Good Friday at our church is entrenched in tradition, to which I am a latecomer. Because we've had a history of having worship leaders on staff who go on to much bigger things (Chris Tomlin, Brandon Heath, Robbie Seay), from the moment I arrived on campus, I was barraged with conversations constantly harking back to our (fairly recent) days of yore, with sighs of "I miss when.." and "it was way better..." We are not a forward-looking community.

Our biggest signature move was to rent out the massive outdoor concert venue across the street from us each Easter weekend. We centered the event around a big concert on Good Friday led by our worship leader du jour. When we needed to cut costs, we moved the weekend back to our campus, but then we built a hefty stage on the lawn, hauled out every watt of moving lights we had and rented a heap more, and had succession of events that drifted slowly from "energetic worship" to "energetic rock festival," all played before our less-than-energetic members (we're Methodists. We don't jump. At most we... lean).

A couple years ago, I joined a worship committee that sacked all that, moved the service back into our sanctuary, killed the rock-show vibe and tried to revert the service back to a night of worship and teaching as strong and unified as we could manage.

It's been a couple of years of that now, and I'm proud of the work I've gotten to do on those services. I won't wander off into a diatribe of what worship is or why it matters, because you've likely (definitely) read much better thoughts than mine before, but as much as we've maintained a good deal of spectacle in these services (we are who we are), it's been nice to center the evening around community and worship, and to focus on the meaning of that particularly sacred evening.

This is all unnecessary introduction for these three videos I did for this year's service, based around the theme of "Torn" - two stories, totally unrelated, but deeply connected to what happened on that Friday a long time ago. If you'd like to see all the videos in context, the sermon they're interspersed in is up at The Woodlands United Methodist website.

I've never been happier with work I've done, or more excited about the stories I got to tell. These videos are my favorite of all my work.

So, I got a grand total of 14 out of 24, which I guess is not bad, but could be a lot better. The Artist lost Best Editing and won Best Actor and Best Costume Design, an award I was certain would go to Hugo. Instead, Hugo won everything else below the line, including both sound categories, ending the night tied with The Artist for the most wins of any movie with five.

In all honesty: I still like my Oscar ballot. Evidently the Academy like Hugo a lot more than I expected them to, giving it awards both deserved (Art Direction) and undeserved (Visual Effects). I took calculated gambles on one or two categories (Best Actor, Cinematography, Visual Effects), but the surprises came in other categories, like Editing and Best Actress.

Someone was complaining today about some of the awards that were handed out that I agreed with: can we agree that even though it was easy to predict, it’s nonsense to have The Iron Lady win for Best Makeup over a film like Harry Potter? That movie had dozens of artists making people into very convincing goblins and werewolves and half-dead wizards, while Iron Lady made Meryl Streep look like Meryl Streep in makeup.

And sure, no one wants to give an Oscar to a Transformers movie, but isn’t Transformers 3 clearly a more impressive piece of special effects than Hugo? Sure, Hugo is a much better movie than Transformers 3, but this isn’t the award honoring that. Why do we feel the need to give Hugo an honorary Oscar in a category that it obviously isn’t the best nominee in? 

Well, that’s the way these things work. Lesson learned. Other lesson learned: I really should’ve picked the short film starring Ciarán Hinds that was directed by the guy who did Hotel Rwanda. That was an oversight.

Every year I write this column, and lately, I've been wondering why I do.

There are hundreds, thousands of these columns written every year, some of them by people who’ve seen all of the films nominated, including the short films and the documentaries. And then there’s me.

I’ve seen only five of the nine films nominated for Best Picture, none of the animated films, none of the documentaries, none of the shorts, and none of the foreign choices. And that’s after seeing thirty-six theatrical releases this year (some of those were on DVD, but still). If I were writing this column as "the outsider's perspective", I would have a legitimate case: some of the best predictions are made by people with no knowledge - and no bias - of any kind.

Unfortunately, I'm not. I'm just gathering my vague sources of information together and making half-blind guesses. There's no reason you should listen to me.

Except for my eerie accuracy, of course. I've had an untouchable three-year run at the Oscars, and I have no intention of stopping now. Of the 24 categories, I’ve posted correct guesses of 19, 19, and 17, which exceeds the results of most prediction experts, including people who do this full time, like Dave Karger and Mark Harris (note: I did not actually research this to find out if it was true. But it stands to reason). And frankly, I don’t see any reason why that accuracy should stop now.

I’ll post my predictions below, with one major caveat: this is the year of The Artist. It will win Best Picture, and as a result it’ll also land a number of other categories. But it’s still unclear just how many more categories that is. Sometimes a movie goes on a tear and just collects everything in its path, and if that happens with The Artist, you’ll see “surprise” wins in categories like Costumes, Cinematography, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, or Art Direction. It'll be easy to spot early on – it’ll land something it shouldn’t have, and you'll see the costume designer or director of photography climb the stage in shock and talk about the thrill of working on such an unusual projects as this.  At this point, you would be wise to see if your pool allows you to change your picks midway through the show, and if so, to change everything up to and including Sound Editing* to The Artist. Be warned.

* Please note on your ballots that The Artist, being a silent film and all, is not actually nominated for Sound Editing.

Best Picture

Nominees:
The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

It’s The Artist. And it’s not close. I mentioned after the Golden Globes that I thought it unbeatable, and since then it’s won at the Producer’s Guild, it’s won at the Director’s Guild, and now no one even knows what movie would be the dark horse that could beat it.

I had movies I liked more than The Artist this year, but it’s a sweet, interesting film and making a silent movie is a gutsy thing to do, and so I have no problem with this. In five years, we’ll have forgotten about it, and while everyone will have vaguely fond memories, no one will think to themselves “y’know, I should go watch that again.” It’s a one-off. But as one-offs go, it’s pretty good.

