BY Joe Neumaier
Monday, February 28th 2011, 10:35 AM
Movie Reviews,Movie Stars,Celebrity News,Movies,Film Awards,Entertainment Awards,Entertainment,Arts, Entertainment, and Media,Driving Miss Daisy,The Kids Are All Right,Warren Beatty,King George VI,Geoffrey Rush,Colin Firth,American Beauty (Movie),Ben Mezrich,Aaron Sorkin,Gladiator (Movie),Facebook Inc.,The Social Network,Black Swan (Movie),David Fincher,David Seidler,Natalie Portman,Academy Awards,The Kings Speech,Annette Bening,Tom Hooper
Oscars 2011 winners Tom Hooper (l.) and Natalie Portman meant that David Fincher and Annette Bening were snubbed Sunday night.
Much of Sunday's 83rd annual Academy Awards went according to the script that seemed to congeal from the end of last year through the awards shows in January and February: Once "The King's Speech" swept the guild awards, earning accolades from the Actors' Guild, the Directors' Guild and the Producers' Guild, its Oscar future was set.
However, one or two other wins Sunday threw a wrench into either conventional wisdom or Oscar-watcher prognostications.
The biggest surprise was David Fincher's loss to Tom Hooper in the Best Director category. The virtuoso behind "The Social Network" was expected to be the big win for the Facebook movie, part of the team – with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin – who adapted Ben Mezrich's nonfiction book "The Accidental Billionaires" into a compelling, of-the-moment drama.
Yet Fincher's loss to Hooper at the Directors' Guild awards was a harbinger of things to come. Hooper, whose style with "The King's Speech" was more unassuming and thus, in Oscar terms, more stealth, was a filmmaker making his first big-screen splash and possessing anything but a household name. But the idea of a "Speech" triumvirate of Hooper, eventual Best Actor winner Colin Firth and costar (and Best Supporting Actor nominee) Geoffrey Rush obviously connected with Oscar voters, and the film – far from, say, "1989's "Driving Miss Daisy" or 2000's "Gladiator" – was not going to be a Best Picture that "directed itself."
That surprise was relatively unexpected, but Annette Bening's snub in the Best Actress category was slightly more of a nail-biter. Yes, Natalie Portman had been a favorite for "Black Swan," and as she arrived at the Oscars, pregnant and glowing, the former child star who'd become a movie princess seemed ready to be crowned.
Bening, however, was the heart of "The Kids Are All Right," a movie that also lost in the Best Original Screenplay category (another major snub, this time in favor of David Seidler's script for "The King's Speech"). Bening -- a pillar of the Hollywood community, Mrs. Warren Beatty, a famous loser for 1999's "American Beauty" on her third nomination -- seemed ready to get what some saw as her due. Except Portman's performance in "Swan" embodied that movie's aesthetic, its nutso-taut psychodrama. Her win wasn't so much a surprise as a snub of Bening, as well as "Kids," a movie that may have opened too early in an Oscar year that favored late-season entries.
Seidler's "Speech" win for original screenplay was also a snub of "Kids" – as well as "Inception," a terrifically original work that won four technical awards – was part of the King's brigade, and the 73-year-old Seidler's story (a former stutterer who had to wait until the Queen Mother died at 102 before he could get his script about her husband, King George VI, produced) was as much part of the film's lore as the historical events it was based on.
Finally, one of those wins for "Inception," Best Cinematography, was something of a surprise. A film that had much of its look done via CGI, gorgeous as it was, seemed otherworldly next to the beautiful work done for "True Grit," the edgy look of "Black Swan," or even "The King's Speech," a movie whose burnished browns and wine-colored color scheme was as cozy as it was regally muted. But even in years where things seem preordained, there were still a few plot twists.
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