Black Swan

“Black Swan”: Even better than you’ve heard

Pick of the week: Darren Aronofsky's gorgeous, sexy, tripped-out ballet saga leaps into the Oscar race

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Natalie Portman

Having seen Darren Aronofsky’s dazzling and disorienting ballet thriller “Black Swan” a second time, I’ll stick to my original position that it’s one of the best movies of the year. Synthesizing Aronofsky’s previous work and foregrounding a breakthrough star performance from Natalie Portman as its tormented protagonist, this is a marvelous construction that’s in line for multiple Oscar nominations: Portman, Vincent Cassel and Barbara Hershey for acting awards, Matthew Libatique for his amazing hand-held cinematography, Thérèse DePrez for production design, Andrew Weisblum for editing and Clint Mansell for a mesmerizing score that blends techno and Tchaikovsky.

Aronofsky himself should walk away with the Academy’s directing prize, in large part because he takes a clumsy, crazy script — which seems to combine “The Red Shoes,” “All About Eve” and a woman-centric rewrite of Aronofsky’s last film, “The Wrestler” — and makes a memorable near-masterpiece out of it. A second viewing also exposes some of “Black Swan’s” flaws, most notably the fact that Cassel’s character, a ramrod-straight martinet choreographer modeled after the legendary George Balanchine, is largely in the story to provide explanatory footnotes: “You must complete the metamorphosis into your evil twin!” (On the other hand, watching Cassel’s perfect carriage, his hips and shoulders exactly aligned as he prowls the rehearsal room like a medium-size predatory cat, is pretty much its own reward. Even getting to use the word “carriage,” in that sense, is a kick.)

There’s plenty of room for legitimate debate on “Black Swan,” and a lot of it will surround the question of whether it’s yet another exploitative male-crafted thriller about a female nutcase or something more ambitious and more universal than that. I’m not sure there’s a right or wrong answer — Aronofsky is deliberately employing the conventions of misogynistic genre movies, while identifying strongly with Portman’s Nina Sayers and her insane, impossible quest for artistic perfection. I’m never quite sure how I feel about thrillers with art-film ambitions: The film-snob part of me believes they’re limited by the traps, tricks and gimmicky resolutions demanded by the genre, while the populist part of me honors the fact that they’re delivering ambitious cinema in a pop context. (One could have exactly this discussion about, say, “Vertigo” — in fact, I recently did.) We’ll be talking about this one all winter, and I look forward to your feedback. Here’s my initial review from the Toronto premiere, stripped down for context and clarity:

“Black Swan” is one of those movies that demand big adjectives. It’s outlandish and melodramatic and spectacular. It aspires to be a 1970s-style event movie, of the kind nobody makes anymore — a movie that will be chattered about at upscale cocktail parties (the kinds of parties nobody has anymore) and also draw large audiences who just want to be terrified and aroused and told a fantastic story. Set entirely within the cloistered, sadomasochistic world of ballet, it definitely won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, and those who don’t like it can make a great show of being populists bored to tears by the tedious self-involvement of high culture.

That will not be me. I’m here to tell you that I found “Black Swan’s” tale of madness, music and sexual repression utterly overpowering from the first few frames of the film. I forgot about the notebook in my lap and totally abandoned that sense I sometimes get that I’m trying to write the review in my head before the movie’s over. I was completely swept up and just wanted to ride along on Aronofsky’s hallucinatory journey with Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), a rising young ballerina who emerges as the star of a leading New York ballet company just as she may also be undergoing a mental breakdown.

I will happily acknowledge my bias, in that I’m a pretty big ballet fan (although no aficionado) and an even bigger fan of “The Red Shoes,” the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger masterpiece from 1948 that Aronofsky and his screenwriters (Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin, from Heinz’s original story) are echoing or channeling or otherwise not-exactly-remaking here. I’ll leave it to genuine balletomanes to judge the quality of Portman’s dancing, but I can tell you that she’s had solid training and that Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique make her look sensational. “Black Swan” features some of the most magnificent ballet sequences ever created for cinema, but Nina is supposed to be a dancer whose prodigious technique is a little cold, mechanical and even fearful. (I’ve heard some skepticism on this point, but the filmmakers claim that Portman did about 90 percent of her own dancing, although a professional double appears in some close-ups.)

