3 Steps to Oscar Enlightenment

1. Prologue Remember when I used to have a "blog"? I believe I wrote things called "articles", often about this "art form" called "the cinema", but I'm involved in this thing called "musical theatre" which takes up a generous amount of "time". However, tonight seemed like a good time to re-enter the blogosphere, because, after all....ITS OSCAR DAY!!!!!!!!$$$$$$$$$$

Tonight, Anne Hathaway (the dictionary definition of class) and James Franco (sex on a stick) will kick off pop culture's answer to the Super Bowl. I expect a livelier, leaner affair this year, perhaps one that will equal 2008's brilliant retro retread, and definitely one that will surpass last year's bland-o-lakes concoction of sap and shtick. My one request of the producers is that, regardless of what they do with the montages and the speeches and the best song nominees and Sean Penn, they take full advantage of Hathaway and Franco's bound-to-be-crackling chemistry. You've got two textbook examples of ebullient star power sharing the world stage. Make it good.

But I digress; this is really about the movies, and this year, 'tis a pretty good crop of nominees. No true stinkers elbowed their way into big categories (whuddup, The Blind Side?), and even the less-than-deserving prestige pieces (True Grit, The Kids Are All Right), aren't anywhere near as mind-bogglingly overrated as, say, Crash, or The Hurt Locker, last year's hyperbolically machismo, appallingly exploitative Best Picture/Director/Screenplay winner (don't get me started). This year, all the major nominees deserved it, even if they didn't quite turn in work worthy of a win. But who will win and why? That below-average segue brings us to

2. PREDICTIONS THAT YOU CAN BET $$$ ON, FOOL

Best Picture-

Will Win: Oscar oracles and jaded journalists alike have spilled gallons of ink over the awards-show friendliness of The King's Speech; it's a period picture, an overcoming-your-disease drama, an acting showcase, a tearjerker, and so on. But the offscreen stats are just as telling; we've got two hugely underrated leads just now getting their dues, an up-and-coming director who's sure to be a major player in years to come, and a legendary producer who's been longing for a new addition to his bulging trophy bag for quite some time. A victory for any other film would be quite the upset.

Should Win: The King's Speech is a very good film, but I don't think it's a great one. Inception and The Social Network were both generational milestones, and are both currently victims of a flash-in-the-pan backlash that's as upsetting as it is expected. I'm happy enough for Bertie, Lionel and Co, but if the dream-thieves or Harvard kids got some love, I'd be ecstatic.

Best Director

Will/Should Win: David Fincher's had it coming for a while now, and a statuette would cement his status as a distinctive Hollywood legend. Also, the Academy is nothing if not PC, and they'll give this big award to "SocNet", the year's hippest picture, to satisfy the young'uns. To quote past Best Director winner Slumdog Millionaire, "It is written".

Best Actor

Will/Should Win: If you ask me, Jesse Eisenberg gave the male performance of the year. But The King's Speech was a monumental step forward for Colin Firth, and an Oscar would encourage him to take more great risks on screen. Plus, potential Great Academy Moments are a huge voter draw, and we all know Firth gives good speech.

Best Actress

Will: GAAAAAAH don't get me started; Annette Bening is a great actress, who gave one of the strongest female performances of the 90's in American Beauty, an singlehandedly made Being Julia worth watching. Her work in The Kids Are All Right is proof that she can and will successfully weather the transition for foxy lady to lionness in winter, but it's not anywhere near her best work. The Academy feels guilty for passing over her when the Globes have showered her with love for years, so I think's she's a pretty sure thing, in spite of that Queen Amidala girl in the tutu.

Should: Rarely has a film rested so squarely on the shoulders of one performer as Winter's Bone. As a teenager tending to her mother and siblings and battling the elements on the outskirts of the Ozarks, Jennifer Lawrence exudes a fearless, galvanizing energy that you can't make or fake. This is a clarion call announcing a new star, and, in a perfect world, Oscar would listen.

Best Supporting Actor

Will/Should Win: Christian Bale's work in The Fighter is nothing less than phenomenal. Oscar can't ignore it. They won't.

Best Supporting Actress

Will/Should: Everyone's banking on Hailee Steinfeld, the budding starlet from True Grit. But Melissa Leo's long overdue, and she does fantastic work in a role that just screams "give me gold!" Maybe my personal obsession with the actress is hazing my judgment a bit, but despite her decidedly unconventional campaign (remember, Bogey beat his drum pretty loudly too), she'd probably do will to jot down a few names to rattle off at the winner's podium.

For my predictions in the rest of the categories, click here...

And, finally...

3. WHAT DO I THINK OF THESE MOVIES?

Inception: A flat-out tour de force that blends genres and burst barriers with grace and grit to spare. It will be remembered as Nolan's finest achievement. Good thing he was nomi...wait. A.

The Kids Are All Right: A Lifetime movie that amps up the topicality, upgrades the cast, and ratchets up the soundtrack budget. It's impeccably acted and nicely shot, but Lisa Cholondenko's much-praised script is overwrought and undercooked all at once. It's a movie that claims to celebrate tolerance, but hammers home the queasy, reductive message that Lesbian marriages are not perfect, either! C.

