Oscars to set fans atwitter?

LOS ANGELES — Amid the giggles from Billy Crystal, will the Oscars add a touch of drama this year? One can hope. At what should have been the climax of last year’s show, images from the 10 best picture nominees filled the screen, while the voice of Colin Firth, who had already won his inevitable prize for portraying the stammering King George VI, delivered lines from The King’s Speech, right on top of ostensible competitors like Black Swan and The Social Network.

The semiotics were unmistakable. Firth’s movie had the top Oscar in the bag, and everyone knew it.

But even the most finely attuned viewers may not be so sure

how the story ends, or where some of the plot twists will lead, come Feb. 26, the next Oscar night.

In what has been an unusually confounding awards season — the raunchy Bridesmaids was nominated for the equivalent of a best film award at the Screen Actors Guild, and a supposed Oscar front-runner, The Artist, is poised to become the first (virtually) silent best picture nominee in eight decades — the potential for surprise remains quite alive.

Perhaps not in every category.

For best actor it will take only a nudge from the Screen Actors Guild awards on Jan. 29 to tip either George Clooney, as a troubled Hawaiian heir in The Descendants, or Jean Dujardin, as the even more deeply perplexed silent film star of The Artist, into the “sure thing” column.

But the unexpected gift from the year’s bumper crop of good movies — The Help, Margin Call, Shame, Beginners, to name a few (with short titles) — if not so many great ones, is a return of the unexpected.

The potential for surprise is especially high in the best picture category. There, a change in the counting mechanism by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, has sharply diminished the impact of second-place, third-place and other votes down the ballot, while allowing a film with as few as 250 first-place votes, in a group with almost 6,000 members, to capture a nomination. So a very small, but committed, minority can add a picture to a roster of nominees that will range between five and 10, depending on how many hit a threshold set at 5 percent of the vote.

NOD TO THE OVERLOOKED

Not quite three weeks ago the actors guild caught the year’s spirit when it nominated Demian Bichir for his portrayal of a gardener and illegal immigrant in the woefully overlooked A Better Life (total box office: $1.8 million), while bypassing Michael Fassbender’s heavily promoted performance as a sex-obsessed man in Shame.

Another eye opener, given the film industry’s supposedly male tilt: a lopsided 25 of 39 actors cited in the guild’s outstanding cast performance category were women. At the Golden Globes, surprise worked the other way: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, directed by Stephen Daldry and regarded by many as a strong Oscar contender, was shut out.

On the last Oscar night, surprises became rare as awards watchers, professional and otherwise, turned microscopic attention to the movie prize game in the last decade. Like The King’s Speech, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire was widely judged to be a lock weeks before it swept eight Oscars, including for best picture, in 2009. A shiver of contrived drama surrounded The Hurt Locker in 2010, as the film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, shook off Avatar, directed by Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron. But awards from the producers, directors and writers guilds had already telegraphed the result.

“I was genuinely surprised when Gandhi won over E.T.,” said Peter Bart, when asked when he was last really stunned by an Oscar. A journalist and former film executive who since 1969 has been a member of the Academy, Bart noted that Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-terrestrial, riding a populist wave, had seemed almost certain to best Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, which was slow and serious. All of that was back in 1983.

DARK HORSES

“When you produce the show, you’re desperate for them,” Bill Condon, a producer of the 2009 Oscar ceremony, said of such shocks. “You can feel it in the room, when there’s more love than you might have expected” for a dark horse that turns out to be a winner. Condon cited The Pianist, which in 2003 won writing, acting and directing Oscars, as an example.

The seeming upsets in Oscar history, of course, have a logic: The Academy’s voting members do talk with one another, and generally know where they are headed, even if the rest of us sometimes don’t.

In 1970, for instance, the best actor nominees included Peter O’toole, for Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Richard Burton, for Anne of the Thousand Days; and Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, both for Midnight Cowboy.

Fans of the old cinema and the new were shocked when both were overlooked in favor of John Wayne, for his turn as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. The accomplished Burton, who died in 1984, never won an Oscar. O’toole, nominated eight times, has won only an honorary award. Voight waited nine years for his award, in 1979, for Coming Home, and Hoffman first won in 1980, for Kramer vs. Kramer.

But Wayne, after 40 years in the business, had never been a winner, and Hollywood had decided it was time to “surprise” him with a prize that was all but ordered up months earlier in the trades.

One of the last Oscar nights to play like a movie — or a good prizefight, really — occurred Feb. 27, 2005. With some heavy awards from the producers guild and others under their belt, those who made The Aviator watched the picture pick off five Oscars, including best supporting actress for Cate Blanchett, only to fade, as Million Dollar Baby, a late-season crowd pleaser, walked off with the big one.

UNCERTAIN ATMOSPHERE

Harvey Weinstein, who joined Warner Bros. in backing The Aviator through his Miramax Films, will surely be watching for that sort of challenge to The Artist (from his Weinstein Co.), in this less settled year.

From his point of view, trouble might come from somewhere far back on the year’s release schedule, much as Crash, released in May 2005, crept up on Brokeback Mountain, a December opener and an awards season favorite that won prizes from critics and professional associations, but not the best picture Oscar.

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, released in May, is still around, and the actors guild named it one of five nominees for its top film award. It shares an odd symmetry with The Artist. Allen’s, a fantasy, gazes at 1920s Paris through an American’s eyes. The Artist, written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, is a French look at old Hollywood in the late ’20s and early ’30s.

If those films split the nostalgia vote, with still more ballots from the old school going to the G-men from J. Edgar or the equine World War I troops of War Horse, or to Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a fable of 1930s Paris, then competitors like The Descendants, The Help, Moneyball and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close will have running room.

Maybe Melissa Mccarthy, the raucous heavyweight in Bridesmaids, and an actors guild nominee as supporting actress, will even give Berenice Bejo, from The Artist, a race. And conventional wisdom will be out the window. To which more than a few will say, “Good riddance.”