Oscar: The Day After

Oscar: The Day After: Is it possible to be both elated and deflated about this year’s Academy Awards?

So many worthy people and films found golden recognition on Sunday night. Watching Martin Scorsese, Helen Mirren and Alan Arkin getting long overdue kudos and films like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Lives of Others finding audiences gave movie lovers reason to hope. Yet the ceremony itself was an embarrassment, like seeing your elder relations trying to dance to “Hey Ya!” at a wedding.

The Academy risks insignificance by forgetting that the medium it is celebrating is film, not TV. A pessimist might conclude that 24 frames per second is no longer fast enough for the brief attention spans of today’s plugged-in and turned-on world.

I’ve felt this way for some time about the Academy Awards, but Sunday’s debacle really drove it home. Ellen DeGeneres may work well on daytime television, where her Cheshire cat grin goes over gangbusters, but she looked seriously out of her league on the Oscar stage — which itself was no architectural marvel.

The Oscar host is supposed to seem like the smartest person in the room; someone who knows the movie industry well enough to poke fun at its participants, but who also has the good sense and taste to celebrate Hollywood’s better traits and finer offerings.

DeGeneres revelled in being clueless and crass. Lacking all sense of occasion, she reduced the Academy Awards to a circus, casting herself as the main clown. She engaged in audience participation stunts — like vacuuming the rugs and having Steven Spielberg snap her picture with Clint Eastwood — that looked like her audition to be entertainment director at a holiday camp. In a word, it was undignified.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when such shenanigans were the comic relief to a show dedicated to serious appreciation of the art of film. Now the art seems more like the dramatic relief to the endless comedy of the Oscars. It was superfluous to have Will Ferrell, Jack Black and John C. Reilly doing a musical lament to the Academy’s missing funny bone because the Oscars have become almost non-stop vaudeville. The only things missing were the seltzer bottles and flying cream pies.

DeGeneres and the other clowns aren’t to blame for this. They’re symptomatic of a larger problem: an organization that sees its authority and influence waning and an industry that fears losing its audiences to the tube, the Net and the iPod.

Rather than maintain the high standards that used to make the Oscars seem so important — and where protests, stunts and streakers were the talked-about exceptions rather than the rule — the Academy has chosen to dumb everything down in a vain attempt to be all things to all people.

I winced at the sight of Academy president Sid Ganis attempting to give his annual salute to the movies within 60 seconds in order to collect a $1 bet with DeGeneres. He looked ridiculous, flapping his gums like a character in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and his message was lost.

And what was the point of trying to beat the clock, when so many of the clowns were allowed to just run it out? I can’t recall an Oscar ceremony where the orchestra played so many prizewinners off the stage in order to clear the decks before the next TV commercial. Yet there was plenty of time for Saint Al Gore to tease us about his next presidential bid while also wagging the finger of global warming shame, and for DeGeneres to make finger puppets behind a screen.

Didn’t the Academy learn anything from the 1995 Oscar telecast disaster hosted by David Letterman, when he acted as if the show was just an extension of his Late Night shtick? The difference is that people back then recognized a TV personality trying to hijack a film audience and they objected to it.

The line between TV and film has become so blurred — it seems like every second film now is a TV spin-off — that Sunday night’s sitcom Oscars might have seemed perfectly normal to a lot of viewers.

For me, the best part of the evening was when Canada’s Céline Dion walked out and sang a new song dedicated to special honouree Enrico Morricone, arranged from his theme music to Once Upon a Time in America.

The song was passionate and the performance was flawless. People in the Kodak Theatre sat in rapt attention, quietly savouring the moment. It was the way the Academy Awards used to be, back when they and the films they celebrated were special. No seltzer bottles or cream pies were needed.

Oscar picks: Who will win and who should win

My crystal ball is shattered, and so am I. This year's Oscar race has been harder to call than a mime auction.

I have blogged; I have been flogged. Praised for my perspicacity and assailed for my assumptions.

