In order to comprehend the intricate working of how Oscars, especially categories such as Best Picture and Best Actor, are doled out you could either dedicate a better part of your day to understand methods of statisticians or simply watch a thirty seconds clip of Rick Grevais' BBC sitcom called Extras. The show follows the antics of Andy (Grevais) and Maggie (Ashley Jensen) who are extras on films sets and often get to rub shoulders in the most unlikely way with stars such as Kate Winslet and Samuel L. Jackson playing themselves. In one of the episodes both wax eloquent about Kate Winslet using her profile to get a film on Holocaust made. While the two extras gush Winstlet informs them the only reason she is doing this is, you guessed it, is for an Oscar. Winslet goes on to say, 'Schindler's 'Bloody' List, Pianist... Oscars coming out of their bloody a*se.' Come to think of it she does have a point. Oscars have always played it safe and politically correct.
Amongst Christian Bale (American Hustle), Bruce Dern (Nebraska), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street), Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club) this year's nominees make up one of the most interesting line-ups of the recent past. The list has a veteran, Dern, a relative unknown, Ejiofor, and top box-office draws and the fact that more than half of them are based on real-life characters and situations makes it better. Barring Christian Bale it'd be safe to suggest that everyone else has perhaps pitched in the performance of a lifetime. Considering everything ideally speaking there shouldn't be a clear winner and yet the result is quite clear. For me it'd be a tough toss-up between Bruce Dern and Leonardo DiCaprio but when you have someone like Matthew McConaughey playing a homophobe Texan redneck who ends up contracting AIDS and finds a pillar of support in a transgender woman (Jared Leto) then everything else pales in comparison. Usually when stars such as DiCaprio play complex characters like Jordan Belfort, a Wall Street broker who swindled millions from the average American and splurged it all in ways you and I couldn't ever imagine, they try and make you sympathize with them. Big stars often believe that somewhere deep within such criminals lies a sliver of humanity that would somehow convince you to forgive their transgressions. But in the hands of Martin Scorsese DiCaprio lets go of himself and never really cares about how bad he comes across. Such display of fearlessness is very rare in mainstream cinema and sadly often goes unappreciated. Similarly Dern filters his entire lifetime of being an actor in small moments across the length of Nebraska, which is also an elegy for the state of affairs in small town United States. The starkness of the film, which Alexander Payne shot in Black & White, resonates loudly with the bleak existence that Woody Grant has. Like the country he dedicated his life to, Woody, too, has nothing exciting to look forward to but ends up living what could be his last few days to the fullest.
Keeping Oscar's tradition chances of either McConaughey or Ejiofor lapping up the statuette are far greater than both Dern and DiCaprio. Irrespective of McConaughey's riveting Ron Woodroof, a true-life homophobic character, who's not only diagnosed with AIDS but in the last days of his life ends up showing compassion towards homosexual members of his Dallas Buyers Club that distributed unapproved pharmaceutical drugs to fellow suffers, this one has Oscar written all over it. Imagine Philadelphia's Andrew Beckett as portrayed by Tom Hanks and Joe Miller as played by Denzel Washington or Rain Man's Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman) and Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) rolled into one... you know what I mean. Now, isn't that Oscar fodder made in heaven? Equally delectable is the prospect of Chiwetel Ejiofor winning for his captivating depiction of Solomon Northup, a freeborn African American man enslaved in the American south for 12 years. The reason this one works is exactly the opposite of the pre-fabricated reaction mongering caveat that a Dallas Buyers Club operates on. Neither Ejiofor nor director Steve McQueen try to attract undue attention to Solomon Northup's misfortunes and like the sad history it depicts, his pathos is just kept there for you to see. This is an important performance in an important film and ergo an Oscar would be more than well deserved.
What also makes Ejiofor and McConaughey front-runners is the fact that historically the Best Director winner at the Director's Guild of America has an 80% impact on the Oscar in the same category and the said winner has a 75-80% shot of winning the Best Picture. And conversely the Best Actor winner has a 80% impact on the Best Picture Oscar and this year Alfanso Cuaron won the DGA Best Director for Gravity and as Gravity has no contender in Best Actor (Sandra Bullock is up for Best Actress but then this category has little influence on other categories) and the director of Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée) isn't in the running... Oh, let's just stick to the Kate Winslet logic from Extras, which has another Oscar winning tip towards the end. Winslet notices a cast member's sister who has cerebral palsy and says that is another way of winning an Oscar. She tells Andy, 'Think about it... Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot... Oscar. Dustin Hoffman... Rain Man... Oscar. John Mills. Ryan's Daughter. Oscar. Seriously. You are guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental.' (See 13:39)
PS: I still feel DiCaprio might just nudge the others. Here's why
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