You've Gotta Give 'Em Hope, or How Oscar Got Its Groove Back

I woke up this morning in a mangled heap. My bedsheets were congregated in the furthermost corner of my bed, I turned my weary bones to see a trail of toilet roll coming out of the bathroom. My head did, and still does, feel like a train has run over it (either that or a Slumdog Millionaire fanatic has kicked it in - they're evil you know), and my stomach is emanating a collection of sounds comparable to urban warfare.

From what I remember last night was wonderful. Hugh Jackman's hyped hosting an unrivalled success, and a classy back-to-basics style ceremony that encompassed past winners returning to present the acting awards (a bit of a strange process, but one that instilled so much pride in the leading Actress nominees at the sight of Sophia Loren and Shirley MaClaine that it hardly mattered), and it's good that the organisers of the show seemed so keen on giving these people their moment in the spotlight, however long that moment was going to last.

The best speeches of the night were the Milk wins. Especially Dustin Lance Black, who came across as so overcome, genuine, and humble, and it's encouraging to see gay men honoured for gay-themed films and the issues that said film represents confronted so passionately and gracefully. I suspect that these Oscars will be lauded, since Hugh's musical theatrics went down so well, and the film the whole world and his wife seemingly wanted to triumph did the job. Personally, it represented my most fruitful prediction score ever, with 20 out of 24 categories correct, including the wins for Penn and The Dark Knight in Sound Editing. But I should have predicted Departures (and probably would have if I'd done them a couple of days later) since virtually everyone was telling me it was in with a chance in the last week.

I will mention one positive thing about Slumdog's big win. I have always loved the idea of the cast and crew going up to collect the award together. Filmmaking is a team sport, and if Danny Boyle's film has generated anything lasting and meaningful it's the community with which its fiercely devoted set of fans embody, and the decision for everyone to be involved in its big moment seems incredibly apt in this way.

Best Win: Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight

Worst Win: Slumdog Millionaire for Adapted Screenplay

Best Speech: Dustin Lance Black for Milk

Worst Speech: There wasn't really one.

Best Dressed: Taraji P. Henson, Kate Winslet, Anne Hathaway

Worst Dressed: Beyonce, Melissa Leo

Best Moment: Philippe Petit balancing the Oscar on his nose

Worst Moment: Ben Stiller's weird Joaquin Phoenix impersonation

So I guess that's another Oscar race over, but I imagine it won't be long before we're discussing the chances of Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, and whoever else in 2009. My review of 2008 and Addict awards will begin in a couple of days.

The Oscar Winners (as if you didn't know)

Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Best Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Best Original Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black, Milk
Best Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Animated Feature: WALL-E
Best Animated Short: La Maison en Petites Cubes
Best Art Direction: Benjamin Button
Best Costume Design: The Duchess
Best Makeup: Benjamin Button
Best Cinematography: Anthony Dod Mantle, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Live Action Short: Toyland
Best Documentary Feature: Man on Wire
Best Documentary Short: Smile Pinki
Best Visual Effects: Benjamin Button
Best Sound Editing: The Dark Knight
Best Sound Mixing: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Film Editing: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Music Score: A.R. Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Song: Jai Ho, Slumdog Millionaire

2008 Oscar Preview & Predictions: Visuals

Art Direction

Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Duchess
Revolutionary Road

What Should Have Been Nominated? There's a major argument for Wall-E, which has the most imaginative and defined production design of 2008. The Fall was never going to get nominated but it has such interesting, diverse arrangement, from the colourful expanse of fantasy to the murky grime of post-war healthcare.

What Deserves To Win? There are few things in this life more overwrought than Changeling but you can muster up an ounce of forgiveness for the richness of its production. The Dark Knight is great too.

What Will Win? I'd be surprised if The Curious Case of Benjamin Button didn't win. It's the only BP nominee of the five and whichever way you look at it the thirteen-nomination haul won't prove fruitful next week.


Cinematography

Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

What Should Have Been Nominated? Above all, the CFCA-nominated work in The Fall. I much prefer Roger Deakins' cinematography in Revolutionary Road to his nomination for The Reader, as he succesfully navigates the restricted visual artificiality of suburbia. I don't know how The Wrestler's Darren Aronofsky and Maryse Alberti couldn't manage a nomination between them, and it's the photography I find increasingly impressive about the gritty Mickey Rourke flick.

What Deserves To Win? The Dark Knight, which is definitely OTT, but certainly a whole lot more consistent with the tone and nature of the film than Slumdog's is. The rest don't excite me.

What Will Win? Slumdog Millionaire. It's very blatant in striking a visual chord and thus is memorable. It's also the BP frontrunner.



