Is there anyone on the planet that doesn’t claim to know who will win big on Oscar night? Still, despite the clutter of prediction and prognostication, we at RT got together to gather up our collective two cents. After five arduous hours of shouting, bitter recriminations, and a near-fatal knife fight that could only be settled by hugging it out over a bowl of Lucky Charms, we settled on our picks. If you don’t like ’em, don’t get mad – tell us what you think! Cast a ballot with your picks, or print our snazzy Oscar ballot out to follow along on Oscar Night.
In addition, you can watch the Oscars with RT on the big night! Our Editor-in-Chief Matt Atchity will be tweeting live from the Oscar ceremony, so don’t forget to follow us on Twitter. Plus, check out our Awards Tour page, where you’ll be able to use your Facebook account to discuss the proceedings with RT editors and other RTers. Immediately following the show, we’ll be updating our Best of the Best Pictures feature in order to place the winner in its rightful historical context.
Without further ado, here are our predictions for the 2010 Academy Awards!
Although Oscar watchers say The Hurt Locker and Avatar are neck-and-neck for Best Picture, we’ll give the nod to Kathryn Bigelow’s tense Iraq war drama for a number of reasons. Chiefly, though Avatar‘s technical wizardry is not in question, a number of folks have been less than enamored with its plot and dialogue; contrast that with the near-universal critical praise for The Hurt Locker. Secondly, James Cameron didn’t enamor himself to many with his “king of the world” speech when he won for Titanic in 1997. And it’s noteworthy that the biggest voting bloc in the Academy is comprised of actors, those sensitive souls that may feel vaguely threatened by the technical advancements of Avatar. In addition, the decision to expand the number of nominees from five to 10 this year seems to effectively limit the possibility of any dark horse candidates swooping in for the victory. Given all those factors, we think The Hurt Locker will pull out the win on Sunday night.
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In the history of the Academy Awards, only four women have ever been nominated for Best Director: Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties, 1976), Jane Campion (The Piano, 1993), and Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, 2003), and now Bigelow. It seems probable to us that Academy voters, aware of the opportunity to make history, will give the award to Bigelow, who’d be worthy of the honor regardless of gender.
Way out west there was this fella… fella I wanna tell ya about. Fella by the name of Jeff Bridges. There was a lot about Bridges that didn’t make a whole lot of sense — most notably, the fact that he’d been nominated for four Oscars and never won a single one. Sometimes there’s a man… I won’t say a hero, ’cause, what’s a hero? But sometimes, there’s a man. And I’m talkin’ about Jeff Bridges here. Sometimes, there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place — and given his remarkable body of work, including a great performance in Crazy Heart — Jeff Bridges will get his moment in the sun this year. The Dude will abide.
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Jeff Bridges |
George Clooney |
Colin Firth |
Morgan Freeman |
Jeremy Renner |
Remember in 1997 when Karl Malone won the NBA MVP award mostly because people were tired of voting for Michael Jordan? We see a similar situation this year — even though Meryl Streep won nearly universal praise for her performance in Julia & Julia, we see Sandra Bullock taking home the Oscar — she’s an audience favorite who tweaked her onscreen persona in a box office hit, which should be enough to put her over the top.
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Sandra Bullock |
Helen Mirren |
Carey Mulligan |
Gabourey Sidibe |
Meryl Streep |
In Inglourious Basterds, Waltz took gleeful malevolence to new heights, relishing every syllable of sinister dialogue Tarantino provided him. It’s a delicious performance – one of the most villainous in recent memory – and Waltz’s coronation in this category seems like a foregone conclusion.
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Matt Damon |
Woody Harrelson |
Christopher Plummer |
Stanley Tucci |
Christoph Waltz |
The Academy loves a dramatic makeover, and Mo’Nique certainly fits the bill. In Precious, playing one of the worst movie moms since Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, the funnywoman-cum-talk show hostess has been showered with honors this awards season, and we think she’s a lock for the Oscar.
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Penelope Cruz |
Vera Farmiga |
Anna Kendrick |
Mo’Nique |
Maggie Gyllenhaal |
Even if the trend has been bucked in the last couple years, the writing categories tend to be where the Academy throws a bone to the innovative left-of-center oddities and highbrow fare that voters don’t feel comfortable enough to honor with the Best Picture Oscar (notable examples include Citizen Kane in 1941, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004, and Juno in 2007). Quentin Tarantino should be familiar with the drill by now; Pulp Fiction may have influenced a generation of indie types, but its lone Oscar was for its script. We think QT will take his second Oscar this year, as Basterds is too inventive to ignore, and too wild not to take the top prize.
