Unfortunately, I didn’t get around to reviewing all of this year’s Oscar picks even though Maria and I were able to get through watching most of them. Still, since we’ve seen lots, I can at least make some predictions and ruminations about this year’s awards. I’ll skip categories that I haven’t seen enough of the films to weigh in on.

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Colin Firth for The King’s Speech

Maria and I were never able to see Bitiful, which the always brilliant Javier Bardem is nominated for, but we’ve heard that he was really good. Still, I’d find it very hard to believe that his performance was better than Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. Firth absolutely lived his role as the stammering reluctant King of England. Firth became the awkward, nervous, bleary-eyed King George using his entire body, in scenes that made me cringe. I loved even the way he carried himself, so unsure, so scared of everything. Throughout the film too, I thought his transformation was subtle and believable.

Compared to Jeff Bridges in True Grit—who was hilarious but fairly run-of-the-mill—and Jesse Eisenberg—who was pretty one-dimensional—Firth is the clear stand-out choice. His character was complex, incredibly complex, and his interpretation is absolutely brilliant.

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Natalie Portman in Black Swan

I admit I’m at a bit of a disadvantage in this category having only seen Black Swan and Winter’s Bone. I’ll tell you what though, if Portman doesn’t win I would be incredibly surprised. Portman’s otherworldly transformation as the lead dancer in her company’s production of Swan Lake has to be the best performance by an actress for 2010. Her madness was subtle. Her take on the character was very simple, but I think that just lent to an even more frightening performance: she appeared, on the surface, to be a simple character but then layer upon layer begin to, literally, peel away. I think this will be Portman’s year when she takes the stage and when her career moves up to that next level.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Geoffrey Rush in The King’s Speech

If Geoffrey Rush doesn’t win for Best Supporting Actor then it better be John Hawkes for his role in Winter’s Bone.

Let’s start with Hawkes. In his role Teardrop, the emotionally unpredictable Uncle to a girl searching for her father, Hawkes is pretty stellar. He’s scary, but believable. He’s complicated but like all of the actors in Winter’s Bone, he makes it seem real like he isn’t acting at all, like you’re almost watching a documentary—a very good one.

However, absolutely hands down, Geoffrey Rush needs to take this award. If Colin Firth’s stuttering King is an unforgettable performance then so is Rush’s pull-no-punches speech therapist Lionel Logel. Rush is nothing short of hilarious through virtue of being so confident in himself and so clever. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition: Rush playing a headstrong, self-assured common man against Firth’s nervous, stammering monarch.

Best Cinematography

Black Swan

In my opinion, this is perhaps the hardest category to call this year because there are three pretty predominant front-runners.

First is Inception. For all those naysayers, Inception was, visually, a pretty stunning film. There were lots of interesting things done with the camera to create a cohesive, yet absolutely mind-bending movie. Think of the action scenes, that whole upside-down segment, etc. It’s definitely in the running.

The King’s Speech is also nominated and if you weren’t paying pretty close attention you might’ve missed it but this film has some stellar camera work. Framing Colin Firth in a super wide angle against the crumbling wall of Geoffrey Rush’s office. Or filming Rush, rising from his chair, his face taking up the whole frame, looming over Firth with an absolutely palpable sense of authority and confidence.

Finally, there’s Black Swan, and this is the film I’m going to pick as the winner. When I reviewed this film I made a bit about how great I thought the camera was, following Natalie Portman around so closely and so controlled it only added to the sense that Portman’s life was constricted, constrained, and enhanced her madness. I loved it, and I think it worked well enough to deserve an Oscar.

Best Editing

The Social Network

I don’t think editing needs to be wildly impressive to win an award, I think it needs to be good and in the case of The Social Network, it was really well done. The movie was edited to keep the pace as a good clip, to unwind the story with perfect timing and the multiple storylines told around the different lawsuits, if you’ve seen the film, were done really well. The way it was written, this was a film that could’ve easily fallen apart without a good editor but obviously it had one and I think it’ll easily win in this category.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Social Network

The only other contender in this category, in my opinion, is Winter’s Bone which could also easily win. In both cases, the dialogue is pretty outstanding but I think The Social Network is the more likely to take the prize. Aaron Sorkin is simply the dialogue master and his screenplay was so fast and furious, so clever and complicated, that it made the film that much more enjoyable to watch.

Best Original Screenplay

Inception

Easily, folks, easily. It’s a pretty brilliant concept for a film even if it was robbed from Total Recall. No other contenders.

