The Oscars 2017

Despite all credible journalistic outlets already having made their predictions and tips for Oscar success this year, it felt pertinent to do my own blog at the eleventh hour - not least because I agreed to host HOME's Digital Content Manager, Sarah Leech, at our gaff for viewing purposes. I've watched the ceremony several times now, with my good lady generally falling asleep around the 4am mark, often streaming from some hooky webcast that goes down every forty minutes prompting a flurry of panicked clicking and pop-up blocking in order to find another pirate stream. But NOW TV came to our aid last year, reducing stress levels significantly (that said, Alex Zane and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman can get in the sea if they show up again between ad breaks).

(I've just checked - Alex Zane IS presenting. Please Sky, I'll suffer Zane and Boyd Hilton for five and a half hours so long as Jane Seymour is kept under lock and key.)

This year's ceremony will no doubt be politicised by those making acceptance speeches, and rightly so - anyone with a platform and a dissenting voice loud enough should be heard in these worrying times, irrespective of how many may actually take note. But when all's said and done, the show is about the films and the films alone - yes, even Florence Foster Jenkins, starring the failing overrated so-called actress Meryl Streep (nominated for Best Actress, obviously). Here's my take on those up for the big gongs, and a few of the not-so-big gongs too:

Arrival

I won't lie, big budget serious sci-fi thinkpieces like this push all the right buttons for me. Your Moonlight's and your Manchester by the Sea's aren't what I really want to be watching more than once, no matter how much act-ting they throw at you. Also it's bloody great to see a genre piece up for a hefty haul of nominations (eight, including Best Picture and Best Director) when they're so often sidelined in favour of films deemed far more important (I'm willfully ignoring LOTR: The Return of the King for this argument to work). Think of Contact meets Donnie Darko and... no wait, that's an awful way to describe it. But it's got a bit of time travel involved and it made me cry upon second viewing. Amy Adams should have been nominated for Best Actress.

PREDICTIONS: Sound Mixing

Fences

All men are bastards. It's a fact, and Denzel Washington's film version of August Wilson's play of the same name takes a whopping 139 minutes to tell us. That's not to say the film doesn't have something to say - it just takes far too long saying it. The fact the film also sticks rigidly to its stage-bound roots, largely taking place in the back yard of the house shared by Washington's Troy Maxson and his wife Rose (Viola Davis) means it rarely feels cinematic in any sense of the word, even though the story is strong and the performances excellent (Washington's Troy is possibly the most complicated and tragic character he's ever portrayed).

PREDICTIONS: Viola Davis will be pipped to the post by Naomie Harris for Supporting Actress

Hacksaw Ridge

Taking influence from war films of the 50s and 60s that colour events with a rose-tinted hue of selfless optimism and Christ-like heroics, Mel Gibson's return to the director's chair is a world away from The Passion of the Christ in one sense, but not entirely dissimilar in another. Much like Full Metal Jacket or Life is Beautiful, it's a film of two distinct halves; the schmaltz is layered on thick during the backstory, before heads are blown off and limbs strewn across the battlefield as Andrew Garfield's Desmond Doss proves exactly how a pacifist medic can be of use at the battle of Okinawa. Based on a true story, it cranks up the cheese but also the tension; a film out of time that lives or dies by how much you buy into Garfield's gee-whizz heroism.

PREDICTIONS: Sound Editing

Hell or High Water

How did this one sneak in to be a Best Picture nominee?! It's absolutely brilliant fun, but not at all what you'd expect to see on an Oscar longlist, never mind a shortlist. With Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham's cops chasing Chris Pine and Ben Foster's robbers, it's a Hollywood throwback that could sit comfortably alongside a dozen 70s exploitation pictures without breaking a sweat. The fact it has a whiff of 'this is why America is broken' about it is likely why it's been nominated; it'll win nothing, but no-one can say it isn't the most honest cinematic thrill ride of all the big nominees. Worth the price of admission for the pissed-off diner waitress alone.

PREDICTIONS: It could surprise us all and take Best Original Screenplay, but I doubt it

Hidden Figures

Pharrell Williams could have all but ruined this film if it wasn't so solid in all other areas. There's about half a dozen songs that crop up out of nowhere for no other reason than to sell a soundtrack so he can buy more fucking hats, when period songs would have fit the bill far, far better. It turns a crowd-pleasing slice of good old-fashioned entertainment into a jarring, pull-you-out-of-the-moment music video on several occasions, But I digress. Hidden Figures goes behind the public-facing theatrics seen in The Right Stuff and Apollo 13 to show us what was really going on at NASA, and who the real heroes were. Like Hacksaw Ridge it's rose-tinted stuff, but undeniably entertaining.

