Never mind all those Oscar predictions posts out there. If you really want to make some money in the office pool, look no further than a random blog created specifically to leak the winners of this year’s Academy Awards. Think it’s a hoax? I guess we just won’t know until Sunday, will we? And by then you’ll be out hundreds of dollars because you didn’t bet on The Reader for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Okay, so who cares if it’s real or not, particularly in this predictable a year, anyway? The real betting should be on who the telecast producers have wrangled to be those “top secret” presenters. Oh wait, it seems the big names, those that obviously should be revealed in order to attract their audiences, have also come out.

Ah, but what are they saying about either leak on the interweb, you ask? As usual, check out the quotes/links after the jump.

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So Etta James doesn’t like Beyonce’s redition of her signature song, “At Last”, and that reminded me that I’ve never linked to Andrew Chan’s piece on Cadillac Records, the only serious appraisal of the film that I saw concurrent with its release. To quote at length, Chan has nothing but praise for Beyonce:

In the film’s climactic number, Beyoncé seals the deal with her rendition of “I’d Rather Go Blind”…as an actress and a singer, she finds ways to make her interpretation both faithful and fresh. Sung directly to an impossible, already-married love interest, label founder Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), the performance begins from the point-of-view of the male, gazing at Etta from behind with his puppy-dog eyes. From the start, the pace and phrasing of Beyoncé’s vocals follow Etta’s with surprising fidelity. Then, as the camera inches forward, eventually framing the singer’s face in close-up, the scene builds in intensity, climaxing with a sneer at the corner of her mouth, and a few defiant, gut-wrenching wails. It’s clear her version is not the original’s moan of resignation, but an enactment of all the bitterness and resentment on which Etta James based her take-no-prisoners persona….

By the time Beyoncé is finished with “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she has achieved what neither Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles nor Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash could manage: a respectful embodiment as well an expansion of a mythic figure. She takes us across a curiously underexplored frontier, where the emotional and physical abandon of an R&B performance becomes both the means and the substance of great melodramatic acting.

Etta’s version of “I’d Rather Go Blind” is embedded above, and Beyonce’s is down below. Judge for yourself.

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The Academy’s list of 49 tunes deemed eligible for the Best Original Song Oscar this year seems like a lot for the Music Branch to pick through. That is, until you notice that more than one-fifth of those contenders are from the same film (High School Musical 3, which, thanks to a new rule, is only allowed, at most, two nominations in this category) and you recall that last year’s list included many more songs (59) to choose from. The talent involved this year, however, is tremendous, at least in terms of those performers who sing the tunes on the soundtrack (many of whom had a hand in the songwriting). These artists include Mariah Carey, Etta James, Beyonce Knowles (who played Etta James), Norah Jones, will.i.am, Jack White and Alicia Keys, Danny Elfman, Emmylou Harris, Chaka Khan and Regina Spektor.

Add to those big names such heavyweights as Bruce Springsteen and Peter Gabriel, both of whom are locks to be nominated, as well as tween favorites Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron (along with the rest of the cast from High School Musical 3), and you could have one hell of a concert if the Academy simply turned its awards telecast into one big celebration of the year’s songs written for the screen. Unfortunately for ABC, the Oscars aren’t just about securing viewers, so there’s no promise that the most popular artists will be among the five nominees. Rather, the true Oscar-worthy songs are those tunes that serve their respective films best — in terms of context as much as in the quality of their songwriting.

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Beyonce’s video for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” may have already garnered nearly 20 million views on YouTube, but it’s not the best of the many great music videos of 2008. Here are five that are better –– and none of them rip off Bob Fosse. You can see my picks for the 5th through 10th best videos of 2008 (yes, including Beyonce) at my blog, alsolikelife.com/shooting.

5. Killer Mike featuring Ice Cube, “Pressure” Directed by Giovanni Hidalgo

One can only imagine how many hours director Hidalgo spent ripping and mixing clips off the internet, cable news, and who knows where else, but watching the result is like a long night’s cram session for a Black liberation theory class in the space of a song.

The sheer breadth of footage is breathtaking, flashing everything from archival newsreel to Hollywood clips to graphic crime videos. The shock-and-awe montage makes it hard to arrive at a coherent thesis for grappling with the laundry list of social ills laid out by both the lyrics and visuals, full of jarring juxtapositions that radically recontextualize familiar images and figures into an alternative universe of hip-hop resistance. Even Barack Obama doesn’t come away unscathed: his “Yes We Can” iconography is eventually followed by a clip of him dancing with Ellen Degeneres that’s as ingratiating as Stepin Fetchit. The lasting effect is a purposeful distancing from the daily stream of images that spoon-feed us into complacency, something that viewers of any race or background can take to heart.

As Ice Cube says, “I’m here to deprogram you.” A machine gun spray of media-fueled dissonance, “Pressure” accomplishes in six minutes what took Oliver Stone’s JFK three hours.

Zoom in on: 2:46. The juxtaposition of Saddam Hussein and O.J. Simpson at their respective trails exemplifies the mad method of this video: a knee-jerk provocation, an inspired association, or both.

Compare to: Terry Lynn, ”The System”

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Who would you rather hear sing Etta James’ signature tunes, the real deal or Beyonce Knowles? If you prefer the latter, then you’ll want to see Cadillac Records and even buy the film’s soundtrack, both of which feature Beyonce performing a few of James’ songs, including a nearly spot-on copy of “At Last” (listen to it here). Other actors in the film (and on the soundtrack) who do their own singing while portraying legendary music artists include Jeffrey Wright (as Muddy Waters), Mos Def (Chuck Berry) and Columbus Short (Little Walter).

It’s a strange idea to pay tribute to a singer with a biopic or ensemble music historical and then replace that singer’s voice with another, more amateur vocalist. Yet Hollywood does it all the time and, surprisingly, the new performances usually turn out pretty good. Just listen to the following nine actors and actresses who managed to do justice to the artist they were portraying.
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