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Return of the King Leads Oscar Nominations
PurdueGraphicsMan writes "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, the final chapter in Peter Jackson's directoral masterpeice is leading the 76 Annual Academy Awards with 11 nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Next in line with 10 nominations including Best Picture and Best director is Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Here is a full list of the nominees in all categories."
You can compare the actual nominations to Roger Ebert's predictions. He was pretty on point for Best Picture, Actor, and Supporting Actress. Its surprising to see the well liked but little seen roles getting nods. Alec Baldwin in The Cooler for one. Likewise it's interesting to see Keisha Castle-Hughes for her work in Whale Rider. Many were predicitng Charlize Theron would run away with her work in Monster but Castle-Hughes could pull an Anna Panquin upset. That role was powerful AND beloved. Something that might worka gainst Theron.
Jude Law's nod is interesting since I don't remember anyone really talking about his performance (as compared to what Sean Penn, Bill Murray and Johnny Depp did this year). Ebert picked Russell Crowe's in Master and Commander which, likewise, didn't seem to have a big impact.
Strangest one is that City of God got three nominations... although it had its NY/LA debut in December 2003 (Ebert made specific mention of it in his Top of 2004 to explain its absence). But here its getting nods for Cinematography, Direction and Writing. It probably only has a chance in Cinematography where RotK is (strangely) absent.
RotK will probably run away with Makeup, Music(Song), Sound, Writing (Adapted), and Costume Design. Of course those are the second tier ones that end up as consolation prizes for a lot of folks. The interesting thing will see how it does in the big categories (which I guess Adapted Screenplay is one).
What is music when you despise all sound?
I think it's very interesting to see that (IMHO) the two best movies to be nominated for best director are ROTK and Lost in Translation. One is a huge epic with a billion setpieces, thousands of extras, and a weaving storyline; this is an extreme challenge to direct. On the other hand, Lost in Translation features very few actors, very few locations, and some of the best low-key directing I've ever seen.
I'm glad that the Oscars are nominating directors who are working from such completely different directions, but both achieving such brilliant results.
What about nominations from the cast? ZERO.
Granted it's probably because the characters are actually co-dependant and everyone was fantastic but still...
I saw Lost in Translation at a pre-screening and while I thought it was "entertaining" I certainly don't believe Bill Murray was any better in that one than any other movie he has been in.
Depp's character was fantastic and he really led the movie and he probably deserves the award out of the list IMHO.
But why not at least NOMINATE an actor for best supporting from LOTR?
The NYT website front page, arbiter of all that is good and important, is touting the splendor and Oscar success of "Lost in Translation," so I can't imagine that any film could have done better than that one. You'd better check your facts.
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That's why Titanic must be the greatest movie of all time. *cough*
Go see "City of God" and see if you still think Peter Jackson should get best director. I definitely think TRotK deserves an oscar for Adaptation and Art Direction, but City of God was really powerful, and it was mostly kid actors.
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hi all (george here)
i have NO idea what the academy is SMOKING here!! god!! return of the king was about the WORST movie i saw all year!! for starters we got to the movie about ten minutes LATE because it took my god damn wife so LONG to shovel the snow out of the driveway and then when we FINALLY got there the idiot at the ticket booth did not accept the tickets i printed out from fan dango because he said that the effing NUMBER was INVALID!! god!!
so then we get to the concession stand and this MORON puts too much butter on my popcorn which gives me gas, but that didn't matter because then my wife spilled the WHOLE god damn BAG as she was carrying it into the theater, also she spilled our sodas, god!! how can i sit for THREE HOURS without soda!! and then during the whole movie this slut in front of us was talking on her CELL PHONE about how her next door neighbor's shit zoo had just given birth to puppies, now what in the hell, PUPPIES, who effing cares!! turn off your god damn phone you hippy
then there was this baby next to us that kept CRYING, now if you have a loud baby take some advice from me (george) and leave the god damn thing at HOME now do you got that!! have a little bit of courtesy for your fellow man now do you got that, all in all it was the worst moviegoing experience of the year and i cannot understand these nominations
your buddy
-gbd
shurely the matrix reloaded wins that one hands down?
