AJ Serrano says...

AJ is back with his thoughts and picks for this year's Oscars. Please take a minute or two to check out his Tumblr, filled with some of his amazing short stories and thoughts on various subjects. Also be sure to find him on Vimeo, where you view his latest projects. But enough promotion, let's get to his third annual Oscar post... Enjoy.

Hello everyone! It’s me again, A.J., here to offer my annual Oscar predictions to Ashleigh’s dear readership.

Listen guys, I was just looking over my picks from the past two years and realized that I successfully picked 12 out of 15 major awards. That means I’m 80% more accurate at predicting the results of the Oscars than Harold Camping is at predicting the end of the world.

But this year’s award show might just shed a few points off that relatively decent accuracy rate of mine. I can’t think of a Best Picture race in recent memory where there were absolutely no clear-cut favorites. 

I guess you could say that Silver Linings Playbook is a favorite if only because it is produced by the Weinstein brothers and those two have a knack for swooning Academy voters into awarding their films with the golden statuette. The producing duo has taken home the coveted golden prize twice in the last four years.

On the other hand, some viewers have complained that the movie is too sappy. I still haven’t seen the film, which is strange because I usually make it a point to see each serious Oscar contender in theaters. I remember a few years ago I hopped on the barely-used Los Angeles subway system to take a 45 minute ride over to Universal City just to see Slumdog Millionaire while it was still in theaters.  I don’t know what it is about Silver Linings that is unappealing to me. I usually enjoy David O. Russell’s films (The Fighter Flirting With Disaster, I Heart Huckabees) but even Silver Linings’ positive reviews and ubiquitous TV spots have yet to convince me to dish out the $14 to see it in theaters. Still, I guess as long as the Weinstein brothers are involved, it has a good shot to win. 

But then you can’t ignore Lincoln, a critical darling since its release in November. Its producers have been preaching to Oscar voters about the film’s relevance to current heated political issues such as Medicare and gun control and how today’s leaders can learn a lesson from our sixteenth president’s display of courage and sensibility in the face of political adversity.

However, to borrow a quote from the film’s iconic director Steven Spielberg, “Everybody loves a winner, but nobody loves a winner.” Will Oscar voters overlook Lincoln because of its box office success and the fact that Spielberg has already won a Best Picture award for his masterpiece,Schindler’s List? Maybe voters will think the film’s twelve nominations are a victory in itself.

So we are left with Argo, this year’s Golden Globe winner for Best Drama. I saw it way back in October and found it to be a fun movie; even though it was less unexpectedly entertaining as Ben Affleck’s excellent 2010 film The Town. A friend of mine had an interesting and funny take on Argo’s surprising award season dominance.  He said “Hollywood is patting themselves on the back for making a movie in which Hollywood pats itself on the back.” That’s the type of ludicrous ego that drives the Hollywood system and started this whole awards-giving nonsense. Argo is a classic example of the type of film that Hollywood loves to award with its top prize. Let’s see what happens on Sunday. Until then, here are my picks:

Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook

Spoiler: Emmanuelle Riva, Amour

Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables

Spoiler: Sally Field, Lincoln

Best Supporting Actor: Robert DeNiro, Silver Linings Playbook

Spoiler: Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

Spoiler: Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook

Best Original Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

Spoiler: Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom

Best Adapted Screenplay: Tony Kushner, Lincoln

Spoiler: David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook

Best Cinematography: Life of Pi

Spoiler: Lincoln

Best Editing: Zero Dark Thirty

Spoiler: Argo

Best Director: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln

Spoiler: Michael Haneke, Amour

Best Picture: Lincoln

Spoiler: Argo

And the Oscar Goes To...

My super talented, brilliant writer of a brother AJ has supplied us with his Oscar predictions yet again this year. He brings up some great points, so enjoy!

