Oscar Predictions

While the installers are busy putting in new carpeting throughout the upstairs of our house today, The Grandstander will, by popular demand (which means that more than one person has asked about it [and there have been two such requests]), revisit an annual feature - My Academy Award Predictions.

This is the third year that I have done this.  Actually, in 2012, I really just made some observations ahead of time, but no predictions per se.  Last year, I did predict the winners in 9 categories and hit on six of them.  Not bad, and let's see if I can do better this year.

Best Picture. 

Nine pictures have been nominated, and I have had the good fortune to see six of them.  Were I voting, I would give the nod to "Nebraska", and I do this by asking the simple question:  Which movie am I likely to watch again and again in the years ahead?  By that standard, "Nebraska" tops the list for me. (By the way, this is not a be-all-and-end-all criterion.  If it were, then movies like Caddyshack, Sixteen Candles, Vacation, and Eight Men Out would have Oscars to their credit, which, good as they are, they really don't deserve.)  However, my call for the Oscar winner come Sunday night is for "American Hustle" to take home the statue.  I had this movie behind "Captain Phillips" before I saw "Nebraska", but I won't argue with this one earning the big prize.

Full disclosure:  I have not seen "Dallas Buyers Club", "Philomena", or "12 Years a Slave".

Best Actor.

Christian Bale was great in "American Hustle", as was Leonardo DiCaprio in "Wolf of Wall Street", and Chiwetel Ejiofor won the British version of the Oscar for "12 Years a Slave", but this seems to be a race between Bruce Dern in "Nebraska" and Matthew McConaughey for "Dallas Buyers Club".  The Academy often likes to award old timers like Dern who get a plum role late in theior careers, but that usually happens in the Supporting category, so I am going to call this one for Matthew McConaughey.

Also, I can't comment on this category without saying one last time that Tom Hanks really got hosed by not being nominated for "Captain Phillips".

Best Actress.

This category appears to be the closest thing to a slam dunk going in, so I will call this one for Cate Blanchett in "Blue Jasmine".  Terrific movie and a fantastic performance.  My vote for second place here would go to the wonderful Amy Adams in "American Hustle".

Best Supporting Actor.

I take back what I said earlier.  THIS is the slam dunk category of the night with the award going to Jared Leto of "Dallas Buyers Club".  However, Barkhad Abdi of "Captain Phillips" won the British version of the award, but Leto won the SAG and Golden Globe, so I'll go with him.

Best Supporting Actress.

I have seen three of the nominees, Sally Hawkins of "Blue Jasmine", Jennifer Lawrence of "American Hustle" and June Squibb of "Nebraska", all great performances, but I will predict that the Oscar will go to Lupita Nyong'o of "12 Years a Slave".  This will also be he Academy's way of honoring this movie which received so many other big nominations.

Best Director.

I have seen four of the five nominees, and my vote would go to Alexander Payne for "Nebraska" if I had one.  Usually, the Best Picture winner director wins this one, which would point to David O. Russell for "American Hustle", but I will go off track and call this one for Alfonso Cuaron for "Gravity".  

Best Original Song.

To me, this has become an irrelevant category for the Academy Awards and has been pretty much since Henry Mancini stopped scoring movies, but since they hand one out, I am going to call a win for Ordinary Love from "Mandela:The Long Walk to Freedom".   Written and performed by U2, I see this as an easy call and am including it here just to fatten up my winning percentage.

Screenwriting Awards.

This are pretty much SWAG predictions on my part, but for Best Adapted Screenplay, I'll go with Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope for "Philomena" and for Original Screenplay, Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell  for "American Hustle".

Best Cinematography

I am not going to be so pretentious as to even pretend to be knowledgeable about the art of Cinematography, nevertheless, I am anxious to see how this one turns out as two of the nominees are "Nebraska" and "Gravity".  The look of the movie "Nebraska" really made me feel the openness and loneliness of the wide open spaces of the American Great Plains, and isn't that what movies are supposed to do?  However, "Gravity" really did make like you were in outer space, for crying out loud.  So, what the hell, a Cinematography prediction for Emmanuel Lubezki for "Gravity".

There you go - ten predictions.  Watch, but don't bet.

Movie Review: "Nebraska"

We watched the Academy Award nominated movie "Nebraska" last night, and I'll cut right to the chase and not mince any words.