While I gave high marks to Master and Commander for their coverage of the tiniest technical details of period naval warfare, and while I thought the foley work of the battle scenes was truly visceral, and while I enjoyed the basic setting and premise in which the characters found themselves, I was really let down by the movie.
It's a thirty minute plot, at most. It can be summed up as "whups, I guess we fucked THAT up, but let's not let that happen again..." about five times in a row. That's it. We blundered, let's move on. Oops, again. Ouch, let's try to avoid that. And oops, we didn't think of that.
It's like the premise behind Moby Dick. Have you read it? Incredible details, no plot. But a movie can't capture these details to a tenth of the degree that print can. You need story. You need arc. You need something to advance and change.
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Irony is Disney getting nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Finding Nemo...
And truthfully, while it was another exceptional movie for Pixar, I didn't find it all that entertaining. Give me Monsters Inc. or a Miyazaki movie any day.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Of all categories, I expected to seem them nominated (and win) in this one. The cinematography was easily the best I've seen in years. Without that ROTK wouldn't be nearly as good -- it added to the tone tremendously.
Actually the only other movie I saw on the list was Lost in Translation. The closer you look at the film itself the more flaws you see. The script is full of cliches (particularly when you think who the director is) but thankfully spends most of the time observing the characters being themselves - and Bill Murray put in what is without a doubt the finest and most honest performance in his career. He totally deserves best actor.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
That was one area where I was sure ROtK (or in fact the whole trilogy) was going to win.
10. Biggest scifi/fantasy genre movie WITHOUT a character that looks like the Oscar statue (Bye, C-3PO!)
9. Best performance by mountain beacons
8. Biggest elephants
7. Best Evil Lighthouse in any movie in all of 2003.
6. The National Cherry Tomato Board would like to make sure that John Noble is nominated for best actor for his work as Denethor.
5. "Most Costumed Geeks in Theatre since Star Trek 6"
4. Best use of recycled pointed ears left over from collapsed "Star Trek" franchise.
3 rings for the elven kings
2. Best title ripped off from that of 3rd "Star Wars" film.
1. Those cheesy green ghosts didn't get nominated for "Eddie Murphy Haunted Mansion". Let's nominate them for their ROTK cameo instead.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Very disappointed that Sean Astin (sp?) didn't get a nomination for best support. I haven't seen anyone play a role as well as that for a long time - certainly better than some of the lead actor nominations!
...is that Sean Astin was passed over for Best Supporting Actor. After his turn in RotK--particularly the scenes on the slope of Mt. Doom--he really deserved at least the nomination. I can't believe they left him out.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Undeniably the success of Jackson's epic has left Hollywood with a slight case of egg-on-face. This was a trilogy shot right outside the establishment orbit; filmed in Jackson's native New Zealand and funded by the independent New Line Cinema after original backers Miramax demanded that the entire story be condensed into a single two-hour movie.
In the view of many experts, The Lord of the Rings was shaping up to be the biggest disaster in cinema history. Now it has gone down as one of its greatest triumphs. Evidence suggests that February 29 will be the date of Hollywood's official mea culpa. Assuming that Return of the King wins best picture (and you'd be a fool to bet against it), it will in effect be an award for all three films. The same goes for Jackson's probable nod as best director.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
No anime in the best animated picture category. Nemo will win, allowing Disney another "me too" moment at the Oscars.
Meanwhile, anime yawns and breaks the $4 billion mark.
Disney's response? Brother Bear.
That about wraps it up.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
It's possible that RotK could win Best Film and Best Director. Best Director seem almost obvious, until you consider that no woman has ever won the Best Director award before. In fact, only two women have previously been nominated, Lina Wertmuller and Jane Campion.
