Slumdog Millionaire
No Country for Old Men
The Departed
Crash
Million Dollar Baby
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Chicago
A Beautiful Mind
Gladiator
American Beauty
Shakespeare in Love
Titanic
The English Patient
Braveheart
Forrest Gump
Schindler’s List
Unforgiven
The Silence of the Lambs
Dances with Wolves
Driving Miss Daisy

There really aren’t that many writer/director projects at all, even among the adaptations.  Titanic was written and directed by James Cameron (though not even nominated for screenplay).  No Country was adapted by the Coens and directed by them.  It happens, but it is rare that the writer accepting the Oscar for Screenplay is also the Director who accepts for Oscar for Directing, even rarer still when the producers are also the writers and the directors — the Coens are one notable example of a recent trifecta win.  They shared the producer award with Scott Rudin.

The Best Original Screenplay, and Adapted Screenplay winners are almost always from films that were nominated for Best Picture.  This year, only one script isn’t from a nominated Best Pic in the original category, The Messenger. The rest are all from popular Best Picture contenders.  In the adapted category, again, only one nominee, In the Loop, is not from a Best Picture nominee.

You have to go back to 1998 to find an adapted script winner that wasn’t from a Best Pic nominee, Gods and Monsters.  You only have to go back to 2003 to find a winner in original that wasn’t from a Best Pic nominee, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.    It’s clear that adapted kind of drives the Best Picture race much of the time.  Could it be that it’s easier to tell stories that have been tested with audiences to know what part of them sells and what part doesn’t?  Could it be that, in many cases, collaboration works better in general than a singular vision?  What does seem clear from some of the original screenplay winners – they are almost always stars onto themselves, writers whose work many are already familiar with – Charlie Kaufman, Quentin Tarantino, or else they are a consolation prize for a film that wasn’t going to win Best Picture, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Diablo Cody.

The Hurt Locker is most likely going to win the Writers Guild award, as it is not up against either Basterds or Up.   That will give him some momentum.  As of now, the only time we heard from Boal was when Kathryn Bigelow graciously offered him the mic at the Critics Choice awards.  Still, Boal as a writer has yet to take full credit for his script.  He will get that chance, perhaps, unless the Coens win at the WGAs. That will make Original Screenplay a bit of a cliffhanger on March 7th.  On the one hand, there is Tarantino’s vibrantly written Inglourious Basterds, complete with memorable, quotable dialogue throughout.  On the other hand, there is a taut thriller by a journalist who spent time in Iraq.

Most of the time, the Best Picture winner also wins for Screenplay first.  Usually, not always.  And in some cases, the two Best Pic frontrunners represent screenplays from either original OR adapted.  This year, all three of the potential winners are from the original category, Avatar (not nominated), The Hurt Locker and Basterds.  When Brokeback Mountain won from the adapted category and Crash won from the original category, most people assumed Brokeback was going to win, especially since it also won Director.   When the Pianist shocked everyone and won Best Adapted Screenplay (over Adaptation and The Hours) and Director (over Rob Marshall), we all thought it would win Best Picture too.  But Chicago prevailed.  Slumdog Millionaire or Return of the King were apparent sweeps from the outset, so there was never the big question of whether or not a win in the screenplay would signal a win for Best Picture: it was written.

On March 7th, we could find ourselves in an interesting situation with regard to the screenplays. With Avatar out of the screenplay race, all eyes will be on Original Screenplay to see if The Hurt Locker’s win there could signal a sweep or a Crash-like Best Pic/Best Director split.  If it follows Crash’s pattern, Inglourious Basterds would win in Screenplay and then win Best Picture.   It really doesn’t seem that unlikely, when you look at like that, does it.  Even still, at this point, it’s more likely that Basterds will win in Original Screenplay and then The Hurt Locker will win Picture.  I’m going to guess, though, that if Locker does manage to beat Tarantino in Original Screenplay?  That is going to signal a sweep.   (If The Hurt Locker, incidentally, beats Avatar in any of the tech categories, like sound or cinematography or score?  It’s a sweep.)

