My Final Oscar 2018 Predictions And Some Random Thoughts About The Nominees

I also discussed my Oscars predictions with Teen Sheng for the Plan A Magazine podcast, which was a lot of fun recording and I think you will really enjoy listening to:

This Sunday, March 4th is my Super Bowl -- The Oscars. You already know from one of my previous blog posts that I'm rooting for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri for Best Picture but do you want to know what my other picks are? 

The Awards Show

Ever since the beginning of the #metoo movement, I've been curious about how this year's awards season would unfold. This year, it will be interesting FOR ONCE to listen to the acceptance speeches. I think all the winners are going to try to make a statement of some sort. Hopefully it won't be the usual, self-congratulatory, I'd-like-to-thank-everyone-I've-ever-met for this award and I'm-so-humbled-to-be-standing-here-in-front-of-all-of-you. 

Dunkirk

This movie is a lot shorter than a typical Christopher Nolan film. It's only an hour and 46 minutes. It is an excellent movie and also deserving of a Best Picture nomination. I saw this movie over the summer in the theaters and I knew when I saw it, it would be in the Oscar race. It doesn't have same feel of a WWII film either because now we tend to think of Saving Private Ryan as the most WWII film ever. This movie is about the event itself. It's just about the evacuation of all these men and being in the middle of a horrific situation. It's pretty much just one gigantic sequence. 

When it comes to winning Best Picture, my issue is that I'm so sick of WWII movies winning Oscars. Can we please have some new stories? It's so formulaic at this point: Make a movie about either WWII or the Holocaust and you win some Oscars. YAWN....

Best Supporting Actor/Actress

Best Supporting Actor/Actress is a category that is filled with villains and antiheroes and because I'm so drawn to those kinds of characters, this category is the most exciting for me - aside from Best Picture. They are very often the pathos of the movie and the most interesting conversations tend to revolve around them. 

I am going to go with Alison Janney because of her performance in I, Tonya. She plays Tonya Harding's abusive, controlling mother. It's a very transformative role and she's almost unrecognizable in that wig and glasses. See, the Academy loves stuff like that. They love it when people ugly themselves up, they love it when actors who typically play good guys play villains, they like it when an actor BECOMES that character. You know what I'm talking about when I say transform: I'm talking about Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot, Jamie Foxx in Ray when he plays Ray Charles in Ray and Charlize Theron when she played that serial killer in Monster. 

Octavia Spencer is also in the running but she's playing the same role that she won her other Best Supporting Actress award for in 2012's The Help - a black woman in the 1960s who works for a white woman. I like her but I don't like it when actors get nominated for playing the same role over and over again. Christophe Waltz went through this a few years ago. He was nominated Best Supporting Actor in Inglorious Basterds and then actually won the award for the same character in Django Unchained. He needs to play a good guy next. We already know he can play a fantastic villain. 

Now for the men. Sam Rockwell wins, hands down. That's my pick for the winner because he is so damn good. Willem Dafoe was also amazing in The Florida Project but when you compare his character to Rockwell's portrayal of Officer Jason Dixon in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, he doesn't have as much to do. Rockwell certainly transformed himself and worked much harder to bring his character to life. 

Predicting Best Picture

This is where things get tricky because they now have a new way to vote after last year's mishap with La La Land and Moonlight. If you are an Academy member, you don't just pick your favorite and submit it. In previous year, Best Picture was chosen this way and whichever film got close to 50% of the vote or more, was the winner. They now have what's called a preferential ballot where they rank all 9 films nominated for Best Picture from first to last. Now, you are not required to fill in all 9 slots and I'm assuming this is because there are Academy members who haven't seen all the films or they just didn't care enough for certain ones to even bother ranking them. Then there is a process of elimination where they go round after round to remove the films that got the least amount of votes or were in the bottom of the ranking. So with 9 films nominated it's really rare that one film will get ranked at number by 50% or more of the voters. It's confusing, I know. Did I mention that this is all done by hand by a group of accountants at PriceWaterhouse Cooper?  With over 6,000 Academy members, that's a lot of ballots to count and recount. 

Examining our own biases seemed to be a theme in this year's Best Picture nominees. Get Out is the most obvious example: If there was a category for political statement of the year, that movie would win. If you want to go just by passion and the art of filmmaking, then Three Billboards is my choice. That is my gut and my heart right there. If you want to put money on it and you are not emotionally invested in who wins or loses then my wallet says go with The Shape of Water or Dunkirk. Honestly, it wouldn't be the first time I completely disagreed with the Best Picture winner. In fact, most years I disagree with the winner. 

Best Actor/Actress

This category this year is pretty boring because it's too predictable. Frances McDormand will win for Three Billboards and Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour. They both have a body of work that is consistent and makes them more than deserving of their awards.

I always considered Gary Oldman and Frances as supporting actors so it's great to see them recognized with something a little higher up on the hierarchy of acting awards. Denzel, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day Lewis, Tom Hanks -- so many of the other nominees have already won and some of them have won numerous times. Let's be real. Daniel Day Lewis does not need a fourth Best Actor award and Tom Hanks doesn't need a third. In the women's category, there are some fresh faces like Margot Robbie, but her work isn't consistent enough for me to want to give her this award and trust that we won't all regret it down the line. Margot Robbie was also in Suicide Squad this year and that's all I have to say about inconsistency. Also, hello, Halle Berry for Monster's Ball? Gwyneth Paltrow winning for Shakespeare in Love? Does either winner even act anymore?