On any given day, I could give you arguments why any of the five Best Picture nominees was definitely going to win.

Then the next day I could tell you why they definitely were not.

The bellwethers just haven't rung true this year. This has been one freaky Academy Awards race. The critics' prizes and industry awards leading to Sunday's golden ceremony failed to penetrate the fog.

Consider these facts, courtesy of Variety and other sources:

    * It's the first time in Oscar's 79-year history that the movie with the most nominations doesn't also have a chance at Best Picture. That's a tough way for Dreamgirls to be remembered.

    * None of the actor nominees is from Best Picture candidates. The last time this happened was at the very first Oscars in 1928.

    * This is also only the second year in Oscar history when none of the Best Picture entries have been nominated for its cinematography, another key indicator.

    * Ditto for art direction. There's only been one other Oscar year when not a single Best Picture player had a corresponding nomination for this category. The last time that happened was in 1945.

The upside of all this indecision is that the Academy did a pretty good job in doling out the nominations.

The Academy spanned the globe and the rainbow in making its selections. It's a positive sign.

But somebody has to make the predictions, so here goes:

BEST PICTURE

What will win: Babel

What should win: Letters From Iwo Jima

Remember last year, when Brokeback Mountain swept most of the pre-Oscar awards, only to lose to Crash on the big night?

The result could be just as strange this year, but no one could really call it a royal upset unless The Queen pulls out an unlikely win.

Right now it looks like a three-way split among Babel, The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine. I'm giving the narrow edge to Babel, having flip-flopped from The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine, because I think it appeals to the Academy's new international outlook.

It's also the film that has the fewest negatives, if also the least amount of unbridled love – even though it arguably leads the field with its seven nominations (Dreamgirls has eight, but three are for Best Original Song). The Departed is good Scorsese but not great Scorsese and it has an unsettling amount of violence. Little Miss Sunshine is beloved by most, but the Academy normally shuns comedies.

As for Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, it's the finest picture of the lot and my pick for the best picture of 2006. But war stories are usually admired but not rewarded by the Academy.

The Queen, meanwhile, is an excellent small movie that will likely be denied anything more than a deserved Best Actress win for Helen Mirren. But ask me again tomorrow.

 

BEST DIRECTOR

Who will win: Martin Scorsese

Who should win: Martin Scorsese

Let's make one thing clear: Oscar does not have a conscience. Oscar is a heartless cad who doesn't feel guilty about snubbing somebody year after year. If he did, then Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and a New York dynamo named Martin Scorsese would have received more Oscars than they could carry.

That being said, let's also say that it looks as if Scorsese will finally get his gold statue, after four previous tries in this category. The Departed may not be his best work, but it's damned good and all signs are that most Academy members feel this is his year – even if they're not exactly wiping away tears of regret for passing him by in years past.

I could make a very strong case for Paul Greengrass for United 93, a brave and wonderfully realized account of America's most terrible day, or for Clint Eastwood for Letters From Iwo Jima, the flawless second half of his superlative Pacific War meditation. But I want Scorsese to finally score.

Alejandro González Iñárritu for Babel or Stephen Frears for The Queen would also be deserved winners. But let's give it to Scorsese, shall we?

 

BEST ACTOR

Who will win: Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland)

Who should win: Leonardo DiCaprio (Blood Diamond)

I have just one hope for Sunday night when Forest Whitaker wins: that he doesn't use the word "wow" in his acceptance speech and doesn't try to act surprised.

He's won dozens of awards for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Gen. Idi Amin. It was fine work from a fine actor, although I'd much rather see him feted for Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, the 1999 Jim Jarmusch picture that I think really showcased his talents.

Given my druthers this year, I'd give the Oscar to Leonardo DiCaprio, in recognition of his very credible work as a South African mercenary in Blood Diamond and as a conflicted ex-con in The Departed. He grew more than any other major actor this past year.

Peter O'Toole playing a dirty old man in Venus was a little too creepy for my tastes, although my esteem for him remains high. Ryan Gosling was good in Half Nelson, but he'll be back with other nominations. Will Smith has been better in better movies than The Pursuit of Happyness.

