Oscar Nominations 2012

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Maybe I'm cynical. I like marvelling at bullshit. Hence I enjoy the Oscars. It just sums up my whole view of Hollywood.

If THE ARTIST wins, I have to say it'll be very appropriate; it's a celebration of all the shallow stuff that Hollywood admires.

Interesting way of looking at it.

Sharky wrote:

The problem with the industry voting is that it just becomes one big Bukkake fest. Let the people decide, not Harvey Weinstein.

The problem with letting the people vote is that then it turns into the MTV Movie Awards and Twilight wins everything.

We need a happy medium.

Jack Wade wrote:

Sharky wrote:

The problem with the industry voting is that it just becomes one big Bukkake fest. Let the people decide, not Harvey Weinstein.

The problem with letting the people vote is that then it turns into the MTV Movie Awards and Twilight wins everything.

We need a happy medium.

Just let PENIS decide.

They do need that kind of wisdom only PENIS could deliver.

Whoa! What's wrong with The Artist? I've only heard/read good reports on the film (I haven't seen it yet). Enlighten me.

Quote :

The Artist is a dismissible movie, even though it was just voted Best Picture and Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle—a calamity that proves the sorry state of contemporary film criticism. When film critics mistake pyrite for gold, it is an undeniable catastrophe, one that is ushering in the end of cinephilia.

Look at the similarly idiotic way critics have fallen for Hugo, as if Scorsese spending $150 million to gratify his own filmmaking hubris was equal to his professed interest in promoting film preservation. Hugo preserves hackneyed, self-righteous filmmaking, same as director Michel Hazanavicius in The Artist turns the levity and sentiment of silent movie comedy into tongue-in-cheek facetiousness. Hazanavicius’ Hollywood backlot story of movie star Jean Valentin (Jean Dujardin) facing both the onset of sound and the rise of a new starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) copies Singin’ in the Rain. It’s film buff folly for audiences who don’t recognize the rip-off and lack of wit.

The Artist is not an innocuous paen to silent movies, but a tribute to insipid commercial filmmaking—and that includes trash like Hugo. The Artist (an unworthy title) complements Scorsese’s craven hunger for mass approval. Scorsese, a former poet of the streets, renounces the spiritual and political dedication that Pasolini maintained throughout his career, which is just as well for media folk who would as soon applaud Scorsese for capitulating to the corruption of commercial cinema. Instead of going deep and exploring how human nature and social politics clash, Scorsese in Hugo stays superficial, ignoring what it really is that makes movies worthwhile. That same deception makes The Artist insufferable.

Toothsome Dujardin overdoes and trivializes movie star confidence. He turns “irresistible charm” into strident buffoonery, imitating Gene Kelly’s jocular hoofing and grinning zeal and Douglas Fairbanks’ moustache (which were already parodied by Kelly in Minnelli’s 1947 The Pirate). Dujardin and Hazanavicius banalize the silent movie concentration on faces where lighting and focus revealed the soul beneath the surface. Hazanavicius’ superficial imitation of silent movie style totally misrepresents the trenchancy that helped Charlie Chaplin charm the world. Chaplin believed in emotional sincerity but The Artist, typical of millennial culture, disrespects emotion and settles for being tongue-in-cheek.

Hazanavicius fakes sincerity by being “adorable”—a horrible method for entertainment that offers facetious pleasure. Problem is, Hazanavicius is not a satirist, he panders. Last year, Sylvain Chomet’s cartoon The Illusionist (a meticulous tribute to Jacques Tati) replicated silent style better and more precisely. Hazanavicius adds sound to The Artist for cheap effects yet these gimmicks deliberately—faithlessly—break the movie’s silent spell. It never captures the sensuous depth of great silent film. Aggressively unsubtle, its over-emphatic music score keeps elbowing audiences to be pleased, rather than moved. The film’s deliberate, winking anachronisms are annoyingly inaccurate and insufficient—even Jean and Peppy’s peppy dancing, though energetic, is a third-rate imitation of American movie musical verve. The cross-cultural influence of French and U.S. cinema used to be dynamic and inquiring as the French New Wave once proved from Shoot the Piano Player to Andre Techine’s French Provincial and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs. But The Artist is not about art, or life. It’s too damn “cute.”

One dopey reviewer claimed The Artist “romances its audience into watching in a new way by asking us to watch in an old way”—clear proof the reviewer lacks the slightest understanding of how silent movies worked. A misunderstanding and corruption of film history and aesthetic standards is now afoot in movie culture, clearing the path for the art form’s irrelevance. (That’s also the unintended effect of the stultifying Hugo.) This attitude is typified by the New York Times review that disingenuously endorses The Artist, recommending it for “viewers entirely innocent of film history—even the young, blockbuster-fed movie fans who find themselves dragged to and then transported by this minor marvel.” This isn’t a movie for innocence but ignorance. The Artist and Hugo hold cinema back; both celebrate the movies’ obsolescence.

http://cityarts.info/2011/11/30/the-disillusionists-the-artist-dumbs-down-movie-love/

I don't get the hate for HUGO. :|

Wait, I just realized it's Armond White.

