Hey, Academy voters! Don't forget ...

Salon critics make last-minute ballot suggestions for Oscar -- actors, writers, songs and more

By Salon staff

Read more: Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Academy Awards

Clockwise, top left: Maggie Cheung ("Clean"), Peter O'Toole ("Venus"), Maggie Gyllenhaal ("Sherrybaby"), Richard Griffiths ("The History Boys")

Jan. 12, 2007 | The guilds and societies and film circles have all been lavishing their praises on a fairly predictable group of people. On Monday, the Globes will likely follow suit. We get it. "Babel" is better than we were first told, as is, allegedly, "Dreamgirls." And Helen Mirren should probably build a nice apse in her living room for the little gold man she almost certainly will be handed on Feb. 25, the night Oscar holds the world hostage.

But wait! There are still 24 hours before Academy voters submit their final ballots (end of day Saturday), and we've noticed some regrettable absences in the early season nominations and awards. Take heed, Academy, or else you could look back on 2007 with the same twinge of nausea and regret that you do 1988 ("Rain Man") or 1980 ("Ordinary People") or, god help you, 1965. We love Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer too, but really, how could you?

Stephanie Zacharek's picks:

Best actor: Peter O'Toole, "Venus"
It's likely that Peter O'Toole will receive an Oscar nomination for his performance in "Venus." But let's not take any chances. After all, the Academy has had the opportunity to give O'Toole an Oscar seven times before -- and if it was dumb enough to overlook his performances in "The Stunt Man" or "My Favorite Year" or the 1969 musical remake of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (one of the screen's great forgotten performances), how can we trust that bunch now? Yeah, yeah, a few years back he got one of those honorary Oscars the Academy doles out when its members figure someone is getting old and they'd better cover their asses. But even though O'Toole accepted the award graciously, he bristled at the implied notion that all his best work was behind him. And in "Venus," as an elderly actor who defies the idea that advancing age automatically extinguishes carnal desire, he plays a character, not an age, giving a performance so vital that it feels youthful at its core. At the end of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," O'Toole's character is about the same age as the one he plays here in "Venus." O'Toole played the aged Chips without any horrendous age makeup -- the only real cosmetic touch was his whitened hair -- instead conveying the essence of his character in his carriage and his gestures, and by changing the timber of his voice. Now, O'Toole doesn't have to pretend to know what it's like to feel old, but the choices he makes are no less remarkable. It's just that this time, he's a young man inside an old one, instead of the other way around.

Best actress: Maggie Cheung, "Clean"
Maggie Cheung is one of our great modern actresses: She once played a silent-film star (in the 1992 "Centre Stage"), and in many of her performances, there's something gravely charismatic about her, as if she doesn't quite fit in the modern era. In Olivier Assayas' "Clean" -- which was made in 2004 but wasn't released in the United States until 2006 -- Cheung plays a reforming junkie trying to rebuild her relationship with her young son, and her performance is iron-willed and brushed with unspeakable sadness. There isn't a hope in hell that the Academy would recognize Cheung -- an Asian actress in a two-year-old non-American film -- with a nomination. But in a dream world where members of the Academy might make choices based not just on actors they're already familiar with, on people who already have some mythically "proven" star power, she'd at least have a shot.

Sound design: "Children of Men"
Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian fable about a world in which babies have stopped being born is the most beautiful-looking movie of the year. But the sound that goes with Emmaneul Lubezki's images is just as impressive, not because it grabs your attention, but because it's so unnervingly subtle. Bullets don't go bang; they make a soft popping noise that almost seems benign, as if death-by-gunfire were the least of man's problems in this lonely new world. Confused wildlife have stumbled into man's habitat, and sometimes we hear them before we see them: A deer wandering through a deserted school announces her presence with a gentle rustling. And there are moments when we can hear the wind slipping between the branches of trees, a hollow, lonely sound -- but one that's at least comfortingly familiar.

Cinematography: "Idlewild"
Many critics' groups have already recognized "Children of Men" for Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography, an honor I'd never want to take away from that picture. But "Idlewild," the musical starring the members of OutKast and shot by Pascal Rabaud, is the greatest-looking movie of 2006 that almost no one saw. Director Bryan Barber has filled "Idlewild" with inventive visual details: A rooster embossed on a whiskey flask comes to life to tease and taunt its owner; a wall full of cuckoo clocks join in on a musical number. Rabaud knows how to blend those novelty visuals with reality -- and he also makes the movie's version of reality look astonishingly beautiful. The lighting in "Idlewild" is exquisite, an interplay of shadows and light, of texture and color, that echoes old Hollywood even as it feels distinctly modern. It works even on the small screen, although it really belongs on the big one.

Screenplay: "Casino Royale"
The "Casino Royale" screenplay, by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, working with Paul Haggis, is proof that there is (or can be) such a thing as a well-written action movie. But by any measure, this is a wonderful script, one that satisfies every craving you might have for smart interplay between characters, dialogue that moves with as much grace as the actors do, and the occasional spontaneous-sounding wisecrack. When a solicitous bartender asks Daniel Craig's Bond whether he prefers his martini shaken or stirred, 007 shoots back, "Do I look like I give a damn?" It's a clever, jazzy line, but it also serves the purpose of cluing us into Bond's concerns and frustrations at that moment in the plot -- an example of the way dialogue can simultaneously move a story forward and bring us straight into the mind of a character. The "Casino Royale" team get something else right, too, by writing Vesper Lynd (played by the terrific Eva Green) as a fully rounded character instead of just a "Bond girl." This is the sort of pleasurable, smart writing Hollywood needs more of.

Next page: Let's hear it for Gosling!