A Slumdog sweep or Harvey for the sneak attack?
After months of all the predicting, all the campaigning and all the other nonsense, it all ends on Sunday night. First-time Oscar show producers Bill Condon and Laurence Marks and first-time Oscar host, Hugh Jackman, have promised to put on a good show, but the question for us, isn’t will there be an audience (probably not) but will the right films win (probably not)? Here are my final predictions for this year’s Oscar race…
Best Picture
We should begin this by saying that, there is no way Frost/Nixon can win here. The film doesn’t even have the right momentum to swing some kind of last minute support for Frank Langella (more on him later). So that leaves four films, although three seem to have lots of detractors. The Reader has Harvey Weinstein pushing like a madman, but Best Picture nominees that do not have corresponding Film Editing nominations have a hard time pulling out a win here. Milk seems to be the political choice, what with most voters actually living in California, where Proposition 8 passed. Voters, who are still stinging from that, might want to cast their vote in this direction, but it hasn’t pulled out a Best Picture win since the New York Film Critics Circle. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button leads with the most nominations of the year, but a lot of people have complained over the film’s length and lack of emotional resonance. Which leads us all back to Slumdog Millionaire. It’s won everything under the sun, has a strong fanbase and at this point, anything else winning would be a bigger surprise than Crash sideswiping Brokeback Mountain back in 2005.
Final Prediction and Rank
1. Slumdog Millionaire
2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
3. Milk
4. The Reader
5. Frost/Nixon
What Should Win: Milk
What Should Have Been Nominated: WALL-E