Oscar Night

[filkertom]

Home. More about the rest of the con later. 'Cause it's time for the Academy Awards!






Okay, I really don't much care. I hope Mickey Rourke wins for The Wrestler, but I am so not up on movies this year I don't even know what's up for Best Animated. [looks] Okay, if Wall-E doesn't win, something is very wrong. And I love both Bolt and Kung Fu Panda. What I'd really like is for Wall-E also to win Best Original Screenplay. Now that would be an in-your-face BOO-YAH!

Here are all the nominations. Thoughts on your faves?

Comments

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

I will admit to not knowing much about the movies up for awards this year. I did like Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda, though.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

Want to see Roarke win, indeed. "Wall-E" MUST win. I think Ledger will win, but I hope its on the weight of her performance not cause he died.

Would love to see Anne Hathaway win.. she rocks, but its a tough category, will probably lose to Winslet.

Would love it is "Oktapodi" wins animated short

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm sure there's gonna be some rub because he died, but his Joker was an amazing performance. If he were still alive, I think he'd still be the favorite.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

Other than Heath Ledger, who I do want to see win, I don't really care about the Oscars this year. I saw none of the movies that had a best actor, best actress, best supporting actress, best animated picture (although both Bolt and Wall-E are on my to-rent list), best picture, you get the point. 95% of the nominated movies I have no interest in. Dark Knight, Iron Man, Bolt, and Wall-E were the only four, and the trailers for Wall-E struck me as being a 10-15 minute short that was stretched out to be a 120 minute movie. No special effects nod to Speed Racer for those races? FEH! I dont care if it didnt win, but seeing those races on the big screen were a joy to watch.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I'll tell you this, seriously: Wall-E was my favorite film of the year. More than Iron Man, more than The Dark Knight. A great little film.

[sdelmonte]

I want Ledger for the simple reason that I love the idea someone could win for playing the Joker. The power of that character, and by extension of the simple super-hero comic book, will be proven once and for all.

OK, maybe not, but it would still be cool.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

Sorry, but I gave up on the Oscars when I realized the innate prejudice against sci-fi films. They don't get any respect apart from FX (which Dark Knight and Iron Man lost). But at least Wall-E won once.

Case in point, the best original screenplay was Milk. How can Milk be original? It's based on actual events! Wall-E was original, unless someone else had the "last robot on earth cleaning up the trash" movie.

I haven't seen Ben Button, but how could that win Visual Effects? From the trailers, all they did was run film backwards.

The Oscars have a twisted set of standards when it comes to winners.

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

Case in point, the best original screenplay was Milk. How can Milk be original? It's based on actual events!

I've kind of wondered that myself. At best they should have a new category, "best relal life adaptation" or something.

I'm glad I didn't watch now, as I was saved from gagging when Sean Penn took best actor. Bleah. I don't know what it is about him, but he's set my teeth on edge from the first time I ever saw him in anything.

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

Hollywood groupthink demanded that Milk get an award; the groupthink for Slumdog Millionaire for Best Picture ruled that out; Penn happened to be standing in the backdoor route used to resolve the contradiction.

[jannyblue.livejournal.com]

I made predictions in a friend's LJ-poll about the Oscars...

...and I won the pool.

Not bad for blind guesswork, coin flips and knowing just how gosh-darned predictable the academy is every year.

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

[begin rant]
So far, what I've seen in these comments is variations on "If it ain't sci-fi (and a pretty narrow definition of genre, at that), it's no good." That's crap.

I've seen Slumdog Millionaire. It's a brilliant, moving, uplifting film, and well deserves all eight of the Oscars it won. And for an American moviegoer, its exploration of the slums of Mumbai is just as much of a journey into an alien culture as any SF film I can think of.

