Oscars 2007: The nominees

So what do we make of them? As fortune would have it - and it's not a given - I'm up to date with most of the big hitters this year. Here is the partial shortlist for the 79th Academy Awards (I don't really have anything to say on Best documentary short of Best makeup), to be held at the Kodak Theatre, Los Angeles on 25 February:

Best picture
Babel
I am a huge admirer of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu, having loved Amores Perros and his English-speaking debut 21 Grams, but I can't help but think he's stretched the chewing gum too far with this globetrotting epic. As with his previous films, it's a number of seemingly disparate stories interlinked by a tragedy (I'll say no more), a format I am a sucker for, but in playing it this time across three continents, he's overloaded the film. It's beautifully made, and he elicits warm-blooded, powerful performances from his actors, but in aiming for global significance Inarittu veers into narrative artifice. One of the connections is so obvious, you'll guess it before it happens, and another is so tenuous it's almost laughable when it's revealed. This is a pity, as he's clearly a highly intelligent, valuable talent to have knocking about in Hollywood. I just say Babel isn't quite as profound as it thinks it is, and he's in danger of becoming an arthouse M. Night Shyamalan.
The Departed
Again, you've gotta love Marty, but let's be brutal, he went off the boil some years ago. After Casino. It's criminal that he's never won best director out of five goes so far, but it would be equally wrong if he won it this year for what is a fairly standard retread of the violent ethnic gangster movie which he made his own. Yes, the action moves to Boston, and to Irish-American thugs as opposed to Italian-American ones, but in doing so we jettison a good deal of grace and style. What director worth his salt would have allowed Ray Winstone to get away with such a ropey American accent throughout the film? It's so offputting, and undercuts the power of the drama unfolding around him. Jack Nicholson is just Jack Nicholson. I didn't much like Gangs Of New York either, finding it full of bluster and self-importance. I hope Scorsese finds his mojo again, and I sincerely believe he will, but honouring him for The Departed, with that animated rat scuttling across his Boston skyline, would only encourage him to coast.
Letters From Iwo Jima
Seeing this on Monday.
Little Miss Sunshine
It's heartening to see a low-budget, Sundance-bought indie hit nominated for the big one, and I wish it well, but it's nobody's idea of best picture. It's entertaining, and smarly-scripted, and it took five years to make, but at the end of the day, it's a kooky road trip. Mind you, it's certainly conservative enough to win awards. I enjoyed it, but it cops out of commenting on the creepy junior beauty pageant around which its story revolves, and descends into slapstick as if it's run out of ideas.
The Queen
By default - and assuming Iwo Jima is as emotionless as its companion, Flags Of Our Fathers - this is my choice for best picture. You know I like it, and it's good to see Stephen Frears back on top form after Mrs Henderson, but it would be an underwhelming Oscar year if this won. It's just a film about the Queen. It's hardly Gandhi or Chariots Of Fire now, is it? Helen Mirren deserves every accolade they can throw at her, however.

Best director
Clint Eastwood, Letters From Iwo Jima
Stephen Frears, The Queen
Paul Greengrass, United 93
I'd love to see Greengrass win this, although I suspect he won't, not with poor old ungarlanded Marty hanging around, looking old and needy. The usual argument: how can a film be nominated for best picture and not best director? Surely if it's one of the five best pictures, its director is one of the five best directors? If Greengrass is one of the five, why isn't United 93 (which you'll know was one of my favourite films of 2006)? His Hollywood career is just starting, so he'll live to wobble a Steadicam another day if he doesn't win.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Babel
Martin Scorsese, The Departed

Best actor
Leonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond
I will make an effort to see this during the week. It appears he's nominated for doing an accent.
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
Strike me down and take away my privileges, but I don't even know what this is!
Peter O'Toole, Venus
He will win, whether he deserves to or not, mark my words.
Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness
I think there's an outside chance that I will never watch this film. I'm not sure I could take it.
Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland
Magnificent, and in a year without a 74-year old legend in the category, it would be in the bag. This is a terrific film: the combination of documentary-style realism and Hollywood thriller works, and Whitaker's turn as Idi Amin is terrifying and full-bodied. There's a little grandstanding, but that seems in character. (I shall declare an interest - one of the film's producers is connected to something I am working on right now.)

