Tom Salinsky

It’s Oscar time again. Ladies and gentlemen here are the runners and riders…

The ones I’ve seen already…

Gravity

Tying with American Hustle for most nominations (ten, one more than 12 Years A Slave) it’s perhaps a little surprising to see this getting quite so much Academy love. Pared-back and innovatively-shot it may be, but it’s still essentially a blockbuster thrill-ride at its core. What’s even more surprising is that it hasn’t been overlooked in the “big six” department. Alfonso Cuarón is nominated for Best Director as is Sandra Bullock for Best Actress. To be honest, I don’t think it has much of a chance in any of these categories, except possibly Best Picture ironically. I wouldn’t give myself odds of better than 4-1 but since Paddy Power was offering 12-1 I’ve put a tenner on it. My full review is here.

Captain Phillips

Another one-person-against-the-odds movie (Robert Redford’s All is Lost didn’t get a nod), Paul Greengrass makes a huge virtue of his lean, documentary shooting style and Tom Hanks makes an appealingly unsympathetic hero – although his real-life crew insist that the real guy was even a bigger asshole – but what knocked me out is the total collapse of the Captain Phillips character when the ordeal is over. Tom Hanks’ raw, authentic, bewildered inability to cope with his recent experience is some of the very best screen acting I have ever seen and his failure to be nominated is utterly confounding – especially when antagonist Barkhad Abdi has got a nod for Best Supporting Actor. This is not to take anything away from Abdi’s performance which is very fine, but Hanks’ snub would be easier to understand if the Academy had failed to notice any of the acting in the movie. Anyway, this won’t win the big prize.

Philomena

A delightful, personal, and very moving film showcasing a completely different side of Steve Coogan, who abandons Partridge-style mugging completely to carve out a much more detailed and intimate portrait of a journalist whose compassionate zeal never tips the story into mawkish sentimentality. In fact the whole film pulls off a very delicate balancing act between humour, soap opera, detective story and politics. The detective story is the loser, but it’s by far the least interesting and necessary component. Judi Dench also gets yet another acting nomination. Nothing for Coogan as actor (which would have been surprising but not wholly undeserved) but the screenplay gets a hat-tip.

Nebraska

Alexander Payne continues an extraordinary run beginning (for me at least) with the brilliantly spiky Election, continued with the more subdued but still excellent About Schmidt, the splendidly freewheeling Sideways and the truly marvellous The Descendents which readers may recall I favoured over eventual Best Picture winner The Artist. Nebraska is a very, very simple story. In fact my only real criticism is how noisily the plot gears were grinding in the first twenty minutes to achieve its fairly straightforward set-up, viz – septuagenarian Woody Grant mistakenly believing himself to have won a million bucks in a sweepstake stops off in his old home town en route to collect his winnings.

As soon as we arrive in Hawthorne, however, we are off to the races as Woody reunites with old friends, family and rivals, most of whom are eager to get their hands on his new-found dough. Accompanied by his son (SNL’s Will Forte – a revelation), and eventually his wife (June Squibb, delightful) and brother (Bob Odenkirk), Woody drifts through much of the movie in somewhat of a senior daze, but this lack of desperate questing serves to give the rest of the movie time to settle. Much of the dialogue is peppered with one-liners, but nothing ever seems forced, except possibly the final pay-off which is just a little too neat.

Immaculately shot in cool, grainy black-and-white, this is a real treat and it’s great to see “little” movies like this and Philomena getting the Academy’s attention as well as the big spectaculars, all-star casts and “important” movies – see below.

The ones I haven’t seen yet…

American Hustle

A strong contender in the three horse race for Best Picture, only a year after Silver Linings Playbook, director David O Russell assembles much of the same cast and gets them nominated in all four acting categories again. I was dissatisfied with Silver Linings because I felt the ending sold the characters down the river. Early reports of this suggest that the plotting also goes awry towards the end, but we’ll see. Like Argo, this could make it if the Academy finds Gravity too frivolous and 12 Years A Slave too self-important.