Best Animated Feature

Coco, obviously! This movie was amazing. It's about a Latin American family but I can see a lot of Asian viewers being able to relate to the story. The only other nominee that I think is deserving of mention is The Breadwinner, which I actually watched last night and enjoyed greatly. It's about a young girl and her family in Kabul, Afghanistan in the days leading up to the American invasion. Both movies have strong, POC protagonists. 

Netflix

First They Killed my Father, a movie about the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which was directed by Angelina Jolie and featured an all Cambodian cast, was not nominated (I wouldn't feel too bad for Angelina -- her other feature, The Breadwinner, did get nominated in the Best Animated Feature category). I thought it was great. It follows the story of a 7 year old girl who was trained as a child soldier for the Khmer Rouge while her six siblings were sent to labor camps. I'm wondering why Netflix didn't decide to go with a limited theatrical release like they did with Mudbound, which is one of Netflix's films that is nominated. Mary J. Blige is up for Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song. In fact, this is the first time someone has been nominated for both Best Supporting and Best Song. Netflix plans on releasing 80 films a year or something crazy like that so I'm thinking we will be seeing more of their films in awards shows and on the festival circuit. 

All year we've been wondering how #metoo would affect the Oscars and I think it is pretty evident. The Weinstein Company used to have tons of movies in the running every year. I'm going to go ahead and say that Harvey Weinstein has singlehandedly reshaped the oscars again this year. Anyone involved in that purge of sexual abusers has been completely left out of the running. Kevin Spacey was replaced by Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World, and Christopher Plummer is now nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Kate Winslet is a frequent nominee but she was most likely snubbed because the film she was in this year was directed by Woody Allen. I guarantee this has a lot to do with all the actors just now expressing regret for working with Woody Allen. James Franco had a pretty successful run during awards season all the way up to the Golden Globes but then several sexual harassment allegations came out after he won his award and when it came time to announce the Oscar nominations, James Franco was nowhere and neither was his film, The Disaster Artist. No best director, best actor or best picture nominations for him. Welp. 

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

 Nobody else could make this Oscar worthy than the queen, Frances McDormand herself. Finally, a Best Actress nominee I can actually back up. Last year, they gave it to Emma Stone and I turned off the TV and ended up missing it when Moonlight won Best Picture. If you read my blog regularly, you already know that Three Billboards is my pick for Best Picture.

So this movie is about some really dark, bleak stuff but they managed to make it funny. It sounds terrible but if you watched the movie, you would know what I'm talking about. It really does require a movie to pull that off. I don't think it would work with a book or a TV show and especially a cast and crew that aren't as skilled as the one they had for this movie. Director Martin McDonagh is a really bold visionary and I am surprised that he was not nominated for Best Director but that's a different conversation. 

Best Director

Why doesn't the number of Best Picture nominees match the number of Best Director nominees? It doesn't make any sense to me. To be honest, I don't care who wins this category this year. Guillermo Del Toro will probably win for his movie, The Shape of Water, based on all the precursor awards shows leading up to this point. I don't really care for his brand of horror-fairy tales though. 

The Shape of Water

I did not like this movie at all.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, it's not your typical Oscar bait yawn fest (I'm talking about you, The King's Speech and Revolution Road). It's also beautifully shot. Director Guillermo Del Toro chose a color to be the cinematic theme for his movie and the greens are so saturated and gorgeous. It's like a love letter for your eyes. The lead character is a woman named Eliza who lives in Baltimore, which is where the movie is set. Also, the villain of the film (Michael Shannon) is basically a stand-in for toxic white masculinity. So it's fitting for 2018.

There is a controversy about Guillermo plagiarizing The Shape of Water. The Guardian reported that Del Toro cribbed the film from a story called Let Me Hear You Whisper by playwright Paul Zindel about a cleaning lady who falls in love with a sea creature at a government laboratory. The report also says that Paul's son, David Zindel, believes his father's work was definitely used as inspiration for the film. Here are the similarities between the two pieces:

• Both feature women janitors who work in a government facility

• Both women use food to gain the trust of the creature being held there

• Both women dance with a mop to love songs for the amusement of the creature

• Both women overhear there is an imminent “vivisection” in store for their sea lovers

• Both sneak the creatures out in laundry carts

• Both have a friend at the facility who help them out with their plan

The sexy fish man thing is unusual but this plot has been done before with aliens and animals in various forms. I want to say this: I am not familiar with plays and I don't think I've ever seen a play that didn't take place in a middle school auditorium. But I did see Free Willy. When I saw the movie, I kept thinking about how similar it was to Free Willy -- the kid, Jesse, works as a janitor in a facility, he uses food to gain the trust of the creature, he dances to Michael Jackson songs for the amusement of the creature, he overhears the owner's plan to let the creature die, he sneaks the creature out and both have a POC friend at the facility who is willing to help them out. 

Are you planning on watching the Oscars this year and if so, what are your picks? Let me know in the comments!

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