Best actress
Penelope Cruz, Volver
I hope she wins, otherwise the much vaunted Latino revolution this year shall amount to very little. It's always cockle-warming when a foreign-language film lands in the mainstream categories, and despite her Hollywood dalliances and relationship with the Scientologist, Cruz came from Spanish cinema and always seems at her best there. If you want a juicy female part, Almodovar's always been your man, and this one was a gift. Even if she does mime the singing bit.
Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal
There's no doubting the power of the Dame's characterisation in this bourgeois potboiler - her avenging lesbian is both sad and scary - I just worry that the film, with all the right credentials, is being slightly overrated. Also, try to avoid seeing the trailer, as it literally shows the entire film in precis, including the ending. I think that's such a cowardly own-goal, and I suspect it's the studio's fault. Let the people see the film and enjoy the story unfolding! It's a good film, but a little too tasteful, and for my money, they make a dash for the end which saps it of its dramatic heft. (Can you sap heft?)
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
The film is shallow but entertaining as hell. Streep is actually more restrained and subtle than you might guess, and a worthy enough nominee, but it's not a winner. Not up against Her Majesty.
Kate Winslet, Little Children
A very fine American accent, and an honest performance, one of Winslet's best. I'm not sure why this didn't make the best picture list. It's a beautifully constructed story, with a few surprises that aren't given away in the trailer. Perhaps the reliance on narration was a minus, but overall, a quality act.

Best supporting actress
Adriana Barraza, Babel
She plays the Mexican nanny, and really goes through the mangle. A fine performance, but even though I've not seen Dreamgirls, because it's not nominated for the other top awards, and because Jennifer Hudson was on American Idol, I feel she may clinch this category.
Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal
No more or less than we've come to expect from the excellent Cate Blanchett, her willowy art teacher is entirely credible, if blown off the screen by Judi Dench.
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine
Terrific, precocious turn from the nine-year-old (she must have been seven or eight when she made it). If she wins, it will be stunt voting, but she could. I expect she's down to a size zero by now and has had her face lifted.
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel
A curious segment the Japanese one, but there's little doubting the skill of this newcomer's turn as a deaf mute teenager trying to lose her virginity and cope with her mother's death. That's two non-English performances in one category if you count sign language. Truly, the Oscars are growing up. (I don't think she's a deaf mute in real life. Is she?)

Best supporting actor
Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine
Fun, but too easy to give an old guy an Oscar for playing a comedy, drug-taking granddad.
Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children
This is what a supporting actor is all about, a little-known character player, previously seen in Maniac Cop 3, in his forties, essaying the hardest part in the film: the paedophile. If there's any justice, he'll win it.
Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond
Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls
Mark Wahlberg, The Departed
Another turn with great impact, and lots of swearing, but I don't see him winning. Haven't seen Eddie Murphy or Djimon Hounsou, but I'd say the latter has carved a good career out for himself since Amistad and might have the Academy's vote.

Best adapted screenplay
Borat
Although "adapted" from a character on the telly, and from improvisations, it's Borat's only nomination, and might earn Peter Baynham and pals a walk up the aisle. I hope it does. It's a brilliant film. It's not the best adapted screenplay though, is it? Not really. Hard to know how to judge this category unless you've read the books the screenplays were adapted from.
Children of Men
I'd plump for this, as the film is a smart piece of work (again, ruined by the content of its trailer), and adapting a book about the future written in 1992 is a task in itself.
The Departed
Little Children
Notes on a Scandal
Some great lines and speeches in this, but did Patrick Marber just lift them from the book? And does that matter? Never having adapted a book into a screenplay, I'm guessing it's fucking difficult.

