Oscar pre-nod

Anyone with even an ounce of cultural sensitivity (actually you'd only need a gramme) would have told you that the film that should have won last year's Oscar for Best Picture was, unquestionably, A Single Man.

And the actor who should have won Best Actor was, equally unquestionably, Colin Firth.

 Alas, he was, as they say, robbed, and he left empty-handed.
 

This year, the buzz is that Colin Firth will win Best Actor for his portrayal of one of the King Georges in The King's Speech, a charming if desperately overblown tv movie/costume drama of the sort at which British film companies excel. 

This would be madness (er... sic), but the American Academy has form here year after year, giving the top honours to some actor who doesn't deserve it and then, presumably out of collective guilt, rewarding the cheated actor the following year when they turn up in some lesser role.

Still, Colin's a nice man and it would be lovely to see him getting a shiny award, so that his paycheques for evermore will be larger than they would otherwise have been (I think that's what winning an Oscar is all about, isn't it?).

Meanwhile, while everyone blathers on about whether King's Speech or Social Network (a well made tv movie if ever I saw one) should win Best Picture, bizarrely no-one is talking up the chances for what was undoubtedly the best Hollywood movie of the year: True Grit.

Jeff Bridges reinvents Rooster Cogburn so brilliantly that all memories of John Wayne slip easily away (the original film has not aged well, the uneasy gear-changes as it shifts from comedy to high drama are crassly handled and Wayne was nowhere near the actor that Bridges is). But it's a meaty and obvious role, so we shouldn't get too carried away in singing Bridge's praises for it.

Whereas Roger Deakins deserves a cinematography Oscar for his brilliant recreation and reinvention of the Cinemascope Western.

And is it just me, or has Matt Damon's rather brilliant turn been unfairly overlooked? His LeBoeuf is a fascinatingly complex character, part-paedophile and all pompously self-important ego:

Damon isn't frightened of roles that make him look pretty ugly and pretty human, and of course the Academy finds that hard to pigeonhole. Glen Campbell in the original was piss-poor so Damon didn't have to do too much to beat him. But he took LeBoeuf and ran with it, making it a central part of the film without seeming to try.

Maybe Colin Firth has some stiffer competition this year?