This past year proved to be one of the best years for movies in recent memory. Of the Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, almost all could, in any other year, make a strong case for being the front-runner. This was also a year with so many incredible acting performances that Oscar stalwart Tom Hanks didn’t even get nominated for his devastating role in Captain Phillips.
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In a year without any movies completely breaking away from the pack as an obvious Best Picture frontrunner, we head into Sunday’s Academy Awards with a sense of mystery surrounding most of the top awards.
It’s a bit of a shame the year’s best picture, The Master, didn’t even warrant a nomination, but such is the way it goes with challenging films from Paul Thomas Anderson. The year’s next best, Django Unchained, will have to be content with getting a nomination, which, given the content of the film, still is a bit surprising to me.
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I both love and hate the Academy Awards.
I tend to argue that they often get it wrong on the Best Picture winners, but even when they mess up, I find myself drawn to the allure of the award. Movies remain America’s grandest form of popular entertainment, making the Oscars, good or bad, a major draw.
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There is a feeling of legitimate unknown, perhaps even a bit of mystery, heading into tonight’s Academy Awards. For the first few weeks of the campaign season, movie fans watched The Social Network build all the buzz to become the Best Picture favorite, but it has now slipped to second, most likely, behind The King’s Speech.
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I’ll be the first to admit that I have no idea how to decipher the instructions for voting for this year’s Best Picture from the 10 nominees. It’s a complicated process that involves ranking all 10 from 1-10, then using some sort of process of elimination until one movie gets more than 50 percent of the votes. I’m pretty sure this is the most confusing and unnecessarily difficult way of choosing a winner outside of the Electoral College.
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While I certainly enjoyed many movies in 2009, very few left me completely wowed. Maybe they fell victim to unfairly high expectations, but other than a precious few (and that doesn’t include Precious, which I’ve yet to see), I walked out of the theatres feeling disappointed more often than not.
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So ... there I was 