I've seen Milk. Sean Penn's performance was amazing. I don't know if he deserved to beat Micky Rourke, as I haven't yet seen The Wrestler. But Penn's win does no disservice to the award. And while the screenplay won in part because the politics of the film appeals to the Academy voting crowd, it also won because it does a masterful job of capturing the culture, politics, and personalities of a particular place and time, and gives the murders, and how they affected so many people,
undeniable emotional impact.

(Originality? Robots, spaceships, Earth drowning in garbage - it's all been done before. And if originality were the only criterion for the Original Screenplay Oscar, ignoring everything else, then most likely the winner would have been Charlie Kaufman's screenplay for Synechdoce, New York. Nobody does original like Charlie Kaufman. But them, I'm a big fan of Kaufman, and believe that his Being John Malkovich is a much better movie than Galaxy Quest, which beat it for the Hugo, and thought it was a very close choice between The Incredibles and his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But I digress.)

I've seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In fact, I've seen all the nominees in the Special Effects and Makeup categories, where it won its two Oscars. It deserved to win the Effects award, and while I might personally have voted for Hellboy II in the Makeup category, it would have been close. Doing the kind of subtle work the artists in BB did is damned hard, harder than big, flashy gadgets and explosions. Imagine what it takes to create a character who has the body size and shape of a seven year old, the posture, movement, facial characteristics, etc. of an octogenarian, still manages to look recognizably like Brad Pitt, and looks just as human as the real people around him.

BB also happens to be an outstanding fantasy film. I put it on my Hugo nomination ballot, and if it gets on the final ballot, it will get my first place vote. Look, I love WALL*E. But its brilliance is all in the execution. As an SF film, it's flawed. It does things with human physiology that I just couldn't believe.

Heath Ledger deserved to win, not because he gave a brilliant performance in a comic book film, but because he gave a brilliant performance, period. I believe that if he were alive, he still would have won.

Since Anne Hathaway's name came up, I'll mention that I just saw Rachel Getting Married yesterday, and Hathaway deserved her nomination. Not because she's hot or cute, but because she completely lost herself in the role of a neurotic, guilt-ridden, fresh out of rehab drug addict with family issues.

I haven't yet seen The Reader, Frost/Nixon, The Wrestler, or Doubt, but I'd like to see all of them. Non-genre films can be good. In fact, they can be great.

One last thing: You really can't judge the movie by the trailer.
[end rant]

[alverant.livejournal.com]

Sorry Mark, you still haven't explained why it deserves a prize for being original. It's based on history, that makes it less original than any SF film.

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

I wasn't trying to explain that. I disagree with your starting premise, that originality is the only, or primary, criterion by which to judge a screenplay. Ask any published author or working screenwriter which is more important, the idea or the execution, and I'll bet the overwhelming majority will say the execution. "Best Original Screenplay" does not mean "Most Original Screenplay". It simply means "Best screenplay not based on an already existing book, play, or other creative work."

And if you just dismiss any movie based on history, you're dismissing a group that includes, among others Apollo 13 and Schindler's List. I won't go along with that.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

I'm not dismissing any movie based on history as a good movie. I'm dismissing a movie based on history as a candidate for "Best Original Screenplay". I see no reason not to include historic events in the list of requirements: "existing book, play, or other creative work". IMHO the spirit of "Best Original Screenplay" is to give an award for an original work. If the events already happened, how can you say it's original?

History is written in books. So if a history book talks about Milk then they make a movie about Milk, doesn't that mean that movie is based on an existing book?

Give Milk an award for best "Adaption of an historic event" or something, but don't call it original. Otherwise we're going to have "original" movies based on the history books we had to read in high school.

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

I've seen Milk. Sean Penn's performance was amazing.

I have no doubt that it's a good movie, or that Penn did a good job as an actor. I personally have a hard time enjoying a Sean Penn performance because he annoys me, so it would take quite a bit to get me to watch a movie with him in it.

It's not a WALL*E thing for me either. I enjoyed that movie as well, but I wouldn't have voted for it as best picture.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

Forgot to include this:

Glad you had a good time and you made it home all right.