For the fourteen loyal P&B readers who don't visit Mike D'Angelo's blog, please stop by, won't you? He just finished a countdown of the best movies of the year, at least according to a selected number of movie nerds. While those results may not be of much interest to non-nerds (though I will always maintain that the Skandies is the best and most interesting of all movie surveys/awards), Mike's posts include clips of the year's best scenes (as voted on by said movie nerds -- the idea is that these are the year's best scenes that can be seen completely divorced from context). So you'll get to see some awesome clips, everything from Children of Men's miraculous "automobile ambush" trick-shot (voted #1 scene of the year) to Borat wrestling in the nude to this hilarious bit from Talledega Nights, a scene I hadn't seen before. My favorite scene of the year is here as well. Good stuff.
Also, if you have a Tradesports/Intrade account, check out the low, low prices on Peter O'Toole. Definitely worth a flyer. You'll also find good prices for Little Miss Sunshine for picture and Scorsese (who's a lock but not priced like one) for director. Alan Arkin might be worth a gamble as well. Make sure you buy me a beer if you score big, but take these tips at your own risk.
Showing posts with label oscars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oscars. Show all posts
Friday, February 16, 2007
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Promises, promises
Believe it or not, there will soon be some serious movie-blogging on this site. Before that commences, though, just a few thoughts on the Oscar noms this morning. Everyone knew Dreamgirls will walk away with Best Picture, right? Isn't that what all the "experts" predicted?
AMPAS not only threw the pundits for a loop, what's shocking is that the "surprises", both moderate and shocking, were actually so damn pleasant. My favorite helming and performance of the year both nominated? Ponies for everyone.
* The best directing job of the year belonged to Paul Greengrass, whose United 93 hovers far above any other American film I've seen all year. After being shut out of the guild awards, everyone kind of wrote off United 93's chances for anything. Nobody wanted to actually sit down and watch this movie, it's been explained. Well, I guess the directing and editing branches did finally pop in the DVD. And perhaps they found themselves enthralled by not only by Greengrass's superior craftsmanship, the detailed recreation of that fateful morning, but also by its artistry. Misunderstood as either well-made atrocity porn or as an indictment of Bushie neglect, United 93 above all captures a change of a collective state of mind -- it depicts, with harrowing intensity, that five hour transition from the pre-9/11 world to the post-9/11 world, when Americans' entitled sense of invulnerability and innocence gave way to a new violent world where there are no safe harbors.
* Half Nelson (about which I hope to post something this week) is much more than just a Ryan Gosling showcase. But I can't complain about this mildly surprising Oscar recognition for Gosling's extraordinary if decidedly un-Oscar performance. At every opportunity Gosling eschews the scene-stealing histrionics that command Oscar attention in favor of portraying something far more unexpected and truthful (see, e.g., the confrontation with Mackie; the scenes in the teachers' lounge; going to his date's pad at 3 a.m. and high). If this nod, for my favorite performance of the year, calls attention to this remarkable movie, cool.
* "Treat FBI officers like mushrooms -- feed'em shit and keep 'em in the dark." Mark Wahlberg, after years of getting treated like an FBI officer, finally gets some much-deserved Oscar attention with the help of The Departed's screenwriter William Monahan, who created the poet laureate of profanity in Dignam. Monahan's nod's not a surprise, but his work better not lose out to that steaming dysentery shit castle Little Children (where the method of the storytellers is tell and show and then tell and then show the same thing again, in case the explanatory voiceover, the Taboo-sketch, and PowerPoint presentation making the same point failed to get through).
