Win Some, Lose Some

I'm glad I didn't make any wagers on the Academy Awards this year. I predicted correctly in only 14 out of 24 categories presented on the live broadcast Sunday night.

I missed three out of the four acting categories and both short-subject (live action and animated) categories, as well as some of the "technical" categories.

I did, however, go against conventional wisdom in predicting Crash would win as Best Picture. I have to confess I have not seen Crash -- it played in theatres so long ago, and did not last there for very long -- but I had heard good things about it as early as October 2004, when Richard Herskowitz praised it at a Virginia Film Festival news conference featuring Sandra Bullock, one of the film's ensemble stars.

As I predicted, Memoirs of a Geisha got the visual design awards (except for Narnia's make-up statuette -- which I also predicted), while King Kong got the sound and visual effects awards. I was surprised by Geisha's win for cinematography. (I loved the black-and-white sculpturing of Good Night, and Good Luck, but thought Brokeback Mountain's lush Rocky vistas would win the day.)

My reasoning in predicting Crash, rather than the buzzworthy Brokeback Mountain, boiled down to a simple fact: Crash is about Los Angeles, and most Academy voters live in Los Angeles. Crash is about the voters' lives, and the lives of their neighbors. Brokeback is about an exotic location, Wyoming, that is too far removed from the the lives of Academy voters to render it relevant to them.

It is, of course, unusual for the directing award to go to a picture other than the one that wins Best Picture, but I also correctly predicted that Ang Lee would win for Brokeback Mountain. Call me psychic.

Now I just have to hope that winning three Academy Awards is enough to push Crash back into the theatres. As more than one speaker during the ceremony reminded us, movies are meant to be seen in a darkened room, with a big screen and a crowd of strangers. As AMPAS President Sid Ganis put it, no actor ever finished filming a scene by saying, "That's going to look great on the DVD."