Best Picture

The Social Network

In my mind, in this heavyweight category, the one that matters the most, there are two contenders: The King’s Speech and The Social Network. Both films are about really interesting, niche subjects: the inventor of Facebook and the stammering King of England. Both are character-driven dramas with really interesting lead characters, really snappy dialogue, and both are really well acted.

In my opinion, The King’s Speech has far more compelling characters. Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth stand heads and shoulders above The Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg. But The Social Network has a quicker pace to it, it feels slightly better put together. While The King’s Speech feels a bit weighty and dragging, at times, The Social Network never slowed down. I liked that about The Social Network, and I think, despite the better character performances in The King’s Speech, it’s overall feel and pacing might see it lose to The Social Network.

Still,  it’s a very tough call… and we’ll have to see.

Caper films are a dime a dozen.

Enter The Town.

Set in the Charlestown area of Boston, Mass. The Town follows around a group of career criminals as they struggle to make sense of the oh-so-difficult world around them. Raised to do crime, this group of confused young men know nothing else and when one of them, a woe-begone Doug MacRay played by Ben Affleck, tries to bow out of a life of hijinks things go wrong. Oh, and he falls in love with one of their kidnap victims, which is usually also a big no no.

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Black Swan is an exercise in imagination and patience; a lesson in ambition and jealousy.

First thing, don’t watch Black Swan if you’d like to feel good by the end. Watch Black Swan if you’re in the mood for a fair share of nightmares and a queasy kind of uneasy feeling at the end of the film. What I’m saying is that it’s a pretty hard pill to swallow.

Black Swan follows a young ballerina, played expertly by Natalie Portman, whose ambition is to be the lead dancer in her company’s adaptation of Swan Lake. That said, it isn’t a ballet movie. Black Swan is a kind of character study. Throughout the course of the film we follow around Portman’s character, almost in a kind of reality TV style, as her ambition drives her deeper and deeper into her role in the ballet, and as it drives her to become more and more mistrustful, jealous and, of course, stark-raving mad.

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I am a huge fan of Ethan and Joel Coen, you must understand. I also enjoy myself a good Western. So when I heard that the Coen brothers were working on a Western, I flipped.

When I first saw the trailers for True Grit, I had a pretty good idea about what I thought the film would be. I pictured something right smack in between No Country for Old Men and O Brother Where Art Thou. Somewhere between a gritty, thriller-drama in the desert and a bumbling odyssey adventure with upright pianos and barn burnings. This, I thought, would be cinema perfection.

True Grit, however, ended up being anything but perfection and despite the Oscar nod—despite the laudable performance by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld—I found it to be a pretty disappointing film.

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The Blind Side is different than I expected. For starters, I don’t like sports movies, pretty much as a rule, because I don’t really like sports. But, like Invictus, which I reviewed earlier, The Blind Side isn’t so much about sports as it is about the human condition, hope, and faith. But, while it was different in that the sports aspect was pretty much glossed over, it wasn’t too different than everything else out there and what you ultimately have on your hands here is a feel-good movie. A feel-good movie done well, but a feel-good movie nonetheless.

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Truly, An Education wasn’t what I expected it would be going in.

To be fair, it was probably my fault. Concerned about sexual content, I looked it up on some family-oriented movie review sites. The kind of sites that warn parents about inappropriate material in films, and tell you which to stay far away from.

This particular website described An Education as pretty terrible. In not so many words, it said that the film was about a young girl being seduced by an older man who wanted to have sex with her. It said that the majority of the film surrounded this attempt, by the older man, to get the younger girl to have intercourse with him. It said that that was essentially the point of the film. I had my own reservations as well. Having recently seen Crazy Heart, I was still smarting from the classic Hollywood older man is swooned by much younger woman fantasy that that film let play out. An Education seemed like it would be much the same. But, as I’d find out, it wasn’t all about sex and it wasn’t just that same old Hollywood story.

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Those that know me well know that I love everything about the British royals—the Monarchy—so I approach a cinematic offering like The Young Victoria ready to just devour it. I’m happy to say that this film is a feast that doesn’t disappoint.

I should clarify. I do love the royals, but more than that, I love a good historical biopic film. The Young Victoria is exactly that: a dramatization of just what the name implies—the life of the young Queen Victoria. The beginning of the film covers Victoria’s growing up, her aging uncle, the King, and the power struggle that surrounded her eventual rise to the throne. Once she assumes the throne—and I hope I’m not spoiling this for anyone but she does become Queen—the rest of the film follows her settling into power, her mistakes and missteps, her personal life and, of course, her falling in love.

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