{"id":2256,"date":"2019-02-05T23:24:34","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T23:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2256"},"modified":"2019-02-20T19:40:33","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T19:40:33","slug":"oscars-2019-here-are-the-runners-and-riders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/02\/05\/oscars-2019-here-are-the-runners-and-riders\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2019 \u2013 Here are the runners and riders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay \u2013 so the nominations have been out for a while and the dust has settled, but nevertheless here\u2019s my take on what Academy voters came up with.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the Best Picture nominees. Eight of them this year, and there are a couple of striking omissions. Let\u2019s start with the three I\u2019ve seen\u2026<\/p>\n

Black Panther<\/strong>. Very serviceable and well-made movie in the professional Marvel style. If more movies like this had had better representation sooner, this would seem rather less remarkable. Compared to the dementedly ambitious Infinity War<\/em>, the elegantly-structured Spider-Man: Homecoming<\/em> or the bananas Thor: Ragnarok<\/em>, this seems a bit ho-hum until you take the wider social context into account. Sadly, no nominations in any other major categories makes this look a bit token, even if the total number of nominations (seven) is quite impressive.<\/p>\n

Roma<\/strong>. Reviewed here<\/a>. Transcendently wonderful. Intimate and personal without being even remotely self-indulgent, it\u2019s a magnificent achievement and deserves to win everything it\u2019s nominated for. And in a world in which the Academy gives its top prize to fare such as Moonlight<\/em><\/a> and The Shape of Water<\/em><\/a>, it just might.<\/p>\n

A Star is Born<\/strong>. Reviewed here<\/a>. The safer bet for Academy voters and if The Favourite<\/em> and Roma<\/em> divide the \u201cquirky\u201d vote, this one might just slip through the middle (although preferential voting ought to solve that issue, it isn\u2019t guaranteed).<\/p>\n

And now the five I haven\u2019t seen (at the time of writing).<\/p>\n

BlackKklansman<\/strong>. This one didn\u2019t appeal, and I\u2019m not quite sure why. I\u2019ve nothing against Spike Lee and it\u2019s a juicy premise. Sadly, I\u2019ll probably end up watching this on iTunes now as it\u2019s almost gone from London cinemas.<\/p>\n

Bohemian Rhapsody<\/strong>. And I was hoping to be spared this one too. I\u2019m not fond of biopics, I have no interest in Queen and the troubled production history does not bode well. Rami Malek is amazing, by all accounts, so I imagine it will be worth seeing for his performance.<\/p>\n

The Favourite<\/strong>. In a neat bit of nominative determinism, Jorgos Lanthimos\u2019s film looks like the one to beat, although as noted, it will have to get past Roma<\/em> and A Star is Born<\/em> first.<\/p>\n

Green Book<\/strong>. The backlash has started, so I don\u2019t think this one is going to triumph, but Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali are surely worth the price of admission.<\/p>\n

Vice<\/strong>. Ugh. Looks a bit Saturday Night Live to me, and I wasn\u2019t a huge fan of Adam McKay\u2019s ADHD style on The Big Short<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reviews of all of these will follow. Best Director meanwhile throws up a bit of an oddity, with a nod for Pawel Pawlikowski whose film Cold War<\/em> wasn\u2019t worthy of a Best Picture nomination. Surely Cuaron has this one nailed on though, even if he can\u2019t get over the line for Best Picture?<\/p>\n

Best Actor will probably go to Rami Malek, although I don\u2019t imagine Bohemian Rhapsody<\/em> will get anything else. Best Actress I imagine will go to Glenn Close (this is her seventh nomination without a win) but I would be delighted to see Melissa McCarthy pick it up, and thrilled if it went to Yalitza Aparicio. Sorry, Olivia Colman, I think the competition is too fierce.<\/p>\n

Best Supporting Actor is a toss-up between two lifetime achievement awards. I was previously nervous about Sam Elliot getting it, but Richard E Grant is so damn good in Can You Ever Forgive Me?<\/em> that I\u2019m now tilting back in that direction.<\/p>\n

For Best Supporting Actress I think again the two nominations for The Favourite<\/em> will split the vote and that should allow Regina King to nab it, although there is a lot of love for Amy Adams and like Glenn Close she\u2019s racked-up a lot of nominations without a win (six).<\/p>\n

The Favourite<\/em> presumably will win Best Original Screenplay (even if it wins nothing else). The Best Adapted Screenplay of the year is almost certainly If Beale Street Could Talk<\/em>, but I suspect A Star is Born<\/em> has this one wrapped up.<\/p>\n

Further down the list, I expect Best Animated Feature to go to Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse<\/em> and deservedly so. Best Foreign Language Film will obviously go to Roma<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I have been catching up with a bunch of films not nominated for Best Picture \u2013 some of which deserved to be. For more on those, see the next post\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay \u2013 so the nominations have been out for a while and the dust has settled, but nevertheless here\u2019s my take on what Academy voters came up with. Let\u2019s start with the Best Picture nominees. Eight of them this year, and there are a couple of striking omissions. Let\u2019s start with the three I\u2019ve seen\u2026 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[521],"class_list":["post-2256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-oscars-2019"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-Ao","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2256"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2295,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2256\/revisions\/2295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}