By Joel Johnson

Well, this is how and why I would vote if I actually had a vote. Anyone can have an opinion about who should win Academy Awards, but the only people who really matter are members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or AMPAS. They may go through careful considered deliberations about who should win, or they may vote for people they like or the ones who happen to be paying their salary at the time. Who knows? Oscars have bypassed classics and sometimes gone to forgettable films or forgettable performances. Deserving stars have often had their best work unacknowledged by Oscar and have gotten a make-up Oscar for a lesser performance. Sometimes there’s simply no redress. Life isn’t fair, and art appreciation is totally subjective. While acknowledging those facts, I find it impressive that a consensus ever emerges about the quality merits within a group of films. So read on and see if you share my opinion or provide any insight into how AMPAS members should or will divide up the statuettes. My ballot is annotated, but it is also truncated. I have chosen to offer my opinion on the four acting Oscars, the two screenplay Oscars, the directing Oscar, and-the evening’s biggest prize-the best picture Oscar.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

Amy Adams for Doubt (2008/I)

Penélope Cruz for Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Viola Davis for Doubt (2008/I)

Taraji P. Henson for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

Marisa Tomei for The Wrestler (2008)—Joel’s Pick

The best supporting actress category is tough to pick because there are very solid-and yet very different-performances in this category. It is also interesting because the winner (Kate Winslet, The Reader) in this award category in other competitions (Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild) has been promoted to the best actress category for the Academy Awards. Penélope Cruz has garnered her second Oscar nomination as Javier Bardem’s delightfully passionate ex-wife who can neither live with nor without her ex-husband in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. As a long-time admirer, it would be very easy for me to vote for her, and many Academy voters probably will. In the increasingly international world of filmmaking, it certainly could make business sense (something that is never ignored in Tinseltown) for Hollywood to recognize perhaps the world’s best-known Spanish actress with this kind of honor. Her performance is, after all, terrific. She nails the part, but I never feel that there’s very much shading in her performance, and it seems to me that it is just too easy-too natural-for her. She presents her character as either madly jealous (due to her character’s sense of abandonment) or passionately sensual.

The two performances by Amy Adams and Viola Davis from Doubt are excellent. Each would be a worthy recipient and rewarding either would make sure that this terrific film doesn’t recede into the murky obscurity that often is the fate of the Oscar-nominated also-rans. Viola Davis should be recognized (as well as acknowledging the truly wonderful part created by John Patrick Shanley) for having needed the least amount of screen time to fashion her Oscar-worthy performance. Taraji P. Henson played the black woman who takes in the geriatric newborn who will grow into and become a youthful Brad Pitt in the aging-in-reverse drama The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. There is really nothing particularly wrong with her performance except that she uses the vocal inflections that may remind one of Gone with the Wind’s Prissy (Butterfly McQueen). The role she plays places her as a black woman in a uniquely intimate and authoritative position of managing the care of elderly white folks during the early twentieth century in what one may have thought would have been a very race-conscious New Orleans. While the relationship between Taraji P. Henson’s Queenie and Benjamin Button, whom she raised as her own son, certainly may have transcended race, one might have expected that the racial tensions in their milieu might have been acknowledged. They are totally ignored. This is not, however, a fair criticism of Henson’s performance since that really has much more to do with the writing and conception of the film than with one actor’s performance. However, it might have added some depth and shading to that performance and to the film as a whole. Unfortunately, the performances in this episodic film seemed to be subservient to the make-up, visual effects, and CGI artists in creating the appearance of the characters at different stages in their lives.

My choice for Best Supporting Actress would be Marisa Tomei from The Wrestler. Winning the same award for My Cousin Vinny so early in her career was a double-edged sword as she has not always been able to deliver Oscar-caliber performances, and that’s a tough standard to have to be measured against. However, she nails the more nuanced Cassidy/Pam role in The Wrestler every bit as effectively as she nailed the delightfully splashy Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny. This is a very brave role for an actress to accept. Her character is an exotic dancer and-if the costuming expenses were figured by the thread-there was little spent to cover her. She’s virtually nude in several scenes. This would be a challenge that many actresses would instantly reject, but the film also asks that she be willing to appear without make-up as a fortyish woman who is trying to appear alluring for young men half her age and young enough to have been her sons. While this adds to the unseemliness of her character’s career choice, Tomei, the actress, is touching the veritable third rail for actresses-aging. For these reasons as well as for her character’s integral role in the film and the chemistry that she and Mickey Rourke establish, she wins my vote.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

Josh Brolin for Milk (2008)

Robert Downey Jr. for Tropic Thunder (2008)—Joel’s Pick

Philip Seymour Hoffman for Doubt (2008/I)

Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (2008)

Michael Shannon for Revolutionary Road (2008)

The drumbeat for awarding Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar for his role as The Joker in The Dark Knight, the latest installment of the Batman franchise, began just after his untimely death from an overdose and well before the film was first shown to the public last July. The drums have only gotten louder, and there seems an inevitability to the Oscar being headed to the Ledger family home in Australia. After all, it’s not like he could “lose” the Oscar because of boorish behavior (e.g., Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind and Eddie Murphy for Dreamgirls). It would be nice to be able to simply say that the late Mr. Ledger gave a powerful, overwhelming performance and, to use a sports metaphor, simply ran the other nominees out of the Academy Awards auditorium. While I do acknowledge that The Joker was portrayed with an aggressive all-out commitment that is much more common on a field of competition than in an actor’s performance, I found the character-as well as the entire film-to be so relentlessly malignant that the film paradoxically is either shockingly riveting or makes one cover one’s eyes to block it out. So, unlike almost everyone else (and clearly the likely overwhelming majority of Academy voters), I am not eager to reward pharmaceutical foolhardiness and canonize this remarkable penultimate performance with an Academy Award. The reason that it is so remarkable is that it is basically a one-note performance that is delivered with great intensity.

Michael Shannon’s mentally unstable son of Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) Wheeler’s realtor (Kathy Bates) is similarly a one-note performance, but he provides the kind of harshly insightful observation that befits a Greek chorus yet almost never emerges from the typical discourse between neighbors in suburbia-the film’s setting. He makes his limited amount of screen time very memorable.

As does Josh Brolin. While Shannon’s John Givings provides a jolt of energy to Revolutionary Road with every scene he’s in, Brolin is a shadowy, vaguely sinister presence in Milk as gay political trailblazer Harvey Milk’s rival and eventual murderer Dan White. Still, these truly supporting roles have probably accomplished all they can as far as burnishing the resume of Michael Shannon and Josh Brolin. Ledger, Hoffman, and Downey all have roles that could be classified as lead roles, but are competing in the supporting role category, making it difficult for some brilliant truly supporting players to receive recognition for their work. Philip Seymour Hoffman delivers another superb performance in Doubt and would be a deserving winner. For me, this is a better performance than his Oscar-nominated role for this category from last year’s Charlie Wilson’s War. The fact that he was just nominated and recently won an Oscar for Capote probably would make the Academy lean toward spreading the wealth to another actor even without the Heath Ledger juggernaut.

I must, however, confess to having a soft spot for Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as white Australian Oscar-winning actor Kirk Lazarus playing an African-American soldier in the movie within the movie Tropic Thunder. Downey is superb in this high-energy layered performance that dominates the film. His performance (as well as the smaller, but critical, supporting role played by Tom Cruise) made something happen that I would have never expected-it made me love a Ben Stiller movie. For that monumental achievement, I can’t withhold my vote from Robert Downey Jr.