The 2012 Academy Awards sucked. Despite Billy Crystal’s resurrection as host, the nominees (Midnight in Paris, Hugo, The Artist) didn’t possess the characteristic gravitas or ambition you’d expect from the candidates for Hollywood’s highest honors. But the tide has turned, and 2013’s high-caliber Oscar nominees are set to engage in the most nerve-racking Academy Awards show in recent memory.
To get an idea of the past year’s resurgence in quality films, let’s compare this year’s Oscar nominees to the 2012 winners. The Artist, in a campaign season fluke, managed to snag the awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay (an impressive feat for a movie consisting of 30 lines of dialogue). Countering 2012’s weak nominees, 2013 brought legions of talent to the big screen—too much talent for the Academy to handle. Of the nine current Best Picture nominees, it’s hard to imagine the best five of the bunch losing to The Artist. In fact, if The Artist’s release date were delayed a year, there’s a good chance it would leave the 2013 awards show empty handed.
This year’s pool of candidates is marked by its variety, novelty, and well, just about everything that makes cinema worth watching. Take The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s most cryptic film to date: this film’s cast alone (including the back-from-the-grave Joaquin Phoenix) packs more punches than last year’s collection of nominated performances. To exemplify this year’s nominees’ range, compare the feel-good dramedy Silver Linings Playbook to the somberly historic Lincoln. These two disparate movies have garnered nearly equal amounts of critical praise, highlighting the dynamic quality of 2012’s releases.
With competition this close, predicting the winners would be a futile effort. That said, what good would an article about the Academy Awards be without a contentious prophecy of the night’s victors? The pre-Oscar awards shows such as the Golden Globes hint at a good night for Argo (with the exception of directing, for which Ben Affleck was notably snubbed a nomination). If the Academy voters shun this award season favorite, there’s a good chance they’ll turn to Silver Linings Playbook or Lincoln for Best Picture. While The Master received near unanimous praise from critics, its inchoate plot arc and disconcerting characters may not agree with the Academy’s current predilection for “charming” films like The Artist and The King’s Speech.
The Oscar for Best Actor is Daniel Day Lewis’s to lose, and if there is a god, Jennifer Lawrence will win Best Actress, but the competition for the best supporting actor categories has set the stage for a nail-biting night. The race for Best Supporting Actor is between Tommy Lee Jones and Christoph Waltz (although one should never underestimate Philip Seymour Hoffman), and in the Best Supporting Actress category, Sally Field and Anne Hathaway have garnered equal amounts of praise. Finally, considering the exclusion of Ben Affleck, the Oscar for Best Director is up in the air. For themore prudent gamblers, betting on David O. Russell for his superb job on Silver Linings would be a wise choice. For the high rollers out there, Amour’s veteran director Michael Haneke could be a plausible choice for this accolade.
It’s hard to think of an Oscars night with more qualified nominees. The evening should be all the more enjoyable because it’s so difficult to root against any of these artists, as opposed to say, the 2010 Oscars where Avatar was at risk of winning Best Picture. The only way the Academy could really drop the ball is by rewarding the insufferably depressing Amour in any of the major categories, but even then, it’s a hard film to criticize. It’s just so fucking sad that I pity anyone compelled to watch it. Seriously, it makes Sophie’s Choice look like The Birdcage.
It’s been a good year for movies. No Transformers sequels came out, Sandra Bullock hasn’t been nominated for an Academy Award, and some of the era’s best filmmakers released new material. On top of all that, James Franco and Anne Hathaway were not asked to return as the hosts of the Academy Awards and, for posterity’s sake, Billy Crystal has been safely returned to the cryogenic freezer Rob Reiner stores in his basement. Let’s keep it up, Hollywood. It would save cinephiles a lot of money spent on repairing post-Oscar night shattered television screens and hours spent bitching on IMDB forums.
