I’ve found out that dread is something that attends all awards ceremonies; if they’re tough to watch on TV, imagine how hard it must be to sit in the audience. In preparation for my projected deadblogging of the ceremony, I’m running my preliminary predictions of winners.
In my case, predictions may not even be likely outcomes, but what I want. The huge problem with awards ceremonies is that they never justify the winner. They don’t say “Crash won for proving to us all how bad the white and the burden of his guilt is, and how all black women are shrews. PS Reverse racism.” It’s not like you can say “Jake Gyllenhaal receives this award in recognition of his discovery of the cure for cancer. All forms of cancer. Yes, even that one.”
We’ve got a simple case of “The winner is …”, the announcement of the results, and then roll credits.
I don’t know why we put so much stock in a set of awards given without reason (well, obviously, they’re the “best”). I would like to point out that Norbit has been nominated for an Oscar.

I repeat: Norbit has been nominated for an Oscar.

Well, here we go, anyway.

Best Actor

George Clooney in "Michael Clayton”
Daniel Day-Lewis in "There Will Be Blood”
Johnny Depp in "Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”
Tommy Lee Jones in "In the Valley of Elah”
Viggo Mortensen in "Eastern Promises”

Why is George Clooney nominated in this field? Even if you like Michael Clayton, how is Clooney anything more than pedestrian in it? That does it, I’m going to have to find a place that’s showing the damned movie and watch it again just so I can deliver a final verdict. How can everyone in the world except for me and Ajay love Michael Clayton? Clearly I’m defective. I’ve only seen three of these movies, having missed Eastern Promises and with In The Valley of Elah yet to see release in Australia. Johnny Depp is amazing, but Daniel Day-Lewis managed in There Will Be Blood, an expert slow boil that occasionally bubbles over before finally exploding into the THIRD REVELATION. Tommy Lee Jones is always worthwhile nowadays, so I’ll be interested as to what he was like.

Performance by an actor in a supporting role

Casey Affleck in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”
Javier Bardem in "No Country for Old Men”
Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Charlie Wilson's War”
Hal Holbrook in "Into the Wild”
Tom Wilkinson in "Michael Clayton”

I’ve seen all of these, and I will give Tom Wilkinson that he was pretty amazing in Michael Clayton. Personally I want to know which universe Casey Affleck was in a supporting role in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, considering that he was the lead and sold the movie, but you know. I’m giving this one to Anton Chigurh, because Javier Bardem really rocked the hell out of that movie.

Performance by an actress in a leading role

Cate Blanchett in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age”
Julie Christie in "Away from Her”
Marion Cotillard in "La Vie en Rose”
Laura Linney in "The Savages”
Ellen Page in "Juno”

Pure guess work, as I’ve only seen Juno.

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Cate Blanchett in "I'm Not There”
Ruby Dee in "American Gangster”
Saoirse Ronan in "Atonement”
Amy Ryan in "Gone Baby Gone”
Tilda Swinton in "Michael Clayton”

I was a bit surprised when I saw that Ruby Dee had been nominated for a role that essentially saw her walk onto the screen, slap Denzel Washington, and walk off, but this is the Academy we’re talking about. To be honest, I’d never heard of Gone Baby Gone until these announcements. Apparently it’s out here in April. The Michael Clayton curse catches again, and I guess Tilda Swinton was good in it but she gets docked major points for participating in the greatest cop-out of the film. I’ll change my tune when I’m out of rehab. Anyway, Saoirse Ronan was pretty amazing so my money’s on her. I just wonder why Atonement didn’t get more acting nominations when … oh, I guess that the Academy doesn’t tally nominations based on my tears.

Achievement in directing

"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” Julian Schnabel
"Juno” Jason Reitman
"Michael Clayton” Tony Gilroy
"No Country for Old Men” Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
"There Will Be Blood” Paul Thomas Anderson

Just between you and me, No Country For Old Men is pretty much cinematic perfection. I still think that Juno isn’t really Academy league, but nor was Crash and look at that. I’ll endeavour to see Diving Bell soon, it just came out here.
PS. Norbit.

Best motion picture of the year

Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

Atonement is tempting, but there’s simply No Country for it.