Best original screenplay
Babel
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
Here's where this film should be, winning an award for its script, which is very witty and full of invention, even if the ending is a cop-out.
The Queen
Pan's Labyrinth
Haven't seen this, despite being ordered to do so by more than one person. I can't generate the enthusiasm. All those funny looking monsters. I will wait for the DVD and catch up. I hope Mark Kermode isn't reading this.

Best visual effects
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Poseidon
Even though I hated this and everything it stood for, there's little doubting the quality of the CGI. When the wave hits, I mean, wow.
Superman Returns

Best cinematography
The Black Dahlia
Children of Men
This looked stunning, I thought, in its muted greys. Really miserable. I'd be happy if it won, but I have only seen one of the other nominees, The Prestige (what a disappointment that was), so I cannot realistically judge.
The Illusionist
Pan's Labyrinth
The Prestige

Don't hold me to my predictions. It's just a game.

Apologies for having to switch to registered users only for the comments from now on, but moderating comments wasn't enough, and I'm tired of the anonymous abuse I've been having to deal with of late. I'm not sure what the ramifications are, and I expect traffic will slow down a bit, but if it's a problem, email me direct. I'm just sick of it.

Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment - movies, theatre, music - is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socialising presence of women.


The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
My first book of 2007. Although it's in hardback (it was published here in August last year), I have been carting it around in my bag since taking receipt before Christmas. It's one of those books that makes you wish your train would be delayed. One of those books that, even though your eyes were starting to fall asleep on the sofa when you decided to go up to bed, you force yourself to read a few more pages before going to sleep. And one of those books that, conversely, you wish would never end. Written in the clear-headed, fact-checked but occasionally poetic style of a New Yorker staffer (which Wright is), The Looming Tower traces the events of September 11, 2001 back to their source, and although written from an American perspective, avoids the usual sullen wound-licking and attempts to understand the motives of al-Qaeda.

The quote above is about Saudi Arabia, where Osama bin Laden grew up, a well-off, privileged young man, but one whose father earned his money and status through hard work (he was a builder by eventual royal appointment in the kingdom, who lived a frugal lifestyle despite his wealth). But the roots of al-Qaeda must be traced back to Egypt, and the father of the radical Islamic movement Sayyid Qutb: a middle-class, educated civil servant and writer who learned his hatred of America while studying there in the 1940s. It was modernity he took exception to ("secularism, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the sexes, tolerance, materialism") and returned radicalised to Egypt, a country still under the yoke of Western colonialism. After Nasser took control in a military coup against the bloated ruling class in 1952, Qtub hoped for "a just dictatorship", but Nasser moved the country towards a socialist, secular society and Qtub's cohorts in the Shia law-favouring Muslim Brotherhood turned against the leader they had helped to put in place.

Qtub ended up in prison after a failed assassination attempt on Nasser, and it was here, brutalised, tortured and horrified at the Muslim guards' treatment of other Muslim prisoners, that he wrote his apocalyptic manifesto, Ma'alim fi a'Tariq (Milestones), which, among other assertions based on his own dark reading of the Quran, stated that any Muslim serving Nasser was not a true Muslim. Thus, did he make enemies of anyone who didn't agree with him and set the clock back to the days of the Prophet Mohammed, before which the world existed in "a period of ignorance and barbarity", jahiliyya. When Qutb was hanged on August 29, 1966, the book seems to say, al-Qaeda was effectively born. "My words will be stronger if they kill me," he said.

Wright carefully takes us from this point to the day the Twin Towers fell. charting the growth of al-Qaeda and giving a vivid insight into the incompetence, delusion and in-fighting that hallmarked its early years during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, when bin Laden and his closest cohorts would camp out in the path of Soviet missiles, inviting martyrdom. The Mujahideen were not impressed by what they saw as these rich Saudi thrillseekers. It is amusing, but also chilling, to read of bin Laden's first fatwa against America (which, after all, as Wright points out, had never been a colonial power, and Saudi Arabia had never been colonised; it was also a deeply religious country, and about as fond of the Russians as he was in the late 70s and early 80s): "What is required," he told his followers in 1989, the "hero" returned from vanquishing the Russians singlehandedly, "is to wage an economic war against America. We have to boycott all American products." I've tried this. Can't be done. It's amazing to think that the future public enemy number one was advocating the boycott of Campbell's soup and Jolly Green Giant sweetcorn in 1989. Seven years later, he declared war on America from his cave, the industrially-excavated Lion's Den, in Afghanistan - and made good on that declaration two years later. "Any American we see," he said in 1989, "we should notify of our complaints. We should write to American embassies."

