Category Archives: Best Picture Nominee

BEST PICTURE NOMINEE: An Education

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Image courtesy of New York Daily News

An Education
Directed by: Lone Scherfig
Written by: Nick Hornby (screenplay), Lynn Barber (memoir)
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, and Rosamund Pike

Warning: boring period piece this is not. Adults looking for a time capsule back to the early 60’s should stick to AMC’s Mad Men.  Though evoking that same atmosphere, An Education is a decidedly modern film, especially thematically, and that atmosphere will most likely be one that those growing up in the period don’t remember.

A wise-beyond-her-years 16 year old falls for an older man in pre-Beatles London. It sounds like a boring premise, but it couldn’t be more exciting, hilarious, and well-executed.  Director Lone Scherfig, working with an excellent adapted screenplay by Nick Hornby, makes sure of that.  Scherfig is yet another female director to emerge out of the 2009 renaissance.  Along with Kathryn Bigelow’s film, Scherfig’s movie is the best to come out of it so far.  Those at the top questioning whether or not female directors have the capability to do more than low-brow  romantic comedies should look here.

While Scherfig’s film is both romantic, and a comedy, it does not fall into either of these genres.  In a way it is anti-romantic, and the humor arises more naturally than the stupidly forced punchlines of The Proposal or The Ugly Truth.  Also unlike those two horrible films, it comes second to the character development, refusing to make caricatures out of its characters.

Newcomer Carey Mulligan gives  the greatest performance of 2009 as Jenny, pressured by her father (Alfred Molina) to go to Oxford and rebelling by having fun instead. Mulligan does the type of acting that many veteran actors still can’t do.  The raw, youthful nature of Jenny is perfectly captured.  She can say more with a look and the way she holds her cigarette than Sandra Bullock does during the whole movie in The Blind Side.

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BEST PICTURE NOMINEE: District 9

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District 9
Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Written by: Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
Starring: Sharlto Copley and Jason Cope

The year 2009 has been a splendid year for sci-fi, with Cameron’s Avatar pushing the limits in film making technology as well as box office potential, Abram’s sleek and erogenous revival of Star Trek reaching wide commercial success, and the pyscho-thiller Moon grabbing newcomer director Duncan Jones some serious attention. It is safe to add to the list District 9, which happens to be the best of the bunch.

Originally, producer Peter Jackson had picked South African born Neill Blomkamp to make his directorial debut with an adaptation to the video game phenomenon Halo. But when financing put the project in development purgatory, Jackson gave Blomkamp the go ahead to make whatever film he wanted. Under one condition: a fraction of the budget.

District 9 comes from a mini-mokumentary made by Blomkamp when his career was still only Nike commercials and digital shorts. It’s all set in his own birthplace, Johannesburg, where there are townships, slums, heavy accents, and barbed wire fences that give the film a harsh and gritty setting.

Twenty years prior to modern time, a large space craft stalled above the city, unable to move. After humans entered the ship, they encountered something much different from the “light of heavens” interaction they were expecting. The aliens were diseased, famished and hopeless. So for twenty years, the government kept them isolated in a ghetto which experienced crime, discrimination and poverty. It is up to the world’s second largest weapons manufacturer, MNU, to relocate the “prawns” into a far-off concentration camp after humans can no longer take their burden. In charge of the evacuation is Wikus (Copley), a pencil pusher looking to prove his place, who begins to find himself split between the two worlds in a great chase for weapons and power that he barely understands.

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BEST PICTURE NOMINEE: The Blind Side

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Image courtesy of Jack FM

The Blind Side
Directed by: John Lee Hancock
Written by: John Lee Hancock (screenplay), Michael Lewis (novel)
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, and Kathy Bates

Good wholesome Southerners have their movie to cheer for this year at the Academy Awards.  John Lee Hancock’s bombastic, preachy and watered down The Blind Side is the one movie nominated for Best Picture this year that didn’t deserve its slot.

This is the crowd-pleasing, melodramatic sports movie that moved both the Monday Night Football crowd and Sarah Palin wannabes to tears.  It also moved serious film critics to tears, but not for the same reasons. Hancock directs this film with a style right out of the sports film playbook, taking no chances and milking every crowd-pleasing scenario for maximum fluff.

