This is, as nearly always, a category populated with superb talent, even though Johnny Depp makes an oddly lifeless vengeful serial killer in Sweeney Todd and Tommy Lee Jones is being celebrated for his always fine work in what is by far the lesser of the films he was in last year. It would be immensely satisfying to see either Daniel Day Lewis win for his towering demonic oil tycoon in There Will Be Blood or Viggo Mortensen as the perfect synthesis of all the intellectual/corporeal/transfigurative elements of David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises.
 

But there’s one name that’s shamefully absent from the academy’s list, that of Gordon Pinsent. I have no argument with the admiration for Julie Christie’s work in Away From Her—the casting of a beauty as remote and iconic as Christie in the role of a woman slipping into the abyss of Alzheimer’s was a major coup for cementing the film’s underlying terror, intimacy and irresolution. But first of all, Christie’s nominated in the wrong category—hers is a supporting, not a leading character—and secondly, the real embodiment of the film’s unruly conflicted emotions and ongoing unease is found in Pinsent’s moving portrayal of Christie’s baffled, guilt-ridden spouse, watching the love of his life transform into a living ghost who might fade in or out of lucidity at any moment. JB   

 

Wha-huh? The Oscars doubles down on Blanchett, with her best actress nod for a leaky sequel to Elizabeth that sunk a lot faster than the Spanish Armada. There should be only one performance that singlehandedly holds up a falling film—Marion Cotillard’s turn as superdiva Edith Piaf.
 

Down way lower on the emotional dial, Angelina Jolie is just as good as Mariane Pearl, vanishing into the role in Michael Winterbottom’s pulsating A Mighty Heart. Pregnant + widow should = Oscar contention, but perhaps Jolie got overlooked because she never offers any histrionics, any raging stereotype of a woman crazed with grief. It’s a superbly understated performance—full of repressed feeling—that draws you in.
 

But the actress who should win, in a fair and just world, is Anamaria Marinca, playing the roommate who’s trying to set up an abortion for her friend in the brutally unfair and deeply unjust world of Communist-era Romania. It’s a performance so natural, so sure, it becomes one with the film—you can’t forget 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days thanks in large part to her, and the scene where she has to endure her boyfriend’s petit-bourgeois family dinner is revelatory. BG
 

 

I call for a trade-up in this category. Why’s Javier Bardem “supporting”? He radiates death from the centre of the Coens’ film like a black hole. He carries the picture just with that psychopath-hunter stare (beneath hair that makes you feel even bowl cuts are a horrible, ominous look that must never return). It may not be as winningly malignant a role as Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, but both beasts, seeping with bloody blackness, should be caged up together.
 

To replace Bardem in the Supporting category, I nominate Irfan Khan, for either—what the hell, for both—The Namesake and A Mighty Heart. As the hopeful immigrant father in the adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, Khan basically holds together the emotional core of a flawed film. In A Mighty Heart, he subtly plays off Angelina Jolie as the hawkish but concerned Captain, the investigator in charge of the hunt for Daniel Pearl. The moment when the news of Pearl’s death is broken to his wife and the dogged policeman turns so sadly and respectfully away is heartbreaking. BG

 

Can I just say how happy I am to see Hal Holbrook recognized here? Sean Penn’s uncomfortably romantic treatment of Jon Krakauer’s haunting non-fiction work Into the Wild has an awful lot of problems, but it was a pleasure to see how the single-most moving section of Krakauer’s reportage/essay translates into the best part of Penn’s adaptation, with Holbrook imbuing Ron Franz, a lonesome old man who rediscovers his sense of awe and adventure from his encounters with a youthful vagabond, with such tenderness, orneriness and love. None of these qualities, save  the orneriness, could be applied to Chris Cooper’s performance in Breach, but he would have been a welcome addition to the nominees. JB

 

Given that the pool it selects from in theory contains every movie made in a foreign language released over the course of an entire year, this category arguably has more potential to recognize greatness than any other. So why is it so consistently a letdown? There are a lot of reasons, some having to do with the weird policy that lets the country of origin propose one film to be considered, but in any case most of us never know any better because the films nominated rarely reach audiences before the nominations are announced (if they ever reach theatrical audiences at all). 
 

Among the worthy films that I’ve seen that failed to make the Academy’s final cut, The Band’s Visit stands out as that rarest of cinematic gems, an unassuming, big-hearted comedy that can effortlessly please a crowd without pandering to it, while films like Syndromes and a Century, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone or Colossal Youth, masterworks by some of the world’s greatest working filmmakers, are probably too formally distinctive, not to mention, in the case of the latter, too immersed in the world of the poor, to ever meet with Oscar criteria. 
 

