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.

The Irishman – Review

Well folks, it’s Oscar season here at Tuesdays with Cory (and everywhere in the cinematic world, really), and so I’ve begun what’s typically a January tradition of trying to catch up on Best Picture nominees that I haven’t yet seen.  Right now, I’m a mere 3 for 9, having seen Parasite, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, and Joker – all of which I’ve reviewed on this blog – and The Irishman, perhaps the most grueling watch on the list owing to its over-200-minute runtime, now brings me closer to at least the halfway point.  Perhaps the magnum opus – at least lengthwise – of Hollywood darling Martin Scorsese (whose recent much-maligned comments on the Marvel machine I also discussed here), The Irishman is in fact up for 10 statuettes, Best Picture among them, so given that it’s bound to come up at least once at the awards based on probability alone, and also given that it’s one of two options that are currently free on Netflix, I figured I’d bite the bullet and spend the better part of this past Sunday evening watching it.

Two nobodies and Ray Romano.  After all, Everybody Loves Raymond.

In almost every respect, The Irishman is exactly what you think it’s going to be, especially if you’ve seen any of the more notable Scorsese movies (the similarly-themed Goodfellas and the similarly-long The Wolf of Wall Street chief among them), so if that’s your kind of thing, then you’re going to love all three and a half hours of this.  There’s a lot of familiar camera work (cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who worked with Scorsese on Wolf, is nominated for Best Cinematography), a whole lot of fuck words, and a whole lot of mafia stuff.  If you’re not really familiar with that, it’s basically a lot of smoking cigars, eating Italian food, drinking wine or some kind of dark liquor, hanging around with Joe Pesci, and dealing in frustrating vagaries, with the occasional whacking of a guy who’s more often than not introduced mere minutes before being whacked thrown in.  I personally found long stretches of it to be about as interesting as watching paint dry, but I think that’s a me problem more than anything else, and to be fair, there’s very little of the three and a half hours that actually feels wasted, which is a real accomplishment given the sheer presence of that much film.

The setting of a pivotal scene in The Irishman, and also the setting of probably every mafia movie that’s ever been made.

Another comparison I’ll draw, albeit a non-Scorsese comparison, is to Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis‘ classic, simply in that it’s a historical drama (fiction or not? Apparently given the contentiousness of Frank Sheeran’s account, it’s kind of hard to tell) peppered with instances of its characters dealing with actual watershed moments in American history.  Naturally, in the case of Jimmy Hoffa and the Italian mafia in general, it’s a lot easier to bake things like the Bay of Pigs and the JFK assassination into the screenplay than it is to bend over backwards to get Gump to like, meet LBJ or something, so it flows fairly well.  There’s also digital manipulation somewhat similar to Gump‘s in here, albeit far more advanced (The Irishman and ILM have a legitimate shot at Best Visual Effects here for a movie that’s mostly about a bunch of overweight old men sitting around chatting in easy chairs).  With that said, while the digital de-aging, as gratuitously used as it is, is almost as convincing as the acting, there’s simply no getting around the age of 76-year-old Robert De Niro when it comes to his movement (I think the ridiculousness of the grocery store slugfest, and perhaps the fact that his role requires the most combat in general, is why De Niro didn’t get a nomination for Best Lead Actor while Pesci and Al Pacino got noms for Best Supporting).

Frank Sheeran’s pretty compelling but also dangerously close to uncanny valley WW2 flashback.

On the subject of the cast, everyone pops on screen at least once – I particularly loved Ray Romano mostly for the what-is-he-doing-here factor – but I think Al Pacino is probably the best of the main three characters as Jimmy Hoffa.  He’s sleazy teamster union prez incarnate, with a likable side and a real love for ice cream to boot, but perhaps to me he was simply the most engaging just because I didn’t personally know a whole lot about Jimmy Hoffa other than that he disappeared (and was presumably murdered).  Pesci and De Niro are of course in their usual mobster form, with plenty of De Niro’s squinty smile to go around, but the more interesting roles to me are the ones that I don’t think wound up getting enough play.  There’s the aforementioned Romano as a teamster attorney and relative of Pesci’s mafia don, but there’s also Academy Award winner Anna Paquin playing Frank Sheeran’s discerning and eventually distant daughter Peggy, a role that frustratingly has like two lines.  I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention one of my favorite actors Jesse Plemons (I wax poetic about him here, and also probably here), in this case playing Jimmy Hoffa’s stepson Chuckie O’Brien.  He’s mainly only in one scene near the end, where he gets into an awfully bizarre exchange with Pacino and others about how you’re not supposed to drive fish around in your car.

One of The Irishman’s better moments is Jimmy Hoffa being publicly glad that Kennedy died.

The Irishman is a marathon of a movie that has the mammoth task of keeping you wired in for three and a half hours from its ensemble’s semi-humble beginnings to its Brooks-Hatlenesque end, and in my case it was hard to not wonder while the credits were rolling if I had wasted a quarter of a day on it.  It’s convincingly executed without a doubt, but it’s simply a movie that I feel that I’ve seen at least 5 times before, and I think that’s best described by the fact that I’d be more likely to give it the award for Most Screenplay than for Best Screenplay.  Amongst its competitors for the Academy’s top prize, what I can say for sure is that Parasite was leaps and bounds better, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood at least slightly edged it out based purely on its entertainment factor, and Joker is probably on par with it overall, at least in terms of joylessness.  Then again, it’s free, so how wrong could you go?

One of my big remaining questions about this movie involves why Harvey Keitel would take such a tiny role.  I mean come on, he was in National Treasure!  And National Treasure: Book of Secrets!

Stay tuned, friends and readers: our push to Oscar night continues next week with either Marriage Story (more likely, since it’s also on Netflix) or 1917.