In Contention: Chicago Film Critics
By Josh Spiegel
December 25, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Every year, the Academy Awards are announced in Los Angeles, and each ceremony has its own particular tagline. Despite the annual switch, the official tagline should be what Oscar-winning scribe William Goldman once wrote: "Nobody knows anything." In regards to the Oscars, it's simple: predictions are easy, but knowledge is hard. As 2008 turns to 2009, we're getting closer to seeing the Oscar nominations announced (that will happen on January 22nd). Until then, all prognosticators can do is look to critics' groups, the Golden Globe nominations, and the Screen Actors Guild nominations.
As nice as it is for the folks at Pixar to take in another accolade, what's important for the Chicago Film Critics is how much of a bellwether the group has been in the past. Chicago's picked five of the last ten Best Picture winners, choosing Far From Heaven and Almost Famous instead of Chicago and Gladiator. And you'd think they'd choose a movie about their own town!
Slightly more interesting is that, since 2003, the film critics have chosen four of five Best Picture winners, the exception being in 2004, when they went head over heels for Sideways, which ended up losing to Million Dollar Baby at the Oscars. What you can take away from the previous awards is that the Chicago group is, more often than not, adept at predicting nominees at the very least; only three of the past ten winners haven't been nominated for Best Picture Oscar - Far From Heaven, Almost Famous, and Mulholland Drive.
Most of the critics have made their decisions on the top actors of the year, and Chicago's choices aren't too outside the mainstream choices. Mickey Rourke and Anne Hathaway, likely Oscar nominees come January, took the Best Actor and Actress awards, for The Wrestler and Rachel Getting Married, respectively.
In what is quickly becoming an unsurprising category in general, the Best Supporting Actor award goes to...yes, Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia. His singing is so beautiful, it....kidding. The late Heath Ledger took another prize for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight. The only notable choice here is in the Best Supporting Actress category, where Kate Winslet won for her role as a former Nazi guard in The Reader. Though that film and Winslet's other holiday movie, Revolutionary Road, haven't gotten universal praise, she's likely to wind up with at least one nomination at the Oscars, as she slowly turns into the film version of Susan Lucci. At the rate she makes movies, she'll get to 19 nominations in no time!
No matter the winners here, it's likely that the outcome will be different at the big show, as Chicago's only managed a 50% success rate in all four acting categories over the past ten years, and that's when they're on a hot streak. Of course, most critics' groups can be hit-and-miss on acting categories, sometimes going for the obvious choice and sometimes going for an out-there choice, as Chicago did in 2005 in giving Mickey Rourke a Best Supporting Actor award for his work in Sin City. I wonder if they owe him money...
The two big winners in general in Chicago this year were WALL-E, with four wins, and Slumdog Millionaire, with three. The latter film, which is seen as one of the sure-thing nominees for a Best Picture Oscar, won for Best Director (Danny Boyle), Best Adapted Screenplay (Simon Beaufoy) and Most Promising Performer (Dev Patel). WALL-E also won for Best Original Screenplay (Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon), Best Animated Feature, and Best Original Score (Thomas Newman).
In regards to Best Director, Chicago critics have a similar record as with Best Picture: in the past five years, they're four for five, but in the past ten years, they're only five for ten, having stuck to the status quo recently, while falling for David Lynch, Cameron Crowe, and Todd Haynes, directors of Mulholland Drive, Almost Famous, and Far From Heaven, respectively. Not only were these three directors not winners at the big show, but only Lynch got nominated.
Unlike some critics groups, Chicago announced nominees a few days before the winners, and this year, they've likely predicted three Best Picture nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, and Slumdog Millionaire. These three films have hooked Hollywood for various reasons: the first for its Forrest Gump-esque epic storytelling, the second for its timely subject matter, and the third for its Cinderella status. What of WALL-E and The Dark Knight, the fifth Chicago nominee?
Both are contenders, definitely, but they're also joined by three films left out of the top five in Chicago: Doubt, which has a Pulitzer to its name and big-name actors behind it, Frost/Nixon, which also has Broadway ties and another timely subject in its look at an embattled president, and Revolutionary Road, another movie with big names and highly respected source material.
It's obvious the contenders for those final spots lie in two camps: the popular movie and the arthouse movie. It's hard to gauge how Academy voters, often stereotyped as elderly and unwilling to nominate something outside the norm, will choose among these, and other stragglers like The Wrestler, a movie likely to be awarded for its performances instead of its whole. The least likely, but most welcome (to me), would be to let the final two spots land in the laps of Bruce Wayne and WALL-E. Having two arthouse movies or one of each in those spots is more likely, as they are much safer choices for Academy voters.
At this point, for Best Picture and Director, I'd imagine no dissonance between the nominees. My current predictions are for Benjamin Button, Milk, Slumdog, Frost/Nixon, and Dark Knight to pick up nominations. As we wait for the Golden Globe Awards and SAG Awards to be announced and for the Oscar nominations to come down the pike, the people and movies to watch for in terms of their hopeful ascension include Marisa Tomei from The Wrestler and Rosemarie DeWitt from Rachel Getting Married for Best Supporting Actress, as it seems that this is the only category with a lack of plentiful sure-thing nominees; Robert Downey Jr. from Tropic Thunder for Best Supporting Actor, a nomination that may be given to the actor if only for having a great year; WALL-E, a movie that has obviously garnered many passionate fans who may end up vaulting Pixar's most adorable character to a Best Picture nomination; and Revolutionary Road, a movie that seems tailor-made for Oscars.