Nina is one of those girls who have been trained for ballet stardom since early childhood, and she has embraced that as her sole purpose in life. She lives with her archetypal adoring-yet-smothering stage mom (a nuanced, borderline-creepy Barbara Hershey) in a small Upper West Side apartment, and she’s painfully shy around the other girls in the corps, who have boyfriends and go out to nightclubs and do the other things young women in Manhattan are likely to do. Nina claims she isn’t a virgin, but she’s doing an awfully good impression of one, and when the wandering eye of company impresario Thomas Leroy (French actor Vincent Cassel, superb as usual) alights on her, everyone knows what to expect.

Ambiguous, sexualized master-student relationships abound in the world of dance (not to mention the world, period) but Cassel’s character is clearly meant to evoke legendary choreographer George Balanchine, who tended to view the young female dancers at New York City Ballet as his private hunting preserve. For Cassel’s Leroy (as, I believe, for Balanchine) it’s all part of the artistic process; if Nina is going to dance both the pure and virginal White Swan and the dark, seductive Black Swan in Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake,” she’s going to have to learn some things about herself she doesn’t know yet. He’s just the guy to teach her.

But strange stuff starts to happen on the way to what ought to be a simple conquest. Elevating Nina to prima ballerina means that Leroy must cast aside Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder, in a brief but memorable cameo), who is both the company’s reigning star and Leroy’s longtime lover. Perhaps deliberately, Leroy also propels Nina into a tense, rivalrous friendship with the company’s newest arrival, Lily (Mila Kunis), a tattooed free spirit from the West Coast who lacks Nina’s drive and precision but has charisma and sexual energy to burn. And by the time Lily lures Nina away from Mom’s apartment for a long night of booze, Ecstasy, non-ballet-oriented dancing and some steamy bisexual exploration, we’ve already cottoned on to the dangerous truth that Nina can’t tell the difference between the real world and what’s in her head. (Aronofsky offers precise visual and auditory cues that demarcate reality from fantasy, but I should say no more than that.)

Nina has troubling dreams and a history of hurting herself (we gather) and a tendency not to recognize the girl she sees in mirrors, windows and other reflective surfaces. She’s haunted by every other woman in the movie — by her mother, by Beth, by Lily, and especially by the woman she sees occasionally on the street or the subway train, the one who looks exactly like her, but is darker, sexier, more dangerous. “Black Swan” sometimes has the buzz and chill of a classic horror film, and definitely contains elements of a clinical, Hitchcockian yarn about a nutso girl who damages other people and herself. But there’s a lot more heart and beauty to it, a lot more Balanchine and “Swan Lake” and “The Red Shoes,” than that description implies.

Aronofsky’s fable about Nina’s quest to transform herself from the White Swan into the Black Swan captures so much about the physical reality of ballet — the blood and bruises, the tortured toes and twisted ligaments — that it feels intimate, sympathetic, even loving. It’s a terrible cliché to say that a movie about artistic creation is itself an autobiography of its creator, but this is one of those rare movies in which director, actor, character and story all fuse into a big and powerful allegory. “Black Swan” certainly has its flaws and limitations — it’s overcooked and implausible, and I’m not sure its ending lives up to the film as a whole. But it’s a magnificent blend of pop and art cinema, the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for from both Portman and Aronofsky, and a must-see film that people will argue about all winter.

Body doubles: The doppelgangers vs. Natalie Portman

The actress's last two films pit her form against those of her stuntwomen, but are the studios the real culprits?

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Body doubles: The doppelgangers vs. Natalie PortmanNatlie, before the stunt switch.

