Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

Criterion's DVD/Blu-Ray of Costa-Gavras' The Confession is out of print. State of Siege , from the same licensor, is still in print, so it may be due to them losing rights to one of the supplements rather than the film itself. Also, Arrow has a pretty good sale going. I probably won't get anything t...

Lean on Pete Just excellent. I kind of had this grouped with The Rider mentally, because the trailers didn't offer a whole lot beyond "young man and a horse". The movies have similarities beyond the horse thing: Both deal with life on the margins of American society, with the way that peo...

Why not Slumdog? I liked it, but it's not one of my favorite Danny Boyle films, from either a narrative or visual perspective. But I think it's a solid win, and Anthony Dod Mantle is the kind of great cinematographer who has spent much of his career working on movies that wouldn't come close to Osc...

Changeling is one of those odd, difficult to explain nominations. It's not that it's undeserving, it's just that, why is this the one movie to get a cinematography nomination, out of a director-cinematographer collaboration that ran from Blood Work through The 15:17 to Paris ? (Stern isn't cinemato...

I considered not voting because I think all of these films are solid contenders, and it's hard to really make a case for why one is notably stronger (or weaker) than the others. In the end, I went for Atonement , partially because I (correctly) suspected that it wouldn't have any votes, and partiall...

I haven't purchased any of the Criterion Blu Ray releases over the last few years because I was hoping for a comprehensive set and here it is! I just bought The VIrgin Spring in the Barnes & Noble sale. I've got a few of the others, but I'll probably give them to a friend or donate them to the ...

Yesterday Criterion announced a box set of several Bergman films. There was speculation that they would do something for his centennial, but this announcement is beyond what was expecting. Most were expecting that it would be like the Kurosawa set, which had the movies without any extra features, an...

An incredibly strong lineup. I'll have to put some thought into this one, because I could honestly make a case for any of these as the winner.

Easy vote for Lubezki, as far as I'm concerned. Despite five very strong nominations coming up, he'll probably only get my vote for one of them. I love The New World , although I've never actually watched the 155-minute cut that was Oscar-eligible. (Have seen the 135 minute cut and the 170 minute cu...

Have not had a chance to watch anything yet, but my Woodfall set arrived on Thursday. It's a great-looking package, and I have to give BBC credit for the really sturdy box, and also glad that each film got its own (thin) case, unlike Indicator's Boettecher set or Arrow's Rohmer set, where each case ...

By the way, the hidden headline for me here is that you haven't see the film. You passed on an Eastwood movie? That rocks the foundation of my world. I'm sure I'll get to it eventually, but I just couldn't bring myself to it after the reviews were so overwhelmingly negative. I posted this in the mo...

By the way, the hidden headline for me here is that you haven't see the film. You passed on an Eastwood movie? That rocks the foundation of my world. I'm sure I'll get to it eventually, but I just couldn't bring myself to it after the reviews were so overwhelmingly negative. Even the Eastwood auteu...

So many of these 2000's lineups are just uninspiring to me. Voted for The Passion of the Christ, could've just as easily cast a null vote.

My picks for the year:
1- The Dreamers
2- Mean Creek
3- Birth
4- Million Dollar Baby
5- Code 46

Somehow, in its 15th weekend, on around 250 screens, this grossed around $1.7 million. Compare that to Mother's Day weekend, its 10th weekend, where it grossed less than $1.2 million on nearly 2000 screens. It might be worth noting that going into this past weekend, it was less than $2 million shy o...

There's also the tired "teachers want to medicate our boys; they don't understand they're just boisterous" hokum that right-wingers like to promote. Uhhh...over-medication is actually a very serious problem facing adolescents (mostly boys) today. Haven't seen the movie, and don't know how...