2016 Oscar Preview: Best Original Screenplay

THE NOMINEES:

- Bridge of Spies (Matt Chairman & The Coen Brothers)
- Ex Machina (Alex Garland)
- Inside Out (Pete Docter, et. al)
- Spotlight (Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy)
- Straight Outta Compton (Jonathan Herman & Andrea Berloff)

SHOULD BE HERE: Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman)

In an era where Hollywood is making pictures based upon already existing name brands, the contenders that have a legitimate stake at being a snub in this category is deep. People love Mad Max: Fury Road and I would champion for films like The Hateful Eight, Creed, and Dope. However, one of my favorite films of the year is Anomalisa. A lot of the success of the film is through the final direction by Kaufman and the use of only three voices in the film, but even without that, Kaufman wrote a brilliant script about a man struggling to deal with the banalities of life. I think it's an incredible script and has several little nuances to it that I didn't realize until after I started thinking of the film days later.

THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS ON THE NOMINATIONS:

2016 Oscar Preview: Best Actress

THE NOMINEES:

- Cate Blanchett (Carol)
- Brie Larson (Room)
- Jennifer Lawrence (Joy)
- Charlotte Rampling (45 Years)
- Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn)

WHO SHOULD BE HERE: Queen Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road)

For the first time since I can remember, the female nomination pool is crazy deep and the male nomination pool is pretty shallow. Rooney Mara (Carol) and Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl) had to wade in the Best Supporting Actress pool just to earn a nomination. However, the one person who really got screwed over was Charlize Theron. Despite not having her name in the title, Theron’s Furiosa is the star of the film and almost entirely the reason (outside of George Miller’s incredible vision) the film is as excellent as it is.Theron is great at everything she touches (well, maybe not this Snow White nonsense) and considering how many other nominations Mad Max: Fury Road received, I'm surprised all acting nods got left out in the dust. 

THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS ON THE NOMINEES:

2016 Oscar Preview: Best Director

THE NOMINEES:

- Lenny Abrahamson (Room)
- Alejandro G. Inarritu (The Revenant)
- Tom McCarthy (Spotlight)
- Adam McKay (The Big Short)
- George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road)

SHOULD BE HERE: Ryan Coogler (Creed)

Ryan Coogler took a franchise that was dead in the water, and turned it into a (semi) fresh story that not only pleased the Rocky faithful, but also casual fans like myself and my wife who have seen one Rocky film between the two of us. It was expertly directed (I mean, that first fight scene alone should have forced Coogler on this list) well-acted, and told a tight and entraining story that pleased all. Ryan Coogler doesn’t deserve an Oscar nomination because he’s black, he deserved a nomination because he directed the hell out of Creed.

THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS ON THE NOMINEES:

2016 Oscar Preview: Best Adapted Screenplay

THE NOMINEES:

- The Big Short (Adam McKay & Charles Randolph)
- Brooklyn (Nick Hornby)
- Carol (Phyllis Nagy)
- The Martian (Drew Goddard)
- Room (Emma Donoghue)

SHOULD BE HERE: Steve Job (Aaron Sorkin)

I completely understand why Steve Jobs received a "meh" response from America. It was the third movie released about Apple's co-founder since 2011 and the overt three-act, playwright, Sorkin-esque style of the film is initially jarring. But I found the style fascinating and bold in all the right ways.

Steve Jobs is a non-traditional biopic that explores Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) relationship with the most important people in his life throughout three separate product launches in his career. Each product launch (Macintosh in 1984, NeXT's "Cube" in 1988, and the iMac in 1998) not only explores Jobs' vision of technology, but the culmination of his life and the people in it. Of course Steve Jobs never had multiple heart-to-heart's and arguments with all of these people at the separate product launches, but it was a clever and interesting device in order to tell the life story of Steve Jobs. Certainly knowing the structure of film going into it helped me like the structure (and the film as a whole) more, but I thought Sorkin (and his dialogue) created an excellent script.

THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS ON THE NOMINATIONS:

Where Does The Danish Girl Fall On The King's Speech Spectrum?

Last year I wrote about The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything and where it fell on The King’s Speech Spectrum. The King’s Speech Spectrum is a ratings spectrum for prestige British period piece movies about extraordinary events or people that seemingly only get made to win Academy Awards. On the lower end of the spectrum is the spectrum’s name sake, The King’s Speech. It is a dull, uninteresting movie that appeals solely to the elderly and those who remember the events depicted in the film. On the high end of the spectrum is The Imitation Game, a well-made period piece that’s engaging for people of all ages and creates themes and messages that are still applicable to current times.

The Danish Girl is a 2015 film directed by Tom Hooper and stars Eddie Redmayne (two key figures to force The Danish Girl to fit on the spectrum) and Alicia Vikander. It follows the relationship between the painter Einar Wegener (Redmayne) and his wife Gerda (Vikander) as Einar goes through a transgender exploration which will eventually lead him to be the first person to undergo sex reassignment surgery.

Leonardo DiCaprio and the Extremely Weak Best Actor Oscar Race

Back in October I wrote about Leonardo DiCaprio's career failing to play the Oscar game and how he wasn't going to win an Academy Award for his work in The Revenant. Since the writing of that post, Leo won the Golden Globe and the SAG Award for Best Actor, and it would be nothing short of a colossal upset if he didn't win the Academy Award for Best Actor as well. I am glad to be proven wrong, and nothing would make me happier than to have one of my favorite actors finally earn an Academy Award. At the same time, it sucks that Leo will finally earn his first award for one of his worst roles. DiCaprio was in The Revenant because as Chris Connolly once said in a Grantland video, "Leo makes your dreams come true". He helps difficult projects like The Revenant get made, but I didn't think he was terribly good in it. That's why it will be bittersweet when he finally wins the Academy Award in a few weeks. At least when Martin Scorsese won his first Academy Award it was still for one of his best films (The Departed), but when Leo wins his first Oscar, it will be for a performance that probably doesn't make his career Top 10.

Extremely Well Made and Incredibly Boring: My Review of The Revenant

I struggle with The Revenant. Not in the sense that it was a purposefully tough movie to watch, but I struggle with it in the sense of trying to respect it on a rational level while despising it on an emotional level. Now I fully admit that I wanted to dislike the movie coming into it, but there are plenty of movies that I’ve only watched solely because they were nominated for Oscars and the quality of the film made me change my mind. Unfortunately, The Revenant was not one of those films. 

But that being said, my feeling of the film and your feeling of this film from watching the trailers won’t be changed by seeing the film. To me, the film looked like a journey that I did not want to experience, and I was correct in my assumption. I know people who couldn’t wait to see this film, and it’s one of their all-time favorites. Ultimately, it will not matter what I write in the rest of this review, because how you feel going into the film based upon the trailers and TV spots you’ve seen is basically how you will feel coming out.

Nonetheless, you cannot deny the masterful and technical achievement it took to get this picture made despite what your opinions of the film are. I do not think that having an arduous shoot is a good enough reason to give a film Academy Awards, but there are a plethora of aspects to this film that are technical masterpieces and worth studying in film classrooms for decades to come. Yet it is extremely difficult to respect something you dislike so much.