Riley ,'Lessons'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Snowpiercer was incredible.
I would've loved to have seen GOTG nominated for best adapted screenplay (co-authored by a woman, who also came up with the idea and wrote the original draft), and even though I haven't read or seen it all the writerly people I know who have are severely pissed that Gillian Flynn and Gone Girl were passed over.
I would have loved to see Snowpiercer nominated for anything, but most of all for directing. It had such a loopy, distinctive voice and tone.
I, too, loved Ralph Fiennes in Grand Budapest Hotel. I'm kinda puzzled to see Robert Duvall nominated for The Judge. I thought that film was critically panned (didn't see it myself.)
Gone Girl was an excellent adaptation, I thought. Managed to streamline pretty well.
Linda Holmes is great, as ever, on the noms: [link]
I've only seen three out of the 8 Best Pic nominees. What the hell is American Sniper? I haven't even heard of it.
Meryl Streep in Into the Woods, really? I guess she was entertaining enough in the role, but c'mon. That just feels lazy.
She's an Important Actor. I think the Academy thinks they have to. Or they've giving them to older actors on the gamble that "Oh, this is their last movie, I bet, better award them with something."
American Sniper does not look appealing to me from the ads. It's Bradley Cooper... as a sniper.
It's Bradley Cooper... as a sniper.
It's Bradley Cooper--as you've never seen him before.
It's true, it's in the ads.
Robert Duvall was excellent in The Judge, which was an excellent movie. (RDJ was fucking excellent in that movie too.) But while I agree with that nom, overall the Oscars can kiss my wide white ass. They have rarely ever been anything but Hollywood money masturbating itself. The fact that the lineup is almost all white men this year really isn't a huge surprise.
I've heard glowing things about Bradley Cooper's and Sienna Miller's performances, but a couple of people whose opinions I respect loathed almost everything else about the movie (and one hated everything but those two actors, full-stop, take the entire rest of it and nuke it from orbit hate).