If only America and its allies hadn't felt the need to enter the Gulf to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in order to protect its oil interests, thus stationing its troops inside friendly Saudi Arabia, September 11, 2001 might have just seen a flood of angry letters arriving on its shores, signed "Osama". As it was, the methodology of al-Qaeda (which means "the base") grew into murderous jihad and you cannot fault Bin Laden's logic for hitting America the way he did. He reasoned that "two or three sharp blows" would cause this great country, defeated in Vietnam and thus phobic about the sight of troops in body bags, to "flee in panic" from its Middle Eastern outposts. "It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death," he worked out.

The Looming Tower makes no excuses for bloodthirsty, crazed terrorism, but neither does it let America off the hook. You might argue that the real villain of the piece is macho office politics, the kind that allowed personality clashes between the CIA and the FBI and childish retention of information that might otherwise have alerted the authorities to the presence of known al-Qaeda operatives inside the United States after 1999, bent on making a big statement. Until reading this book, I never quite understood the difference between the CIA and the FBI. Now I do. The former gathers intelligence outside the US, the latter prosecutes criminals within. Thus, the former doesn't like to share with the latter, for fear of the latter compromising the former's sources by taking intelligence to court as evidence in a federal prosecution. You can understand the logic, but not taken to the extreme that led to this devastating outcome. John O'Neill, philandering FBI chieftan played by Harvey Keitel in US miniseries The Road to 9/11, is painted as a thwarted hero. If anyone could have joined the dots, given the facts, it was him. Bin Laden's would-be nemesis, he perished in the Twin Towers, symbolically, having retired from the Bureau and been handed a lucrative semi-retirement private security job at the doomed building in Manhattan. You couldn't make it up.

I actually believe it is a dereliction of duty not to be interested in all this stuff. Al-Qaeda want to kill us and, some might say, with good reason. It seems clear to me, as an atheist who has never read the Quran, that this ancient text, like the Bible, can be interpreted in many different ways, and there lies the problem. This book paints extremists like the Taliban in an unforgiving light, and for good reason (their regime in Afghanistan was barbaric and, frankly, ludicrous, putting men in prison until their beards grew to a suitable length, that sort of thing). It also has bin Laden down as a master of public relations and spin, stage-managing his appearances before the media as brilliantly, albeit on a budget, as any Stalin or Hitler. Because he is not a head of state, what will happen when, as seems like, his kidneys kill him off? His arch collaborator Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of al-Jihad and "al-Qaeda's ideological leader" seems the obvious man to take over - albeit his whereabouts are unknown. He is, after all, the one who in 1995 "reversed the language of the Prophet and opened the door to universal murder" when he cleverly rubber-stamped the once forbidden act of suicide, using his great theological intellect to excuse suicides from the eternal damnation previously thought to be their fate, so long as they died "in pursuit of true faith." Not having a faith, I find all of this mind-boggling, but that which we do not understand we can have no hope of defeating. The leaders of this movement are all intelligent, educated men who relish a theological debate over lamb and flatbread. They are not savages. It would be easier if they were.

So, The Looming Tower has multiplied my knowledge of so many pressing issues. It does not linger long on the destruction of the World Trade Center, although there are gory details that had passed me by, like firemen being killed instantly when people jumping from the building landed on them. Rather, it's all about how we got here, a subject in which many political leaders seemed uninterested at the time, hell-bent instead upon vengeance. How do you defeat an enemy with no country?