Dallas Buyers Club

This is the one I know the least about. Part of the recent rehabilitation of Matthew McConaughey which began with 2012’s rather unsatisfactory The Paperboy, it also stars Jared Leto as a transgender character and follows the tale of a drug smuggler – not cocaine but untested HIV pharmaceuticals. It’s released in the UK on 7 February so look out for a full review some time after that date.

Her

One of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard for a movie, grinding through the unproductive furrow of the wretched S1m0ne, and the absurd Electric Dreams as well as the ghastly AI and the limp Bicentennial Man. I didn’t see Robot and Frank so maybe that was better. On the other hand, this is Spike Jonze who can usually relied on to be interesting, so let’s give it a whirl. It’s released here, appropriately enough on Valentine’s Day.

The Wolf of Wall Street

I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to a Martin Scorsese movie this much. I couldn’t get on board with The Departed which began by examining the mirror-image moral conundrums faced by a cop-turned-mobster and a mobster-turned-cop, then turned the movie over to Jack Nicholson who proceeded to Nicholson all over the middle third. After his character’s demise, the afore-mentioned moral conundrum is entirely lost in a welter of gunfire and bodies hitting the decks. It scarcely seems to matter what moral choices any of these characters make, today everybody dies. Completely pointless in my view. Shutter Island was diverting but ultimately a rather empty puzzle-box picture, and Hugo was very disappointing (full review here). This, on the other hand, seems to have a much clearer direction to head in, a crackerjack cast and – hey! – jokes! I doubt it will sweep the board though, in what is looking like a pretty strong year.

12 Years A Slave

And here it is – the bookies’ favourite and the likely front-runner, but it remains to be seen after Django Unchained, Lincoln and The Help how much more guilt-porn the Academy can take. It also remains to be seen if it’s any good. I haven’t seen either The Hunger or Shame but I’ve heard extremely mixed reports about both. 12 Years has been largely praised by critics and has done decent box office, but I worry that it will be too worthy and not engaging enough as a piece of narrative.

What wasn’t nominated

As well as All is Lost missing out, I had expected to see Inside Llewyn Davis get a mention and possibly August: Osage County. I feared that the execrable Blue Jasmine would appear and vaguely wondered if The Butler was in with a chance. Although I loved Saving Mr Banks and although the Academy generally appreciates Hollywood-devours-itself movies, that film always looked too… breezy to be in with a chance. In fact, the breezy parts I liked the best. When it attempts to wring psychological depth out of a piece of fruit, and when we spend endless tediously repetitive minutes cavorting with Colin Farrell in what is meant to be small-town Australia, I want to check out.

Other predictions…

If it all goes Steve McQueen’s way, and it still could, then Chiwetel Ejiofor has a good chance for Best Actor and McQueen himself for Best Director. Best Actress is probably going to Cate Blanchett – it’s hard to overlook such a stellar performance if, like me, you didn’t think much of the script. For people who liked the rest of the movie, it must have seemed virtually god-given.

As is often the case, the supporting nominations are a little more open. Michael Fassbender is probably the front-runner, again for 12 Years A Slave, but I wonder if Jared Leto might just nick it. For Best Actress, June Squibb must be a good bet. The Academy loves them some old ladies and if those old ladies are on film lifting up their skirts in a graveyard in order to taunt an old suitor in his grave, so much the better.

Best Director will probably go the same way as Best Picture, so if they give it to Alfonso Cuarón, and your bookie is still open, put a big bet down on Gravity immediately. On the other hand if, as seems more likely, it isn’t Gravity’s night, I can see these two awards splitting between Slave and Hustle although I’m not sure which way around is more likely.

Finally, screenplays and as usual we have two bites at the cherry as the Academy distinguishes (sometimes eccentrically) between original screenplays and adaptions. In the Original Screenplay category, I imagine American Hustle has it sewn up, and likewise I would expect Adapted to go to 12 Years A Slave. If, say, The Wolf of Wall Street pinches Best Adapted Screenplay, we could be in for some 3:00am surprises.

Okay, that’s where we’re at. More reviews coming soon.

As long-term readers may recall (oh, the delusion!), my primary “use case” for my iPad is entertainment on long journeys – videos, ebooks, games (music is more convenient on my iPhone). The longer the journey, the harder it is to manage two key elements, especially where video is concerned: having a long enough battery and having enough choice.

