2008 Oscar Predictions

2008 Oscar Predictions: It's that time of year again: Academy Award predictions. The fun thing lately has been the predictions since the actual Oscar telecast itself hasn't been worth watching since David Letterman actually made it entertaining over a decade ago.

(Apparently, making the Oscar telecast entertaining is an ever bigger sin than making it the most boring and unfunny four hours of television every year since Dave has never been asked back, whereas Whoopi Goldberg kept getting asked back even though each successive hosting job by her topped the previous as the worst Oscar telecast since 1984's legendary debacle.)

Best Actor.

Last year was a weird year for my predictions. While I technically got four out of five actors right, I picked Leonardo DiCaprio for The Departed whereas he got a nomination for his diamond movie. And I was foolish enough to think the staid Academy would have the balls to pick the man who actually did give the best performance of the year last year, Sacha Baron Cohen for Borat.

What an idiot I was to think that the Oscar voters would actually nominate the most clearly deserving person of the year! Instead, they nominated Ryan Gosling for Half Nelson. (That's not a knock against Gosling, by the way, I haven't yet seen Half Nelson.) This year Best Actor is probably the toughest nut to crack, aside from the obvious winner, Daniel Day-Lewis. (Man, I've got to stop thinking that obvious has anything to do with winning an Oscar.)

If I had made this list two weeks ago I would have placed Denzel Washington as a sure-fire, but in the past few days it has come out that American Gangster is roughly 99% fiction, which isn't good for a movie based on a true story. That may hurt the movie's chances more than Denzel, but I'm willing to go out on a limb here and suspect that his Oscar nod will be corrupted by this development as well. Lately, the Oscars have fallen in love with Johnny Depp and appear to believe that he can do no wrong.