Winter's Bone: Authentic to a fault, though you wish said authenticity had served a slightly less hackneyed story. Still, the non-pro cast amazes, and the location photography shimmers. Here's a film that finds spare-poetry in the done-to-death stereotypes of small town America. B+

The King's Speech: This is a veritable actor's workshop, with a small army of Britain's best firing on all cylinders. It never bludgeons you over the head with its sentimentality, but instead produces a small yet steady trickle of small, honest emotion. And if it sometimes feels like the best HBO movie never made, well, there are worse things a movie could be. A-.

Black Swan: Cold, lurid, and more than a little silly, Black Swan spends its first half attention to hide its horror-movie roots behind a shoddily constructed veil of forced symbolism and "pacing" (read: "stuffing"). However, once the movie gives into its oversexed, knife-wielding dark side, it soars, with the never-better Portman at the helm. It's pulp with a pulse. B+.

Toy Story 3: Mas.ter.piece. A.

127 Hours: At once one of the most intimate and expansive dramas of recent years. James Franco uncorks reserves of despairing mania and hushed tenderness that we never saw in Harry Osborne or Daniel Desario, and Danny Boyle is at the peak of his freewheeling technique. A once-in-a-lifetime collaboration. A-.

The Fighter: An embarrassment of riches, with Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, and Melissa Leo giving career performances, Amy Adams proving herself as a serious actress, and director David O. Russell doing some of his subtlest and strongest behind-the-camera work. It's a Shakespearean family drama where the verbal altercations cut just as deep as the physical fight. It has a certain bravery, a "true grit" that was missing from.... (A.)

True Grit: A beautiful mess. Gorgeous photography, and nom-worthy work from Steinfeld and Jeff Bridges, but the Coens dirty the water with a shockingly diffuse tone. Half the tone, you can't tell if they're thumbing their noses at the classic western, tipping their hats, or just sticking their tongues out and saying "hell with it"! B-.

The Social Network: The sharpest script in years+ a cornucopia of soon-to-be-stars=an event to remember. Yes, "SocNet" was a full on occasion upon its release, but time has proved that it holds up spectacularly as a piece of film making. The more I think about it, the more I likes it. A.

Lady Comrade

As I glanced over my "Saviors of Cinema List", I noticed that, from the recent selections I've made, you think I was a serial killer who skipped on his prozac. Let's take a break from the depression, shall we?! Here's as jovial a picture as you're likely to find....

NINOTCHKA

Reports indicate that the filming of Ninotchka was a routine, workmanlike affair, but I call bullshit. I'd bet the cast and crew popped out of bed each morning like toast from a Cuisinart, drove to work with radios up and hair down, hummed gaily in their dressing rooms, and then skipped onto the set with every line memorized and every inflection solidified, nailing scene after scene and exchanging jokes, hugs, and generous amounts of food between takes. How else to explain the tidal wave of unencumbered euphoria that rolls over you the moment the first scene fades in and doesn't let up till the credits roll? What other scenario would explain that rich, cherubic glow that coruscates onto every corner of every frame, that feels not like a lighting trick but a genuine external response to the indisputable beauty of undiluted joy? The movie has something rapturous running through its veins, something that, thank god, is highly communicable, something that even the most skeptical soul can't build up much of an immunity to. You don't just watch this marvelous meringue of a social satire, you catch it. I'm no expert, but I think that any encounter with Ninotchka, however brief, is a bit like falling in love.

It begins with what Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin"; a physical object that powers the plot. Here we have a set of stolen jewels belonging to the deposed Russian aristocracy. When three Soviet stooges (Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart, Alexander Granach), take said jewels to Paris to pawn them off, they don't expect to encounter a former Russian monarch, Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire) and her lover, Count Leon D'Algout (Melvyn Douglas), onto the scheme and ready to press charges. But none of them expect Ninotchka (Greta Garbo), an aggressively chaste, exceedingly curt espionage mastermind, sent by the Kremlin to salvage the jewel situation. You'd expect Leon and Ninotchka to fall in love, and 'deed they do. However, most romantic conversations don't go like this;

Leon: What kind of a girl are you, anyway?
Ninotchka: Just what you see. A tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution.
Leon: You're the most adorable cog I've ever seen.

Ninotchka: What have you ever done for mankind?

Leon: Nothing. Now for womankind, my record isn't quite so bleak.

They don't write 'em like this anymore. But then again, they don't have actors like this anymore, actors who had not just cut-and-dry talent but personas, sets of gloriously singular, idiosyncratic character traits that allowed writers and directors to tailor films specifically to the wildly unique skills of their stars. Indeed, the DNA of Ninotchka is inextricable from the genes of the Great Garbo, perhaps the most puzzling and compelling starlet in the hardly diminutive canon of Hollywood studio lore.