Let’s take choice first. Depending on what kind of iPad you’ve bought, you’ll have 16Gb, 32Gb or 64Gb of storage. Once you’ve installed a few apps, a few ebooks and a few videos, you may find that even 64Gb is gobbled up quite quickly. As a f’rinstance, as each Doctor Who DVD comes out, I rip it in an iPad-friendly resolution (with commentary and trivia text turned on, naturally) and stick it in iTunes to watch at a later date. I’ve got about half-a-dozen I have yet to watch and a new one comes out almost every month. Sometimes more than one, if it’s a boxed set. Each one takes up around 1.5Gb. Add some iTunes movies, some other DVD-rips and pretty soon I’m looking for external storage. Other (lesser) tablets let you plug SD cards or even USB sticks straight in but the iPad is pickier, sad to say.

When I bought my iPad I had the foresight to get the Camera Connection Kit to go along with it. This dongle plugs into the dock connector and then accepts a USB connection to a camera or an SD Card. Images and crucially videos can then be copied off the card for viewing on the iPad. Copied off, notice, so there needs to be room (but existing videos in your library can be deleted to make room).

However, the source and the files need to look exactly like they’ve come off a camera. This means a folder structure something like this DCIM » 100DICAM and then giving every file an 8.3 filename. So your copy of Casablanca needs to be renamed CASABLAN.M4V, or on a really bad day DCM_0001.M4V. Worse, this filename is not visible when you inspect the SD card from within the Photos app – all you have to go on is thumbnail, often black. And folder structures are ignored. Still, it’s a cheap solution, especially if you have some SD cards lying around, and once you’ve copied the right file over, watching from within the Photos app is fine, if a little weird – why can’t I copy it to my media library? Better still, why isn’t the “Open With” option available so I can open a video file in any format using an app like AVPlayerHD.

Other options exist. For a while, I was considering an AirStash. This is a wireless transmitter for the contents of an SD Card which works with a companion iPad app. It’s not expensive, only $100, but hard to get in the UK without the help of Bundlebox and crucially the battery only lasts five hours without a recharge (and you can’t transmit from it while it’s recharging).

In the end, I wound up getting a 320Gb Hyperdrive for $200 which has turned out to share many of the same limitations as the Camera Connection Kit option, but thankfully not all. It’s a kludge of the Camera Connection Kit software, “fooling” the iPad into thinking that it’s importing files from a camera and although it again denies you access to filenames, and tends to provide only black thumbnails, you can have folders and sub-folders on the disk and navigate through them, so I’ve just put each file in a folder which identifies it. I copied my iTunes movie folder on to it, and most movies were already in an appropriately-named folder which saves time. With TV series box-sets, it was a bit more laborious. I had to create a folder called Breaking Bad S2, and then 13 sub-folders, each called Breaking Bad 2.x, each with one episode in. Sounds tedious, but actually it only took a minute or two. When plugged in to a laptop, the Hyperdrive behaves like any other USB drive. Plugged into the iPad with a mini-USB lead, via the Camera Connection Kit – take note, it takes 4-5 minutes to copy a whole movie over, then you can unplug the drive and watch your movie through the Photos app (and delete it when you’re finished to make room if you wish).

Just before I entered my credit card details, I had a quick tour of the site and spotted this little beauty – the Hyperjuice Stand. Now, it’s true I already have a navy blue Smart Cover to prop my iPad up, but that doesn’t stop this being a really, really clever idea. It’s a rubberised stand, lightweight, but just heavy enough to securely hold the iPad in place (360g), at a near vertical angle for watching movies or a flatter angle for typing – but the space inside is filled with battery! 11,000mA of battery which will keep an iPad going for around 16 hours! For only $130 it’s an absolute steal, and because it’s got a standard USB port on it, you can use it to charge or power a great many other devices besides iPads. It charges via a mini-USB connection too, so you can use the same AC adapter as your iPhone, or charge it off your laptop if that’s more convenient.