Costume Design

Australia
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Duchess
Milk
Revolutionary Road

What Should Have Been Nominated? This is a fine set of nominees but if I'd have had my way Eiko Ishioka's designs for The Fall (yes, again) would have been justly rewarded. Although ineligible, April Ferry's cutesy rural wartime outfits hit the spot in The Edge of Love, and don't actively seek attention in the way that some of this year's nominated costumers undoubtedly do. The Secret Life of Bees has such a bright, fantasy-style tone to it that's mimicked wonderfully by the attire of Queen Latifah et al.

What Deserves To Win? Australia and The Duchess have clothes that adhere to their respective periods and in both cases illustrate the flamboyance of their production, so it's difficult to pick a winner. Probably Australia because it seems to confound expectation and celebrate originality a little more.

What Will Win? The Duchess, since it's so definitely a costume drama. Even Milena Canonero won this in 2006 for Marie Antoinette, despite the film being unpopular and regarded as a failure by many. What do they know? :-P


Film Editing

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Frost/Nixon
Milk
Slumdog Millionaire

What Should Have Been Nominated? Burn After Reading's mechanical seamlessness contributes to the continual satire, and Quantum of Solace is one of the more well-put-together Bond films in recent memory, cool and engaging without ever going full-blown crazy/frantic.

What Deserves To Win? Elliot Graham's work on Milk is excellent, spanning years with ease and blending archival footage gracefully, without making these forays into the past seem sentimental or unnecessary.

What Will Win? The Slumdawg. Overdone, but they love lively.



Make Up

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Hellboy II: The Golden Army

What Should Have Been Nominated? Doomsday. Gore, disease, physical deformation, mutation, tribal beonging. Madness. I also love the makeup in Let the Right One In, which meshes well with the setting and like the film feels very natural amidst its own physical and thematic extremes.

What Deserves To Win? The Dark Knight. Joker and Two-Face. Creeeepy.

What Will Win? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which wouldn't be my choice but isn't a bad one. Major gimmicky age make-up for everyone involved.


Visual Effects

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Iron Man

What Should Have Been Nominated? The wondrous effects-laden Eagle Eye, which regrettably offers up big budget theatrics with very little consideration for much else, and somehow manages to cast Shia LaBoeuf as someone called Jerry (surely he hasn't reached that stage yet?). But whatever, great FX.

What Deserves To Win? All of these films have so much money pumped into them that the effects were inevitably going to be impressive, but I think that the guys from The Dark Knight have the toughest job in making impact when everything around it is so equally dark and dangerous.

What Will Win? It's a semi-tough call because I'm not sure that The Dark Knight will win any other Tech awards, and so is in with a chance. But I can't help thinking that the win for The Golden Compass over Transformers last year means that cutesy and colourful wins the day, and so I'm willing to bet that Benjamin Button grabs this prize.

Best of 2008: Music

It's nearing the end of the year (less than two weeks now!) and so it's about time I put some year-end lists together. I love making lists, editing lists, agonising over list-placings, and so forth. This installment is all about MUSIC, and believe me, I agonised over this particular list, switching my top three albums so restlessly that I became a Caravan Girl, ate myself, exploded in a bout of Happiness, and was eventually rushed to A & E. Yet Seventh Tree still didn't top my list. Hmm ... At the risk of sounding like an Alexander Payne speech, music albums evolve in your mind over time. It's totally about longevity... and about making a fifty-minute CD that's a compact bundle of joy that you wouldn't dare remove a song from. I'm sure it ain't easy but these albums (largely) achieve something special.

I've amended last year's list to include albums which I hadn't heard by December, which included M.I.A's masterpiece Kala, Arcade Fire's meditative Neon Bible, and the runaway best album of the year, Roisin Murphy's dance classic, Overpowered. Last year's number one, Girl's Aloud's Tangled Up is now at number five, though I admittedly still listen to a few of the songs on it. The lasting ones: Damn, What You Crying For?, and the still-sublime Call the Shots. It pales in comparison to their amazing effort this year, but there's so much competition (such is the amount of decent music in 2008) that I had a major dilemna tweaking the upper rankings.

As for the singles, well, I've strayed away from the songs released from albums in the 2007 edition, since it's not really championing new music. Instead, it's pretty much the twenty-five (no, I couldn't get the list any smaller) tunes that play with my emotions the most -- whether it be plucking away at my delicate strings or urging me to dance wildly and make a complete fool of myself. They're both of equal worth, right?

Albums of 2008



10. Black Kids - Partie Traumatic

For a start, I love the three singles the Black Kids released this year -- two of which are in my singles list and the other, Look At Me (When I Rock Wichoo) a close omission. This band stands out from all those boring indie bands that are around at the moment, mixing it up musically and crucially bringing the fun factor to an exhausted (of late) style of music.

