The Academy did a very good job this year of nominating some very smart movies-- they're normally much further behind the curve.  Although they missed out on "Jesse James" (only two noms) and "Zodiac" (zero!), it was a very good year and the nominations are uncharacteristically representative of that.  "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood" are both very deserving.

There's not a truly bad movie in the top five, which is very unusual.  "Juno" is the weakest of the bunch, but it's certainly not an abomination like "Crash."

"not to mention the second time Blanchett wins (the other was Hepburn in The Aviator) for a celebrity portrayal that is more impression than performance."

The academy (not to mention the public) loves this shit.  When an actor impersonates a famous personality, it gives viewers the feeling that there can be an objective measure of the quality of the performance.  The performance succeeds to the degree that the simulation succeeds.  The same goes for the Academy's preference for portrayals of characters with mental defects and foreign accents.  To base one's judgement as to the quality of a performance on such factors reflects a vulgar understanding of the art, but then the Oscars are less about art than about ticket sails, and a vulgar understanding of the actor's craft is all that most people have or care about.

Next year, how about a TNR Subscriber shindig at Sundance? As opposed to a cruise, I mean. Cultural, not cheesy; long weekend, not 7 days; beautiful surroundings, great food and conversation. Just a thought.

Every so often, the Academy awards performances that are truly deserving.  Usually they reward mediocrity over the course of a big, fun show, featuring lots and lots of very famous people carrying on with the business of being famous.  

I am going to confess *ulp* that I have not actually seen "No Country for Old Men," largely because people who know me very, very well have told me that I would not enjoy the experience of watching it, and I've gotten to a point in my life when I take things like that into consideration, art be damned.  But from everything I hear about both it and "There Will Be Blood," which I may yet see, they are wonderfully made films (albeit with a lousy ending for the latter).  I may see "Atonement," even though the commercials bore the crap out of me.  But I thought both "Juno" and "Michael Clayton" were excellent films.  So this year's slate seems to stack up well, certainly when one keeps "Crash" (ugh) and "Forrest Gump" (meh) in mind.

And I'm still on Cloud 9 that there is a mere one (deserving) nomination for "Into the Wild."  Dear GOD, how I hated that movie.

Um.. Chris?  I'm eagerly awaiting your review of Teeth.  How long are you going to make us wait already??

I haven't seen any of those movies yet, so can't really comment apart from saying I put more trust and emphasis on the Orrsters than the Oscars.

Teplukhin - great idea.

Michael Clayton? Are you serious? The movie was so Clooney-centric, playing off his act far more than any twists of plot. We felt one way throughout the entire film, the subplots were predictable...  It was a tired crossover of The Firm and The Fugitive.

ejbenjamin, I think you nailed it with "Juno" as the weakest of the bunch, and a signal of how strong the nominations are. I loved "Juno," but it had an unshakable air of pretense that reminded me of "American Beauty," which I enjoyed on first watching but found empty as a store-brand twinkie on repeated viewing. Not a "Forrest Gump" among the lot of them, which is pretty remarkable for the Oscars.

fI think the Coens are shoe-ins for the directing honors, and I can't imagine "There Will Be Blood" being strong enough to split the vote there and nab Best Picture.

I think Ellen Page is a good underdog candidate for Best Actress.

Question: is Best Supporting Actress a three-way tie between Jarvier Bardem, Tom Wilkinson and Hal Holbrook? I can imagine Holbrook building up some support, under a "Let's give it to the old fart before he dies" banner.

Wilkinson is the kind of nominee who gets a lot of support in this category--a well-respected, well-liked, hard-working, and very talented actor who has paid his dues and has been nominated before. That kind of nominee normally has a lot of support in the best supporting actor category.

Still, I see Jarvier Bardem as the front-runner.

For what it's worth, Roger Ebert's "Top Ten" list has been a remarkably good predictor for the Best Picture winner these last few years, and on top of his list is "Juno." He's also predicted almost every upset in the Best Picture category that I can remember, going back to 1998's "Shakespeare in Love."

For now, he's predicting "No Country For Old Men."