Having watched my choice of videos, secure in the knowledge that my battery will never run out, and arrived at my destination, I don’t want now to revert to a regular laptop. However, as lovely as the iPad is, it’s hard to type anything as long as, say, this blog post on the on-screen keyboard. So my other purchase was this handsome Aluminium Keyboard Buddy Case, only $49. It pairs quickly with the iPad via Bluetooth and the battery life is very good. Typing is certainly easier than without a physical keyboard, although the keys don’t have quite as much travel as I would ideally like – however it doesn’t really work as a case. I can fold my SmartCover out of the way, but even with it removed altogether, the iPad and the supposed case never snap together securely, they just sort of lie together. I tend to carry them separately in my Troop Brown Canvas Bag.

What toys have you bought for your iPad?

The whole family

LIMITLESS
w. Leslie Dixon (novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn) d. Neil Burger
Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Robert de Niro, Anna Friel

Limitless is a sprawling pharmaceutical fantasy that works handsomely for as long as it can coast on its star’s winning charm, inventive direction and the giddy excitement of its premise, but is slightly let down by a clumsy ending and some lapses in logic.

Struggling writer Eddie Mora (Cooper) is offered a little clear pill known as NZT which, his sleazy ex-brother-in-law claims, will allow him to access 100% of his brain, instead of the mythical mere 20%. Not scenting urban legend bullshit, Mora takes the pill, pulls his landlord’s wife, spruces up his apartment and rattles off ninety brilliant pages of novel in a frenzy of organised creativity until the magic medicine wears off. Now hooked, he goes in search of a further – ideally limitless – supply, and that’s where his troubles really start.

This is all sketched in with admirable economy, and director Burger uses every trick in what must be a fairly hefty book to bring these changes of mental state to life. Sudden close-ups of Cooper’s impossibly blue irises, infinite zoom-ins, shifts in digital grading, animated letters falling from the sky, simultaneous Bradley Coopers multi-tasking, all work well to make cinematic and visceral what might otherwise have been merely conceptual. I found the x-ray movie of him swallowing the pill a little hard-to-take and it’s true that these kind of directorial flourishes can becoming irritating and tic-y if overused, but Burger seems in control of the material – almost to the end.

Before then, Abbie Cornish is winsome but underused. De Niro seems cast largely because his reputation as an actor saves three script pages to build up the character, but he shows up and glowers suitably. A variety of largely unfamiliar faces fill out the remaining roles of sleazy gangsters, smooth executives and bangable babes.

For much of its length, the movie is high on its own giddy concept – there’s nothing Eddie can’t do when pumped up on NZT and the film loves to see his superbrain tackle tough spot after tough spot. Of course, he’s done nothing to earn this, which is why having such a likeable star is so important. And then comes the inevitable crash, but – hopefully without giving too much away (stop reading now if you’re genuinely spoilerphobic) – the movie’s too much in love with its delightful central character and can’t bring itself to punish him in the way we’ve clearly been promised. The filmmakers even wheel in a tastefully uglified Anna Friel to point out just why this can’t last – and then ignore it. It turns out that NZT’s use is rather more widespread, which starts to raise other little awkward questions about who is manufacturing it and why.

Unable to decide whether his hero should pay the price for his hubris or be rewarded for his cunning, director Burger and screenwriter Leslie Dixon just go ahead and give us a jarringly brutal fight scene to resolve most of the dangling plot strands and then an ambiguous but basically “junkily-ever-after” coda designed to ensure that Eddie won’t have a sudden come-down and so neither will we.

Thoroughly enjoyable, full of charm, wit and invention, but ultimately empty inside the glittery shell and not really sure what it was trying to say. Not every movie has to have a strong moral message (use Western Union) but is it asking too much of a piece of popcorn entertainment to pick a point-of-view and stick to it?

This blog having been sadly neglected, I’m going to put up a few quick posts tying up loose ends. First is the Oscars. My quest to see all ten Best Picture nominees having met with success, all that was left was to watch the ceremony and test the quality of my powers of prognostication.

The ceremony itself was certainly marred by the choice of host. Anne Hathaway is a perfectly charming presence, but was rarely given anything funny to say. James Franco, such a charismatic and fearless actor seemed to be playing the part of stiff and gauche neophyte out-of-his-depth and made me feel rather uneasy watching him moreorless throughout.

