Oscars 2015

Everything should be released sooner. The Deer Hunter "let them WANT to see it during the voting period" strategy is played out in our current echo-chamber Oscar culture.

still nothing on Spike Lee's Twitter aside from promotion of his Ganja & Hess remake.

Grand Budapest was back in March, right? If it won, it'd be one of the longest stretches between release and reward since ... Silence of the Lambs?

uh it was nominated

Guess I was right, then.

My brain is clearly halfway off today. Allow me an attempt to salvage my argument: I'd have thought that, even if it was complete garbage, Selma would've had a legitimate shot at winning best picture. Given the dearth of non-musical supporting nominations, any chance it might've had as even a dark horse candidate seems to have been scuttled.

Not sure, but I and some other lucky fest-goers saw The Hurt Locker a year and a half before it took Best Picture.

(xp)

@lag00n

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag0BxADNLZqgcFZOcnNoN0Vxd0Q3YTdOZ2hvRlpSQWc&usp=sharing#gid=0

you guys, conservatives are fuming about the oscars too. because nolan got the shaft. lmao.

Sasha Stone @AwardsDaily · 6h 6 hours ago
In not nominating Gillian Flynn the Academy just passed up a chance to honor the first and only woman to adapt her own novel in 87 yrs.

This morning may have finally sent her off the deep end.

and Sasha Stone?

http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/2015-oscar-nominations-a-dark-day-for-women-in-hollywood-20150115

Fiennes getting no nod.. that's truly baffling too. fuckers don't 'get' funny performances but i wonder what Ralph has done to piss them off. film gets 9 noms but the guy that carries the damn thing gets nothing.

Given the furor over the lack o' ladies in the running across the board, the smear campaigns against Boyhood are really going to write themselves.

looking back thirty yrs these are the closest roles to 'comedy' by lead male actors

Tom Hulce - Amadeus
Robin Williams - Good Morning Vietnam
Roberto Benigni - Life is Beautiful
Johnny Depp - Pirates of the Caribbean
Leonardo DiCaprio - The Wolf of Wall Street

and those are all in movies that aren't pure comedies or anything

I'm hardly a fan of Fiennes in general but he is incredible in GBH, definitely carries it, so many great line deliveries ("you FUCKERS!")

Wouldn't Nicholson's latest two at bats count as at least technically comedic?

these British and Irish actors get funnier as they age.

i love ra(l)phie fiennes, dude is vv good at comedy. would like to see him do a purely sleazy scumbag role a la his cameo in 'the good thief'.

Not sure I'd call Fiennes' failure to be nominated "baffling." Best Actor was v. competitive. Some people thought he might benefit from GBH's recent momentum, but he was always in the #6-#10 range. I'm guessing that he, Oyelowo, and Gyllenhaal were the next three vote-getters (followed by Spall, maybe?), though it'd be interesting to know the order.

i bet carell nosed out gyllenhaal's eyes at the end.

true to form the Academy nominated the least interesting combination.

Absofuckinglutely.

btw all you people going, "You know, my girl/boyfriend are catching up on Oscar movies and are gonna give Foxcatcher a chance," I'm warning you now.

Carell, Cooper, Cumberbatch, Keaton, Redmayne

vs.

Fiennes, Gyllenhaal, Oyelowo, Spall

You could put literally anyone in the latter group -- Wahlberg in Transformers, McConaughey in Interstellar, Sorbo in God's Not Dead -- to bring it up to five and it would still be unquestionably the better group.

forgot about wahlberg, intense perf

http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/53b0f1bceab8ea2863981c82/mark-wahlberg-running-transformers-4.gif

Jon Langford in Revenge of the Mekons

xp

Beautiful shot.

Enough of a rooting interest for the Boyhood categories and Citizenfour that I'll probably watch a little more of the show than usual. Very disappointed that Yo La Tengo's 40 seconds in Boyhood doesn't qualify anywhere--Best Wim Wenders Imitation or something.

http://graphics.latimes.com/oscar-nominees-2015/

Observers were quick to point out that the 87th Academy Award nominees lack racial diversity. All the finalists in the best actor and supporting actor categories are white. “Birdman” director Alejandro Inarritu is the only non-white nominee in the best director category.

