Oscar Nominations, Upcoming movies, & Other Whatnot

When the Oscar nominations were announced earlier this month one of the biggest surprises was that Ben Affleck wasn’t nominated for Best Director for ARGO. Critics are theorizing that this may help it win Best Picture to make up for the snub, but to me it’s just another factor in what looks like one of the most unpredictable Academy Awards programs ever.

For instance, try to predict who will win for Best Supporting Actor - Alan Arkin, Robert De Niro, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Tommy Lee Jones, or Christoph Waltz. They’ve all won Oscars before! I guess this will take the edge off for all five nominees because no matter who wins, the other four can’t really be that disappointed. They’ll each think something like “it’s not like I don’t already have one.”

There’s also the interesting inclusion of Michael Haneke’s AMOUR as both a Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Picture of the Year nominee. I’ve just seen the movie and am happy it got nominated, but it looks like a real long shot for it to win Best Picture. Not sure if that means it’s a shoo-in for Best Foreign film though. I’ll still make predictions when the day is closer (the Oscar ceremony will take place on February 24th), but I bet I’ll get more wrong than ever before. 

In other movie news, this is a pretty slow season for quality movies but there are some that I’m looking forward to: Fisher Stevens’ STAND UP GUYS starring Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, and Christopher Walken and Dave Grohl’s documentary SOUND CITY (a recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast with Grohl really whet my appetite for this one).

Speaking of documentaries, I recently saw an interesting one by Douglas Tirola called ALL IN: THE POKER MOVIE (2009). Come to think of it, this poker movie reminds me that I never saw ROUNDERS. As it is expiring from Netflix Instant at the beginning of next month, I better get on that.

More later…