Oscar Predictions

What was supposed to be the Oscar year in which Richard Linklater and "Boyhood" took home the big prizes, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and "Birdman" might just pull it off instead. The past several weeks have proved that the momentum has almost decisively shifted to the latter's favor, even if its lead actor's chances have gone done. Who will win?

The real horse-race this year is the Best Actor category. While it initially seemed like it was Michael Keaton for his comeback role in "Birdman," with wins at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, as the man to beat, Eddie Redmayne seems to have taken the lead with his best performance yet in "The Theory of Everything." Redmayne also won at the Globes and then took home trophies at the Screen Actors Guild ceremony and recently at the BAFTAs. Had Keaton and Redmayne not been nominated, this easily would have been Benedict Cumberbatch's win for his exceptional work in "The Imitation Game," but with such fierce competition from Keaton and Redmayne, this isn't his year. Incidentally, Steve Carell has also given us his best work in "Foxcatcher," but in a role that essentially is a supporting one, and with all due respect to Bradley Cooper and his third consecutive nomination for "American Sniper," David Oyelowo's performance in "Selma" was more deserved. Carell and Cooper are the least likely to win.

So who will win Best Actor? My head tells me it's going to be Redmayne. While the Academy has traditionally picked a veteran over a newbie (e.g. Humphrey Bogart over Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck over Peter O'Toole, and John Wayne over Dustin Hoffman), these days, they're not too interested in a comeback (e.g. Sean Penn over Mickey Rourke), and definitely are in love with biographical portrayals (for films like "Ray," "The Iron Lady," "The King's Speech," "Capote," etc.). There is an understandable controversy about Redmayne's performance, centering on the Academy's constant rewarding of actors without disabilities portraying characters with disabilities. However, with Redmayne's case, because he was playing Stephen Hawking in his earlier years as well as Hawking as the figure we now recognize, I wouldn't be surprised if Academy voters ignore the controversy. Still, while Redmayne's is a really great performance, Keaton, in my mind, slightly surpasses him. For one, it's true that comedy is harder than drama. It is also, it could be argued, equally or more difficult to create a new character, especially one that seems to, in some respect, tease Michael Keaton and his status as former superhero star staging a comeback. My prediction is still that Keaton will win, but I'd say it's only slightly higher than 50 percent; it is, essentially, the toughest Best Actor race in a long time.

Regarding the final major nail-biter, the Best Picture race, this is also the hardest race to predict in years. "Boyhood" seems to be the choice of critics, as it won at the New York and L.A. film critics awards as well as the Critics Choice Awards; "Birdman," however, stole its thunder with wins at the Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, and Producers Guild awards. The latter three in particular are usual good indicators of who will win. This is another head-versus-heart match. I think "Birdman," Inarritu's fifth film, could very well likely win, but my gut still tells me that the Best Picture (and Director) Award will go to "Boyhood." "Boyhood" is an epic of the 21st century, and I think the Oscars will reward that.

Regarding the rest of the races, they should be fairly predictable:

Best Actress: Julianne Moore ("Still Alice")
Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette ("Boyhood")
Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons ("Whiplash")
Best Adapted Screenplay: "The Imitation Game"
Best Original Screenplay: "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
Best Song: "Selma"
Best Visual Effects: "Interstellar"
Best Makeup: "Guardians of the Galaxy"

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2014: The Year of Shitty Movies

Hey there, cats and kittens,

While this time of year typically brings great joy to release my list of the best films of the year (as I did in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013), I regret to inform you that there will be no top ten list this year. This past year has given us, by far, the worst slate of motion pictures in more than a decade. Whereas the previous year gave us such noteworthy greats as "Wadjda," "12 Years a Slave," and "Nebraska," this year gave us a disappointing mess, for lack of a better word.

There were a variety of different duds, from blockbusters ("Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier") to independent artsy movies ("Only Lovers Left Alive"), and movies so boring the best solution was probably to turn them off ("Particle Fever" and "Le-Weekend"). Some big names gave us crap, too -- there was Darren Aronofsky's worst film ("Noah"), and Tim Burton's most boring ("Big Eyes"). And of course, how can I not forget Mr. Clint Eastwood? Eastwood, though still a universally-loved legend, this year not only gave us the awful "Jersey Boys" (which actually was ridiculed by the critics), but he also directed the most divisive, controversial (and arguably the worst) movie of his career: "American Sniper." Aside from the fact that this movie dumbs down and rewrites history while painting the Iraq War in black-and-white moral terms, this movie was simply boring--dreadfully boring (and you would think that a guy with four Oscars would notice a fake baby). Aside from its opening moments, there wasn't a single scene that really engaged me, and people might be able to legitimately claim it's "powerful" if they've never seen a plethora of other superior war movies. "American Sniper" is one of the worst movies of the year.

Then there's "Birdman," a movie I really, really wanted to like. What a cast -- Michael Keaton, in his comeback role, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis. Coupled with a clever screenplay, as well as a respected director and great cinematography, this should have been a movie I really liked. And yet, like so many other 2014 movies, I felt letdown and bored out of my mind. That being said, I hope Keaton wins the Oscar. His performance is excellent, and is one of the few good things about "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)." Perhaps one day, I will re-watch it and enjoy it, but I doubt that will happen.

