There Will Be Oscars
Sunday night's Oscar ceremony is a wide open race - only Daniel Day-Lewis is a shoo-in to win Best Actor. But, Best Picture should ultimately rest in good hands as the two favourites to win may very well be the two best movies released in the UK this year. No Country for Old Men is the Coen Brothers' best reviewed film since Fargo, and There Will Be Blood is a triumphant return for director Paul Thomas Anderson after a five year hiatus.
Odds-on favourite to walk home with the Best Picture Oscar, the Holy Grail of Academy Awards, on Sunday night is the Coen Bros' masterful No Country for Old Men.
If There Will Be Blood emerges the surprise victor in a Brokeback Mountain / Crash scenario, the Best Picture will still go to an astonishing, accomplished piece of modern cinema.
Basically, the Academy will make the correct choice this year whichever movie wins... unless Juno shocks everyone.
Part of the Oscar fun is yelling what, "What were they thinking?!" when the Best Picture is announced. Dances With Wolves over GoodFellas? Driving Miss Daisy over Field of Dreams? The Bridge on the River Kwai over 12 Angry Men?
Less mentioned are those times when the Academy were bang on the money with their Best Picture choice.
Who would argue that Casablanca, All About Eve, The Apartment, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Unforgiven did not deserve the top honour?
And other wins have made more sense with the passing of time. For better or worse, the Oscars are a mainstream awards ceremony which makes the original Rocky's win for Best Picture over All the President's Men and Taxi Driver understandable - in 1977 America was emerging from a particularly dark decade, and the old-fashioned American dream values of Stallone's boxing classic matched the mood. And it remains one of cinema's best tearjerkers.
Another contention is the films ignored completely that are later proved classics - Vertigo, Some Like It Hot, 2001 - or its traditional snubbing of fantasy movies - Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was Fantasy Film's first Best Picture win after almost eighty years of Oscar.
While No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are not fantasy movies, they are not typical Oscar fare. Both draw heavily on horror cinema - No Country's Javier Bardem is as memorable a screen psycho as Norman Bates - and There Will Be Blood is a Gothic horror Western that casts Daniel Day-Lewis as the Devil. Not for nothing did it premiere as a surprise film at Austin, Texas' Fantastic Fest.
A win for No Country for Old Men would also go some way to remove the stain of never awarding Alfred Hitchcock, popular cinema's most influential moviemaker, a Best Picture Oscar for his suspense classics.
The Coens conjure up scenes, including a nighttime shoot-out and an unnerving conversation in a desolate petrol station, that echo Sir Alf working at the top of his game.
Both films also journey into real hearts of darkness, something the Academy Awards have not honoured since Schindler's List in 1994, or to pick a less obvious Oscar friendly movie, The Silence of the Lambs in 1992.
Whichever movie wins, the real victor come this Sunday will be fearless, visionary cinema.
Rob Daniel
