Moonrise Kingdom and Oscar?

After snatching the Best Feature prize at the Gotham Awards-- the first awards proper of the season-- and snagging five big Independent Spirit Awards nominations, does Moonrise Kingdom have what it takes to take it's youthful love story all the way to the Academy Awards?

Well the golden reviews the Wes Anderson film received this summer were pretty impressive.  A 94% on critical aggregate Rotten Tomatoes, and a 84 on Metacritic are comparable to falls heavy hitters (and certain Best Picture nominees) Argo and Lincoln; my review here.  Plus, it's $45 million at the summer box office is good enough (more so than The Artist made last year.)  It was a bonafide sleeper that played and played and played well.  It held the record for the biggest opening weekend per-screen average for a live action feature of all time, until Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master yanked it away a mere four months later.  It's an enchanting film, and upon its debut as the opener of this years Cannes Film Festival, many were wistful of the personally-honed nature that Wes Anderson channeled within his own idiosyncratic charm.

There's a quiver and a hopefulness that perhaps now is his time, and a shot with Oscar.  Anderson was previously nominated for Best Original Screenplay (with Owen Wilson) for 2001's The Royal Tenenbaums and for Best Animated Feature for 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox, but aside from that the Academy has been immune to his gifts.  Moonrise Kingdom is against odds, a seminal Anderson selection about a budding young romance between two misfits, elaborately and preciously staged, but there's a longing and romanticism and dare one say, soulfulness, that he's never expressed on screen before.  He lies on the artifice, as Anderson does, and does superbly, but there's also a stripped down fragility at the heart of Moonrise Kingdom that expresses a loneliness and tenderness he perhaps hasn't yet achieved on screen before.

While Moonrise Kingdom will forever remain a dark horse Best Picture (and even more so Best Director) candidate, these early gets offer a nice bit of exposure for a film surely to be forgotten in the haste of the coming weeks.  If nothing more, it solidifies what will surely be Moonrise's best bet-- an Original Screenplay nomination.  Hopefully, the coming weeks will set up a win.