If you win an Academy Award, 
for the love of Meryl Streep, cry. And be witty. And thank your mom. 
And bow down to lord and savior Harvey Weinstein. But please 
just remember to cry.



By this point, at the tail end of the seemingly interminable awards 
season, the likes of Anne Hathaway, Daniel Day-Lewis, 
and Ben Affleck have likely logged hours each giving acceptance speeches as they steamrolled the precursor awards shows. Jennifer 
Lawrence 
has charmed America on a handful of occasions with her thank-yous. But 
has anyone thus far given a truly great acceptance speech?



As the stars prepare for Oscars Sunday, we’ve perused the greatest hits
 of Oscar speeches past and come up with this, an instructional video 
for giving the Academy Award acceptance speech of viewers’ dreams.

 

Best Picture

Ramin: This turned out to be such a hard year for predicting the Oscars! The winner was supposed to be Argo, until it was Silver Linings Playbook, until it was Les Miserables, until it was Zero Dark Thirty, until it was Lincoln. But after the guild awards were announced, the momentum swung back to Argo, which I am grateful for, because even if it’s not the best movie of the year, it’s one of the best, and so much better than the C-SPAN presentation that was Lincoln. If I could choose, I would have voted Les Miserables, the epic and excessive (in the best way) movie musical. I still remember the night in late November that we both saw it at Lincoln Center, and we thought it had the Best Picture Oscar in the bag. Oh well. We dreamed a dream. I’ll still be cheering when Affleck takes the podium.

Who should win: Les Miserables

Who will win: Argo

Stories about Little Movies That Could usually center on coincidences involving celebrities and financing—serendipitous, right-place, right time stuff. While our film couldn’t have taken off—or gotten started—without Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, David O. Russell, Harvey Weinstein, or the late Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, the real steam for its genesis came from long-gone, unfamous people in our own lives. People whose stories we could never forget, because they forever changed our own.

Both of us had experienced the loneliness and frustration depicted in the film firsthand. Renee grew up the child of a paranoid schizophrenic, believing she had the world’s only mentally-ill mom, feeling ashamed by it, and dreaming of her mom’s silver lining. She optioned Silver Linings Playbook (the novel) during her very first week working at the Weinstein Company, with the hope it might help audiences see that mental illness is just that—an illness—comprising but one part of a person’s whole, rather than defining them.

The Silver Linings Playbook novel hit Michelle like “a ton of bricks thrown at [her] chest.” Five years earlier, her husband had died at the age of 33, and like Tiffany, Jennifer Lawrence’s character in the movie, Michelle couldn’t seem to identify herself as anything but her dead husband’s wife. She was crippled by severe survivor’s guilt, stuck in a pitch-black mindset with no idea of how to find her way out. By the time she came across the novel, Michelle had found her silver lining in the form of other people—her family, her friends, her community, her therapist, and most importantly, her now-husband and son—and she wanted other struggling people to see that this sort of transformation was possible. The characters in Silver Linings Playbook proved it.

I just finished proctoring the geriatric psychiatry station of the comprehensive examination that second-year students take at the Harvard Medical School. Serendipitously, I also viewed Sari Gilman’s Academy Award–nominated Kings Point, a 30-minute documentary covering 10 years in the life of an age-restricted community in Florida, that’s set to premiere on HBO on March 11. While the doctors-to-be all did well in interviewing and diagnosing a “standardized” geriatric patient, it occurred to me how their interactions could have been enhanced by viewing Gilman’s film.

Kings Point takes the viewer into the lives of five aging-in-place residents who are extremely insightful into their own circumstance. They accept with equanimity the true horror of aging alone, sundered from family and community. They all bought the Florida dream and left New York City for what they believed to be the Promised Land. The promise of home ownership, eternal sunshine, and companionship with like-minded people lured them into a desperate trap. For as they aged and developed infirmities, as their spouses died off, they were left alone and frightened. As one of the elders noted, “Nobody gets too close here; they are afraid.” And Kings Point elucidates these fears all too clearly and poignantly. They desire connection but are so afraid of loss that they shy away from closeness and commitment, two essential aspects of our human nature.

The result is isolation and a focus on simple self-preservation. As Gert, one of the elders, notes, “I’m taking care of myself.” The cinematographers—Daniel Gold, Gabriel Miller, and Toby Oppenheimer—manage to capture both the surface beauty of the setting with its pink houses, lush lawns, bubbling brooks, and tall palm trees and contrast it with a glimpse into the residents’ sense of living in a prison they cannot escape from. Filming through windows with protective bars on them, down long, empty, and sterile corridors—all reinforce the loneliness and despair of the individuals living there.