Natalie Portman’s look-alikes are out to steal her thunder! No, this isn’t some “Black Swan” fever dream, but the reality of Ms. Portman last two films, both of which feature body doubles complaining about their mistreatment.

Several weeks ago, dancer Sarah Lane told several media outlets how she performed many of the difficult moves in “Black Swan,” when the studios had hyped the film as featuring 85 percent Portman’s own dancing. It was a back and forth between Fox Searchlight and Lane over percentage points, but the real story was how Lane was basically uncredited in the film and taken out of behind-the-scenes reels in order to play up Portman’s abilities.

Now an Irish student, Caroline Davis, has told the Sun that in Portman’s most recent movie, “Your Highness,” Davis was hired to jump naked into an icy lake in lieu of the pregnant actress. She was only paid roughly $500 to do so. Both the film and its trailer use Davis’ backside as a gratuitous body shot, although the college student doesn’t seem to be complaining, telling the paper, “I’m a film studies student so I jumped at the chance to be on set.”

 These “allegations” surround Portman’s most recent films like a dark specter, calling into question the actress’s previous tough-as-nails reputation.

But although these stories revolve around the use (or lack thereof) of Portman’s body, in both cases it is the studio that produced the film that is actually culpable for any misdirection. In the case of “Black Swan,” Fox Searchlight overplayed the star’s ballet expertise and lack of a body double, while Portman herself only spoke about the difficult training. For “Your Highness,” it was Universal that took advantage of a young, non-union performer in order to shoot a difficult scene that an experienced body double would never have done for such a small fee. Neither actress has spoken out against Portman herself.

It’s a depressing narrative that puts Portman’s body in the center of two scandals that have less to do with her and more to do with the cynicism and hype of Hollywood producers. Natalie Portman, Sarah Lane and Caroline Davis are equal victims of cinema’s obsession with creating the perfect female form.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew.

Is “Your Highness” the worst film ever made?

Why James Franco and Natalie Portman's new stoner atrocity deserves a special place in the canon of awfulness

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Is James Franco and Danny McBride in "Your Highness"

“Your Highness” must have seemed like a great idea at the outset — and by “the outset,” I mean the six baked minutes it took co-writer and star Danny McBride to scribble the basic concept on the back of an unpaid invoice from the swimming-pool guy. That basic concept appears to be “Cheech & Chong make ‘The Princess Bride,’” or perhaps “Beavis and Butt-head meet ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail.’” Except, two things: Both of those concepts sound way funnier than this movie is in practice and, no, it shouldn’t take six minutes to write that. I’m thinking there was a lot of giggling and high-fiving and talking in junior-high Shakespeare accents involved.

It’s easy to say that McBride and James Franco and Natalie Portman and director David Gordon Green — whose WTF career devolution, from “George Washington” and “All the Real Girls” to “Pineapple Express” to this atrocity seems destined to lead, sooner or later, to Budweiser commercials featuring women in white baby-doll lingerie — had more fun making “Your Highness” than we have watching it. But let’s face it, that describes 65 percent of all films made in Hollywood. Gingival surgery would be more fun than watching this brain-draining, spirit-sucking attempt at a stoner spoof, which combines the cutting edge of frat-boy wit, the excitement of a mid-’80s made-for-TV action flick and the authenticity of a Renaissance Faire held in an abandoned field behind a Courtyard by Marriott. A bus trip from Duluth to Sioux City would be more fun, and don’t think I didn’t do my research: That takes 13 hours and costs 96 bucks.

For a few hours after having seen “Your Highness,” I considered the possibility that it was the worst movie ever made. The image of McBride as the dim, smug and beefy Prince Thadeous, who begins the story as an irritating lardass loser and ends it as an even more irritating hero, was burned into my brain, complete with the enormous severed minotaur dong he wears on a necklace. (Monster cock! ICWYDT!) And while I shouldn’t feel bad for James Franco about much of anything (let alone the Newtonian backlash from all the media-fellatio he has enjoyed), his directionless, Keanu-lite performance as Thadeous’ cooler and studlier brother, Fabious, only deepens the sense that his career has abruptly hurtled off a cliff into a bottomless abyss.

