Peter Young Writes For You

This column was originally published in the Central Western Daily on Tuesday 2nd March 2010.

The 82^nd Academy Awards will be presented in the US on Sunday 7^th March, which means that all of the drama will unfold during the day on Monday 8^th March Australian time. The winners of the British Academy Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Golden Globes have already been announced and are said to predict the outcome of the Oscars. However, as last year’s Best Actor category showed, where Mickey Rourke won at the majority of award ceremonies but lost out to Sean Penn for the big one, the winners are not necessarily set in stone. Here are my tips for who will win and who should win an Oscar.

Best Lead Actor Jeff Bridges has been winning acclaim for his role of grizzled country singer “Bad” Blake in Crazy Heart. He also actually performs the songs in the film. I expect him to win this year based on his large and impressive body of work and his previous four nominations. For my money, Colin Firth should win for his portrayal of a college professor planning to suicide after the death of his lover in A Single Man.

Best Lead Actress Sandra Bullock is strangely in the lead to win best actress for The Blind Side as well as worst actress for the bomb All About Steve. As a heartstring tugging sports flick, all tickets to The Blind Side should come with a box of tissues. Bullock is probably the best thing in it, so I’d prefer the award go to Cary Mulligan for her performance as a 1960’s schoolgirl who is swept off her feet by an older man in An Education.

Best Supporting Actor Austrian actor Christolph Waltz will be unstoppable in this category. His remarkable Nazi Colonel Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds is easily the most memorable villain of the year. Expect an acceptance speech where Waltz babbles about how Basterd’s director Quentin Tarantino changed his life.

Best Supporting Actress Comedienne and actress Mo’Nique’s frighteningly gritty performance as neglectful and violent mother Mary in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (yes, that is actually the full title of the film) has already won several awards. She’ll accept her Oscar with an emotionally charged speech. God is sure to be thanked.

Best Animated Feature Disney’s return to hand drawn features with The Princess and the Frog, and two old school stop motion hits in Coraline and The Fantastic Mr Fox have made 2009 a very memorable year for animation. However, no other film, animated or otherwise, had the heart of Up. The first ten minutes of this Disney-Pixar classic are gut wrenchingly sad and will never leave you.

Best Director James Cameron will win for his motion capture remake of FernGully. His breakthroughs in high tech filmmaking (Terminator 2, The Abyss and Titanic) have shaped the film industry over the past twenty five years. He’ll never win a best screenplay award, but much like The Jazz Singer in 1927 which introduced sound to the cinema, Avatar will be remembered as a turning point in motion pictures. For films set on Earth, I’d love to see James Cameron’s ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow get the nod for The Hurt Locker.

Best Picture Dances with Smurfs will win, no question. This year, to improve TV ratings, the nominee list for best picture has been expanded to ten films. My picks for the silver medal would be South African sci-fi classic District 9 (love the prawns), Iraq-set military thriller The Hurt Locker and Quentin Tarantino’s rewriting of World War 2 history, Inglorious Basterds.