Random Oscar Thoughts
Nominations are out, and I have probably seen fewer nominated films than in any other year. So here are some brief, very random and uneducated thoughts:
Glad to see Crash nominated for best picture--the only of the five nominees I've seen.
Very glad to see Keira Knightley nominated for Best Actress for Pride & Prejudice. She was excellent, but is very young, too young, I would have guessed, for the voters.
Matt Dillon's nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Crash was, to me at least, a surprise. He was very good, though, although some of the lesser names in the film were probably even better--thinking of the shopowner here, particularly.
For the first time in, I think, a few years, the Best Picture and Best Director nominations line up perfectly. No complaining from various outlets about how silly it is for a movie to be nominated for Best Picture and not Best Director this time around. (I've always thought such complaints silly--as if the quality of a film rests that much on its director. An outgrowth of the whole "auteur" theory, methinks.
Only three animated films nominated, and two are stop-motion (Corpse Bride and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) . The non-Pixar crop of animated films (Madagascar, Chicken Little, et al) ain't getting much respect.
King Kong got shut out of the biggies, but it did get Art Direction, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects nominations.
An out-of-nowhere Cinematography nomination for Batman Begins. Odd.
John Williams gets two Best Score nominations, for Munich and Memoirs of a Geisha. How many nominations does he have? A hundred? I haven't heard any of the scores, but am keen to get the two Williams scores, the Brokeback Mountain score, and possibly the Pride & Prejudice score. I'll have to defer judgment until I've heard some of these, but I suspect Williams' Star Wars score got unfairly dismissed out of hand as "just more Star Wars stuff." It's a fine, fine, score.
Star Wars only gets a makeup nomination. No Visual Effects? Really? I smell an anti-Lucas backlash. (The Visual Effects nominees are Narnia, King Kong, and War of the Worlds).
Until Whenever
2 comments:
I think I read Williams now has 43 nominations. By comparison, Woody Allen just set the record for Screenplay nominations -- with only fourteen. (Which is a LOT, really, next to anyone but Williams.)
I don't know how you can just listen to a movie's score; I get bored. I'll buy soundtracks, but scores? I think I've only ever owned three -- Halloween, which I got as background music for a haunted house, Robocop, because I frickin' loved that movie, and there were some great tracks (by Basil Poledouris, I think), and Peter Gabriel's Last Temptation of Christ. I also have a CD single of the Raiders March, my only John Williams music. (Actually, I think I have an mp3 of the Emperor's March, and maybe of the Superman theme, too.)
I loves me my scores. I listen to film scores a lot, and find that the good ones can approximate, if not replicate, the experience of listening to a good classical piece or symphony.
I have the Gabriel, it's excellent. I was in a college production of Equus where the director used the Passion music as background music for some key scenes. Very effective.
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