She’s a sleeper star on a breathtaking hot streak. And on February 24, Emmanuelle Riva, Oscar’s oldest Best Actress nominee ever, will celebrate her 86th birthday on the red carpet in Hollywood. Yet another dance with serendipity—and, perhaps, a handsome gold statuette—for the French actress, who has collected a mantelpiece worth of hardware for her masterful turn in Austrian director Michael Haneke’s staggering Amour.

The French-language end-of-life drama stars Riva and fellow French screen legend Jean-Louis Trintignant as Anne and Georges, retired Parisian music teachers in their 80s struggling with Anne’s sudden spiral into paralysis and dementia. It is the story of love at its zenith, without glamour; pure, intimate, spare, sans melodrama. The couple’s daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), a musician in London, provides stark contrast, effusively anguished on her whirlwind visits. When Eva sheds the film’s only tears, they seem an indulgence, out of step. “Your concern serves no purpose to me,” Georges, caregiver for her mother, tells Eva. The film has been called Haneke’s warmest and most humane. Although, for the man who brought us The Piano Teacher, Funny Games, and The White Ribbon, that alone doesn’t say much.

“The title is Amour [Love]. It is nothing else. And it’s true that that is an extremely appropriate title,” Riva tells The Daily Beast, speaking in French from her home in Paris.

With only two weeks left until the Oscars—mark your calendars for Feb. 24—most of the winners are so locked up, this article doesn’t need a spoiler warning. Argo will grab the Best Picture award. The acting trophies will go to Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln), and Anne Hathaway (Les Misérables). And the best-director statuette belongs to Ben Affleck.

Oh, wait. Even though Affleck won the Golden Globe, the Critics' Choice Award, and the Directors Guild Award for making Argo, he’s not in the running for a directing Oscar. There are plenty of Internet conspiracy theories about his snub, but blame likely goes to the snooty auteurs who vote for the nominees in the category. They look down on actors who want to direct.

If Affleck were nominated, he’d surely win. But since he’s been sidelined, the best-director Oscar race will be one of the few wild cards of the night. “I think it’s between Ang Lee [Life of Pi], Steven Spielberg [Lincoln], and David O. Russell [Silver Linings Playbook],” says an Academy voter who would only speak anonymously about handicapping the Oscar race. The other nominees are the underdogs Michael Haneke (Amour) and Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild).

Much of the attention this Oscar season has gone to the rich and unpredictable Best Picture category, but the most interesting race may actually be happening down the ballot between a murderer’s row of politically charged documentaries. Five Broken Cameras, Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s look at Palestinians coping with the arrival of militant Israeli settlers in their West Bank community, faces off with The Gatekeepers, Dror Moreh, Philippa Kowarsky, and Estelle Fialon’s unprecedented examination of Israeli security agency Shin Bet. David France’s searing chronicle of AIDS activism, How to Survive a Plague, is in the mix, as is Kirby Dick’s present-day cri de coeur against sexual assault in the military, The Invisible War. In this company, the much-loved music biopic Searching for Sugarman, a hit at last year’s Sundance Film Festival is practically a ray of sunshine.

“They’re all excellent films,” Dick said, considering the films that are going up against his searing condemnation of the sexual-assault epidemic in the military for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards on February 24. “It was an amazing year this year for documentaries. But this is the film that—if it does get an Academy Award—it will motivate Congress, it will motivate the [Defense Department], it will motivate the military to make even more changes. There will be a direct result from this winning the award and the reduction of rape. That will happen.”

It’s a bold claim for Dick to make. But he might actually have a point.

Anne Hathaway: Havoc (2005)
Oscar Nomination: Best Supporting Actress, Les Misérables

Despite her penchant for painfully awkward awards speeches and her cult of haters, Anne Hathaway is a virtual lock to win the best-supporting-actress Oscar for her poignant turn as doomed prostitute Fantine in Les Misérables. Her weepy, hyperventilating rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” is arguably one of the finest “Oscar moments” of the year, after all. But before she dazzled in Les Miz, Hathaway starred in the so-bad-it’s-hilarious misfire Havoc. Directed by Oscar winner Barbara Kopple from a screenplay by Oscar winner Stephen Gaghan (Traffic), the film chronicles the travails of two rich white girls from Beverly Hills (Hathaway and Bijou Phillips) who act black and eventually get mixed up with menacing Latino gang members in East L.A. The film, which also stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and features a brief appearance by Channing Tatum—in his first film role—sees Hathaway rapping along to Tupac and Jay-Z, smoking crack, and throwing haymakers. You will laugh your ass off.

