Wrap it Up

I don’t know how exciting this year’s ceremony will be since most of the awards seem very predictable. I will be utterly shocked if Jennifer Hudson doesn’t win. That would make me believe that those geezers still have some surprises left. The telecast better zoom in on the losers with a HD camcorder because I wanna see their disappointment in high definition. That’s when those home theater systems come in handy. And I love it when they try to play music to get them to wrap it up. It never works and I’m sure they’ll be tearful speeches as usual.

But seriously, here are my Oscar predictions vs my actual choice.

Best Film - Babel or Letters from Iwo Jima will win instead of The Departed
Best Actor - Forest Whitaker, which is okay by me. But Leo was pretty damn good in Blood Diamond
Best Actress - Helen Mirren, no question. That lady’s a fox.
Best Supporting Actress - Jennifer Hudson, can’t say about the other nominees really
Best Supporting Actor - Eddie Murphy will win, but I prefer Djimon or Marky Mark
Best Director - It’s Scorsese baby all the way!
Best Original Script - The Queen is my guess
Best Adapted Script - The Departed
Best Cinematography - Pan’s Labyrinth, I personally prefer The Prestige
Best Editing - United 93, but I think The Departed was better edited and paced
Best in Art Direction - This one is tough. I prefer The Prestige once again, but I think they’ll give to Dreamgirls
Best Costume Design - I actually can never guess this one right. I think Devil Wears Prada is a front-runner though.
Best Score - Anybody’s guess. I think The Fountain was grossly mislooked for this category. Clint Mansell is so talented.
Best Song - It’s either Randy Newman or Dreamgirls (freakin’ 3 out of the 5 nominations!)
Best Make-up - Pan’s Labyrinth
Best Sound - This is a weird category. I’m gonna go out on a limb and gamble on Flags of Our Fathers. War sound effects are really hard to pull off
Best Sound Editing - Pirates II or Blood Diamond
Best Visual Effects - Pirates again
Best Animation Film - Happy Feet
Best Foreign Language - Pan’s Labyrinth, a safe bet by the sheer force of its other nominations
Best Documentary - Inconvenient Truth
And I have no idea about the short film categories…

Judging by the amount of labor it took for me to write my guesses, this is gonna be a hellishly long ceremony. I’m sure there are gonna be a lot of Oscar parties that might run out of steam. My advice is to use a sony handycam to videotape your guesses before the ceremony. And then tape your reactions to the actual winners. That would be a funny tape if you were at a party full of film students. Trust me, things can get heated.

Related posts:

1. Oscar Round-up
2. Oscar Favorites for 2008
3. Ancient Technology
4. Sundance 2007
5. Lakeview Terrace: LAPD still getting a bad wrap