As far as Adapted Screenplay goes, there are two strong Best Pic frontrunners in that category – Up in the Air and Precious.  Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner should win their first Oscar for this adaptation.  They will likely win the Writers Guild award, since they’ve won every single critics award and precursor in their path.  They aren’t up against In the Loop or District 9 at the WGAs, however, and that might make a slight bit of difference.  Precious is really Up in the Air’s biggest threat.  If it is a threat to win Best Picture at all we might see its first win here in the Adapted Screenplay category.  If passions run strong for Precious, it could win in the Screenplay category and then go on to shock everyone by winning Best Picture.    Like Inglourious Basterds, it’s hard to imagine Precious winning just the one Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.  And, like Basterds, Precious has that crucial editing nod.

It might seem like this race is locked and loaded and that it will be Up in the Air, and Inglourious Basterds.  But with the length of time now that final ballots will be outstanding, there is time for voters to the change their minds.  Nothing will change the fact that both the original and the adapted categories this year offer wildly diverse and brilliantly written works, more so than usual.   There is not a weak offering in the bunch.  All of them are vivid, memorable stories that range from love stories, to war stories, to black comedies, and straight up dramas.  It is reassuring that the writer is still a valued and essential force in the Oscar race.

Two stories won’t go away.  The first are the occasional but passionate articles about Precious, whether it’s a movie for the white community to feel better about themselves (“see the black people can find their way out of the ghetto), and/or it’s a movie that stereotypes the African American community.  The NY Times posted an op-ed about it recently:

The blacks who are enraged by “Precious” have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is about 40 years behind Mississippi. In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more “middle-class white Americans” to his film.

He finishes with:

Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme. D. W. Griffith produced a series of movies in which Chinese, Indians and blacks were lifted from savagery through assimilation. A more recent example of climbing out of the ghetto through assimilation is “Dangerous Minds,” where black and Latino students are rescued by a curriculum that doesn’t include a single black or Latino writer.

Right, okay.  But that story really did happen.  So we should just not tell that story?

Would the world be a better place had Precious never been made?  Do black filmmakers, and women filmmakers, always have to “speak for the community”?  Can they ever just make films about the not-black-not-white-but-human condition?  Do we always see that Precious is black?  I don’t have the answers to these questions. I am merely asking them.  “My black friend” in New York felt a great kinship with the character and the film – does that make him an Uncle Tom?  Owen Gleiberman defends with an article that declares, “Attacks nf Precious are starting to say more about the attackers:”

The insult of a cliché — as drama, or as social observation — is that it’s a lazy abstraction elevated to a plane of “truth.” Whereas what I loved about Precious is that it presents its heroine, from minute one, as a lacerating and tragic and spiritually messy and complicated individual; that’s true of the forces that bear down upon her as well. Gabourey Sidibe’s impacted, mostly hushed, but quietly emotional performance allows you to respond to the moment-by-moment experience of Precious’ internal strife, and the nearly universal praise for Mo’Nique’s performance is a recognition that Precious’ mother is never just a “type.” She’s a force, as profoundly etched in the misery of her past and the love-hate rage of her present as the clinging monster-mother from The Glass Menagerie.

He continues:

What I most want to address, however, are several points in Reed’s essay that strike me as almost perversely wrongheaded. After making the specious claim that Precious is a movie largely reviled by African-Americans (he provides no evidence — but the film’s box-office demographics do not bear out that assertion), he states: “In guilt-free bits of merchandise like Precious, white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African-Americans.”

I think he’s talking about a different movie. Over the decades, Hollywood has made dozens of facile dramas, many of them set at inner-city schools, in which African-Americans are lifted up through the efforts of saintly white characters. But Precious isn’t one of those films. There are virtually no white characters in the movie; the stray ones who appear don’t carry any noble, righteous weight. Yet having established the patronizing genre/category he thinks that Precious belongs in, Reed writes that white critics “maintain that the movie is worthwhile because, through the efforts of a teacher, this girl begins her first awkward efforts at writing.” He then adds, “Redemption through learning the ways of white culture is an old Hollywood theme.”

