Oscars 2010 – The Academy Awards
Well tonight’s the night we celebrate some ground breaking technology, career capping performances and the biggest Best Picture race we’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s Oscar night and there’s quite no other night like it.
In our household we put on the pre-show with the Countdown to the Red Carpet and then we stay glued to all the evenings events…managing to cook and eat dinner with crepes suzette to round it all off.
So let’s take a look at this year’s super-sized Best Picture. In the past academy members were asked to simply mark off the movie they liked the most. This year, however, we break with tradition as 10 movies are nominated and academy members have to rank the contenders from 1 through 10.
What happens next is that when all first place voting forms are counted the film with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and those voters second choices will count instead. This process will then continue until one move gains more than 50% of the vote. It is therefore entirely possible that the film with the most No. 1s won’t necessarily win!
So who are the nominees:
Avatar, Inglorious Basterds and The Hurt Locker are the early favorites with Up In The Air, Precious, An Education and District 9 all following closely. It’s highly thought that A Serious Man and The Blind Side will be most likely to be eliminated first of all. Our pick: The Hurt Locker
In the Best Actor category we see Jeff Bridges – Crazy Heart, George Clooney – Up In The Air, Colin Firth – A Single Man, Morgan Freeman – Invictus and Jeremy Renner – The Hurt Locker are the nominees. Our Pick: Jeff Bridges
Best Actress: Sandra Bullock – The Blind Side, Gabourey Sidibe – Precious, Meryl Streep – Julie & Julia, Helen Mirren – The Last Station and Carey Mulligan – An Education all contend. This one will be a close race between Bullock and Streep. Our pick: Sandra Bullock
Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds, Woody Harrelson – The Messenger, Stanley Tucci – Inglourious Basterds, Stanley Tucci – The Lovely Bones and Matt Damon – Invictus. No problem on this one… a clear cut Our Pick: Christoph Waltz.
Best Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique – Precious, Maggie Gyllenhaal – Crazy Heart, Anna Kendrick – Up In The Air, Penelope Cruz – Nine and Vera Farmiga – Up In The Air. Our Pick: Mo’Nique.
Best Director: Kathryn Bigelow – The Hurt Locker, James Cameron – Avatar, Lee Daniels – Precious, Jason Reitman – Up In The Air and Quentin Tarantino – Inglourious Basterds. Our Pick: Kathryn Bigelow.
So that’s all the awards we really care about isn’t it? Sure there’s another hundred categories such as Best Animated Feature (Our pick: Up), Best Foreign Language Film (who cares?), Best Documentary (The Cove), Best Make Up, Best Costume Design, Best Sound Editing / Mixing etc., but all we really care about are the top six categories… am I wrong?
Let me know what you think…who’s going to walk away with this year’s Oscar’s?
Enjoy you’re evening…