These two idiots wander about the countryside — “Your Highness” was shot in Northern Ireland, so at least there’s pretty scenery — speaking in intentionally fakey Angoloid accents (sprinkled with wacky, occasional contemporary utterances, like “butthole” and “sweet!”), smoking some pipeweed they stole from Bag End, giving hand jobs to a Yoda-like alien pederast called the Wise Wizard (you can only wish I were kidding), lopping off the penises of would-be ass-rapist minotaurs and sporadically attempting to rescue Fabious’ fiancée (Zooey Deschanel) from an evil wizard called Leezar (Justin Theroux), who plans to impregnate her with his foul seed. Oh, and Toby Jones plays a little, Iago-like elfin character called Julie. Who turns out to have no dick. Did I mention that there are a lot of dicks in this movie? Or that the people who made it are dicks? Or that I must be a dick, too, since I lacked the dignity and self-respect to walk out on this bloated, atrocious spectacle?

Now, in case you think I’m just being a humorless prig — and I may be! I wouldn’t be the person to ask! — I do indeed get the point, to the extent there is one. McBride and co-writer Ben Best (they created the TV series “Eastbound & Down”) don’t take their movie seriously on any level. They inoculate themselves against all criticism, or try to, with an early-National Lampoon-meets-”Kentucky Fried Movie” level of intentional badness. If you’re as old as I am, or somewhere close, you might remember the Tolkien parody “Bored of the Rings,” and that’s the general idea here (with all the smart and funny parts taken out). The minotaur’s hacked-off love-hammer is supposed to gross us out; the accents are supposed to sound phony; Fabious and Thadeous are supposed to be buffoons. But that doesn’t make “Your Highness” any better, and might make it worse. There’s a special place in cinema hell for bad movies that were made semi-accidentally on purpose by talented people who ought to know better. If you’re going to pre-Mystery Science Theater your own movie, and deprive the audience of the pleasure of mockery through your own insincerity, then don’t come off like a bunch of self-indulgent dumbasses who squandered millions of dollars on something that is almost never funny. At least, that’s my advice.

Almost a full day of near-sobriety later, “Your Highness” no longer looks like the worst movie in history (although it might make the top 1 percent). Given an awkward role as a chaste but ass-kicking female warrior (not to mention a painful-looking metal thong), Natalie Portman brings a distinctive touch of class to the proceedings. The mysteriously underutilized Justin Theroux is terrific in every scene as the evil wizard, and gets to say: “You are too late! The Fuckening has begun!” He has another funny line, which got the biggest laugh in this nearly laugh-less film, but out of some misguided sense of charity or ethics I won’t give it away. As for Danny McBride … uh, he seems like a cheerful fellow! It’s not a criminal act, exactly, that he has dragged a once-promising director and several talented co-stars down the cannabis-scented rathole that is this epic, unwatchable disaster. I can only assume that his parents and friends and various other people genuinely enjoy his work as a writer and performer, and do not wish as fervently as I do that he would find some other occupation. 

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Natalie Portman vs Sarah Lane: Why “Black Swan” performance wasn’t about dancing

Her white swan was perfect ... or was it? Ballet body double raises question of film's authenticity

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Natalie Portman vs Sarah Lane: Why The two Ninas of "Black Swan."

In a controversy that reads like a real-life version of a movie plot, “Black Swan” dancer Sarah Lane has caused a stir with claims that lead actress Natalie Portman wasn’t the ballet expert that the film’s publicity team claimed she was. According to the ballerina — who performed the film’s more complicated dance sequences and on whose body Natalie’s face was grafted for those scenes – Portman’s talent was vastly overstated in the press during Fox Searchlight Films’ bid to win the best actress Oscar for their movie.

That’s not to say that Lane doesn’t admire Natalie’s performance:

“I do give her a lot of credit because in a year and a half she lost a lot of weight and she really tried to go method and get into a dancers head and really feel like a ballet dancer.”