Directing

Nominees:
The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)
The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
Hugo (Martin Scorcese)
Midnight In Paris (Woody Allen)
The Tree of Life (Terence Malick)

Another year, another chance to honor Martin Scorcese for Raging Bull and Mean Streets by giving him an Oscar for a different movie.

I know there’s much to be said for the work Scorcese did in Hugo, but if it’s The Artist’s year, then it wins Best Director, too. If Scorcese hadn’t already won for The Departed, he’d be a lock here, but he did win, so we don’t have worry about that. Plus, since The Departed was good, but not great, there’s a general sense among Academy voters that they don’t want to honor him twice for movies significantly worse than the ones made in his heyday. So count on a win for Michel Hazanavicius and a charming, French-accented speech, probably about courage and overcoming naysayers.

By the way, I’m offering 6-to-1 odds whether anyone will name-check Uggie, the dog, during their speech. 10-to-1 if it’s someone not actually in The Artist. Easy money, you guys. Any takers?

Actor In a Leading Role

Nominees:
Demián Bichir - A Better Life
George Clooney - The Descendants
Jean Dujardin - The Artist
Gary Oldman - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt - Moneyball

Ah, the first big decision of the night, and the only big category still in any sort of real doubt.

Until a few weeks ago, George Clooney was the runaway favorite for this award. But The Artist kept snagging awards, and The Descendants kept being pushed further and further to the sidelines, and then Jean Dujardin landed the top spot over him at the SAG awards. Oscar enthusiasts everywhere gasped and said “if Clooney can’t even win at the SAG awards, what chance does he have at the Oscars?” After all, other actors love Clooney. And now some Frenchman is going to come and steal his thunder? Not in my America! Let’s take back our awards and rename our fries! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Whoops, got off track there. In all seriousness, I don’t think the SAG award is a real precursor. The Screen Actors Guild doesn’t have a way to honor a Best Picture – the closest they come is “Outstanding Performance By a Cast,” an award that went to the dozen-or-so actresses that carried The Help rather than the two people (plus one dog) who carried The Artist. I view Dujardin’s win as an anomaly rather than a sign, and I’m picking Clooney. But keep in mind what I said at the beginning of this post. If this is The Artist’s year as much as I think it could be, this will be the extra award it’s most likely to snag.

Actress In A Leading Role

Nominees:
Glenn Close - Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis - The Help
Rooney Mara - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep - The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams - My Week With Marilyn

It’s a two-woman race between Viola Davis and Meryl Streep, who are apparently good friends (they were in Doubt together, and I recall Streep name-dropping Davis from the stage after landing an award that year, saying “give this woman a movie!”) and both exceedingly gracious about this sort of thing. They’re both quite good in their respective movies, and despite a string of nominations as long as both arms, Streep hasn’t won an Oscar since 1983 (for Sophie’s Choice).

I wrote about this earlier, but think the streak continues. Viola Davis is incredible in The Help, she’s won most of the awards up to this point, and people want to vote for her. It makes them feel good.

African-American actresses don’t get a lot of good movie roles, and while everyone’s very excited about her now, Davis may not get another chance like this. Meryl Streep certainly will.

Actor In a Supporting Role

Nominees:
Kenneth Branagh - My Week With Marilyn
Jonah Hill - Moneyball
Nick Nolte - Warrior
Christopher Plummer - Beginners
Max von Sydow - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Christopher Plummer plays a dying father coming out of the closet. The other actors are nominated for roles that are not that. Next.

If you're looking for more effective discussion of the issue, it's also fair to note that Plummer has won pretty much all the awards up to this point. The only guy who's won awards other than him, Albert Brooks, did not manage to snag a nomination here.

Actress In a Supporting Role

Nominees:
Bérénice Bejo - The Artist
Jessica Chastain - The Help
Melissa McCarthy - Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer - Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer - The Help

Octavia Spencer should win this, for all the reasons mentioned about Viola Davis. The other nominees include another actress from The Help (Jessica Chastain, who is most notable for probably being nominated for the wrong movie - she should’ve been nominated for Tree of Life), and a just-happy-to-be-here Melissa McCarthy. Her only real competition is Bérénice Bejo from The Artist (for obvious reasons), and Janet McTeer (for playing a woman disguised as a man, which the Academy loves).

Spencer’s won too many awards in a row to pick against her. It’s gotta be her.

Animated Feature

Nominees:
A Cat in Paris
Chico & Rita
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango

The movie that won the Golden Globe for this, The Adventures of Tin-Tin, which has that shiny Peter Jackson-Steven Spielberg résumé, missed a nomination here, apparently as a result of being “motion-capture” instead of “traditional” animation. I won’t pretend to understand the logic behind that, but it leaves a pretty clear path for Rango to win this category going away, as it faces two uninteresting sequels (Puss In Boots and Kung Fu Panda 2) and two buzzless independent films (A Cat In Paris and Chico & Rita, neither of which have been released stateside).

Cinematography

Nominees:
The Artist
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
The Tree of Life
War Horse

There’s a lot going on in this category. Logic would dictate that The Artist should snag this award – the likely Best Picture winner is a film wholly dependent on its cinematography.

(Forgive me if I get a bit verbose here, but I love cinematography and this is one of my favorite awards to consider)

The line the cinematography in The Artist walks is a tougher one than critics have acknowledged: it has to effectively tell the story in a way that a modern audience would be engaged by while also remaining wholly faithful to the style that it’s imitating.  Even though the film’s DP, Guillame Schiffman, nails both categories, I imagine most of the credit will instead go to the film’s director, Michel Hazanvicius.