* Cinematography, Children of Men. Of course. In last year's The New World, Emmanuel Lubezski's delighted the senses with shafts of light illuminating untouched earth. In stark contrast to Malick's lush pastoralism, here Lubezski creates an equally vivid world, but one that's been utterly corrupted by the creations of men. Lubezki's jittery compositions and desaturated greys brilliantly imposes a kind of Holocaust-doc grimness and determinism onto the Big Brother dystopia envisioned by Cuaron and his art director (where's the art direction nod, dammit?). The result is a crackerjack concept, sci-fi realism, flawlessly executed. And yes, those trick shots -- esp. in the car with Julianne Moore and in the war zone -- were fucking awesome. But one gripe: While I'm sure not enough voters ended up seeing Agnes Godard's characteristically amazing work in The Intruder, did the cinematography branch also skip the shimmering nightscape of Miami Vice, easily the most beautifully shot movie of the year? And pity poor Steven Soderbergh, whose unfairly maligned The Good German was, if nothing else, a technical marvel.
* Unfortunately, the underrated Prestige didn't get recognized by the writers for the year's most profound screenplay. To my shock the Academy didn't overlook the dueling magician movie's art direction and cinematography, which had been undervalued even among movie nerds. Our focus on Nolan's narrative and thematic hocus-pocus mostly blinded us to the care with which Nolan constructs the visual design. Good job Academy actually paying attention to the cinematic properties.
* Other hits: Penelope Cruz in Volver. Not a surprise, but given Volver's rather stunning omission in Foreign Language, I'm glad she was able to hang on. And this just in: the Iwo Jima diptych is pretty damn good.
* Other misses: Sasha Baron Cohen. Come on. Ken Watanabe, I suppose. Haven't really caught up with the big Oscar-baits (still on tap: Pan's Labyrinth, The Queen, Dreamgirls, Babel, Notes on a Scandal, possibly Little Miss Sunshine), so kinda hard to gripe just yet.
AMPAS not only threw the pundits for a loop, what's shocking is that the "surprises", both moderate and shocking, were actually so damn pleasant. My favorite helming and performance of the year both nominated? Ponies for everyone.
* The best directing job of the year belonged to Paul Greengrass, whose United 93 hovers far above any other American film I've seen all year. After being shut out of the guild awards, everyone kind of wrote off United 93's chances for anything. Nobody wanted to actually sit down and watch this movie, it's been explained. Well, I guess the directing and editing branches did finally pop in the DVD. And perhaps they found themselves enthralled by not only by Greengrass's superior craftsmanship, the detailed recreation of that fateful morning, but also by its artistry. Misunderstood as either well-made atrocity porn or as an indictment of Bushie neglect, United 93 above all captures a change of a collective state of mind -- it depicts, with harrowing intensity, that five hour transition from the pre-9/11 world to the post-9/11 world, when Americans' entitled sense of invulnerability and innocence gave way to a new violent world where there are no safe harbors.
* Half Nelson (about which I hope to post something this week) is much more than just a Ryan Gosling showcase. But I can't complain about this mildly surprising Oscar recognition for Gosling's extraordinary if decidedly un-Oscar performance. At every opportunity Gosling eschews the scene-stealing histrionics that command Oscar attention in favor of portraying something far more unexpected and truthful (see, e.g., the confrontation with Mackie; the scenes in the teachers' lounge; going to his date's pad at 3 a.m. and high). If this nod, for my favorite performance of the year, calls attention to this remarkable movie, cool.
* "Treat FBI officers like mushrooms -- feed'em shit and keep 'em in the dark." Mark Wahlberg, after years of getting treated like an FBI officer, finally gets some much-deserved Oscar attention with the help of The Departed's screenwriter William Monahan, who created the poet laureate of profanity in Dignam. Monahan's nod's not a surprise, but his work better not lose out to that steaming dysentery shit castle Little Children (where the method of the storytellers is tell and show and then tell and then show the same thing again, in case the explanatory voiceover, the Taboo-sketch, and PowerPoint presentation making the same point failed to get through).
