DGA as kingmaker

There's been a lot of talk about whether The King's Speech is going to sweep or split the Oscars. In many ways, it's a year unlike any other -- and I don't just mean King's Speech and Social Network. I mean King's Speech taking on Inception across the techs, taking on True Grit, taking on The Fighter in supporting categories. This is a year for battles.

And then it hit me. If David Fincher had just won the DGA, this would be a completely different event. We wouldn't be trying to figure out if Fincher's BAFTA win means anything, it would be used by many to predict The Social Network winning Best Picture. There are still plenty of people who think Fincher will win the Oscar. I'm not one of them. If he does, I'll be all the happier for it, as it will probably single-handedly cause me to lose my Oscar pool, but over the nine years I've been following the race, there are only two times the DGA has let me down -- 2002, when The Pianist came out of nowhere, and 2005, when Crash came out of nowhere.

Splits simply aren't easy to predict.

Believe in the upset

Think Fincher and The Social Network can squeeze this one out? I'll have plenty to say on the subject over the next ten days, but every year I always come back to this video. It's undoubtedly the most unprecedented upset in the last however many years of Oscar. There's a reason they don't have this on the official Oscar YouTube channel, either.

Best part? It's a tie between Jack Nicholson mouthing, "what happened" after he reads the winner, and the fact that everyone who's not associated with the movie looks completely displeased.

It's the upset we always hark back to, and it's always a reminder that nobody knows until the envelope is opened.

Jack Nicholson presents Best Picture Oscars (2006) @ Yahoo! Video

Unanswered questions

Right now, I'm pretty much walking in the same circle just to generate content: there's only so much one can write about The Social Network and The King's Speech, and I need to save that for my preview blow-out next Friday.

So while the next couple days will predominantly have reports on the tech categories, with the remaining guilds handing out their awards -- we'll get top honors from the costume designers guild, american cinema editors, motion picture sound editors, and cinema audio society -- I figured it's time to do something different.

What do YOU want to know about this year's Oscars? Maybe it's something as basic as "what's the difference between sound mixing and sound editing"? Or maybe it's something as complicated as, "even though Natalie Portman's won almost every award, is there any precedent for her to lose next Sunday?" Leave a comment or e-mail your questions to me at jgilmore@dailygamecock.com over the weekend and I'll answer them on Sunday night. Don't be shy.

The art direction dilemma

The Art Directors Guild is pretty helpful when it comes to the Oscar, but unfortunately they have three awards: contemporary art direction, period art direction and fantasy art direction. This year, they awarded The King's Speech and Inception in the latter categories, and those two films are arguably going toe-to-toe for the Oscar?

What's a predictor to do?

Loving movies

While my head swirls with thoughts and ideas about where the Oscar race will end up, I thought it'd be a good idea to step back and just consider how cool it is that we have movies that we love, or that we're even capable of loving movies to begin with.

The Oscars bring out the best and worst of people who love movies. The roughly two and a half months between the Golden Globe nominations and the Academy Awards constitute a time of great hope, of crossing our fingers and holding our breath as we firmly believe that this year will be the year the powers that be reward the film we each consider "best." It's a marvelous, awesome time of the year for people like me, because for those two months, the blogosphere just wants to talk about movies -- what was good, why was it good, analyzing performances, camera work, direction -- it's what I do every day on some level or another, and the Oscars are one of the purest forms of cultural debate.

'Inception' wins ASC

Inception cinematographer Wally Pfister wins the American Society of Cinematographer's award for outstanding cinematography in a motion picture for 2010. Pfister has lensed all of Christopher Nolan's films since Memento, including both of his Batman films.

Joel Coen presented Roger Deakins with the ASC's lifetime achievement award.

The 'King's' cracks: 'Network' takes back 30%

I know what you're thinking -- The King's Speech won seven freaking awards. It's unstoppable, it's going to bowl Oscar, we should just figure it'll win seven or eight and The Social Network and The Fighter should give up.

No way.

This race just took a dramatic turn, and things are more heated than ever. David Fincher's Best Director win at BAFTA suddenly opens up the possibility that a Picture/Director split may not be so foolish to bet on. Granted, the BAFTAs are kind of notorious for split years -- 2007 (Atonement wins Pic, Coens win Director), 2006 (Queen wins Pic, Paul Greengrass wins Director), 2004 (The Aviator wins Pic, Mike Leigh wins Director), 2003 (Lord of the Rings wins Pic, Peter Weir wins Director) -- even though they did pick Roman Polanski's win for Best Director (and gave The Pianist Best Film) in 2002. I feel very, very strongly now that David Fincher could pull off his win, because they obviously loved The King's Speech, and yet they didn't award Tom Hooper.

64th Annual BAFTA Awards

The King's Speech caps seven wins including Best Picture; The Social Network pulls out three including Best Director.

Best Picture: The King's Speech
Best Director: David Fincher, The Social Network
Best Actor: Colin Firth, The King's Speech
Best Actress: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Best Supporting Actor: Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech
Best Supporting Actress: Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech
Best Original Screenplay: David Seidler, The King's Speech
Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Best British Film: The King's Speech
Best Film Not in the English Language: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Best Animated Film: Toy Story 3
Best Original Music: The King's Speech, Alexandre Desplat
Best Cinematography: True Grit, Roger Deakins
Best Editing: The Social Network
Best Production Design: Inception
Best Costume Design: Alice in Wonderland
Best Sound: Inception
Best Makeup and Hair: Alice in Wonderland
Best Special Visual Effects: Inception 
Best British Debut: Chris Morris, Four Lions 
Orange Rising Star Award: Tom Hardy

Is supporting acting a battleground?

Maybe in an effort to make things more spicy headed down the home stretch, there are a great deal of people who think Christian Bale and Melissa Leo will lose the Best Supporting Acting categories to Geoffrey Rush and Hailee Steinfeld, respectively. For the Actor, it's because Bale is judged as "not well-liked" for his infamous demeanor and Rush is part of a sweep. For the Actress, it's because Melissa Leo, instead of sticking to Paramount's Oscar campaign for the film, took out ads for herself in Hollywood trade papers. Pretty terrible ads.

I say -- no way. Even if Leo loses votes, where are they going to go? Adams? Steinfeld? Carter? The Best Supporting Actress race is, if anything, completely wide open apart from Leo's clear frontrunner status. The argument goes that True Grit is the next-most-well-liked movie, and ergo they'd want to vote for Steinfeld. But The Fighter is a tremendously well-liked movie -- three acting nominations, picture, director, screenplay, editing nominations.

For Bale to lose, there would have to be a huge momentum swing to Rush, which again I can't see happening because The Fighter is a movie with broad praise. Geoffrey Rush already won his Oscar back in 1996 for Shine. Bale has the "overdue" factor; a decade of shape-shifting, rigorous and unconventional performances should count for something.

Want some historical basis to not expect a big switcheroo in both supporting categories? By all means, I'm happy to oblige.