More to the point is that technical prowess only takes you so far, and there are other films nominated here more impressive in their filmmaking acumen: Hugo for its inventive 3-D work, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for its remarkable digital creation. And Janusz Kaminski’s (a five-time nominee and two-time winner) work on War Horse is no less impressive than his usual efforts, only less praised. So I’ll instead pick Emmanuel Lubezki’s luminescent work in Tree of Life.

Regardless of DP, every Terence Malick movie is artfully shot in a way that it soon becomes apparent that the cinematography is the movie. I’ll post the trailer here so you know what I mean.

I’ll put it this way instead: all of these movies made me admire their photography. Tree of Life makes me want to be a photographer.

Art Direction

Nominees:
The Artist
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Hugo
Midnight In Paris
War Horse

Usually this one’s a little more obvious than it is this year. Either the likely Best Picture winner is a big costume drama or historical epic that its art department takes home the trophy as well, or there’s one big standout work in that clearly deserves the award, even if it takes no awards other than this one. Last year was a good example of the latter, as Alice In Wonderland walked home with the award despite mediocre reviews.

This year? Stuart Craig should really take it for Harry Potter, but at this point it’s the eighth movie, it’s the fourth time he’s been nominated, and it would really be a “lifetime achievement” award if he won. Don’t count on it. The likely Best Picture winner is nominated here too, but some old cars and shiny floors and Mary Pickford’s old bed (that’s a real thing) seem like not a lot of art is being directed. That leaves a quaint time-travel movie with minimal interiors (Midnight In Paris), a war movie no one is all that passionate about (War Horse), and a movie about French train stations from the turn of the century directed by a legend (Hugo). Since Hugo snagged eleven nominations but won’t run off with any of the major awards other than maybe – maybe – Best Director, I’ll pick it here. I’ll assume this’ll set off a mini-run of Hugo wins.

Costuming

Nominees:
Anonymous
The Artist
Hugo
Jane Eyre
W.E.

This one’s a bit of a toss-up. The old rule of thumb about any Academy Award is that it doesn’t go to the person who did the best (fill-in-the-black here), it goes to the person who did the most of whatever their category is. The most acting, the most editing, the most whatever. But none of these nominees fit that category.

Anonymous nailed its Shakespearean costumes quite well, but no one is going to award anything to a movie about Shakespeare from by the guy who directed 2012, Godzilla, Stargate, and The Day After Tomorrow. On that note, W.E. is directed by Madonna, so that’s out too. Jane Eyre was perhaps too accurate (read: bland). No one likes handing out trophies for frumpy frocks.

That leaves our two most-nominated films, Hugo and The Artist. I’m reluctant to lean away from the clear favorite, but I have to think that hundreds of turn-of-the-century Parisian waistcoats beat a half-a-dozen flapper dresses. I’m picking Hugo.

Documentary Feature

Oh, I am not jumping into the documentaries yet. These categories don’t count. Let’s leave these until later.

Music (Original Score)

Nominees:
The Adventures of Tintin
The Artist
Hugo
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
War Horse

Ah, back on solid ground. There are five lovely scores here, including two from John Williams, who is securing his 46th and 47^th nominations here (for The Adventures of Tin-Tin and War Horse – both Spielberg projects, naturally). Even when you consider that every Hollywood score seems to be composed by either Williams, Howard Shore (also nominated here), or Hans Zimmer (with a touch of James Horner and Danny Elfman around the edges), that’s a pretty impressive feat. Both of his scores are very good, and Shore’s is more than serviceable, but they won’t win this. Neither will Alberto Iglesias for his contained, subtle work on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Ludovic Bource did the score for The Artist – yeah, you see where I’m going with this – and even if it’s maybe not necessarily the best score of the choices, he layered that film with wall-to-wall music, and it’s the most important score to its film of the choices named.

Music (Original Song)

Nominees:
"Man or Muppet" - Bret McKenzie
"Real in Rio" - Sergio Mendes, Carlinhos Brown, Siedah Garrett

I’ve complained about this already. There are only two songs nominated, and one of them is named “Real In Rio.” No one wants to vote for a song that sounds like a tourism ad. The winner’ll be “Man Or Muppet,” from The Artist.

I kid, I kid. It’s from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, of course.

Makeup

Nominees:
Albert Nobbs
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
The Iron Lady

Another short category. There are only three films nominated: The Iron Lady, Albert Nobbs, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Potter deserves it, but at this point in the game there’s no question of what should win, only what will.  Mark Harris had a great point about this one:

“Two types of movies win this award: Those with immense prosthetic transformations (The Wolfman, Star Trek, How the Grinch Stole Christmas) and those in which an actress is persuasively transformed into a famous person (La Vie en Rose, Elizabeth, Frida). The Iron Lady… is both.”

That’s all the argument I need.

Film Editing

Nominees:
The Artist
The Descendants
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Moneyball

I am already angry about this category, even before its been awarded. Because I know already that it’s going to go to the wrong movie. It’s gonna go to The Artist, or maybe Hugo, where the degree of difficulty for editing is fairly low, as opposed to a movie with a high degree of difficulty: Moneyball, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

I don’t mean this to sound denigrating, and I don’t mean this to sound cocky, but there’s probably no way around either, so I’ll just press on: I could’ve edited The Artist. It just isn’t that tough a film to assemble. At the very least, I could’ve pieced together a solid rough cut that a better editor could’ve touched up later, but for the most part, there’s not that much mastery required to put this movie together. The film is mostly shot in long, master takes, or with a pair of medium shots that you’d crosscut between, or with a sequence of shots you’d clearly assemble in a certain order. Once you’d gotten a handle on the trickiest bit – editing in a way the replicates the style of silent film editors who didn’t have a century of film language bred into them – it’s all smooth sailing.