* Cinematography, Children of Men. Of course. In last year's The New World, Emmanuel Lubezski's delighted the senses with shafts of light illuminating untouched earth. In stark contrast to Malick's lush pastoralism, here Lubezski creates an equally vivid world, but one that's been utterly corrupted by the creations of men. Lubezki's jittery compositions and desaturated greys brilliantly imposes a kind of Holocaust-doc grimness and determinism onto the Big Brother dystopia envisioned by Cuaron and his art director (where's the art direction nod, dammit?). The result is a crackerjack concept, sci-fi realism, flawlessly executed. And yes, those trick shots -- esp. in the car with Julianne Moore and in the war zone -- were fucking awesome. But one gripe: While I'm sure not enough voters ended up seeing Agnes Godard's characteristically amazing work in The Intruder, did the cinematography branch also skip the shimmering nightscape of Miami Vice, easily the most beautifully shot movie of the year? And pity poor Steven Soderbergh, whose unfairly maligned The Good German was, if nothing else, a technical marvel.
* Unfortunately, the underrated Prestige didn't get recognized by the writers for the year's most profound screenplay. To my shock the Academy didn't overlook the dueling magician movie's art direction and cinematography, which had been undervalued even among movie nerds. Our focus on Nolan's narrative and thematic hocus-pocus mostly blinded us to the care with which Nolan constructs the visual design. Good job Academy actually paying attention to the cinematic properties.
* Other hits: Penelope Cruz in Volver. Not a surprise, but given Volver's rather stunning omission in Foreign Language, I'm glad she was able to hang on. And this just in: the Iwo Jima diptych is pretty damn good.
* Other misses: Sasha Baron Cohen. Come on. Ken Watanabe, I suppose. Haven't really caught up with the big Oscar-baits (still on tap: Pan's Labyrinth, The Queen, Dreamgirls, Babel, Notes on a Scandal, possibly Little Miss Sunshine), so kinda hard to gripe just yet.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
The Horse-Race that Matters Least
Recently, my Wednesday papers have come bundled with a "special section" called The Envelope. In this special weekly fold-out section, we're treated to a blow-by-blow account of the "Oscar season" as it's now known. Urgent questions are raised: Would the voters penalize Leo for his Costneresque accent? Or will the boy wonder finally get his shot with The Departed? Can you hear that deafening industry buzz on Dreamgirls? No? Do you live east of La Cienega, you loser? Is Letters of Iwo Jima a late arriving dark horse, a la Million Dollar Baby? Will Peter O'Toole's refusal to cross the Atlantic cost him his last shot at the elusive award?
Eager for answers? Me neither. Until I started perusing this section one idle morning, I hadn't given these questions a second thought. And considering that I'm a movie geek who can name every Oscar Best Picture winner from 1927 on, I started to wonder: does the general reader actually care about this crap? If so, why?
Since the Los Angeles Times caters to the entertainment industry, you can argue that maybe this section is a local thing. But how to explain the editorial decision of the Paper of Record, which deemed the Oscar horse-race so vital to its readership that it has been hosting a frequently-updated blog called "The CarpetBagger" for over a year? And the hundreds of Oscar sites that obsessively detail the studios' every move? Besides the actual industry insiders, why are there so many people eager to play-act being an insider on one of blogs now tracking the Oscar race? In fact, why "track" the Oscar race at all?
It's one thing to be disappointed at the Oscar party when your favorite loses out to some piece of shit. But if you can't get over Brokeback Mountain's loss last year in a couple of hours -- unless your name is James Schamus or Ang Lee -- you're in need of some serious medical attention. The Oscar results, in the grand scheme of things, mean next to nothing. I know, we care about all kinds of trivialities. How is following the Oscars any different than following sports, for example? First of all, allegiances to sports teams have been formed over years; there's a longstanding emotional attachment, not to mention civic or national pride that you feel about the team from your city or country. Can someone really be that attached to Capote? And so what if a bunch of strangers prefer Crash to your favorite? A more important distinction is that the point of sports is winning. You follow sports to find out who wins and loses, which is settled on the field. The point of movie-watching isn't, or shouldn't be, following "winners and losers". If O'Toole wins his Oscar, does it actually enhance your enjoyment of the movie? Would it make Venus any better, more worthwhile as art or entertainment?