“Sandra Bullock in a football movie,” is a great selling point for studio executives.  In order to sabotage and exploit an audience’s emotions, you need a marketable lead.  In the year 2009, there was no one more marketable (or undeserving of their profits) than her.  Her Oscar nomination (and likely win) for playing Leigh Ann Tuohy is the result of a frivolous, cooly calculated business decision.  Though her performance is the reluctant highlight of this film, it is by no means anything more than her spouting off clever one liners with a Southern accent.  Bullock plays emotional-yet-controlled in almost all of her films, and never that greatly.  She does the same thing here, but with a drawl so it’s Oscar worthy.

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BEST PICTURE NOMINEE: Avatar

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Avatar
Directed by: James Cameron
Written by: James Cameron
Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and Sigourney Weaver

Once upon a time, famed sci-fi director James Cameron made a little film known as Titanic. Made with a record $200 million, the picture earned a record $1.8 billion at the worldwide box office, won a record 11 Oscars (Ben-Hur and Return of the King are the only other two films to do this) and ignited the Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet to become the most sought after talent today.

That was over a decade ago. Now Cameron is back with another next big budget saga, to once again defend his self-claimed title as “King of the World.” Mission accomplished. The film has already broken most of Titanic’s records, earning a staggering $2.4 billion worldwide. And with critical praise, nine Oscar nominations, and his 3D technology reshaping the industry, it looks like Cameron may need an avatar of his own just to share his great success.

But records, innovations and box office aside, how does good is Avatar? Continue reading →

BEST PICTURE NOMINEE: A Serious Man

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Image courtesy of Time Out New York

A Serious Man
Directed by: Joel & Ethan Coen
Written by: Joel & Ethan Coen (screenplay)
Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, and Sari Lennick

The Brothers Coen set the last three years of the 2000’s on fire.  First No Country For Old Men, their new-age western masterpiece adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, wins Best Picture of 2007 at the Academy Awards.  Then the next year, fearful of being taken too seriously by the Hollywood elite, they unleash Burn After Reading, a hilarious farce of mass proportions.  Now with 2009’s A Serious Man, they put forth comedy so staunchly pitch-black a viewer not accustomed to the Coens may think they have no idea how to tell a joke.

In that assumption, they couldn’t be more wrong.  In their screenplay, the Coens have managed to not only write one of the funniest scripts of 2009, but also layered it with philosophical musings and darker thematic elements.  All of this is set against the the late 60’s Midwestern Jewish background the Coen brothers grew up in, which many critics think makes the film autobiographical.  What I think they are trying to do is just show what it was like, not tell their life story.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is the vessel with which the Coens convey that environment.  He is an academic coming up for tenure with a wife  (Sari Lennick) who wants to leave him for the more sensitive and passive-aggressive Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), children who only want him to fix the TV, and a social outcast brother (a hilarious Richard Kind) who sleeps on the couch and comes up with formulas to win at gambling.  All of these forces crush Larry simultaneously, as well as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed neighbor who is invading the property line in order to build a garage and the other neighbor who teases him by sun-bathing nude.  Surrounded on all sides both physically and mentally and desperate for answers, he reaches out to three rabbis.

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BEST PICTURE NOMINEE: The Hurt Locker

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Image courtesy of IGN

The Hurt Locker
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Ralph Fiennes

The Hurt Locker is that little military movie in the summer you didn’t see because you’d rather have watched Transformers 2 for the third and fourth time in a row. But I wouldn’t put myself on any pedestal, I didn’t see The Hurt Locker until it came out on DVD after garnering a plethora of critic groups awards and Golden Globe nominations, hoping the hype for Hurt was worth the watch. It is the movie against all odds, small budget in a big summer, female director in an industry run by men, an Iraqi war setting in the age of modern war movies being serious taboo, The Hurt Locker overcomes those obstacles, but not with the blast of fierce action as critics promise. Instead, it’s defused and delivered with a slow burning tension which is rare among war movies.

The film follows the reckless Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) as he steps up to head a bomb squad unit serving in Baghdad. His unusual and ballsy methods are not only cause trouble for the squad, but often is responsible for their ability to overcome some of the great obstacles they face. Their journey is a journey with no destination of place, but that of time. Each day survived is one day closer to them returning to home to their wives and families. The plot appears to follow the conventions of a typical modern war film, but The Hurt Locker is far from that. Taking unexpected turns and leaving politics aside, director Katherine Bigelow explores deep into what makes these characters tick, sans all the standard patriotic “I love my country” bullshit.

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