It's a week before Christmas, a solid handful of Oscar frontrunners haven't even opened yet, and the race is becoming almost crystal-clear. It's been a strange month, December, as contender after contender has been knocked out, or seemed to be knocked out only to rise again as award after award gets handed out. Now that we've seen what the Screen Actors Guild thinks of as the year's best performances, adding that in with the critic awards thus far gives a pretty good idea of how things will shake out in January.
Primarily, and somewhat surprisingly, Slumdog Millionaire has emerged as the only Best Picture nominee you can take to the bank. When Oscar guru Nathaniel Rogers put it on his Best Picture top 5 back in September, I thought he was nuts-- a movie set in India, full of dirt and crime, and half in Hindi? But the dumbed-down logic that happiness is what people seek during troubled times is coming abundantly true here, as Slumdog has catapulted every single one of its darker, more high-minded competitors. Prepare yourself for inevitable backlash-- I admit I may be part of it-- when people start dismissing it as a Dickensian fantasy that would seem entirely ordinary if it weren't set in India. There's a little logic to that argument, though it's mostly jealousy, but there's still no knocking this one down on its way to Oscar.
Behind that, it's worth looking at today's SAG Best Ensemble nominees to see which ones feel right, and which don't. The five are Slumdog Millionaire, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Milk, which are a pretty unlikely Best Picture lineup-- SAG almost never matches entirely. But the Slumdog nod, for a movie featuring only one credible acting nominee (Dev Patel) and absolutely no extraordinary acting, means it's a really serious competitor. The others could all fall out somehow. Doubt seems the likeliest to go, since it's a movie that's entirely about strong acting, but has pretty much nothing else to back it up-- the direction is poor, the technical stuff OK, and really only the screenplay stands to deserve a nod. Same goes for Frost/Nixon, whose 79 MetaCritic score indicates a good-but-not-great movie not all that deserving of a Best Picture berth. It still seems likelier to get in than Doubt, given the Ron Howard pedigree and entertainment factor, but could be easily felled if the Academy decides they want to get adventurous.
That leaves us with Milk and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, both of which are likely Best Picture nominees by most measures. Milk is almost guaranteed two acting nominees in Sean Penn and Josh Brolin, and while Benjamin Button will have to struggle to even get Brad Pitt in there for Best Actor (he made it with SAG), it has the epic scope and technical wizardry on its side. With the SAG noms today they seem guaranteed to make it in.
The disappointing thing to me about the ensemble nods from SAG is the lack of outliers, a crazy nominee guaranteed not to get in for Oscar but fun to see there anyway. Last year we had Hairspray and 3:10 to Yuma; the year before, Bobby made it in. But this year SAG,as the critics have, is sticking solely to end-of-the-year Oscar bait, leaving The Dark Knight and The Visitor and anything else that came out before October to fend for itself. Granted, there isn't that much else to choose from; Doubt, for all its disappointments, is still better than most anything I saw this year. But these nominations, particularly the crazy devotion to Slumdog Millionaire, simply confirm that this race is shaping up to be pretty ho-hum, a rote recognition of the best prestige movies of the year rather than any kind of reward of achievement.
The two movies capable of shaking this thing up are the ones I bet you will be at the top of my and head honcho Josh Tyler's top 10 lists: Wall-E (my pick) and The Dark Knight (his). The populist hits, the critical successes, the movies you can guarantee people will be talking about in 10 years (I would not dare say the same for any of today's SAG Best Ensemble nominees). Their absence from critical awards has been much-discussed here, and as they seem to slip off the Oscar radar, it's hard not to mope about the Oscar race that could have been. Sure, Wall-E couldn't have been nominated today, and The Dark Knight was a longshot too. But absent serious Golden Globe attention for either of them, and no critics rallying to save them, the two summer blockbusters in this race seem close to being TKO, replaced by a series of interchangeable prestige pictures features Adult Themes, Big Ideas, and Heavy Drama.
Below is the chart, which is getting mighty skinny now that just about everything is in release (but it's still ridiculous how many more we still have to go). As always, find the full list, including movies already in release, here. I've taken Valkyrie and Defiance off the chart below, not as slights to them, but because now that the Golden Globes haven't nominated them, no one will.
Next week I'm not certain I'll have a new column... it'll be Christmas Eve, there's no real new information coming up in the next week, and I'll be busy readying my top 10. As always, keep checking back with Cinema Blend for the latest news about critics awards and whatnot, but don't expect too much more of my brilliance for a while. Take a vacation! We've both earned it.