What’s funny about this whole “scandal” is that both sides of the argument only care about Natalie’s performance leading up to the film’s taping: something that really isn’t taken into consideration while audiences are watching the film. We’re not even sure we understand what Lane’s motivation is with coming out with this news: If she feels like she wasn’t given the proper credit, why go to the press now? Did she think, as Mila Kunis’ character in “Black Swan” did, that by undermining the lead she would be given the starring credit in the production?

Unfortunately, it’s equally ridiculous that the studio is now responding with its own claims defending how many of the dance scenes in the film were pure Natalie, as if her Best Actress win was based entirely on her ability to pull off a fouetté. It’s become a haggling negotiation; with the film’s choreographer (and Portman’s fiancé) Benjamin Millepied claiming that “85 percent of that movie is Natalie” and Lane claiming that the actress only did 5 percent of the body shots.

While the studio and ballerina are haggling over the percentages of sur les pointes, the question we should be asking is, “Why does it matter?” “Black Swan” is a film that deals with dissolution of reality, takes place entirely through the eyes of an unstable young woman, and in no way purports to be a documentary. Though the studio did hit it strong with its pre-Oscar talk of Natalie’s preparation for the role, nobody should have been under the illusion that Natalie Portman had somehow transformed herself into a world-class ballerina. That’s not her job: She’s an actress. And whatever preparation she did for the role is secondary (and for the most part, irrelevant) to her performance.

You can’t help but feel that this “Black Swan” scandal is only being called such because 2010 happened to be such a big year for audiences trying to deduce the reality of films like “Catfish” and “I’m Still Here.” But “Black Swan” wasn’t a documentary, nor was it a faux-mentary, and all the hype surrounding Natalie’s ballet chops in the film did not influence the way audiences perceived her role in the psychological thriller.

Ultimately, the blame for this controversy falls as much on Fox as it does on Sarah Lane: After all, they were the ones who made such a big deal about Natalie’s dance skills to begin with, leaving the door wide open for someone to come in and question the validity of the claim. And honestly, what would the movie have lost if every interview about the film hadn’t crammed in some mention of Natalie’s years of prep work? Absolutely nothing. Would she still have won the Oscar? Probably. It may have even helped audiences separate the actress from her character: After hearing about all her prep work for”Black Swan,” it’s hard not to imagine Nina as an extension of Natalie’s own hyper-fastidious, Type-A persona. As Manohla Dargis of the New York Times wrote in her review of “Black Swan” when it came out:

 Ms. Portman’s performance in “Black Swan” is more art than autobiography, and as a consequence more honest, but because it’s so demandingly physical the lines that usually divide actresses from their characters are also blurred. This is, after all, Ms. Portman’s own thin body on display, her jutting chest bones as sharply defined as a picket fence.

Again, though, this focus on Portman’s physique over her performance shows just how little stock critics put on Natalie’s ability to pull off the role on the basis of her acting ability alone.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew.

The Oscars’ black hole of boredom

By trying to be "young and hip," last night's Academy Awards turned into a great big middle-of-the-road splat

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The Oscars' black hole of boredomNatalie Portman poses backstage with the Oscar for best performance by an actress in a leading role for "Black Swan" at the 83rd Academy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011, in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles)(Credit: Associated Press)

Oscar has fallen, and he can’t get up. Now, if you get that reference, you’re probably: A) too old to belong to the demographic that was supposedly being hunted by the producers of Sunday night’s dreary and confused telecast, and B) too young to have written most of the shtick. Presented with one of the most varied and interesting lists of nominated films in recent memory — many of which had actually been seen by large numbers of paying humans — the academy managed to screw up its messaging totally and create a soul-sucking black hole of boredom.

