So far I have seen four of the ten Best Picture nominees. All four were excellent films and certainly deserve to be honoured in the best picture category. As you may or may not know there are three main flavours of best picture nominee. Front runners, spoilers, and it's an honour to be nominated. Our front-runners this year are the documentary known as How to Make a Best Picture Winner a.k.a. The King's Speech and the young upstart The Social Network which is about this new fangled internet thing that most of the members of the academy don't understand. As you may have gathered I'm slightly bitter about this whole thing.
Our spoilers are The Fighter and True Grit. True Grit was shut down at the Golden Globes but recieved ten nominations for the Oscars, placing it in second place for most nominations behind...you guessed it, The King's Speech.
Now, I must confess, I haven't seen The King's Speech. It's likely a good, even great movie. But like I mentioned above, it doesn't seem to have anything special about it. It was made to win an Oscar. A classic hollywood style feel good film. Once again this is based on the presumption that it follows the true story of the actual King George. If it does something wierd like say have the King kill himself in the middle of the film that would be something interesting. But let us assume for my purposes (to rant about how old and out of touch the Academy is) that it doesn't.
Finally our, It's An Honour to be Nominated category: Winter's Bone, The Kids Are All Right, 127 Hours, Black Swan, Toy Story 3, and (shockingly) Inception. Now I just put these movies in this category because they're all that's left. Honestly the only ones that really should be happy 'just to be there' are Winter's Bone (The best movie that nobody saw) and The Kids Are All Right (new age family lesbian comedy). 127 Hours and Black Swan (I've seen the latter but not the former Edit - I've seen 127 Hours. It's incredible, but not quite as horrifying as I had been led to believe. You can't really describe it as a thriller either because you know what's going to happen before you see it. So I just think it's not a front runner for best picture because it doesn't quite have the scale of the other films that are nominated. It's still excellent though - check it out.) are both critically praised dramas that go a little to far with the horror/thriller aspect than the academy enjoys. Toy Story 3 (My best movie of the year, and the movie that deserves this award) is just there so that the academy can acnowledge that Pixar makes excellent movies but they'll never get a best picture award because 'They're just animated films'.
Finally we come to Inception. And this is where I am shocked. I assume that Inception doesn't have a hope in hell based on the fact that Christopher Nolan was blatantly snubbed in the Best Director category, but I can't explain why to you. Sure it's a bit sci-fi actiony for their usual tastes but that's just window dressing. The heart of the film is in the story's tale of dreams and reality, and the way it dissects the characters to show the inner workings of the human mind. This was Christopher Nolan's big film. He said he had been working on this script in some form since before 2000. This was a directors movie. The fact that he wasn't even nominated is stunning to me. Oh well, that's life.
What we really have is an Academy Award that's about old vs. new, Classic feel good film-making vs. a tragic tale of Shakespearian proportions. I suspect (and hope) that The Social Network will win. I watched it today and found myself loving every moment of it's tragic tale of greed and the breakdown of relations in modern society. It was a great movie. I find it very difficult to rank amongst my previous top 5 films of the year. I expect I would place it above Machete and Kick-Ass, my fourth and fifth respectively, not because those films aren't serious, (I find that not being serious isn't a problem. Scott Pilgrim, which also came out this year is one of the best movies I've ever seen and it would be described by many as not serious) but just because it has something to say, which in this case trumps the relentless mayhem of Machete, and the bloody teen energy of Kick-Ass.
My picks in the other major categoies are:
Colin Firth for Best Actor - Because if the Social Network wins they'll want to give King's Speech something, and also because they feel they owe him one.
Natalie Portman for Best Actress - This one's a no brainer, she absolutely blew me away.
Christian Bale for Best Supporting Actor - This is so Bale will stop being so serious for a while and loosen up. Maybe make a comedy. Or a family film.
Hailee Steinfeld for Best Supporting Actress - The Academy often gives this award to young plucky newcomers.
Toy Story 3 for Best Animated Film - Um....... duh?
Darren Aronofsky for Best Director - This one is close, and it could go to either him or David Fincher, but having watched both films back to back I think that Aronofsky made the most difference to his movie. (Though I'm a big fan of Fincher's work and think he did a great job with The Social Network. Black Swan was just a bit more of a directors film. Social Network was more about the script.)
The Social Network for Best Adapted Screenplay - I think this one's fairly straightforward. The dialogue in this is ridiculously good.
Inception for Best Original Screenplay - Because they're going to have to come out and give Nolan props for this movie somewhere so why not this category AKA the Pulp Fiction category for "We don't like your movie because it's too new-fangled for us but everyone else in the universe loved it so here you go don't say we never gave you anything"
Alex
No comments:
Post a Comment