Compare that to the work the editors of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo had to do. The New York Times did a great slideshow of the editors breaking down what they had to just for one four-minute sequence early in the film, its well worth your time, if just to understand the amount of detail that goes in to every scene you see on screen. Its director, David Fincher, shoots an unbelievable amount of takes of every shot, and then, incredibly, divides up the frame so that he can pick his favorite take of everyone in the scene.  Then the editors have to stitch the frame back together with all of Fincher’s favorite performances. The pacing and tone of the editing changes depending on where the scene is, who the character we’re following is, and what time period it is. It’s an unbelievably complex process.

But for some reason most Oscar predictors seem to feel the opposite of me. Everything I’ve read indicates that The Artist is a lock for this award, and how difficult it is to tell a story with no dialogue, and yadda yadda yadda. None of them know what they’re talking about when it comes to editing, but they do know what they’re talking about when it comes to Oscar predictions. And they’re right – most of the time, the editing award matches up to the Best Picture winner, unless there’s a particularly showy war movie or cerebral action piece. That said, the Academy does love Fincher – he won last year for The Social Network. But they also love Thelma Schoonmaker, the editor of all of Martin Scorcese’s movies (I’m not a huge fan of her work, but she’s won seven Oscars at this point, so who am I to judge?). I think Hugo and Dragon Tattoo split the non-Artist vote, and The Artist takes the prize. But just know my heart’s not into it.

Documentary Feature

Not yet, not yet. I’m not ready.

Short Film (Live Action

No.

Sound Editing/Sound Mixing

Nominees:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse
Drive/Moneyball

Okay, I can handle this. Usually, these two categories are paired: the film that wins one will win the other. So we can win this by process of elimination: the films that are nominated in one category but not the other (Drive, Moneyball) are out. There’s a Transformers movie nominated, so we can toss that out too. That leaves Hugo, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and War Horse. Not a lot of interesting soundscape things in Dragon Tattoo, really – and no Fincher movie has ever won this award – so that leaves Hugo and War Horse. It’s a choice between critical adoration and war movie, and that’s a tough call. I’m gonna go with War Horse, but keep an eye on Hugo during this award show. It has the potential to go on a run and sweep all the non-Artist Oscars. Plus, no one really liked War Horse that much.  Then again, no one like King Kong that much, either, yet it’s got three Oscars on its presumably giant mantle.

Visual Effects

Nominees:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Hugo
Real Steel
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Alright, process of elimination again: the Transformers movie is eliminated by virtue of being a Transformers movie, and Real Steel is eliminated for being even stupider. That leaves Harry Potter (which has never won this award) Hugo, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Now, ready for a crazy fact? If you kept reading on that Mark Harris article I linked to, you would’ve seen that since this award was created in the late 70’s, when given a choice between a Best Picture nominee and one that didn’t snag a nomination, the voters have voted for the Best Picture nominee. Every. Single. Time. So logic says Hugo.

I still say Apes takes it, though. Hugo is magical and the 3-D work is very good, but if we awarded films for being 3-D, we’d probably have to hand Piranha 3-D an honorary Oscar.

Writing (Original Screenplay)

Nominees:
The Artist
Bridesmaids
Margin Call
Midnight in Paris
A Separation

Is Woody Allen nominated here? Yes? Well, that was easy.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Nominees:
The Descendants
Hugo
The Ides of March
Moneyball
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Academy loves Alexander Payne – they’ve nominated him in this category as far back as Election – and The Descendants has the privilege of being in the writing category that doesn’t include a Woody Allen script. I know it’s unwise to pick against Hugo, but I can’t recall ever hearing anyone gushing about its sharp writing at any point (it’s based on a children’s picture book, after all). I’m sure that Moneyball will get some love here – both Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin worked on the Moneyball script, that’s a stunner of an Oscar pedigree. But The Descendants is the more emotional movie (Brad Pitt weeping in his truck aside), so you have to figure this category belongs to them.

Foreign Language Film

Nominees:
Belgium, Bullhead
Canada, Monsieur Lazhar
Iran, A Separation
Israel, Footnote
Poland, In Darkness

I’m tempted to call Iran’s A Separation a lock here, since it got some Best Picture hype as well as an Original Screenplay nomination. But the films that have been the big favorites in the past – I assumed The White Ribbon and Pan’s Labyrinth were unbeatable, and was shocked to see Israel’s Waltz With Bashir lose to the Japanese Departures - have all missed out on the prize. And Poland has a movie this year that’s about the Holocaust, which, in the realm of Important Movie Subjects, is tough to beat.

The voters in this category (and the following categories) are a smaller group – you have to have seen all five of these movies to vote, and there aren’t screeners sent out, so you have to have the free time to go to whatever small LA or New York theater is showing them. So who knows where this category’ll end up? It’s going to be decided by a few dozen voters.

That said, everyone’s gushing about what an incredibly moving film A Separation is, so I’ll go with the favorite, even though it violates one of my standard Oscar voting rules: never bet against AIDS or the Holocaust.

Documentary Feature

Nominees:
Hell and Back Again
If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
Pina
Undefeated 

Oh, man, are we back here again? Fine. Fine! I’ll do it.

Everyone will talk themselves out of voting for Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory – the final chapter in the 20-year fight by the Paradise Lost filmmakers to get the West Memphis Three released from prison – but I don’t know why. This is a story that a number of Hollywood celebrities latched onto (after seeing Paradise Lost, Peter Jackson made his own documentary about the subject), and awarding a film about their release is the exact sort of victory lap the Academy loves. Its only real competition is Hell and Back Again, an apparently quite disturbing doc about an injured soldier returning from Afganistan and trying to rehab his badly injured body and psyche.