Let’s see how I go come Monday!

This is it, my friends: the elephant’s graveyard. I wish I had seen Eastern Promises.

(If I was smart, I would make montages of each month’s movies, kind of like a Star Wars poster. You know I’m not smart.)

Last night I saw Sweeney Todd once more, but beforehand I stopped by the bathroom of the cinema. In this particular bathroom, every stall had the words “Mr. Moops” or simply “Moops” carved into either a door or a wall. In my careful selection process – for you can never be too careful with public toilets – I saw that one of the stalls had “Moops” written in it … but underneath someone had scrawled “Moors!”.

I laughed long and hard – it was a perfect intermission for a lovely evening.

I figured that it can’t hurt to have a bit of a book log going on. I suspect that the book writings will be even briefer than your average movie outing, because I’m not that certain of literary criticism save knowing that I’m not a big fan of Imperial pints of semen. So here we go, our first adventure: all of the books I’ve read post Cryptonomicon! (I suspect I may have left some out, in which case I will attack them in future instances).

First round: White Teeth, The Beach and Mort!

I updated my About page. Hopefully it will contain things to either interest or enlighten you. I’ve made a new vow: I will finish writing about 2007 before the Oscars, which I plan on not liveblogging this year because I got terminally bored last time (wait, they’ve got Jon Stewart back? Urgh, I might have to eat my words).

So I’ve got a week to do four months and the Arbitrary Awards. Which I still have to devise. I have to relocate all of my tickets, but it can be done folks … I believe in me.

I realise that a good few of my few good readers are big fans of Neal Stephenson. I do realise that if I say anything against him I’ll never be allowed to release any fiction of my own. I’ll start with some personal background for you:

I get through two or three books in the average working week. Snow Crash took me maybe a day and a half, and I had a good, brief time. Cryptonomicon took me in excess of two weeks. I had a mighty uphill struggle reading this book. You can’t say “But Alex, Snow Crash is only 230 odd pages, to Cryptonomicon‘s 918!”. Indeed, they are very different beasts. By the logic stated here, it should have taken me merely four times as long to read Cryptonomicon. Length has nothing really to do with the speed of reading; in the week after Cryptonomicon I read somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1000 pages.
No, friends, Cryptonomicon is dense. It’s dense and many things happen in it while, at the same time, nothing happens at all.

What the Hell?

CJ7, Stephen Chow’s latest movie, was released in China at the end of last month. It’s already showing at Reading Market City, in a limited engagement – and what the heck is it? I really couldn’t tell you. The allegedly heartwarming but more likely “what the heck?” adventure of a young boy, his impoverished father, and the alien that he brings home from the dump. It’s also an examination of how there’s no use in sending your son to a private school if he doesn’t do any work, and how OH&S is the most important thing in the world.

Dicky Chow is poor. He cannot afford toys. When the ball that his father fetches from the dump turns out to be an alien dog-thing, a new adventure is born!

Except there’s not that much adventure to it. CJ7 is an odd duck of a movie; the centrepiece of comedy, replete with shot for shot remakes of a scene from Kung Fu Hustle makes no sense – and then turns out to have been a dream sequence anyway. I spent a large amount of this movie turning to Oliver and Vanessa in the seats next to me and putting my arms up in the universal motion of “I’ve got nothing”.
Don’t take this as a negative reading of the film, though: I spent a great deal of it laughing, and part of that may have been due to my trying to figure out what the heck was going on. This is nothing like E.T.: CJ7 – for that is the name bestowed upon the alien thing by Dicky – has no interest in going home, but rather a simple interest in being a pet. Heck, there’s not even any controversy about government agencies wanting to come in and claim back the alien. There is conflict between the rich bully kids with their weird hairstyles and bad dubbing and Dicky, and conflict between Dicky and his father (which, blah blah, true heart of the movie), but none of it flows.

The unwritten law of these sorts of comedies is that they have to go super maudlin before they return to the super-happy status quo. CJ7 is no exception to this rule, and covers this ground in spades. On top of that, the theme song for the movie is “Sunny”, by Boney M. I don’t think there really is anything more that can be said than that. Americans can look forward to being confused by CJ7 in March.