Internet tradition holds that any users who say the word “Oscars” more than three times during the months of January or February are required either to prognosticate the winners or to divulge who’d get their votes if they were eligible to exercise that power. This year, the evening before the 86th Academy Awards go live on ABC, I must uphold that custom or else the makers of the Paranormal Activity series win.
If I were a card-carrying member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the following list would represent my hypothetical ballot selections, no less subjective and arbitrary than the average AMPAS member’s official ballot. These are not my predictions as to who will win, because that’s not my forte. Betting on me will bring you misery and cost you your life savings. I’m aware of many of my deficiencies, and Oscar-guessing is one of them. If more than one-third of these match the actual results, it’s because my fifty-year-old self acquired the technology and the bitterness to travel back in time and sabotage the sacred PricewaterhouseCoopers envelopes.
Alexander Payne’s new film Nebraska perfectly replicates that forlorn Midwest sensation of being trapped in rooms with hordes of impressionable, elderly relatives all living on the same slow-motion wavelength, visiting and reminiscing and comparing their amnesia levels and enjoying life’s remaining minutes at the speed of molasses, except when they’re jumping to conclusions at hyperspeed. When that happens to me, I put on a brave front while suppressing the desperate urge to crawl out of my skin. With SNL’s Will Forte acting as my proxy and reenacting my childhood family vacations so vividly, I’m surprised I didn’t convulse in my seat with flashbacks.
Older fans of Matthew McConaughey’s spate of ’90s romantic comedies may be in for a shock when they walk into Dallas Buyers Club and see him playing Christian Bale’s character from The Machinist. He and costar Jared Leto (both radically transformed and up for Oscars this year) underwent severe weight loss for their roles in this based-on-a-true-story underdog drama that’s one part can’t-we-all-just-get-along and four parts sticking-it-to-The-MAN.
If you’re online much, you’re already aware this year’s Academy Awards nominations were announced today. If you follow either The Hollywood Reporter or The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences on Twitter, you had the opportunity to see the categories live-tweeted one at a time early this morning. If you shared my mistake of following both entities, you were treated to a double-barrel Oscar-nom redundancy blast that turned Twitter to sludge for fifteen minutes. Homework question: how many live-tweeters does any given event really need?
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 