An Oscar Education – Predictions Updated
A funny thing happened when I finally saw An Education. I realized that the film, with some of the strongest female characters your likely to see on film this or any year, was going to be a hard sell to the Academy. Carey Mulligan’s role doesn’t fit the mold that Oscar has developed: either deglam or play a famous female figure. If you do both (see: Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose) you get the gold. If you do neither, well, you’re Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. At least that’s how it used to be. When I wrote my first Oscar post of the season, I mentioned that this year we could finally see a female director win the Best Director statue. I was talking about The Hurt Locker‘s Kathryn Bigelow, who I have since removed...
Read MoreAhh… Oscar Season
Six short months from now, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will hold the 82nd annual Academy Awards ceremony. It’s fitting then that this official end of summer is also the official start of Oscar season. Yes, now that the summer is over, the grown-ups can enjoy the cinemas again. We’re already getting a taste of things to come with the Venice and Telluride film festivals underway. Toronto starts in just three days. The buzz is certainly building. So before we go into buzz overdrive, I though I’d post my first Academy Awards predictions of the 2009-2010 Oscar season. Of course, the yea-round Oscar watching that goes on these days means some pictures are already on there way to Oscar. What struck me as I put together my predictions is that this year there’s a chance that...
Read MoreMovie Review: The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker (2009)–**** The eagerness to embrace Kathryn Bigelow’s film The Hurt Locker may seem like a direct response to the almost universal rejection of the clumsy, overtly political Iraq War films that we saw hit the screen two years ago. It’s true that The Hurt Locker is not a Lions for Lambs or an In the Valley of Elah. Instead, Bigelow’s tense psychological thriller, set the second year of the Iraq War, will be the picture by which all other Iraq War films are judged. The film follows an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team on a series of missions in Baghdad in 2004. When the original team leader (Guy Pearce) is killed in an IED blast, Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) comes on to lead Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldriged (Brian Geraghty) into tense situations...
Read MoreGet Email Updates