It seriously made my jaw drop to see a scholar of Ishmael Reed’s stature claim, in the middle of the New York Times, that an abused, illiterate black teenager struggling to learn how to read and write is an instance of someone “learning the ways of white culture.” Since when did literacy become a conspiracy of “white” indoctrinization? It’s enough to make you wonder if the victimization stereotypes that Reed sees in this movie are really in the eye of the beholder.

Meanwhile, some have charged, or probed at any rate, this idea of the Wandering Jew in An Education.  True, the real-life character upon whom David was based was, in fact, Jewish, and therefore a bit of a stranger in a strange land amid the gentiles.  But claims have been made that THIS David, played by Peter Scarsgaard, is the embodiment of all that has always been assumed and feared about Jews.  I would think it laughable if I hadn’t myself been the victim of hate mail (I’m only half Jewish on my father’s side – not even technically Jewish, but do you think that makes a difference?  My blood must be tainted).  The belief that Jews are the root of all possible evil in society prevails to this day.  Irina Bragen lays it out on Fighthatred.com piece called, “The Wandering Jew in ‘An Education’: The Anatomy of an Anti-Semitic Film”:

From the moment David starts following the teenage Jenny in his fancy car, the pudgy, effete David Goldman proclaims his ethnicity. (Jenny: “I’m not a Jew.” David: “No, I am. I wasn’t … accusing you.”) Like the predatory creature characterized in “Der Ewige Juden,” Goldman pretends to adopt the values of his host culture in order to turn its treasures into his profit. He offers Jenny “three five-pound notes” to drive her cello home safely out of the rain; “I’m a music lover,” he tells her. Then he proceeds to corrupt the innocent gentile girl (played by Carey Mulligan) with expensive flowers, gifts, concerts, art auctions and trips to Oxford and Paris.

David enriches himself by ruining good English neighborhoods, deflating property values and looting cultural treasures from displaced widows. He moves blacks into white neighborhoods: “Shvartzes,” he tells Jenny, “have to live somewhere; it’s not as if they can rent from their own kind.” The only identifiable Jew in the film, he constantly uses the collective “we” to justify his wickedness: “This is how we are, Jenny,” Goldman editorializes. “We’re not clever like you, so we have to be clever in other ways, because if we weren’t, there would be no fun.” He uses the word “stats” for old ladies he victimizes. They “are scared of colored people; so we move the coloreds in and the old ladies out and I buy their flats cheap.” Along with his partner, Danny, David barges into a house, military style, and speeds away with precious relics. “We have to be clever with maps,” he tells Jenny. An ancient map, he rationalizes, “shouldn’t spend its life on a wall…. We know how to look after it…. We liberated it.”

Is it possible that the film attempts to link the predatory Jew with his purloined Jewish homeland?

In “An Education,” Jenny’s values, and those of her middle-class parents, teachers and first boyfriend, are antithetical to those of the crooked Jew. The Brits are refined, attractive, honest, sober and hard working. Boyfriend and classmate Graham, “a handsome boy,” according to the script, plays the violin, is modest and clean-cut and presents Jenny with the same plainly wrapped Latin dictionary for her birthday as her parents.

Miss Stubbs, an English teacher, encourages Jenny to pass her “A” levels and earn her way into Oxford in the same honest way she once got into Cambridge. Like Graham and Jenny,

Miss Stubbs is “attractive,” “bright” and “animated.”

By contrast, writer Nick Hornby, who initiated the film project based on a woman’s personal essay that he changed to suit his themes, confesses that he feared “no conventional male lead would want to play the part of the predatory, amoral, lonely David.” David’s wife, Sarah, “a homely looking woman in her early 30s,” shows no surprise when her husband’s fiancée, Jenny, shows up at her door. As alien a creature as David may be, the dark, curly haired

Jewess is accustomed to her man’s infidelities.

