2010 ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEES

The Academy Award nominees were announced this morning.  Unfortunately, there weren’t many big surprises.  Most of the films and actors expected to be nominated all were.  However, the Best Picture category was expanded to 10 films this year rather than the usual 5.  Here are the nominees in the most important category:

Avatar 

The Blind Side

District 9

An Education

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

Precious

A Serious Man

Up

Up in the Air

Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, and Up in the Air were the expected front-runners.  It was the other 5 that people weren’t sure about previously.  I’ve seen all but 2 of these films and from what I’ve seen, I can say that only Up in the Air and Avatar are deserving of winning the prestigious award.  Up in the Air received 6 nominations while Avatar leads the way with 9.  It was nice to see District 9 and The Blind Side get nominated as well though.  The Blind Side was maybe the only big surprise of the nominations.  Sandra Bullock was expected to receive a nomination for her acting, but the movie was not.  It just barely missed the cut for my top 10 movies of the year.  Though it’s a movie full of cliches, it did have enough heart to make it interesting and worthwhile.

Snubs:                                                                                                                                            Of course, I’m disappointed that (500) Days of Summer got completely shut out of the nominees.  The Golden Globes had some more interesting nominations as they had nominated that film in a couple of categories along with other worthy nominees like Tobey Maguire for Brothers (also snubbed here).  Some people were hoping for The Hangover to make the list now that Best Picture was expanded to 10 films, but the Oscars are known for completely overlooking comedies.  They continued that tradition this year.  I think Zoe Saldana deserved some more recognition for her acting in Avatar, but that movie has not received any acting nominations since many people feel that the motion-capture technology used in the film hinders any true acting.  I disagree.  Well at least that piece of crap Where the Wild Things Are wasn’t nominated.

2010 GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINEES

The nominees for the Golden Globes were announced this morning and some things I was excited about, others not so much.  Up in the Air, Precious, and The Hurt Locker have been leading the list of nominees with most award groups so far this year.  Precious certainly had some good acting, so the actors who got nominated deserve their nominations, but the movie overall was just okay.  I actually watched The Hurt Locker online since I never got a chance to see it in theatres.  This was another case of good acting, but the story just wasn’t that interesting to me.  InGlourious Basterds was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama along with these films (and Avatar), as well as Quentin Tarantino for Best Director.  I gave the movie 2 1/2 stars when I reviewed it which was a slightly positive review due to it being something different than the average movie fare, but I cannot imagine sitting through this dragged-out film again.  I am glad, however, that the one standout in the film, Christoph Waltz, got nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role.  He’s the only one who deserves to win for this movie.  Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is up for Best Animated Feature Film and I gave it my worst review of anything I saw this year.  I imagine it’s hard to come up with 5 nominees for this category as there are not many worthy animated films that appeal to both kids and adults alike.  Plus, it has the least chance of winning in that category.  At least the overrated Where the Wild Things Are (the other lowest-rated movie I reviewed) only received a nomination for Best Original Score and nothing else.

What I’m very happy about is (500) Days of Summer being nominated for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and its star, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, being nominated as well.  I don’t know if I’ve ever related to a character in a film more than the one he plays.  I also said that Sandra Bullock gave the best performance of her career in The Blind Side, so naturally she got nominated.  The same goes for Tobey Maguire in Brothers which I just reviewed.  I was glad to see him get nominated for his best performance too.  It was also a pleasant surprise to see a nomination for this year’s big comedy hit The Hangover.  Usually the Golden Globes only recognize highbrow comedies as they’ve snubbed movies like Knocked Up and Superbad in the past.  District 9 is up for Best Screenplay which I agree with for being one of the most original films of the year.  It was only the onslaught of action thrown in at the end that I didn’t care for.  Finally, it’s always great to see one of my favorite actors, Morgan Freeman, get nominated.  His nomination is for Invictus.  As of the time of this entry, I have yet to see Invictus, Up in the Air, and Avatar (which hasn’t even been released yet) but I plan on seeing them all.  Hopefully I’ll enjoy them a lot and agree with their nominations.

Here’s a link to all the nominees:        http://www.goldenglobes.org/nominations/

Christian Bale signs on for The Fighter

Anyone who knows me personally knows that my other main obsession besides movies is watching boxing.  So I was very happy to find out today that the film about boxer “Irish” Micky Ward is finally being made.  There have been talks for the last few years about getting this movie made but it is finally coming to fruition.

It’s called The Fighter and it stars Mark Wahlberg as Ward.  He was a brawler type fighter who was trained by his half-brother Dicky Eklund.  Matt Damon and Brad Pitt were both once attached to play Eklund but eventually dropped out. Wahlberg has remained passionate about playing Micky Ward and has always been attached.  Now Christian Bale has signed onto play Eklund.  This explains why Wahlberg and Bale were both seen together watching the world’s #1 fighter Manny Pacquaio train for his upcoming bout with Ricky Hatton.

If you want to see possibly the greatest fight of all time, just go to YouTube and watch Ward-Gatti I (they had two rematches).  Round 9 is spectacular.

Bruno gets slapped with NC-17 rating

Sacha Baron Cohen, best known for his Borat character, is getting ready to release a movie this summer based on one of his other characters from Da Ali G Show known as Bruno.  If it’s even nearly as funny as Borat, it should be pretty good.  But it received an NC-17 rating in its first submission to the Motion Picture Association of America… mainly due to numerous sexual scenes the MPAA found to be objectionable.  This would really hurt how much money the movie could take in.  So I’m sure that Cohen will have to trim some scenes so it will get an R rating and make much more money.  This should definitely make the DVD worthwhile though; you know it’s gonna have a lot of deleted scenes!

And here’s a link about a song he’s doing for the film featuring some superstar singers:

http://www.sindhtoday.net/world/81739.htm

Strange Casting for The Three Stooges

So it came out recently that the Farrelly brothers (There’s Something about Mary, Stuck on You) are making a Three Stooges movie.  Supposedly they’ve been trying to get this movie greenlit by a major studio for like 10 years.  Well now it will be made.

But the weird thing about this is who’s playing the Stooges.  Jim Carrey will be Curly.  Carrey is very funny but looks nothing like Curly did so he is reportedly going to gain like 40 pounds for the role.  But more surprising is that two very serious actors are playing the other roles.  Benicio Del Toro (Traffic, The Usual Suspects) will be playing Moe and Sean Penn is playing Larry.  I do see a little resemblance there.  Penn did have the Jew-fro goin’ on in Carlito’s Way.  Anyway, at least most people found him funny in Fast Times in Ridgemont High.  But he’s done mostly very serious movies since then and won 2 Oscars.  I guess he feels he doesn’t need Oscars anymore (Benicio Del Toro has one also) so now he’s trying to finally have some fun.