who i think should win at the oscars 2015

One of my most dreaded trivia questions are of The Oscars: Who’s been nominated more than 9 times for Best Supporting Actor? Which year did the Best Original Screenplay category result in a tie? Billy Crystal made an appearance in which 1997 Oscar-nominated documentary? Because I like movies that usually don't focus on people with posh British accents, learning important lessons about life and shit, or famous attractive humans looking slightly less attractive, je m’en fous about who takes the award.

But like the satisfying feeling I just experienced from searching the French expression for “I don’t give a shit” and inserting it for no good reason into the preceding paragraph, I do enjoy the opportunity for feeling superior that’s afforded by The Oscars. Passing judgement on other people’s tastes is a lot of fun, especially if those other people actually have much better jobs in the US film industry, while I just dispense prescriptions and sit in a cubicle while posting on a site people used to read for literature reviews.

More importantly, moaning about — I mean, sophistically expressing my dissatisfaction with — The Oscars is also a good social activity; when we moan together, we’re really collaborating on a draft of our collective — and judgement— challenging the notions of artistic worth, the valuation of pop culture itself, and the fact that Jennifer Aniston doesn't actually look half bad without any makeup.

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Michael Keaton (Birdman)

On his worst nights, Michael Keaton walks from his home to KFC and orders the 10 piece bucket deal. The bucket consists of 10 pieces of succulent chicken, with three large sides and four hot, cheesy garlic bread slices. He orders it quickly and takes it home to eat while watching Naomi Watts in Funny Games. Funny Games is one of his favourite movies because it’s a re-make of a film that the director already made, and Michael Keaton enjoys referring to it as ‘Meta’ in parties because hollywood people seem impressed with that term, like it makes him appear smarter than he actually is, and he wants people to like him, but he doesn't really understand what it means. His favourite scene in Funny Games is when Naomi Watts is tied up in her underwear and humiliated in a roomful of men. He feels suddenly turned on by the chicken grease around his lips. Some nights he dreams of re-making Batman starring him as Batman not doing Batman activities, but just eating chicken in front of the telly and being an average guy. This morning he licked his reflection in the mirror because his reflection told him to do that. He wonders what Edward Norton is doing right now. He gets a call from his agent: You've been nominated, he says. What? Nominated. For an award? Yes, idiot. For what? The Oscar, the most tasty golden piece of chicken you could ever order, Michael, is going to be handed to you on stage in front of millions of hollywood people, and all you have to do is be there and open your mouth. But I haven’t made a movie in years. Yes, you have. No, I haven’t. What the hell is wrong with you, don’t you remember Multiplicity? But that was 1996; this is 2015. No matter, the Academy thought your performance was so Meta that it outlasted the confines of time and space, and now there’s a piece of chicken on a stage in Hollywood waiting for you. Do you want it or not?

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Reese Witherspoon (Wild)

Reese Witherspoon is willingly killed by a bear. She gets a divorce, gets high on some heroin, and has a lot of dirty homeless sex. She takes a pregnancy test and decides to give birth in the wild. She treks across the wild and gives birth to an energy bar the length of her arm. She carries the energy bar on her back and vandalizes big rocks with Emily Dickinson graffiti. She peels off her toenails and eats them. She washes herself in snow to feel high. A small child appears in the middle of her journey and sings her a song while she whips herself with tree branches. She cries and tells their terrible. A fox appears in the middle of one afternoon and says, Chaos Reigns, and she says, Wrong movie, Fox. Lars Von Trier sends her new boots. but they’re a size too small. One day a bear walks by one of her Dickinson poems and is touched by its sincerity so he swipes right on Witherspoon’s Tinder profile. They agree to meet somewhere in the wild, where he will eat her. She does this all for the Oscar. And by gawd, if I have anything to do with it, she'll get it.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Patricia Arquette (Boyhood)

While the film is basically about a boy’s life as he grows up and goes through various changes, one scene in Boyhood Patricia Arquette reminds us that it wasn't just the kid who was suffering through all these changes. As she breaks down towards the end of the film, Arquette powerfully shows us that not only was she enduring all of those changes as well as her son, but also she was aware of the time passing by and wore the wounds of all these changes. While Mason, the titular protagonist, matures over the years and develops an interest in photography or hangs out with friends until he starts manhood, Arquette’s mother is dealing with a child going through these changes as well as studying and also dealing with her own failed choices in various boyfriends. And that’s when the entire film flips for just a moment in the eyes of the viewers and you realise she has been suffering through it all with all of the knowledge and fear that adulthood brings. It’s a subtle performance that is strong throughout the film, but it’s that scene that brings everything into focus and delivers a punch as mother meets mortality, and doesn't like what she sees.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

J.K. Simmons (Whiplash)

J.K. Simmons’ performance as Fletcher in Whiplash is so gargantuan that if he somehow loses this year, the actual winner should never stop apologizing to the actor. He dominates the film not just through the power of his tyranny, but also through subtle manipulations and quiet moments with his fellow young actors. He represents an abusive yet seductive power, like a wise angry monk preaching about perfection, that it makes sense when Andrew (Miles Teller) cares so much about his approval. Without Simmons in this role, it’s unlikely the film would even be a success that it is. He gives everything to Fletcher’s ferocity it intimidates even me, but also is able to make his perception of talent constantly striving to be better seem sincere and not just like an excuse to be an abusive prick. Add to that the fact that Simmons has been on point for so long as an actor and this becomes a long overdue deserved win for a man who so easily portrays all manner of different characters.