On the upside, some of the dopier decisions of ceremonies past had been quietly reversed. Gone was the shepherding of multiple technical award winners on to the stage simultaneously. Gone were the ponderous personal valedictions from five presenters to five acting nominees. Back were the individual musical numbers for Best Song (sort-of).

The awards themselves were fairly predictable. In the technical categories, both Inception and The Social Network did slightly better than some had predicted, raising a question mark over The King’s Speech‘s chances at the top prizes. But stuttering Bertie eventually scooped up Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay as it was always bound to. Apparently, my choice of Tom Hooper was anti-consensus, but honestly I only picked him because of the momentum of the movie itself.

Truth be told, it almost certainly wasn’t the best-directed movie of the year – certainly 127 Hours and The Social Network both have stronger claims. Yet, I don’t think it’s fair to right off Tom Hooper’s contribution entirely. Hooper does use the camera and the sound design in interesting and compelling ways. The movie neither looks nor sounds like a TV movie (as An Education did last year, for example) and if, as is generally agreed, Colin Firth pulled off the performance of his career, then surely some of the credit for that can be given to the director?

My only other anti-consensus call was picking Hailee Steinfeld for best supporting actor, which I had serious cause to doubt after watching Melissa Leo in The Fighter but if you make an out-there prediction, and you stick to it, and you’re right – then you’re a genius. Whereas if you dither about and pile up caveats and codicils, then who cares? Of course, Steinfeld did not prevail and Melissa Leo fucking did, not undeservedly.

That’s it till next year. If this blog is still here, we’ll do it all again then.

3D is back in our cinemas and it’s big business. Cinemas can charge more for 3D movies, 3D movies earn more revenue and – along with monster screens – are another key differentiator for cinema, in this frighteningly modern age of Blu-ray, iTunes and Bittorrent (whatever that is).

Of course, 3D is nothing new, and I don’t want to use this space to reproduce Wikipedia entries about its history, nor whine about it being used badly or inappropriately, nor even do I want to assess its place as another colour for moving picture artists to add to their palette. I want to talk about something more fundamental – what is it?

The briefest of history lessons, just to explain why 3D is suddenly back in our cinemas, and to add a little context. 3D in this sense essentially means delivering two subtly different images to each eye. This can be done in various ways, with the most popular in the twentieth century being the red/blue anaglyph method. This sends a red-tinted image to one eye and a blue-tinted image to the other eye thanks to cardboard glasses. The method is cheap to implement but entails obvious compromise of colour within the images. LCD shutter glasses which blocked all light reaching each eye alternately were briefly experimented with but you can’t give out expensive items of electronic equipment free with breakfast cereal and they need both power and careful synchronisation with the projected image. Neither is ideal, which is why 3D was so niche for so long.

The reason for the current swathe of 3D movie is that two new technologies have caught up with an existing one. The glasses you get given at your local Vue or Odeon today are polarised, which effectively means that half the light enters one eye and the other half enters the other eye. No colour distortion, but a dimmer image, and you can’t just blast twice the light through 35mm film to make up for the shortfall, since twice the light means twice the heat and you’ll melt the celluloid. However, the advent of digital (filmless) projectors combined with hugely reflective metal screens means that polarisation can be deployed without the images being reduced to a murky gloom. Reflective screens + polarised glasses + digital projection systems = $$$ it seems.

And more is to come – 3D TV is on its way, with several lenticular (you know, like those corrugated postcards which seemed to move if you tilted them) systems which send a different image to each eye, provided you sit in just the right position and keep your head still.

But what exactly is the benefit of all of this?

Well, it isn’t 3D except in the very trivial sense that the images you are watching now have an apparent third dimension of depth to add to their existing dimensions of height and width. No, it’s stereoscopy or stereo imagery which is no more like actually being there than a stereo recording is actually like being at a concert.

Let’s start by considering how our brains interpret the three-dimensionality of the world at the moment. Information about how near or far things are comes from three sources.

