Oscars 2015

i think psychology has proved that "war heroism" is v often insanity, temp or othwise

(btw remind me to tell you about the time i visited sgt york's childhood home)

― I dunno. (amateurist

remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke

(couldn't resist)

Never in my life have I been so thoroughly nonplussed by a being movie nominated for Best Picture as I am with Sniper. Politics aside the movie is an absolute piece of shit. (I do have to admit BCoop is great.)

If the movie is a big hit (as it seems to be) i wdn't completely write off a Cooper win at the Oscars, whatev the politics

Everyone in that category outside of Carell has "a shot."

Isn't it odd that Under the Skin got zero nominations? Not even one for the immaculate soundtrack?

no

Yeah that is not an academy-type movie. Def on my best of list for the year.

american sniper aka the hurt locker II: more hurt, less locker

More Hurt, Less Locker, No The

So, yeah, it took Sniper all of ONE SINGLE DAY to become this year's highest-grossing best picture nominee.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4003&p=.htm

I've followed news about its climbing grosses all weekend. And here I thought Gran Torino would be Eastwood's last box office hurrah.

I'm choosing to pretend that this phenomenon is strictly stemming from Eastwood worship, lest I have to once again back away from American pop culture slowly.

Hollywood Obamaists circling the wagons discreetly, preferring their pro-war American exceptionalism to come from the shadowy artsiness of Bigelow-Boal.

They do that, don't they?

can one circle a wagon discreetly?

At night. It will become less discreet soon.

This might actually push a few doc votes to Citizenfour as a "statement." (I am still thinking Last Days in Vietnam, which apparently says nothing politically.)

Alfred, you circle wagons COLLECTIVELY, you don't circle around one wagon. You are fired from my remake of Rio Grande.

He Wore a Red AIDS Ribbon

Rally Round the F**, Boys!

Brokeback Stagecoach

The apparent success of American Sniper seems pretty not surprising to me. Muddled morals fog of war movie, hero whose lies took traction but whose truth has my guess gone unknown by the same hyper patriots who embraced the fiction, military, Eastwood, America - it's like pan partisan movie bait. And it's probably the only best picture nom with machine guns.

Ludicrously enough, I think the Wes Anderson one has 'em.

Firing? Or just soldiers standing around? I can't remember.

I noted way back when on the "Interstellar" thread how refreshing it was, love the movie or hate it, to see a big budget blockbuster with no guns or other military fetishising.

Just two dudes breaking each other's industrial helmets on a rocky, bombed-out looking terrain while somewhere nearby a flag waves.

Mark Harris:

There’s something else to consider: In part as a result of that huge box-office number, the conversation around and about American Sniper is about to get a lot more political. Eastwood’s film pretty much skated through its prenomination heats because of (1) Clint love among the Academy’s mostly old/white/male votership, which is not monolithic but, you know, not entirely non-monolithic; and (2) the history police being too busy disemboweling Selma to pay much attention to the fact that Eastwood’s movie was about a man who made his name by killing 160 people in the Iraq War.

Now that changes. The next few days are likely to see any number of right-of-center media outlets herald the film’s box office triumph as a victory for “real Americans,” and an implicit counterweight to “Hollyweird.” And there’s going to be more discussion all along the ideological spectrum about the degree to which American Sniper is in fact a conservative movie — conservative not in the kind of overt expression of politics that it shrewdly takes pains to avoid, but rather in its relative lack of interest in the people Chris Kyle killed, or the country in which they were killed, or what we were doing there.

is this footnote true?

You’d have to go all the way back to 1941’s immensely popular hit Sergeant York to find an Academy Award–nominated war movie that so directly equated American war heroism with a body count.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/american-sniper-bradley-cooper-box-office-oscar-race/

There's a huge gun battle in GBH

Xp

I never saw Black Hawk Down

Was it Sam Fuller that said there's no such thing as a totally anti-war movie?

that who

last days in vietnam was about as feel-good as a vietnam movie can possibly be for americans without actually making everything up. found what i saw pretty boring.

every time i see an ad for the eastwood movie it reminds me of the movie in inglourious basterds.

http://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/files/2011/06/IB-Hitler-laughs.png

dfh, r u Seth Rogen? he tweeted same

not far off, at this point

LDIV was pretty well-made and effective for what it was imo, though someone who saw it and had no idea what happened in vietnam would probably come away thinking that the worst thing that happened there was that we left, which is A Problem of course

Lol I haven't seen GBH in almost a year, but totally, there is a gunfight in the lobby! I totally forgot!

plan on seeing american sniper to see if there's anything to the hogwash folks on both sides of the aisle seem to be flinging at it. i seem to recall someone at the ny times labeling it "pro-family" in a v. glorious strawman piece and based on talking to the critics i know who've seen it and dug it (who are not righties), it's decidedly...not some "men of valor" B.S. (or whatever that movie was starring actual navy SEALs).

there is a gunfight in the lobby

pretty entertaining one too. reminded me of a comic variant on the amazing gunfight in the hotel in johnnie to's exiled

For a change, the docs are the strongest of the three short film lineups. The Reaper and Our Child are incredibly tough to watch.

Imitation Game is bad beyond belief. Direct to TV trash. 1/10

i wish it were that bad, it'd be more interesting.

they are forecasting

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/tags/academy+awards

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8853c1IUAEPumR.jpg

could not ID the two on the right w/out looking at nominees list.

so will Wachowskis' bomb be Redmayne's Norbit?

The reviews I've bothered to look at say he's by FAR the best thing in it, so no.

btw that Beat the Crowd contest is now open -- the one that had no winner last year, cuz, the crowd picked every winner.

no way tatum isn't the best thing about that movie

Mark Harris:

I’m not sure why, in the last four years, Oscar voters have suddenly become so determined to turn inward, although they certainly live in a world that encourages it. Every year now, awards season seems to be twice as noisy as the year before. Given the glut of mailings, screenings, DVDs, trade publications, and blogs that exist because of Oscar advertising, roundtables, preliminary awards, dinners, contrived festival honors, panels, and Q&As, it’s easy for people who live and work inside the bubble to start to believe, between October and February, that the bubble is all there is. When they go home for the holidays in December, it’s with a stack of screeners; when they self-disgustedly flee Hollywood in January, they get only as far as Sundance. And this winter, the scandal over the Sony hack and The Interview provided an unusual corroboration of the idea that what Hollywood does really is front-page news with real-world stakes. In that context, a vote for Birdman, which might have looked like an act of self-absorption back in November, may now feel more like a defiant act of self-affirmation: We’re here, we’re deeply flawed but sincere — get used to it!

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/best-picture-birdman-academy-awards-producers-guild/