on her mantel just yet. She'll still have to go up against Guillermo del Toro for the DGA prize, who's already won both the Globe and Critic's Choice awards for his masterful The Shape of Water.

(The Oscars nominations will be announced January 23. The ceremony will be later than usual this year, broadcast March 4)

FLIGHT PLAN

Teen yearns to spread her wings in wry, warm-hearted Lady Bird

Okay, I didn't have high hopes for Lady Bird. From the trailer, it looked like it was going to feature one of those indie heroines who's supposed to be adorably quirky, but is really just tiresome — the kind of character so often played by Greta Gerwig (in movies like Damsel In Distress, or Frances Ha).

Knowing that Gerwig wrote and directed this movie only intensified my dread.

But, surprise! With Lady Bird, Gerwig delivers a wry but warm-hearted portrait of family, home, and dreams in modern America. The family in question is not dysfunctional in any clichéd movie comedy way, but Gerwig captures the gulf of potential calamity in the fractious relationship between a high-school senior (Saoirse Ronan) and her loving, but harried mom (Laurie Metcalf).

As in most mother-daughter relationships, one false move or the wrong word might set either one of them off as they try to navigate the mine field of what they think or feel, and their ability (or not) to express it.

Ronan and Metcalf: Driving through the minefield

The movie begins with a quote from Joan Didion: "Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent Christmas in Sacramento."

Ronan plays Christine, who calls herself "Lady Bird," and is facing her senior year at a Catholic girls school in the suburbs of the state capital.

She has few scholastic ambitions, but she's eager to leave the nest and fledge, preferably to a college on the East Coast "where culture is." Unlike Sacramento, which she calls "the Midwest of California."

The plot is episodic as the school year scrolls by. But Gerwig's most trenchant observations concern issues as eternal a time itself — the elliptical orbits of friendship; separating the reality of sex from its romantic mythology; the often fraught, but fiercely devoted relations between parents and children.
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