The climactic scene after David proposes, when Jenny, unaware of his treachery, informs her school’s headmistress that she plans to marry a Jew, is blatantly anti-Semitic:

Headmistress: “He’s a Jew? You’re aware, I take it, that the Jews killed our Lord?”

Jenny: “And you’re aware, I suppose, that our Lord was Jewish?”

Headmistress: “I suppose he told you that. We’re all very sorry about what happened during the war. But that’s absolutely no excuse for that sort of malicious and untruthful propaganda.”

The pretty girl makes no attempt to defend her fiancé’s human dignity, no effort to profess her love for him. As a depersonalized, demonized Jew, David has no qualities worth defending. Instead, Jenny suggests she prefers spending the Jew’s money over studying her Latin.

“My choice is to do something hard and boring or marry my Jew and go to Paris and Rome and … eat in nice restaurants and have fun.”

The articulate headmistress, played by Emma Thompson, defends the native values that the rootless Jew tempted her student to abandon. “Nobody does anything worth doing without a degree,” she warns Jenny.

When a character like Emma Thompson makes blatant anti Semitic statements in a modern film, we expect that she will eventually be exposed for her ugly prejudices; in a coming of age story, especially, we expect that the education of the heroine would include her awakening to the falsehood of the racial slurs and stereotypes thrown at her by the corrupt adults in her world. In an Education, by contrast, it is Jenny who repents for her mistakes; After she discovers her fiancé is married, a remorseful Jenny returns to the Headmistress of her school. A weeping Mary Magdalene, Jenny is now “dressed soberly in clothes not unlike a school uniform.” This transformation, the screenwriter notes, “completes a circle.”

The headmistress smiles, pleased at Jenny’s repentance and willingness to return to the wholesome Christian values with which she was raised. “I suppose you think I’m a ruined woman,” Jenny tells the Headmistress. “You’re not a woman,” the Headmistress kindly responds, “pleased with her line.” As movie blogger Joe Baltake points out, the film “seems to go out of its way to justify Thompson’s anti-Semitic outburst.” Baltake is one of a minority of critics to acknowledge the film’s anti-Semitism (many of the glowing reviews fail to even mention that Jenny’s seducer is Jewish, or that the word “Jew” appears in the film). A little more subtly, David Edelstein, of New York Magazine, writes, “The story’s most obvious lesson is: Beware of Jews bearing flowers….”

Despite the advertising campaign’s promise of a seduction film, there is nothing erotic about David. True to another ugly stereotype, Goldman turns out to be wimpy, “fruity,” “babyish” and disgusting. He calls Jenny “Minnie,” and wants her to call him “Boobaloo.”

Best Film

• Bright Star, Jane Campion
• Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold
• Helen, Joe Lawlor/Christine Molloy

Best Actor

• Tom Hardy, Bronson
• Christian McKay, Me And Orson Welles
• Alex MacQueen, The Hide
• Andy Serkis, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Best Actress

• Anne-Marie Duff, Nowhere Boy
• Kelly Macdonald, The Merry Gentleman
• Carey Mulligan, An Education

Best Screenplay

• Jesse Armstrong/Simon Blackwell/Armando Iannucci/Tony Roche, In The Loop
• Nick Hornby, An Education
• Paul Laverty, Looking for Eric

The Peter Sellers Award for Comedy

• Peter Capaldi, In The Loop
• Sacha Baron Cohen, Bruno
• Ricky Gervais, The Invention Of Lying

London Film Museum Award for Technical Achievement

• Barry Ackroyd, Cinematographer, The Hurt Locker
• James Herbert, Film editor, Sherlock Holmes
• Tony Noble, Production designer, Moon

Most Promising Newcomer

• Katie Jarvis, for her performance in Fish Tank
• Duncan Jones, for his direction of Moon
• Peter Strickland, for his direction and screenplay of Katalin Varga

Best Documentary

• Afghan Star, Havana Marking
• Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, Sacha Gervasi
• Sleep Furiously, Gideon Koppel

Kris Tapley does his rundown of the top ten best Jeff Bridges performances for Fandango’s awards watch section.  What is stunning about it, I guess, is that he doesn’t place Crazy Heart at the top of the list.  I thought I’d add a poll for you to be the judge of the films Kris put on his list to see if you agree.

