It’s one month before the Academy Awards: Do you know where your Oscar buzz is? This week has been rife with distractions from the main event, including the Sundance Film Festival and the presidential inauguration, not to mention the public spectacle of admitted liar Lance Armstrong and online hoax victim Manti Te’o. And then there’s the little matter of new Academy rules that prohibit campaigning following the Oscar nominations.
Movies can be screened, but the Harvey Weinstein gravy train has come to a halt. Showbiz 411’s Roger Friedman thinks it’s a mistake:
“If this were the case in actual political campaigning, the correlation would be that prior to the conventions you could entertain potential voters. But between the choosing of the nominees and the election — from Labor Day til November 7th or so — all talk of the candidates would cease.”
Actually, that sounds pretty sweet. But the result in regards to the Oscars, he writes, “is that no one is talking about the Academy Awards at all.”
That will change this weekend with the Producers and Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremonies on Saturday and Sunday, respectively. Throw in the Director’s Guild Awards on Sat. Feb. 2, and it will be Oscar Unchained until the broadcast on Sun. Feb. 24.
And it wasn’t an entirely uneventful week. Let’s check the Gold Linings Playbook to see who’s feeling the amour, who’s miserables, and who’s trying to achieve the impossible.
Best Picture
Lincoln remains the frontrunner on account of its 12 nominations. Marshall Flores, on behalf of Awards Daily, crunched the numbers and found that the film with the most nominations has won Best Picture 57 times. But just as Zero Dark Thirty became a target for those who question its politics, its depiction of torture and the filmmakers’ access to the CIA, Steven Spielberg's biopic has amassed some detractors, too. Okay, it’s mainly The New York Post and Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells, but still. Meanwhile, the Argo train is gaining steam with each passing week, further fueled by its surprise Golden Globe and Critics Choice wins in the wake of Academy's unfathomable snub of Affleck for a Best Director nomination.
The Daily Beast’s Ramin Setoodeh offers, “If there’s one thing the Academy loves, it’s a comeback story—and a funny thing happened on the red carpet. The early precursor awards that were supposed to go to Lincoln went to Argo instead.” Plus, let’s not forget that Argo portrays America, not to mention the film industry, in a heroic light.
Here’s an interesting scenario posited by Gold Derby’s Zack Laws:
“In every other category in which it contends, our experts are predicting another nominee to win. So you have to stop and wonder: can Argo be the first film since 1935 to win Best Picture without winning anything else? “
Silver Linings Playbook expanded nationwide to more than 2,500 theatres last week, and got an endorsement on Huffington Post from “Dr. Oz” (“The movie shows us the humanity and similarities in the lives of those who are challenged with major disorders”). Beasts of the Southern Wild, already available on DVD and Blu-ray, was also re-released in select theatres a year following its Sundance triumph.
1. Lincoln
2. Argo
3. Silver Linings Playbook
4. Zero Dark Thirty
5. Life of Pi
6. Beasts of the Southern Wild
7. Les Miserables
8. Amour
9. Django Unchained
Best Director
Lincoln may have a tenuous hold on its frontrunner status, but as Steven Spielberg knows all too well, there is precedent for a director taking home the Best Director Oscar without a corresponding Best Picture win. It happened to him at the 1999 ceremony when Saving Private Ryan, for which he was honored, lost to Shakespeare in Love. More recently, his fellow nominee this year, Ang Lee, won for Brokeback Mountain while Crash took Best Picture bragging rights. This year, we can’t even be sure that the DGA, which is handing out its awards Feb. 2, will put this race into sharper focus. Three of its nominees are absent from the Academy’s Best Director slate.
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)
Best Actor
It remains a foregone conclusion that Daniel Day-Lewis is poised to make Oscar history as the first to win three Academy Awards for Best Actor. But the week was livened up by news that Joaquin Phoenix was honored at the London Critics’ Choice Awards. Sparing the London critics the disdain he reserves for the Oscars, Phoenix rose to the occasion with a gracious acceptance letter:
"I struggle with the idea of winning awards for acting. Stating I'm Best Actor for something as subjective as film seems strange to me. To the uninitiated it implies I'm solely responsible for the creation and implementation of the character. I am not.”
After gracious thank yous to cast and even crew members, he concluded with this recommendation:
“P.S. There's an up-and-coming actor named Daniel who's in a movie called Lincoln. You should check it out."
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)
Best Actress
There may not be a Saturday Night Live curse per se, but over 38 seasons only a handful of actors who have hosted as official Oscar nominees have gone on to win. The last was Forest Whitaker in 2007, when he was crowned Best Actor for his performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.
The mostly panned episode did not help Jennifer Lawrence’s chances of joining an exclusive club that includes only Jeremy Irons and Hilary Swank. Lawrence was game, but the writing for her episode was strictly from hunger.
Meanwhile, Jessica Chastain had something of a career weekend, starring in the nation’s No. 1 (Mama) and No. 2 (Zero Dark Thirty) films at the box office. She topped such present and past box office heavyweights as Arnold, Mark Wahlberg, and Russell Crowe, and while several Oscar pundits still give the edge to Lawrence as the heart of the much-loved Silver Linings Playbook, Academy members are likely to reward the Julliard-trained Chastain, who has now proven her versatility and box office clout.
But don’t count out Amour’s 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva, counters Gold Derby’s Tariq Khan, who argues in part that “this year’s critical darling…has the most challenging role; support is soft for the category’s perceived frontrunners; (and) the Academy is filled with Francophiles.”
Khan, who in recent years correctly picked Marion Cotillard and The King’s Speech to score Oscar upsets, has another irrefutable argument on behalf of Riva: “Because I said so.”
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)
Best Supporting Actor
“I don't think there is a front-runner in this category,” New York magazine’s Kyle Buchanan wrote on Jan. 10. “All five of the men nominated here have won before, so it's something of an even playing field, and Jones has a super-tasty Lincoln performance full of Big Scenes, which could give him an advantage. But Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman are no slouches, either. The former has dropped not-so-subtle hints about how much he'd like a trophy, while the latter, in particular, could win for what's basically a co-lead performance.” Except for Waltz’s Golden Globe win, not much has changed in the past two weeks. Waltz made an appearance on The View last week, but so far none of the others have been working the talk show circuit. Again, the SGA awards this weekend should help sort out this category.
1.Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln)
2. Robert DeNiro (Silver Linings Playbook)
3. Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained)
4. Phillip Seymour Hoffman (The Master)
5. Alan Arkin (Argo)
Best Supporting Actress
For Anne Hathaway, hope is high and life worth living as this category’s frontrunner.
1. Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables)
2. Sally Field (Lincoln)
3. Helen Hunt (The Sessions)
4. Amy Adams (The Master)
5. Jacki Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook)
Final Oscar voting begins Feb. 8 and wraps Feb. 19.
Follow Movieline on Twitter.