It’s January, which means it’s a new year with a new class of Oscar nominees. This is my favorite time of year, yes I enjoy this more then Christmas!
First I’m tired of this five - ten approach to nominating movies for the best picture category. Let’s just make it ten and stick with it. This year there were eight films nominated (there weren’t two that could fill the out the field?).
I’ve seen seven of the eight movies and Roma is on my agenda to see. More on that to come. Of the seven films I’ve seen I throughly enjoyed six of them. I thought A Star is Born was seriously over rated. Green Book, BlackKklansman, Vice and the other nominated films I saw I’m glad they are competing for best picture. I like the diversity of the category. You have a mega blockbuster (Black Panther), a foreign film (Roma), a political satire (Vice), a very dark comedy (The Favourite), a really odd true story (BlackKklansman) among others competing for the top honor.
Circling back for a minute Roma is a Netflix movie. I believe, with my whole heart, that movie going first should be a shared experience, with friends, family, & strangers at a theater. It pisses me off that Netflix has done the bear minimum to meet the qualifications to be considered for the Oscars and won’t put the movie in the theaters for some showings. I get their trying to drum up subscribers for their sight but it feels like they’re holding a piece of me hostage in doing so.
Moving on. Some great performances were nominated this year. I loved Glenn Close in The Wife. I’m routing for her to win best actress. The chemistry between Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen in Green Book was fantastic making two performances worthy of being Oscar nominated. All three nominees from Vice more than deserve the nominations. Vice was one of the most original films this year. I’m glad to see it getting so much attention.
The biggest acting surprise, and surprise overall, was Willem Dafoe’s nomination for At Eternity’s Gate. This is the films sole nomination. (I assumed the beautifully shot movie would be nominated for cinematography). Willem Dafoe was great in the movie but was he really better then Ethan Hawke in First Reformed or John David Washington in BlackKklansman?
Speaking of BlackKklansman what a movie. The saying truth is stranger than fiction clearly applies to this movie. It’s a well deserved nomination for best picture and its director Spike Lee.
Moving down the line a bit to the animated feature category. There were some awesome films nominated and I love that Isle of Dogs and Spiderman Into the Spider-verse are competing with one another. The pair of movies are two of my favorite animated features ever.
The biggest snubs of the year comes in the documentary category. Both Won’t You be my Neighbor and Three Identical Strangers were thought provoking movies with interesting subjects. Both truly deserved to be called academy award nominees. At least the Ruth Bader Ginsberg documentary, RBG, is competing.
I’m not going to talk about the Kevin Hart and now hostless Oscars situation. It just pisses me off.
The Oscars will be here soon and until then happy movie going!
No comments:
Post a Comment