Kris’ list:

1. Starman
2. The Big Lebowski
3. The Door in the Floor
4. Crazy Heart
5. Fearless
6. The Contender
7. The Jagged Edge
8. Tucker: A Man and His Dreams
9. Bad Company
10. Thunderbold and Lightfoot.

My own top ten after the cut.

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Crazy Heart
3. The Last Picture Show
4. The Fabulous Baker Boys
5. The Contender
6. The Fisher King
7. Fearless
8. Against All Odds (guilty pleasure)
9. King Kong (another guilty pleasure)
10. Starman

…Make sure you read this one.  New York Magazine’s Mark Harris offers up the kind of writing rarely exhibited on the web, where the constant need for content often results in sloppy work (raises hand).  But when you read this kind of story, and Damien Bona and Mason Wiley’s Inside Oscar, one is reminded that there are still very good writers covering this silly little corner of the world:

Which brings us to the moment, two weeks before balloting for nominations ends, when things get really rough-and-tumble. In the strange etiquette of Oscar competition, a hard-core, balls-out campaign to get Academy Award nominations is permissible, under the justification that everyone is just helping their movies, whereas pushing hard for an actual win not only looks narcissistically needy but also may be pointless, since most voters decide whom they want to win before the nominations are even announced. So the real work happens during a mid-January sprint, when actors, writers, and directors suspend their lives to embark on an ego-bruising bi-coastal nightmare carnival of awards and lunches, brunches and teas, screenings, Q&As and tributes, diving into the soul-depleting madness of what Evelyn Waugh long ago called Hollywood’s “continuous psalm of self-praise.” Movies that don’t join the fight get lost in the shuffle. And that’s why Bridges is the sheepish but willing star of “an evening with … ” himself, a service he will repeat the very next day at another venue.

A week later, in Los Angeles, I ask Bridges about how it feels to spend more time selling Crazy Heart than he did making it (the film was shot in 24 days). “And not getting paid for it, by the way,” he says with a grin, “which is funny, because this is harder work! The acting … that’s something I would pay them, at least a little, to let me do.” He makes these comments while standing on a red carpet, a location in which he will find himself four times in two weeks. “Is all this a good thing?” He squints bemusedly at the exploding cameras. “It’s a weird thing. I guess I don’t love the show-business aspect, the barker-at-the-carousel side. But with a movie you’re pleased with, and you want people to see, I’m enjoying it.” Bridges is an Oscar voter, and when I ask if he’s caught up on the dozens of DVD screeners that are vying for his vote, which he has to cast in just a few days, he laughs. “No way,” he says. “I’m way behind.”

Incidentally, this is the piece that goes with the photos we posted a bit ago.  Do not skip this article.  Read it now.

Melissa Silverstein has remarked, both on Twitter, and now in this article, that much is made of Kathryn Bigelow’s looks, as if much of the driving force behind her success is that she is gorgeous.  And we all know she is gorgeous.  We just don’t expect, I guess, a successful female director to be THAT gorgeous?  And at 58?  Here is Silverstein:

I long personally for the day when nobody cares that Kathryn Bigelow was married to James Cameron or how she looks. Because I have read articles that literally have said that James Cameron directed The Hurt Locker or that she only has a career because of him. But we lived in a world where Kathryn Bigelow is being held up to an absurd standard. She’s a boy and a girl. She’s the hot one and the kick ass one. She’s everything to everybody. That’s a lot of pressure on one person.

Silverstein makes several good points, and has asked questions where others haven’t.  I have had to do battle with many commenters who continually say, “she’s only winning because she’s a woman.”  I always counter it with, “she’s winning despite being a woman.”  This is the first time I can remember that a “womans film” is being regarded with the same awe and respect that a film directed by a man would.  The conversation around Bigelow was condescending at first, “this cute little lady and her cute little war movie.”  But every time Bigelow accepts another award (the Golden Globes notwithstanding) it is breathtaking in its disruptiveness.

