Blogocentric Formulations

All-Time Oscar Ballot

"Blog Harbor from The Talent Pond"  PROMPT (DAY 11): It's Oscar time! You get to put together your all-time best Oscar ballot! Movies don't necessarily have to have been nominated for an Oscar or even be an awards-type film (if you truly think the Best (Quality) Picture you've ever seen is Caddyshack, or that Ryan Reynolds' turn as Deadpool will never be surpassed by the performance of another actor, that's totally okay as long as you honestly believe your selection is the pinnacle of achievement in that particular field. Not your favorite, not your guilty pleasure, not the one you'd like to win... your honest-to-God pick for the best representation of each category. Think of this like Fantasy Football for movies! BONUS: While you only have to complete the "Big Six" categories, I will give a special prize

to anyone who completes a full Oscar ballot and also lists films for ALL the bonus categories as well!

BIG SIX CATEGORIES (REQUIRED)

Best Picture. This is probably the hardest category for me to choose because there are so many great movies out there. I adore As Good as it Gets and Whiplash and Argo and Inception and American Beauty and Shakespeare in Love and L.A. Confidential and Good Will Hunting and Jerry Maguire and A Few Good Men and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but if I'm being honest, I think some of the older films need to be considered in this category. It's pretty hard to do better than Casablanca, which is basically a perfect movie. Sure it's older and slower by today's sensibilities, but everything about it is pitch perfect. It won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay at that year's Oscars... plus was also nominated for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Best Music. It's a classic for a reason!

Best Director. I don't know how you can give this award to anyone other than Steven Spielberg. I'll pick Jurassic Park as the film of choice, but really, the man in responsible for some of the most iconic films in history. Entire generations have grown up awed by his movies and he's still turning them out at an impressive clip. Ready Player One was great... and he made that fifty years into his film career. There are other insanely talented directors, no doubt: Nolan, Scorsese, Fincher, Tarantino, etc. but few of them have had as much of an impact on an entire generation of filmgoers like Spielberg has. His highlight reel is insane: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, Hook, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report, Munich, Lincoln, etc., etc. That's quite a resume!

Best Actor in a Leading Role. Easy one: Hugh Jackman for Logan. Here's a crazy stat; he's played the Wolverine character in nine different films over the past seventeen years... and he didn't phone it in once. In fact, he seems to have gotten better and better as time goes on and was surprisingly sympathetic - even tragic - in his turn as the Old Man Logan character in last year's Logan. I have a ton of respect for actors who are able to embody a particular role over the course of many years and films, constantly finding fresh nuances... and I think Hugh Jackman is the best at it. Robert Downey Jr. is a very close second with Tony Stark / Iron Man, but Jackman played a much more conflicted and multifaceted character over a longer period of time.

Best Actress in a Leading Role. This is hard for me to admit, but I've gotta go with The Streeper. She's one of those actresses that I find completely brilliant in some things, but also completely overrated in general because everyone acts like she can do no wrong. Meryl Streep can do wrong, and she did it in Mamma Mia!, Into the Woods, The Giver, etc. etc. However, she's also undeniably great in some movies. She was brilliant in The Devil Wears Prada, for example. And I'd pick her for Julie & Julia. If you were to play audio only of this film side by side with old recordings of Julia Child, I'd defy you to be able to tell me which one was the real one. Streep absolutely disappeared into this role; it was like watching Julia Child herself on screen.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Gotta give it to Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder. The movie is hilarious start-to-finish, and all of the actors do a great job of playing the Hollywood stereotypes they've been given... but Robert Downey Jr. is in a league of his own on this film, playing the critically acclaimed genius and yet incredibly insecure Kirk Lazarus. Yes, the movie is very crude, but if you haven't seen it yet, watching RDJ's performance won't disappoint. He's captivating to watch (and laugh-out-loud funny). "You never go full retard."

