Saturday, January 28, 2012

criticizing movies I haven't seen yet

So, it's Oscar time. And the nominees are named, and I hate most of them. Even though I haven't seen them yet. After the debacle of "The King's Speech" getting Best Picture for a story about an extremely wealthy man who had his life handed to him on a plate, well, I was hoping for more this year.

Let's look at what's going on:

The Artist: apparently the favorite. The strikes against it are
a) it's black-and-white
b) it's a silent film
c) it's about Hollywood.

Because of (c), it's going to win. That's because Hollywood is self-absorbed.

The Descendants
Apparently this is some kind of film with George Clooney. Hollywood loves George Clooney. I think he's pretty good, but you don't have to give him a nomination every year. Apparently the film is about how hard it is for a man to be a parent. Yawn.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
I'm really looking forward to 9/11 replacing the Holocaust as the best option for Oscar bait. After all, it was uber-tragic. Not just regularly tragic.
Tom Hanks dies. Deal with it. At least they didn't kill his dog (Turner & Hooch).

The Help:
Apparently black domestic women in the South have lessons for all of us. I'll pop in reruns of Good Times first.

Hugo:
It's OK to not nominate every single freakin' Scorcese film! It's too late, Hollywood. You dropped the ball with Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. I don't even know what this one is about.

Midnight in Paris:
aka 6 p.m. on the East Coast. Owen Wilson plays a screenwriter. Please, screenwriters, stop writing films about screenwriters!!! Nobody else cares! There are 6.8 billion people on the planet, and like 43 of them are screenwriters. Surely you people can do a little legwork and write stories about other people!

Moneyball:
Yay, Billy Beane turned a last place team into a playoff contender that never won a post-season series. Worse, Jonah Hill got an Oscar nomination. Jonah Hill? What's up with that?

The Tree of Life:
I feel obliged to favor this film because the title mentions the subject of phylogeny, which paid my rent for a few years. OTOH, I ultimately found phylogeny to be not exciting enough to stay in. I bet the film isn't even about phylogenetic reconstruction algorithms!! Or, if it is, they probably like Neighbor Joining, like all the drones in computational biology who use an inferior algorithm just because it was published first. Read a book!

War Horse:
See Hugo, above, and replace Scorcese with Spielberg.

And they couldn't find a tenth film? Here's a suggestion: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Or maybe include Inception again and make up for 2011!

Two more films from Best Actress:

Albert Nobbs. Um, Glenn Close still looks like Glenn Close. She's got to do more than get a haircut to look like a man. For one thing, she's only 5'4.5" tall. For a guy, that's midget-sized. And she has the facial structure of a women. The sad thing is that Glenn Close really deserves an Oscar for something. But I think I'd giggle a lot if I went to see this film.

Iron Lady. Could we please stop worshiping right-wingers? In the past decade, we've seen a Best Actor go to an English King and a Best Actress go to an English Queen. Enough already! We've had the revolution. And Margaret Thatcher was a terrible PM. If the UK hadn't been lucky enough to find oil in the North Sea, her austerity measures would have succeeded in destroying the economy completely.

Oh, but she beat up Argentina. Wow. Enough wars already. Yes, Meryl Streep should have about five more Oscars by now. But not for this one.

I'm off to see a black-and-white silent film because apparently I live in 1926 and that's all the cinema has.