• Perspective. Things which are further away are smaller in our field of vision (Dougal) and parallel lines which recede from us appear to converge.
• Parallax. Things which are nearer to us appear to cross our field of vision more quickly, whereas things which are further away cross our field of vision more slowly. This works even with stationary objects if you move your head. Try it now and notice that your monitor or laptop screen moves through your field of vision much more than the wall behind it.
• Stereoscopy or stereopsis. The left eye sees a different version of the image than the right eye. The brain automatically combines both images into a single version of reality, giving each element of the image a “depth value”.

Of these three, perspective is present in any photograph of the world, and is obviously a part of any movie, 3D or not. The second, parallax, in the first sense is equally present in any live-action movie and, was a key reason for Walt Disney to create his multiplane camera in the 1930s. However, in the second sense, it is absent from all movies, 3D or not. You can’t move your head and see a different image as you could if you were witnessing the events live. The 3D stereoscopy is an illusion, one which is shattered if you try and interact with the image in even the most trivial way. We are not Luke Skywalker, able to walk around the projection of Princess Leia and see her from whatever angle we please. At least with your “RealD” glasses you can move your head without the image actually falling apart, unlike those lenticular TVs I mentioned earlier (disclaimer: this technology will obviously improve over time and I haven’t sat in front of one myself yet, so I know not whereof I speak – but that’s the prerogative of a blogger, is it not?).

Undoubtedly, 3D stereoscopy can enhance some movies. It can also ruin others (for some insights into what’s going right and wrong see this fascinating series of article by David Bayon on the PCPro blog). But it would please me if there were more realistic descriptions readily available for what is going on. Traditional “2D” cinema creates an illusion of depth through perspective and parallax. People with good vision in only one eye don’t live in flatland and if you close one eye, your ability to – for example – catch a ball will only be very slightly impaired. Stereoscopic movies enhance the depth illusion but do not complete it, and very odd effects can be created when an object which appears to be jutting out towards the viewer, then moves off the edge of the screen.

Stereoscopic movies are probably here to stay and the technology now exists to retrofit stereo into movies shot with a single camera, so we’ll be seeing more of them, not less. But they aren’t now, nor will they ever be as three dimensional as the room you’re sitting in right now. For that, you’ll have to go to theatre.

Here follows a personal list of favourite, significant or just thoroughly entertaining movies, one for each year from 1930 to 2010. I reiterate, this is a personal list, so it is unashamedly Anglo-American for the most part, but I’ve also tried to keep an eye on cinema as a developing art form and include movies which cast longer shadows at the expense of quirkier choices whose appeal to me might be harder to fathom (for example, my absolute favourite movie of 1986 is Little Shop of Horrors but I couldn’t leave out Withnail & I). I’ve also tried to include as many different genres as I can – musicals, comedies, thrillers, police procedurals, westerns and space operas – you’ll find them all here. Finally, when faced with really tough choices, I’ve picked movies which are most typical of their era, which seemed appropriate under the one-film-per-year constraint.

Lists like these tend to generate outraged debate. Good! Let me know what gems I have omitted. If you can be bothered – compile your own list, and fill it full of Kurosawa, Bunel, Bergman, Truffaut and show me up of the Anglo-centric philistine I no doubt am.

1930 Feet First
1931 City Lights
1932 The Music Box
1933 Duck Soup
1934 It Happened One Night
1935 The 39 Steps
1936 The Great Zeigfeld
1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
1938 The Lady Vanishes
1939 The Wizard of Oz
1940 The Philadelphia Story
1941 Citizen Kane
1942 Road to Morocco
1943 Casablanca
1944 Double Indemnity
1945 Brief Encounter
1946 It’s a Wonderful Life
1947 The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
1948 Rope
1949 The Third Man
1950 Sunset Boulevard
1951 The Lavender Hill Mob
1952 Singin’ In The Rain
1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
1954 On The Waterfront
1955 The Ladykillers
1956 Forbidden Planet
1957 12 Angry Men
1958 Vertigo
1959 Some Like it Hot
1960 Spartacus
1961 Breakfast at Tiffany’s
1962 Dr No
1963 8½
1964 Carry on Cleo
1965 The Sound of Music
1966 The Fortune Cookie
1967 The Graduate
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey
1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1970 MASH
1971 Dirty Harry
1972 The Godfather
1973 The Exorcist
1974 The Godfather Part II
1975 Jaws
1976 The Pink Panther Strikes Again
1977 Annie Hall
1978 Grease
1979 Alien
1980 The Blues Brothers
1981 Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
1983 Trading Places
1984 Gremlins
1985 Back to the Future
1986 Withnail and I
1987 The Untouchables
1988 Die Hard
1989 The Little Mermaid
1990 Goodfellas
1991 The Silence of the Lambs
1992 Unforgiven
1993 Jurassic Park
1994 Pulp Fiction
1995 Sense and Sensibility
1996 Shine
1997 LA Confidential
1998 Saving Private Ryan
1999 The Matrix
2000 Billy Elliot
2001 Amélie
2002 Chicago
2003 Finding Nemo
2004 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2005 The 40 Year Old Virgin
2006 Little Miss Sunshine
2007 Michael Clayton
2008 The Dark Knight
2009 The Hangover
2010 …. to early to say. I hear Inception is good…

