Oscar Watch 2005: The Upside of Anger and Sin City

I know it's extremely early to be worried about the 2005 Oscars, especially when you consider that the median release date for Oscar nominees is approximately Thanksgiving. Nevertheless, the Spring movie season is drawing to a close, and I thought now would be a good time to go over the deserving films that will be long forgotten by next January.

First up is The Upside of Anger. I'm not particularly in the mood for a detailed review, but I will say this: I loved this movie. It reminded me of Wonder Boys, not necessarily because of any similarity in the plots or anything, but because they're both what Quentin Tarantino has called "hangout movies". That is, they're movies with characters so well-drawn and likable that you watch the movie over and over again, just because you like hanging out with them. I look forward to the DVD release of Upside, for this very reason.

I don't know what the studio was thinking, releasing this movie in March. It could have easily been this year's Sideways, i.e. the independent critical darling that opens in New York and L.A. in October and coasts on the word-of-mouth buzz to an Oscar nomination, before opening wide in the winter. Honestly, it's like it was tailor-made for this release-plan. In addition, they could have capitalized on all the "Costner's Comeback" stories that would have inevitably followed this movie's release. If this movie had come out in October, it would have been a shoo-in for nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor (Costner), Best Actress (Joan Allen), and Best Original Screenplay (it's an original screenplay isn't it? If not change that to adapted.) As it is, I think the best it can hope for is the latter two. There are so few decent performances by women in a given year that a performance as good as Allen's won't be forgotten. The same is somewhat true of screenplays, the biggest reason it has a shot here, but not in Best Picture is that there are ten slots for writing nominations instead of five.

Another movie I hope doesn't get forgotten come Oscar time is Sin City. I don't think it will; it's a remarkable achievement on the technical level, and that's all it would ever get nominations for anyway. Regardless of the films merits or release date, there's no way the Academy would ever give serious consideration to a pulpy comic book movie. (Too bad Mickey Rourke). I think Sin City is a solid lock for nominations for Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, and Makeup. Voters in these categories tend to have longer memories than voters in the rest of the categories, for the simple fact that no studio would ever change a release date on a film in the hopes that it can get nominated for Best Makeup. As a result, there's no December logjam like there is for Best Picture nominees. Best Editing and Best Cinematography are another story. Here the logjam is a problem, because movies like Cold Mountain are made so they can rack up big numbers here and the ads can say "nominated for seven Academy awards", even if none of them are best picture. This is where the critic's prizes come in. If Sin City manages to make a lot of year-end top ten lists, or win a lot of critic's awards, voters beyond the ones in the tech categories will give it more consideration. Who knows, it might even have a shot at Adapted Screenplay. It wouldn't be the first comic book movie to get a nomination here; American Splendor and Ghost World both managed the feat, and with relatively early release dates to boot.