So, let’s say that while walking around my workplace I look down at the floor and found a stray envelope. I pick it up and discover that its an Academy Awards ballot addressed to one of the students in our institution’s MFA program. Were I the sort of individual who would conveniently neglect to return this document to its rightful owner, choosing instead to take the unexpected opportunity to help shape the Oscar nominations, the document mailed back to he Academy would look a little something like this…

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
1. Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road
2. Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
3. Rebecca Hall, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
4. Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
5. Meryl Streep, Doubt

I suspect that Winslet will actually win the Best Actress Academy Award tonight, so you can imagined how thrilled I am since she’s at the top of my list…
Oh wait.
As has been noted by plenty of other people, one of the crummiest aspects of Academy voters correctly ignoring the calculated effort to position Winslet’s central role in The Reader as a supporting turn is that her far better work in Revolutionary Road will go officially unheralded. It seems to be a surprisingly tight race in this category considering that Winslet is on her sixth nomination without a win. While I think Streep will get that third Oscar at some point, there are probably enough voters who feel it is Winslet’s turn to finally get her that little golden man tonight, especially since Streep’s performance has a mannered, theatrical quality that can be off-putting. As for the five names I’d put on the ballot, I never expected Hall to actually get Oscar love, but it’s a real shame that Hawkins isn’t invited tonight.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
1. Sean Penn, Milk
2. Michael Sheen, Frost/Nixon
3. Ben Kingsley, Elegy
4. Leonardo DiCaprio, Revolutionary Road
5. Javier Bardem, Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Surprisingly, this looks to be a competitive category this evening. Most prognosticators expect Mickey Rourke to come out on top for his effective turn in The Wrestler, but I think that, in the end, enough Academy voters won’t be able to get past the long string of years in which Rourke was a professional disaster. They’ll see the nomination as reward enough, just as it was for, say, Burt Reynolds several years ago. That may be my bias since I think Penn’s performance as Harvey Milk may the best of the year, in any category, and Penn is the likeliest beneficiary if Rourke doesn’t prevail. Then again, if they split the vote, Langella could have an Oscar to position next to his Tony. Slumdog‘s Best Picture win may be all but predetermined (or, if you prefer, it is written), but there are plenty of question marks in the acting categories. Considering I have Oscar-friendly names like Kingley, DiCaprio and Bardem on my list, I find it a little remarkable that I only have one name in common with the Academy.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
1. Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
2. Debra Winger, Rachel Getting Married
3. Rosemarie DeWitt, Rachel Getting Married
4. Penelope Cruz, Elegy
5. Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

While the Academy won’t allow a performer to be nominated twice in the same category, I’m fairly sure that the intricacies of their voting process allow for a person to get named separately for different roles on the initial ballot. It me a while to figure that out (and I had an assist in doing so). Until I did, this was a very thin category. As much as I admire the fearlessness of Tomei’s performance, for example, it’s easily the weakest performance of the twenty I cite here. Clearly I think Jonathan Demme’s latest deserves far more awards recognition than it’s gotten, but the fact that the Academy didn’t find a seat for Winger is particularly baffling. As for how the awards will go tonight, I think Penelope Cruz will likely win. Hopefully, Javier Bardem will fulfill the traditional winner’s obligation of presenting the following year’s acting award in the corresponding category for the opposite gender. It would be a nice bit of happy convergence to see him present the Oscar to the person he repeatedly co-starred with in Spain.

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
1. Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
2. Bill Irwin, Rachel Getting Married
3. Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky
4. Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road
5. Gary Oldman, The Dark Knight

Since everyone agrees that Ledger winning is the one lock in the acting categories this evening, it’s obscured one notable detail. In the twenty years since Tim Burton’s Batman kicked off the superhero era of American movies (even though it took Sam Raimi’s Spider-man to kick it into high gear), there have been some fantastic performances in the genre, but Ledger’s is the first to even sniff Academy recognition. While I admire the other performances I list behind Ledger’s, I feel compelled to give special notice to Eddie Marsan’s, given that I’ve twice written about Happy-Go-Lucky without even typing his name. Sally Hawkins is wonderful in the film, but Marsan is close to her equal, the seismic Yin to her sunny Yang.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)