Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

you don't hear many people talking of Nathalie Baye, a performer who is truly amazing and free of affect, too often. Baye is one of the best French actresses of her generation. Her performance in a movie called Une liaison pornographique is one of my favorites from an actress in recent memory. She'...

We Italians, being famously less sophisticated than our neighbors and cousins, always found that there was something missing in Adjani, and with the exception of Adele H, Camille Claudel and Queen Margot her movies were usually box office bombs here. (When Margot went to Cannes, Adjani was epected ...

Just chiming in again – Mister Tee absolutely summed up my feelings on this year. Revisiting The Lion in Winter last night, I was almost shocked by how artificial the whole affair was, the very lazy way in which the source material was treated (ie there was a clear lack of self-aware humor which cou...

I wanted to briefly chime in and say that I'm astonished that so many gravitated toward Turner in this race. I mean, I really like Turner, too. Rarely enough for a nomination, but I do (in recent years her presence seems to have gained a weight, a force, that has apparently worked well in things lik...

Watching The Help this past weekend got me thinking about Cicely Tyson. I love her. She's wonderful. Her face was beautiful back then, of course (I think it still is) but it was also very expressive, and this quality obviously served her well as an actress. I've never quite responded to her work in ...

I haven't seen enough of the nominees to really vote, though I imagine my choice would probably come down between Hurt, who plays a rather complex character with affecting simplicity (or maybe he plays a simple character in a complex way? I don't know), and Mastroianni, whom I have, historically, al...

I have absolutely nothing to contribute to this discussion because I haven't seen a single nominee, but was Victor Banerjee's exclusion something of a surprise? It seems that the acting placements for A Passage to India were all over the place – Ashcroft winning awards in lead and then being nominat...

She was the airy blonde hoity-toity girlfriend of Sarsgaard's partner in crime.

With the upcoming release (and what seems to be trashing) of Scherfig's One Day, I got to thinking about An Education, and...oh my. I'm shocked to see that some on this board even called this a good movie. (I'm also pretty surprised to see people label Up in the Air intelligent filmmaking, because i...

Any thoughts on The Help yet? Most of what I'm hearing about it (not only the bad reviews, but the good reviews, too, and the "pleasant" and reasoning they use, their benign language, etc) makes me think I'll hate it – exploitative revisionist bullshit that's excused because, ahem, the act...

I really like Missing and Costa-Gavras is a director I admire greatly but Jack Lemmon is, in this film, Jack Lemmon. That's really the only way to put it. He's phony and calculated. I always saw Missing as Gavras' attempt to mix a kind of Hollywoodized humanism with his usual political bite/fervor b...

Meh. I love Atlantic City and I love much of Louis Malle's work but the Lancaster performance does, I think, illuminate the script’s major deficiencies. It’s so obvious that the screenplay was penned by a playwright, because all the characters are rather neatly endowed with quirks and idiosyncrasies...

It was a crime that Donald Sutherland was not nominated for his beautiful work. Tommy Lee Jones was also much, much better than Sissy Spacek in a less showy role. And Paul Le Mat was fantastic in Melvin and Howard. Nicholson. etcetc. The list goes on. I haven’t seen Tribute and I don’t really want t...

Pacino needed some bread and cheese to go with that ham. And it's not even interesting ham! But maybe I should revisit the film. The Cannes Best Actor award for Lemmon I just don't get. I like The China Syndrome, and it doesn't get the cred it probably deserves today. It does manage to succeed as a ...

My parents came to NY around the early 80s and fondly recalled Passione d'Amore as one of their favorite films they saw upon coming to the states from India, in 1982 I believe (they love Scola). I was able to track down a very grainy, very old subtitled version of the film on VHS and was totally mes...