The Official TWC Oscars Preview Post: 2020

It’s that time of year again, folks, and I’m back with something to prove after going a lowly 3 for 7 on my predictions last year (I had to check the tape on this one – still can’t believe that ratings for the awards show itself actually went up last year).  I’m looking to reattain the 5/7 glory of 2018 on another lucky number 7 predictions, and I’ve seen the same fraction of Best Picture nominees that I did that year as of this writing (I’m 5 for 9, and it looks like I was 5 for 8 last year on that front – seems like 5 critically lauded movies a year is all I can really stomach), so anything is possible.  For the curious, those movies are: Joker, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, Marriage Story, The Irishman, and Parasite.  In my past few reviews, which have featured The Irishman and Marriage Story, I’ve made my opinions on my personal hierarchy of these movies somewhat clear, so I’ll refrain from saying it again here, other than to say go Parasite!  Now, on with the baseless speculation you all presumably came here for.

When does the Joker-Irishman crossover drop?

Brad Pitt will win Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood.  This is definitely the lowest-hanging fruit as far as my predictions go, given that Brad Pitt won the Golden Globe and the SAG award in that category, so it’s the one I’m leading off with to try to get into some kind of rhythm.  Furthermore, it’s also the award that I think Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood most deserves to win, besides maybe Best Production Design (seriously, Quentin Tarantino has to be one of Hollywood’s most overrated directors, and he’s maybe Hollywood’s most overrated writer, but I digress).  With the votes on The Irishman in this category likely being split between Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, the path to a win for Pitt is fairly clear, unlike Leo‘s path for Best Actor, which is littered with standouts like Joaquin Phoenix and Adam Driver.  Which brings me to my next, much hotter take…

Brad Pitt stoically fighting off other Best Supporting Actor contenders.

Adam Driver will pull off a surprise Best Actor win for his work in Marriage Story.  Ever since writing about this movie last week, I’ve been thinking about what I said about how Joaquin Phoenix still probably deserves the win over Driver in spite of Kylo Ren’s great performance in Noah Baumbach‘s divorce movie, and I think I’m here to go back on that statement.  It’s potentially (definitely) wishful thinking, but I’m hopeful that the Academy will realize on Oscar night how overrated Joker is as a whole, and also realize how much Marriage Story caters to California-based audiences and critics (I talked about this last week as well), and while Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t necessarily deserve to suffer due to any of those things, he’ll probably be just fine with his SAG award and his multiple Golden Globes.

Adam Driver closing the door on ScarJo’s Oscar hopes.  Or opening the door to his maybe?

Conversely, Scarlett Johansson will be blanked in both female acting categories.  Being nominated for both Best Actress (Marriage Story) and Best Supporting Actress (Jojo Rabbit), is a big win for Johansson, as I imagine she may be currently struggling to extricate herself from the Marvel machine (this year’s upcoming Black Widow suggests otherwise), but she’s faced with stiff competition in each category.  The Academy’s inexplicable love for biopics is poised to rear its ugly head with further recognition of Renee Zellweger‘s work in Judy, which is nominated for little else, and which won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress earlier this year.  Somewhat less understandable to me, especially considering that I haven’t seen Judy and therefore probably shouldn’t knock it so much, is Laura Dern‘s near-universal praise for her turn as a sleazy divorce attorney in Marriage Story, but then again, I haven’t seen Jojo Rabbit either, so I really don’t have much of an idea of how Johansson’s work would stack up.

I haven’t seen this one yet, and I know this caption is supposed to be about ScarJo, but I’m really here to say I love Sam Rockwell.

Knives Out will win Best Original Screenplay.  Not much to say about this, other than that it’s probably wishful thinking of a similar brand to my last prediction, but it’s a hill I’m willing to die on.  I’d be fine with Parasite or Marriage Story winning this category as well – they’re both cleverly and and realistically-written stories dripping with originality – but the indulgence of Tarantino’s script simply shouldn’t be rewarded (it will be).  Read about my love affair with Rian Johnson‘s whodunit – which manifested in the form of three theater viewings in the span of a week’s time – here.  It’s the only film besides Parasite (also nominated in this category, and the winner of the WGA’s Best Original Screenplay award) that’s nominated for anything that I saw multiple times, and for good reason.

