I got no money on this.  But here's my final picks for the Oscar pool.

One Battle After Another for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Walter Moura surprise (and deserved) Best Actor win for Secret Agent

Jessie Buckley as Best Actress for Hamnet (haven't seen, but going on the buzz, and we've all loved Buckley since I'm Thinking of Ending Things)

Benicio del Toro Best Supporting Actor.  This might be the most 'up-in-the-air' category.  If Delroy Lindo wins, maybe through some fierce vote-splitting among the front-runners, I would be very happy to concede.

Wunmi Mosaku for Best Supporting Actress.  I haven't seen Sentimental Value which is hobbling my ability in the category, and I've already mentioned how I do not believe that Amy Madigan is deserving.

Blue Moon's Robert Kaplow for Original Screenplay; although I haven't seen Panahi's Just an Accident.

Secret Agent for International Feature.  Again, Just An Accident would be a welcome win on GP.

Best Animated Feature - I'm placing a bet on a mid-show hijacking by Feathers McGraw who might just have to kneecap a Demon Hunter or two.

Haven't seen any of the Docs.  Perfect Neighbor is definitely the one that has my fascination.

Best Music: It's a bit of an irony that in Sinners' celebration of African-American musical genius, the winner of the Score would go to some goddamn Swede, so instead I'll root for that film in the Song category so that the hard-working neo-Soul singer/producer Raphael Saadiq gets to enjoy the victory.  For Score, I'll be happy to see Jonny Greenwood win, even if this hasn't been my favorite of his PTA scores, and although I eventually dumped unceremoniously on Bugonia, I still think that Lanthimos collaborator Jerskin Fendrix is an outstanding composer.

Best Casting: a newer category, in a true and just world this would go to The Secret Agent which is filled with colorful characters and faces.  It won't though, because this is ultimately a Hollywood jack-off award that will go to the talent agent with the best drugs.

Production Design: Sinners

Sound: Sirat

Honestly don't care for the rest.  If Frankenstein wants all the make-up and costumes, fine, as long as they take all that shit with them when they leave.

I'm glad that Conan O'Brien has breached the subject of that whole "vampire riverdance" thing about Sinners so I don't seem like such a crag about it.  If that film's centerpiece sequence, the pastiche running through black musical tradition, is one of the more impressive scenes this year, I hope we might agree that the film's vampire riverdance is surely one of the most embarrassing.  And not just as a knock on the Irish (as Conan frets), but.....it's just dumb. 

And what does it say to the purported themes of the film exactly?  I've read a number of pieces on the film that these vampires represent some kind of predatory force which exploits and "extracts" black musical genius, but....why the Irish?  You mean like all of them Irish people running the record companies, the management agencies, the publishing houses, the lawyers drafting the unfair contracts?  I don't even want to get into all that.  What's more concerning to me is the implication here that the Irish musicians of the time, of the American South, were uniquely involved in predating on black people's music, which is historically ridiculous.  It's funny even that if we consider the biggest historical threat (not vampires) to black people at the time were the Klan, a nativist organization which had consigned the Irish to a similar sharecropper under-status as the recently freed black population.  And far from being a predatory or parasitic relationship, in terms of musical tradition, the nexus between the southern Black musical traditions of blues/gospel and the Scots-Irish tradition of Appalachian folk is much closer, more mutual and sympathetic than such a vampire paradigm would suggest, which is best illustrated in Harry Smith's seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, a vault of both black and white rural folk/blues from the dawn of this music's archival recordings.

I mentioned in my review of Sinners that, as impressive and exciting as the film is, one of the year's best, any larger statement that the film is trying to make concerning the ethnic relationships of these musical traditions is simply incoherent   I wouldn't even take it that seriously, except that so many seem to want to.

Paul Thomas Anderson's first statue.  Cheers.

I hope Conan O'Brien didn't turn into a vampire

No I'm not.  I understand when you have such a rich Celtic, Gaelic tradition of vampires........oh, wait, they don't have any of that.  The Swedes.  On the other hand.  Hear me out.  Got some of these Draugr things....

Maybe you guys let the wrong ones in, that's all I'm saying.

To answer Javier Bardem's "Say 'No' to War" with Lionel Ritchie's "Say You Say Me" is potentially interesting, but Ritchie is a weak vessel these days.  Didn't he say that he didn't believe any of the things he wrote about?

Michael B ain't too bad.

Jesse Buckley ain't beat.

Classy move to invoke the high water mark of 1975 to make an example.

Either the parties are starting or we got a lot of tornado alarms going off around here.  This season is a banshee bitch.

crumbsroom wrote:

I was very happy with all the One Battle wins. Particularly Penn since no one seemed to think that was coming and I thought that was one of my favorite performances from him in years.

I was rooting for Benicio ("....ocean waves....")  but I'm happy with Penn's win.   And good for Penn to use the moment to shift focus back to Ukraine.

I've seen many who have said that this was Penn's best performance, and I've reflexively pushed back a little.  "In years" is more acceptable.  I might say top 5.  But for me, I would still put Falcon and the Snowman at top, maybe Carlito's Way not far behind.