Apparently, there were two main thrusts that drove both the real life story and the success of the film: football and Jesus.   Guy Lodge at In Contention looks at how the marketing team went straight for the god-fearin’ Heartland when looking for movie dollars. Thing is, the Heartland has been left out of much of the Oscar race for the last long while.  There have been films with performances that were worthy of consideration but because they were “family” films and they starred a country/western singer, no one ever took them seriously.  But money, as Bob Dylan reminds us, doesn’t talk, it swears.  As The Blind Side closed in on $300 million it started to get the industry’s attention.

In her defense of Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side, Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek does talk a bit about the film’s main character’s politics, but mostly she is trying to tell people that a good performance is a good performance, no matter if it’s artsy fartsy or not.  It isn’t often that film critics try to talk Oscar but every once in a while they shock even themselves by dipping a toe into that fecund pool.  Here is Zacharek in defense of Ms. Bullock:

But so much of what’s great in acting, as in life, happens in the margins. “Deserving” isn’t the same as marvelous, thrilling, sexy, titillating, arresting, strange or discombobulating. It doesn’t always allow for wonder or surprise or anger, or any number of complicated feelings that actors can draw out of us. And an actor who pulls off one of the hardest effects to achieve — that of believable, extraordinary ordinariness — is likely to get lost in the shuffle.

Which is why I’m here to give a big Texas cheerleader shout-out to Sandra Bullock in John Lee Hancock’s “The Blind Side.” The movie, based on the true story chronicled in Michael Lewis’ book “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” details the rags-to-shoulder-pads rise of Michael Oher, a once-homeless African-American kid who was taken in by a Memphis mom and her family and who, with their help and encouragement, went on to become a top NFL draft pick. In the movie, the lumbering, gentle Oher — his nickname, one that we learn he doesn’t much care for, is “Big Mike” — is played by Quinton Aaron, in a cautious and economical performance. Bullock is the Memphis mom, Leigh Anne Tuohy, a former Ole Miss cheerleader who lives extremely comfortably in a big house with her husband, a former star athlete himself (played by Tim McGraw), and her two children. She works (as an interior decorator), she raises her kids, and she engages in occasional fundraising activities with the other society ladies. She’s blond (from a bottle, natch), she’s peppy and she’s a Republican. So what else do you need to know?

Finally, Zacharek closes it out with:

The response among people I’ve read and talked to since Bullock’s nomination seems to amount to this: She’s an actress people like, but they’re more grudging about granting their respect. But I’d argue that playing an extraordinary everyperson comes with its own specific challenges and its own potential pitfalls. What Sandra Bullock does in “The Blind Side” is wonderful precisely because it doesn’t reach for greatness. Instead it’s built on the sturdy, reliable vocabulary of the ordinary.

But wait, wasn’t Bullock’s character such a big deal because she was anything but ordinary?  What was it about the real Leigh Anne Tuohy that was so exceptional people came from miles around to gaze at her generosity?  She adopted a black football player who had no home.  A wonderful gesture that happens all over the country, all over the world, every day.  The difference here is that the football player himself became such a success despite the way the film dumbed him down.   The story, though, ends up being about how great Leigh Anne Tuohy is, and then is translated into how great Sandra Bullock is.  I will admit I am completely taken in by sap.  It gets me every time.  The Kite Runner, The Great Debaters.  So I’m not judging here in the least bit.  And the more rich white families who share their homes with poor kids who have no families, the better.

So I agree with Zacharek that we ought to remove the politics and faith-based themes of this film (for anyone who might have a problem with that) and just look at the quality of the performance.

I will say that Oscar winners win for all kinds of crazy roles — half of the time, they don’t deserve to win but win because they are the most “liked.”  Academy voters aren’t critics and they aren’t fans.  This business is their bread and butter.  They’re certainly not going to ignore a performance that is arguably the most popular and most talked about performance of the year.

Okay, ducking and putting on my body armor.

Oh and let me answer the questions in advance:  What do I have against Christians?  Nothing.