Best Actress in a Supporting Role. I really enjoyed Rachel Weisz's character of Penelope Stamp in The Brothers Bloom. The movie itself isn't as great as I had hoped it would be after Rian Johnson blew everyone away with his directorial debut Brick, but Weisz brought some incredibly quirky energy to the role of a wealthy woman who collects hobbies. Every time the movie comes on and she appears in one of the scenes, I'm transfixed.

BONUS CATEGORIES (OPTIONAL)

Best Animated Feature. There are a lot of great animated movies out there, and while there are definitely films that I like better for personal reasons, I think the most stunning animated feature I've seen is WALL-E. As much as I prefer some other animated films for pure entertainment (The Incredibles, How to Train Your Dragon, the first 25 minutes of Up) this movie made believe that a robotic trash compactor could fall in love. That's no small feat! Coco is a very close second for me in this category.

Best Cinematography. Since I couldn't give costume design to Memoirs of a Geisha, I'm going to give it the cinematography award instead. There are a lot of true masters in this field (Roger Deakins and Claudio Miranda are magicians with light and cameras), but I love the fact that Dion Beebe isn't afraid to experiment. Not only does he do rich, lush film cinematography like for Memoirs of a Geisha but he also experiments with color saturation and high speed digital video to do projects like Collateral and Miami Vice. I probably could have listed any of his films here, but Memoirs was particularly gorgeous.

Best Costume Design. I almost gave this to Colleen Atwood for the stunning Japanese wardrobe in Memoirs of a Geisha, but I just had to give it instead to Milena Canonero for the staggering attention to detail in all her costumes for Marie Antoinette. The complexity of the costumes in that film (and that time period) are truly awe-inspiring and each piece looked as extravagant and luxurious as you'd imagine they'd be in real life. I actually also kind of like Black Panther for this category next year too.

Best Documentary Feature. There are a lot of great choices in this category. Undefeated, Murderball, and Exit Through the Gift Shop were all excellent. And then of course there are the "big hit" documentaries like March of the Penguins, Michael Jackson's This Is It, Fahrenheit 9/11, etc. Plus the ones that were fascinating subject matter if nothing else, like Super Size Me, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and The Queen of Versailles. Seriously, you guys, if you don't watch documentaries, you totally should. There are some amazing documentaries out there! I think my pick would have to go to An Inconvenient Truth, though. It was a toss-up between that and The Aristocrats (and if you haven't see The Aristocrats yet, you owe it to yourself to check it out!), and for me An Inconvenient Truth hit that sweet spot that very few documentaries manage to hit... it's compelling, well-made, AND it's about an important message. Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim did an incredible job bringing the dangers of climate change to the forefront. (But seriously, also watch The Aristocrats if you want a fascinating look at the world of comedy.

Best Film Editing. Easy: Memento. How do you not give this award to a movie that quite literally told the story backwards and out of order? It's a pretty amazing accomplishment to make the audience feel as confused and disoriented as the character at first, and then bring them around to figure it out at the very end. A close second for me would be Requiem For A Dream; the editing of the whole film, but especially the drug-fueled sequences is insanely complicated and well cut.

Best Foreign Language Film. The foreign language film that still sits with me, even a decade-plus after graduating from film school, is Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (translated to "Hate" in the American home video version). It's a remarkable story about a literal day in the lives of three immigrant friends living in a multiethnic housing project. They find a handgun in the aftermath of a riot and each have designs on what they could use it for. One wants to win respect by killing a police officer, one wants nothing to do with violence, and one goes back and forth between his friends' two extreme positions. It was made in 1995, shot in black and white and in French, and is still possibly the most compelling 100 minutes I've ever spent in a theater.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling. First of all, I want you to know how painful it is for me that DC has won an Oscar and Marvel has not... especially for Suicide Squad. "The Oscar-winning film, Suicide Squad" is a phrase that no one should ever have to utter. This is also a hard category because so much of the stuff that used to be done with makeup is now done with visual effects instead. I think I'd have to go back a ways to find makeup and hairstyling that totally blew me away. Terminator 2: Judgment Day had great makeup effects but didn't really wow me with hair design. I think I'd have to go with The Cell starring Jennifer Lopez. Michele Burke and Edouard F. Henriques created some downright terrifying imagery with their use of makeup and hair design.