PREDICTIONS: Will struggle against some tough competition

La La Land

Backlash be damned; this film is beautiful and I don't care who knows it. Yes I'm biased, having been to LA a few years back and had the exact same romantic experience at Griffith Observatory as Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (yes, even the floating). But it's a beguiling, shamelessly old school Hollywood musical of the kind they simply don't make anymore, not least because it could have tanked (Coppola's One from the Heart springs to mind, which made $600k back from a £26m budget). Director Damien Chazelle can do no wrong in my eyes, however I'm beginning to wonder if he's only able to make films about jazz (his festival-screened student feature, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, follows very similar themes). That said, if the world can have a dozen Marvel films released every week, it can certainly handle a film about jazz every once in a while.

PREDICTIONS: Picture, Music Score, Original Song, Cinematography, Costume Design, Production Design

Lion

Coming off like it's going to be a giant advert for Google Earth via Slumdog Millionaire, Lion actually swerves a fair majority of the usual syrupy clichés in favour of something more realistic. That's not to say this in the same league as Manchester by the Sea when it comes to the grim realities of life, but the true story of Saroo, a lost child from India being adopted by an Australian couple, only to attempt to track his real mother down twenty-five years later, is classic awards season stuff - and indeed contains all the ingredients you might expect from such a film. But it never strays too far into cloying or sentimental (J. A. Bayona's The Impossible springs to mind as its antithesis in this department). Sunny Pawar as the younger Saroo is a revelation - Dev Patel should send him up to collect the award if he wins Best Supporting Actor.

PREDICTIONS: Empty-handed

Manchester by the Sea

I'll freely admit this didn't grab me until it became apparent why Casey Affleck's Lee Chandler is so monumentally depressed. It's a smack around the head so hard made all the worse by the fact it's an accident, changing the course of his life and those around him. The film plays fast and loose with timelines, but its so tightly-edited that the jumps back and forth feel completely natural, never forced for the sake of clever-clever storytelling in the way that say 21 Grams or indeed Arrival deploys similar techniques. It's not an easy watch but isn't without its humour; will struggle against La La Land and Moonlight.

PREDICTIONS: Actor (Casey Affleck), Original Screenplay

Moonlight

If it wasn't for La La Land, Moonlight could well nab a few more statues - that said, it's slow-burning portrayal of three moments in a young gay man's life (child, teenager, adult) has had a slow-burning appeal in the lead-up to the Academy Awards themselves; some judges may have had a last-minute change of heart. It's mesmerising stuff, and could well have been overlooked by the Academy had it not been for last year's #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. Expect to see some fallout from this stealing a few of La La Land's shoo-in nominations; it'll be like Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction all over again (well, sort of).

PREDICTIONS: Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali), Supporting Actress (Naomie Harris), Director (Barry Jenkins), Adapted Screenplay

And the Rest...

Captain Fantastic // Viggo Mortensen goes native. Gets his willy out. Votes Bernie Sanders.

Nocturnal Animals // Our Peter's Oscar-night outfit is inspired by this (see here). A bold statement.

Elle // Paul Verhoeven film in Oscar-nom shocker. In French, so no-one watches it.

Jackie // Natalie Portman wins Best Actress. The End.

Florence Foster Jenkins // Meryl Streep doesn't win Best Actress. Donald Trump tweets about it.

Kubo and the Two Strings // Will lose to Moana, despite some beautiful stop-motion animation.

Zootopia // Far better than it has any right to be. Even with Shakira as a pop star gazelle.

Star Trek Beyond // Up for Make-up and Hairstyling. Will lose to Suicide Squad.

Suicide Squad // Er... how did this happen?

Passengers // This is currently rated 31% on Rotten Tomatoes. I thought it was pretty good TBH.

Deepwater Horizon // The colours looked off on my new TV. Turns out it was the film.

Sully // Tom Hanks' moustache deserves an award of its own. Sam Elliott to present it.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story // Surprised Forest Whitaker wasn't up for Worst Supporting Actor.

Doctor Strange // Benedict Cumberbatch cracks a joke about Adele in this. I didn't laugh.

The Jungle Book // The live-action remake. Filmed on green-screen. With no animals. Quite.

The Lobster // Hang on, what year was this released...?!