This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences attempted to up the excitement factor by giving us not just five nominees for Best Picture, but ten – divided neatly into five which are in with a shot (with two clear favourites) and five also-rans. Yay Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences!

I’ve (almost) succeeded in my mission to watch all ten before the ceremony, and here are my thumbnail reviews. For my predictions as to the Oscar winners, see my earlier post here.

AVATAR (wd. James Cameron; starring Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana)
Synopsis: Paraplegic marine Jake Sully is dropped on alien world Pandora and given an “avatar” to control so he can better mingle with the 10 foot tall, bright blue natives. If you know the story of Pocahontas, you pretty much know what comes next.
Review: James Cameron creates a jaw-droppingly, eye-poppingly convincing world, populated with not just the slender yet muscular Na’vi, but a whole da-glo managerie of hexapod creatures, sentient trees and much else besides. The story is pretty much by-the-numbers, with a somewhat static middle third, but everything does pay off and there are even some grace notes in the script, and some bright performances – hello Giovanni Ribisi!
Fun facts: James Cameron’s first film since 1997’s Titanic, but he’s been talking about it pretty much since then.
Oscars: Nominated for nine and could win them all. Big favourite for Best Picture.

THE BLIND SIDE (w. Michael Lewis, John Lee Hancock; d. Hancock; starring Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Quinton Aaron, Kathy Bates)
Synopsis: To follow
Review: To follow
Fun facts: To follow
Oscars: Also-ran, except for Sandra Bullock

DISTRICT 9 (w. Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell; d. Blomkamp; starring Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, David James)
Synopsis: In Jo’burg, a civil servant responsible for rounding up alien “prawns” eventually starts to see things from their point of view when he becomes accidentally infected.
Review: Probably my favourite film of the year – witty, fast-moving, exciting, satirical and intelligent. It gleefully steals from the very best to make something which feels entirely fresh, and the special effects are so good you forget they’re there.
Fun facts: First-time actor Copley improvised virtually all of his dialogue.
Oscars: Nominated for three more besides Best Picture, which it won’t win in a thousand years. In with a shot for Adapted Screenplay. Would have won for Effects in any field which didn’t include Avatar.

AN EDUCATION (w. Nick Hornby, book Lynn Barber; d. Lone Scherfig; starring Carey Mulligan, Emma Thompson, Peter Sarsgaard)
Synopsis: In 1961, 16 year old schoolgirl Jenny discovers that working hard to get into Oxford seems rather less glamorous next to her exciting new older boyfriend who whisks her off to Paris and pinches artworks from old ladies.
Review: Perfectly amusing, with a winning turn from Carey Mulligan, but entirely inessential and unextraordinary. A Channel 4 film which has been inexplicably nominated for an Oscar. Bizarre.
Fun facts: Screenplay by novellist Nick Hornby, based on Lynn Barner’s memoire.
Oscars: Also-ran. The kind of dull-but-worthy British film that won for Goldcrest in the 80s, but those days are over.

