Oscars 2015

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/

they're self-obsessed and sexee [sic]

Slant pair doing v well with their forecasts imho; kudos Eric.

and Ed ranked all the nominees (but one), and the loser is Whiplash.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/ranking-oscars-2015-nominees

for someone who claims to hate this whole rat race stuff you sure spend a lot of time reading blogs about it

yeah well, life is boring when there's literally nothing to do at work

just do what i do and read wikipedia pages about obscure soviet apparatchiks killed in stalin's purges

daring call on orig screenplay by Eric; GBH still seems too good.

It won the WGA and the BAFTA, so it's not that daring.

I def think GBH is winning at least 3 or 4. Just not the big ones.

just do what i do and read wikipedia pages about obscure soviet apparatchiks killed in stalin's purges

― I dunno. (amateurist)

what I was reading about last week: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marozia

4th of Harris' 5 prediction columns:

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/oscar-predictions-part-4-the-acting-categories/

most entertainingly headsploding result of the night wd be Citizenfour for doc, Am Sniper for, well let's say best actor.

also hadn't realized before reading E's piece today that the best actresses' films only got ONE other nomination total.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/article/oscar-winner-predictions-2015-actress

That's not exactly what I was saying. I was saying the three actresses who are most dominant in their film (i.e. most screen time) only got one other nod. Useless Jones' movie got 5 nods.

ok got it

(drugged)

Which, at the risk of incriminating myself, isn't to say that those clamoring for a solution to the problem are any less toxic, diminishing the merits of Moore's valiant, stricken performance in Still Alice as though it's a crime against humanity that she's going to collect her overdue Oscar for a disease-of-the-month melodrama and not for, say, flashing her bush in Robert Altman's Short Cuts or telling Marky Mark where he can put his money shot in Boogie Nights. Many refuse to examine the ways Moore, a dependably controlling performer, wrestles with the material, and how that struggle enriches the plight of her character facing early-onset Alzheimer's disease. And they're the same ones endorsing Cotillard (perfectly fine in a role that mainly asks her to cry and collapse) simply by virtue of her appearing in a more respectable film, engaging in an equally deleterious practice of equating "best actress" with "any female performer who happens to appear in the movie I'm the least embarrassed to be talking about."

otm

also: cranky because an hour ago I had written something similar

I'm cranky because Mark Harris basically started to make the exact same points as I did and then said, "but that's for another time." X(