Handicapping the 2010 Oscars
As always, your humble blogger will be watching the Academy Awards show — especially since the Powers That Be took 50% of your humble blogger’s advice with regard to hosting duties this year. That said, this evening’s festivities are a bit odd, in that there are so many mortal locks in the major categories. Christoph ...
As always, your humble blogger will be watching the Academy Awards show -- especially since the Powers That Be took 50% of your humble blogger's advice with regard to hosting duties this year.
As always, your humble blogger will be watching the Academy Awards show — especially since the Powers That Be took 50% of your humble blogger’s advice with regard to hosting duties this year.
That said, this evening’s festivities are a bit odd, in that there are so many mortal locks in the major categories. Christoph Waltz is gonna win for Best Supporting Actor, Mo’Nique is gonna win for Best Supporting Actor, Jeff Bridges is gonna win for Best Actor, and so forth.
For reasons that passeth all understanding, Salma Hayek did not appear in a Major Prestige Picture. This leaves the Best Actress category is a bit more muddled. Unfortunately, I fear that Sandra Bullock will win in a year when Gabourey Sidibe, Carey Mulligan and especially Meryl Streep gave better performances.
The real uncertainty is over who wins Best Picture. With the voting rules having changed, the conventional wisdom has The Hurt Locker edging out Avatar and Inglourious Basterds for Best Flick.
It’s interesting that these are the three films being talked about, since they’re all war pictures, even though they’re operating in very different keys. Long-time readers know how I feel about Avatar, so I won’t regurgitate it here. I finally saw The Hurt Locker last night. It’s much better than Avatar — there are nuances to the characters and everything — its massive adrenaline rush began to wear off about two-thirds of the way into the picture (though the final 10 minutes are better than entire hours of Avatar). And as that rush worse off, so did the willing suspension of disbelief.
Then there’s Charli Carpenter, who’s rooting for the Basterds:
Tarantino has done what he always does best, though not always in the same way – something unexpected that makes us uncomfortable. Partly because so many of the uncomfortable conversations the film would have sparked are about one of the most important moral issues of our day: the limits of just war theory. And partly because Basterds does something most films don’t do: make us think about film itself as it ties into power politics.
In what is likely a sign of advanced aging, the film I’ll be pulling for is Up — because the directors of this movie had the audacity and skill to put this effortlessly heartbreaking sequence into a children’s movie. Oh, and because of Dug.
I’ll live-tweet the show itself, with a wrap-up post sometime in the morrow.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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