This is it, guys. Here are my selections for who should win the Oscars for the big 6 catetgories: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, and Best Picture. Let's get right to it.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Viggo Mortensen in "Eastern Promises" A terrific performance, and if I were all the Oscar voters (as Deep Roy played all the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), he would win. Menacing, funny, author of one of the most awesome fight scenes ever -- a naked bathhouse bloody knife brawl -- and utterly compelling, he gives one of the most original performances of the year. Viggo Mortensen is now the definitive Russian mafioso. And this was one of the best action thrillers in a good while.
Also nominated:
George Clooney in "Michael Clayton" Good, but not his best performance, and not the best of the year. Clooney's a reliable actor: not good enough to lift terrible source material but good enough to make good source material seem great. That's what he does here.
Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood" He'll win, bet on it, but that doesn't mean I had to like him. He's full of conviction and all sorts of impressive actorly mannerisms, but it's a histrionic scene-chewing performance of a one-note character. (For a more measured -- and more chilling -- portrayal of an Old West magnate of greed, see Gerald McRaney as George Hearst in Deadwood.) For Oscar-winning overacting, the new "IS THAT MY DAUGHTER IN THERE?" is "I DRINK... YOUR... MILKSHAKE!"
Johnny Depp in "Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" Fantastic performance by a fantastic actor, but more Globe-worthy than Oscar-worthy. He sings, he dances, he scowls, he prances, but like Day-Lewis he never allows any character development to bubble forth. Still, he's lots of fun in all that makeup.
Tommy Lee Jones in "In the Valley of Elah" I didn't see this, but I imagine his performance here couldn't have been too different than his performance in No Country for Old Men. I'm guessing they were just trying to spread the nominations around.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Charlie Wilson's War" Hilarious. I gave him the Golden Globe in this category, so I'd better stick to my guns. He's a terrific actor, it was a really fun movie, and he was surprisingly good as a classic comic relief/second fiddle. He won't win, because comic actors don't win as often as dramatic ones unless they're Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny. But it's not an overwhelmingly strong category this year, and Bardem will win, of course. It's No Country's year.
Also nominated:
Casey Affleck in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" I heard he was incredible, and if I'd seen the movie I'd probably have gone for him.
Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men" Everyone loved this guy but me, frankly. He'll win the Oscar. His menace struck me as being adolescent. As a man with a gun, he's easy to fear, but for me he fell short of what the Coens were striving to portray: the sort of existential dread of a cold universe that cares nothing for the fates of its charges. Instead, he was just a guy with a terrible haircut and a compressed air machine.
Hal Holbrook in "Into the Wild" My friend Justin Noble makes a convincing argument that this guy should win, but I just didn't see it. He's a wonderful actor -- I didn't think of Mark Twain once while watching the movie! -- but only onscreen for about ten minutes, and the movie's main character is so narcissistic that his memory hardly lingers. His familiar, wrinkled face is a pleasure to behold, but as with Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, there's only so much an old man's craggy face can tell you about the human condition. 10 minutes isn't quite enough to say it all.
Tom Wilkinson in "Michael Clayton" A nice performance by a wonderful actor of a man going righteously bonkers, but it wasn't quite the best of the year. Still, I like Wilkinson, and I'm glad he's followed other great old British actors and moved from the standard arthouse period dramas to more mainstream fare like Batman Begins and this movie.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Ellen Page in "Juno" Great performance, even though she can't quite suppress her Canadian accent, and even though she mostly just channels Thora Birch from Ghost World. Still, it's a funnier movie, and a less misanthropic one, and Page deserves recognition for a great performance even if Hollywood is still casting hot chicks as characters who are supposed to be the opposite of hot chicks.
Also nominated
Cate Blanchett in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"
Julie Christie in "Away from Her" It's great that she's back in front of the camera. She reportedly gave a great performance, but I suspect she got a Globe for who she is, not what she did, and she may be able to carry it all the way to the Oscars.
Marion Cotillard in "La Vie en Rose"
Laura Linney in "The Savages" That she doesn't have an Oscar is an outrage. I didn't see this movie, but Laura Linney is pretty close to the best actress in Hollywood, hardware or no.
PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Tilda Swinton in "Michael Clayton" Again, I gave her the Globe, so I'm sticking to my guns. Had I seen Ronan or Ryan, I might have changed my mind. But Swinton gave a surprisingly moving performance in a role from which you really wouldn't have expected it, the unscrupulous lawyer trying to let someone get away with murder in a courtroom drama. She's a fine actress, and whether she gets the hardware or not, it's nice that she was nominated.
Also nominated:
Cate Blanchett in "I'm Not There" I hear this was a remarkable performance, and I'm betting she'll win the Oscar for it, especially as there's no chance she's winnong for crappy Elizabeth sequel.
