Coming this Sunday: The Oscars

The 81st Academy Awards will be held on Sunday; as of last night, I caught up on my Best Picture nominee viewing by watching The Reader. That I am a filmmaker and film-lover does not require me to watch the Oscars or care about them, but I am also fascinated by Hollywood history and the film business itself, and that does. I am also curious to see to what extent the "leak" of the Oscar winners turns out to be true. I do not think the leak is real, but I'm curious to see if the author is a good guesser.

The BP nominees are Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader, Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. For me, there is no question that Milk is the best film in this batch. Ideally, we'll see an upset this year - a kind of Revenge of Brokeback Mountain - that will throw over heavy-favorite Slumdog for Gus Van Sant's gay-martyr biopic, but I'm not holding my breath. (Memorably, Brokeback seemed a likely winner at the 78th Awards, only to be upset by the unfathomably stupid Crash, one of the worst BPs in my lifetime.) I also enjoyed Benjamin Button, which was an extraordinary technical achievement and which has stayed with me in ways I would not have expected initially.

I have long had a love/hate relationship with Ron Howard's work. On the one hand, I grew up with him in "Andy Griffith" reruns and on "Happy Days" and with films like Splash and Parenthood. And then there's "Arrested Development," one of the greatest TV shows of the past 30 years, which he was closely involved in producing. On the other hand, I think he's often a terrible director, responsible for awfulness like A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code. So, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Frost/Nixon. Previous to this film, I thought Apollo 13 was his best work, so it all kind of makes sense: when he's working closely with history and has strong source material, I usually like what he does.

F/N, which I illegally downloaded and watched on my television (yep, I'm the enemy), has the benefit of a couple of great impersonations as well as being full of ideas; it's "about something." It's about a great many things, actually. These qualities go a long way to making a film watchable from my point of view, regardless of how well-directed it is; Howard is a competent craftsman, so this film is highly-watchable, involving and thought-provoking, if not particularly emotionally stirring or surprising in its outcome. I happen to really enjoy watching actors playing modern historical figures (that is, real people I have actually seen in another context), so this bias certainly aided my enjoyment of the film. My mind wandered when anyone made a speech longer than 30 seconds or so - such as Nixon's late-night drunken harangue on the phone with Frost - because I was taken out of the film at those moments and reminded that it was based on a play. And I also didn't care about the Nixon character, particularly, and didn't care what the playwright felt he should have said. But these moments were only a minor distraction from the telling of a truly interesting encounter, well-dramatized.

I feel less charitably toward The Reader. I also watched this film from a ripped screener (although, unlike F/N, it did not have Dutch subtitles), but I don't think I'd have felt better about the film if I had seen it in a theater. Kate Winslet is pretty much my favorite female star, and she's perfectly good here (I think it's likely to be her year to finally get an Oscar, too), but this is one of those "prestige" films, those Oscar-bait films, that come out at the end of each year and lull us quickly to sleep. It's a film about makeup, period details, famous-actress nudity and the Holocaust. There are no surprises - even the surprise twist is no surprise - the story just marches onward into the gloom. Every scene of the film is slathered with music to help us understand what to feel moment to moment, a practice I find endlessly irritating. Well, I guess that's Hollywood for you.

I was not a fan of director Stephen Daldry's last prestige film, The Hours, which bored me stupid. Apparently, he is set to remake My Fair Lady in 2010. Sheesh.