In Contention

Tag: Brazil

  • THE LONG SHOT: Critical mass

    Guy’s updated Oscar predictions here.

    Just one week on from the first formal awards announcements of the season, the Oscar season may still be taking its first steps, but my personal interest in the precursor trail is nonetheless set to peak this very weekend.

    That, of course, is when the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association weigh in with their selections of the year’s best, showing up the likes of the nominee-naming Washington group as the pretenders they are, while classing up the season with some unapologetically idiosyncratic film smarts.

    Or so we hope – for as much as the major critics’ groups often delight us by throwing caution (and Oscar-soothsaying cred) to the wind with rebellious left-field picks, they are equally capable of falling dully into line behind pre-anointed favourites. I was recently chased by Tom O’Neil’s resurrected Gold Derby site for my NYFCC and LAFCA predictions, and while I’m as game as anyone for a spot of light-hearted, consequence-free punting, the irony of the exercise still nagged away at me: the day I predict either group’s set of winners accurately is the day they’ll cease to matter to me.

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  • Getting carried away with ‘WALL-E’ and the LAFCA

    BrazilI have been griping about the state of the movie year since after the Toronto International Film Festival, and frankly I took some heat for bitching about it. So yes, I feel some vindication about the way the season is shaping up: 2008 is a hugely disappointing year at the movies, with only a handful of really brilliant films. After the bounty of last year, obviously our hopes were high, which is a mistake, but it seems we have endured one failure after another this year.

    So the Los Angeles Film Critics Association voted “WALL-E” best film of the year.  Does this increase the film’s Oscar chances for a Best Picture nod? It will certainly draw some more attention but at the end of the day the film will land in the feature animation category, which is where it belongs.

    I agree with Kris that “WALL-E” is over-appreciated and hugely overrated. Yes, it was a good film, a beautiful picture that was a stunning visual experience, but it’s not the masterpiece it is being hailed as. In my opinion it is indicative of the weak movie year we are suffering through.  I have three more films to see to wrap up my 2008 coverage, and at this writing, “The Dark Knight” is my choice as best film of the year, with Nolan my best director.  So I have to say it was cool to see both slide in as runner-ups.

    But let’s be realistic about the L.A. Film Critics.  They like to make a statement. They did it in 1985 with “Brazil,” an unreleased film from Terry Gilliam that somehow won their Best Picture prize and forced Universal to finally put it in theaters.

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