There were movies that had great performances, like the always perfect Marion Cotillard (deservedly nominated this year for "Two Days, One Night") in "The Immigrant," Joaquin Phoenix in "Inherent Vice," Tom Cruise in "Edge of Tomorrow," Melissa McCarthy in "St. Vincent," Oscar Isaac in "A Most Violent Year," and the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman in "A Most Wanted Man"; great performances in crap movies that could cure insomnia. There were other movies that were just utterly ridiculous, like "Fury," a movie in which five Americans in a tank defeat practically the entire Nazi army, or pretentious junk like "Begin Again," or dull documentaries like "Citizenfour," or puffed-up animation such as "Big Hero 6," Disney's movie where they turn a likable healthcare-providing robot into a weapon of mass destruction. And it wasn't simply Hollywood that released such garbage. Films from a variety of different nations also bored me to tears: "Ida" from Poland; "The Tale of Princess Kaguya" and "The Wind Rises" from Japan; "Stranger by the Lake" and "Ernest and Celestine" (two radically different movies) from France; "What If" from Canada; "The Missing Piece" from Cambodia; "Calvary" from Ireland; "Mr. Turner," "Starred Up," and "Under the Skin" from the U.K.; and "Force Majeure" and "We Are the Best" from Sweden and Denmark.

Maybe I should just quit.

Here's hoping for better movies in 2015.

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The Curious Case of Batman Returns

I always believed that “Beetlejuice,” with its quirky combination of horror and comedy, its silly visual effects paying tribute the films of Harryhausen, and its wonderful set design by Bo Welch, was the essential Tim Burton movie. But perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe it’s “Edward Scissorhands,” with its pessimistic view of normality, or “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and its juxtaposition of Halloween and Christmas, or “Ed Wood” with its homage to passionate yet not entirely conventional (or good) filmmakers. Or maybe it might actually be a rather divisive film, one called “Batman Returns.”

Tim Burton made “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” in 1985, “Beetlejucie” in 1988, and was then tapped to create the highly-anticipated “Batman” in 1989. A huge blockbuster and a highly-entertaining movie, it nonetheless left Burton in mixed spirits of his experience. He would return to direct the sequel three years later only if he was given more control, and more control he was given. The result was “Batman Returns,” a much more personalized and, well, less “Batman” of a movie.

But is it bad, good, or mediocre?

Allow me to use the words of Roger Ebert to demonstrate what is so perplexing about this movie: “I give the movie a negative review, and yet I don’t think it’s a bad movie; it’s more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us more or less what we deserve from a Batman story.” This is where the first dissonance lies: is this really a Batman movie? Burton is certainly one of its most famous students of German Expressionism in cinema, and his movies are always (except for “Alice in Wonderland”) fascinating to look at, and so is this film. But do I really want Batman to show up in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”? (To be fair, all Batman films are flawed or at least divisive. Some might argue that Prince songs didn't need to be in “Batman,” or the samurais were too boring in “Batman Begins,” or there was too copious an amount of psychology and allegories in “The Dark Knight." I haven’t even mentioned “Batman Forever” or “Batman and Robin.”)

The movie returns Michael Keaton as Batman. There are also two new characters--Danny DeVito as the Penguin, in the style of “Freaks” and “The Elephant Man” as a character forever ostracized from society, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, a role that might still be her best-known yet. The three of them constitute what I think Burton likes most in storytelling: the sympathetic view of outsiders. But even with DeVito and an enormous amount of makeup and Pfeiffer and her toughness and leather, the two characters are considerably less interesting than Jack Nicholson’s role in the previous film as the Joker. The character that really is more interesting is the non-canon role played by Christopher Walken as Max Schreck, a CEO with political interests and a giant lock of white hair, using his various methods to pin the three against each other. (The name of the character is borrowed from the the actor who played the title role in F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” from 1922; Schreck means “fright” in German.) Considerably more ambiguous and enigmatic than the other two villains, why is it that Schreck is more interesting to watch than two of Batman’s most famous villains? "That's what you get when you put Christopher Walken in a role."

Finally, one gets the sense as one often does when watching a Burton film that this is a deeply personal film about what it means to be alone, to be different. Welch's elaborate sets give the impression that something is truly wrong and disturbing with this world; its score by Danny Elfman, who composed all but one score for Burton, seems as if it was written with specific instructions to darken the mood this time around. While not being a Batman expert, I know it well enough to understand that the original character was meant to be more dark and mysterious than say Adam West was and that the comics, particularly those by Frank Miller and Alan Moore (whose “The Killing Joke" provided a model for the first Burton Batman film), have been particularly dark. But was it necessary for a Batman film to be so dark and personal?

Since 1985, Burton has established himself as sort of an “other” filmmaker. He is perhaps known best as the oft-director of his close personal friend Johnny Depp (they’ve made seven films together), or the quirkiness which has already been described; regardless, he’s who Christopher Lee called “one of the great directors of our age.” It’s not entirely clear who his movies are directed towards, but they are certainly appealing to many. Is “Batman Returns,” a fascinating yet perplexing experience, one of those movies?

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