Fatroland.com is sticking around on Blogger for the time being, so before I hit my drunken stride again with my usual wafflings about music that goes whoomp in the night, here are my tips for the Oscars.
Well. It would be a shame to let my Cineworld card go to waste.
Best Picture
Hurt Locker. There's no real competition. Precious is an immersing experience, as blogged about here, and looking at Oscar's newly beefed-up list, several of 'em turned up in my Best Movies of 2009.
But Locker has that perfect storm feel, like the third Bourne film or United 93. The other nominees are all worthy though, with two flies in the ointment: An Education, which I haven't seen, and Avatar, which is an awesome triumph of style over any kind of substance whatsoever.
Actor In A Leading Role
Jeff Bridges was the grizzled dad you wish you'd had in Crazy Heart. I still have a lot of Dude love for the guy: even now, my heart skips a beat when he's drinking in a bowling alley at the start of Heart. The gong should go to Colin Firth, though, for his portrayal of grief in A Single Man, if only for this phone call scene.
Actor In A Supporting Role
The opening scene of Inglorious Basterds is so simple, so beautiful and sets up the conflict with the minimum of fuss. The rest of the film was a disappointment, with the chilling exception of the crazy-ass Christoph "That's A Bingo!" Waltz as the Nazi officer.
Actress In A Supporting Role
Two nominations for Up In The Air? Really. It was a good film, but I can't help feeling a slot has been pilfered here. And I don't think Penélope Cruz should get the proverbial nod over Judi Dench, who was a all-singing revelation. So then. Mo'Nique should easily bag this as a brutally possessive mother and the best film villain since Anton Chigurh, albeit with real hurts rather than a two-headed coin.
Animated Feature Film
What no Avatar? I don't see how that is any less an animation than the hand-scrawled works of Hayao Miyazaki. As for the nominations, I was disappointed with Fantastic Mr Fox, thrilled by Coraline, but would give an Oscar to the wonderful Up.
The other bits no-one cares too much about
I haven't seen enough to make a judgement on Actress In A Leading Role and a lot of the other categories are best left to the experts.
I can tell you that Avatar looked great, the costumes in Nine were fabulous, A Prophet should have been in for best film, never mind best foreign language film - oh and the music shone in Crazy Heart, A Single Man and, above all, Moon. Does Moon count towards this year? Anyways...
A final thought. If Serious Man and In The Loop don't get screenplay awards, if they don't start moving up the screenplay awards up the order of priorities, and if Kathryn Bigelow doesn't leave the Oscars beknighted as Queen Of The Universe, I'll eat my Cineworld card.
well it looks like bigelow has usurped mirren as Queen of the Universe, and rightly so. Although i wish she'd go t drunk and said something slanderous about Cameron's sexual habits or something, that would've been funny.
ReplyDelete'Stick this up your ass, James, just like you wanted me too!' or something, hee hee
Saw Hurt Locker last night (meaning I saw it - not that there is a version of Saw crossed with HL, that's would be too sick) and yes I was thouroughly impressed. Question is, right type of film to beat Avatar? take the edgy, politicized war film out and is there any other type of film that the academy would deem better than the one that puts style before substance. In terms of the ones I've seen on the best film nominations list, Avatar is last while Up comes a very close second. I don't think the academy would see it that way tho.
and yes you are also right about Colin Firth, he was awesome and that phone call scene was one of the most powerful ive seen in a long time. Overall, its nice to see that the film industry is enjoying a healthy and abundant time of it at the moment
I'm so relieved Avatar didn't win much. It wasn't even on my top 30 of last year. And I only saw about 40 films.
ReplyDeleteThe Guardian did a wonderful one-page piece about Bigelow and whether the Academy was now taking women seriously - and then followed it by four pages of the best dressed women! Woo!