National Board of Review 2008 winners – Slumdog is top dog
The National Board of Review, the first major Oscar precursor award, will be announced today. I’m putting my money behind Milk. Though if they are in the right mood, Slumdog Millionaire could take this one home. More as it is announced. UPDATED: Slumdog is top dog. Here are all the winners from the NBR release: Best Film: SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE Best Director: DAVID FINCHER, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Best Actor: CLINT EASTWOOD, Gran Torino Best Actress: ANNE HATHAWAY, Rachel Getting Married Best Supporting Actor: JOSH BROLIN, Milk Best Supporting Actress: PENELOPE CRUZ, Vicky Cristina Barcelona Best Foreign Language Film: MONGOL Best Documentary: MAN ON WIRE Best Animated Feature: WALL-E Best Ensemble Cast: DOUBT Breakthrough Performance by an Actor: DEV PATEL, Slumdog Millionaire Breakthrough Performance by an Actress: VIOLA DAVIS, Doubt Best Directorial Debut: COURTNEY HUNT, Frozen River Best...
Read MoreIt isn’t an Oscar article without Slumdog or Milk, right?
I wrote about the Best Picture hopes for Milk and Slumdog Millionaire a few days ago. Today, while putting things I should be doing off, I stumbled upon an article titled “The Oscar Recession” on The Daily Beast. Two movies absent from this article’s analysis of the race: Slumdog Millionaire and Milk. Now, it’s not a post about specialty divisions and their hopefuls. Instead it focuses on the recession’s effect on publicity budgets for mainstream studio Oscar contenders. The question I have is does a pared down budget for the studio pictures mean that specialty divisions’ films will have a better chance at the Best Picture prize? If the studios are being more judicious with their budgets and, as this article implies, the contender list shrinking because studios want to back a winner late in the game, Fox Searchlight...
Read MoreEarly Oscar Contenders: Slumdog Millionaire V. Milk?
During the 2008 presidential election, the underdog story Rocky was referenced over and over again. Sen. Hillary Clinton compared herself to the Best Picture winner’s central character as she tried to win the Democratic nomination. Sen. John McCain briefly used Rocky III‘s “Eye of the Tiger” as a campaign theme, only to have a member from the band Survivor request that he stop using the song. Both candidates may have lost to Barack Obama, just as Rocky lost to Apollo Creed, but we may yet have use for the Rocky comparison. When Rocky won Best Picture, it beat films like Network, Taxi Driver and All the King’s Men. They were better films. Much better, in fact. But in a year that saw the end of the Nixon era and the election of Jimmy Carter the mood of the country may well have contributed to Rocky‘s sweeping...
Read More2008’s Creative Dearth
As someone who fancies himself a bit of a film critic, I try to manage my own expectations despite my genuine love of cinema. (That sound pretentious, but bear with me.) Before this year, I would generally see anything that was thrown in front of me because I would rather watch a bad movie than no movie at all. Lucky for me, from 2005 to 2007, I was able to sit down in front of movies that were great beyond all expectations or at least interesting in spite of their flaws. The three years prior to 2008 were amazing years for cinema. We saw great filmmakers working at the peak of their powers. From Spielberg with Munich to the Coens with No Country for Old Men, filmmakers were responding to the world in a way that audiences haven’t seen...
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