THE HURT LOCKER (w. Mark Boal; d. Kathryn Bigelow; starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty)
Synopsis: Under the command of a new and apparently reckless team leader, a three man bomb disposal squad goes about its work in Iraq.
Review: For the first three quarters, Bigelow and Boal trust that their characters and the episodes of their working lives will be strong enough, and they’re right. When a more melodramatic plot arrives, late in the day, it seems irrelevant and upsets the tone so masterfully maintained up till then.
Fun facts: Bigelow is James Cameron’s ex-wife, so it’s not just that Bigelow is only the fourth woman ever nominated for Best Director – this time it’s personal.
Oscars: Nine nominations, same as Avatar, and competing head-to-head in every category.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (wd. Quentin Tarantino; starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Diane Kruger, Michael Fassbender)
Synopsis: Demented fairytale, set in something which looks an awful lot like World War II, but not quite enough like it to be mistaken for it.
Review: Far more about cinema than about warfare, Tarantino’s latest is also his most juvenile, but at the same time probably his most fun, mixing agonising suspense with bravura imagery and a shockingly devil-may-care attitude to history. Provided you aren’t looking for maturity, you are unlikely to leave the cinema disappointed, but let’s face it – Up has a better chance of winning Best Picture.
Fun facts: The soundtrack is compiled from other war movies, for which Jonathan Ross castigated Tarantino on his chat-show. Tarantino was forced to admit that because he doesn’t compose music himself he prefers to choose music from stock because otherwise he feels he’s handing over too much control to another artist.
Oscars: Will win exactly one, for Christoph Waltz.

PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL “PUSH” BY SAPPHIRE (w. Geoffrey Fletch, novel Sapphire; d. Lee Daniels; starring Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey)
Synopsis: Barely-literate, abused, single teenage mother Clarice Precious Jones struggles to rebuild her life with the aid of a sympathetic teacher.
Review: Deeply moving drama which transcends its movie-of-the-week logline due not least in part to a series of bravura directoral flourishes.
Fun facts: Mariah Carey was a last-minute replacement for Helen Mirren.
Oscars: Up for a staggering six Oscars, but only likely to win for one of the lead actresses or just possibly its screenplay. A long-shot for Best Picture, but not an also-ran.

A SERIOUS MAN (wd. Joel and Ethan Coen; starring Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Sari Wagner Lennick)
Synopsis: In 1967, physics professor Larry Gopnik becomes a latter-day Job weeks before the his son’s barmitzvah as he faces the collapse of his marriage, questions over his professional ethics and the bewildering advice of a variety of Rabbis, old and young.
Review: The Coen Brothers on doggedly quirky form, for much of its running time this is original, funny and moving stuff, but the what-the-hell ending is a huge disappointment, even if it is somewhat in keeping with the overall message.
Fun facts: Lead actor’s first film after a substantial stage career.
Oscars: The slimmest of chances for Best Picture.

UP (w. Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Thomas McCarthy; d. Docter, Peterson; voices: Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer)
Synopsis: Elderly Carl Fredricksen floats away from a grim retirement home in search of the adventures he and his late wife dreamed about.
Review: Beautiful stuff, as ever from Pixar, with humour, visual appeal, story and drama expertly balanced. The 3D is not instrusive and the characters beautifully rendered. Possibly not their very best – the narrative splits into three chunks fairly gracelessly (on the ground, travelling, fighting) – but the wordless opening sequence might be one of the best pieces of animation ever.
Fun facts: John Ratzenberger, Pixar’s lucky mascot, can be heard as a construction worker.
Oscars: Will scoop Best Animated, but that’s yer lot. An also-ran in the Best Picture stakes.

UP IN THE AIR (w. Sheldon Turner, Jason Reitman, book Walter Kirn; d. Reitman; starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick)
Synopsis: Ryan Bingham is happiest when flying across the United States and very good at his job – firing people who work for other companies. His life is upset by the presence of two women, one who admires his lifestyle and one who threatens to destroy it.
Review: A very near miss, full of smart touches and another breezy-yet-angsty performance from Clooney. It loses energy towards the end and the plot doesn’t quite serve the characters as strongly as it could.
Fun facts: Most of the firees were genuinely made redundant and asked to re-enact the moment on camera.
Oscars: Has a chance of picking up an acting or screenwriting award. Hardly an also-ran for Best Picture, but certainly not a favourite.