Of course, all of this assumes that al-Qaeda actually flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, which may not be the case. That's another entry, I think.

The living is easy
I don't go to the theatre very often. I go to see musicals even less often. But on Saturday night we saw Porgy & Bess at the Savoy in London's glittering West End from the Dress Circle and it was tremendously entertaining. I don't know the play - I've never even seen the 1959 Otto Preminger film, which I understand the Gershwins didn't much rate - so it was a brand new experience for me. It's amazing how many of the songs I knew - Summertime, It Ain't Necessarily So, Plenty Of Nuthin' - and that I'd absorbed the name Catfish Row, where the poor black workers lived in South Carolina, throwing dice (or "bones"), mending nets, stabbing each other and singing and dancing. Having been with my dad to see Spamalot before Christmas, I am coming to the conclusion that if you're going to spend a small fortune going to a West End theatre, you might as well see a musical. That way, for your money, you get to see a lot of amazing physical exertion and skill, and listen to a fantastic hidden orchestra. (For the record, the other musicals I have seen in that there London are: The Buddy Holly Story with my mum and dad, Tommy, Shock-Headed Peter, and Taboo. The non-musicals plays I have seen are: Waiting For Godot with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Gasping by Ben Elton, starring Hugh Laurie, Panic On The 39th Floor by Neil Simon, Death Of A Salesman with Brian Dennehy, Stuff Happens by David Hare, and a Steven Berkhoff production of Kafka's The Trial years ago. There may be some others, but the list is not a long one. Maybe I should go more.) So, thoroughly enjoyed Porgy, which I understand is really an opera, but I've seen one opera, Don Gionvanni at ENO, and you couldn't understand a word of it, so this can't have been one, as I followed it all the way through. But here's the big treat: I felt I recognised the actor playing crippled Porgy so I looked him up in the programme during the interval and - yes! - it was Clarke Peters! Clarke Peters! Lester Freamon, fastidious, dolls-house-furniture-making detective off of TV's The Wire! Turns out he lives over here, and is something of a regular on the London stage, and he wrote the book for Five Guys Named Moe. So I enjoyed the second half even more for the shallow fact that somebody off my favourite US television series was doing a gig in front of me. What a rich and lovely singing voice he had too, and some excellent, convincing cripple acting too. Hooray. On many levels.

Happy birthday, David Bowie
Sixty years old today. Sometimes I get blase about how important to me David Bowie is, then I remember. I was asked to write 450 words on his musical legacy for today's Independent, which appears to have been printed as written. This is pleasing to me, as my excursions into national newspapers are rare. They asked me to pick five great tracks from his 30-plus years in music, and if you can't be bothered to read the whole piece, here they are:

Life On Mars? (from Hunky Dory, 1971)
Cosmic, piano-led, Ronson-arranged epic, inspired by My Way and one of the most lyrically obtuse pop hits of all-time ("from Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads"?)

Five Years (from Ziggy Stardust, 1972)
Show-stopping, chest-beating vocal performance over ascending, string-assisted apocalyptic ballad. Oh, and it opens the album.

Station To Station (from Station To Station, 1976)
Kraftwerk-acknowledging ten-minute trans-European mutant symphony that introduced the Thin White Duke alter-ego

Ashes To Ashes (from Scary Monsters And Super Creeps, 1980)
A bonfire of his own vanities ("Major Tom's a junkie"), this bendy number one only went and invented the New Romantic movement [They changed this to "helped invent" in the Independent]

Little Wonder (from Earthling, 1997)
Drum'n'bass-driven cut-up rocker with an unnervingly conventional widescreen chorus and a lovely cockney vocal ("I'm gettin' there")

Any favourites to add? I'm also mad about Be My Wife from Low but five choices, that's all we've got.

The Thick Of It: what the f-word is going on?
Fuck. Having watched This Life struggle over 80 minutes, it was life-affirming to see The Thick Of It flourish over 60 minutes. It's certainly not a given that a show which is normally one length should work over a different length, but the quality of the writing and performing are of such a high standard, they pulled it off. That's pulled it off without Chris Langham, the programme's beating heart, or so it once seemed.

In order to compensate - and to fill the extra leg room - the writers created two hapless MPs: Mannion (Roger Allam), the Cameron-style Tory, and Swain (Justin Edwards), Hugh Abbott's junior-minister substitute at the Dept of Social Affairs and Citizenship. It was a simple but inspired move to "open up" and include the Tory opposition, especially as in real life the Tories are creeping up on the government. I've worked with Justin Edwards on The Day The Music Died, and Will Smith (who turned up as a Tory researcher a bit like Will Smith) and Chris Addison on Banter - and I wrote the MTV Awards with Simon Blackwell, one of the show's bedrock scribes, for two years' running, so I felt very close to this as it went out ("Look! Look! It's Will!", that kind of thing), but it didn't get in the way of my enjoyment.

How good to know that a programme as smart and scurrilous and sweary as this can be one of the highlights of the season on BBC. It was cleverly plotted, a fact expertly masked by the hand-held, let's-do-the-sitcom-right-here energy of the presentation, and unlike its spiritual forefather Yes Minister, it wears its dexterity and eloquence very lightly. You are not invited to stand and warmly applaud Sir Humphrey's latest witty speech, the jargon just flies past, only occasionally questioned - Will's character was accused of making up the word "linkjack", which is such an Armando Ianucci construct, I'll put money on it being one of the master's own. And how thrilling to see Peter Capaldi's monstrous Malcolm Tucker on the back foot, robbed of his power base by the PM's impending departure. Now that's character, something you earn over a couple of series. A nod too to Alex McQueen, who plays the PM's adviser, who is unique in that he doesn't swear, and asked what the f-word is going on only when pushed to the very limits of his calm. (There were too many lines to quote, and they go by so fast, but I loved it when he spoke of feeling a sandwich's "heft" before buying it.) Sorry, I can't think of anything to say about it other than positive things.

Where are they now? Oh yeah
This was "event telly" for an entire generation, apparently, and certainly, in our house, there was no Sky-Plus-ing of This Life + 10. We sat down to watch it when it went out. And what a crashing disappointment it was. A feature-length special, it was actually written by Amy Jenkins, who created This Life and will always have her place in the pantheon for that, even though she didn't actually write much of it: five episodes out of a total of 32 over two series, none at all of the second series - the bulk was written by the likes of Richard Zajdlic, Matt Graham, Jimmy Gardner, Joe Ahearne and others, which considering no duff episode ever went out, brings kudos on them for ever more. The problem with this reunion episode was that it was, well, a reunion episode. Once we'd discovered what the five housemates were now up to - Milly a mum (cue: career guilt), Anna a barrister (cue: biological clock), Egg a literary sensation (cue: not-spending-enough-time-with-his-family guilt), Miles a Tory millionaire (cue: not a rich as he seems revelation), Warren a life coach (cue: problems of his own revelation, or not much of a revelation at all) - it was all nostalgia and gear-crunching dramatic shifts, like the attempted suicide and the fall from a horse and the bailiffs arriving, as if they'd been waiting in the wings to come on and play the deus ex machina card for the preceding 80 minutes. By the end of it, I was wishing it would hurry up and end, and I speak as someone who loved these characters in their Portishead heyday. This actually felt as if it was a reunion for the actors rather than the characters - Jack the film star, Andrew the voiceover king, Daniela the square peg actress still waiting to kill off Anna in our imagination, Jason and Amita apparently out of work (I hope she's a mum). It made me sad. I don't blame a single person involved for doing this - not Jenkins, not the cast, not BBC2, not World Productions - it must have seemed like a great idea at the boardroom table, but the reality was an overlong, overindulgent overture whose documentary device wasn't even used realistically and whose only really clever moment was to have Warren scroll through a mid-90s playlist on his iPod. I liked Miles' hair though.

And what happened to Kira, Rachel, O'Donnell and Jo? I feel a reunion special coming on. No, stop it.