So if your theory about the high-brow vote getting split is true, I believe Juno would be the beneficiary.

Tep:  I'm sure you're kidding, but do you know how impossible--and expensive--it would be to get a place at Sundance?  Let alone, say room for 50 TNR nerds (and I put myself at the top of that list)?  Anyway, you're all invited to my house for an Oscar party.  I'm a good cook and, Cookie, make awesome cookies (you should taste my seven-layer bars--that is, if you like coconut, chococlate and butterscotch chips!).  Ah, one can dream.

Rhubarb:  "I loved "Juno," but it had an unshakable air of pretense that reminded me of "American Beauty," which I enjoyed on first watching but found empty as a store-brand twinkie on repeated viewing."  Yes. That whole plastic bag thing.  Ugh.   And might I add unbelievably misogynistic?

My problem with Juno was that no woman, no matter how young, frisky, and frolicsome, will avoid depression after giving birth and signing adoption papers.  The hormones alone will ensure that.  So the whole thing was sweet and all, but really, anybody who says it wasn't political or anti-choice is nuts.

ejbengamin, it's nice to see someone else liked "Jesse James" besides me.  Casey Affleck turned in two very solid performances this year and it was nice to see him recognized.  His Robert Ford is the weaseliest of the weaseliest.  He probably doesn't win (my guess would be Bardem) and probably shouldn't, but it was one of my favorite portrayals of the year.

Being a Minnesotan, I suppose I should adore "all things Coen brothers."  I mean, if a celebrity has a long layover at the airport, we usually adopt them as one of ours.  The Coen brothers could make a techically brilliant (and perhaps even compelling) "Care Bears Meet My Little Pony" movie.  I don't think there are better technicians in the field at the moment.  These guys really know how to film something, but their work sometimes leaves me a bit cold.  In this movie, I guess we're supposed to gather that greed in the face of relentless peril is senseless and that true evil is quite banal.  Okay, and. . . . . . .all the people in Minnesota (at least the ones at my family reunion) all sound like the actors in "Fargo."

Diablo Cody worked in the alternative press up here in Minnesota and I liked "Juno," but the first half seemed like Ellen Page doing a one-woman show entitled "The Little Preggers Who Could."  Still, it's solidly written, but if this wins best picture, I'd be shocked.  With Rhubarbs all the way.

Still haven't seen "There Will Be Blood," but hope to this coming weekend.

Cate Blanchett for "Elizabeth:  The Golden Age?"  Nice, solid work, but there was better stuff out there.  But who can ever really argue with a Cate Blanchett nomination?

Hey Chris any thought on the Documentary nominations?

Juno deserves to win best picture among these nominees.  Alone among them, it features, across the board, well-drawn, convincing characters whom we recognize and care about.  Also alone among them, it features a beautifully constructed story where what happens to those characters is subtle, believable, and moving.  The huge shift that takes place in the movie, from funny to serious, from kid to grown-up, from make-believe to real-life, is almost imperceptible as you watch it, mostly because the plot is so well grounded in the characters.  This movie is nothing like the relatively silly and false Little Miss Sunshine, which relies on broad humor and outlandish situations for laughs.  Juno, by contrast, relies on witty people who say funny things, and, as a result, we don't doubt, as we do in Little Miss Sunshine, that they are real people living in a real (though entertaining) world.

I tend to focus so much on movies' literary elements -- things like plot, theme, and character -- because, in my view (perhaps contrary to auteur film theory are any film theory), they're just more important, or, maybe, more fundamental than or primary to the cinematic elements.  Movies remain about story-telling.  If you don't nail the literary elements, or if they're confused at the outset, all you've got, at best, are a lot of pretty pictures.