Documentary Short

Nominees:
"The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement"
"God is the Bigger Elvis"
"Incident in New Baghdad"
"Saving Face"
"The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom"

Interesting thing I learned this year: almost all of the votes in this category are decided by Academy members who attend a screening of all these movies back-to-back-to-back, then vote immediately after. So the challenge isn’t “which movie of these is the strongest”, but “which movie of these will stand out the most?” I’m assuming it’s Saving Face, a film about a plastic surgeon returning to Pakistan to help women whose faces have been scarred by acid attacks – often by their husbands, who are almost never made to stand trial. Just watching a one-minute clip of the film was a rough experience.

Best Short Film (Animated)

Nominees:
"Dimanch/Sunday"
"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"
"La Luna"
"A Morning Stroll"
"Wild Life"

Critical consensus indicates that Pixar’s "La Luna" (an endearing twee short about a boy helping his father and grandfather keep the moon lit) will win this category, but I’m doubtful. In its last six years of entry in this category, Pixar is 0-for-6. Instead, I’ll pick "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore", which, in addition to being charming and fun, is also a pretty awesome iPad app.

Best Short Film (Live Action)

Nominees:
"Pentecost"
"Raju"
"The Shore"
"Time Freak"
"Tuba Atlantic"

The last category! We made it! We made it!

This category is always awful. I haven’t seen any of these five films – in fact, there’s never been a year where I’ve seen any of them – and so it’s always guesswork based on video clips, trailers, and online sentiment. Four of these films are indie-type comedies of the offbeat variety (“Tuba Atlantic” is about a dying Irish man trying to signal his brother in New Jersey via gigantic horn, for example). I’ll pick the one that isn’t – "Raju", about a couple who adopts a young Indian boy, then learns that perhaps his parents aren’t actually dead.

Well, that’s it. It’s done. Thank goodness.

There was a time I wrote this article with a chip on my shoulder – I’m weirdly competitive about award show predictions – but now that I’ve been so accurate for a couple years in a row, I’m more inclined to root for my favorites over my predictions (well, those favorites that got nominated, that is. But I’ve certainly griped about that enough).

Best of luck on your Oscar ballots! Keep in mind that those who have taken my picks as their own in years past have been known to have a little extra change in their pocket come Monday morn. Just sayin’.

In the past thirty years, no individual has been more mentally connected with the work of Shakespeare by the general public than Kenneth Branagh. He has directed and starred in an exceedingly large number of award-winning film adaptations of the Bard’s works – most notably Henry V (for which he was nominated for an Oscar in both acting and directing) but also As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour Lost, and Hamlet. The man has been feted with nominations for Golden Globes and Golden Lions and Golden Bears since the late 80’s. And since Thor is a grandiose story of an action hero torn from Norse legend, with themes of love and honor, and fathers and sons, and betrayal, Branagh seemed a perfect fit to bring this story to the silver screen.

So, if you’ll give me a few minutes for a brief aside to the director here: Kenneth, why is this movie so damn silly?

I know, I know: it’s tough to make a comic book movie feel grounded. From the very beginning, Thor (an impressively buff Chris Hemsworth) goes to war with the Frost Giants of Jotunheim to seize the source of their power, the Casket of Ancient Winters. I guess at that point, you just wrote off realism for the rest of the movie. You have Odin (played by Anthony Hopkins with all the gravitas one can muster while looking like this, fall into “Odinsleep” at one point, the laziest plot device I have ever heard of. The characters cross a rainbow bridge guarded by an all-seeing guardian (Idris Elba, who is, racially speaking, a bit unconvincing as a Norseman) to travel by the Bifröst in between worlds. So maybe you thought looking for rationality here was a bit of a lost cause.

But there are so many way to keep a movie like this from sliding into camp, Kenneth, and your movie uses none of them. You’re man who adapts Shakespeare, and you were flummoxed by the work of Stan Lee.

After all, this is a movie that Natalie Portman signed on to just because you was involved. “I was just like, ‘Kenneth Branagh doing Thor is super-weird, I’ve gotta do it,’” she said later. That’s an Oscar-winning actress telling you she assumed you’d find a way to make this film serious, Kenneth, and instead you spend a good chunk of the movie dealing with the arguments of Thor’s exceedingly pointless Asgard entourage(They’re known as Sif and the Warriors Three, which sounds like a band that puts 80’s metal licks behind J.R.R. Tolkien lyrics. Whenever I talk to anyone who saw Thor, the first thing I say is “seriously, why are we supposed to care about Thor’s friends?” The only response I ever get is “I know! What was that?”).

You took a comic book about a guy with a flying hammer and somehow made it more silly. How is that even possible? 

And yet… despite (and sometimes because of) all the nonsense, this movie proved to be a lot of fun. Summer movies are designed for cheeseball adventures, and I don’t mind armored men with odd accents hurling giant hammers at each other and setting Natalie Portman’s heart aflutter. That’s the exact sort of thing I go to the movies for in late May, when summer movies kick off. These movies are supposed to be bombast and nonsense and bright colors, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Could I have done without the robot from the original The Day The Earth Stood Still pointlessly destroying a small New Mexico town? I could have. But intergalactic space battles between immortals? I’m on board.

A lot of the credit should go to the cast, who are all much more convincing in their roles than they have any right to be. It is not easy to play a Norse god, but Hemsworth, Perkins, and Tom Hiddleston sell the grandiosity of it with seemingly little effort. And Natalie Portman plays an astrophysicist wholeheartedly dedicated to her work. I don’t know how Portman manages to remain a movie star while so effortlessly playing these socially-awkward types, but it may be time for us to realize that she’s closer to this in real life than she is to this.

Since Branagh won’t be at the helm next time, let me say this to whoever ends up being in charge of this thing: I know I don’t make this request too often, but I could use a little more sturm und drang next time around, guys. Even in the summer. Even in late May.

