Category Archives: Academy Awards

Matinee

One of the many advantages of a) working from home and b) having HBO is being able to watch Oscar-nominated documentaries during lunch.

Today’s featured selection:  The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossoms.

tsumani and cherry blossom posterI’ll admit that I had not heard of this film before I saw it listed on HBO OnDemand.  If perchance you haven’t either, I strongly encourage you to invest the short 40 minutes required.

Director Lucy Walker chronicles the tsunami that devastated Japan on March 11, 2011.  Survivors share their stories of loss, and work together to rebuild their communities — already making progress a mere month after the storm hit.

And what are the ‘cherry blossoms’ in the title, you ask? I’ll let you watch the film and find out. 

It is a vital part of their history and culture, and one reason a tsunami could never break the Japanese people.

Sheep schtick

It has been 22 years since The Silence of the Lambs won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Feeling old?

silenceThen come to New York City and see Silence: The Musical, the way funny parody of that award-winning horror story now playing on Broadway.

Clarisse is there…Dr. Lector, too.  And the wannabe transgender, his little dog and the senator’s daughter, ‘putting the lotion in the basket.’

But the lambs?

Well, they aren’t so silent in this version. They sing.  They dance.  They move set pieces.

Cast-of-Silence-The-Musical-650x433They even ‘clomp’ out a musical number using their little lamb hooves.  I had a major flashback to doing something similar during  a show at Martin City Melodrama & Vaudeville Company in Kansas City…

Just off-Broadway.

Acting normal

Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway — you’re Oscar winners!

jennifer and anneNo wonder you’re smiling.

But whereas the world loves Jennifer, most folks find Anne just…so annoying.

What gives?

Both are talented actresses.  Both gave Oscar-worthy performances this year — Jennifer in Silver Linings Playbook and Anne in Les Miserables. And both are attractive and smart.

But of the two, only Jennifer appears comfortable enough to stop acting…to be herself on the awards show stage.  So her speeches — and even her trip up the Oscar stairs — appear to be authentic expressions of emotion.

Not badly acted attempts at sincerity.

So stop it, Anne…or we’re taking all the shiny trophies back.

Popcorn, please

image

Hope a bunch of new Oscar contenders come out at the box office…

Cause there be movie passes in the house!!

The five dollar bet

Friends ask if I’ve seen the movie Lincoln. I haven’t.

It feels like homework.

But on this President’s Day holiday, I will celebrate the greatest president in our nation’s history by going to see Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film.

lincoln movie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A big thank you to AMC Theatres for having a $5 movie special in honor of the holiday.

(That might have tipped the scales a bit in the movie’s favor.)

No zombies for the zombies

The 2013 Oscar nominations for Best Director had just been announced — the words were still hanging in the air in a cartoon word balloon — when Steven Spielberg announced his plans to suspend production on Robopocalypse.

Surprised?  Not me.
Robopocalypse-Movie-570x805I’ll bet Anne Hathaway, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress and slated to star in the long awaited sci-fi extravaganza, seconded the notion.

No doubt she and Spielberg — both frontrunners for their work in Les Miserables and Lincoln respectively — remember what happened to Eddie Murphy a few years back.

He was considered a sure thing for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the movie Dreamgirls…and then Norbert happened.

And the Academy said, “No way, no how.”

The nominations this year have shown what a old group of fuddy duddies the Oscar voters can be.  (No Best Director nod for Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow — are you serious??)

Steven Spielberg is just playing it safe.

Motion pictures

Happy New Year!

Now that 2012 is in the rearview mirror, websites are talking ‘best of.’ My favorite conversation encountered today was

Best Movie Poster

Obviously there are lots of posters to choose from over the course of a year. (Thank goodness these websites posted images to jog my memory.)

But for me, my favorite poster lined up with what I think is the front runner for the Oscar:

argo poster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Check back in a week or so and see if I’ve changed my mind.)

The score

I’m not one to typically notice movie scores. And that’s not the reason I decided to watch Pride and Prejudice on E! tonight.

I have Matthew MacFadyen to thank for that.

But as I watched the Jane Austen classic for the umpteenth time, it was hard not to appreciate the music that underlies each scene — not telling us how to feel, simply providing the perfect accompaniment to the action.

I had a much more immediate appreciation of the score to Little Women when it was released in 1994. In fact, I bought the score before I bought the movie — an almost unheard of action on my part.

The music that accompanies the news of Beth’s death is in and of itself a showstopper.

And more recently I loved the soundtrack to The Social Network, which won a well-deserved Oscar.  I remember being excited that the same composers were doing the score for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Which makes me think I pay more attention to movie scores than I originally thought.

One more time

I organized my recycling today…which inspired me to review images I have featured on The Egg.

Do any of them deserve another life, another look?

Oh, yeah.

Happy Sunday everybody.

No drama

Thank goodness for Facebook and Twitter.

I read them during the Oscars last night, which were boring and predictable.

No disrespect to Billy Crystal intended; it’s not his fault frontrunners won every single gosh-darn award.

I mean, would it have killed Academy voters to give, say,  Brad Pitt the Best Actor Oscar? Or maybe Jonah Hill Best Supporting Actor?  Just for the drama of it all?

(I’m a Moneyball fan. So sue me.)

But instead we sat through the same people winning the same awards and giving very much the same speeches they have given at all the other award shows that have beaten the Oscars to the punch.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

So if you didn’t suffer through the full broadcast like me, you may have missed perhaps the most heartfelt moment of the night — Meryl Streep’s acceptance speech for Best Actress in The Iron Lady.

Her win wasn’t unexpected, but her perspective and sincerity were refreshing…especially at almost three and a half hours in.

Enjoy.