Why not devote that wasted ink to something important, like when we'll be getting out of Iraq, or when Britney will finally start donning knickers again? Vexed as I may be, it's apparent that throngs of people care about the Oscar race as a kind of sport, keeping horse-race sites like Movie City News thriving. Scott Tobias and Noel Murray share my befuddlement, and in their Onionavclub exchange, offer up some terrific points. Noel is on to something when he links the rise of Oscar prognostication to a decline in the esteem of movie criticism. Oscar prognostication/tracking satisfies the reader's temptation to see what's up and down, but does so in a putatively "objective" fashion. Oscar stories end up flattering the reader by offering up buzz instead of expertise, and they provide the reader with handy movie-ranking shorthand. Why bother discussing the merits of a movie when you can now argue about the more "objective" Oscar-worthiness of the movie? "You liked The Good German? Well, I see no nominations besides at best cinematography. Oscar voters would never go for something that dark."
At one time, the Oscar race was interesting as a parlor game. But now it's been inflated to such a degree that the Oscar campaign itself is worthy of extensive news coverage. We now have innumerable weirdos, folks who aren't even film aficionados, now versed in the Best Supporting Actress race, which means being experts in predicting how a bunch of old farts will feel about unseen female supporting performances. The end is nigh, I say.
Eager for answers? Me neither. Until I started perusing this section one idle morning, I hadn't given these questions a second thought. And considering that I'm a movie geek who can name every Oscar Best Picture winner from 1927 on, I started to wonder: does the general reader actually care about this crap? If so, why?
Since the Los Angeles Times caters to the entertainment industry, you can argue that maybe this section is a local thing. But how to explain the editorial decision of the Paper of Record, which deemed the Oscar horse-race so vital to its readership that it has been hosting a frequently-updated blog called "The CarpetBagger" for over a year? And the hundreds of Oscar sites that obsessively detail the studios' every move? Besides the actual industry insiders, why are there so many people eager to play-act being an insider on one of blogs now tracking the Oscar race? In fact, why "track" the Oscar race at all?
It's one thing to be disappointed at the Oscar party when your favorite loses out to some piece of shit. But if you can't get over Brokeback Mountain's loss last year in a couple of hours -- unless your name is James Schamus or Ang Lee -- you're in need of some serious medical attention. The Oscar results, in the grand scheme of things, mean next to nothing. I know, we care about all kinds of trivialities. How is following the Oscars any different than following sports, for example? First of all, allegiances to sports teams have been formed over years; there's a longstanding emotional attachment, not to mention civic or national pride that you feel about the team from your city or country. Can someone really be that attached to Capote? And so what if a bunch of strangers prefer Crash to your favorite? A more important distinction is that the point of sports is winning. You follow sports to find out who wins and loses, which is settled on the field. The point of movie-watching isn't, or shouldn't be, following "winners and losers". If O'Toole wins his Oscar, does it actually enhance your enjoyment of the movie? Would it make Venus any better, more worthwhile as art or entertainment?
Why not devote that wasted ink to something important, like when we'll be getting out of Iraq, or when Britney will finally start donning knickers again? Vexed as I may be, it's apparent that throngs of people care about the Oscar race as a kind of sport, keeping horse-race sites like Movie City News thriving. Scott Tobias and Noel Murray share my befuddlement, and in their Onionavclub exchange, offer up some terrific points. Noel is on to something when he links the rise of Oscar prognostication to a decline in the esteem of movie criticism. Oscar prognostication/tracking satisfies the reader's temptation to see what's up and down, but does so in a putatively "objective" fashion. Oscar stories end up flattering the reader by offering up buzz instead of expertise, and they provide the reader with handy movie-ranking shorthand. Why bother discussing the merits of a movie when you can now argue about the more "objective" Oscar-worthiness of the movie? "You liked The Good German? Well, I see no nominations besides at best cinematography. Oscar voters would never go for something that dark."
At one time, the Oscar race was interesting as a parlor game. But now it's been inflated to such a degree that the Oscar campaign itself is worthy of extensive news coverage. We now have innumerable weirdos, folks who aren't even film aficionados, now versed in the Best Supporting Actress race, which means being experts in predicting how a bunch of old farts will feel about unseen female supporting performances. The end is nigh, I say.
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