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What happened to Up in the Air? Upon its release in December, awards prognosticators deemed a favorite to win Best Picture and at least several acting awards. Its Oscar stock may have dropped precipitously since then, but we think the Academy will still recognize Up in the Air for its smart, literate script.
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Didn’t the Academy already tip its hand in this category? By nominating Up for Best Picture — and none of the other nominees in the running for Best Animated Feature — doesn’t it logically follow that it’s the best of the bunch? Even though some voters may have Pixar fatigue, it seems unlikely that anything could top Up, which already took home the Golden Globe for animation.
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Avatar looks pretty.
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When your movie captures a dreamscape as potent and vivid as Pandora, you’re probably getting an award.
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When in doubt, go with the period piece. When three period pieces are involved, go with the one that seemed to get the most praise for its look.
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Our usual inclination in this category is to select the movie with the most noticeable cuts – the movie with the flashiest display of the editor’s craft. With that in mind, we’re going with Inglourious, since it maintains a palpable, unnerving level of tension while utilizing virtually every visual idea in Tarantino’s arsenal.
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A movie about a down-on-his-luck country singer had better have a killer soundtrack. Fortunately Crazy Heart‘s collection of tracks mixes twangy classics and rock-solid originals – especially Ryan Bingham’s gritty, tear-stained The Weary Kind.
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With the exception of Buck Sanders, who’s co-nominated with Marco Beltrami, everyone up for the Best Original Score has been previously nominated at least twice. We think Michael Giacchino is going to win, not least because of the fact that the part of Up that’s always mentioned is that wordless montage at the beginning – those heart-wrenching three minutes that tell the tale of Carl’s marriage, punctuated by Giacchino’s poignant, three-hanky music.
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Duh.
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To compensate for not winning Best Picture, the Academy will bestow the technical awards on them tall blue folks.
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(See “Achievement in Sound Editing.”)
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Let’s get down to brass tacks: any time you have the opportunity to reward a movie for making a girl with green skin look attractive, you’ve got to do it.
According to right wing pundits, Hollywood is aggressively insular in its bleeding-heart liberalism. We at RT would like to table that argument – indefinitely, if possible – but they might have a point in one respect: the Best Documentary category. Man on Wire excepted, recent winners have tended to focus on ecological and/or foreign policy debacles. By that logic, we’re picking the save-the-whales thriller The Cove.
The Most Dangerous Man in America (100%)
This category has been hard to pick in recent years, with several wild cards (Departures in 2008, The Lives of Others in 2006) triumphing over movies that earned some measure of box office success (Waltz with Bashir and Pan’s Labyrinth, respectively). The Golden Globes aren’t much of a predictor, either – the last time a movie swept both awards was in 2004, with The Sea Inside. And although Michael Haneke (Cache, Funny Games) has become something of a divisive figure in international cinema (his films have been alternately embraced and decried for their ambiguity and brutality), few question his craftsmanship and integrity. We think he’ll join the ranks of Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa with a win in this category.
When it comes to short docs, the voters tend to favor entries that focus on the timely and the poignant. Given the domestic automobile industry’s woes, this seems like a safe choice.
China’s Unnatural Disaster
The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner
The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant 
Music by Prudence
Rabbit a la Berlin
Nick Park is nominated in this category with a new Wallace and Grommit short, A Matter of Loaf and Death. Case closed, right? Not so fast. Our choice is the action-packed, deliriously satirical Logorama. It’s as anti-corporate as a year’s subscription to Adbusters, but manages to delight nonetheless with its handmade look, which utilizes some of big business’ best-known trademarks and mascots as sentient beings.
French Roast
Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty
The Lady and the Reaper
Logorama
A Matter of Loaf and Death
Filmed in Ukraine near Chernobyl, Juanita Wilson’s haunting, mysterious The Door already won big at the Irish Film and Television Awards. And that’s all we got, though Internet Oscar swamis say this category is in the bag – and if it’s on the Internet, it has to be true.
The Door
Instead of Abracadabra
Kavi
Miracle Fish
The New Tenants
Come back and watch the Oscars with RT this Sunday, March 7 starting at 4:00PM Pacific/7:00PM Eastern for live coverage of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards! With your trusty Oscar ballot in hand, we’ll be covering the show via Twitter and Facebook on our Awards Tour headquarters with all the latest winners and pictures live from the show!