 

BEST ACTRESS

Who will win: Helen Mirren (The Queen)

Who should win: Helen Mirren (The Queen)

It's been heartening to see Mirren racking up so much hardware this awards season, if at times a trifle tedious. She hit a career peak with her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in troubled times and Mirren has had quite a career. She wins it and she deserves it.

My fondest wish, though, is that there could be a tie this year, as there was back in 1968 when Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand shared the Best Actress prize. Meryl Streep's performance as a fashion bitch in The Devil Wears Prada is the stuff that Oscars are made of in years without The Queen.

As for Kate Winslet (Little Children), Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal) and Penélope Cruz (Volver), better luck next time.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Who will win: Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine)

Who should win: Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine)

It is flying in the face of conventional wisdom to suggest that Eddie Murphy won't win this category for his impressive Dreamgirls turn. He's considered a lock by many people, but I think he may have alienated voters with his long history of disdain for the Academy and his squandering of his comic gifts – his current turkey Norbit made bags of cash but also made him look greedy and artless.

But if you believe that a supporting actor is one who creates a memorable character just outside of the spotlight, then almost any of the other nominees is more deserving. Especially Little Miss Sunshine's Alan Arkin, the most lovable junkie grandpa ever to grace a dysfunctional family. I think he might benefit from second doubts about Murphy.

And how about Mark Wahlberg (The Departed), Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) and Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond)? All delivered standout performances opposite bigger-name stars. I'm calling it for Arkin, but really for me it's anybody but Murphy.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Who will win: Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)

Who should win: Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)

I'm siding with the majority in choosing Hudson, as long as she promises not to torture the word "dream" in her acceptance speech. After becoming famous for losing on TV's American Idol, she launched a movie career that, er, dreams are made of. As difficult diva Effie White in the Motown musical Dreamgirls, she sang and acted her heart out in a thankless role.

But I won't be crying myself to sleep Sunday night if little Abigail Breslin takes it for her title role in Little Miss Sunshine, one of my favourite movies of 2006.

The two Babel nominees, Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza, are likely to cancel out their support; let's hope they get other chances in the future. Cate Blanchett is always worthy of acclaim, and in another year her emotive turn in Notes on a Scandal might have taken the trophy. Just not this year.

AND THE REST:

    *  In the writing categories, there's a consensus that Little Miss Sunshine will win for Best Original Screenplay and The Departed will win for Best Adapted Screenplay. I can't argue with that.

    * Best Foreign Language Film has to be front-runner Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro's Wonderland treatment of fascist-era Spain, although Deepa Mehta's Water has strong support. Pan's Labyrinth is also likely to take Best Makeup for its incredible creatures.

    * Anyone who bets against An Inconvenient Truth for Best Documentary Feature probably also doesn't thinking global warming is real. As an aside, I'm also predicting Al Gore for next U.S. president.

    * Emmanuel Lubezki's fluid lensing in Children of Men is the kind of work film schools will be talking about for decades. I'm not alone in choosing it for Best Cinematography.

    * Best Editing even has film editors divided — they split it between Babel and The Departed for their Eddies award — but I think the skilfully interwoven stories of Babel give it the Oscar gold.

    * Dreamgirls will add to what could be a pretty nice haul Sunday night with statuettes for Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design and Best Original Song ("Listen"). The movie looked and sounded great.

    * I haven't seen any of the nominees for Best Documentary Short, but the consensus is that The Blood of Yingzhou District will take it.

    * I predict a noisy split: Best Sound Mixing to the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest crew (including Canada's Paul Massey); Best Sound Editing to Letters from Iwo Jima. It's just a hunch.

    * Best Visual Effects also has to go to Pirates of the Caribbean for that sea monster alone.

    * Best Original Score is anybody's guess, but I'm thinking nominee leader Babel will get it.

    * Looks as though the powerful Pixar posse will win Best Animated Feature for Cars over the better-made Happy Feet and Monster House.

