Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Oscar Blitz 3: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

And the nominations for Best Picture are…

Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King's Speech
127 Hours
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone

You can see a full ballot list for printing at Oscar.com.

The Good?  Completely predictable (and so I’ve done pretty well covering everything with my Oscar blitz).

The Bad?  Completely predictable (Come on, Academy, throw us a bone, everyone likes a few surprises).

The Ugly?  This continues to be the existence of an Animated Feature category and the rules for submission in the Foreign Film category.

So, it looks like if I want to cover the rest of the categories that matter to me (acting, directing, cinematography, editing, writing, art direction, and costumes), I need to see Animal Kingdom (which is already in my Netflix queue with The Social Network and Winter's Bone), Another Year, Biutiful, Blue Valentine, I Am Love, Rabbit Hole, and The Tempest. I think I’m still going to save Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until both parts are out.

Except Another Year, none of those new additions are particularly appealing. I’d love to hear from anyone who can convince me otherwise.


Addendum: I have to laugh that Salt actually received a nomination (Sound Mixing)!

5 comments:

Stasia said...

Geez, it seems like SO MANY best pic noms. BTW, I didn't hate SALT either--kids actually enjoyed the action. Finally, I LUUURVE Colin Firth (making me no different than most 40-something American women), so I'll be cheering him on come Oscar night :)

Sylvie said...

I am definitely rooting for Firth and Hailee Steinfeld. I also hope Inception picks up some technical awards, especially for sound and art/set direction. For once, I'm pretty much fine with anything I've seen getting Best Picture, except Black Swan (and I assume that will hold up once I've seen them all).

Anonymous said...

My laugh was for Unstoppable. There's always that one weird movie in the technical categories that unexpectedly gets to call itself "Oscar-nominated," like Transformers.

I had no idea Animal Kingdom was a gritty crime drama. I assumed it was about animals in a kingdom. I added it to my queue to see what all the Jacki Weaver fuss is about.

Sylvie said...

My laugh was for the fact that I rented Salt last week as a "break" from all the Oscar contenders!

John Marcher said...

Hi Sylvie- re those others you need to be convinced on, though I haven't seen them yet I think anything by Innaritu and Taymor are worth watching because even their "failures" are more imaginative than the best that most other directors can produce.