Academy Awards Picks: 'Argo' for Best Picture?

For movie lovers, there’s no better time than this now – Academy Awards time.

For some, the Oscars has become a fashion show, a chance to critique what your favorite actor or actress is wearing. For others, it’s an exercise in celebrity watching.

But if you love movies, Sunday Feb. 24 – yep, just a few more days! – is truly your opportunity to indulge and share in your love and passion of the cinema.

The past year has been a great one for the movies – from great summer block-busters to sweeping musicals to thought-provoking and illuminating looks at our nation’s history.

With that said, here are our picks for this year’s Academy Awards.

Supporting Actor: One can make a great case for all the nominees in this field
but our pick goes to Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained Where has this guy
been all our lives? He’s simply one of the best actors around today and proof
of that is his portrayal of the mysterious bounty hunter in “Django.” This movie is over-the-top, bloody and gory and yet Waltz is never overshadowed by it and actually helps ground Quentin Tarantino’s excesses. Can’t wait to see what he does next!

Supporting Actress: Sally Field is great in Lincoln and a strong favorite to win
this category but Anne Hathaway had the much harder job and she pulled it off
with amazing style. It’s not just her acting, but her singing that gives her the edge in this category. Hathaway had a great year with another fine performance in the Dark Knight but even with her short screen time, she steals Les Miserables”

Best Actor: Really? Do we need to ask? Daniel Day Lewis is remarkable in
Lincoln, going from grieving father to conflicted leader to an icon for the
ages. He is Lincoln. Another great performance by one of our finest actors.

Best Actress: In a film full of dangerous SEALS, Jessica Chastain is the tough, steely heart of Zero Dark Thirty. At first torn about the methods used by the CIA to elicit information from terrorists, Chastain’s slow but steady transformation into a win-at-all-costs soldier in the war on terrorism is mesmerizing, culminating in her heartbreaking final scenes.

Best Director:
He doesn’t need any more accolades and he’s already accomplished so much in a legendary career, but let’s give Steven Spielberg another award for his trophy
room. Some directors had the flashier movies, and some had the meatier, more
dramatic scripts. But really, no one had a tougher subject and still hit it out
of the park. Many expecting Lincoln to be a comprehensive look at one of
nation’s great presidents. Yet it was a tightly focused look at politics and
the art of compromise and it was compelling filmmaking.

Best Picture:  Some would argue that there’s no clear favorite, no clear overwhelming winner. They’re wrong. Argo stands clearly above the rest – a rousing, crowd-pleasing movie that was tense, moving, hilarious and scary. It took equally insightful looks at both Hollywood and the deadly games nations play and did it with intelligence and wit. And despite knowing that the Americans got out of Iran, the final escape was an arm-chair gripping, edge-of-your-seat sequence that had moviegoers applauding. What more can you ask for?

Bonus Pick: Patch Goes Pop will be cheering if Skyfall wins for Best Original Song. It’s the best Bond song in years and if the producers had any brains, they’d lock up Adele as the singer for the next three or four Bond movies.

Patch Goes Pop can be reached at patchgoespop@yahoo.com