Lol, that gif is awesome if you're listening to music.

My picks (for the categories I have an opinion in):

BEST PICTURE
The Tree of Life

BEST DIRECTOR
Terrence Malick - The Tree of Life

BEST ACTRESS
Viola Davis - The Help

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Christopher Plummer - Beginners

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Jessica Chastain - The Help

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Midnight in Paris - Woody Allen

BEST ANIMATION
Rango

BEST ART DIRECTION
Midnight in Paris

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Tree of Life

BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Man or Muppet from The Muppets - music and lyrics by Bret McKenzie

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
The Artist

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I basically want The Tree of Life to sweep every category it's nominated in. Best movie of the year in my book.

I really like The Artist, and I'm glad it got a nod for trying to do something different, but I don't think it deserves to win. It was lacking in subtlety, which insults the viewers a bit, I think. If you want to put themes and symbols in a silent movie, trust your audience. It's not the dumb masses who are going to see a silent film in 2011. Your audience is going to know film, so know your audience!

I wanted Viola Davis to win an Oscar as soon as I saw The Help, and that's not something that I do often in a summer film (OK, so it happened with Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds, but who's keeping track of my claims besides me, anyway?) I remember thinking that she deserved to win Best Actress, but they might nominate her for best supporting. I'm glad to see she's in the correct category. I don't think Streep is a shoe-in like many seem to. Her performance was great, but I tend to prefer a performance bringing life to a fictional character rather than a stellar imitation of a real person. Personal preference, I suppose.

Really hoping Rango wins, too. I found it to be one of the best animated movies of all time, and I feel like more people should be talking about it.

Makeshift Python wrote:

Then again David Fincher did predict last month that his film wouldn't get nominated just for anal rape alone.

The scene itself, although disturbing, was nowhere as gratuitous as Irreversible and at least Lisbeth exacted revenge on the lawyer who defiled her. I cheered her on, and loved her goth look...done that dark circles thing too...

I think Brown mentioned Craig mumbling too much...although I understood him perfectly, I still have no idea what those two old guys were saying before the theme kicks in a minute into the film.....

Mrs Aural Sects wrote:

Makeshift Python wrote:

Then again David Fincher did predict last month that his film wouldn't get nominated just for anal rape alone.

The scene itself, although disturbing, was nowhere as gratuitous as Irreversible and at least Lisbeth exacted revenge on the lawyer who defiled her. I cheered her on, and loved her goth look...done that dark circles thing too...

I think Brown mentioned Craig mumbling too much...although I understood him perfectly, I still have no idea what those two old guys were saying before the theme kicks in a minute into the film.....

There was a few moments when I found it hard to understand Craig, admittedly. But it's not in the Bond films, except for "you'reanidiot" / "sorry" / "I said you're a bloody idiot!" But I think that was intentional ;)

[quote="Mrs Aural Sects"]

Makeshift Python wrote:

I think Brown mentioned Craig mumbling too much...although I understood him perfectly, I still have no idea what those two old guys were saying before the theme kicks in a minute into the film.....

Yeah I had the issue at the beginning too. And I also understood Craig, actually a lot better in TATTOO than in certain bits of QOS.

I understood Maud Adams a lot better in Tattoo.

Makeshift Python wrote:

I think Brown mentioned Craig mumbling too much...although I understood him perfectly, I still have no idea what those two old guys were saying before the theme kicks in a minute into the film.....

Yeah. I actually downloaded the script after seeing the film to find out what the fuck they said.

Quote :

Morell: What kind is it?
Vanger: I don't know. White.
Morell: And the frame?
Vanger: Dark
Morell: Postmark?
Vanger: Same as last time.
Morell: No note?
Vanger: No
...
Vanger: I can't take it anymore.
Morell: I know. I'm sorry, Henrik.

Mr. Brown wrote:

Makeshift Python wrote:

I think Brown mentioned Craig mumbling too much...although I understood him perfectly, I still have no idea what those two old guys were saying before the theme kicks in a minute into the film.....

Yeah. I actually downloaded the script after seeing the film to find out what the fuck they said.

Quote :

Morell: What kind is it?
Vanger: I don't know. White.
Morell: And the frame?
Vanger: Dark
Morell: Postmark?
Vanger: Same as last time.
Morell: No note?
Vanger: No
...
Vanger: I can't take it anymore.
Morell: I know. I'm sorry, Henrik.

Ahh...thanks for that :cheers: