Oscar Season is Upon Us!

Current Tunes: Neurosis – Under the Surface

Well on Monday the illustrious, presumptuous, pompous, preposterous, ambidextrous Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced their nominees for the 2010 Oscars. The countdown has begun! Over the course of the next month, the nominees, and the studios that back them will scrap and fight to the death for a chance to at a 45 second acceptance speech and a golden statue shaped quite similarly to a bowling pin.

Like any year, the nomination announcements brought with it plenty of surprises, along with just as many “duh!” moments as well. But overall, it still promises to be an exciting, competitive year, perhaps the most competitive in decades.

The main reason for that being the game-changing decision to up the list of Best Picture nominees to ten instead of the traditional five. And true to their strategy, the field consists of five quality independent/art-house choices and five flicks born of popular clamor and adoration. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you the Academy did this to get higher ratings for the show.

The population as a whole is sick and tired of seeing Best Picture go to low-budget masterpieces that they never see because their distribution deals are worth less than a bucket of sand in the Mojave. Make no mistake though kiddies, this is just appeasement straight out of the Neville Chamberlain playbook. Though I think the winner this year will be considerably difficult to pick, I still believe that old habits die hard and the Academy will continue (rightly) to throw their lot in with the lower profile films when it comes to Best Picture.

That being said, and I’m not going to bother listing all ten films, I’ll just point out the winner: “The Hurt Locker.” The day of nominations I was leaning on “Inglorious Basterds” but Katherine Bigelow’s war-time chronicle is not only considerably deserving, but it has history on it’s side. You can pretty much write Bigelow down to win the Best Director award, and more often than not the film that wins that award takes home Best Picture.

The only film I think that has a chance to upset “Locker” is of course “Avatar,” but I’m having a very, very hard time believing the Academy will go that far. I know it made boat loads of money. If there’s any reason to vote for it, that’s the Academy’s M.O. Nevertheless, can you imagine any one soul on this planet taking the AMPAS seriously after they give a Best Picture award to “Avatar” but not to “Citizen Kane?” I already don’t put any stock in their legitimacy, and I’m utterly enthralled and obsessed by the Oscars. “Avatar” is a movement, a landmark just like “The Matrix” or “Star Wars” before it. But those films didn’t win Best Picture and neither will “Avatar.”

Regardless of who wins, I’m overjoyed they acknowledged “District 9” and honored it with a nomination in the category. On the extremely unlikely chance that it actually did win Best Picture, I would be absolutely jubilant. “District 9” very rightfully picked up a nomination for Adapted Screenplay too, and I wholeheartedly believe it is the most deserving in that category. However, I expect "Precious" or "Up in the Air" to win that category, more likely "Up in the Air."

I was as well to see “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” nominated for two whole categories: costumes and art direction. Both of which make plenty of sense to me. As a generality, the absolute last thing I notice in a film is usually the costuming, and its admittedly the category I care the least about overall. Nevertheless, when I saw this film had made the list, it was perfectly logical to me. Ditto for art directors Dan Hermansen and Denis Schnegg, who previously had worked on just about no film worth note as far as art direction goes, but managed to put together a bang-up job on “Parnassus.” Between the two, I think my money might be on costumes being the more likely win for Gilliam’s latest. But the reality is, it won’t win either.

It’s sad in its own way that there’s absolutely no reason to talk about the acting categories this year. Bridges, Bullock, Mo’Nique, & Waltz. Write them down for winners. Sure bet. Take your friends’ money, go ahead. Easy way to make a week’s worth of grocery money.

Cinematography is a category they have absolutely gotten wrong every year since I can remember. I’m still fuming over “The Dark Knight” being screwed by the Academy in this category last year, and I think this year they’re primed for another big mistake. Being a moderately technical award, “Avatar” has to come out the favorite but “Inglorious Basterds” is the true owner of this statue. Yet as I stated before, the Academy never gets this right so three cheers for robbery…

One category that I’ll be especially curious to see the outcome of is sound mixing, for which “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is nominated. Now, I know what most of you are thinking but hang on just a minute. Set aside the whole notion of seeing the phrase “Academy Award Winner” on the DVD packaging for a moment.

I read more than one article in the past year praising the sound work on this film, with most of these articles going to great lengths to point out the meticulous, precision sound work that was done for it. The same men nominated for “Fallen” were nominated for their work on the original “Transformers” film as well, and anyone will tell you being nominated multiple times around in this category is no small feat. Going on that, it appears to me the film quite deserves to win, but I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people who pitch a fit if it actually does.. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.