Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

Just to emphasize that the lull in American casualties in Iraq is apparently over: March saw only 31 deaths; the first 12 days of this month have already had 36. But you'd never know it to watch TV news. About 8 of those casualties are in the past 24 hours, but not a peep on last night's network ne...

Yeah, Eric and BJ, I was thinking more along the historical lines Magilla documents -- add in Some Like It Hot, widely deemed the all-time greatest comedy, failing to receive a best picture nomination; American Graffiti winning nothing; and Tootsie losing even screenplay to the lumbering Gandhi. Th...

Just as the majority of voters in the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 voted for the clearly intellectually challenged George W. Bush, Just for the record, more voters in 2000 voted Al Gore... As I've said many times, I have trouble finding coherence in the voter quirks of recent years. In m...

BJ, I like your point, and it matches what I felt at the moment Shakspeare's win was announced: I simply couldn't believe such an on-the-nose Oscar favorite had failed to pick up the prize (where far lesser such films -- Braveheart, Dances with Wolves -- had waltzed home). I think two factors, in a...

This is a classically middle-brow list, with a few modern wrinkles (i.e., Groundhog Day, and just about all of Charlie Kaufman's credits). But even if they weren't trying to strike into fresh territory, they failed, as many here have said, by picking mediocrities like Rocky, Gump and Shawshank, and...

My wife watches the BBC News on PBS, and she told me they did an extended feature on Pitney last night -- this while he didn't even rate a mention on the CBS Evening News (guess they were too busy promoting Katie!!!). I'd agree Pitney's wildly emotional style is a borderline case -- I can't argue w...

BJ, back as far as the mid-80s, I detected what I started calling Critics' Syndrome -- the gap between the delighted surprise a critic experiences in discovering a film, and the inevitably smaller delight experienced by an audience which has been told (by these critics) to look foward to the film. ...

I've noticed the pace of American casualties has slowed down. As a trade-off, Iraqi civilian deaths have accelerated precipitously at a rate of dozens per day. This correlation (when US casualties are down, Iraqi casualties go up) has been occurring so consistently that I've been assuming a causati...

This is perhaps the ultimate for true Oscar-completists: at 3:30 AM overnight tonight, TCM will be showing two Lon Chaney silents. The first -- 1928's Laugh, Clown, Laugh -- is one of the only five films ever nominated for the instantly obsolete Title Writing category. Maddeningly, at least in NY, ...

Yeah, Penelope -- you might not (based on your comment) like Bloody Sunday any more than you did Bourne Supremacy, but you'd at least have a better idea of what to expect from United 93. Bloody Sunday is a faux cinema verite recounting of the 1971 Irish uprising/bloodbath. It's done utterly without...

Jesus Christ, criddic. You expect slop like that to persuade people? The quote Saunders hails so highly ("Bush nails it!") is a complete distortion of anything anyone is saying. No one says don't try to uncover terrorists; they're saying, do it through the long-established means of gettin...

I've finally got around to working on this and found, like many have, it's a complex process. Some all-time-horrible choices I find hard to include because there's no decent winner among the other nominees (unless I say "as opposed to ANYTHING"); and some of the most egregious omissions I...

Reds was seen as the favorite in '81 because of its generally decent precursor run (DGA, WGA -- though not Globe best picture), but, as Dennis says, it was a serious box office letdown, and I thought it vulnerable all the way (though I'd thought On Golden Pond was the threat). I haven't seen Chario...

A problem with the "historical context" thing is, even in such contexts, there would be dissenters (as in 1941, and, here, 1999). How much deference we give to the predominant view can by governed by whether we were there at the time to be part of the dissent. I'd say, for instance, Forre...