Heath Ledger

BOOMERANGST: And the Oscar Goes to…

By Roy Trakin

It may seem like there are a lot more pressing issues to worry about than Hollywood’s year-end rush of prestige pictures to qualify for the Academy Awards, but this race has an interesting backdrop. While such highly touted movies as Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, Gus Van Zant’s Milk, Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road and the favorite, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, have yet to be released, things are still pretty wide-open, but judging from the blogosphere, certain favorites are emerging.

With the Oscar nominations being announced January 22, just two days after Barack Obama’s inauguration, the Best Picture battle could well come down to Danny Boyle’s dazzling, uplifting saga Slumdog Millionaire, which features a young, idealistic Indian hero with determination, hope and the same kind of jug-ears as our next Chief Executive, against Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, his brooding, cynical, End of Days Batman sequel, a quintessential John McCain film if ever there was one.

During the darkest days of the Bush administration, the almost unanimously praised The Dark Knight seemed a likely nominee, at the very least, with Heath Ledger’s haunted performance as The Joker a lock for a posthumous Supporting Actor nod. But Obama’s victory seems to have tilted the scale in favor of optimism, a desire to get on with the future and put the past behind us. Seen in that light, Slumdog Millionaire, with its color-blind approach to globalization and the ultimate triumph of the underdog, told through the device of perhaps capitalism’s apex in Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, is the quintessential movie for the Barack Obama era, steeped in a spirit of can-do wish fulfillment, the kind of escapist, feel-good fare Hollywood itself regularly crafted during the last Depression in the ‘30s. The critical momentum is already starting on the film, though its frequent Hindi subtitles could well hurt it in the general population, but the precedent has already been set with the 1982 winner, Gandhi, which earned Oscars for Best Picture, star Ben Kingsley and director Richard Attenborough. I like the film’s Boyle for Best Director and Simon Beaufoy for Best Adapted Screenplay (from the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup).

As for the other major categories, my picks for Best Male and Female Actor also involve roles that seem to speak to the increasing racial integration of not just the U.S., but also the world, including Richard Jenkins’ quietly understated performance in writer/director Thomas (The Station Agent) McCarthy’s affecting The Visitor as a middle-class professor who gets a new lease on life when he allows a pair of what turn out to be illegal immigrants to stay in his Manhattan apartment, then learns to play the bongos from them. My choice for the other big Oscar is veteran stage actress Melissa Leo’s turn in first-time writer/director Courtney Hunt’s harshly realistic Frozen River as a struggling, working-class single mom forced to smuggle Native Americans across the Canadian border for money. Welcome to the real/unreal world.