Wendy DeCora.com

T-3.5 hours to the Academy Awards. I finished seeing all the Best Picture nominees just yesterday. So now I can have an opinion. Since I’m going to discuss the movies and spoil some things, I’m going to put my main thoughts in an extended entry. But my non-spoiler Best Picture thoughts are:

Should Win: Finding Neverland
Will Win: The Aviator (or maybe Million Dollar Baby)

In general, I think the Oscars are really up in the air this year. There isn’t a clear “that’s it, that’s the movie” favorite this year. There aren’t anymore LOTR movies to pull for.

So without further ado…

The Aviator: This is the big epic movie that generally the Academy (and myself) tend to favor. Its a Scorsese picture but it doesn’t feel like his other films (which, for me, is a good thing). I thought Leonardo had a fabulous performance in this film and I LOVED Cate Blanchette’s portrayal of Katherine Hepburn. The picture was stylized in an interesting way: the way the film looked reflected the way films looked during the time period pictured. So at the very beginning, everything was in three-tone color. Basically, red, blue, and beige, which was the earliest form of color film. Then it went technicolor and the other forms of color. It was an interesting technique, if not a little annoying. Though not nearly as distracting as the blue/yellow saturation that was employeed in Traffic a few years ago. I liked the movie, even if it did drag on from time to time. It made me very curious about Hughes‘ contributions to aviation and that he would test pilot his planes and I was really fascinated to read the details of his surviving the crash of the XF-11 spy plane. And I think a good biopic makes you more interested in the people and finding out facts about them. Which The Aviator did. Its definitely the most standard Best Picture nominee. I will not be surprised if it wins.

Finding Neverland: Of all the nominated films, to me, this one was the most perfect. It was totally complete, totally contained, stayed true to itself throughout the entire movie. I can’t believe the director wasn’t nominated for Best Director because this picture was just so perfectly realized. I loved it. It was a great film. Trancended the genre bounds of a romance or a family film or a biopic. It was delightful and Johnny Depp was fabulous. I also think that Freddie Highmore should have been nominated for best supporting actor as the young boy who inspired Peter Pan. That young actor was just so good. Much better than Thomas Hayden Church who just played the same guy he’s played in ever sitcom he’s ever been in.

Million Dollar Baby: This is a movie I would have never seen if it wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, but I’m glad I did. It was a very quiet and moving film. I had heard about “the twist” but had no clue what it could be. It really felt like a standard sports picture, with good acting, until that twist when Hilary Swank’s character is sucker punched, falls, and ends up as a quadrapaligic. Didn’t see that coming at all. And then the movie becomes about a father-daughter relationship and euthunasia. It was a good movie in that it was a movie that made you think and feel. I tend away from those films as I prefer to just be entertained, but I’m glad I saw this one. I will admit, I still didn’t get the whole sub-plot with Clint Eastwood’s characters daughter and the letters and his learning gaelic. I mean, I understood that his daughter was absent from his life and Hillary Swank’s character was filling that void, but the letters, especially the narration about/from one at the end confused me. If The Aviator doesn’t win, I think this one will.

Ray: I LOVED this movie, except for the last 5 minutes. The last five minutes attempted to tack on the last 20 so years of Ray Charles’ life in some bad wedding reception/high school graduation presentation-type montage that just left a bad taste in my mouth as a cinema junkie. Jamie Foxx will win for this movie since he was the movie.

Sideways: HATED IT HATED IT HATED IT. I don’t get what the big deal about this movie is. I can’t stand movies that bill themselves as comedies but really there are just humorous moments from time to time when the rest of the movie is just dramatic, or, in the case of this film, stupid. The “guy has midlife crisis, takes trip with friend” genre is just lame. The whole wine thing was an interesting point and interesting subject to tie a narrative around. I got those parallels, but I just couldn’t stand this movie. Maybe you have to be a divorced middle-aged person to see any humor in this. I’m ok with not being in that group. If this movie wins, I will be more disappointed than when American Beauty won, because while I hated the storyline of that movie, I really appreciated the cinematography, the music, the contstruction and the performances in the film. So why I didn’t like the movie, I understood how it was considered Best Film. Not the same with Sideways, I don’t like movies where people play “ordinary people” and get all kinds of props for it. Its a movie, I don’t want real life. That’s what reality television is for.

And this ends my commentary for the 2005 Oscars. I think I need to go get something tasty to eat while I watch the show tonight. Not that I haven’t had the E! Live from the Red Carpet coverage on since 1pm or so. *chuckle*

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