    * I've seen all of the nominees for Best Animated Short except for the one I think will win: Pixar's alien abduction funny Lifted. The clips I've seen and the industry acclaim for director Gary Rydstrom suggest an Oscar hoisting. Better luck next time for the NFB's Torill Kove (The Danish Poet).

    * And finally, I've seen all of the Best Live Action Shorts, and I figure it's a gimme for West Bank Story, a comedy that sets West Side Story across Arab-Israeli boundaries. What a concept.

 

 

E.T., CALL OSCAR

Pixar's Lifted, about an alien-in-training, is up for an Oscar Sunday night.

The categories for short films at the Academy Awards have traditionally been the make-or-break ones for office Oscar pools, since they’ve usually been a straight guess. Very few people outside of the Los Angeles city limits would have had an opportunity to see them prior to awards night.

This has changed in recent years with the advent of the Internet and its online streaming ability that is ideally suited for short subjects.

In many cases, you still can’t see all of the movies, but you can at least get a glimpse. Such is the case with Best Animated Shorts, which looks to be particularly competitive this year.

The Animated World Network is offering handy little clips of the five contenders: Pixar’s Lifted, Disney’s The Little Matchgirl, Fox’s No Time for Nuts, the NFB’s The Danish Poet and the Hungarian entry, Maestro.

The most curious of the lot is Pixar’s Lifted, the first film directed by movie sound ace Gary Rydstrom, the man behind many of the memorable noises in the Star Wars prequels, Finding Nemo, Terminator 2 and many other blockbusters.

It’s a story about a rookie space alien who has is being tested for his ability to abduct humans. He’s using some kind of tractor beam, the kind seen in the cheesiest of sci-fi movies, and he’s not very good at it. An unimpressed examiner sits by him with a clipboard, grading him on his lifting skills. There’s a Lifted page at the Pixar website that shows how it was made.

Word on it is good to win the Oscar on Sunday, if only because Rydstrom has many friends in the industry. Which made me wonder why it is that Pixar hasn’t seen fit to put it out for public consumption yet, either online or off. It was shown for three nights in September at an L.A. theatre to qualify for the Oscars and it’s part of a road show of Oscar-nominated shorts that Magnolia Pictures is taking to select U.S. cities. But most people won’t be able to see Lifted until June 29, when it will be released along with Ratatouille, the next Pixar feature.

This struck me as an awfully long time to wait for Lifted and odd that a 2007 release should be considered for the 2006 Oscar year, but apparently it’s not without precedent.

A Pixar spokeswoman says the company goes by the production date, not the release date. Last year it was nominated for the short One Man Band, which didn’t arrive in theatres until June 2006, when it was attached to the Pixar feature Cars. The same strategy is being used for the Lifted/Ratatouille combo. “It won’t change, whether we do win the Oscar — knock on wood — or we don’t,” she said.

THE BUS KEEPS ROLLING

Just when you think you're starting to get things sorted out, with the latest batch of awards indicating a Best Picture showdown between Babel and The Departed, along comes further evidence of a possible win by Little Miss Sunshine. The IMDB posed the $64,000 question in its daily poll as to which dark horse Oscar candidates people are rooting for.

The poll had nearly 25,000 respondents.

The winner by nearly 24% was Little Miss Sunshine for Best Picture. That was followed by (I'm rounding off percentages):

• Ryan Gosling for Best Actor (13%);

• Abigail Breslin for Best Supporting Actress (11%);

• Djimon Hounsou for Best Supporting Actor (10%);

• Other (8%);

• Meryl Streep for Best Actress (5%);

• Penelope Cruz for Best Actress (5%);

• Paul Greengrass for Best Director (4%);

• Jackie Earle Haley for Best Supporting Actor  (4%):

• Babel for Best Picture (4%);

• The Queen for Best Picture (4%);

• Rinko Kikuchi for Best Supporting Actress (4%);

• Alejandro González Iñárritu for Best Director (2%);

• Adriana Barraza for Best Supporting Actress   (2%);

• Stephen Frears for Best Director (1%).

