“It just doesn't matter,” Bill Murray pep-talked to his misfit campers in Meatballs. You've got to think that Teams Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook similarly rallied the troops in the wake of Argo’s surprise Best Picture and Best Director wins at the Golden Globes. Go home, they might have said, it’s the Golden Globes. It just doesn’t matter.
Except that it does, contends In Contention’s Kris Tapley: “Anyone who dismissively calls it a non-issue doesn't get it. With six weeks, every little nuance and acceptance speech will be grist for the mill. It matters.”
That means that Tommy Lee Jones better start smiling, Golden Globe-winner Anne Hathaway better keep all her acceptance speeches as gracious and humble, and Jennifer Lawrence better recover from her rivals-slamming turn hosting Saturday Night Live.
But what matters more are the major Guild award ceremonies in the offing: The Producers Guild Awards on Jan. 26, the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Jan. 27, and the Director’s Guild Awards on Feb. 2. These should give a clearer picture of the Oscar race. Or not. A DGA award, one of the most reliable Oscar indicators, will come to naught should either Ben Affleck or Kathryn Bigelow, neither nominated for an Oscar, win.
As Times-Picayune critic Mike Scott noted on NOLA.com, “Usually the Golden Globes at least do a little to clarify an Oscar race or two, but in what is shaping up to be a more difficult-than-usual year in which to predict the Oscar winners, Sunday's Globes only clouded things… many of the Oscar races would appear to be coin-flip races at this point.”
One thing is irrefutable after Sunday night: After Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s hosting triumph at the Globes, Seth MacFarlane needs to have better jokes than his Hitler gag on nomination morning.
No Best Picture-nominee had a better week than Argo with its seven Oscar nominations and Critics Choice and Golden Globe wins for Best Picture and Best Director. No Oscar nomination for Best Director; no problem. Writes Tom O’Neil on GoldDerby.com:
“There is a clairvoyant member of the academy's producers' branch whose judgment I've learned to trust through the years. He's never been wrong about Best Picture as far as I know, not even when Crash pulled off an upset over Brokeback Mountain. Now he's backing Argo and feels very strongly about it. Right after Oscar noms were announced and before Argo pulled off those jaw-droppers at the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes, he roared at me, ‘Mark my words, Argo is going to win the Oscar. I don't give a damn that Affleck isn't nominated for Best Director. That only makes me more hellbent to vote for his movie!"
But despite Argo being “back in the mix,” wrote Steven Zeitchik and Glenn Whipp in The Los Angeles Times, Lincoln, leading the pack with 12 nominations, remains the frontrunner.
Or not. Silver Linings Playbook, like Lincoln, had a disappointing night at the Globes, but it is the first film since Reds at the 1982 ceremony to have received nominations for Best Picture, Director, all four acting categories, and screenplay. Plus: “People love Silver Linings Playbook; they respect Zero Dark Thirty,” write Michael Hogan and Christopher Hogan for their For Your Consideration blog on Huffington Post.
Silver Linings Playbook producer Harvey Weinstein catered an Italian lunch for members of the Hollywood Foreign Press, the New York Times reported. Lincoln director Steven Spielberg pulled off the coup of getting the services of “Hillary Clinton’s husband” to introduce his film at the Golden Globes. Advantage: Spielberg. Like Tapley said: It matters.
Meanwhile, Kathryn Bigelow, mired in the controversy surrounding her film’s depiction of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” gamely reiterated her “depiction is not endorsement” line of defense in a self-penned article in Wednesday’s The Los Angeles Times.
1. Lincoln
2. Silver Linings Playbook
3. Argo
4. Zero Dark Thirty
5. Life of Pi
6. Beasts of the Southern Wild
7. Les Miserables
8. Amour
9. Django Unchained
With Affleck and Bigelow out of the Best Director race, Spielberg's chances for a third Academy Award for Best Director are looking good, unless David O. Russell benefits from all that Academy love for Silver Linings Playbook. But don’t count out Ang Lee, noted Anne Thompson on her Thompson on Hollywood blog:
“Lee survived the brutal directors derby that left Kathyrn Bigelow, Ben Affleck and Tom Hooper hanging, and he commands serious respect inside the Academy, which gave him the Oscar for Brokeback Mountain. Remember, these 5700 voters are people who know what goes into making movies and this gorgeously executed heart-tugger with worldwide appeal ($400 million and counting) had a high degree of difficulty.”
