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Movies & TV

2016 Oscar nominations full of surprises

Sure, Alejandro G. Inarritu’s oxygen-sucking survival odyssey The Revenant tops the list with 12 nominations, but Inarritu glances over his shoulder he’ll see George Miller and Mad Max: Fury Road coming straight at him with 10 nominations. A lot of them are in the same categories – picture, director, cinematography, film editing, makeup, production design, visual effects, sound mixing, sound editing and costume design. And Inarritu’s just riding a horse, while George Miller has a souped-up tanker truck. Which is on fire.

Okay, that’s probably a more hopeful prediction than we’ll see when the envelopes are opened on February 28 – and I am obviously in the tank for Miller, a visionary artist and storyteller who, at the age of 70, delivered an action masterpiece that puts the works of directors half his age to shame.

By contrast, Inarritu’s self-aggrandizing virtuosity, embraced by the Academy last year with picture and director wins for Birdman, seem far hollower to me. But the guy’s got fans, and the dreary solemnity of The Revenant obviously resonated with the membership during the nomination round.

The Revenant also scored nominations for Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy in the lead and supporting actor categories. DiCaprio, we are told, is the favourite, though I wouldn’t be so quick to count out Eddie Redmayne, last year’s winner for The Theory Of Everything Redmayne’s up for The Danish Girl, in a performance that offers even more look-at-me moments than DiCaprio’s. And since Oscar frequently confuses “most acting” for “best acting”, he might feel the love yet again. (Matt Damon’s cheerful despair in The Martian and Bryan Cranston’s magnificent hamming in Trumbo kind of melt away, as does Michael Fassbender’s fine understated turn in/as Steve Jobs.

The best actress category is similarly opaque. I’d say Brie Larson’s work in Room is the performance of the year, but Charlotte Rampling’s expertly modulated turn in 45 Years might play to the voters’ sense of history. Or they might go full ingénue and give it to Saiorse Ronan for Brooklyn. I doubt Cate Blanchett, nominated for what’s really a supporting role in Carol, will make it to the podium, and the odds are similarly slender for Jennifer Lawrence, the sole nominee for David O. Russell’s Joy.

Speaking of Carol, it’s a shame that film didn’t make it to a best picture nomination, though less of a surprise that Todd Haynes failed to make the cut for best director. Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott went unrecognized as well it’s an especially competitive year. Lenny Abrahamson being nominated for Room was a pleasant shock with nominations for picture and Emma Donohue’s adapted screenplay, it means we can’t fully count that one out of the race for best picture, either.

Supporting actor is a simpler bet: Sylvester Stallone in Creed ticks all the boxes for a beloved veteran. The supporting categories always favour the ingénue and the stalwart, and Stallone winning for his genuinely tender resurrection of Rocky Balboa 40 years after first playing the character is an Oscar moment too good to pass up.

And in that case, things might tilt the other way in the supporting actress category, giving Alicia Vikander a shot at winning for The Danish Girl. (As the campaigning intensifies, voters might even be persuaded to consider it an omnibus prize for her work in Ex Machina – and even The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) Kate Winslet did just win a Golden Globe, and Rooney Mara’s really the lead of Carol, so I can’t dismiss either of them too quickly … but who knows?

The other supporting actress candidates, Rachel McAdams and Jennifer Jason Leigh, offer a window into the fates of Spotlight and The Hateful Eight, respectively. Tom McCarthy’s journalism procedural is up for six awards, including picture, director, original screenplay, film editing and two acting awards (McAdams, and a supporting nod for Mark Ruffalo), while Quentin Tarantino’s bloated chamber drama landed just three – for Leigh, for Robert Richardson’s cinematography and for Ennio Morricone’s original score. It would have been unthinkable before this morning that a “serious” Tarantino movie miss out on a screenplay nomination, but there you go.

We should also consider The Big Short. Up for five major awards – picture, director, adapted screenplay, film editing and supporting actor (Christian Bale) – it’s the dark horse in this year’s race. It’s as important a story as Spotlight, but a lot more fun it’s as showy as The Revenant, but it’s showy in the service of the material, not the filmmaker.

With weighted ballots and a massive screener push, I can see Adam McKay’s financial-crisis study shooting right up the middle to take the top prize in a shocking upset – although maybe at this point I’m just thinking like one of its heroes.

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