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The Nominees for Best Picture -- Oscar® Movie Reviews |
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OSCAR© 2008 –
Nominated Films Reviewed by Film Critic Edward X. Young
“The Psychic Critic” -
www.exyoung.com
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Last
year this critic posed the rhetorical question, “Is Hollywood dead?”
This year I must ask “Is Oscar® dead?” As of Tuesday, January 22, 2008,
the date that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences® (A.M.P.A.S)
announced this year’s nominees, a strike by the Writers’ Guild of
America (WGA) that was expected to last less than four weeks has turned
into an industry war of attrition that has gone on for nearly three
months with no end in sight. In its aftermath, the deadlocked labor
dispute has already virtually wiped out The Golden Globes® and The
People’s Choice Awards®, reducing the usual star-studded hoopla of those
annual events to meager press conferences in which the nominees and
winners were unceremoniously read off a list. Other awards shows that
normally precede the Oscars® seem destined to befall a similar dismal
fate. The prospect for a gala telecast of the 80th Academy Awards® is
dark.
Darker still is the curious collection of movies that garnered the top nominations for the Hollywood Gold. Of the prominent pictures released in 2007, there is a peculiar predominance of grim themes of betrayal, vengeance, injustice, degenerative disease, and bloodshed. What can you say of an Oscar® year where the most upbeat nominated picture is a movie about accidental teen pregnancy?
Whatever … Be sure to tune in on Sunday, February 24, 2008 to see if there even is an Oscar® telecast. However it works out, it promises to be the weirdest awards night in the history of Hollywood Gold.
The films nominated for Best Picture are as follows:
ATONEMENT:
A tale
of puppy love gone horribly awry,
ATONEMENT
begins
in 1935
with 13-year-old
Briony Tallis (Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan), a spoiled upper-class British
school girl who dreams of becoming a world-famous novelist . The pubescent
prosaist develops a fatal attraction for Robbie Turner (James McAvoy, who made
his mark in THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND) an educated working-class man who
is secretly courting her 23-year-old sister Cecelia (Keira Knightley). When her
passions are casually dismissed, the vengeful teenager uses her storytelling
talents and position of privilege to concoct an elaborate lie that yields far
more than she bargained for. True lovers are torn apart; families are destroyed;
and a community is disgraced. Before things can be set straight, everyone
is swept up in cataclysmic world events that widen the chasm to restitution. As
tragic ramifications of her childish crime extend into the post-war years, a
remorseful Briony is left scrambling to use her creative writing skills to make
atonement. If you were enthralled by THE ENGLISH PATIENT (Oscar®-winner
for Best Picture of 1996) then ATONEMENT is your cup of tea.
Winner of two Golden Globe® awards, including Best Motion
Picture – Drama, ATONEMENT
is nominated for seven Academy Awards®.
JUNO:
This
diminutive Canadian import is this year’s
LITTLE MISS
SUNSHINE
with a dose of
NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
thrown in; and if you liked those movies, you’ll love
JUNO,
a simple story of a well-meaning but reckless high school girl (5’1” tall Best
Actress Oscar® nominee Ellen Page) who out of boredom gets intimate one time
with nerdy boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) and ends up a 16-year-old
expectant mother. After a distasteful reception at a clinic, she makes a noble
choice to have the baby and give it up for adoption – and makes a calculated
plan to use humor and wisecracks to break the news to her folks and diffuse
reactions from teachers and classmates, while she embarks on a quest to find the
perfect prospective parents for her child.
JUNO
is so refreshing because it has performers playing high school students who look
and act like real high school students. It also boasts an outstanding ensemble
cast that features actor J. K. Simmons who was such a terrifying villain on
HBO’s prison series
OZ,
but plays such a lovable and supportive father here. Universally hailed as the
“feel good” movie of 2007,
JUNO
is nominated for four Academy Awards®.
MICHAEL CLAYTON:
How
could a movie about corporate law become the wildest cinematic roller coaster
ride of the year? The legal thriller
MICHAEL CLAYTON
has been expertly crafted by a dream team of artists. At the helm is director
and screenwriter Tony Gilroy, who’s the same guy who scripted all three Bourne
espionage adventures that starred Matt Damon. In the titular role, charismatic
George Clooney is perfect as morally conflicted “fixer” for his firm, who gets
called into play whenever his bosses have broken the rules and want to get away
with it. As a chief legal executive, who resorts to lethal motions when it
becomes clear that she can’t win her case inside the courtroom, Tilda Swinton is
creepier than she was as the White Witch in
THE CHRONICLES OF
NARNIA.
As a guilt-ridden legal gun-for-hire, who goes berserk during a deposition, Tom
Wilkinson nearly steals the show. Co-producer Sidney Pollack takes a pivotal
part as the firm’s head, who firmly believes the truth can be adjusted.
Nominated for seven Oscars®,
MICHAEL CLAYTON
plays like the best John Grisham thriller never written by John Grisham. Who’d
have thought a movie about a class action civil suit could be so exciting?
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN:
It’s no movie for the faint of heart. This sanguine and suspenseful modern
western is packed with so much tension it’s guaranteed to make your pulse pound.
Set in West Texas in 1980,
NO COUNTRY FOR
OLD MEN
follows the tracks of three desperados: an out-of-work cowboy (Josh Brolin), a
cocksure bounty hunter (Woody Harrelson), and a psychopathic killer with an
abattoir’s captive bolt air gun (Oscar® nominee Javier Bardem). Hot on the trail
of a blood-stained satchel of cash from a dope deal gone bad, these separate
disparate men are driven by greed and at the mercy of chance and fate. As each
takes a turn as hunter and hunted, they learn there are no clean getaways. It’s
like THE
GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
without the laughs. Nominated for eight Academy Awards®,
NO COUNTRY FOR
OLD MEN
is faithfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s ultra-violent “Southern Gothic”
novel and directed by those cult film favorites, The Coen Brothers – and it’s
their most mature effort to date. Surprisingly somber and unselfconscious, the
Coens have masterfully structured a forensic character study set in a moral
desert that is as beautifully brutal and poetic as any of Sam Peckinpah’s
elegiac westerns.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD:
There
will be comparisons drawn between this picture and the mystery-thriller
CHINATOWN
(1974). In
THERE WILL BE
BLOOD,
Best Actor Oscar®-nominee Daniel Day-Lewis’s interpretation of the ambitious oil
baron, Daniel Plainview, bears an uncanny and seemingly deliberate resemblance
to the profligate water baron Noah Cross (who was played by John Huston) in the
earlier film. In many ways, both pictures make perfect companion pieces.
Oscar®-nominated director Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film can be viewed as a
prequel to director Roman Polanski’s masterpiece. In Polanski’s film, the
villain we meet is a tycoon who lives above the law and is already consumed by
evil; in Anderson’s epic character study, we discover how such a man got that
way – a painstaking examination of an eager industrialist led astray by
unrestrained ambition and transmogrified into a monster. Both films also
explore the morally questionable origins of Los Angeles, City of Angels, the
foundations of which seem laid over libations of oil, diverted water, and blood.
Nominated for eight Oscars®,
THERE WILL BE
BLOOD
(which takes its title from Exodus 7:19)
is only loosely based on “Oil!” the 1927 Upton Sinclair novel; but achieves the
author's intent to analogize unbridled capitalism to cannibalism.