Oscar Anomie

In which the sad and peculiar truth is revealed that I just don't care much about this year's Academy Awards. Every year I look forward to writing the Oscar prediction features on my website, but this year, aside from having no time, I just haven't had any inclination. There have been worse Oscar years, but none in recent memory that have left me so frankly apathetic about this year's big show. I'm still trying to understand this, but here are my best guesses:

1. Brokeback As time goes by, I like the prohibitive favorite in this year's top races less and less. And I feel bad about this, because as a progressive cultural marker, I want to be excited about it. If a big gay love story is about to win Best Picture at the Oscars, I'd love to feel like cheering. And the movie's okay, an easy trade up from early 00s Best Picture winners like Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind. In fact, Million Dollar Baby is the only Picture victor of the whole decade that I've found all that moving, though Chicago was good and plucky, and I'll take the Return of the King win as an oblique nod to The Fellowship of the Ring. But that's just the thing with Brokeback Mountain: it isn't the best, it isn't the worst, and its competence feels neither engagingly plummy nor aesthetically ambitious. Nothing in the film has the charge of the premise; subversive subject aside, the movie is just as determinedly middlebrow and almost as domesticated as traditional bait like The Cider House Rules. To me, everything impressive about it also feels glassed-off and distant. As it has loped to the forefront of the competition, its own remoteness has come to define the whole derby. (It hasn't helped that none of the key players—not the fratty and giggle-prone Ledger and Gyllenhaal, not the perpetually scowling Williams or the vapid cockatoo Anne Hathaway, not self-serious writers Ossana and McMurtry or the chirpily apolitical Ang Lee—have inspired any affection as podium personalities.)

2. Best Actress This category, perennially my favorite, is at best a compromise solution. Knightley, winning as she is, is beautifully courted by the camera and woven in by the editing. Considered in the abstract, apart from all the pristine favors done her by the film, what's special in the performance fades a bit. Huffman's proficiency feels a little cold, once you're out of the theater and away from Transamerica's thin, homespun charms. Theron's stuck in a frightened film that seems to cut away from her own best ideas about the character; Dench is an instant irrelevance. And then there's Witherspoon. The almost certain winner has one sterling scene—her first, slightly hoarse barroom rencontre with Cash—but the role is written within hoary limits, and there's every reason for her to fall back on her usual diet of knitted brows and saucer faces, which is just what she does. Voting for any of them feels like voting for John Kerry. Most years, even the lean ones, at least have a Moore in Far from Heaven or a Theron in Monster to inspire idolatry; sometimes, like last year, the leading women outstrip the men without breaking a sweat. This year's bum crop just feels inert.

3. I Don't Even Feel Like Continuing Who needs this? I don't feel as bilious toward this year's awards as I'm sounding like I am. Honestly, I'm just indifferent. But this is what happens every time I start writing about them, or even thinking about writing about them. (Cue Sandra Bullock: "I'm whiny all the time, and I don't know why!")

To resist this slide into grouchiness, I'd like to salute the nominees that do make me feel proud to watch the show, and have a little of that Academy magic attached to them. I wish there were more of them, but these'll do for an Honor Roll of the legitimately Oscarable:

Best Picture
Capote

Best Director
Bennett Miller, Capote
Steven Spielberg, Munich
(the latter for the film's wild ambitions and strongest passages, forgiving its lapses—it's the one political "issue" movie of the year that feels genuinely courageous, pushing itself to all of its own edges)

Best Actor
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
Terrence Howard, Hustle & Flow
(Ledger has slipped a bit in my regard, and Strathairn is strait-jacketed by Clooney's stunningly narrow conception, but I will say that Phoenix unexpectedly improved on second view—a truly promising performance in need of a more daring director. Like, say, Bennett Miller.)

Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, Junebug
Catherine Keener, Capote
Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener

Best Original Screenplay
Noah Baumbach, The Squid and the Whale
(the ending notwithstanding)

Best Adapted Screenplay
Dan Futterman, Capote
Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, Munich

Best Cinematography
Emmanuel Lubezki, The New World
(by many leagues the year's best nomination, in any race)

Best Original Score
Dario Marianelli, Pride & Prejudice
(judicious and delicious understatement, perfectly matched to the film)

Best Original Song
"Travelin' Thru" from Transamerica

Best Sound
War of the Worlds

Best Sound Effects Editing
War of the Worlds

For the record, I'm predicting most of the same winners that everyone else is, but they go like this: Picture/Brokeback Mountain, Director/Lee, Actress/Witherspoon, Actor/Hoffman, Supporting Actress/Adams, Supporting Actor/Giamatti, Original Screenplay/Crash, Adapted Screenplay/Brokeback Mountain, Cinematography/Brokeback Mountain, Foreign-Language Film/Tsotsi, Film Editing/The Constant Gardener, Art Direction/Good Night, and Good Luck., Costume Design/Memoirs of a Geisha, Original Score/The Constant Gardener, Original Song/"Travelin' Thru" Sound/Walk the Line, Sound Effects/War of the Worlds, Visual Effects/King Kong, Makeup/The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Documentary Feature/Murderball, Documentary Short/God Sleeps in Rwanda, Animated Feature/Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Live Action Short Film/Six Shooter, Animated Short/9