Hugh Jackman: Movie 43 (2013)
Oscar Nomination: Best Actor, Les Misérables

The Oscar campaign trial features a host of tried and true tactics nominees use to goose their chances of scoring the golden statue. There’s the endless stream of Q&A sessions with gawking journalists, the cozying up to powerful producers and voters, and the talk-show circuit so dizzying that it becomes impossible to tell your Fallon from your Kimmel.

This year, however, there seems to be one campaigning trick trumping them all: tears. From typically stone-faced Robert De Niro’s blubbering to Katie Couric to Anne Hathaway getting verklempt over Catwoman, here’s a look at what’s become the Oscar Campaign Trail of Tears.

Robert De Niro

Early this morning, the event’s host, Seth MacFarlane, and actress Emma Stone announced the nominees for the 85th Academy Awards—the preeminent awards ceremony honoring the finest achievements of the year in film.

And, as in most years, there were quite a few surprises—and snubs.

1. SURPRISE: Joaquin Phoenix, The Master

Academy Award-winner Quentin Tarantino is laughing all the way to the bank this week. The controversial film auteur and his longtime studio chief-partner Harvey Weinstein took a gamble on transforming the atrocities of American slavery into comedic, action-packed entertainment. And the new movie, Django Unchained, which opened Christmas day, bested the glitzy Les Miserables at the box office with numbers indicating that the flick could do as well as, or maybe even better than Tarantino’s top-grossers Inglourious Basterds ($120 million) and Pulp Fiction ($107 million).

And to build on the Django momentum, there’s an entire product line to compliment the Jamie Foxx-fronted spaghetti western/slave revolt/action drama/fantasy tale.

Last fall, the National Entertainment Collectibles Association, Inc. (NECA), in tandem with the Weinstein Company, announced a full line of consumer products based on characters from the movie. First up are pose-able eight-inch action figures with tailored clothing, weaponry, and accessories in the likeness of characters played by Foxx, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio, James Remar and Christoph Waltz. The dolls are currently on sale via Amazon.com.

BEST PICTURE

*Beasts of the Southern Wild

Due to the Academy’s bizarre weighted voting system, there can be anywhere from five to nine nominees for the Best Picture Oscar (we think), so a plethora of films will be nominated. Les Misérables tugs at the heartstrings, Amour offers one of the more realistic depictions of on-screen love in recent memory, Silver Linings Playbook is a refreshingly coarse take on the screwball comedy, and Zero Dark Thirty provides a visceral, expertly crafted account of the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden. But it’s Benh Zeitlin’s little film—and protagonist—that could, Beasts of the Southern Wild, that deserves the Best Picture Oscar.

This stunning debut tells the tale of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a ponderous 6-year-old girl who lives with her tough-love father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in “the Bathtub”—a Katrina-ravaged community in the southernmost reaches of the Louisiana bayou. A terrible storm melts the polar ice caps, unleashing a group of prehistoric creatures called Aurochs. Amid the chaos and her father’s diminishing health, Hushpuppy goes off in search of her long-lost mother. The film, made on a budget of less than $2 million—raised via a string of nonprofits—and shot on grainy, beautiful 16mm, was the most original and engrossing cinematic vision presented this year. “In a million years, when kids go to school, they gonna know: once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub,” says Hushpuppy. Indeed.

Amour
Silver Linings Playbook
Les Misérables
Zero Dark Thirty
The Master
The Dark Knight Rises
Django Unchained

BEST DIRECTOR

*Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty

While Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild was the most original film of the year, and Michael Haneke and Paul Thomas Anderson showed why they’re considered two of the most technically masterful craftsmen around in Amour and The Master, respectively, no filmmaker exhibited as thrilling a combination of craft, complexity, and vitality as Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. That she could methodically capture the behind-the-scenes action that went down during the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden, as well as splicing in kinetic action sequences, in less than three hours—and present it in such cohesive fashion—is a staggering achievement. Bureaucracy and tradecraft have never been this engaging. Bigelow deserves to be the first woman to take home not one, but two Best Director Oscars. The times they are a-changin’ ... and it’s about goddam time.

Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild
Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master
Michael Haneke, Amour
David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook