Kathmandu:

Right so the 24th is Oscar Night and we will have yet another yearly event that is important but terribly, terribly flawed. Before he became one of the Best Scriptwriters (if not the best), William Goldman used to be my favourite author who wrote classics such as Marathon Man and The Princess Bride. He has worked in Hollywood and written scripts for movies like Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid for which he won an Oscar. He wrote about the Oscars.

For example his first rule is that, “Nobody knows anything”.

Studio bosses, so-called insiders make wild guesses but they don’t actually know if a script, movie, actor, actress or anything involved in a film is going to be either a commercial success or a prize winner, which doesn’t mean that it was a Box Office hit.

Goldman also wrote that everyone involved in a film hoped it would win at the Box Office or (a far second behind) get some kind of recognition like the Oscar, Golden Globe et cetera. Because if the film did well at either, everyone in it got a chance to work again. Goldman calls it, “The great What’s Next factor”.

This year’s Oscars have critic raving about There Will Be Blood, which is distinctly a class film but so far Atonement has won the Best Picture at the number of festivals and it is the kind of movie that brings people into the movie hall.

There Will Be Blood has eight Oscar nominations as does The Coen Brothers, No Country For Old Men. I personally feel the latter is a brilliant film but it didn’t do much to bring in money. The great thing about the Coen Brothers is Javier Bardem who is the baddie and is the most villainous villain in recent cinema. He is up against a fantastic performance by Tom Wilkinson as an elderly man having a break town in Michael Clayton, another Best Picture nominee with George Clooney nominated as Best Actor. The Academy is made up of Hollywood people and Clooney is a favourite with them, which might swing the vote for him and away from competitors Daniel Day-Lewis who plays a crooked oilman in There Will Be Blood and a never before performance by Oscar winner Johnny Depp, who sings his role in the fantastic Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises in a tightly controlled performance and Tommy Lee Jones in In The Valley Of Elah in a very different role from what he’s used to playing are also contenders.

The great Cate as in Cate Blanchett has two nominations — one for Best Actress in the historical movie Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Best Supporting Actress in the Bob Dylan film I’m Not There where she plays one of the six actors who showed different aspects of the singer. Her competition is Marion Cotillard, who plays French singer Edith Piaff in La Vie En Rose, Julie Christie in Away From Her where the great actress makes a return as an old lady sleeping into Alzheimers disease. Ellen Page in her teenage role as a pregnant Juno and Laura Linney in The Savages. The current thinking is if she doesn’t get in the leading category,

she will be in the supporting category where her closest rivals are Saoirse Ronan in Atonement and Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton. Also in there Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone and Ruby Dee in American Gangster.

So having read all of the above, let’s go back to and end with William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything”.