Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

I'll echo the consensus that Huston was robbed, and toss a word of support to Allan Garfield, whose performance in The Conversation is highly underrated IMO. Not sure if he'd be among my personal nominees (the already-mentioned Gielgud and Feldman are on my radar as well, and I fall squarely into th...

Personally, I'd put it mostly down to the fact that as great and inventive a film as Cabaret may be, it's still, when all's said and done, a musical, and when movie musicals fell out of fashion, they seem to have fallen far and fallen hard. Using my own early experience as a template, I'd wager that...

I of course am the wrong person to judge what history makes of this, because I was always in the Really Like Godfather/Love Cabaret camp, which was never a critical majority. But I don’t see how this qualifies as something for the Ordinary People/Raging Bull pile – that was a case where a film many...

Best Picture: Hugo

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Best Leading Actor: George Clooney, The Descendants

Best Leading Actress: Viola Davis, The Help

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids

So I realize that Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann would have been eligible for Persona this year and they haven't been mentioned here yet. Did everyone forget or do you all really not consider them shouldabeens? Bumping Hepburn & Hepburn (Katharine terrible in a terrible film; Audrey solid but e...

Phoenix is by far my least favorite of these nominees, not even in my top ten for the year... and he's absolutely fantastic in Walk the Line . That's how strong 2005 was for lead actors, and to my delight, four of my five personal picks made the actual nominees list. Howard had as strong a breakthro...

My top 5:

1. Bill Murray, Lost in Translation
2. Peter Dinklage, The Station Agent
3. Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
4. Ben Kingsley, House of Sand and Fog
5. Sean Penn, Mystic River and 21 Grams

I voted for Daniel Day-Lewis, as decisively and as enthusiastically as I would have almost 10 years ago. At the risk of revisiting the minor flame war I inadvertently started when I first joined the board, it’s for my money the greatest, most thrilling performance any actor has ever committed to fil...

Voted for Wilkinson, easily the best of the bunch and of the year. I didn't mind Washington's win, though; Hollywood wouldn't allow him to go without a Best Actor trophy, and I'm glad he has it for a role where he actually got to loosen up and deliver a performance that's honestly enjoyable rather t...

Easy vote here. Crowe gives a fine movie-star performance in Gladiator , and Bardem and Harris are both worthy of consideration. But it's Tom Hanks' transformative virtual one-man show, at times as inspirational (no ironic quotation marks called for) as any overblown Hollywood prestige film and at t...

Kevin Spacey is capable of being a very good actor, but he's emphatically not a "chameleon," and American Beauty asks us to believe in him as an everyman of limited intelligence and ambition, who has failed to rise above the unfulfilling middle-class existence that American Beauty caricatu...

I'll give Benigni and Life Is Beautiful the benefit of the doubt, and chalk up their utter inability to "work" for me on any level to the fact that they're distinct cultural products that are destined to look very different to those outside said culture than those inside it. But that doesn...

Nicholson is out immediately. I recently caught As Good as It Gets on TV, and was surprised at how much he doesn't rely on the "Jack" tricks that sabotage most of his later work (though he does use them), and he's quite entertaining. But in a film that practically assaults with its ordinar...

No Best Actor snub has ever been more conspicuous by its absence than William H. Macy in Fargo . He's on my personal shortlist for best male performance of the '90s, and his placement in the supporting category was probably the most ridiculous act of category fraud ever at the time. (It has since be...

Unlike most of you, I actually don't think there's a truly bad performance in the lot this year. Downey is extraordinary in a not-very-good movie, and Eastwood makes some of the best use I've ever seen of his legendary screen presence in an extraordinary movie; I wouldn't nominate either of them, pe...