CSI KFC?

Steve Zaillian’s adapted screenplay for The Irishman will win over Greta Gerwig’s for Little Women, because the Academy has an aversion to even nominating women for awards.  Disregarding the fact that The Irishman features a script almost equally as indulgent as Tarantino’s, and is probably close to double the length, my frustration with it is that it’s a movie that we’ve all seen before.  You could probably say the same for Gerwig‘s creation – after all, I’ve just learned via Google that Little Women has been adapted for the screen a whopping seven times – but based on what I’ve heard about Little Women (I haven’t seen it – yet) and based on the sourness of my experience with the slog that was The Irishman, I’d rather her win for something unoriginal than Zaillian, if only because she was snubbed for Best Director.  Which again gracefully transitions me into my next prediction…

When you head out to go clubbing with the girls only to ultimately realize that it’s 1868.

Parasite is going to surprise a lot of people.  This Korean film, which I talked about here, is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Production Design, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.  It pains me to say I think it’s a long shot for Best Picture, but don’t be shocked (I wouldn’t be) if it picks up some of the other lesser statuettes, including but not limited to Best Director, over the likes of Academy darlings Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino (not to mention Sam Mendes, who won the Golden Globe for his work on 1917).  Parasite only won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, but I expect/want this under-the-radar pick to fare better on the ninth, leading people to ask what the heck that movie is.  And yes, this prediction is purposefully open-ended – gotta pad the stats for next year.

You know how you sleep in matching silk pajamas in a house almost entirely made of glass because you’re super rich? Me too.

Roger Deakins will win Best Cinematography for his work on 1917.  If there’s one thing I’ve heard about 1917, it’s that it looks like it was filmed in one shot, which can be gimmicky for sure but certainly paid off for 2014’s Birdman.  As it stands, there are also few cinematographers more due for accolades than the oft-overlooked Deakins, who was nominated a whopping 13 times (for a number of little projects like The Shawshank Redemption, Skyfall, No Country for Old Men, and Prisoners, to name a few) before finally winning his first Oscar last year for Blade Runner 2049.

Still haven’t seen this one yet – might be a weekend project.

There you have it folks!  Now for the fun part: sitting back and waiting for the big reveal of how wrong I am.  Tune in next week for either an actual movie review or a sidebar about Super Bowl trailerfest (like this one from last year) – I haven’t decided yet.

Marriage Story – Review

My final pre-Oscars cramming post this year focuses on Marriage Story, the Noah Baumbach opus on divorce that hit Netflix back in November around the same time as The Irishman.  It’s much leaner than Scorsese‘s marathon labor of love (which I talked about last week here), and overall feels a lot less joyless in spite of what’s obviously very heavy subject matter, but it has garnered a similar amount of critical acclaim, both from the reviewing public at large and the Academy – the latter coming in the form of nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor (Adam Driver), Best Actress (Scarlett Johansson), Best Supporting Actress (Laura Dern), Best Original Screenplay (Baumbach), and Best Score (Randy Newman).  As always, I’m going to talk about my experience with it from its beginning (which I think is one of the best movie openings ever, rivaling the classic and somewhat similarly-themed Married Life montage in Up) to its bittersweet end, but for the time being suffice it to say it’s one of the better Best Picture noms I’ve seen in the past year.

One of the clips from the opening montage – I tried to find a picture of the clip of Adam Driver playing Monopoly, which honestly might be the best moment in the whole movie, but I couldn’t.

