The Chronic Curmudgeon

Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon. Dame Judi Dench, thank you for playing, but you got your career achievement award for Shaekspeare In Love. Keira Knightley? Thank you soooo much for taking your clothes off for Vanity Fair, but you're a babe in these woods and you have 40 more years to win your Oscar; plus you were in a Jane Austen story, and as I have slept through everything connected to that woman for the last 30 years, you're out. Charlize Theron just won a couple of years ago for a better movie; North Country was a Lifetime Movie of the Week. Felicity Huffman played the kind of physically and emotionally stretching and challenging role that the academy loves, so she could theoretically sneak in here. But the officially coronated darling this year is Reese Witherspoon. Not only was she really, really good in Walk The Line (one of the few movies I've actually gone to see this year), but she has been doing solid work for a long time (Election), and she's gorgeous -- which the academy also likes. She's the closest thing to a lock there is this year.

Best Actor: Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Terence Howard, thank you for playing. Here are your parting gifts. David Straithairn I would actually love to see win; Edward R. Murrow's brave stand against cowardly fearmongering and abuses of power by the government is a story that needs to be told over and over again in George W. Bush's Amerika. But there's too much glamour elsewhere in this category, and Straithairn doesn't have a big enough name yet to win. Joaquin Phoenix delivered an amazing performance as Johnny Cash, and in any other year he might well have been the winner. But there are two huge performances ahead of him in the pecking order this year.

Heath Ledger starred in Hollywood's chosen film, in a role that Hollywood would desperately like to reward. And from everything I have read, he's pretty good in it. But long after Brokeback Mountain has faded into memory as little more than a 2000s version of Love Story, a sappy love story remarkable only for the fact that its lead characters are gay rather than for the story or film, Hoffman's Capote will likely stand as an inconic character study, in the same league as DeNiro's Jake LaMotta, Ben Kingsley's Gandhi, or Jamie Foxx's Ray Charles. He should win, and I think he will.

Best Director: Ang Lee. Spielberg won't win, considering that Munich didn't even rate a Best Picture nomination. Paul Haggis was rewarded with a nomination, but there are no gay people in Crash, so it's not his year. This leaves us with Clooney, Lee, and Bennett Miller. The fact that you had to ask "who?" when I said Bennett Miller tells you why he's not going to win. Clooney would have a shot because the academy likes to acknowledge TV people who break out of the small screen to the big one (Helen Hunt, Jamie Foxx)... except that the anointed picture is Brokeback Mountain, that Ang Lee did take a risk in working it, and that he got royally screwed in 2000 when a cheap Charlton Heston knock-off (Gladiator) won Best Picture over Lee's far superior Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee wins.

Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain. I'll admit it: I don't want it to win. Me, the lefty-liberal supporter of all rights gay, does not want to see a movie win Best Picture simply because it deals with a gay storyline. And that's what this is, in the end... Hollywood reacting to the Bush/red states faux moralism and mantra of Hollywood being out of touch. "Oh yeah? Well if you think we're outside your values before, wait'll you get a load of this, you blue-nosed prigs!" I like the sentiment, but that's not enough to win a Best Picture Oscar. And for all those running around saying, "Oh, but it's a beautiful story, you forget that you're even watching two men," I ask you this: if you weren't watching two men, would you even give a rat's ass about that story? Or would it be just another Movie of the Week running on some second rate cable network on Sunday afternoons? Right. I thought as much.

Munich got no buzz once it was released, and I doubt it has a chance. Capote features a great performance, but biopics don't usually win Best Picture. That leaves Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, and the anointed movie. Crash has been getting the late buzz as a dark horse in this category... Good Night and Good Luck would be a more direct and relevant thumb in the red states' eye; Murrow's assertion that features strongly in the movie that "we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home" should be repeated at seven second intervals for the remainder of George W. Bush's presidency. It's a more important film with a more important message. However, Hollywood has its agenda, and so I don't think anything has a chance to get in its way. Brokeback Mountain takes its place alongside "Oliver!," "Ordinary People," "Out of Africa," "The Last Emperor," "Gladiator," "The English Patient," and "Driving MIss Daisy" as one of the least remarkable and least worthy BP winners in Oscar history.

There you have it; that's who's going to win. Yawn.