The Weekend Review: Five Things that this Weekend's Golden Globes Tell Us About the Upcoming Academy Awards

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

It's that time of the year again.  While everybody else is hitting the gym and counting calories, I'm tuning into the movie awards season while polishing off the last Christmas cookies.  The kiddy awards - hosted by the various critics circles and trade guilds - have all had their say, and even the Golden Globes wrapped up on Sunday, leaving just the elephant in the room to weigh in on the movies of 2014.

And with the Academy's Thursday announcement looming large on the horizon, everybody seems to be scrambling to make some sense out of the field of potential nominees.  Will Guardians of the Galaxy snag a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination?  Is Into the Woods really Best Picture material?  Will Interstellar be this year's populist nomination (ala Inception or The Help)?

While I certainly don't have all of the answers, the Hollywood Foreign Press might have at least some of them.  While their record at predicting Oscar winners is admittedly spotty at best - correctly predicting 8 of the 21st Century's Best Picture winners - it is at least as good a predictor as some awards and better than most.  Looking back on the winners and losers from this last weekend might shed some much-needed light on which films to keep an eye on at this year's Academy Awards.

5)  Don't count out Grand Budapest Hotel.  I have never been a Wes Anderson fan.  His films are quirky for the sole purpose of being different and come off as insufferably smug.  The best of them, 2012's Moonrise Kingdom, was only just alright, while the are decidedly worse.

There's no denying, however, that I seem to be in the extreme minority of opinion among cinephiles, many of whom find him a breath of fresh air amongst mainstream blockbusters and overly produced prestige films.  His three Oscar nominations - for The Royal Tenenbaums, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and the aforementioned Moonrise Kingdom - not to mention Grand Budapest Hotel's win for Best Musical or Comedy at this year's Golden Globes, are testaments to that fact.  But while the Academy seems fond of Anderson's writing, they seem somewhat less enamored with his films as a whole: none of which have ever earned a Best Picture Nomination.  While Grand Budapest Hotel is a pretty safe best for a writing nomination, its chances at the big prize are considerably more dubious.

4)  Michael Keaton is back.  I still have no idea what happened to Michael Keaton.  He seemed to be everywhere in the 80s and 90s, between Mr. Mom, Beetlejuice, Batman, Batman Returns, Multiplicity and Jackie Brown, you could hardly miss him.  After a thoroughly disappointing Jack Frost, however, he seemed to disappear completely: popping up for only the odd TV or voice over appearance.  With Birdman, however, he's resurfaced in a big way.

I've been predicting Keaton for Best Actor since seeing his utterly mesmerizing performance in the film, and for good reason.  Varying from subtle to explosive, Keaton's turn as the has-been Riggan unnervingly draws upon his own celebrity: playing a character who might as well be called Michael Keaton.  It's basically what Seth Rogen does in all of his movies, only good this time.  His Globe win, coupled with the myriad of other accolades his performance has justly earned, make his chances of winning an Oscar just this side of inevitable.

3)  Leviathan is safe (as long as last year's favorite doesn't rear its ugly head).  Best Foreign Language Film has always been an odd category, since its nomination criteria is just so radically different from pretty much every other category.  This is how, despite winning the Palme d'Or (essentially the Nobel Prize in film) and generating some dark horse buzz for Best Picture, Blue Is the Warmest Color was deemed ineligible for the category that it was inevitably going to win.

This is why last year's favorite is the only film that can really spoil Leviathan's inevitable Best Foreign Language Film win.  Despite losing out to Winter Sleep at the Cannes Film Festival this summer, in the months since it has garnered an incredibly broad following among the exact type of film goers that largely compose the Academy's voting body.  Unless the Ghost of Oscars Past rules lawyers its way into competition, Leviathan seems to already have this category in the bag.

2)  The Lego Movie might not be as safe as we originally thought.  Sunday's biggest upset wasn't for Best Actor, Director or even film.  It was for Animated Feature.  Despite being an uncannily strong year for animation, the front runner was always presumed to be The Lego Movie - the surprise Winter release that became a runaway financial and critical success for the creative team behind 21 Jump Street and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

But with How to Train Your Dragon 2 winning the animation prize, all bets for the Oscars are off.  I still consider the The Lego Movie to be the leader of the animated pack, but it's now running a considerably more neck-and-neck race against the Dreamworks sequel.  Both are exceptional films, especially in their field, but it would be a real shame if one of the best movies of 2014 loses out in the only category it has a realistic chance of winning.

1)  Boyhood is the film to beat.  This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who's been paying attention to the year's preliminary movie awards.  Boyhood has been steamrolling its competition for going on its second month now.  And while certainly gimmicky - it was shot intermittently over the course of 12 years, allowing for its entire cast to age in real-time - it's the kind of gimmick that the Academy voters turn out to see.

Realistically, there's very little that will turn the tide of Boyhood's inevitable success.  Birdman probably has the best chance of stealing the top prize from it, and maybe - just maybe - Interstellar, if Academy voters were as blown away by it as mainstream audiences were (unlikely at best).  This is one film whose success I'm not especially keen on betting against.

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