Something big is happening in Hollywood. For an industry built on the noise and chaos of hype, illusion and celebrity, it seems almost contradictory that this small revolution within the film industry has arisen from a silent battle cry. Eighty-four years after the last silent film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Artist has positioned itself as the front runner to claim the golden statuette on February 26. Whatever you have to say about the film’s flaws (inconsistent tone, flat characters, its gimmick factor) pales in comparison to the fact that a silent film has achieved such critical and commercial success in an society that craves the conventional and demands instant gratification.

I had a feeling that this year’s Academy Awards were going to be unique after Clint Eastwood’s sprawling biopic J. Edgar was met with a quiet apathy by both critics and moviegoers back in October. In the past, Eastwood’s films have been greeted with lavish praise and numerous awards from the Academy. He has received the Best Director award twice in his career and four of his films have received Best Picture nominations. With an A-list cast of Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, and Judi Dench and a big studio budget, J. Edgar seemed like an obvious shoo-in for this year’s Best Picture race. That is, until no one showed up to see this snooze fest. The result: 0 Oscar nominations.

America’s silent treatment towards Eastwood’s films is a refreshingly rebellious act. Think of it as a middle finger to the old-fashioned Hollywood regime that thought they could release the same conventional schlock every year and that the audience was too stupid to notice or care.

It wasn’t just Eastwood who was pushed out of the pop cultural lexicon this year. Most all of the major studio Oscar bait failed big time with critics and audiences in the winter months. War Horse, Super 8 and Cars 2  all failed to live up to lofty expectations. Instead, the Best Picture list is dominated by small budget, intellectual fare (Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life, The Artist, The Descendants). Average moviegoers started to talk more about Dujardin, Payne, Bejo and Malick and less about industry giants like Spielberg, Eastwood and DiCaprio.

When The Artist claims its prize for Best Picture of the Year next Sunday, that split second of silence before the applause is the sound of a resounding shakeup in the film world. The independent film has become mainstream.

My 2012 Oscar Picks

Best Picture: The Artist

Spoiler: Hugo

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Spoiler: Michel Hazanivicius, The Artist

Best Actor: Jean Dujardin, The Artist

Spoiler: George Clooney, The Descendants

Best Actress: Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

Spoiler: Viola Davis, The Help

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Spoiler: Nick Nolte, Warrior

Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, The Help

Spoiler: Bérénice Bejo, The Artist

Best Original Screenplay: Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

Spoiler: Asghar Farhadi, A Separation

Best Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne, The Descendants

Spoiler: Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball

Best Cinematography: The Tree of Life

Spoiler: The Artist

And the Oscar Goes To...

Kirk Douglas. In a night of mostly predictable wins, Kirk Douglas stands out as the most memorable part of last night's Academy Awards. 

But onto what I really want to talk about...

When I think of Oscars, I think of glamour. I think of drama, and because I am a girl, I think of dresses. This year, the dresses failed to impress. In fact, I was hugely disappointed with the majority of the dresses at this year's Academy Awards. All roads lead to the Oscars, and I expect the dresses at the Oscars to be the best of the best, like the nominees. The Oscars should be a chance for actresses to show off high end fashion gowns. I found myself thinking I had seen a lot of these dresses before. However, there were some dresses that I did enjoy. Here are some dresses that stood out to me:

My pick for best dressed: Cate frequently takes fashion risks and they always pay off. This dress is different, but not over the top. And her hair is perfect with this dress. 

This dress is unique and so flattering it is amazing. This picture does not really do the dress justice, but I was floored when I saw Mila's dress on TV. Well done!

And... that's about it. I really did not love any other dress. I feel like the dresses matched this year's Oscars- BORING. But, I do not want to end on a bad note, so I will leave you with some of my favorite past Oscar dresses. Enjoy!

Who was your pick for best dressed this year? Were you as disappointed in the Oscars as I was?

Oscar Predictions 2011

Greetings Actualists™,

That is right- I did just make up a nickname for all you loyal Actually, It’s Ashleigh readers who flock to these hallowed web pages daily to gobble up the freshest scoop on pop culture in the land so use your new, trademarked nickname with pride.

