First off, I just noticed that Blogspot has this annoying tendency to list new posts on top of the page which, fine, makes sense most of the time. But if you're new to the site, you might want to read from the bottom up, to get a sense of what happens here.
Anyway, the Oscar nominees were announced today. (It's amazing that the process takes so long that the NOMINEES for the awards for 2005's top movies are first being announced a month into 2006, and the awards themselves won't be revealed for almost another two months. But as Robert Plant once said, hey, hey, what can I do?
http://www.oscars.com/nominees/list.htmlStrangely enough, my least favorite movie of the year was nominated for Best Picture, that's a bit of a surprise. I'm talking, of course, about "Crash," an absurdly contrived and overblown two-hour movie that has no more to teach us than the title of the Avenue Q song "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist." (And at least that song is entertaining.) I would've liked to see "Match Point" and "The Squid and the Whale" get a little more love. But it's hard to be too upset about any list of nominees that includes a song called "It's Hard Out There For a Pimp" (as one of just THREE recognized songs). Maybe they can have Antonio Banderas perform that this year, as he did for the "Motorcycle Diaries" song last year. Even stranger than the fact that the song was nominated, is the film it was from: "Pride and Prejudice." Look it up.
Okay, don't bother looking it up. It's actually from "Hustle and Flow."
Overall, the nominations were interesting, as usual, but also a little disappointing, as usual. There are definitely patterns through the years. There's always the one small-to-medium budget indie film that surprisingly gets nominated for best picture (this year, "Capote," and it's not the first time it's a biopic) , and there's always another more interesting mid-level indie film that gets overlooked (this year, "The Squid and the Whale") and becomes a favorite in the best screenplay category. (My theory is that the screenplay categories are more culturally progressive than the the other categories; to put it another way, they seem to nominate the hipper films for screenplay awards, but ignore them elsewhere.) "Brokeback" fits a pattern, as the star-studded, much-hyped love story that leads in nominations.
A couple of surprising divergences: Neither "Cinderella Man" (a well-executed, crowd pleasing, Ron Howard/Russell Crowe period drama about a boxer) nor "King Kong," (a huge-budget, well-reviewed sci-fi epic directed by Peter Jackson) drew as much attention as they might have in past years. But this was a year for more politically conscious choices, with the Academy rewarding films--and even selecting a host, in Jon Stewart--that are all bound to have the red states seeing red ("Brokeback," "Capote," "Syriana," "Good Night," "Tramsamerica.")
Even "Munich" antagonized conservatives who thought it humanized anti-Israel terrorists, though I suspect what those narrow-minded types were actually frustrated about was that it showed the Israelis to be conflicted about executing terrorists, which certainly seems like a valid human emotion, even if you agree with the executions. For me, it was this sense of remorse and conflict that separated "Munich" from other violent revenge films (for example, the mind-numbing "Man On Fire," one of the few movies I've ever walked out on), and makes it feel like a genuine classic.
More later... gotta try to look busy.
