Oscar battle offers some family drama
Many are calling the current Academy Award season “the battle of the exes,” and for good reason. The top contenders for both the best picture and best director Oscars are The Hurt Locker and Avatar, and their creators, Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron. And from 1989 to 1991, Bigelow was married to Cameron.
Bigelow was Cameron’s “middle” wife, after Sharon Williams and producer Gale Anne Hurd, and before actresses Linda Hamilton and Suzy Amis. (It was Bigelow’s only marriage.) Both are saying the right things in public. Still, it makes for interesting Oscar drama.
Avatar and The Hurt Locker both have nine nominations. Ah, but here’s the difference: Only The Hurt Locker has nods for writing and acting, while both have technical honors galore. That alone indicates for me that The Hurt Locker is the better picture. Indeed, it’s my hope for top honors when the Academy Awards are handed out on March 7.
I’m also pulling for Bigelow because I’d love to see her bust up one of Hollywood’s last men’s clubs. She’d be the first woman to win an Academy Award as best director.
The 2010 Oscars also feature 10 best picture nominees. You may be surprised to learn it’s not new. Most years before 1944 featured 10 nominations. After ‘44, they went to five.
I’d guess it’s been brought back to get a few more popcorn flicks among the nominees in hopes of boosting interest and ratings. For example, there’s no way The Blind Side would get a best picture Oscar nomination if there were only five picks. Even with 10 picks, I can’t believe it was nominated. I’d prefer any number of other possible best picture nominations, from The Young Victoria to Fantastic Mr. Fox to The Messenger to even Star Trek.
I found only one major surprise in the acting categories. I don’t see how they could have left Emily Blunt of The Young Victoria off the best actress list. I preferred her work to Carey Mulligan’s for An Education (for sure), and maybe even to Helen Mirren’s for The Last Station.
The documentary category shapes up as a battle between two powerful, social-conscious efforts — Food, Inc. and The Cove — while a three-way battle is shaping up in animation, pitting Pixar digital (Up), classic Disney cel animation (The Princess and the Frog) and delightfully old-fashion stop-motion animation (Fantastic Mr. Fox).
‘PIE’ WINNER: I was pleased Monday to award the prize at the second quarterly short film contest of Rochester’s 360/365 Film Festival to Johannes Bockwoldt, a film instructor at Rochester Institute of Technology. The assignment was a three-minute film in which somebody gets a pie in the face. Special Delivery tells the three-minute tale of a delivery man who tries to escape spilling the pie he’s delivering. It’s clever and funny and features incredible stunts by the leading man, Darren Stevenson. (He and his wife, Heather, are co-founders of Rochester’s PUSH Physical Theatre.) Check out the film on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZq_OeN6evY.
THE CHASE IS ON: Turner Classic Movies has begun its annual “31 Days of Oscar” celebration, in which every film has connections to the Academy Awards. It makes great viewing.
For example, it’s often debated which film offers the greatest chase. On Saturday, TCM (cable channel 60) is showing the top contenders, starting with Steve McQueen as a cop who puts the pedal to the metal on the hills of San Francisco in Bullitt (at 8 p.m.). Then there’s an impassioned Gene Hackman as the cop Popeye Doyle, chasing an assassin through Brooklyn in The French Connection. Popeye is in a car and the killer is in a subway on the elevated tracks above him. To my mind, it’s the all-time champ and will never be equaled. Keep in mind, there are no digital effects at play in this ‘71 Best Picture Oscar winner. What you see is what they shot. Don’t miss it.
I’M FULL of good viewing ideas this week.
Saturday at 8 p.m., HBO is premiering its feature Temple Grandin, a fascinating biopic about an autistic woman and her struggle for self-identity and respect. It’s the true story of a woman who became a nationally known expert in animal husbandry. Note also that Temple Grandin includes the first great performance of 2010; Claire Danes is incredibly good as the title character.
For four successive Wednesdays, starting Feb. 10, WXXI (DT-21.1, cable channel 11) is presenting Faces of America, an engrossing look at the family roots and interconnections going back centuries among 12 notable Americans, from Meryl Streep to Stephen Colbert to Dr. Oz to Mario Batali to Yo-Yo Ma, and others. With the learned guidance of host and Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., you’ll learn the emotional and physiological importance of knowing your family’s past, and the effect it has on you.