My name is A.J. Serrano, younger brother of Ashleigh, and I am stopping by today to talk about movies- more specifically the Super Bowl of the movie world: i.e., The Oscars! This year’s race is definitely the most intense and competitive in recent memory. The fact that all ten Best Picture nominees this year are basically all deserving of the crown puts the cherry on top of the proverbial sundae. 

So before you join your local Oscar office pools and/or place your bets among your circle of friends, allow me to humor you with my picks for the major categories. This is not to downgrade the prestige of an Oscar win in the categories that I do not include in this blog since it is common knowledge that filmmaking is a collaborative process in which every department must be on top of their game to create a good movie. Instead, these following categories seem to be the most anticipated by the majority of movie-loving population. 

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

I absolutely loved Jeremy Renner’s turn as Jem the bank robber in The Town, but we all know that this race is between Geoffrey Rush and Christian Bale. Rush gave another typically stellar performance in The King’s Speech and he seems to be the favorite heading into this weekend. But he already won an Oscar for Best Actor back in 1997 and Christian Bale has been criminally overlooked by the Academy for far too long now. My pick: Christian Bale

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Fifteen-year-old Hailee Steinfeld gave an incredible performance in True Grit and Helena Bonham Carter showed that she can also give a great performance even when not making meat pies out of human flesh or playing croquet with flamingos as the Red Queen, however Melissa Leo was simply unforgettable in The Fighter. Yeah, her recent viral campaign to get the Oscar is way egocentric but I’ll give her a pass on this one because her performance was that good. My pick: Melissa Leo

Best Actor

My pick: Colin Firth. This doesn’t require further explanation. If you haven’t seen The King’s Speech yet, get off your laptop right now and go watch it.

Best Actress

What will the Academy do? Natalie Portman absolutely nailed a difficult role in a movie that pretty much all takes place in her sub-consciousness. But Annette Bening is the four-time nominee and an aging screen legend who was in the type of liberal-minded film that the Academy really loves to award. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bening got the nod, but Portman took on the more demanding role. My pick: Natalie Portman

Best Original Score

Imagine that you are a film composer and a director tells you that he needs you to write him a musical score to a movie about Facebook. I bet the first questions that would come to mind would be: 

1) Facebook is a really nice, useful tool but the idea of a movie being about Facebook just sounds bananas. (I just realized that this is actually not a question but more of an observation) 

And

2) What the hell would the musical score for a movie about Facebook even sound like? 

Well, it would sound like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ genius score for The Social Network- music that has reached the status of being inseparable from the iconography of that movie. My pick: The Social Network

Best Picture

I am going to skip Best Director, mostly because it seems pretty obvious that the safe bet (Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech) seems all but a lock in that category. However, the best picture race is a bit different. How does the Academy want to be perceived with this pick? Do they want to award the big summer blockbuster and give the prize to the worthy Inception? Do they want to play it safe and pick The King’s Speech? Stir up the political pot by rewarding The Kids Are All Right? Appease the artsy crowd with Black Swan? Having been able to experience first hand the marketing campaigns of all ten of these films here in Los Angeles, I can tell you Miramax is pumping a whole lot of dough into The Fighter’s campaign hoping it will take home the top prize. And Disney/Pixar and Warner Bros. are doing the same with Toy Story 3 and Inception, respectively. But this award technically is not supposed to be about what producers can buy their way to the podium at the end of the night, its supposed to award the film from a technical, critical, and social standpoint. Toy Story 3 was certainly the best third film in a series since the Best Picture winning Return of the King but I think it still pales in comparison to The Social Network. Featuring the finest dialogue in decades, outstanding performances, masterful direction, and a powerful story, The Social Network deserves the golden statue on Oscar night.

There you have ‘em, my picks for the Oscars. Hope you all watch this Sunday. Oh and p.s.- if you haven’t seen street artist Banksy’s deliriously funny documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, see it before Oscar night. Peace!