2K10 Oscar Predictions

By Glenn and Jake

Last year, Jake and Glenn did their most passionate predictions ever of who would win an award for Best Picture. While their prognosis was inaccurate and often bordered on schizophrenia, the comfort of knowing two people were predicting the Best Picture award on a website the way you did with your friends comforted hundreds of readers who would have otherwise been diagnosed, correctly, with schizophrenia. 2009 was a terrible year for politics, but a great year for films. What follows are our predictions for Best Picture. Hopefully they will turn out better than the health care debate.

The Blindside

Jake: The Blindside stars Sandra Bullock as a woman who is forced to pretend she's blind to get a job teaching real blind people how to read braille. Bullock's powerhouse performance, which includes "accidentally" knocking things over, is both hilarious and touching. After meeting a blind football player, she realizes that maybe being fake blind isn't as bad as being really blind. The lesson she learns is a very potent one: always be yourself.

Glenn: My parents saw this and told me they loved it. Usually that's enough for me to want to call in a bomb threat to every showing of a film that night, but this time I gave them a chance and watched it myself. I don't want to say I cried, because I don't think men should admit to that, but I will say that I left the theatre knowing I would never step on a football field again. Truth be told, I loved Sandra Bullock in Speed 1, 2, 3 and 4 but don't like most of her romantic comedies. This one is better because there's no romance in it. This is my dark horse because one of the main characters has dark skin.


Avatar

Jake: Avatar is the story of a young man searching for the perfect picture to represent himself on an automotive help web forum. We see him browsing through Google images, with little to no results. Soon he grabs his camera and heads to the street to take the picture himself! We feel heartbreak as he has his shot all lined up, but the cat he's going to take a picture moves and he's back to square one. Eventually he takes a picture of a hot car and is accepted into the web community warmly. This film has a little bit of everything and is the only film nominated to take on a modern theme. This movie would have never been made five years ago, especially not in 3D.

Glenn: The fact that this movie is in 3D has to set it as the front runner for Best Picture. Last year's Best Picture winner, My Bloody Valentine 3D, was also about people in blue suits and tribalism. It just presented it in a much more symbolic form - someone in a mask killing teenagers. Avatar is much more literally about finding yourself out of place and having to thrive in an unknown situation. Most James Cameron movies are awesome, especially Terminator 2 and Aliens, but this is his best one yet. I agree with Jake that the theme is very modern, but not QUITE post modern. I'm sure parents across the country could understand the film and obviously did since it made 1.3 trillion dollars in its opening weekend. That's as much as this year's budget deficit! There will be no deficit of awards for Avatar at the Oscars.


Up in the Air

Jake: Up in the Air is the story of a NBA recruiter who travels to Africa to look at some very tall men. He is surprised that they don't know how to play basketball since they truly are tall. He makes a basket and and net out of a laundry basket and a fishing net. That's a really good scene. He teaches the tall men how to play basketball, but he can only sign one to his NBA team. Who will he choose? The one who is best at basketball! A one-on-one tournament is held leading to a very thrilling conclusion that involves more slam dunks than a story of Isaiah Ryder's glory days. This was the feel good movie of 2009 and the best basketball film of all time.

Glenn: This movie made Blue Chips look like Blue Velvet. What I liked the most about this film, beside the fact it was filmed in my hometown of St. Louis, is that it has a message that even when you try to change your life to be happy, it won't work. If more modern films presented this reality, people would quit trying to improve themselves and instead stick with the sub-par versions we use as avatars in our daily lives. George Clooney is probably my favorite actor, and though I think he'll take Best Actor for this film, the basketball parallels are too rich for the Academy voters. This movie should have been about airplanes instead, like 1948's Best Picture winner: Airplane!


17 Again

Jake: This is the story of an old cast member of Friends wishing he was young again so his best days wouldn't be behind him. Matthew Perry gets taken back to a simpler time, except only his age travels back in time. He's still in the current year (2009 for this film). At first he's happy, but then he realizes that he has to go to the prom again. He can't get a date so he burns the school gym down while prom is going on killing all of his fellow classmates. He spends the rest of his life in prison. I didn't like the turn this movie took, but at least I learned a lesson.

Glenn: I hate that this movie was nominated when movies like Vice Versa, Like Father Like Son and the Great Outdoors never even got a nod for Best Editing or Fattest Star. This movie was stupid, even if it fulfilled a fantasy I carried with me through the first few years of college. The Academy usually loves movies about redemption, but hates movies with people from Friends. People from that show have mostly made shit movies, with the exception of The Breakup with Jennifer Anniston and Ed with Matt LeBlanc. Ed was a movie where a chimpanzee played baseball. 17 Again also has Zac Efron, who makes the many 15-21 year old girls who read this site will scream with glee because he is so good looking. And he truly is good looking. I wish the Academy would recognize that.


Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Jake: This movie is a remake of the popular 2009 film Observe and Report. Paul Blart is a mentally unstable mall security guard who goes on a rampage trying to find a flasher. Kevin James turned in a powerful performance as Paul Blart, the titular mall cop. This was the saddest movie I saw in 2009, but it was also the funniest. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but if you miss out on this film you'll be the oxymoron.

Glenn: I liked Observe and Report better. If you're going to remake a film that came out the same year, at least add some slapstick comedy to it. Maybe someone farts or someone else drives around a mall on a golf cart. Things like this are easy and will make parents and babies laugh. Instead Kevin James rapes someone and then shoots a guy in the dick. This movie was too graphic for me, and I served two tours in Somalia.

Predictions
Jake: While I found Paul Blart to be the most touching movie and 17 Again to be the most challenging, I'm going to have to pick Up in the Air because it's about basketball. Ever since I was 12 I loved the game of basketball. Maybe it's because I'm tall and everybody always asked me if I played basketball. I didn't, but I was on the wrestling team. If a movie about wrestling came out this year I probably would have liked that, too.

Glenn: What my tall compatriot is forgetting is that there was a movie about wrestling this year. It was called The Wrestler, and it was about Linda McMahon's run for US Senate in Connecticut. As I said earlier, I think Avatar is the front runner because it has more dimensions than the other films. Seeing 17 Again at the IMAX in Winnipeg was very disappointing. The Blindside is a good movie to be a dark horse because when you go in and see it, you are expecting a movie JUST about football then it becomes about football and life at the same time. It has the soft gift of low expectations. If Paul Blart somehow pulls an upset, I will personally give back every fucking Academy Award I've won in the last ten years - probably not to the Academy itself but to John Candy's widow. He should have won Fattest Star in 1988 not me.