One way of explaining what happened last night is that the Oscar producers tried to tack young and hip, just as academy voters tried to tack mass and mainstream, correcting for several years of more audacious indie-style winners like “The Hurt Locker,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “No Country for Old Men.” The result was a great big middle-of-the-road splat, presided over by a monumentally uncomfortable pair of stars, the miffed-looking James Franco and the perky-like-a-little-coffeepot Anne Hathaway.

While the show galumphingly tried to incorporate bits of the Twitterverse snark that surrounds it (and has all but superseded it), the biggest prize of the evening went to a dignified, achingly sincere Masterpiece Theatre-style film about the suffering of the Queen of England’s late papa. I have no particular problem with “The King’s Speech”; in fact, I enjoyed it. But my colleague Matt Zoller Seitz was correct to note, last week, that it might be the fifth- or sixth-best of this year’s nominated films (after “Black Swan,” “True Grit,” “The Social Network,” “The Fighter” and “Winter’s Bone,” at the very least). Awarding “King’s Speech” the best-picture prize was at least predictable; giving Tom Hooper the directing award, in a category that included Darren Aronofsky, the Coen brothers, David Fincher and David O. Russell, feels more like criminal pandering. (If I had a video clip of Sen. Paul Tsongas and his “Pander Bear” from the 1992 presidential campaign I would stick it in right now. Anybody? No? Well, let’s just move on then.)

It wasn’t simply that Franco was baked or bored, or that his idiosyncratic blend of sincerity and authenticity are precisely out of sync with the combo demanded by the Bob Hope-Billy Crystal-Whoopi Goldberg Chair of American Toastmastership, although those are all plausible hypotheses. Franco was pissed. On a night when he could have been building a multimedia installation or running lines for “General Hospital” or getting busy with an NYU sophomore or working on a paper about Sir John Suckling, Franco had to hang out on a cold night in L.A. with all these dorks, presiding over a pseudo-event so miscellaneous it couldn’t be rescued through meta-ness or reframing or any other kind of mental gamesmanship.Was this “performance art” like your GH gig, Jimmy? No, it wasn’t, was it? It was just lame.

Oscar’s leaden attempt to rebrand its trademark telecast as young and hip and social media-savvy (just consider all those terms surrounded with scare quotes, in celebration of your/my/our/James Franco’s sense of detachment and superiority) was as awkward as such things generally are. Justin Timberlake pretending to use an iPhone app to change the bewildering background projections — ho ho ho! Nobody in the entire world thought that was funny. Not you, not me, not the people watching in India or equatorial Africa. Not Kirk Douglas and Melissa Leo. (Why the negativity, people? At least they seemed like human beings.) Not my mother-in-law who doesn’t know what an app is or my 6-year-old son (who does). Not the person who wrote it, and definitely not James Franco. That was more and different pandering, of the sort that makes everybody unhappy, like the time your grandfather gave you a quarter but all you can remember about it is the terrifying tuft of hair sticking out of his nose. (More Paul Tsongas video, please. I just want to keep typing that name: Paul Tsongas!)

Speaking of the 1990s, let’s talk about that set, shall we? A few puff pieces last week dutifully described the use of digital projections as a “radical departure” from Oscar tradition and even invoked the term “virtual reality,” a sure sign that whatever you’re talking about will resemble a sales conference hosted by a mid-level Fortune 500 corporation. I spent much of the evening trying to figure out what those illuminated hoops looked and felt like. A briefly hot Las Vegas resort hotel, now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy? The inside of a vintage Wurlitzer jukebox? A rejected design template for “TRON: Legacy”? Then, when we saw a black-and-white clip of Bob Hope cracking wise on the first Oscar telecast — and when Bob Hope is much, much funnier than your current hosts, your show is in trouble — I grasped that the set was sort of, halfway supposed to evoke the classic interior of the Pantages Theater, not far away on Hollywood Boulevard, where the ceremony was held in the ’50s. But evoke it for whom, and why? To make Kirk Douglas feel less confused? (I’m kidding; he did fine.) To give younger viewers and participants some vague, disembodied sense of being connected to history? Wait, yes, that’s it exactly.

