About a week before the Academy Awards I posted my Oscar ballot – at least, the one I would submit if anybody in the Academy cared to give me a vote. But since my ballot is only for my own fun, I didn’t take it quite so seriously, at least when it came to seeing all the nominated films. Sure, I saw nine of them, but at the time of my ballot hadn’t seen The Fighter and justified the omission with some sort of flippant, “Nobody else has seen them all excuse.” Well, by now, I have seen The Fighter, and I’m ready to amend my ballot for inclusion of The Fighter. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: March 2011
The Best Picture Project Oscar Ballot 2010 – UPDATED
Filed under The Best Picture Project
The Best Picture Project – The Deer Hunter (1978)
Directed by Michael Cimino
Screenplay by Deric Washburn, Story by Deric Washburn, Quinn K. Redeker, Michael Cimino and Louis Garfinkle
Starring Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, John Savage, Christopher Walken and John Cazale
The Deer Hunter might be the darkest film to ever win Best Picture, and if not the darkest, then at least the bleakest. Certainly, over the years the Academy has recognized pictures that were not of the sunniest disposition – after all, Hamlet is several hours of brooding, followed by Hamlet’s death – but on the whole, the Academy has shown a decided tendency towards films that could either be called heartwarming, uplifting, or hopeful. Think about Gigi, Around the World in 80 Days, Rocky, et al. And even some of the darkest to win Best Picture haven’t been all that dark. Continue reading
Filed under The Best Picture Project
Sorry I’m so Slow…
Sorry I’m so slow about getting a new post going this week but it seems like everything on earth has intervened to prevent a proper one. First, there’s my real job – lawyer to broken families. Then there is the work I’ve been doing on three projects, racing them towards various levels of completion. Continue reading
Filed under What I'm Writing
The Best Picture Project – Chariots of Fire (1981)
Directed by Hugh Hudson
Screenplay by Colin Welland
Starring Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Ian Holm, Alice Krige
After I watched Chariots of Fire I didn’t know how to approach it for this project. Should I trash it? Should I love it? Should I go sideways and talk about some aspect of the movie that leads me down another path onto another topic and ignore the movie altogether, which seems to be exactly what I’m doing now? Even as I’m writing this, I’m still not quite sure how to approach it. Continue reading
Filed under The Best Picture Project
The Best Picture Project – Gandhi (1982)
Directed by Richard Attenborough
Screenplay by John Briley
Starring Ben Kingsley
Is a movie – or any work of art – about a great man inherently a great movie? The answer is clearly no. There are many terrible films about great men – how many times has Jesus been on the big screen in a steaming pile of crap? Similarly, there are films about despicable men that are not automatically despicable themselves. For example, see A Clockwork Orange, or Taxi Driver. Both films are about morally bankrupt individuals, and yet, they are great films.
Clearly, a great subject does not naturally make a great film, just as a reprehensible subject doesn’t naturally make a reprehensible film. Continue reading
Filed under The Best Picture Project