The nearly one in four vote for Little Miss Sunshine, followed by strong support for Abigail Breslin to take an upset win for Best Supporting Actress over front-runner Jennifer Hudson, indicates there's still gas in the tank of Little Miss Sunshine's VW bus. It's important to remember that IMDB users are not the same as Academy voters.  I would wager there there's very little in common between the two groups, apart from a love of movies.

And what is to be made of the idea that Little Miss Sunshine is viewed by so many people as a dark horse for Best Picture? Does that mean they don't think it  has a serious  chance of winning, but wish it did?

  It's curious that Babel and The Queen are considered dark horses by a much smaller percentage of those polled, and neither The Departed nor Letters From Iwo Jima are on the dark horse list. 

Oscar’s Gender Split: It’s not politically correct to say this, but I’ve always suspected there’s a gender divide at the Oscars that conspires against Best Picture wins for movies appealing primarily to men.

To state the obvious, these are movies loaded with violence, blood and testosterone that tend to attract more males than females. Cop stories, westerns, war movies, thrillers and the like. I don’t know the exact gender breakdown of the 5,830 voting members of the Academy. I’ve heard that males are in the majority, but no one has said by how much. I’ve also heard that some male voters can’t be bothered filling out their ballots and turn them over to their wives or girlfriends.

Very few "guy movies" take the Best Picture Oscar. So far this decade there's just one: Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe, in 2000.

Perhaps these two factoids cancel each other out. But look back over the history of the Oscars, and one plain fact emerges: there are very few Best Picture winners that could be called “guy movies.” In this decade, there has been only one: Gladiator in 2000. The film was an anomaly in many ways, not least of which was its theatrical release outside of awards season. But it had a high blood-and-guts quotient, which made it more popular with men than women. The fact that it also had a very strong romantic subplot – Russell Crowe’s warrior is avenging the murder of his wife and child – probably explains why it was able to attract enough female votes to take Best Picture.

I think the gender divide is the reason why Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is facing so much perceived competition from Little Miss Sunshine and Babel. The Departed is in many respects a classic Oscar film – a star-filled drama made by a great filmmaker who deserves his gold – yet it's a “chap flick” through and through. The only significant female presence is Vera Farmiga, who manages to avoid being swept away by the testosterone tide. And the film has a very high body count.

I have no statistical proof that more men than women are going to see The Departed. I do have water-cooler anecdotes. Speaking to women about their Best Picture preferences, I detect more female love for Little Miss Sunshine, Babel and The Queen than I do for The Departed or Letters From Iwo Jima.

Men, on the other hand, tend to prefer The Departed, Babel and Letters From Iwo Jima. The only film of the five that seems to fully span the gender divide is Babel, which may be a clue for next Sunday night’s Academy Awards.

I am now about to attack my own thesis. The most passionate defender of The Departed I know is a woman: Sasha Stone of Oscarwatch.com. She recently posted her very insightful interview with the Oscar-nominated William Monahan, screenwriter of The Departed. (So take these gender musings with a grain of salt and don’t squeal on me to my mom.)

But Stone admits she’s puzzled by how The Departed seems to be more popular online than it is in the real world. Several polls on the Net, Oscarwatch included, give The Departed the edge for Best Picture. Yet in the real world, it’s considered to be in a tight three-way race with Babel and Little Miss Sunshine. “Is The Departed a Net geek movie?” Stone wrote in a comment to one of my earlier blog posts. “I don’t think I have ever seen such a huge disconnect between the most predicted film to win (Babel) and the polls so overwhelmingly supporting one film (The Departed).”

Do I dare suggest that most Net geeks are male?

Another Canuck makes some Oscar noise

It's quite the chore totting up all the Canadians who get nominated for Oscars.

TANNIS TOOHEY/TORONTO STAR

Torill Kove picks up her Genie for best Animated Short for The Danish Poet. Feb. 13. She's up for an Oscar, her second nomination.