Awards? Yes, they gave awards and I haven’t mentioned them, because except for Melissa Leo’s unhinged F-bomb outburst and the outrageous, even shameful selection of Hooper as best director, it all went according to plan. Natalie Portman and Colin Firth had been practicing their lines, and delivered them nicely. (Yes, Annette Bening deserved to win, but Portman became the ass-backward representative of “Black Swan,” which deserved to win all kinds of other awards but didn’t.) Christian Bale looked more like The Dude than Jeff Bridges did, and gave every impression of being intensely weird. Lots of people we’d never heard of before mentioned their parents and grandparents and children, which is always irresistible. That Carrot Top-Yahoo Serious looking guy who won the live-action short prize was hilarious (although his movie isn’t that great). Accepting an inevitable and thoroughly deserved screenwriting prize for “The Social Network,” Aaron Sorkin went on and on and on — shocker! — and ended with the words “guinea pig.”

We were all the guinea pigs last night, Aaron, and the experiment didn’t go well. After that prepackaged opening riff when Franco and Hathaway inserted themselves into the nominated films — which was silly but fun and actually involved their talents as, y’know, actors, instead of their limited ability for shtick — the whole evening felt more and more like a bad idea gone wrong. (Sen. Tsongas, please!) I’d compare it to, like, taking your aunt to the prom, except that James Franco would handle that situation with awesome suavity. Anyway, if he’s got an aunt I bet she’s hot. And I bet she’d rather see “Black Swan” than “The King’s Speech.”

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Your Oscar night primer

We can't know who's going to win. But we can tell you what to watch for: Banksy, virtual set disasters and more

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Your Oscar night primerAnna Hathaway and stills from "Exit Through The Gift Shop" and "Social Network"

Anne Hathaway and James Franco’s purported musical numbers: Bust or must?

I will admit to being totally suckered by the snippet from a “Grease” number that will apparently be performed by Oscar co-hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway on Sunday night. Sneaking that out the way they did — via Franco’s Twitter feed — is a nifty use of social media and sends a signal that the Oscars are hipper and savvier under the new regime. Or simultaneously hipper and suffused with nostalgia, which is even better. Now, I’d be delighted if they decide to do the whole damn show as selections from classic musicals: “West Side Story,” anyone? “Oklahoma”? “The Band Wagon”? But any tiny flub by either of the stars — a missed dance step or a mistimed lip-sync — will launch a tide of snarky Tweets to rival the parting of the Red Sea.

The “updated” set design: Virtual reality or lame-ass PowerPoint?

In what the Hollywood Reporter has described as a “radical departure” from past Oscar telecasts, the show’s producers are reportedly abandoning traditional set design for a series of projections meant “to take viewers on a trip through Hollywood history.” Now, first of all, we hear almost exactly the same Orwell-lite rhetoric every year, reminiscent of the way fashion magazines write about the fall collections: Past double-plus-ungood! Present and future awesome! I suppose it’s possible that this year’s electronic dog-and-pony show will seem like a technological Great Leap Forward into the age of virtual reality (which was more like 1996, but never mind). It’s also possible it will resemble a trip to the Universal Studios theme park, or a pharmaceutical industry trade show. Why aren’t Hall & Oates performing?

Best Picture: “The Social Network” vs. “The King’s Speech” (with “True Grit” sneaking up on the outside)

The main event in the best-picture race — a much-discussed showdown between a movie about a Harvard dropout turned Internet zillionaire and a movie about a stutterer who becomes king of England — now seems almost like an afterthought, as I recently discussed with my Salon colleague Matt Zoller Seitz. But not entirely! While “The King’s Speech” is widely expected to be Sunday’s big winner, and could easily pile up seven or eight awards, some Oscar-watchers still wonder whether the two big titles will cancel each other out, while a dark horse — maybe “The Fighter” or “True Grit” — sneaks in, à la “Crash” in 2005, and steal the prize.