Ruby Dee in "American Gangster" She had about half of Hal Holbrook's screen time, and only one really meaty scene. But in that one scene she really made an impression. Neither Ruby Dee nor her late husband Ossie Davis have done much movie acting in the past 20 years outside of periodic Spike Lee films, but it's always a pleasure to see either of them. In this movie, she looks positively regal as a woman fatally compromised by her loving, corrupt, drug lord son. She doesn't have much to do, but it's wonderful to see her.
Saoirse Ronan in "Atonement"
Amy Ryan in "Gone Baby Gone" So get this: an actress got an Oscar nomination for a movie that Ben Affleck directed. And supposedly she's terrific. How crazy is that?
ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTING
"No Country for Old Men" Joel Coen and Ethan Coen One of their most fully-realized movies, albeit not their best. But this is a weak field this year, and with Juno and Michael Clayton in the Best Director and Best Picture races blocking more worthy contenders, the Coens really don't have much competition. I'm giving them the award because I think they'll win and because I don't think anyone else in the list deserves it over them. (I do, however, think that Tim Burton, Brad Bird, and David Cronenberg deserve it over them, that it's weird that Sean Penn wasn't even nominated, and that Danny Boyle, Paul Verhoeven, and Paul Greengrass deserved a bit more consideration than they received, and probably deserved a nomination over Reitman and Gilroy.)
Also nominated:
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" Julian Schnabel A dark horse to win, Schnabel has been making critically acclaimed character studies that no one sees like this since his debut, Basquiat. In all likelihood, he won't get the award, but if the voters think the Coens are getting too much, he could be a compromise vote.
"Juno" Jason Reitman Reitman did a better job with this movie than he might have. Though he fully indulged one of his trademarks -- quick flashback asides keyed to dialogue, as in The Simpsons or Family Guy -- he managed to rein in his young actors and get them to give remarkably mature performances for a high school sex comedy.
"Michael Clayton" Tony Gilroy Gilroy's debut, and it was terrific, but fully a genre piece. He proves capable and competent, and he'll get even better once his directorial ambitions reach full flower.
"There Will Be Blood" Paul Thomas Anderson The buzz about this movie was incredible, but it just didn't live up to it. Anderson is a notorious control freak, and he did himself no favors by wearing all the hats he did: the movie suffered from his decision to have Paul Dano play two characters, from his script, and from his thudding direction. There was a great movie somewhere in the three hours of screen time, but Anderson's always been too self-indulgent for his own good, and one of these years he'll need to come to terms with that.
BEST MOTION PICTURE OF THE YEAR
"No Country for Old Men" Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, Producers Not my favorite movie of the year (that would be Eastern Promises or Ratatouille), but the one in the list I like the best, and also the one I think will win.
Also nominated:
"Atonement" Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Paul Webster, Producers
"Juno" Lianne Halfon, Mason Novick and Russell Smith, Producers This year's Little Miss Sunshine, the little indie comedy that could. Both are flawed, overrated, overwritten, and full of the kind of cookie-cutter quirk foisted on arthouse audiences by major studios looking to corner the market on indie comedies. Neither one deserved a Best Picture nomination, but both are pretty good, and Juno's probably better. Little Miss Sunshine's saving grace was Alan Arkin, who won an Oscar for his performance; this one is saved by a genuinely terrific performance by Ellen Page, and its humanism toward its characters. No matter how annoying, no character in the movie is genuinely bad; all are trying to be good people, and that makes them sympathetic. Not one of the best movies of the year, but a good movie, and that's no mean praise.
"Michael Clayton" Sydney Pollack, Jennifer Fox and Kerry Orent, Producers Producer Sydney Pollack gave a solid performance in the movie (even better than his "Oh, I'm sorry -- is my directing interfering with your phone call?") commercials; it's always fun to see directors act. And this was a solid movie, a solidly professional performance by George Clooney in a star vehicle designed for him. If it wasn't appreciably better than a movie like The Client or The Pelican Brief, it's still in very good company as a rare latter-day exponent of a previously thriving genre, and it's nice to see both as a good movie and, hopefully, as a harbinger of more legal thrillers to come. Here's hoping.
"There Will Be Blood" JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Lupi, Producers I've said enough about this overrated, overacted, overwrought mess of a movie, sunk by its director's ego, poor scriptwriting, and inability to self-censor his boundless ambition, and by Jonny Greenwood's incoherent score. As with all spectacular failures, there's a lot about this movie that's great. There's a lot more that's awful. The reactions to it were equally varied, and equally extreme. Some day, Paul Thomas Anderson may make a masterpiece. This isn't it.