I'll pop in and out on this post, you'll know it's me when it's in italics. And also because I'll probably be being mean.

(Thanks to Ben for letting me post. As I am currently employed in the broadcast television industry, I requested to be kept anonymous (A wise choice. Oprah's gaze is far-reaching. I sort of picture it like Sauron's eye, myself). Suffice it to say that I went to college with Ben, and he and I see eye-to-eye on quite a bit.)

If you didn't hear about Oprah Winfrey's public relations code-red earlier this week, you can read about it here. 

Oprah's first mistake, as pointed out by the article (don't worry, I didn't read the article either), is asking people with Nielsen boxes to watch her cable network, OWN. You can't do that in the TV business. It is a cardinal rule. Nielsen, as a company, actually goes out of its way sometimes to remind those in television to keep the data pool "clean." Those boxes that sit in people's homes may look innocuous, but they send back numbers to Nielsen every day: numbers that translate into ratings. Ratings translate into jobs gained or lost in an already volatile industry.

The former maven of daytime has since apologized, and Nielsen is examining whether or not to assign a dreaded "asterisk" to some of OWN's ratings, meaning that the data has been contaminated and is therefore unreliable for use by potential advertisers. (soon, her data will be quarantined, then buried deep inside the earth's core.)

But a deeper question remains: why hasn't Oprah's impressive past success helped her thus far create a cable TV juggernaut? (or an actual Juggernaut? She has the money for it.)

One answer is quite simple. The channel, network, whatever you want to call it, should not be called "OWN." It should simply be called "Oprah," or "The Oprah Network." The American viewing public has a remarkably short memory. (But somehow remembers the lyrics to every novelty rap song from the 90's.) While the hype surrounding the network's launch was neck-deep, once things kicked off, the channel began its descent into relative oblivion. I daresay many people scroll past OWN on their cable channel guide because they don't even remember what it is. (They're missing out. Unfaithful: Story of Betrayal* is top-notch.)

Even before this incident, it was apparent Oprah was on a mission for more viewers. A blitz of commercials blazed across the cable universe, showing her interviewing the likes of George Lucas and Steven Tyler at their respective homes. After all, if she could put herself in the promos, wouldn't that finally get people to watch? (Maybe, but... it would still be an interview with George Lucas or Steven Tyler, though.)

"Oprah," the long-running broadcast show, was successful, even until the end, because it became more than just a talk show with the occasional celebrity interview. It became a spectacle. And spectacle, more than anything, is what is needed to make ratings gold on both broadcast and cable TV, these days. (And you know who sold spectacle better than anyone? Carnival barkers! Let's bring back carnival barkers!)

When you tuned in, you never knew if it was going to be a regular, run-of-the-mill show, or if she was going to give a car to every single person in the studio audience. No one else did that. No one else does that. (Though I've been switching dentists every six months, just in case)

We don't have time for appointment television anymore. We're all staring at our phones all day. And that simple fact is scaring television's powers-that-be to death. (Not a metaphor. The mortality rate is quite shocking.)

So, what does Oprah's decide to do? She decides to use one of the newer (more powerful?) media to try to push people to an older one. She hops on Twitter and haphazardly decides to beg people (during the Whitney-Houston-spectacle-driven Grammy's Sunday night) to switch over to her network.

Though I have heard a few statistics to the contrary, I firmly do not believe that using Facebook and Twitter to push people to appointment TV viewing works, especially among viewers under 35. With the exponential increase of the use of Netflix and various DVR services, we have been trained to watch only what we want to watch, only when we want to watch it. Unless, as I said, it's a spectacle. Like the finale of "LOST." (No spoilers! I have it DVRed!)

As cable TV audiences continue to fragment and shrink, people like Oprah need to find and  develop better ways to push people from television to their online, on-demand presence. Not the other way around. (possible solution: Juggernauts. They're very convincing)

*One of my college roommates was just on this terrible show. If you click the link, he's the Hispanic guy re-enacting the white guy's life.

By the way, this may seem obvious, when you're searching for images of Deep Throat from All The President's Men, don't absent-mindedly Google Image Search "deep throat." You're welcome.

Whereas this is a clip of the opening credits of the movie, which feels a little different:

The ad campaign was so misleading one disappointed moviegoer actually sued the studio about it. My favorite part of the suit? Where she complained that there was “very little driving in the movie.” I can only hope that someone once sued Paramount over how little snow there was in White Christmas. The lawsuit must have been at least partially successful, since this a more indicative trailer, and it literally asks the question “what do people see in this movie?” right at the beginning. That’s a lot of self-doubt for a TV spot. Did this commercial play on television? It seems unbelievable:

Me, I liked the slow pace of the film, checkered with occasional moments of startling violence of the Tarantinan variety (at one point, Gosling spends a good two minutes stomping off a guy’s jaw). But I saw the film in a theater with three other people, and one of them was so frustrated by the movie that he ended up answering two separate cell phone calls during the film. Even a movie with as limited draw as Drive still managed to divide its audience. Even for an indie movie, that’s pretty divisive.

Every other category evokes little to no anger - somewhere out there, someone's horrified by Super 8's snub in sound editing, but that person is not me. So I'm gonna finish my review of the Oscar nominations with one last look at the acting categories.

Best Supporting Actor and Actress
I've already talked about Best Supporting Actress once, and I simply can’t summon any anger for the rejected potential nominees. Frankly, I can’t even really think of any. I should have done this piece sooner. Sandra Bullock, I guess? Oh, Shailene Woodley.

Woodley’s an intriguing subject. She’s so very good in The Descendants, yet until now she’s been best known for the ABC Family show she’s on, “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” a show she’s supposedly not very good on.