Many of them leave our home and native land to work in Los Angeles, and their citizenship isn't always obvious. If they're part of a team nominated for a technical Oscar, they often get lumped in with their American co-workers.

Such is the case with Toronto-reared  Paul Massey, who is nominated for Best Sound Mixing for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest along with Christopher Boyes and Lee Orloff.

It will be his fifth time at the Oscars, and he has yet to win one.  Best Sound Mixing is a relatively new category, created in 2003 when the Academy redefined its awards for this craft.

Massey was previously nominated for his work on Walk the Line, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Air Force One and Legends of the Fall.

Whatever happens at the Oscars Feb. 25, Massey will least have official recognition from politicians in Ottawa.

Liberal M.P. Ruby Dhalla (Brampton Springdale) tabled a motion in the House of Commons asking all Members of Parliament for unanimous support for Canada's Oscar aspirants.

"All of the Canadian nominees, are talented individuals who have made tremendous contributions to the arts and television industry and are deserving of our upmost support and encouragement," Dhalla said in a press release.

The other Canuck nominees are Ryan Gosling (Best Actor), Paul Haggis (Best Original Screenplay), Deepa Mehta (Best Foreign-Language Film) and Torill Kove (Best Animated Short Film).

The Montreal-based Kove won a Genie this week for her Oscar-nominated short The Danish Poet.

She'll be making her second trip to the Academy Awards. She was first nominated in the same category for My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts.

The unflappable Kove, originally from Norway, was taking it all in her stride on Genie night. She's up against stiff competition from Disney and Pixar, who also have nominated shorts, but she doesn't like to think of competing against other animators.

"I’d like to think that animators are each other's biggest fans," she said. "They inspire me."

She's going to Hollywood this weekend with high hopes but modest aspirations about winning her category.

"I think they’re all really strong films. I have trouble thinking of it as competition, but I guess that’s what it is."

An Ebert Oscar mystery

It's nice to see Roger Ebert rallying from a tough year of illness and joining the Oscar fray. He's doing his annual Outguess Ebert contest for his Chicago Sun-Times readers at rogerebert.suntimes.com.

Like most of us scribblers this time of year, the veteran film critic is giving his predictions of who and what will win, along with his preferences of who and what should win.

In four of the top six Academy Awards categories, his predictions and preferences are identical: Babel for Best Picture, Helen Mirren for Best Actress, Eddie Murphy for Best Supporting Actor and Jennifer Hudson for Best Supporting Actress. He predicts Forest Whitaker will win Best Actor; he prefers Peter O'Toole.

But Ebert's line on Best Director is puzzling. He's teasing us with a mystery. He predicts Martin Scorsese will win for The Departed. And his preference?

"For reasons of tact, I prefer not to reveal my preference," Ebert writes.

Since when are Oscar pundits supposed to be tactful? Where's the fun in that?

Ebert obviously admires Scorsese's work: "I reviewed Martin Scorsese's first film in 1968, something I never tire of reminding patient readers. In the review, I predicted, essentially, that he would stand astride the film world in, oh, say, 10 years. And so he did. But where is the recognition? Where is the Oscar after 39 years?"

That sound like a preference to me. So why not just say it?

Is Ebert afraid he might sway Academy voters? If so, then what's the intent of his long-running "Memo to the Academy" feature on his TV show?

Is he worried about jinxing Scorsese's chance by piling on too much praise? Is he afraid of hurting the delicate sensibilities of Clint Eastwood? Does Clint still carry a .44 Magnum?

Ebert's preference of Babel for Best Picture implies support for Alejandro González Iñárritu. Ebert often champions favoured underdogs; why not this time? Ebert also really liked The Queen and United 93. But does he have no love for Stephen Frears or Paul Greengrass?

I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm just really curious.

How about it, Roger? Could you tell us your preference after the votes are in?

Reading the digital tea leaves

AP Photo/Matt Dunham

British actress Helen Mirren mugs with her Best Actress statue at the British Academy Film Awards Sunday night.

