Jeff Bridges sings The Weary Kind

Oscar winner sings an Oscar winner.

Kind of makes you wish they hadn't abandoned the performances of best song nominees this year.

Oscar outcome

I was 5 of 6 for the top awards at last night's Oscars. Sandra Bullock's shocking Best Actress win threw my predictions all out of whack. I also missed both screenplay picks, both documentaries, both short subjects, best foreign film, cinematography, sound editing and film editing. Ouch.

Otherwise, the night's big news was the groundbreaking win by Kathryn Bigelow for Best Picture and Best Director for the excellent but little-seen The Hurt Locker. Many people now know Bigelow as the first woman to win a directing Oscar and the ex-wife of James Cameron.

But you may not know that the 58-year-old Bigelow has a long list of credits prior to this year's award-winner.

Let's start with Near Dark, a 1987 roadhouse-meets-vampire film that has become a cult classic. Adrian Pasdar, Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton star.

Another Bigelow action film is Point Break, the 1991 feature starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. Best known for some amazing surfing and sky-diving sequences, the movie also features one of the best hand-held, first-person chases I've ever seen.

A couple of Bigelow films I have yet to watch include Strange Days, a 1995 science fiction feature written by James Cameron and starring Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett. Roger Ebert gives the movie four stars, and I am now trying to find the time to watch my DVD from Netflix.

And K-19:The Widowmaker (2002) is Bigelow's latest feature before tackling The Hurt Locker. The submarine drama stars Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson and is next in my Netflix cue.

What's next for Bigelow? This story says she is to direct the pilot for a new HBO series billed as a light family drama. Then she returns to the grittier side of life with a feature about a lawless region in South America known as the Triple Frontier.

My Oscar picks

Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin will hopefully bring a little improvisatory comic energy to the Oscar telecast Sunday night. The show's producers are promising a hipper, faster-paced show this year. Among other things, this story says...

Ditching the five best song nominees was one of the first and most controversial moves the producers made. But, as Shankman sees it, stopping the telecast in its tracks to stage a song only because it is a nominee is neither "organic" nor "comfortable."

The Rock Candy Blog over at the Arkansas Times website is conducting a little Oscar prediction contest with some very real prizes: free tickets to the Rave theater on Col. Glenn Road. I could have used them this afternoon when I spent $10.75 to see Tim Burton's oddly-flat 3D version of Alice in Wonderland.

So, what the heck, I filled out an entry form and emailed it to the Times' Oscar Pool contest. My predictions are as random as anybody else's since nobody has seen the live-action, animated or documentary short subjects.

Here's my entry form (the numbers indicate points available in each category in the Arkansas Times contest):

Best Picture (5)
The Hurt Locker

Best Director (5)
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Best Actor (4)
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

Best Actress (4)
Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Best Supporting Actor (3)
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress (3)
Mo'Nique, Precious

Best Adapted Screenplay (3)
Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air

Best Original Screenplay (3)
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Best Animated Film (3)
Up

Best Foreign Film (4)
The White Ribbon

Best Art Direction (3)
Avatar

Best Cinematography (3)
The Hurt Locker

Best Sound Mixing (2)
The Hurt Locker

Best Sound Editing (2)
Avatar

Best Original Score (2)
Up, Michael Giacchino

Best Original Song (2)
"The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)" from Crazy Heart, Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett

Best Costume Design (2)
The Young Victoria

Best Documentary Feature (3)
Food, Inc.

Best Documentary Short (2)
China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province

Best Film Editing (2)
Avatar

Best Makeup (1)
Star Trek

Best Animated Short Film (1)
French Roast

Best Live-Action Short Film (1)
Instead of Abracadabra

Best Visual Effects (1)
Avatar

Oscar madness

With the big awards show set for Sunday night, I guess I might as well chime in on the Oscars.

I wrote last month about The Blind Side, a Best Picture nominee I simply can't believe anyone would seriously consider Oscar-caliber material. But some are saying we might expect a surprise winner this year because of the new voting formula in the Best Picture category.

This WSJ article sums up my thoughts about the prospect of the new system of voting possibly resulting in an unthinkable Oscar upset:

Which wrist to slit first if "The Blind Side" wins?

Of the two favorites, Avatar and The Hurt Locker, I prefer the latter. But my favorite films of the year were quite different from the nominees. Oscar candidates that I did NOT include in my top 10 are Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, Precious and Up. Of those, the only one I might consider adding to my list is District 9, excellent on a second viewing on Blu-ray the other night.

As for Up, I agree with this critic that the best part of that animated feature is the amazing montage near the start of the movie. It makes you laugh, cry, breaks your heart... all in just over 4 minutes. Too bad the rest of the film is so pedestrian. Here is that brilliant, heartbreaking sequence. The score by Michael Giacchino should win him an Oscar Sunday night. I'll be watching.

Oscar voting algebra

Very interesting analysis piece in the New Yorker about the Oscar nominations.

In addition to expanding the best picture nominees from five to ten this year, there's been a big change in the way votes are cast for the top award. In the past, members voted for their favorite picture, and the nominee with the most votes won. Not so starting this year. Who knew you would need a degree in higher mathematics to understand the rules:

Members—there are around fifty-eight hundred of them—are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.

The story also says the two frontrunners are Avatar and Hurt Locker, and it makes the case for why the Hurt Locker might actually win. Bottom line: most everyone likes it and a vote for this little war drama is a vote for the first woman (Kathryn Bigelow) to direct a best picture winner.

The Blind Side: Oscar quality? Really?

Mulling over the Oscar nominations announced this week I am most troubled by one entry: The Blind Side, a formulaic film some have compared to a Lifetime Movie.

I'll just say it wasn't very good.

The Blind Side has been a surprise box office hit with midwestern and southern audiences. Houston Nutt makes a cameo appearance.

The film was one of the 10 best picture nominees. Star Sandra Bullock is up for best actress.

The movie is about a upper-middle class white family in Memphis who befriend and adopt a hulking, mute black teenager. Based on a true story, the movie follows him from homelessness to the NFL, but in the end we know almost nothing about the kid, Michael Oher, because the movie is really about the fiesty Bullock character. Actor Quenton Aaron as Oher has a total of maybe 50 lines in the whole movie.

The film, especially it's contrasts with Precious, has sparked some very heated debate about race, politics and more. See here, here, and here.

Any black folks out there seen Blind Side? How many whites saw Precious?

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Otherwise, no major Oscar surprises. District 9's nomination for best picture makes me reconsider whether it should have been on my list of the best for '09.

It looks like Hurt Locker has a real chance at best picture, and director Kathryn Bigelow for best director. That's good.

Should be an interesting Oscar show next month with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin co-hosting.