What, you expected me to watch the show in order to write this review? That’s ridiculous. I don’t get paid for this. Who would put themselves through such an affair for no reason?

Oh, that’s right, me. Challenge accepted!

…alright, hunting for it on OnDemand… pulling it up… and… here we go.

(fourteen minutes later) …and I’m back. That’s all I can take, guys. This show is awful. 

It’s everything I don’t like about scripted television – bad, flat lighting, hastily delivered lines, several unconnected storylines running along from episode to episode without resolution, all the action happening in a series of close-ups to hide the shoddiness of the sets (unsuccessfully). There are ways to sell a show on a tiny budget so it doesn’t look cheap. This show doesn’t do any of them.

All the acting is bad, but there’s varying levels of badness to it – there are bad actors who can’t do any better, and there’s good actors who aren’t being the opportunity to do better work. And of those, Woodley looks like the best of the lot. I mean, Molly Ringwald’s in this show too, and while it’s been a long time since Sixteen Candles, she’s doing pretty lousy work here.

Woodley’s taken some offhand shots at the show during her interviews for The Descendants, mostly in a “no offense, but working on ABC Family is not like working with Alexander Payne and George Clooney” sort of way. The show’s creator, Brenda Hampton, pretended not to notice and insisted that “doing that film was a very good thing for her and for us. She brought what she learned back.” Early prediction: Woodley lands a bigger role in a big film sooner rather than later, her star starts to rise, and she departs the show in a year or two. No one stays on ABC Family if they can’t help it, with the possible exception of Melissa Joan Hart.

For Best Supporting Actor, the obvious complaint would be Albert Brooks for Drive, since he’d managed to win about 40% of the supporting actor trophies that were handed out before getting ignored by the Academy. There’s no way he would have beaten Christopher Plummer next Sunday (a respected elderly actor playing a dying gay father? Who could top that?), and Brooks seems to be taking it pretty well, so it’s just one less tuxedo rental for him, I guess.

As to those people who kept harping on Andy Serkis’ being ignored for playing the digital version of Caesar, the ape in Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Let it go. Sure, playing a role like that looks awfully tough, but when has the Academy ever nominated an acting performance from a prequel to a reboot? Annoyed the Academy doesn’t respect motion capture? Of course they don’t! Who wants to give an Oscar to a guy for playing a chimp?

Mostly, these snubs are just indicative of the Academy’s stances on the movies these actors came from. Woodley not being nominated means The Descendants has no chance of winning Best Picture, if it ever did. Brooks being ignored was just one of the various ways the Academy ignored Drive (no nominations in Best Actor, Picture, or Director, either). And Serkis being ignored just means that the Academy still hates monkeys.

When you get down to it, there’s really not a whole lot that’s shocking here.

Well, of course it’s a cash grab. They’re a movie studio. What else would it be? And furthermore, who cares?

Most movies walk a fine line with insolvency. They gamble on a lot of movies, most of them don’t hit, and then they’re saved by the occasional film that sells like gangbusters and makes them hordes of money. A studio like Summit Entertainment acquires the ‘Twilight’ books, makes a two and a half billion dollars off of them, and gets purchased by Lionsgate this month. A studio like MGM has a century of success, then makes a couple bad calls in a row, finds itself two and a half billion in debt, and is forced to file for bankruptcy. It’s a high-stakes game they’re playing out there.

The 3-D craze has played itself out, but there’s a new concept emerging where studios take movies that have already made hoards of money, convert them to 3-D, and release them to the public again. The Lion King was the first of the bunch, but this spring we’ve already had Beauty and the Beast, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and soon Titanic will be back in theaters. I’m assuming the pattern will continue until we get to Norbit or something.

A lot of people hate 3-D, and are diametrically opposed to this practice. I have no problem with it, for two reasons:

1. Movie studios need to make a lot of money, and this isn’t a bad way to do it. Another way they do it is by grabbing old things that I loved, like ‘Battleship’, or Alvin and The Chipmunks, and turning them into horrifying film franchises. Then those franchises advertise their terrible films with their terrible puns and terrible catchphrases and terrible poop jokes (I’m talking about the Chipmunks movies here. Battleship doesn’t have any poop jokes. I don’t think) everywhere I go, until I’m tempted to tear out my eardrums and retinas.
   
   This way is easier. They convert the film, re-release it to theaters, there’s a small, noninvasive promotional push for it showing scenes from a movie I liked, and then it’s gone again. I didn’t see Beauty and the Beast in theaters, but I’ve always liked the movie and didn’t mind watching clips of Gaston and Cogsworth pop up on my television every now and then.
2. These movies are a way to connect to my childhood. I was ten when my grandparents took me to see The Lion King. I loved it then, and seeing it again on a big screen, munching popcorn in the dark, reminded me of what I loved about it. It’s a great movie, epic and grand, and the animation is beautiful.* I imagine that if I had kids, I’d enjoy the ability to take my child out to a film of that quality and have us experience it together. When you consider how low the standards are of parents taking their children to the theater, that’s a real win.

So calm down, everyone. It’s not a desecration of your childhood to have people watch a movie you liked while wearing 3-D glasses. And anyone who thinks it is should be forced to watch both Battleship and Alvin and the Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked, just to teach them a lesson.

*If you’re wondering why I chose to rank The Lion King, a movie I love, 16^th overall in a weak year for film: While The Lion King is a tremendous film, I enjoyed the experience of re-watching­ the film about the same as I enjoyed watching the films that surrounded it for the first time. But then, I’m not a movie re-watcher in general.

Since I spent a whole post talking about the movies passed over for Best Picture, and another whole post talking about those snubbed for Best Song, I guess I’ll have to move a little faster, since the Oscars are almost here and I still have to get through all the other categories.

