G’s Oscar Picks pt. 1

So I thought I'd take a stab at picking these Oscar winners, and thought I'd start with the category that I actually have a right to discuss, since I saw all of the "Best Director" nominees. This might've been the year that I saw all of the Best Picture nominees too, but the expansion to 10 flicks this year in that category killed that plan. So, Best Director it is…

Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire- (Lee Daniels) This was the most powerful movie in the bunch, and definitely courted the most controversy. The acting was natural and engaging, especially considering the untrained sources that some of the strongest performances came from. The film was unrelenting and dark yet still ended up celebrating the resilience and awakening of a main character that would have simply been doomed in the hands of another storyteller. These reasons make Lee Daniels' nomination for best director well deserved. I can't help feeling that the movie didn't "feel cinematic" enough for Daniels to deserve the Oscar though. It's hard to explain what I mean by that, besides saying that the movie looked like a TV movie and not something that I plop down 12 bucks to see on a 60 ft. screen. That's not because it's a movie without aliens or explosions, it just did not feel like it was shot with the level of technique and skill that makes a movie really "feel" like a movie. An example of a movie that is not an f/x fest but still has that "cinematic" quality would be…

Jason Reitman (Harvard-Westlake represent!)
Up in the Air – This movie was very "Seinfeld"-like, it was really about nothing. We follow characters doing their job, which is firing people, and navigating the twist and turns of life and the changing expectations that we have for it. To make a compelling movie out of "nothing" is a challenge, but it's a challenge that Reitman succeeds in accomplishing. He even uses what we know about George Clooney the person in service of the character that Clooney plays, so that our expectations, based on what we know about Clooney, makes what happens to his character all the more interesting and surprising. But was this the best directing job when you have movies like…

Quentin Tarantino
Inglorious Basterds- My favorite living director at the top of his game. The "strudel scene" alone makes him a deserving nominee. There were so many moving parts, so many dialogue heavy scenes to keep interesting, not to mention so many languages spoken throughout that Tarantino deserves an Oscar just for keeping Inglorious Basterds from becoming an incomprehensible mess. But he ain't gonna win, nor should he, though it's two different movies that makes "ain't" and "shouldn't" true...

Kathryn Bigelow (Columbia represent!)The Hurt Locker- Predicted Winner: I liked this movie a lot, but I sure didn't love it. It had great acting, was shot well, and definitely kept the tension ratcheted up. It felt like a one trick pony though, with the same scenario playing out over and over again. It's an intense scenario, finding and diffusing bombs in the middle of a war zone, but it's still the same one. It didn't help that the "oh shit!" moment of the movie, the six bombs revealing themselves surrounding bomb tech SSG William James (played by the Oscar nominated Jeremy Renner) at once, was plastered all over the ads and posters for the movie before I got into the theatre. I think Bigelow is gonna win though, because it is a good, well directed movie that's gotten a heap of praise, and it happens to have a director that can make history as the first woman to win the Directing Oscar (the reason that James Cameron thinks that her winning is a done deal). Oscar voters love to make history, especially with a winner that you cannot argue is undeserving. I'm also predicting a Bigelow victory because she's already won the Directors Guild Award, and that award has forecast the Directing Oscar winner in 54 out of the 60 years that the DGA has given the award. She's not my winner though because I have to go with…

James Cameron (Avatar)- When you spend $500 Million on a movie your goals would seem to be to get a whole lotta butts in the seats, and wow them enough to keep those butts coming back. Cameron delivered on that. He also made a 3D movie that didn't treat the medium as a gimmick to "shoot things at you" with, but instead as a tool used to really immerse you into another world. He achieved that. He also achieved some surprising things for a movie of this kind. While the script wasn't Shakespeare, Cameron got strong, interesting performances from his cast (see the Star Wars prequels if you think that's easy to achieve with such special effects laden films). The greatest achievement was getting the strong, engaging performances that Cameron got out of the "fake" characters, the Na'vi,. The technological advances that Cameron spearheaded, and Cameron's attention to the most minute details led to "Avatars," or CGI characters, that could show the full breadth of facial expression, and therefore emotion, that made the performances that guided the CGI representations shine thru (and in my opinion should have led to an Oscar nomination for Zoe Saldana). Advancing the art of filmmaking, while telling an interesting, engaging (if not unfamiliar) story? That's Oscar-worthy to me!

 

 

 

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