Best Director: David Fincher vs. Darren Aronofsky

There’s a widespread view that the directing prize is where “The Social Network” will receive its consolation prize, with David Fincher receiving a kind of mid-career achievement award, in place of the Oscars he didn’t win for “Zodiac” and “Fight Club.” But don’t be shocked if Fincher gets nudged off the dais by Darren Aronofsky, whose dark and dazzling “Black Swan” bespeaks a powerful individual vision that has wowed Hollywood, but is simply too idiosyncratic to be a serious best-picture contender.

Best Actress: Natalie Portman vs. Annette Bening

How quickly the wind can change! Even a few days ago, when Matt Zoller Seitz and I discussed the best-actress nominees in a chat session, we both assumed that Annette Bening’s performance as an alcoholic lesbian mom in the soapy but highly affecting “The Kids Are All Right” was a near shoo-in. We were behind the curve, baby, and now the smart money expects Natalie Portman to be crowned as Hollywood royalty while Bening looks on graciously. (I’m still rooting for the latter, but thinking more realistically.) Portman, one expects, will go for bland, safe and humble; she must understand that she’s a controversial figure among movie buffs and that this moment will define the rest of her career.

Best Actor: Colin Firth vs. the letter J

There’s no significant suspense in the best-actor race, and you can probably get excellent odds in Vegas by betting the “J” field (that would be Javier Bardem, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg and James Franco) against Colin Firth’s performance as stuttering King George VI in “The King’s Speech.” Firth is widely respected and genuinely liked; he is a classically trained British actor with impeccable Hollywood credentials, and his moment onstage will be a love-in. (By the way: No, this isn’t an award for “A Single Man” a year later, smartypants. “King’s Speech” may not be earth-shattering cinema, but he’s terrific in it.)

Leading indicators: How to read the Supporting Actor and Actress races

These categories tend to produce oddball winners, so don’t be shocked to see, say, Jeremy Renner, who was the best thing in Ben Affleck’s ludicrous Boston fantasia “The Town,” or Jacki Weaver of the Aussie crime thriller “Animal Kingdom,” up there. (Those would, in fact, be admirable choices.) My hunch, however, is that these categories may provide exit-polling results that point toward a “King’s Speech” landslide, with Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter winning instead of the favorites (probably still Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, both from David O. Russell’s underappreciated “The Fighter”).

Best Documentary: Will Banksy wear Vera Wang?

While most observers expect Charles Ferguson’s excellent financial-collapse doc “Inside Job” to win the Oscar, much of the attention inside the Kodak Theatre will be devoted to figuring out whether phantom-like English street artist Banksy, the director or entrepreneur or grifter or whatever of the hilarious “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” is there at all. Academy higher-ups have decreed that Banksy may not attend in disguise, so maybe he’ll wear a garbage bag, as fellow Brit Lucy Walker did for the New York premiere of her nominated doc, “Waste Land.”

As recently reported in Salon, “Waste Land” has been surrounded by murky whispers that Walker didn’t personally make much of it (which she and her producers strenuously deny). That could create an interesting onstage moment if this inspiring saga of an improbable art project in the Rio landfill captures the prize, as seems distinctly possible.

Foreign-language film: “Biutiful” vs. “Dogtooth”

No, I’m totally kidding. Or rather, I’m just throwing a bone to the tiny and desperate cinephile core here, because there is no way in frickin’ heck that the cryptic Greek allegory “Dogtooth,” one of the more surprising nominees in Oscar history, wins anything ever. That said, the foreign-language Oscar race, with its arcane rules and history of total lottery-ticket randomness, has virtually no commercial or artistic ramifications and could go to any movie on the list. “Biutiful” (officially the Mexican entry, although made entirely in Spain) offers a name-brand star and filmmaker in Javier Bardem and “Babel” director Alejandro González Iñárritu, but that counts for much less in this category than in any other. I won’t be surprised if Danish director Susanne Bier’s “In a Better World” or French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s “Incendies” (neither yet released in the United States) snatches the prize, leaving a worldwide audience mildly puzzled.

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