I loved this movie.  Loved it.

Directed by Alexander Payne ("Sideways", "The Descendants"), and staring Bruce Dern and Will Forte, this is a movie that I can see myself watching again and again (very much like Payne's "Sideways").  It is the story of an elderly man, Woody Grant (Dern), who thinks he has won $1 million in a magazine sweepstakes, and he is determined to set off from his home in Billings, Montana and travel to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect it.

Of course, he really hasn't won a million dollars, he is an elderly, alcoholic bordering on dementia, and, all in all, not that nice a guy.  His wife calls him a "dumb cluck" and to his two adult sons, he wasn't much of a father as they grew up.  In any event, the younger son, David (Forte), sets off on a road trip to Nebraska to get away from his own troubles, give his mother a break, and convince the old man that he's being scammed.

Along the way, they spend time with some relatives and meet up with some of Woody's old friends, and make, as people always do in such movies, lots of discoveries about themselves and their history.

"Nebraska" is filmed in black and white, which is perfect for the mood of this movie.  It captures the vastness and emptiness of small town America in Montana and Nebraska.  The characters. the main ones and the peripheral ones, are drawn amazingly well.  Even the music that is the background score is perfect.  The movie makes you laugh and cry, and it really makes you feel that you are out there on the Great Plains with Woody and David. 

Bruce Dern, at the age of 77, is getting a lot of buzz for the Best Actor Academy Award.  Not sure if he will win, but this is the kind of "lifetime achievement" award that the Academy often bestows on older actors.  Not sure if he's going to win it, but I wouldn't argue against it if he did.

"Nebraska" has a bunch of big time Oscar nominations - Best Picture, Dern for Best Actor, Payne for Best Director, and Bob Nelson for Best Original Screenplay.  It is the sixth of the nine Best Picture nominees that I have seen, and if given a vote, I do believe that I would give this my vote over my previous Number One, "American Hustle".

Anyway, see "Nebraska".  It is a terrific movie.

To Absent Friends - Harold Ramis

Actor-Director-Screenwriter Harold Ramis died yesterday at the age of 69.

When the history of American film making in the late twentieth century is written, Ramis' name be a mere footnote when compared to the likes of Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, and Lukas, but when you are talking about movie comedy, how can Harold Ramis not be considered a true giant? Consider this mere sampling of his body of work, in each of which Ramis either wrote, directed, or acted:

• Animal House
• National Lampoon's Vacation
• Groundhog Day
• Meatballs
• Caddyshack
• Ghostbusters
• Stripes
• Analyze This

On Facebook yesterday, my friend Dan Bonk said it best: "I would have laughed a lot less in life had it not been for Harold Ramis."

That is a damn fine epitaph.

RIP Harold Ramis.

The Sochi Games Draw to a Close

The Winter Olympic Games in Sochi will close down today, and, while I have not written of them in this blog, I will say that I have enjoyed watching them.

The Winter Olympics bring to the forefront an odd mixture of sports that are unfamiliar to Americans, so, as such, they often draw criticism from xenophobic American sportswriters and sports fans.  "What in the hell kind of sport is luge/biathlon/speed skating/curling (take your pick, and I could go on)? Who cares about that stuff?"  Well, just because we don't have Little League Biathlon here in the US of A, doesn't mean that these things are not sports, and, in fact, are very important sports in other parts of the world, and seeing them once every four years is kind of fun.

The prime example of this to me is curling.  "Shuffleboard on ice" some folks sneer, but, once you get the basic rules of the game straight in your mind, and it is relatively simple, and watch these players (curlers?) do their thing, you realize that you are watching performers with a unique skill set.  And is the joy and sense of accomplishment for Canadian curlers winning a Gold Medal any less important to them that the joy experienced by Sidney Crosby or Kobe Bryant winning Gold Medals in their sports?  I contend that an Olympic skier, snowboarder, luger, biathlete, or curler experiences a "thrill of victory" equal to or greater than the ones experienced by NHL or NBA professionals. 

Okay, all that said, what did I like best about these Olympics?

