At the crack of dawn this morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its usually confounding, bizarre, idiotic, and trite little list of Oscar nominees.
This year, we have to say we agree with most-- and we use that word with great hesitation-- of their choices...
Best Actor: This is pretty much the only perfect set of nominees in the whole show. Jenkins, Pitt, Rourke, Penn, and Langella were the five best leading male performances of the year. Congratulations to the Academy-- they finally got something right.
Best Actress: Inarguably the biggest snub of the year in any category, the omission of Sally Hawkins' unforgettable, Golden Globe-winning performance in Happy Go Lucky is almost reason enough to boycott the boring-ass show right here. At least indie actress Melissa Leo was rewarded, but still...
Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress: Pretty solid here-- Michael Shannon, Heath Ledger, Viola Davis, and Penelope Cruz are all award-worthy and are nominated.
Documentary Feature: The biggest surprise of all-- the Academy actually rewarded a micro-budget classic that hasn't had any publicity of any kind (Trouble the Water), plus Werner Herzog's Encounters At the End of the World, one of the year's best films in any category, and the endlessly popular Man on Wire.
Foreign Film: Waltz With Bashir and, surprisingly enough, The Class are both represented, but it baffles us why the Academy would overlook the year's third-best film overall, The Secret of the Grain, an absolutely riveting account of one family's attempt to open its own business. It's devastating and uplifting at the same time-- what could be more Oscar worthy?
Best Picture: Now we come to the tricky part. While we're relieved to see Milk represented here, seeing as its the year's best film, we're more than worried that this is going to be Benjamin Button's year. We'd be satisfied if a predictable, ridiculous, and still incredibly entertaining film like Slumdog Millionaire wins, but God forbid the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the Forrest Gump wannabe with its endless running time, pointless storyline, trivial anecdotal plotting, and racial stereotypes we thought Hollywood had gotten over in the 1930s wins a majority of the 13 categories its nominated in. (We could go on for hours longer about this Brad Pitt film, but the real problem is the fact that it's so widely praised; if it had been a bomb, we might even get behind it, for at least it was mildly amusing at times.) And don't even get us started on The Reader...
You can read the rest of the nominations here.
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