Thursday, January 22, 2009

Question Mark

Every year I get a little excited about what movies/actors/actresses will end up on the Oscars nomination list. One of my favorite things to do is count how many of the movies on that list I have seen. For 2008 the sum total is three. I have only seen three Oscar worthy films this past year.

The first was Hellboy II: The Golden Army. It is a favorite of mine and was nominated for makeup. The second was The Dark Knight. Again, it was nominated mainly for technical awards. They had to wave a Best Supporting Actor at Heath Ledger, considering it was his last performance. I am going to take a guess and say they will not give that Oscar to him. The third movie on my list would be Kung Fu Panda.

All I can say about the Oscars situation this year is, well, question mark? It looks like your typical early 1990s lineup to me. *gasp* The '90s are back "in." My life has surely been ruined. Or, at least my theatre life for the next 4 years has been ruined. The only thing I will have the opportunity to see on the big screen are melodrmatic jerks prancing about offering heavy-handed messages of environmentalism and some sort of morality mutated from angst over and apologetics for them thar bigots out there who nobody knows. Smoking and using plastic bags to carry your groceries home are the only two evils we recognize as a society. (Aside: Germs are also problematic and let it be known that plastic bags keep many harmful germs off your food.) It's pretty tough to make those two evils into an interesting story.

I admit I do enjoy the previews for movies that I would never watch as well as the reviews. My favorite preview of the year was from Frost/Nixon. Was it just me, or did the actor portray Nixon as having a high-falutin' British accent? What kind of a joke is that? Nixon was about as far from pretentious as you can get. He was a crook who got caught -- unlike his predecessors who often were pretentious. Of course, I didn't see the movie. Neither do I plan to. And, for once, I may not even bother to watch the Oscars.

Edit: I just noticed that Iron Man was nominated for two technical awards. I did see Iron Man.

1 comment:

Just Me said...

I looked through the list myself yesterday and realized that not only had I not seen any of the movies that were nominated, there were some I had never even heard of. I went through the whole list, even the tech and costume nominations, hoping to find at least one that I had seen. Nothing. Two of them we own, Dark Knight and Iron Man, but I haven't even watched those. I am really out of the loop.