To me, the most accomplished film among the Oscar contenders is Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, which means it's not going to win big. The film, which is in Thai cinemas now, stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a fastidious couturier whose obsessive quest for artistic perfection hits a snag when he falls in love with a waitress. It's an exquisite drama, a sophisticated study of human impulses, obsessions and contradictions, constructed with formal elegance to reflect the interior of a man's emotion through a story that takes place almost entirely in a townhouse.
It's a long shot for a film like Phantom Thread to win best picture (and Anderson to win best director), though my great wish is that my guess is pathetically wrong. Usually, the Oscars are a pompous pageant to celebrate the middle-brow -- a roster of innocuous, risk-averse films that come in decent, prestigious packages and that make Hollywood feel good about itself -- and Phantom Thread is too cryptic, too layered for that standard. When Barry Jenkins' Moonlight scored an upset last year over La La Land, one was tempted to interpret it as a beginning of a positive shift -- and yet it'd be too rash to assume that Hollywood, in the wake of equality demand and all that, is on the road to genuine recalibration.
Out of the nine best picture nominees, three stand a good chance. The Shape Of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Get Out (the rest are Lady Bird, Dunkirk, Darkest Hour, The Post and Call Me By Your Name). I find The Shape Of Water and Three Billboards (which will open next week) to be tailored Oscar packages: uplifting, mildly provocative, with resonance about the contemporary US, and totally warm and harmless at heart. In short, nice and banal. Get Out is more inventive, a genre subversion in which a black man is trapped in an all-white suburb, and it will be fun to have a horror film winning best picture. And really, the political nature of the film will give it a big boost as the bitter memory of #OscarSoWhite still leaves a trace in the industry's mouth.
Then there's Dunkirk. Blow by blow with the rest of the nominees, Christopher Nolan's evacuation drama has fine cinematic acumen, especially its three temporal shifts, and while I thought it was at times abstract and distanced, my admiration for it has grown in recent weeks when it is put in context with other titles in the running.
In the acting department, the results are pretty much locked: Gary Oldman for best actor, Frances McDormand for best actress. Yes, it's pretty boring -- and Vicky Krieps, who answers Day-Lewis' commanding presence in Phantom Thread with feminine defiance, wasn't even nominated.
The real revelation of the year is of course Timothee Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name, a young actor who didn't just act in the role of a teenager coming to terms with his desire -- Chalamet understands his character and inhabits him with insight and sensitivity. There's no complicated technique, no artifices of facial expression and body language; the waves of bliss, confusion and sorrow simply flow out of him. Too bad the Oscar voters will prefer bombast over grace, and technique over spontaneity.
Willem Dafoe will vie head-to-head with Sam Rockwell in the supporting role. Dafoe plays a hotel caretaker in The Florida Project, a film about an impoverished mother and daughter living in a cheap motel near Disneyland. It's a film of raw energy and heartbreak, so naturally it has been completely ignored in other major categories. Rockwell, meanwhile, plays a racist cop in Three Billboards, and the momentum has swung in his favour since January. I would prefer Dafoe to win, but Rockwell, more expressive and sentimental, will.
This year, these titles circulating the awards season have already been released in Thailand, except Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which will open next Thursday. Even in the documentary category, two front-running titles have been shown here (Faces Places, a French story about village life and photography by Agnes Varda and JR; and Icarus, a sports doping story, which is on Netflix). Here's a summary of my predictions:
