Bull Moose Strikes Back

Oscar nods this morning. I really dislike the new system of nominating ten movies for Best Picture. It’s not like any of the extra five actually have a chance of winning, if they want to get more eyeballs on the ceremony they need to find a better way than the equivalent of giving everyone a trophy.

On the other hand, I smashed my dry streak of not having seen any of the nominated Best Picture nominees at the time of nomination.  This year I have seen of five of the ten nominees, including the front runners, Avatar, and The Hurt Locker. The others being Inglorious Basterds, Up, and District 9.

I told you what I thought of Avatar here. Truthfully, I think that District 9, Up, Inglorious Basterds,and The Hurt Locker are all much better than Avatar. The Hurt Locker especially.

The Hurt Locker is the best Iraq War movie ever made. Not that there was any competition for that title. But it is also one of the best handful of war movies I’ve ever seen. There is no politics in the movie, but it is an intense study of how different men react to the pressure of war. Check it out all four of the ones I’ve mentioned.

I also have to register an official complaint about the lack of eye candy included in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress category.  Personally, I think Amy Adams’ turn as Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum 2 was worth a nod.

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• I finally saw one of the nominated pictures on Friday night: Slumdog Millionaire. I really liked it and am pulling for it.
• I like Hugh Jackman, I don’t care what Dr. Cox says.
• The opening number was good. Poking fun at the normally overblown opening number is a good sign…
• … which quickly fades as they unveil this awful format of having five former winners introducing the five nominees. I thought the object was to speed things up.
• Milk gets it’s political speech in. Better do it now, Milk won’t likely win another big category. Did the screenwriter say “God?”
• Jack Black was pretty funny. Taking his Dreamworks Animation movie money and betting it on Pixar. Zing.  I’ve grown weary of Jack Black lately, but by avoiding him when I do see him he’s funny again.
• Ben Stiller is always a highlight when they allow him to come on.
• Another good comedy bit with Seth Rogan and James Franco. Laughing at The Reader was good. The Reader is getting picked on a lot tonight. (With good reason.)
• As I expected when I saw The Dark Knight Heath Ledger wins. He would have won if he hadn’t died. I still say The Dark Knight got hosed out of a Best Pic nod. I wish they’d stop calling Ledger’s overdose accidental. It wasn’t on purpose, but it wasn’t actually accidental. Semi-accidental is more like it.
• Who likes Bill Maher? Much like Keith Olbermann, I didn’t like Maher before I knew his politics. He knocks the “petty gods”  that at least two of the winners thanked and that the Milk screenwriter said created gays equally. (For the record, I think Maher was unfairly pilloried after his comments about the 9-11 hijackers. Brave and evil/crazy aren’t mutually exclusive.)
• These Oscars are death. This new format is horrible.
• I’m guessing Paul Newman edges out Heath Ledger is the Death Montage Applause Competition. Or, they don’t even include Ledger. I forgot that Charlton Heston died. Heston got a shamefully small amount of applause.
• I forgot Stan Winston died, but some say CGI killed him long ago.
• Now that Danny Boyle has won an Oscar, I have to reignitethe greatest argument ever had in my college apartment: Shallow Grave sucked.
• I’m hoping there will be a tie between Kate Winslet and Anne Hathaway and they’ll have to settle it by hot oil wrestling.
• My daughter got a Kate Winslet (in Titanic) Barbie doll for her birthday. None of the of the other nominees have one of those. Or is there a Barbie Out of Africa doll.
• I hope Mickey Rourke wins. I want to hear that f-ed up speech.
• Bah. I’ve had enough of Sean Penn. Yeah, yeah, shut up Penn. You get off on thinking we all think that you are “homo-loving communists,” more than any of us actually care. I am self-congratulatory-phobic, though.
• Who is this Spielberg guy? An up ‘n’ comer?
• Huzzah to Slumdog. In what seems like a mediocre batch of Best Pic nods, it seems like the best. I have a hard time believing any of the other tedious nominated movies would be better.
• The show was death this year. The comedy bits were good, every thing else was horrid. The new format is a failed experiment. Not showing clips of the nominated performances but having other actors talk about the performances instead is  inexcusably stupid.

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