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Offbeat – 24 February 2012

Based on all of this gratuitous riffing, I can now narrow the field of possible Oscar winners down to some or other drama that was shown sometime in the last twelve months.

The Oscars should be fairly safe this year. Movie stars are normally safe people. From what I read they work from about four in the morning and go to bed early, so most of them don’t have time to do drugs, prescription drugs and large amounts of alcohol. Except Heath Ledger, Demi Moore and Lindsay Lohan. But Heath Ledger has been dead for a while, and Demi Moore and Lindsay Lohan aren’t nominated. So, as I said, the Oscars should be safe this year.
There have been a lot of predictions about who will win. I know that it is more than likely to go to a drama. A nice BBC diagram tells me this is almost more than certain according to the categories that are out there. According to their analysis, dramas are most likely to win, followed by crime thrillers. There haven’t been all that many crime thrillers this past year, as far as I can tell, but there have been a bunch of dramas.
The chances of a war movie winning one of the statuettes are about zero. The chances of a horror movie winning it are less than zip. I can tell you this for a fact, because there aren’t any movies I am looking forward to in either of these genres. I can tell you that I am looking forward to a couple of Marvel superhero movies, but these don’t win Oscars either.
I am certain now that a drama will win. I can’t tell you which one, because none of them have come to the cinema and even if they did, I wouldn’t go and watch them, because I have enough drama in my life without renting them on DVD. And no, I don’t care one iota if it is a silent movie drama. Absence of dialogue and the presence of a Jack Russel terrier called Uggie are not going to change the world for me.
Based on all of this gratuitous riffing, I can now narrow the field of possible Oscar winners down to some or other drama that was shown sometime in the last twelve months.
I know it won’t be an Adam Sandler film where he plays a man and his sister. That style of movie was so yesterday. And so, so, so bad. The silent movie with the dog was made by some French people, so it is unlikely to win except in the foreign movies category, which should, in theory, rule it out. I may be wrong on this one though. ‘The King’s Speech’ won a best picture, and in that movie they speak English.
Looking at all the other stuff that I have read bits about, even whole paragraphs, that leaves Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, a movie about servants and race issues called ‘The Help’ and a George Clooney film with a comatose wife in it called ‘The Descendants’.
If the members of the Academy have memories that stretch far back they will rule out ‘The Help’ because they gave an Oscar to ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ and anyway Barack Obama topped all the impassioned efforts for equality by becoming President of the USA. The Thatcher film will be out of the running because they already did the Britflick thing with the stuttering royal, and anyway, the only serious impediment Margaret Thatcher had was her complete lack of emotion. That leaves George Clooney.
My money is on the George Clooney flick. It has a wife in a coma who has left a living will saying her life support must be turned off. It also has George Clooney in it who has lots of influence and enough money to mount his own productions. Did I mention that the movie has Hawaiian music in it? That has to count for something as well.
I am not sure how the Oscar voting works, whether the members discuss obsessively with one another how their votes will influence their chances with the winners or, more particularly what their votes are going to be.
The one thing I do know is the less contentious the movie, the less action, the less visceral excitement, the more likely it will be to take home the best movie Oscar. If you are the sort of person who grooves on internal monologues about turning off a loved-one’s life support, or you love Jack Russle terriers, this year’s Oscar show is going to deliver plenty of treats.
As for me, I’m going to watch ‘Captain America’ again.

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