After much deliberation, here are our final picks:

Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain
Best Director: Ang Lee – Brokeback Mountain
Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon
Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney
Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz
Best Original Screenplay: Crash
Best Adapted Screenplay: Brokeback Mountain
Best Foreign Film: Tsotsi
Best Documentary Feature: March of the Penguins
Best Animated Feature Film: Wallace & Gromit
Best Art Direction: Memoirs of a Geisha
Best Cinematography: Brokeback Mountain
Best Costume Design: Memoirs of a Geisha
Best Documentary Short: God Sleeps in Rwanda
Best Film Editing: Crash
Best Makeup: The Chronicles of…
More... | 1 Comment

Will Win: I did not love Brokeback Mountain. There, I said it. It was good – not amazing. I liken Brokeback Mountain to the English Patient. When I watched both of them, I recognized that I was seeing a good film with great cinematography. However, I also recognized that my seat was becoming increasingly uncomfortable because I was ready for the film to end. I left the theatre thinking, “That will win the best picture Oscar” not “Seeing that movie has changed how I see the world.”

I get it. Jack and Ennis are in love and are forced…
More... | 5 Comments

Your recent winners for Best Cinematography include The Aviator, LOTR: Return of the King, The Road to Perdition, LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring, and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Go a little further back and you have Titanic, The English Patient and Braveheart. What does that tell you? When it comes to cinematography, the Academy loves something big. Sure, Road to Perdition won a few years ago, but that had more to do with nominee Conrad Hall’s death that year than anything else. Among this year’s nominees (Batman Begins, Brokeback Mountain, Good Night and Good Luck, Memoirs of a Geisha…
More... | 1 Comment

You should all know this by now. What makes the difference in whether or not you win your Oscar pool is not the Best Picture or Best Actor categories. In our current Oscar world, those are fairly predictable. No, what matters are the often hard to predict technical categories. Let’s take a look at Sound Mixing, where the nominees are King Kong, War of the Worlds, Memoirs of a Geisha, Chronicles of Narnia, and Walk the Line. Worlds and Narnia haven’t received much buzz. Their prize is in the nominations. Geisha features a sound crew that has previously been nominated…
More...

Out of the five films nominated for best foreign language film, Tsotsi and the Final Days were released in the past week. Don’t Tell, Joyeux Noël, will not be released until March and Paradise Now is already out of theatres. This bodes well for Tsotsi, the Final Days and Paradise Now. Best foreign language films released in the U.S. before final balloting is complete have won 77.78 percent of the time (FilmJerk).

Paradise Now and Tsotsi are the two films that have been the most talked…
More... | 1 Comment

Evaluating the best animated short category is not easy given that I have not seen any of the films. Five films are nominated: Badgered, The Moon and the Sun, The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello, 9, and One Man Band. None of the nominees are previous Oscar winners. However, One Man Band is a Pixar product and 9 is currently being turned into a feature film. Shane Acker, the creator of 9, won a Student Academy Award last year. The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello won the Australian Film Institute award for best short animation, is…
More...

The nominees for best documentary short are all Oscar newbies with the exception of Steven Okazaki. Okazaki won in 1990 and is nominated this year for the Mushroom Club. The Mushroom Club examines the effects of Hiroshima sixty years later. The two other strong contenders for the win are God Sleeps in Rwanda, a film about women in Rwanda after the genocide, and the Death of Kevin Carter, a short about a photojournalist who took a photo of a starving woman in the Sudan and how doing so changed his life. I am going to go out on a…
More...

This will be an interesting category to watch come Oscar night. Many experts are picking Crash, which creatively weaves together the lives of many people in melting pot LA. Crash did recently pick up the Writer’s Guild award, which gives it a huge boost. But it still stops short of slamming the door on its competition. One of the biggest reasons why is what we have previously mentioned as “The Clooney Factor.” The ever popular George Clooney is up for three categories, and it seems plausible that Academy voters will want to hand him something shiny. But Best Director is…
More...

Best supporting actor is one of the toughest races to call. Traditionally, a safe way to pick a winner has been to ask, “Will this be the defining role for the career of this actor?” Unfortunately, this was not the career-defining role for any of the actors. George Clooney was good, but not amazing in Syriana. Matt Dillon was excellent in Crash, but had a very minor part. Dillon’s career defining film remains Drugstore Cowboy. Paul Giamatti should have won for Sideways last year, and a win here would be considered a make-up award. Jake Gyllenhaal was good but not…
More... | 2 Comments