In Contention

By Josh Spiegel

February 24, 2011

Where is his right hand? You know what, we probably don't want to know.

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So, friends, it’s come to this. We are now less than a week away from the 83rd annual Academy Awards. I hope you’ve all filled out your Oscar pools at work — following, of course, the tips from yours truly — and I hope you’re prepared to be completely bored. As always, I welcome being wrong about this, but nothing has happened in the last couple of weeks to make me think differently. In fact, the only thing that’s reminded me that the Oscars are coming up real soon this week is that some of the writers I follow on Twitter are sporadically talking up the show. America may have moved on, even if movies as inexplicable as The King’s Speech and Black Swan have topped $100 million at the box office. With only one In Contention left before the awards are announced on Sunday the 27th, let’s take a look at a few of the big categories and make a final analysis.

We’ll start as big as they get, with Best Picture. As I’m sure you vaguely remember (or will remember on Oscar night with an utterance of, “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.”), there are 10 Best Picture nominees, ranging from Toy Story 3 to The Social Network to 127 Hours. My final pick remains the one that’s become more and more apparent in the past few days: The King’s Speech. While The King’s Speech has not won every important precursor award (most notably, it lost the American Cinema Editors’ award this past weekend to The Social Network), the wave of love (or, mostly just like) for this movie is inescapable. A handful of film writers and critics have already written off this film’s presumed victory as one of those movies that, a decade after the fact, most people are embarrassed to know is a Best Picture winner.




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Are they right to do so? I’m no big fan of the film, but for recent frustrating victories, I have to point to Crash. Everyone assumed that Brokeback Mountain had the heat to win the Best Picture for 2005, but it lost to this multi-character drama about how the world is small, racism is bad, and other obvious and trite statements. Crash isn’t the worst Best Picture winner ever, but I would argue that it’s just not a good movie, even though it appeals to the base instincts of the typical Academy voter: lots of actors, set in Los Angeles, talks about social issues, and so on. The King’s Speech has many faults, but should it win, there will be no surprise. As I’ve said in weeks past, I want surprises from the show, and a surprise in this category would be any movie aside from The King’s Speech or The Social Network winning. As it stands, this is a two-horse race, and the winner is going to be the King of England.

But are there any dark horses in the category? Could there be a third film in the running, something that sneaks behind the top two movies? Some of the Best Picture nominees have about zero percent of winning — I love Toy Story 3, but it’s not taking the gold, sadly — but there are a few films worth watching. My pick for a dark horse winner is as simple as the film is: True Grit. What does True Grit have going for it? It’s directed and written by two recent former Oscar winners, Joel and Ethan Coen. Though they’re still very quirky filmmakers, the Coens have been embraced by the Academy (why else would A Serious Man have gotten a Best Picture nomination last year?). It stars last year’s Best Actor winner, Jeff Bridges, in an iconic role once played by John Wayne.


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