Much like Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and much like plenty of other movies that have carved out swaths of awards-night territory in the past, Marriage Story is an actor’s movie – this of course shows up in the talent that it attracted for its production in the ultra-bankable stars of Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, and that in turn shows up in its nominations.  It’s chock full of emotional monologue opportunity, with each member of the principle cast getting his or her chance to shine, and reportedly its production itself – namely in major character background – was influenced heavily by the cast as well.  There isn’t a whole lot of crafty camera work going on, and this is just fine, because for the most part Marriage Story would do very well – maybe even better – as a play.  This shows up in the blocking, with numerous instances of characters walking from room to room mid-dialogue in critical scenes, including but not limited to the apartment fight scene that everyone is hearing about, which was actually done over 50 times in order to get it right.  It’s a movie not just for appreciators of dramatic tour de force, but also for Hollywoodites, with its major characters being in some way associated with show business, and this is doubtless a factor in a lot of the acclaim (or potential acclaim, I guess) it has received from the Academy.

This had to be a scary moment for Scarlett on set – she would have ruined his hair for Star Wars if her hand slipped.

As for those characters themselves, we of course have Adam Driver’s Charlie, a theater director originally from Indiana who’s “more New Yorker than New Yorkers” according to his soon-to-be ex-wife (“what’s the fiancee version of divorce?” she asks at one point), Scarlett Johansson’s Nicole.  Nicole is herself a gifted actress, who in spite of achieving her own success in the Big Apple is feeling the pull back to LA and work in television.  Stuck in the middle, as is sadly often the case, is their 8-year-old son Henry, played by Azhy Robertson, and as I’m sure you can imagine a lot of the drama is centered around what will ultimately happen with him and where he’ll wind up living.  Driver and Johansson are both brilliant here, with nominations well-deserved; in particular, I’m sad for Driver, as he’ll likely lose to Joaquin Phoenix (not saying he shouldn’t) in spite of the fact that this is probably some of his best work to date.  Of course, no divorce movie worth its salt would be complete without a cast of sleazy lawyers, and in this case they’re played by Laura Dern (nominated for Best Supporting Actress, though that’s one that I’m not 100% sure I understand), Chantix frontman and sleazeball incarnate Ray Liotta, and Alan Alda.

Laura Dern’s getting all the love, but don’t sleep on my guy Alan Alda, who at one point starts telling a joke that’s so long that he doesn’t even finish it.

This cast effectively brings to life a script that’s teeming with realism.  It’s a screenplay of course highlighting the painful and drawn-out nature of a real-life divorce, constantly being punctuated by conversations in courtrooms or conference rooms with people you don’t know that act like they do.  Each character, no matter how minor, is multi-layered, seemingly good-natured in one scene and irredeemable in the next, and this writing, in combination with the incredible acting, will find you swapping your own allegiances as a viewer as the film goes on, and in my case (assumedly a common one) leaving room for ambiguity by the fade out.  The dialogue is Sorkinian at times but mostly just feels overwhelmingly authentic, and that – in conjunction with the undercurrent of insistence that there has to be a better (less selfish? more representative?) way to work out the separation between two people who in many cases still love each other – is what makes the basis of the movie (Baumbach’s own separation from Jennifer Jason Leigh in 2010) so apparently visible.  Tying a bow on all of it, too, is a score from Randy Newman that sounds a lot like his most famous work (is this the beginning of the Randy Newman “Story” Cinematic Universe?”) – between he and his cousin Thomas, who is nominated for his work on 1917, there’s a high likelihood that this year’s statuette in that category will have the Newman name affixed to it.

No joky caption here, just intense stuff.

As I said at the top, the main thing Marriage Story has going for it relative to all of the Best Picture nominees that I’ve seen not named Parasite (and what I expect to be true of the ones I haven’t seen as well) is that it isn’t joyless. One commonality that Baumbach’s story shares with the other nominees is that it contains no single character that you’re able to completely like and/or pull for, and of course its plot is basically a heartbreaking Shiatsu massage without the benefit of feeling any better afterwards, but somehow along the way the writing and the final product finds a way to exude some very not-too-depressing charm, and I’m not just talking about that Adam Driver Company scene.  This hindsight perspective may in some part be a result of the fact that the movie is bookended excellently with the only narrative positivity that really exists in the script, but maybe that’s by design, or even in keeping with the movie’s message.  Either way, it probably deserves better than its box office take, and it’s worth watching on Netflix if you have the time, before or after its name is read on the 9th.