But can anyone tell me how Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, winner of the Palme d’Or and one of the most talked-about films of the year, managed to be completely ignored? Some say it comes down to the film’s stance on abortion, but really, it has no overt stance. It’s more directly concerned with the politics of friendship than the politics of unwanted pregnancy, and its tracing of the wildly unsavoury trials undertaken to procure an illegal abortion in 1989 Romania could hardly be taken as an endorsement. I guess Juno just gave a more cheerful face to teenage sexual misadventure. What are you gonna do? JB 

 

My single biggest beef with the existing nominees of 2008 has a name, and it’s Jason Reitman. Juno for Best Picture I guess I can live with. The movie is obviously endearing, Page is sly and nicely attuned to her character’s repressed anxieties, the story is respectful of both the individuals and the bigger issues it deals with. But Reitman as Best Director is a pathetic flub. Remember the year when that avatar of bland Hollywood competence Ron Howard beat Robert Altman and David Lynch for Best Director? I fondly recall the hilarious shrug of incomprehension shared by Altman and Lynch afterwards. If Reitman takes an award from the likes of PT Anderson and the Coen brothers, it’ll mark a new, staggering low in the already-tainted category’s history. It could only be more drearily poetic if Reitman were able to beat Wes Anderson, since he spends so much of Juno blithely aping Anderson’s style. Come to think of it, Wes Anderson wouldn’t make such a bad replacement for Reitman here. The Darjeeling Limited may have its structural flaws, but Anderson’s approach to the material is as inventive and understatedly heartfelt as ever. JB

 

I’d nominate a bunch of different directors for this category. Michael Winterbottom (for A Mighty Heart) and Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum) both deserve kudos for thrilling chase movies. From a well-known real life ending, Winterbottom engineers a rollercoaster of emotion that pulls you along into every rise, dip, and roll. It’s as startlingly good a re-telling of a horribly true tale as United 93, which Greengrass followed by taking an action film on a flying leap out of its genre. The third Bourne film never lets up, not even in its fascinating political message—the tortured becomes the torturer, slipping into the cracks of a US surveillance system to short-circuit it, becoming the insurgent who takes down the corrupt establishment from within. You can’t get a more exciting criticism of post-9/11 BushWorld than that.

But David Fincher, for helming Zodiac, deserves the Oscar. It’s such a haunting, viral, toxic-fog San Francisco that he’s conjured up, in a film so different from Fincher’s more gothic, conventional thriller Seven. The obsession with the killer infects the hunters, and us, as we get sucked into a can’t-look-but-got-to, paranoid fascination with serial killers that has no resolution. Come to think of it, then, maybe it’s an even better reflection of a post-9/11 BushWorld than Bourne. BG 
 

 

Juno’s a sweet little film, sure, but the film’s plot basically involves waiting for a pregnant teenager’s irony to finally break. Even the much-praised No Country For Old Men creaks at the end, hobbling off in a series of pseudo-epilogues (and can someone please explain to me what the @*%# happens in that last motel room scene?!?). Actually, I’m all for a complete overhaul in this category.
 

A Mighty Heart and The Bourne Ultimatum deserve spots here, but the obvious SNOFU (Situation Normal Oscar Fuck-Up) is not giving nominated director Julian Schnabel’s film a Best Picture nod—that’s like complimenting a chef but not recommending his restaurant to anyone, and The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly is a five-star film. And call me obsessed with bed-ridden dramas, but Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages should be up for Best Picture beside it. Such an understated, wryly observant study of life is a rare gem these days, especially in American cinema.
 

But then there’s the film that should win this category. And should have been released in the US in 2007 on enough screens so that it could have been just nominated. And the film for which the Academy should be collectively thrown-into-a-sack and bludgeoned with all the pointy little Oscar statues for not even including in the Best Foreign Film category. That’s Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, which won the Cannes Palme d’Or for a reason. This film sears through you like the wind-chill during an Edmonton deep-freeze, and it’s an international crime against cinema that it’s not up for a single prize at a ceremony that pretends to showcase the best of film to millions of viewers around the globe. BG

 

The best American movies of 2007 were marked by a force that convention would tell us is the antithesis of  good drama: irresolution. There Will Be Blood, I’m Not There and No Country for Old Men all have endings, to be sure, but not of the sort that make us feel as though all that’s passed before has built up to some point of clear closure, a tying up of all loose ends or meting out of justice. Yet only one audacious, wildly ambitious film made irresolution its very subject, heightening the effect with a dizzying accumulation of details that send us diving into rabbit holes or fleeing dank basements where all hopes for answers curdle into still greater mystery. 
 

Zodiac is one of the greatest displays of grand cinematic collaboration in recent memory—director David Fincher, focusing on character to produce his most visionary film; the staggeringly magnificent cast, memorable and fascinating in even the smaller roles; the cinematography of Harris Savides, a testament to the potential of digital filmmaking to discover its own ebullient new textures—and one of the finest films about obsession ever made. Its failure to secure any nominations at first feels like an appalling oversight, yet perhaps it only makes sense that something so audacious and ambitious remain hovering outside mainstream acceptance, even if it will undoubtedly outlive the spectacular middlebrow mediocrity of something like Atonement. JB 

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