Little Miss Sunshine.

Spoilers herein. You’ve been warned.

Ok, this one perplexed me. It was funny, well written, and well acted but Best Picture? I dunno.. the fact that it was nominated alongside The Departed for BP yet BORAT! was not nominated for anything besides Best Adapted Screenplay (itself a stretch, since it was based on previously created television show characters, not a book or play or anything like that) just doesn’t seem right.

And What The Hell, may I ask, is up with Alan Arkin winning Best Supporting Actor for this role? He was only in the movie for the first hour, and he had some nice choice dialog and a handful of funny scenes, but it’s nowhere near the masterful performance of Djimon Hounsou in Blood Diamond, one of the most frighteningly passionate performances I’ve ever seen.

Oscar complaints aside, I did enjoy the movie quite a bit. I do like me some road movies, because you’re never quite sure where you’re going to end up next, and in this movie it’s one zany setpiece after another, all starting with the family dinnertime around the fried chicken bucket on the formica kitchen table in a house that appears to consist entirely of wood paneling. A call comes in that the regional winner for the Little Miss Sunshine contest has to back out at the last minute, leaving the Olive the youngest, a pudgy, plain-looking girl with pair of eyeglasses half the size of her head, the soul representative for Albuquerque. She has a talent routine that the audience will not be able to enjoy till the last half hour of the movie (and in the fine tradition of Napoleon Dynamite, it’s a surprise dance routine that must not be missed), practiced up at the instruction of her profane, heroin-snorting grandfather. The always fidgety and stressed-out Greg Kinnear is the dad who’s trying to get a 9-step book to success published and can adapt any situation to a maxim on winners and losers. Steve Carrell is hilarious as Uncle Frank, at one time the top Proust scholar (huh?), who after a string of bad luck is home from a visit to the mental hospital due to an attempted suicide. Paul Dano is Dwayne, a disenfranchised teenager who’s taken a vow of silence while he reads Nietzsche and literally sits around waiting to become old enough to join the Air Force. Toni Collette is the kind of Roseanne-inspired mom that throws a box of popsicles on the table and proclaims “dessert.”

The movie is definitely all about the characters as they move from one hairbrained situation to another, packed like sardines in an aging yellow VW Microbus with a broken clutch as they traverse the desert towards California and the Little Miss Sunshine contest. The van provides a running joke in which the family has to push it up to 20mph before Dad can float the gears up to 3rd. Along the road, Frank will have a chance meeting with his former gay lover at a gas station while buying straight porn for Grandpa, the family will have to deal with the prospect of illegally transporting a dead body across state lines, Dad uses an unorthodox method to defuse a potentially disastrous traffic stop, and Dwayne suffers a complete breakdown when he learns that he’s colorblind and won’t be able to join the air force. All this before we get to the surreal fiasco that is the Little Miss Sunshine talent show itself.

All in all, a very different kind of comedy that’s skillfully directed, sharply written, and expertly acted. Good, but not BP material in my opinion.