Leigh Paatsch’s Oscars 2019 favourite nominees, dark horses and snubs
It’s been a fascinatingly even year in film, with several big Academy Awards categories wide open. Leigh Paastch takes a look at the sure-bets, maybes and the unlucky few robbed of even a nomination.
Leigh Paatsch
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Not a classic year by any stretch. But a fascinatingly even year.
That’s the glass-half-full angle on 2019’s fresh crop of contenders for Academy Awards glory.
Several prominent categories — including Best Picture, Actor and Actress — remain more wide open than any set of Oscar nominations in the modern era.
This new-found unpredictability for the Oscars can only be a good thing.
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However, from a glass-half-empty perspective, the slow slide of the Oscars into irrelevance continues unabated.
When you are an awards contest where the most nominations are shared by a polarisingly strange costume drama (The Favourite) and a black-and-white Mexican mood piece produced by a multinational streaming company (the Netflix-backed Roma), you are not exactly reflecting the movie-going will of the people in any shape or form.
The same old types of movies — festival-friendly ‘prestige’ productions, by and large — standing at the front of the queue for a statuette every year can only be a bad thing.
Anyway, now that we finally know who is still in the running and who has pulled up lame, let’s take a look at who did best and worst out of this year’s nominations.
THE SHOW PONIES
ROMA: Make no mistake, this hauntingly beautiful memoir of life in Mexico in the 1970s is a dead-set masterpiece. The Vegas bookies — who have a great track record with Oscars predictions — have this as an even-money or 50-50 chance of winning Best Picture. If Roma wasn’t just playing on Netflix and was widely available in cinemas, it would be almost unbeatable.
CHRISTIAN BALE: While the general consensus is that Vice isn’t much of a movie, Bale’s eerily accurate portrayal of enigmatic US political manipulator Dick Cheney is one hell of a transformational performance. The clear frontrunner for Best Actor honours, if only because Bale’s work is just as significant as the Winston Churchill impersonation of last year’s winner, Gary Oldman.
GLENN CLOSE: Anyone who caught Close’s work in The Wife last year would have admired the performance, but would not have ranked it as being of Oscars calibre. However, an upset win at the Golden Globes somehow shuffled the widely-respected Close to the front of the Best Actress pack. Hers to lose now that Lady Gaga’s superb work in A Star is Born is not resonating with awards voters elsewhere.
THE DARK HORSES
GREEN BOOK: If any movie stands a chance of running down Roma’s lead in the Best Picture race, it is this irresistible crowd-pleaser about a snooty black jazz pianist (current Best Supporting actor favourite Mahershala Ali) and his Italian wise-guy chauffeur (Viggo Mortensen).
RAMI MALEK: The only logical challenger to Christian Bale’s stranglehold on the Best Actor crown. Like Bale, Malek found himself in a so-so movie, but didn’t let that stop him unleashing an incredible feat of acting in becoming an exactingly exuberant match for the late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury.
OLIVIA COLMAN: While Glenn Close seemingly has the better of Lady Gaga in the Best Actress stakes, she will still be looking over her shoulder for Colman to make a determined lunge at the line. The consummately skilled Brit was the breakout star of The Favourite as a monarch losing her mind.
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A STAR IS BORN: Just over a month ago, everyone assumed Oscars night was going to be re-titled The A Star is Born Show. However, results elsewhere on the awards circuit suggest all the love that was once in the room for this brilliant musical drama has gone. Stars Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper are rank outsiders now in the acting categories, while Cooper missing out completely on a Best Directing nomination is the biggest snub in recent memory.
TONI COLLETTE: The Australian star delivered one of the great performances of 2018 — male or female — in the acclaimed horror film Hereditary. Unfathomable to think she missed the cut for Best Actress (and her compatriot Nicole Kidman can consider herself unlucky on this count as well for her work in Destroyer).
OTHER SNUBS: No love for the amazing ‘silence is deadly’ thriller A Quiet Place indicates the Oscars has the wrong fingers on the wrong pulses. The groundbreaking superhero movie (and deserved global smash hit) Black Panther deserved better than a handful of token nominations. And the complete absence of nominations for female directors and key creatives is an entrenched trend that needs to be stopped.
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