It’s been a very, very strange week for Oscar-watching. Mere hours after the nominations were announced last Tuesday, the giddiness and punditry was put on hold when word got out about Heath Ledger’s death. Since then almost all of the conversation has started with “It almost doesn’t feel important anymore…” or “It feels bad to be talking about this in light of what’s just happened.” Daniel Day-Lewis has even made a point of deflecting conversations to honor Ledger, as he did during an interview on Oprah and his acceptance speech for his SAG award last night.
But amid the ongoing writer’s strike and an honest-to-God tragedy, the show, in some way, goes on. As the Oscar nominations settle in, two major guilds held their award shows over the weekend, the Director’s Guild and the aforementioned Screen Actors Guild (SAG). For the most part it all went as expected: the Coen Brothers took the Best Director prize with their peers, the only award that the guild gives out (hey, you award what you know, right?) The SAG awards went largely to the usual suspects as well—No Country for Old Men took the ensemble prize, and Day-Lewis, Julie Christie and Javier Bardem added yet another award to the mountain they’ve amassed thus far.
The one real surprise was Ruby Dee, who snuck past Amy Ryan and Cate Blanchett to win Best Supporting Actress for her work in American Gangster. In a way this blows the supporting actress race wide open, given that it had been neck-and-neck race between Ryan and Blanchett up to this point. I’d bet that even Saiorsie Ronan and Tilda Swinton, the other contenders in the category, are sticking their heads up now, wondering if anything is possible.
A number of the Oscar-nominated movies expanded wider last weekend to capitalize on their new buzz; Michael Clayton benefited hugely from this, adding 1,000 theatres to what had been a paltry run. No Country expanded a bit too, and both are lurking strongly outside the top ten. On the inside, though, are Juno and There Will Be Blood, both of which had big weekends and one of which (hint: it’s the one about babies and not oil) crossed the ever-important $100 million mark. Juno is now the most financially successful of the Best Picture nominees by a long shot, and though it’s still considered the kid brother of the big kids in the top five lineup, sometimes box office dollars mean something when it comes to casting ballots.
From this angle, a little over a month before the ceremony, there seem to be a number of sure things. You can bet the rent on Daniel Day-Lewis taking home Best Actor, and maybe your electricity bill payment on Julie Christie getting her award too. Javier Bardem? Bet the price of a really, really nice pair of shoes. The supporting actress race, as I’ve said, is murkier, though I still might bet a beer or two that Cate Blanchett takes it away.
The Best Picture race looks locked up by No Country, but since that’s the biggest race, it’s the least fun when it’s decided ahead of time. As I mentioned last week, I think I’m going to pretend that There Will Be Blood can stage an upset and pretend to root for it, even though my heart belongs in No Country. There are theories abound that No Country and Blood could cancel each other out and leave room for Michael Clayton or even Juno to take the top prize. I say hooey. Sometimes a frontrunner is just a frontrunner, and that’s looking the way things will go this time too.
I’ll be checking in with more updates weekly until the Oscars, as always, but there’s a whole lot less speculation to do these days, and therefore a lot less fun. Hopefully someone will say something really inappropriate on television, or get arrested, or something interesting to shake up the race. That darn Daniel Day-Lewis, always being such a class act and making people want to vote for him!