9. Alphabeat - This Is Alphabeat

I can't stand Rubber Boots either, but if you take that away this is a solid, excellent pop album, filled with plenty of cheese and tons of bite. Go-Go is a favourite (why didn't they release that?!), as well as the addictive Boyfriend. I think they hail from Denmark (or Norway?) so together with Robyn they're really spicing up the Scandinavian pop scene.



8. Burial - Untrue

The Mercury Music Prize can be very pretentious at times, but at the end of the day it does what it says on the tin. I had never heard of Burial, nor Rachel Unthank, and I certainly wouldn't have known about the wonder of Laura Marling. Burial is a mysterious man (Jo Whiley joked that there are only two known photos of him), but whatever his Pimpernel-esque status he crafts an album full of unique sounds that conjure up stark imagery and feel atmospherically dense.

7. Kleerup - Kleerup

Robyn wasn't wholly responsible for last year's incredible With Every Heartbeat, you know? Kleerup featured on it and have now released their own album, showcasing collaborations with Marit Bergman, Neneh Cherry, and fresh-faced Lykke Li herself, who you'll be seeing quite a bit of in the course of this post. It's not the most innovative or intense dance track you've ever heard, but it'll get you revved up no problem.

6. Grace Jones - Hurricane

I totally jumped on the Grace Jones bandwagon this year. I was only a baby when she released her previous album so it ain't shock of the century that I wasn't so familiar with the woman (past Slave to the Rhythm), but trust me, I feel suitably enlightened right now. Hurricane is a little gem; political, generous, epic, mammoth, and most importantly always true to itself. This Is opens the record as unapologetically as any number of novels have done in the past. A major comeback.

5. Will Young - Let It Go

I surprise myself. Not that I don't like Will Young, don't get me wrong. Hell, I voted four times for him when he won Pop Idol. I've paid for his career! But, fine as his songs have been lately (and I usually like the singles he releases) he doesn't do much for me from a musical standpoint. Being honest, there isn't much to get excited about in that way on Let It Go either, but lyrically this album is filled with such grief, pain, and the tumultuous nature of being in love with someone. It's so honest, and as such his voice is as lingering as his words. A good chunk of the album is superb.



4. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

Vampire Weekend's music feels so nonchalant... almost like somebody's died and you haven't noticed. But it's amazing that they can make this feel a) captivating, and b) strangely uplifting, even when you haven't got a clue why they're going on about Oxford Uni or Peter Gabriel. It's an absoloute delight, and something that stands out as original without having any entrenched gimmicks or personalities.

3. Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree

Oh, is it really number three? :'( .. I can see myself switching this top three in my head as the year's pass, since they seem to interchange in my CD player like an unrelenting pinwheel. I can say Seventh Tree is a marvel; it's majestic, gorgeous, and yet precocious and shy, spirited, wallowing. It's a paradox. How can listening to songs that proclaim love as "the folly" and have lines so negative as "you don't love me" be so gratuitous? And every song seems to build up and up... from the soaring end of Little Bird (my favourite part of the album) to the emotional breakdown in Eat Yourself and the dramatic end to A & E. What makes it number three (and this is a pretty technically perfect record) is because it feels more modest. I daren't say the word "slight". I maybe feel less generous towards the subtle than the daring, which is to a degree a reversal of my feelings towards Acting. To use an Oscar analogy (why not?) this is the inhibited Catalina Sandino Moreno to the consuming Annette Bening at #2, and the angst-ridden Imelda Staunton at #1.



2. Girls Aloud - Out of Control

I think this says it all.


1. Lykke Li - Youth Novels

It's great to be young. Very few responsibilities... good skin... you can have sex with whoever you want and not fall under an anvil of judgement. Lykke Li is just 22. You can tell this through the subjects she paruses in Youth Novels, the young love in Little Bit, where she sings about being under that familiar spell of only wanting to give an inch of yourself in fear of getting hurt, only to end up declaring yourself as no more than a possession. The line "And for you I keep my legs apart, and forget about my tainted heart" rings true also. Dance, Dance, Dance is about having fun and forgetting your troubles, Let It Fall is an all-out love fest, as she sings "And I love the way tears hit my face". But the music and lyrics often feel really mature in this way, and it's interspersed with such touching moments of sadness, heartbreak and alarming self-doubt. Everybody But Me is particularly self-critical. But what caps the album off are the volatile, aggressive tunes, like I'm Good I'm Gone and the life-changing Breaking It Up, which really encompass what this album is all about: being young, naive, impetuous, ready to blow, but having the absoloute time of your life.


