Best Picture: Zero Dark Thirty
(Every time I hear about this I wonder, how good can this movie really be if it came out less than 18 months after bin Laden died? I mean except for splatterfests like the "Saw" movies or low budget, overglorified haunted house attractions like "Paranormal Activity" you need at least 18 months to make the thing. I mean did they have the script already in production when bin Laden died? Did they use some top secret government time machine to find out in advance? Has bin Laden actually been dead for years and on ice all that time as some have claimed?)
Best Director: Ang Lee "Life of Pi"
(I dunno. Why not? They didn't nominate Kathryn Bigelow for "Zero Dark Thirty" or Ben Affleck for "Argo" so it would seem like it'll either be Spielberg or Lee.)
Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis "Lincoln"
(You know anonymous SEAL guys aren't going to win it, so this is a good fallback position.)
Best Actress: Meryl Streep...wait, has she even been in anything this year?
(I just assume she'll win every year. OK, she's not in anything so I'll go with Jessica Chastain from "Zero Dark Thirty" but maybe Streep will pull a Kanye West on her.)
Best Supporting Actor: Philip Seymour-Hoffman "The Master"
(Because Hollywood has no originality, so let's just give all the awards to people who already have them!)
Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway "Les Miserables"
(This is just wishful thinking that she'll go up to accept and flash her vagina again.)
Best Screenplay: Whoever wrote "Zero Dark Thirty"
(Because they worked really fast!)
Best Special Effects: The Hobbit
(The best special effect being to stretch a 300-page book into 10 hours of films!)
Best Animated Picture: The Avengers...wait, it wasn't animated? OK, then whatever Pixar came out with this year.
Just for fun I decided to do a little research project from Tony Laplume's box office breakdowns from 1980-2011. Just going back a few years I wanted to see what place overall the "best picture" of the year came in:
2011: 71. The Artist ($44 mil)
2010: 18. The King's Speech ($135 mil)
2009: 116. The Hurt Locker ($17 mil)
2008: 16. Slumdog Millionaire ($141 mil)
2007: 36. No Country for Old Men ($74 mil)
2006: 15. The Departed ($132 mil)
2005: 49. Crash ($54 mil)
2004: 24. Million Dollar Baby ($100 mil)
2003: 1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($377 mil)
2002: 10. Chicago ($170 mil)
2001: 11. A Beautiful Mind $170 mil
2000: 4. Gladiator ($187 mil)
Kind of an interesting trend that at the start of the 21st Century the Best Picture was actually a fairly popular and successful movie. But after Lord of the Rings it's like the Academy decided enough of this populist stuff and started to go back to more obscure pictures, notably "The Hurt Locker" in 2009 and "The Artist" in 2011. It is often odd how the "Best Picture" of a given year will hardly be seen by anyone and only be shown in six theaters by the end of that year.
Speaking of movies, tomorrow is Week 4 of Box Office Blitz!
6 comments:
Ugh. Movies awards. I hope people that deserve then get them. And then they are all happy. And I thought Zero Dark Thirty was a reenactment - real life was their script.
I want to see Zero Dark Thirty, but otherwise none of the others have any appeal to me. I'll read about the award winners in the paper the next day.
S
Bigelow had been working on a bin Laden movie before he was taken out. So they got to make a different movie because of it, a more dramatic version of the change in the conclusion of "Fever Pitch" when the Red Sox finally won the World Series and made a happy ending possible.
I'm going with Lincoln for Best Picture. Of the 6 I've seen, the only other one really worthy of consideration is Argo. I still need to see Django, though, so I can't compare that one.
I saw Zero Dark Thirty this past weekend and frankly I found much of it boring. In my humble opinion Argo was a much better movie. Unfortunately the Acadamie doesn't let me vote on this.
That is kind of scary to think of them writing the script while Bin Laden was lying on the ground. Best screenplay indeeed.
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