Another weekend, another set of confusing awards.

The Brits of BAFTA like The Queen and the American writers of the WGA like Little Miss Sunshine for best original screenplay and The Departed for best adapted.

Which means we still can't say with any certainty which of these three films will win Oscar's Best Picture, or whether it will be Babel or Letters From Iwo Jima, the other two contenders.

So I'm looking elsewhere for clues. And I think they might be as near as a few mouse clicks away.

I've studied several major online polls that collect and collate Oscar predictions. (These are predictions as opposed to preferences, which I'll get to in a minute):

* Gurus o' Gold: A panel of critics, of which I am a member, that convenes every week or so at Movie City News (www.moviecitynews.com). We've been predicting for a couple of weeks now that Little Miss Sunshine will take the prize. The feel-good Sundance film currently leads with 54 points. The Departed and Babel are tied for second place (each has 46 points), followed by Letters From Iwo Jima (34) and The Queen (29).

* The Academy Tracker: Online poll at Variety.com shows The Departed leading with 32% of the vote. But second place is "Undecided" at 26%, followed by Babel (20%), Little Miss Sunshine (9%), Letters From Iwo Jima (7%) and The Queen (6%). For what it's worth, the percentage for LMS jumped by 1 per cent overnight, following the BAFTA and WGA awards, while Babel and Letters slipped by about the same.

* Entertainment Weekly: A panel of critics and Oscar watchers at www.ew.com list their predictions. Babel leads with 25 points, followed by Little Miss Sunshine (22), The Departed (19), Letters from Iwo Jima (12) and The Queen (12). LMS and Letters are gaining, the other three are slipping.

Do these figures tell us anything? Only that respondents to these polls believe that the three main contenders for Best Picture are, in alphabetical order, Babel, The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine.

Now let's look at a poll where personal preference is sought, not predictions:

* The Vanity Fair Oscar Poll: Online at www.vanityfair.com, which also has a daily blog called Little Gold Men, it has The Departed leading by a precise 31.7% of respondents, followed by Little Miss Sunshine (27.37%), Babel (20.18%), The Queen (13.97%) and Letters From Iwo Jima (6.78%). LMS does better when personal preference is used as the selection criteria.

Here's the million-dollar question: How many of these Vanity Fair voters are also Academy voters?

The Departed has almost exactly the same score on the Vanity Fair preference poll as it does on the Variety prediction poll. Does that imply any advantage or momentum?
And what does the sizeable "undecided" vote on the Variety poll mean? Are more than one in four respondents amongst Variety's Hollywood-savvy audience still hedging their bets?

Sasha Stone's Oscarwatch.com, meanwhile, has two Best Picture polls:

What will win: The Departed (39%), Little Miss Sunshine (30%), Babel (22%), Letters From Iwo Jima (5%), The Queen (1%)

What should win: The Departed (47%), Little Miss Sunshine (20%), Babel (15%), Letters From Iwo Jima (9%), The Queen (6%).

It's still a guessing game at this point. Best Picture probably comes down to a three-way fight between Babel, The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine.

Al Gore Oscars update

My modest prediction last week that former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore will ride an Oscar win and a Nobel nomination to launch a 2008 presidential election bid brought a vigorous online  response. Especially over at Jeffrey Wells' popular Hollywood Elsewhere blog (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com), where an astounding 101 respondents debated my sanity prior to engaging in an all-out cyberbrawl over the various players and policies of U.S. politics.

One thing I didn't predict is that Gore would launch his campaign from the stage of the Kodak Theatre on Feb. 25, if, as expected, his global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth wins the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. That would be a really nutty prediction, especially since there's no guarantee Gore could even take the stage. The Oscar would go to director Davis Guggenheim, not the ex-veep, even though Gore stars in nearly every frame. And yet it seems some people think that Gore might use the Academy Awards stage as a presidential platform, as L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke writes in her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog. (For the record, Finke doesn't think it's going to happen, either.) Gore would look like the worst kind of grandstander to hijack the Oscars for a political pitch, and he knows it.

