Oscar Thread: Return to the Middlebrow

By request, a thread to discuss the nominations. I will have a couple of movie roundup posts in the near future, but I would say that after a couple years of better-than-usual Best Picture nominations, all 5 this year are all again definitively middlebrow Oscar-type pictures, although with varying degrees of doorstopness. I do have to add the caveat that I can’t yet comment on Frost/Nixon or Forrest Gump II, although I would be shocked if the latter wasn’t the least watchable of the 5. Of the nominees, the surprisingly non-didactic and entertaining Milk would be my choice; I’ll say more about the good-but-highly-overrated Slumdog later. The Reader was a little better than it seems on paper, mostly because of the actors, but I wouldn’t say it was a good movie or anything. I was foolishly hoping that The Wrestler would get a token movie-too-good-to-win nomination, but that didn’t happen.

As many have already said, it’s good to see Anne Hathaway and Melissa Leo get nominated (I agree that the former’s movie would have merited Best Picture and Director nominations); I’m also glad to see Tomei (every bit as good as Rourke) get a supporting nod. I would have liked to have seen Kristin Scott Thomas, although the annual Meryl Streep slot does make the odds worse. Among ignored pictures, allow me to also cite Darnell Martin’s Cadillac Records, not a great movie but a very good and entertaining one that would seem to be an Oscar kind of movie in a just universe.

And, of course, the fact that An American Carol didn’t receive 15 nominations is proof that the nominations are a IslamoCommieNazi conspiracy.

…Another list of exclusions. I guess I need to see Happy-Go-Lucky?