Best Original Score. I never thought I'd say this, but Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame (and Atticus Ross) completely deserves his Oscar for The Social Network. The score is haunting, modern/futuristic, and completely fits the darker tone of the film. Compositions like "In Motion" and "Carbon Prevails" are really catchy (and great writing music, by the way!), and their interpretation of Edvard Grieg's "In The Hall of the Mountain King" is one of the coolest things to happen to classical music since the Piano Guys and 2Cellos started doing covers of mainstream songs.

Best Original Song. Oh man, there have been so many great songs over the years. Runners up for me would be "How Far I'll Go" from Moana, "In The Deep" from Crash, "Lose Yourself" from 8 Mile, and "How Do I Live" from Con Air. (I love the fact that Con Air has been nominated for an Oscar, by the way ). Not to mention all the glorious 80s songs! But my pick for this category would be "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman. Maybe it's just because it's fresh in my mind and I wrote a blog post about it earlier this year ("2018 Anthem" ), but this is such a powerful, inspiring song. I'm still listening to it months after the movie's been released.

Best Production Design. When you consider the size and scope of the project, I don't know how you can look at anything other than Grant Major's and Dan Hennah's work on the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and not be completely blown away by the fact that they literally re-created Middle Earth! J.R.R. Tolkien's classic books inhabit an entire world he created, and the production design folks on this trilogy brought it to life in extensive detail.

Best Sound Editing. I'd have to give this one to Dane Davis for The Matrix. I remember seeing it in the theater and it being one of the first movies where I actually paid attention to all the weird techno sound effects and music and dialogue and the way they interconnect. This movie was ahead of its time in a lot of ways, and sound was one of the most important, I think.

Best Sound Mixing. I was tempted to give this to The Matrix as well, but instead I'm going to award it to Baby Driver. You can't watch that movie and not pay attention to the way the music interplays with the action in the film. It's truly incredible the different ways they found to blend the sounds together.

Best Visual Effects. I'm going to cheat a little and go with Avengers: Infinity War even though it's not out yet. It's incredible how realistic they've gotten the visual effects these days. One of the last vestiges of the uncanny valley that VFX artists have had a hard time bridging up to this point has been realistic eye movements and facial tics... and even in the trailers, if you look closely at Thanos, for example, that's a completely CG character that looks around and moves his face like a real person. It's absolutely stunning to be at a point where flesh and blood actors can stand side by side with CG characters and have them move and emote the same.

Best Adapted Screenplay. In my opinion, there are few more egregious oversights than when the 2009 Oscars snubbed Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner's transcendent Up in the Air in favor of Precious. And I don't use the word transcendent lightly. I read the book shortly after seeing the film and was truly shocked to see all the stuff that wasn't in the book. Anna Kendrick's entire character was added by the filmmakers! As was just about every moment that made George Clooney's character sympathetic. In Walter Kirn's book, the Ryan Bingham character isn't very likable and doesn't have much of an arc per se. The humanity and moments of really touching connection in the film were all the work of the screenwriters. They took what was, in my opinion, a mediocre book and turned it into a truly excellent film. If that's not the definition of Best Adaptation, I don't know what is!

Best Original Screenplay. This was probably my most difficult category to choose. There are some truly amazing original films out there, from Pulp Fiction to The Usual Suspects to Shakespeare in Love to Jerry Maguire. I think my choice, though, would have to go to Good Will Hunting not just because it's an excellent movie but because I love the story of two guys from Boston writing a story that featured the areas and people they grew up with. They wrote one hell of an emotional story about a tough kid who isn't so tough after all when you get past his rough exterior and formidable intelligence.