Matt vs. the Academy

After a whirlwind two weeks in Sydney, I'm back in New York, gearing up for the Oscars this weekend. In preparation, I've selected my  predictions  for who will take home each award. Let me know how they match up with your picks. But before this year's Oscars, we continue our look at the race from 5 years ago with another 2006 Best Picture nominee... The Departed Director : Martin Scorsese Screenplay : William Monahan (based on the film Infernal Affairs, written by Alan Mak and Felix Chong) Starring : Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, Anthony Anderson, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Corrigan Academy Awards : 5 nominations 4 wins, including Best Picture and Best Director The ultimate double cross story, The Departed follows two fresh police academy recruits who operate on separate sides of the law. Colin Sullivan (Damon) is immediately assigned to the unit investigating organised c...

I am writing to you now from cloudy Sydney, where Kat and I are visiting friends and family. Despite the lack of sunshine, it is still warm here and certainly more preferable than a New York winter. My predictions for the Oscar nominations (in the last post) resulted in a fairly average hit rate overall. However, I managed to peg eight of the nine Best Picture nominees, and scored five for five in both the Best Director and Best Cinematography categories. On the other end of the spectrum, I had selected five tunes to be nominated for Best Song and still didn't manage to correctly guess either of the two actual nominees. We now turn our attention to another nominee from the Best Picture race of 2006... The Queen Director : Stephen Frears Screenplay : Peter Morgan Starring : Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell, Helen McCrory, Alex Jennings, Roger Allam, Sylvia Syms, Tim McMullan, Mark Bazeley Academy Awards : 6 nominations 1 win, for Best Actress (Mirren) ...