Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for March 05, 2010

I saw Hurt Locker. While there were some intense scenes I didn’t think overall it was a great film.

I haven;t seen any other of the nominated movies.

I hope he didn’t sprain his wrist reaching for that one

Oscars, is that Hollywood’s mutual admiration club? Everyone from the backers to the judges are industry connected.

Another hairbrained scheme, Adam?

“Everyone from the backers to the judges are industry connected.”

Uh, yeah, that’s the whole idea… If you win an Oscar, you’re being honored by your peers. Does it bug you that the Rube Goldberg award for “Cartoonist of the Year” is awarded TO cartoonists BY cartoonists?

This year’s crop isn’t bad. There aren’t many glaring omissions among the nominees that I can think of, although I also can’t work up a heck of a lot of enthusiasm, either. The only category I have a real rooting interest in is Best Actor, where I’m hoping Jeff Bridges finally wins the award he’s deserved for years…

As long as “Avatar” doesn’t win “Best Picture”, I’ll be happy. It was an effective spectacle, but it wasn’t even nominated for its screenplay, and if you haven’t got a good screenplay you haven’t got jack.

i haven’t gone to the movie theater in months, i wait until they come to DVD or blu-ray

it costs way too much and there are too many people who talk over the films to be able to enjoy it

I love that adam is left-handed. not common

Try a matinee. Cheaper & less people around.

I saw Hurt Locker on dvd and really liked it. I do not go to the theater, my wife can’t sit that long and so we just wait until the movie is released on dvd.

fritz, are you a Bridges fan because of his “dude-ism”?

Watch it. I have a beverage.

Bridges was great in Lebowski, certainly, but he’s been great in many things for a long time. The first time I saw him and said “Wow! This guy oughtta get an Oscar nomination!” was in “The Door in the Floor”. If that movie had made a bigger splash I’m sure he would have gotten at least a nod. As it was, he got a nomination for an Independent Spirit Award, but lost to Paul Giamatti for “Sideways.”

Bridges is a highly skilled actor who can always be counted on to give an interesting performance, even in supporting roles. He’s been around forever, works steadily, and in “Crazy Heart” he gives a defining performance that carries the movie.

(Although Bridges DOES play both guitar and piano, in both “Crazy Heart” and “Fabulous Baker Boys” what we hear is Bridges’ voice and someone else’s playing. In “Door in the Floor”, however, the artwork they showed as being his character’s was really drawn by Jeff.)

Any movie that I really want to see, I still try to see on the big screen. And until I can afford a $20,000 home screening room with a 40-foot screen and a professional sound design, that means going to the theaters; I probably saw about 60 to 70 movies in theaters in the last year. Anything where the visuals are important, like a sprawling Western or a creepy suspense/horror film or a period costume piece or even an exploding-helicopter movie, I want to be SURROUNDED by the experience (although I don’t like IMAX; it fills my field of vision, but overflows it so I can’t take in everything at once). Movies with people talking in rooms can fit on a small screen.

Also, I think comedies are better seen with groups, laughter being contagious. So far, they haven’t added laugh-tracks to DVD releases of comedies, but it’s probably just a matter of time. With today’s technology, though, it’d be easy enough to give you the option of turning it on or off, like subtitles…

Why? It IS superior. “Shakespeare In Love” had everything; romance, wit, a stellar cast giving top-rate performances, pathos… It wasn’t some sloppy, manipulative, sentimental paean to The Greatest Generation… (Both movies had lots of good mud, though.)

“Ryan” got it right in its opening minutes, with a harrowing depiction of the storming of the beaches at Normandy, but the overall plot was kind of silly, and the closing dissolve from Tom Hanks’ face to the crying old veteran was cheap, false, and about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

“Saving Private Ryan” was “noble”, but in terms of making a good movie this is one of those cases where the Academy based its award on the finished product rather than “good intentions.”

I saw “Shakespeare In Love” five times in the theaters, and have watched it many times since, at home. Seeing “Ryan” once was enough.

Adam will be the only one watching it. Like Parade Magazine in the Sunday paper. It’s just a big tribute to them by them, and nobody else cares. The winners are chosen politically, as discussed yesterday. Talent has nothing to do with any of it.

Oh, I’m sure me and Adam won’t be the only ones. The Oscar telecast, despite a downward trend in ratings (although last year’s broadcast improved on previous losses), is still one of the top-rated shows of each year. I’ll predict about 40 million U.S. viewers, which of course doesn’t include a vast international audience.

Susan, it could happen, although I thought that the problems with “All About Steve” had nothing to do with Bullock’s performance in it.