Best Foreign Film

Ida (Poland)

While other nominated films Leviathan and Timbuktu makes this category a tight race for me, Ida triumphs visually. It’s beauty is also due to a simple story, executed elegantly. Every freeze-frame could be taken as an artfully shot photograph, but never so painterly as to undermine its steady pacing, one can't help but to be reminded of Bergman. I'm finding it difficult to articulate how perfect this film is to people who might easily call it depressing. As with Bergman, I went away with a sour feeling, but I watched with a sense of wonder and,­ more significantly, ­true compassion for the suffering of the two lead female characters. This is a sure winner for me not because of originality (that’d be Timbuktu), for timeliness (Leviathan), but because it is a triumph of independent film making combining visual artistry with concise storytelling.

Best Original Screenplay

Wes Anderson, Hugo Guinness (The Grand Budapest Hotel)

The amount of period dramas nominated every year seems to prove that the film industry are willing to serve a “true story” while sacrificing the  imagination of film-makers in order to make prestigious art. Few screenwriters are willing to both place themselves in history and write their way out of it. With his ever-improving filmography, Wes Anderson used his unique way to immortalise the writing of Austrian humanist Stefan Zweig — not to create a simple adaptation of his work, but to run wild with society in pre-WWII Europe and fit them into a plot as mechanically precise as the weapons that would later destroy it. He created a loveable protagonist in Gustave H., a bisexual debaucher whose fondness for poetry and perfume never slowed his mission to get rich quick, and whose unlikely brotherhood with Zero while attempting to prove his own innocence was one of the most tragically heartfelt relationships he’d ever showed on film. Once again, Anderson’s writing proved to produce ninety minutes that were both thrilling and sincere.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Paul Thomas Anderson (Inherent Vice)

While they can also be visually stunning, Paul Thomas Anderson’s films contain some of the most compelling dialogue in modern cinema, as depressing salesmen, con artists and porn stars talk their way towards goals too big for one human to achieve. In his first full-on adapted screenplay, Anderson translates to film the high paranoia and anarchic vision of Thomas Pynchon’s reference-heavy book, detailing an endless corporate conspiracy in 1970s Los Angeles investigated by one doped-up tenacious detective. Joanna Newsom’s narration gives a  feminine, mythical siren-like backdrop to Anderson’s cast of super-masculine men. Following the plot of Pynchon’s difficult narrative, Anderson maintains the offbeat speech rhythms and selfish deliberations of his best characters, resulting in his most mercurial and heavily narrative film, and certainly his most funniest. As a beautifully shot abstract piece amid a sea of Oscar made movies, it’s not likely to win any awards, but it was certainly more surprising and engaging moment to moment, word by word, than the other nominees. 

Best Original Song

“Everything is Awesome” (The Lego Movie)

This category came down to two possibilities for me: “Glory” by Common and John Legend from Selma or “Everything Is Awesome” from The Lego Movie. As far as choices go, they are drastically opposite sides of the spectrum, with one being an incredibly serious anthem for change and the other being a post-post-modern deconstruction of the post-modern pop song. In my opinion, removed from their films, “Everything Is Awesome” is the better song. It triumphs by mocking an idea while also being better than the thing it mocks by being it. It is so catchy and infectious it makes sense the entire Lego world is obsessed with it while also pointing out the shallow depths to which songs like it go to to get popular. The propaganda anthem of the totalitarian society in the film, manufactured just like the plastic people it entertains, it’s also a rollicking song that can be appreciated on its own merits. It’s an impressive one-two punch, proving satire works best when it works smart and catchy.

Best Director

Richard Linklater (Boyhood)

Shot in different locations in his home of Texas over the course of 12 years, Linklater’s magnum-opus is a remarkably directed and an engrossing story to behold, made all the more impressive by the fact that he was making the film primarily with kids. Boyhood managed to draw me in from the first scene,cementing its interesting characters with the kind of subtlety that the director has been perfecting his entire career. Part of what made the film so enjoyable to watch was Linklater’s wise decision to downplay as much as possible anything gimmicky in the way the film was made. Instead to drawing attention to the progression of time — which would have been clichéd — Linklater’s significant tool was to allow his characters to develop their own stories and histories. It is a joy to watch, a landmark entry in the history of cinema.

Best Picture

Boyhood

The smell of the beanbag chair in our shared bedroom in Abbey Wood, London, upon which me and my brother played Halo for hours without getting up to pee, instead that one time he wet his trousers, and how the controllers faded from black to grey as we held onto those controllers for dear life, summer days collapsing into themselves, a small voice inside my father saying, ‘Something is wrong with your children,’ and his triumphant sensation of throwing our XBox into the bin when we fought over stupid shit, so much fighting eventually forcing my mother to lock the door of her bedroom and wait until the insults thrown back and forth between the two of four boys she birthed and the man she married died down. The kisses we would get from her before we left the house for school, two Muslim siblings, eighteen months apart, in the back of dad's Mazda as we drove to Arabic classes in the mosque on Saturdays, sweet maternal kisses no one talks about with their friends, but you know everyone else received one from their mother that morning. Boyhood is a movie about women, women who care for boys, boys related and unrelated, boys everywhere who have no clue how to grow up without the tenderness and discipline of a woman to guide them from video games to university to a job to house to a grave. Boys with mothers and toy guns, and fathers sitting in corners who need women to be husbands. Boyhood is a 12-year project that happens every 12 minutes in the back of 12 family cars driving to 12 schools as 12 brothers and sisters receive 12 kisses 12 fights after killing each other 12 times while playing Halo for 12 consecutive days.Boyhood will produce 12 more Boyhoods until there are no more 12 years left for any of us.