It's been about six months since my Oscar last dispatch, but I'm here to be about the 50th person to tell you that awards season is back, and there's nothing you can do about it. No, don't run away and hide in a corner until you can watch your Dark Knight Blu-Ray edition. Oscars are supposed to be fun! And this is the time of year when they actually are fun, when only a few contenders have actually been seen, there's room for all kinds of speculations, and all of your favorites still have a shot at winning the gold. Plus, I promise we'll be talking about The Dark Knight later, so bear with me.
With the Venice and Toronto film festivals wrapped up, and the New York version just about to get underway, a handful of American contenders are already making their voices heard. Make that a really, really small handful. While last year's New York Film Festival was peppered with new offerings from all kinds of beloved artsy directors, from Todd Haynes (I'm Not There) to Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited). The festival even produced the eventual best picture winner No Country for Old Men, best director nominee Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and best animated feature nominee Persepolis.
But this year there's a huge lack of American offerings, and same goes for the two festivals that preceded it. Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler came out of Toronto and Venice with rave notices, particularly a lot of best actor talk for Mickey Rourke. The Wrestler is represented in New York, as is Clint Eastwood's The Changeling, which got positive if not entirely enthralled reaction at Cannes. Fellow Cannes debut Che, the Guevara biopic starring Benicio del Toro, is coming to New York as well, but with its four-hour running time it's considered a challenge, if not an impossibility, for awards attention.
So what happened this year? Where are the autumn auteurs who charm festival audiences before they hit the Oscar circuit? And are the American movies coming out this fall just so bad that the New York Film Festival had to give it a big "No, thanks."
The main problem seems to be a bigger rush toward December than ever, with nearly every Oscar hopeful crowding into the last month of the year, hoping to get more attention. That's why so few of the movies are surfacing now-- they're not even finished yet!-- and also why some of them will inevitably fail to get noticed. Some have un-ignorable starpower in their favor-- Doubt, with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Revolutionary Road with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, The Soloist with Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey, Jr., among others-- but some will manage to get lost in the shuffle no matter what they have going for them.
But like I said, right now that's all nothing but speculation. Right now there are no sure bets-- not even festival favorites like The Wrestler or Changeling, which are mostly driven by the power of their performances-- except the surest bet there's been all year: The Dark Knight. See, I told you we'd get back into familiar territory! People have been talking Dark Knight Oscar prospects since even before Heath Ledger died, but as the movie became exponentially more popular, the speculation got wilder and wilder. Plenty of smart Oscar watchers are predicting a Best Picture nomination, not exactly confidently, but with hope that the Academy can once again acknowledge a giant populist hit along the lines of Jaws, Star Wars and even Titanic.
The Dark Knight means all good things to all Oscar people, really. Its participation in the awards would get more people to watch the ceremony than they have in past years, giving people an opportunity to root for a movie they've actually seen. It's a chance to honor Heath Ledger (who will inevitably get his Best Supporting Actor nod) after he lost out for Brokeback, and a chance to honor Nolan, who got attention but not nearly enough for Memento all those years ago. At the very least, the technical nominations are in the bag. Dark Knight has competition from Iron Man in those departments, but if the pendulum swings in Knight's favor, it should be enough to snag plenty of those statues.
So who would've figured that we'd get nearly to the end of September and the only movie anyone is willing to put on an Oscar shortlist is a superhero movie that came out in July. That's the fun of this time of the Oscar season--surprises are everywhere, as is the promise that another one is still to come. After all, this time last year was only the beginning anyone talking about this weird indie called Juno-- and not a soul had seen There Will Be Blood. Ah, how things change.
Next week I will have seen Che and The Wrestler, and may have some more insight on how those will fit into the bigger picture. It'll also be a good time to talk about acting awards, given that Benicio del Toro and Mickey Rourke are both angling for the Best Actor slot. And hopefully by then I'll have rigged up some kind of chart that gives an idea of what's coming out and when, and exactly what people way smarter than me are saying about its chances.
