Caught the announcement of the major Academy Award nominations in the shuttle on the way to the office. As those of you who take the time to read the comments know, the New York Frontiersman rebutted my post on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with a review in which Peter Hichens excoriated it. While I respect Mr. Hichens’s viewpoint, I’m glad to see that I wasn’t the only one who liked the film, which garnered nominations for Best Actor (Gary Oldman), Best Adapted Screenplay (Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan), and Best Score (Alberto Iglesias). Although I haven’t seen their entries yet, I’ll also be championing such BOF faves as Max Von Sydow, perhaps our greatest living actor (who grabbed a supporting nom for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close), and Terrence Malick, director of the criminally underrated The Thin Red Line (nominated for The Tree of Life). If it’s still playing at our local arthouse cinema, Madame BOF and I are scheduled to check out The Artist–which picked up several nominations–with the senior Mrs. B on Saturday, so that would be another contender I’ve actually seen (along with most-favored Hugo) when we gather chez Drax for the annual Oscar bash on February 26.
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The Artist is fun but, like the whole list of 2011 best picture nominees, the fact that this is the best they can come up with reinforces my feeling that it was a lousy year for movies overall. My pick out of the nominees would be Midnight in Paris–I enjoyed it the most of all of them. But even that is not really a “best picture.”
Increasing the number of Best Picture nominees to 10 only exacerbates the situation. Most years, I’ve seen few if any of the nominated films (I usually catch them on cable after the fact), so I’m often reduced to rooting for people I know I like from other things. Did enjoy The Artist, though.
What, no Captain America-The First Avenger for Best Picture? This looks to be the worst list I’ve seen in years. The fact that they only chose nine nominees, when they can choose an even ten, speaks volumes for the crap, er… crop of flicks pumped out this year. Color me bored.
Well, nothing can compete with what I consider the Golden Age of the ’60s and ’70s, when such a wide variety of films was being made by a crop of incredible artists. Now the good ones are really diamonds in the rough.