Cases in point, for me, were Blood and No Country, well-executed sound and fury (or, in the case of No Country, very little sound).  These were both uncommonly beautiful films, and yet neither drew me in.  They are both very allegorical, which is a dangerous place to start, because right away, you've decided that you're going to use people and stories not to talk about the people or the stories but to talk about something else.  Of course this is done all the time to good effect, but I find tiresome allegorical story-telling that dispenses with reality -- where the overwhelming sense is that the people are mere symbols.  It doesn't help that, in both movies, the something else -- what the movies are supposed to be about -- is obscure, and, meanwhile, the characters and (in No Country, at least) the stories are unconvincing.  For example, the killer in No Country is, on his own terms, a weird psychopath.  I bet nobody like him exists.  Of course, the movie isn't about psychopaths, or even about this psychopath.  He's supposed to represent something else, some larger menacing force -- but I was never sold on what that was exactly.  Daniel Plainview had potential as a character (although, I found Day-Lewis's performance to be a bit mannered, and what's with that weird very much non-midwestern accent anyway?), but the movie was undone by a (very, very) slow build-up to a stupid ending that made no sense of the guy.  And making sense of the guy is all that was holding my interest, because it wasn't a compelling tale about the world.  The movie is filled with menace, and yet it doesn't actually get around to showing any real costs to the sort of American progress Plainview represents.  Blood, by the way, is *not* a story about obsession, as some have said.  Obsession stories show the hero becoming obsessed, as in the criminally overlooked Zodiac.  There's a change, an arc.  There's no change in Blood.  We don't see the cost of obsession, because we never see what that obsession *has done* to the character.  The character merely stands in for the obsession.  Once again, the main character seems to represent a larger force, but clumsily so.

Michael Clayton, meanwhile, did feature a character I cared about and believed -- Michael Clayton -- but he lived in a pretty silly potboiler with an implausible villain who did implausible things.  The frustration of the movie was that the the great realistic style didn't match up with the Firm-like plot.  Gilroy seemed like he was trying to make a larger point about the corrupt world we live in, but that's hard to do when your story is so outlandish, and that point didn't come through.

Atonement was a great book made into a mediocre movie, especially the ending.  Redgrave's performance is horrible in my opinion -- she doesn't capture this character at all -- but, more importantly, the screenwrtier's gloss on the big reveal and what it means was simplistic and dumb compared with the book's treatment of the writer's "atonement" and the possibility thereof.  I won't give anything away.  The ending is, on a very basic level, the same in both book and film, but it's far more interesting and ambivalent in the book.  I was ready to forigve Keira Knightley -- a lame performace forcing me again toward the view that, while beautiful, she doesn't quite have the goods, acting-wise.  But the ending really ruined it for me.

Lundell,

As a native Minnesotan, I think Juno is the stronger North Star nomination than No Country. Sure, the Coen brothers and all, but Juno is actually set in Minnesota -- and paints a more sympathetic picture of Minnesota's growing class divide and St. Cloud-to-Twin Cities commuting corridor than we deserve. So major Minnesota props to Juno, even if it was the lightest entry of the bunch.

(And a second on Ellen Page for Best Actress. I don't think any other performance this year so carried a movie, and so well, as hers.)

So who's the front-runner for Best Actress this year? I honestly don't know.

Looking over the Best Supporting Actress nominees, I thought Tilda Swinton seemed like a good pick. But if what you say is true, I'd put my money on Ryan. I think the Academy would realize there's something vaguely insulting about giving someone two Oscars almost back-to-back, both of them for playing famous celebrities. I think Blanchett will go home empty-handed this year because it seems so obvious she'll be back again soon.

Well, Friend-O, I agree with you more than anyone else I read on a regular basis, that's for sure, and I haven't found *any* critic, or, to be honest, other person, who had my reaction to No Country.  I'm starting to suspect that I'm just objectively wrong about that movie, but I'm sticking to my guns for now -- until a second viewing on DVD.  In the spirit of agreement, though, case in point is the overlooked Gone Baby Gone, which I thought was a really interesting, compelling movie for *exactly* the reasons stated in your review.  Looking forward to more Orr in '08!

Rhubarbs, great insight on the Juno subtext regarding our home state.  I think a lot of the country still views Minnesota as the land of Hubert Humphrey and Harmon Killebrew (not to mention the state where Walter Mondale is still president), but things have obviously changed and Juno does a very good job of pointing that out.  Growing up in Minnesota in the 1960s, I never saw anyone who remotely resembled the Garner/Bateman couple, but they are all over the place now.