1.Steven Spielberg (Lincoln)
2. David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook)
3. Ang Lee (Life of Pi)
4. Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
5. Michael Haneke (Amour)
Nothing new to see here. Should Daniel Day-Lewis not emerge victorious on Oscar night, it would be an upset of Saving Private Ryan proportions. But if someone can lead the charge, it would be Hugh Jackman, posits Jenelle Riley on theatre website Backstage.com. Day-Lewis is already a two-time Oscar winner, she noted and Jackman is beloved:
“I mean, BELOVED. Watching Jackman at screenings and in interviews…I’m reminded of the charm offensive waged last year by Jean Dujardin. You remember him, the dashing foreigner who went on to beat frontrunner George Clooney? Actors love Jackman. In a SAG Q&A last week, I watched Jackman get a standing ovation that went on for nearly three minutes, only ending when he asked the audience to stop. And the Academy loves him too—he even hosted the Oscars in 2009 and was, of course, fantastic. Let's not forget that actors make up the biggest branch of voters. And even people who don't like Les Misérables love Jackman.”
1. Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln)
2. Hugh Jackman (Les Miserables)
3. Denzel Washington (Flight)
4.Joaquin Phoenix (The Master)
5. Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook)
Conventional wisdom has this as a two-person race. Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Lawrence each won a Best Actress Golden Globe, the former in the drama category and the latter in the comedy category. And we all know how the Academy feels about comedy. Silver Linings Playbook presently has major awards momentum, but it remains to be seen whether an attempt will be made to reign in Lawrence’s tendency toward off-the-cuff and unfiltered comments (acting is “stupid” in her Vanity Fair cover story; her “I beat Meryl” First Wives Club in-joke in her Golden Globe acceptance speech) that charm many, but may put off older Academy voters who may go for the more mature Chastain. And speaking of mature, Emmanuelle Riva will turn 86 on Oscar night. Can you think of a better birthday than an Academy Award for the venerable actress who received her first Oscar nomination 54 years after her debut in the inscrutable art house classic Hiroshima Mon Amour?
1. Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty)
2. Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook)
3. Emmanuelle Riva (Amour)
4. Naomi Watts (The Impossible)
5. Quvenzhane Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Oscar voters might simply be too intimidated not to vote for Tommy Lee Jones, whose looks-could-kill scowl in response to Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig’s Golden Globe’s bit launched a thousand memes. But this remains the closest race and the one hardest to predict. Noted Christopher Rosen, “Christoph Waltz won (a Golden Globe) -- which was great, since he was great in Django Unchained -- but (a) he didn't have to go up against Robert De Niro at the Golden Globes and (b) he might not have the same support from the AMPAS that he did three years ago, when he was a Hathaway-like shoo-in. That means a Hollywood lifer like De Niro or Tommy Lee Jones could swoop in and take the trophy. Or maybe not, and Waltz dances off with his second Oscar. Stay tuned.”
1. Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln)
2. Robert DeNiro (Silver Linings Playbook)
3. Phillip Seymour Hoffman (The Master)
4. Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained)
5. Alan Arkin (Argo)
Tying her own career arc to that of fellow nominee Sally Field in her Golden Globe acceptance speech was an at once gracious and canny masterstroke by Anne Hathaway, who now, as with Daniel Day-Lewis, has an aura of Oscar inevitability. Anthony Breznican observed in Entertainment Weekly:
“It seems…that there’s one of these each year — an actor contender so sure-fire that it’s not just that everyone adores him or her. It’s that the win seems etched in stone from the earliest tea leaves of Oscar buzz. Natalie Portman was declared the inevitable Oscar winner for Black Swan from the moment the movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, and the scenario never really changed. The aura of inevitability became part of the engine of what made it inevitable. Ditto for Anne Hathaway from the moment Les Misérables was wheeled out to the press. Yet I would love to see Sally Field win the Oscar for her extraordinary and defining performance as Mary Todd Lincoln. You’d think that she’d have a shot. And maybe she does. Yet Hathaway’s fate, like Portman’s, seems to have been decreed in advance by some cosmic media star chamber.”
Anne Thompson was more succinct: “Hathaway is unbeatable,” she proclaimed following Hathaway’s Golden Globe win.
But this category is prone to surprises and upsets, so while this year may not be case in which anything can happen…something might.
1. Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables)
2. Sally Field (Lincoln)
3. Jacki Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook)
4. Helen Hunt (The Sessions)
5. Amy Adams (The Master)
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