. . . off to the races! . . .

The awards season is gearing up! I’ve never been a booster, a sports fan, or an especially spirited follower of competitive events in general, but Oscar season is my Kentucky Derby, my Stanley Cup championship, my Superbowl . . . minus the scary geriatric rock group who, according to the BBC, exceeds age restrictions for standing on the field to see their own half-time show this year.

If you’re a betting person, then from this early vantage point the smart money for Best Picture is on Brokeback Mountain, with Ang Lee nabbing the Best Director award. Brokeback hasn’t opened in town yet (the locals may be hesitant about rushing out to see a homosexual love story between two cowboys), but the film is absolutely tearing through the regional critics associations’ awards, not to mention nods from the Writers and Directors Guilds of America and the Golden Globes. The best actor category looks as though it could come down to Heath Ledger for his role in Brokeback or Philip Seymour Hoffman for his brilliant turn as the title character in Capote. There weren’t a lot of female roles which garnered attention this year–you kind of get the sense the Globes were casting their glance pretty widely–but Reese Witherspon’s name comes up regularly for Walk the Line, as does Felicity Huffman for Transamerica. Witherspoon carried off the emotionally complex role of June Carter with a great deal of grace and common sense, which balanced Joaquin Phoenix’s brooding Johnny Cash. Meanwhile, outside of its gender-bending main character, the premise for Transamerica looked pretty rote: a long car trip during which estranged father (in this case, father in process of sex change) and son express buried feelings and overcome differences to become close. But if I spot the film on video before March, I’ll view it on the basis of critical acclaim for Huffman. Some commentators have expressed surprise that The 40 Year-Old Virgin was nominated for Original Screenplay by the Writers Guild, since the film was heavy on improv. But then, improvised dialogue was a key part of Lost in Translation, which won the Academy Award for Original Screenplay in 2004. I’m not sure if the Academy nomination screenplay list will echo the Writers Guild and Golden Globes’s choices, but strong contenders will be Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, and The Squid and The Whale in the Original category, and Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and A History of Violence under Adapted Screenplays.

It goes without saying that everything in the preceding paragraph is open for revision between now and the awards show.

Speaking of the show itself, I had been fairly confident this was the year for Ellen DeGeneres to host, but thinking about it after the announcement, Jon Stewart made more sense. DeGeneres is more women-friendly than Stewart because of her talk show and her friendly image . . . but then, the show’s viewership probably already skews pretty heavily female (all those pretty dresses!). The hard demographic to get is the 19 to mid-30s male crowd, and Stewart should tap into that. He’s highly literate without coming off as cerebral as, say, Steve Martin, and he can be acerbic but is seen as less edgy than Chris Rock. I think Rock got a bad shake on last year’s show–personally, I thought he was very funny, and if some high-strung, self-serious actor with a pine bough up his posterior can’t take a joke, that’s his problem and not the performer’s. Rock on, Rock.

One film out now that doesn’t have to worry about tapping into the 19-35 year-old male quadrant is Peter Jackson’s magnum opus King Kong. (How’s that for a segue?) As a remake of the 1933 King Kong, Jackson’s film surpasses the imagination of Merian C. Cooper/Edgar Wallace in the depth and shading he adds to his characters, starting with Kong himself. I was cautioned about the racial imagery in the 1933 film before even seeing it, and it was hard to view the movie later without seeing the title character either as an ugly stereotype or unfathomable monster. It sounds contradictory, but Jackson does more to humanize Kong by making him closer to a normal gorilla–an oversized one, sure, but with recognizable animal behaviors and motivations. Actor Andy Serkis provided the physical basis for the character after weeks of studying wild gorillas in Rwanda, and it adds dramatically to the authenticity of the gorilla’s movements and expressions. The bond between Kong and Ann Darrow (played by Naomi Watts) is not sexual, but one of sympathy (Ann for Kong), protection (mutual, at different points in the film), and amusement/affection. In the midst of this complex relationship, the romance between Ann and Jack Driscoll (Adrien Body) is superfluous; writers Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens try to pad the Driscoll character by changing him from the rough-mannered sailor in the original film to an accomplished playwright, but he still exists primarily to rescue Ann from Kong so that the action can move from Skull Island to New York City. The character in the middle of this spectrum, with the improvements to Kong on one end and the dearth of Driscoll on the other, is Carl Denham (Jack Black), the driven film director who endangers Ann and the other members of his cast and crew by taking them to the uncharted island to film his movie. Black adds the right mix of comic and dangerous strains of manic energy to his performance, but we rarely see any side to the character’s personality other than his obsession to complete his perfect movie, the chance to document one of the last remaining pockets of mystery in the world. Black has commented that he based his performance on other driven directors such as Peter Jackson and Orson Welles, and you can definitely see the fingerprints. As much as I’m looking forward to his next performance, in Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny, I’d be glad to see Black in future dramatic roles, as well.

The special effects are amazing, of course (not that we’d expect anything different from a man who’s conjured up entire armies of Uruk Hai), but they feel a little overdone in the film’s middle section on Skull Island. Because . . . why have Kong fight just one T. Rex when he can fight five?! The bug-pit scene also could have been scaled back or even eliminated. I understand his reason for filming the pit–it was a scene that had been cut from the original film. However, it did nothing to inform any of the characters and did not advance the plot (except to narrow down the number of surviving cast members in singularly nasty fashion). The film works best in the scenes between Ann and Kong; the bugs and other creepies really just delayed us in getting to their final tragedy high above the Manhattan skyline.

Some viewers objected to moving the final moments of the film from the top of the Empire State Building to the street below, and of having the Denham character utter the famous line “it was Beauty who killed the Beast” (sic) from the original film. I thought it was a useful way of illustrating again the world coming between Ann and Kong–rather than leaving the camera on Ann falling into an embrace with Driscoll, the street scene emphasizes the cheap nature of Kong’s exploitation, the ruin of dreams, the loss of man’s wonder with the natural world, and Denham’s sudden realization of his inadvertent cruelty. Awfully big themes for a movie about a big ape.