He also has everything to gain by delaying his announcement until later this year, because he's still on a roll promoting his film and spreading the green planet doctrine. (He'll be speaking to a sold-out crowd Feb. 21 at the University of Toronto.) Once he commits to being in the race, the meter starts running on campaign contributions and all of his actions and statements are viewed with much more critical scrutiny. But I still stand by my prediction that he will run, and he will win.

CLASS OF 2006

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences photo

The Oscar nominees at the annual awards lunch. (Click on the image above to enlarge the photo.)

I’ve been staring at the official class photo for this year’s Oscar nominees, looking for clues, signs and loopholes. Okay, I’m really just gawking.

It’s the photo from the annual lunch hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to instruct nominees in how to conduct themselves on Oscar night. To sum up: be brief, and don’t thank every member of your family and the guy who does your dry cleaning.

The lunch Monday at The Beverly Hilton attracted a record 140 Oscar aspirants, not all of whom sat for the photo, which may indicate just how competitive the race is this year. Few people want to pass up a chance to put their faces in front of Academy voters, who have their final ballots in hand.

Especially not Paul Haggis of London, Ont., nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Letters From Iwo Jima, who plunked himself on a chair practically dead centre for the shot, right in front of the giant Oscar statue and right next to Best Actress nominee Penelope Cruz (Volver). How very un-Canadian of Haggis to exalt himself like this, especially since Letters director Clint Eastwood modestly takes a fourth-row standing off to the side.

And Eastwood looks like a glory hog when compared to the humble Steven Spielberg, who stands way in the back row.

But you could argue that as the director of Crash, last year’s Best Picture winner, Haggis deserves pride of place.

He’s enjoying himself almost as much as Best Actor nominee Peter O’Toole (Venus), who has his arms around Cruz and Sherry Lansing, the former head of Paramount Studios and this year’s recipient of the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

And both Haggis and O’Toole are obviously having a better time than Best Supporting Actor nominee Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls), third row, who looks annoyed, guilty, bored or frightened. Perhaps all of the above.

There’s Best Actress nominee Helen Mirren (The Queen), looking regally sexy in the front row. But where are her chief rivals, Meryl Streep and Judi Dench? Are they filming? Too busy to eat lunch?

Finally, I can’t believe how many men wore jeans to this event, including the guy in the third row, extreme right, who is also rocking a brand new pair of white running shoes. Was he planning to sprint after lunch to work off the calories?

This is Hollywood, guys! Would it kill you to dress up?

OSCAR THE GROUCH: I wish I could summon up the ghost of John Wayne to storm over to Academy headquarters on behalf of Sasha Stone, the webmaster of the popular site Oscarwatch.com.

I would have Wayne’s spirit march up to Sid Ganis, the president of the Academy, look him in the eye and say, “The next person to bother this little lady is gonna answer to me!” (Read aloud with your best John Wayne impersonation.)

After seven years of allowing Stone to generate free publicity and much good will for the Oscars, the Academy has suddenly decided she’s competition for its official www.oscar.com site.

It has sent Stone one of those cease-and-desist letters demanding she change the name of Oscarwatch.com, since Oscar is a registered trademark. (I wonder what Oscar Mayer, Oscar de la Renta and Oscar the Grouch have to say about this.)

It claims she has no right to use the name Oscar and her site “is likely to confuse visitors searching the Academy’s site.” Yeah, right.

Stone is not sure what she’s going to do. She’s just the mom of a young daughter, who runs Oscarwatch.com out of her home. She earns a measly $20,000 per year for the few ads she runs on her site. She doesn’t has the deep pockets it would require to take on the Academy and its lawyers, who obviously have far too much time on their hands.

It seems to me that the Academy has bigger worries than a website that maintains year-round interest in its most important event. Shouldn’t it be figuring out how to keep movie fans from switching off the Oscars, rather than having the Oscars switch off movie fans?