2015 Academy Awards Discussion

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Something about the way The Grand Budapest Hotel was written and acted didn't sit well with me--and I say this as somebody who's in general a huge Wes Anderson fan--but it was absolutely gorgeous and should definitely win in art direction, and maybe original score too considering that Gone Girl somehow managed to not be nominated for that. I haven't seen most of the Oscar bait-y films this year so a lot of the big categories I actually can't really comment on, but I'd be happy if either Boyhood or Birdman won Best Picture. (This is also an incredibly white Oscars all around, even by Oscars standards, but that might for all I know be a function of something disappointing going on in the industry in general for the past year, rather than the Academy itself being racist.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Rosamund Pike is kind of a weird choice for Best Actress, I don't think anyone would've considered anyone other than Ben Affleck the lead. I guess you could argue she was sort of a co-lead, but I'm sure if you told anyone she'd be nominated for Gone Girl everyone would've assumed it would've been for Best Supporting Actress.

She carries half of the movie essentially by herself. And no, people have not been assuming that. She's been talked about as a Best Actress contender since it was released.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'd still be fine with Boyhood winning Best Picture, but the more I think about it the more it starts to feel kind of like one of those 'highlights reels' of someone's early life you sit through at wedding receptions, but for almost three hours. I'm not sure if I'd claim that Birdman is a 'better' film--and the award is 'Best' Picture, after all--but I found it more enjoyable and more interesting. I think maybe the issue is that despite my being on paper more or less exactly the generation that Boyhood is ostensibly speaking about and (presumably) to, the way my childhood went didn't really bear much resemblance to it, so it just fell into a sort of 'uncanny valley' only with detached disinterest instead of fearful revulsion.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I think an ensemble piece with multiple only loosely related plots is exactly the sort of treatment that the Titanic calls for, honestly.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

If we want to talk about questionable awards of the nineties let's talk about 1994. One can make an argument for Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and The Shawshank Redemption all being very good films, but twenty years on it's hard to seriously argue that Forrest Gump is the best of the three. (Does anyone remember Four Weddings and a Funeral or Quiz Show any more?)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Holy sh[inks], literally the two worst nominated screenplays won. God damn you Academy.

Which screenplays were you rooting for?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Holy sh[inks], literally the two worst nominated screenplays won. God damn you Academy.

Which screenplays were you rooting for?

GBH and er... Whiplash, I guess. I don't know, haven't seen Inherent Vice yet. But Imitation Game is just horrible and completely whitewashes Turing's homosexuality.

I was rooting for Foxcatcher and Whiplash. Inherent Vice was just okay. Agreed on The Imitation Game.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Buh-bye Birdman sweep. Hello three-hour wedding video as Best Picture, I guess.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Buh-bye Birdman sweep. Hello three-hour wedding video as Best Picture, I guess.

God I hope so. There is something deeply unsettling about Alejandro González Iñárritu winning three (3) oscars in one night.

Agreed. It should be two (2) Oscars. Linklater should have won Best Director.

EDIT: Moore wins Best Actress; precisely nobody is surprised, nor should they be.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Boyhood wasn't boring, as such; it should have won Best Director for holding together as well as it did (see also Life of Pi, not as good a film as the other 2012 nominees, but one that required more directorial skill to make work), and Arquette's award was definitely well-deserved.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

That is sad.

And it's not really fair to say Boyhood 'barely grossed anything'. It made back eleven times its budget.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Honestly, which 2014 movies will be really remembered in ten years? Probably Interstellar, as it's one of the top movies in its genre already, but beyond that?

Birdman, Boyhood, and American Sniper are very time-specific movies, and Grand Budapest Hotel will probably blend in with Anderson's other movies. Biopics are quickly forgotten. Whiplash is a maybe, but most people don't know about it even now. Gone Girl doesn't seem like the type of movie to endure, but who knows. All the superhero movies blend together, but maybe GotG has a chance... I kind of doubt it, though. Maybe The Lego Movie? Edge of Tomorrow? I honestly don't see 2014 as a very "historic" year for movies.

Being time-specific isn't necessarily a bad thing. Boyhood in particular was very clearly angling for a sort of 'sign and symbol of the times' feeling--the fact that it was so blatant about this was part of what rubbed me the wrong way about it--and I think that it might have done it well enough that people will continue to respond to it as a representation of the 2000s and early 2010s into the future. Birdman is probably the sort of thing that a specific group of people will continue to talk about (I'm not sure quite how to define this group, and I don't think it's just 'movie people' as conventionally understood), but not necessarily the general public.

American Sniper will be treated as a footnote in Clint Eastwood's career at best, an oozing abscess on the shoulderblade of Clint Eastwood's career at worst, even five years from now, to say nothing of ten or twenty or fifty.

What genre could Interstellar be said to be 'one of the top movies' in? Certainly not sci-fi as a whole; maybe some specific type of sci-fi.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'll add that as a Wes Anderson fan I don't get the appeal of The Grand Budapest Hotel specifically. Why is it supposed to be so much better than The Royal Tenenbaums? Is it really any better than Moonrise Kingdom?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

What genre could Interstellar be said to be 'one of the top movies' in? Certainly not sci-fi as a whole; maybe some specific type of sci-fi.

As much as I love sci-fi, it isn't exactly the "strongest" genre out there. I'd say Interstellar is a top ten, maybe top five sci-fi movie based on how "good" it is. It's my personal favorite, but I can acknowledge that 2001, for example, is "better" on the "good" scale even though it's a chore to sit through and doesn't have half the heart that Interstellar does (not to say that I don't admire 2001, though). I'd grant you a few other classic sci-fi films similarly, but not that many before the balance tips. Certainly not enough to push it out of the top ten.

Granted that sci-fi is not as strong a film genre as it is a literary (or even television) genre, but here we go.

2001, Aliens, Blade Runner, Terminator 2, Wrath of Khan, The Empire Strikes Back, Metropolis, District 9, Solaris, the original RoboCop, Fahrenheit 451, Silent Running, Voices of a Distant Star, Ghost in the Shell, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Fly, the original Planet of the Apes, Mad Max 2, Quatermass and the Pit, and Gattaca are all better films than Interstellar. I say this as somebody who, to go along with what you're saying, only likes about half of them.