Frozen River
Happy-Go-Lucky
In Bruges
Milk
Wall-E
What Should Have Been Nominated? I suspect that the Coen's Burn After Reading finished relatively close behind, along with the other three or four screenplays that were in with a chance at the eleventh hour. It would have been a worthier nominee than a couple of these picks. Jonathan Levine's The Wackness didn't have a cat in hell's chance but it meanders topics previously treated as token in indie comedies chiefly and callously turns its characters inside out.
What Deserves To Win? Andrew Stanton's Wall-E, which I've gushed and gushed about for seemingly forever.
What Will Win? In Bruges will get a few votes but it may be stretching things to think it has reached a Lost in Translation or Eternal Sunshine level of revered originality. I think it more likely that Milk will win because its only other chance is for Sean Penn, and although Wall-E has a record number of animations for an Animated film it couldn't get a BP nod and it doesn't have a lot of dialogue.
Adapted Screenplay
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Doubt
Frost/Nixon
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire
What Should Have Been Nominated? Anything else???? The Dark Knight, The Fall, Let the Right One In, Savage Grace...
What Deserves To Win? Definitely David Hare's adaptation of The Reader, which undeniably trips itself up on occasion but is often thoughtful.
What Will Win? That movie about kids in India.
Original Score
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Defiance
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E
What Should Have Been Nominated? James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer's collaboration for The Dark Knight, which was apparently disqualified. Similarly, last year's masterful There Will Be Blood score got the chop. Also a special shout-out to John Powell's Horton Hears a Who score, which got nominated for a Golden Satellite and Golden Reel but couldn't manage anything else.
What Deserves To Win? A.R. Rahman will have many of the Indian headlines on Monday morning, and in terms of this set of nominees, a win for him here would be justified. Slumdog's towering, colourful music is the best thing about it.
What Will Win? Slumdog Millionaire.
Original Song
Slumdog Millionaire - "Jaiho"
Slumdog Millionaire - "O Saya"
Wall-E - "Down to Earth"
What Deserves To Win? I'm in the O Saya camp. The Slumdog soundtrack is great.
What Will Win? It's tough because I like Peter Gabriel, he's the only big name nominee in this line-up, and there's the possibility of vote-splitting, but there are two things that suggest to me that Jaiho will probably win. The first is that when Lord of the Rings was as unstoppable as Slumdog seems this year it managed to wrestle this prize away from three superior songs. I love Annie Lennox but Into the West is nothing great. The second is the Hustle and Flow win over Dolly Parton in 2005, which proves that you don't need to be a big name or have an easy-listening track to prevail.
Sound Editing
The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E
Wanted
What Should Have Been Nominated? Eagle Eye - top notch action, and The Strangers has some spine-tingling sound effects too.
What Deserves To Win? Good category, but I think that The Dark Knight definitely trumps the others. It's so audacious and hammers home the audio thrills and spills with unflinching force.
What Will Win? I don't want to say Slumdog so I'll go for The Dark Knight, because it's not going to win a lot, and this seems to be the category where they go for loud/action.
Sound Mixing
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E
Wanted
What Should Have Been Nominated? Again, The Strangers. Making horror films scary is a lot more dependent upon the sound now with the countless number of visual sights we've been subjected to. Doomsday has that loud, epic but crucially natural cult grit.
What Deserves To Win? The patient, perfect mechanism of system in Wall-E; whether that be robots, spaceships, the clasp of a hand, or a foray into American musicals as cultural irony.
What Will Win? Slumdog Millionaire. They favour films with lots of music in it.
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