I’m kinda thinking that this might be the year they give Streep her next, though. The reason she hasn’t won a shelf full of Oscars is that mere excellence is what’s expected from her. She’s been held to a higher standard for years now, but sooner or later they’re gonna have to give her another, and maybe this is the year.

One thing the Golden Globes do that the Oscars ought to follow is give separate awards for dramas and comedies. Making a truly comedic comedy is as hard as (or harder than, many say) making a truly dramatic drama, but too often people (even Academy members, who should know better) think that “serious = good.” That’s part of the reason, I think, that the “Ryan” camp is so upset about losing to “Shakespeare.”

The other way the Oscars should follow the Globes is to let the nominees drink while they wait for their categories; it makes for more entertaining speeches. :-)

I stand by my comments above. I simply think it was a better movie than the other nominees, and if the cross-dressing theme echoed “Tootsie” or “Yentl”, those echoed “Twelfth Night”, “As You Like It”, “Merchant of Venice”…

I’ve already mentioned that I’m biased in favor of good dialogue, and the dialogue in “Shakespeare” shines, glimmers, flies through the air, jumps through hoops…

It’s perhaps arguable that “Ryan” was “one of the great war movies of all time”, but what of it? War movies are a genre just the same as period costume pictures are a genre. It’s apples and oranges, and I think “Shakespeare” was a better apple than “Ryan” was an orange. “Ryan” was termendously heavy-handed.

I didn’t say it was far-fetched, I said it was silly. Risking eight men’s lives to save one man whose only significance is that his brothers all died is strategically stupid, whether it happened once, never, or a hundred times.

Yes, all those men who died to save Ryan allowed Ryan’s children and grandchildren to live. By the same token, the act of “saving” Private Ryan, taking him from a front-line postion where he wanted to stay and where he presumably had as good a chance as any of surviving, resulted in the non-existence of those other men’s future children and grandchildren. Spielberg didn’t choose to mention THAT, of course. Instead, he played the “survivor’s guilt” card, which, because of his experiences with the Shoah Project, he was surely familiar with. The idea that those who died in the camps (or in the trenches, in this case) were somehow BETTER than the ones who made it out alive… It’s a natural psychological state, but it’s unhealthy and false. “Why couldn’t worthless old ME have been the one who died, instead these others who were better than me?” It’s cheap manipulation to instill or indulge that in the audience, like it was cheap to have Oskar break down at the end of “Schindler’s List” and weep “Why couldn’t I have saved JUST ONE MORE?” That ain’t what Schindler actually did. It’s button-pushing gamesmanship that Spielberg indulges in when he’s aiming to be “taken seriously”. Just because a movie’s depressing doesn’t make it significant. There was one movie of the five nominated which wasn’t constantly threatening to topple over on itself as a result of its gravitas - “Shakespeare In Love.”

Many would argue that “Saving Private Ryan” wasn’t even the best World War II film nominated in 1999. Many critics put Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” at the top of their lists that year, and that surely split the vote. “Life is Beautiful”, which you also mentioned above, was another “Gosh those Nazis were so EVIL” movie that probably cost “Ryan” votes. Don’t get me wrong, I love hissing at Nazis as much as the next guy, despite being a Fritz. My favorite movie of all time is “Casablanca”, but the problems of three little people – or ONE, in Ryan’s case – don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

“Ryan” was nominated for 11 awards, but look at the ones it won: Editing, sound, sound effects editing, cinematography, and of course director. “Shakespeare” was nominated in 13 categories (including director, editing, sound, and cinematography), but look at the ones it won: lead actress, supporting actress, music, costumes, and SCREENPLAY.

“Ryan” won for the technical categories, “Shakespeare” won for the creative categories. Spielberg got his due as a technician, not an artist, like Cameron did for “Titanic” (and may likely do for “Avatar”). Spielberg is a far better director when he allows himself a light touch, like in “Jaws” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark”; in a suspense-horror movie, or an action-adventure, emotional manipulation is part of the fun.

All five Best Picture nominees that year were, oddly, period pieces: three set against World War II, and two set in Elizabethan England (one early, one late). Before the Awards telecast, I saw a panel discussion (I think on the History Channel) featuring a group of historians weighing in on the five from their own perspective. The consensus was that all five were historically inaccurate to varying degrees, but the distortions that troubled them the least were in “Shakespeare In Love”, in that it alone was not intending to be seen as historically accurate. “Ryan” got kudos for that opening sequence of the Normandy Invasion, but of couse that was again technique, the effective showing of what it might have been like if we had had documentary footage of WWII combat like we had of Vietnam combat. But that’s only the first 20 minutes or so of its nearly 3-hour run time. (That’s another sign of its own inflated sense of importance: It’s perhaps as much as 50% too long for the demands of its plot.)