Plucked from a barber shop by a studio exec and flung headfirst into stardom, Garbo rose to fame in a series of MGM melodramas, almost always playing the wealthy woman with a beggar's heart. In the late 20's and early 30's, she became a national object of love and lust and racked up multiple Oscar noms, all while skipping out on premieres, ignoring fan mail, and declining interviews. She was the original Hollywood hermit, and her stolid reclusiveness, combined with her distinctly European features and angular, exacting performance style sent the American public on binges of frenzied speculation. Audiences packed movie houses when a new Garbo flick was out, not just to revel in her distinctive brand of star quality, but to make some sort of attempt at figuring her out, at peeling away the luminescent layers and understanding what was at the core of this woman who was so gorgeously remote, so magical in her misanthropy that she in some ways seemed like more of a heavenly creature than a mere mortal.

For theatergoers then and for movie buffs now, part of the picture's allure is how cannily it plays on the thoroughly anomalous power of Garbo's charisma. The picture first half-hour has her playing a sort of exaggerated version of what we construe to be her personality-severe, savvy, and unshakably somber. Indeed, she's so plainly brutish, so staggeringly forthright, so deliberately frigid that you wonder if this is the apotheosis of her trademark acting style or if she's just poking fun at herself. Then, something shocking happens. In the midst of a lunch-table dialogue between Leon and Ninotchka, the camera cuts away from her, and when it cuts back...she's laughing.

Armed with an abundance of charm, self-deprecating wit, and good looks, Douglas has finally triumphed over that famous scowl, finally broken her open for all to see. She can laugh?!,we think to ourselves. Before long, we know she can smile, swoon, and sob as well. It's nothing less than genius how the picture puts Leon in OUR shoes; he wants to unravel the mystery of Greta Garbo. So do we, but sadly, we've never had what it takes. Leon does, and we're lucky enough to watch him at work. "Garbo laughs!", the posters for this movie proclaim. Yes, and the audience gasps, because, at last, we feel we know this actress, that we understand her in the way that we "get" Bogie or Judy Garland or Lucille Ball. This entertainment epiphany occurred not a moment to soon; perhaps realizing that this picture cemented her stardom once and for all by exhibiting her surprising sense of humour and vivacious versatility, Garbo retired soon after this one hit screens. She avoided the business for 50 years and died a recluse, albeit a seemingly happy one.

But let's strip away the legend for a minute. You could go into Ninotchka without a drop of historical context and still have a ball. This is romantic comedy at its finest. It provides us with two immensely interesting characters played by two great actors-Douglas, taking debonair to a new level, and Garbo, stretching herself like never before. It gives those two characters some of the most beautiful words ever crafted by a screenwriter (or rather, a team of screenwriters, headed by the incomparable Billy Wilder). It plops them down in a location perfectly in synch with the starry-eyed tone of it all; Paris, of course. You couldn't go wrong with this material, and Ernst Lubitsch went very very right indeed.

Then again, that's nothing new; Lubitsch was one of the greatest directors ever to work for a major studio. The combination of sly wit, soignee sensuality, quiet piquancy and unforced energy with which he imbued even the smallest detail became so iconic that fellow directors dubbed it "the Lubitsch touch". His style is clever, but it never forces us to admire its cleverness; it's a kind of brilliance that registers subconsciously so that our real mental faculties can get involved in the story at hand instead of the specifics of its telling.

He has a lucid way with visuals; scenes unfold with the unforced, intoxicating grace of good ballet. Some of his most effortless (and best) work is on display in Ninotchka, which contains a thirty-second moment that, for me at least, sums up both Lubitsch's appeal and his indisputable genius. As Leon and Ninotchka cheekily re-enact a Russian-style execution using a blindfold and a champagne bottle, watch where he places her in the shot, how he frames a brief kiss as part of the almost interminable buildup to the punchline, how he slopes the camera just a tad at a crucial moment. Like just about everything he ever directed, this scene is erotic, enchanting and endearingly goofy all at once. The Lubitsch touch is the Midas touch-his work is simply irresistible, especially here, in what is certainly one of his two or three best films.

Some have called Ninotchka the anti-Casablanca, arguing that, while that film argues in favor of national pride, this one makes a case against it. But the film's ideologies are not opposing views, just different takes on how to fix a broken world. Casablanca claims that, to unite a frayed nation, we must understand that sacrifices for our country are ultimately a display of love for its citizens. Ninotchka aims for the same destination, but suggests a different route; we must cherish individual relationships over national issues, for a nation full of happy people will become a better one. Both suggest that we act with people, not causes in mind. They suggest two different but equally valid ways of doing so. And yet, for all their intellect, these movies provide enjoyment and escape as well; they ride on the sturdy shoulders of their stars.Casablanca plays with our perception of Bogie as a Tough Guy, and Ninotchka invites us to solve the mystery of a beguiling woman who once stated; "I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference."

(Note: The hat Garbo wore in this film started a fashion craze, and became the most iconic cinema headpiece outside of Princess Leia's Danish-buns. If there's one film artifact I wish I had in my possession, it's this.)