The lack of diversity prompted the hashtag, #OscarsSoWhite on Twitter. An L.A. Times study in 2012 revealed that 94% of Oscar voters who choose the nominees were white and 77% male. Blacks represented 2% of the academy while Latinos were even fewer.

As was widely expected, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced a slate of Best Picture nominees on Thursday morning that have gone largely unseen by general moviegoers so far.

Ahead of nominations, the eight movies nominated for Best Picture had earned a combined $203.1 million. That's the lowest total since the Academy expanded the field beyond five nominees—and by a large margin, too. The previous low was 2011, when the movies had earned a combined $519 million ahead of nominations.

The highest-grossing Best Picture nominee this year is The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is writer/director Wes Anderson's biggest movie ever with $59.1 million. Budapest opened back in March—a few weeks after last year's Oscar ceremony—and is already available to watch on HBO. Therefore, don't expect any kind of serious theatrical re-release here.

At least now everyone can see the expansion experiment was a total failure.

Cranky old Bob Lefsetz was ranting that the Oscars are out of touch with real people like him who uh, just watch Breaking Bad and stuff and don't go to the movies.

ignoring Interstellar, Lego, Guardians, Gone Girl.. yeah i'd say that was out of touch. i guess they've been through this a few times before; the late 60s, the mid 80s etc. i recall hearing that the nod/s for Beverly Hills Cop in 84 were a sop to more populist movies. obviously the massively out of touch late 60s era is documented in that Pictures At A Revolution book. for it to be *news* everywhere, that the Oscars are now so bland and uniform really does 'The Academy' no favours.

ignoring Interstellar, Lego, Guardians, Gone Girl.. yeah i'd say that was out of touch.

Maybe you'd like them to nominate the box-office chart so they'd be even more like the fucking Grammys.

Interstellar was shit btw, tech nominations are more than enough for that geekwank.

15 nominations btwn Budapest and Boyhood is about as "in touch" as they get from my POV

can we plz throw "populist" in the goddamn garbage can re film, music etc

that shit is populAR

The lack of anything egregiously Blind Side-esque in the best picture noms is kinda heartening.

Maybe you'd like them to nominate the box-office chart so they'd be even more like the fucking Grammys.

The Lego Movie and Gone Girl were critical hits, bub.

yeah not enough for me to see em tho

Let a little populism into your life, Morbs.

It would be nice for them to recognise that making a Marvel blockbuster as witty and imaginative as GotG is harder than making a solid biopic of a troubled Brit scientist but that will never happen.

Unusually good year for big box-office movies. At least half of these got great reviews:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2014

yeah Re-Model, Stranger by the Lake was also eligible, so talk to the hand.

http://www.oscars.org/sites/default/files/2014_reminder_list.pdf

Someone should add up the total cost of, say, those top 20 movies. And then we can all barf together as one.

Carell, Cooper, Cumberbatch, Keaton, Redmayne

vs.

Fiennes, Gyllenhaal, Oyelowo, Spall

You could put literally anyone in the latter group -- Wahlberg in Transformers, McConaughey in Interstellar, Sorbo in God's Not Dead -- to bring it up to five and it would still be unquestionably the better group.

― Vulvacura (Eric H.), Thursday, January 15, 2015 4:35 PM

even punch up with Eisenberg in Night Moves

The lack of anything egregiously Blind Side-esque in the best picture noms is kinda heartening.

Sez you.

that Mr. Peabody & Sherman gross proves that brats and their parents will watch anything

Just for the sake of argument, here's my subjective list of the 2014 movies that made over $50M that based on critical/popular reception would not be incredibly outlandish to consider as best picture nominees:

4	The LEGO Movie	WB	$257,760,692	3,890	$69,050,279	3,775	2/7	9/4
15	Interstellar	Par.	$185,136,958	3,561	$47,510,360	3,561	11/5	-
17	Gone Girl	Fox	$167,210,252	3,284	$37,513,109	3,014	10/3	-
25	Into the Woods	BV	$107,130,087	2,833	$31,051,923	2,440	12/25	-
53	The Grand Budapest Hotel	FoxS	$59,100,318	1,467	$811,166	4	3/7	8/

In other words, the Academy basically did just about all they could this year frankly.

On which chart is The Judge