Let’s start with the only other categories people care about: the acting categories.

Best Actor and Best Actress

The eventual winners of these categories will be George Clooney, Christopher Plummer, Octavia Spencer, and either Meryl Streep or Viola Davis (probably Davis). Could The Artist dominate all categories on their way to a clean sweep? They could. But everyone else in these categories is an also-ran and knows it. There’s no real reason to get bent out of shape at a lack of recognition in a nomination slot. The Academy Awards is just one more award show to go to where you’re not making a trip to the podium (and there are – this is no exaggeration – several dozen you’re supposed to attend. There’ve already been more than sixty this year, including the BAFTAs last night, where most of the nominees were expected to show). I imagine one gets bored awfully quickly.

As for the rejects: the Academy only handed out one award for “strong and silent” this year, and it went to Gary Oldman (I’ll discuss his performance whenever I review Tinker Tailor), so Ryan Gosling’s out of luck for Drive. Michael Fassbender got well and truly naked for Shame, and while most Oscar watchers have suggested he was shut out because he has a sizable penis, I think we can all agree that this is a pretty stupid idea. In reality, it just seemed like Shame was a pretty divisive movie, and a lot of people just didn’t like it that much. Not to mention, Fassbender had a few different performances for voters to chose from this year, and at least some of them must have preferred him in A Dangerous Method. Or even X-Men: First Class, maybe (don’t laugh. If you’ve seen it, you know he’s great in that).

I think most were surprised that Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t land a spot for J. Edgar, a movie that will always be remembered for having makeup so bad even the movie poster looked unconvincing. Because people hate celebrities, there’s been some snickering that his “desperate” bid for an Oscar nomination came up short; which shows a total lack of understanding of who DiCaprio is as an actor.

Look, DiCaprio doesn’t care about Oscars. He just doesn’t. He likes working on interesting projects, and he likes working with top-notch directors, and that’s the sum total of Leo’s movie-selection process. In the past ten years, he’s worked with Martin Scorsese (multiple times), Stephen Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Baz Luhrmann, Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Sam Mendes, Ridley Scott, Ed Zwick, Todd Field, and Danny Boyle.

That’s a hell of a list, and the amazing thing about it is that I didn’t leave anyone off. He didn’t do a single paycheck role anywhere in there. Even his big, crowd-pleasing hits are risky movies (Inception springs to mind). Even Titanic was a fairly interesting historical study that finished with everyone drowning in icy water, so he's never had a nose for standard Hollywood fare. As much as I love Clooney’s commitment to small films, he’s still willing to take a paycheck role every now and again (this is unfair of me. I love the Ocean’s movies and would be thrilled if Clooney did nothing else). 

Tilda Swinton lost her Best Actress slot to Glenn Close* for playing the mother of We Need To Talk About Kevin, and while I feel for her, it’s not like this hasn’t happened to her before (remember all the buzz when she wasn’t nominated for I Am Love? Anyone? Just me? Okay, never mind). It’s tough to be centerpiece of a movie that divides critics that much, and I think she got shuttled to the side the same as Fassbender did. It’s just no one’s made the penis excuse for her (yet!).

* If you’re a woman playing a man, you get nominated. It’s a rule. With the exception of She’s The Man, of course. If you’re a man playing a woman, you get gutted and possibly tarred and feathered by the press. With the exception of Dustin Hoffman, of course.

I wanted to love this movie more than I did.

I’d been entranced by the trailer, which (aside from a brief bit of awkward plot summarization in the middle) is an entrancing bit of earnest indie sadness, propelled by the two leads’ mostly improvised dialogue.

I got my hopes too high. Seeing the movie was an adventure in mild disappointment. Because, for the most part, the movie works. The photography is naturalistic and simple,

the story refreshingly small. It’s a relationship split by the chasm of an ocean, but the divide never feels that wide, it lacks the sweeping scope of the bigger-than-life love stories Hollywood’s trying to sell us on. It’s no Cold Mountain, nor An Affair To Remember. It’s not even Sleepless In Seattle. It’s just two young college graduates, ignoring their own good sense and the data fees for international texting to try to make a relationship work. Their bullheaded certainty that their love can bear the strain of distance and the U.S. immigration system (as if anything could) could melt a moderately cold heart. And when the reality of their lives slowly crumples the foundation of that love, it’s hard not feel the pain of it almost as deeply as they do, even if you saw the knife coming in well before they did.

I’ve always liked Anton Yelchin, and he’s well cast here – he’s so open and likable and easy to bruise. But Felicity Jones, the then-unknown cast in the lead opposite him, is a revelation. She’s garnered festival acting awards right and left since the movie’s release, and all of them deserved. From the opening frame, she is so blindly, wholeheartedly in love, a shaking doll of porcelain emotions. She chips and falls apart, then pulls herself together, only to collapse again. This movie was too small to garner any Oscar love, but I’ll guarantee that we’ll be seeing her name bandied about in that conversation in years to come.

But how small a movie is too small? Our leads fall in love, are separated by distance, develop other relationships that don’t work out, and struggle to decide whether they should be together or not. And while I’m invested enough to follow along, I’d prefer that they maybe did something else interesting with their time while I was watching. But instead they sit and mope, have dull conversations with their parents, build hipster chairs and write unseen blurbs for fashion magazines. I was bored silly by Cold Mountain, and at least in that movie, Jude Law spends a lot of his time getting shot at.

The problem with realism, of course, is the banality of it. The second ends up feeling a bit like watching an artfully shot version of my own life, though I (unfortunately) don’t have Jennifer Lawrence as my live-in girlfriend. I feel for these two, but I’ve got my own problems. If I want to spend two hours watching young people stare glumly at their phones, I’ll just go to the mall.