• Believe it or not, I really got a charge out of the X Games types of events like slope style snowboarding and skiing, and the 4x4 ski races.
• Curling.  Didn't see as much these games as I did in the Vancouver Games four years ago, but enjoyed the matches I did see.
• The alpines ski events and skiers like Tina Maze of Slovenia and Mikaela Shiffrin of the USA.
• Noelle Pikus Pace, thirty-something mother of two, winning a Silver Medal in Skeleton for the USA 
• Rochester, PA's Lauryn Williams winning a silver medal in bobsled for the USA, thus becoming the first woman and only the fifth American ever to medal in both the Winter and Summer Olympics.  Such an accomplishment should earn her, at the very least, Pittsburgh's Dapper Dan Sportswoman of the Year honors.
• And finally, the hockey tournament, both men and women events.  Is it only me who finds Olympic hockey far more entertaining than an ordinary normal NHL contest?  How can these players, many of them NHL stars, play this skillfully and in such a free-flowing manner, only to return to NHL thuggery hockey once they are back to their teams this week?  
• I will remember the heartbreak of the USA Women blowing that 2-0 lead to Canada with under four minutes to play in the gold medal game, as well as the intensity and high level of play of the USA-Canada men's semi-final game.  (I will try to forget the no-show performance of the USA in the 5-0 loss to Finland in the bronze medal game.)

So farewell to the Winter Olympics for another four years.  It was a pretty damn good show!

Movie: "Monuments Men"; Book: "Killer"

You've no doubt seen the commercials promoting George Clooney's new movie, "Monument Men", so you probably have a pretty good idea what it is about.  A team of seven men attached to the US Army in Europe following the Normandy Invasion on D-Day are assigned the task of rescuing works of art that have been stolen by the Nazis during the course of the war.  The German Army has orders that in the event that Hitler dies or Germany surrenders, all of this artwork is to be destroyed.

The race against time to find and save these art treasures is the story of the movie.  Clooney proves to be a man for all seasons here.  Not only does he star in the movie, but he directed it and co-wrote the screenplay.  It is also a terrific cast - Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, and the guy from "The Artist" and Lord Grantham for Downton Abbey.

Very good movie, and highly recommended.

Regular readers of The Grandstander know that I am a big fan author Jonathan Kellerman and his series of mystery novels featuring psychologist Alex Delaware and his police friend, Lt. Milo Sturgis.  "Killer" is the latest in the series, released earlier this month.  

In this one, Alex is called upon by a Judge to consult in a child custody battle being waged by two sisters.  What follows is a threat upon Alex's life, a murder, a disappearance, and the involvement of a long ago patient of Alex', now a serious gang-banger in Los Angeles.

I will resort to that hoary old cliche - once I started reading this, I couldn't stop.  Finished it in two days.  If you're a fan of Kellerman/Delaware, I know you will read this.  If you are unfamiliar with the series, you can pretty much start with any one of the novels; it is not necessary to read them all in order, so "Killer" would be as good as any to begin with.

No one writes better dialog than Kellerman.  The conversations within any of these books are examples of really terrific writing.

To Absent Friends - Cannonball Butler

The Grim Reaper continued his relentless run through the month of February by claiming the life of former Pittsburgh Steeler Jim "Cannonball" Butler last week at the age of 70.

If you are a Steelers fan under the age of fifty or so, your only memories of the Steelers are of a team that has a glorious history in the Super Bowl Era and is a perennial playoff, if not Super Bowl, contender.  However, if you are an old gink like me, you know that the prior to the hiring of Chuck Noll and the drafting of Joe Greene, the Steelers were more often than not, perennial doormats in the NFL, and it was guys like Cannonball Butler that came to symbolize the general ineptitude that surrounded the Steelers in those days.

The obituary in the Post-Gazette the other day emphasized the one play that pretty much epitomized Butler's tenure with the Steelers.  When running on to the field late to get in position in punt formation, Butler ran in front of the punter and was hit by the center's snap to the punter.  A botched play that I have never seen happen in a football game in the fifty or so years since it happened that day at Pitt Stadium.  And, yes, I can say that I was in attendance at Pitt Stadium that day and saw this play unfold.  No jumbo-trons at Pitt Stadium back then to enable us to see a replay of this epic play. Probably a good thing.

After spending three seasons with the Steelers, Butler played five seasons in Atlanta and made the Pro Bowl in 1969 while playing for the Falcons.  In fact, the obit in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution refers to him as "former Falcons great, Cannon Butler".

RIP Jim "Cannonball" Butler.

For Patrick and Zachary

To honor two of my great-nephews, who will be graduating from high school in a few months.