Singles of 2008

1. Black Kids - I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You

2. Kings of Leon - Sex on Fire

3. Lykke Li - Little Bit

4. Janelle Monae - Many Moons

5. Vampire Weekend - A-Punk

6. MGMT - Time To Pretend

7. Laura Marling - Night Terror

8. Pendulum - Propane Nightmares

9. Lykke Li - Breaking It Up

10. Grace Jones - Williams' Blood

11. Jordin Sparks feat. Chris Brown - No Air

12. Girls Aloud - The Promise

13. Goldfrapp - A & E

14. Kylie Minogue - The One (Freemasons Vocal Mix)

15. CSS - Left Behind

16. Kleerup feat. Marit Bergman - 3AM

17. Leona Lewis - Forgive Me

18. Estelle feat. Kanye West - American Boy

19. Burial - Ghost Hardware

20. The Saturdays - Up

21. Alphabeat - Boyfriend

22. The Pussycat Dolls - When I Grow Up

23. Duffy - Rockferry

24. Black Kids - Hurricane Jane

25. Santogold - L.E.S. Artistes

Here's to an amazing year of music in 2009. *Clink" *Clink* *giggle*

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year...La La La

So here we are. It's that time of year again, although you wouldn't think it, would you? This year's Oscar race is frankly as flat as a pancake, and it'll take a lot of these unproven December releases to come up trumps to make this year's competition as juicy as last years. But still: a race is a race is a race, and it's time I made some official predictions.

I'll start by saying that Slumdog Millionaire looks like a frontrunner at this stage. It's got raves, positivity, a wonderful poster. Is is too Field of Dreams? Time will tell, but for now it's nailed on for the nomination. As is Milk, which could prove to be one of the few buzzed about films of the year that actually gets universal praise -- if early word on the other contenders is to be believed, anyway. The Dark Knight made gazillions, and feels like a pulpy Michael Mann film rather than a comic book movie, so I wouldn't put it far behind.

As for the rest, we'll see. Nothing save that batman film and Wall-E made any impact before Autumn and it's pretty much guesswork as to the other two BP slots. I'm going for Benjamin Button because it's gimmicky, has a good cast, a good director, and there's something about the trailer that's kinda Forrest Gump about it. With a hint of Golden Compass. I know, it's weird. Edward Zwick's mediocre late-year released Blood Diamond stole in to grab multiple nominations in a fairly weak 2006, and so what will his Defiance achieve in an even weaker 2008? I say it might just make a lasting impression with its New Year's audacity.

But there are other contenders; Aronofsky's The Wrestler seems incredibly heavy but no doubt popular, Revolutionary Road seems depressing but high-brow, and Doubt's trailer wails "take me seriously" with the force of a pissy banshee. Wall-E is the film I really want to triumph, and it could just become the second Animated Feature ever to be nominated in this category. Wouldn't that be lovely?

Other observations.... Eastwood's gonna get nominated somewhere. Sally Hawkins is seriously on the brink of being ousted by the star power of Anne Hathaway, unless Jolie's performance is too much for them, but I doubt it. Robert Downey Jnr. had a major year, and so a nomination for Tropic Thunder in a very weak category seems entirely plausible. Totally regretting not seeing that at the cinema now, by the way. Oh, and it's looking increasingly like Best Actor will be the most exciting race (Rourke, Penn, Di Caprio or Langella?) and Supporting Actress will be the most boring (surely Viola Davis is gonna grab that?).

Predictions follow in full. *** = lock ** = likely * = need to keep campaigning

BEST PICTURE

*The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

**The Dark Knight

*Defiance

***Milk

***Slumdog Millionaire

Alternative: Wall-E

BEST DIRECTOR

*Darren Aronofsky - The Wrestler

***Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire

*Clint Eastwood - Gran Torino/Changeling

**Christopher Nolan - The Dark Knight

***Gus Van Sant - Milk

Alternative: David Fincher - The Curious Case...

BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

**Leonardo Di Caprio - Revolutionary Road

*Daniel Craig - Defiance

**Frank Langella - Frost/Nixon

***Sean Penn - Milk

***Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

Alternative: Clint Eastwood - Gran Torino

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

*Sally Hawkins - Happy-Go-Lucky

*Angelina Jolie - Changeling

*Kristin Scott-Thomas - I've Loved You So Long

***Meryl Streep - Doubt

***Kate Winslet - Revolutionary Road

Alternative: Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married

BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

*Josh Brolin - Milk

*Robert Downey Jnr. - Tropic Thunder

**Philip Seymour Hoffman - Doubt

***Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

***Michael Shannon - Revolutionary Road

Alternative: Liev Schreiber - Defiance

BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

***Penelope Cruz - Vicky Cristina Barcelona

***Viola Davis - Doubt

*Marisa Tomei - The Wrestler

*Kate Winslet - The Reader

*Elsa Zylberstein - I've Loved You So Long

Alternative: Taraji P. Henson - The Curious Case...