E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fight or flight? This year it’s Million Dollar Baby versus The Aviator BY PETER KEOUGH
	Peter’s picks Best Picture: The Aviator Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Aviator Best Actor: Jamie Foxx, Ray Best Actress: Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby Best Supporting Actor: Morgan Freeman, Million Dollar Baby Best Supporting Actress: Cate Blanchett, The Aviator

I’d wager that fewer people watch the Oscars to find out who and what will win than do so to see how the latest bogus controversy pans out. This year, it’s not just the brouhaha over host Chris Rock’s comments about the viewing habits of straight black men. More significant is the antagonism of right-wing and other groups to Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, which was nominated for Best Picture and in other categories and boasts recent wins for Eastwood from the Directors Guild and for Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman from the Screen Actors Guild.

The likes of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved have revealed the ending in order to point out the picture’s moral incorrectness. No doubt the image-conscious Academy, its liberal agenda rejected in November, will be feeling pressure. An additional factor might be the death this year of a beloved Hollywood figure (I won’t say who in order to preserve Baby’s ending) who embodied the issue dramatized in the film (this is trickier than discussing The Crying Game).

Will this trumped-up conflict affect the voting? You might recall the similar controversy that arose in 2001 when stories spread that John Nash, the real-life protagonist of Best Picture nominee A Beautiful Mind, was guilty of anti-Semitic remarks. That information had been available to anyone who read the book on which the movie was based; some nonetheless attributed the "leak" to Miramax, whose In the Bedroom was also in contention. (The Aviator is likewise a Miramax film, though no one is pointing fingers at Harvey Weinstein this year.) In 2001, as it happens, A Beautiful Mind won in several categories including Best Picture and Director.

So, it seems Oscar voters answer such challenges with courage and integrity. Sure they do. This time, they’ll be reacting not to Harvey but to the perceived red-state "mandate," and to those people with the power (by means of the FCC) to impose $500,000 fines on perceived indiscretions by the media. Given this ambiguous threat, I don’t see them switching from the longstanding favorite, Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, most recently winner of the Producers Guild Award and a SAG award for Cate Blanchett. I expect they’ll give Scorsese his first and long-overdue Best Picture and Best Director Oscars. They’ll also honor Blanchett — how can they resist such an uncanny incarnation of Katharine Hepburn, winner of the most acting Oscars? — as Best Supporting Actress. As for Baby, whose support is strongest with the dominant acting faction of the Academy, they’ll accord Best Supporting Actor to Morgan Freeman, himself well-deserving and long overdue after four nominations.

And will they give the Best Actress Oscar to Hilary Swank as well? She’ll have to duke it out with Annette Bening in a rematch of their 2000 bout when they were nominated for, respectively, American Beauty and Boys Don’t Cry. As Clint’s character, the curmudgeonly boxing manager, points out in the movie, at 31, Swank’s character is too old to be starting a boxing career. Swank at the same age might be a little young too be taking home her second Best Actress Oscar. On the other hand, Bening at 46 might be too old to take home her first. The last time an actress over 40 won a Best Actress Oscar was 10 years ago, when 48-year-old Susan Sarandon did it for Dead Man Walking.

But is it so much a matter of age as of image, with Bening delicately embodying the old Hollywood ideal of glamor and Swank beefed up on a new feminine mystique of macho babes who don’t mind a bit of ass kicking? Bening, I believe, will be the loser in this contest between old and new.

By the way, whatever happened to Sideways? The winner by far of most of the critics’ groups’ awards, it was, I believe, doomed by that very fact. The failure of Paul Giamatti to get even a Best Actor nomination sealed its fate. No one doubts anyway who’s going to win that award. And maybe that’s where this year’s only suspense and controversy will lie. Chris Rock has already been chastened by his quoted-out-of-context remark that no straight black man ever watches the Oscars. The few straight black males who do watch this year will find Rock leashed by a seven-second time delay. This year, it’ll be safe for the Academy to broadcast its inoffensive self-image. Viewers will be sitting on the edge of their seats wondering whether Jamie Foxx will repeat his Emmy performance when accepting his Best Actor statuette and sing a song.