This raise the question of whether women in the Academy will vote for Coppola, to see a woman get the award for once and set a precedent. It's not as if Coppola doesn't deserve it either, she made a delightful and semi-profiund film on a 3 million dollar budget.
Of course, Jackson's achievement with The Lord Of The Rings is amazing and probably the largest single project a director has ever taken on, so he deserves it too.
All I'm saying is don't be too surprised if there's an surprise upset, for Coppola, in these two categories. Coppola has a strong chance, especially since RotK may be considered a "boy" film by female members of the Academy.
... Annie Hall will win best picture. Get over it.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I was disappointed that this movie had nothing to do with Gary Larson.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It's interesting that they basically ignored Cold Mountain... when it came out everyone was crying "Oscar bait!" I mean, if a decent Civil War epic love story, featuring a host of Academy Award winners and nominees, directed by the same man as a previous Best Picture, and released by Miramax can't even get nominated, what does that say about the Academy? Maybe they aren't so shallow after all...
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
For the first 20 years of Oscar's history it was traditional for the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars to be awarded to the same film.
Then in 1948, they split for the first time with the Best Director Oscar going to John Huston for "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and Best Picture going to "Hamlet".
Since 1948 the two Oscars have split only 11 more times in the 75 years of Oscar's history. The past 20 years have seen only 4 splits.
This year I suspect there will again be a split with Peter Jackson being awarded the Best Director Oscar and "Lost in Translation" getting Best Picture. There's no way they will allow Jackson's achievement on his 3 fabulous LOTR movies to go unrecognized, but I think it's generally thought that "Lost in Translation" is the better film. So it would seem reasonable they'll split the awards in an effort to recognize both films.
Only time will tell.
You need arc.
Arc is not soley provided by plot; Someone missed the interplay of the 2 main characters in the film (played by Crowe and Bettany), which is central to both the books and the film.
As for the actual plot summary, it's a painfully simple excercise to cut down most any movie in this way.
For example, ROTK's plot can be summed up as "bunch of people try to get rid of an item that makes people turn bad. whoops, someone almost turned bad! whoops, someone did turn bad! whoops, someone almost turned bad! [repeat]."
City of God is the greatest movie of the recent fiction-as-documentary brazilian productions. Other good title are Central do Brasil (Brazilian Central) and Bicho de Sete Cabecas.
It tries to show the life in the favelas in the 70's and 80's. Although it is a fiction story, historical facts are mixed with the narrative, and, well, it could be true. Everyone who knows about the brazilian reality up the favelas, would ever doubt about its veracity (if it was true).
It is amazing to know that all actors (except for one) were amateurs, and most lived in the favelas. The tape has a lot of action and pleases the action-inclined types and also the deep-thinking ones.
You can get out of the cinema excited at the first moment, but soon will get sad because you know that is the reality for many people. And that was 20 years ago. And problems are still here (and maybe worse). About 3 months ago one of the actors of the movies (the one that is shot in foot by Dadinho) was arrested stealing a purse in a bus, to buy food.
City of God is only a movie. A really good one. The real world is not so cool.
Ahab, maimed in body and spiritually scarred, seeks to find in the vast expanse of ocean the great beast that took his leg and his pride and kill it.
Okay, if we take out all the unneccessary blah, that's "man seeks revenge on whale"?
That's not a plot. It's an interesting idea, but it's not a plot. A plot would be something like:
1. Man seeks revenge on whale.
2. So he assembles an elite team of whalers to help him.
3. One of this elite team is an old rival of his, to whom he has not spoken since they fell out over a girl or something.
4. Meanwhile, a bunch of evil English guys is also after this big whale.
5. The girl whom the two main characters fell out over turns up in a tavern the day before the ship is about to leave and tells them about the dastardly English plot.
6. She agrees to infiltrate the English bad guys by dressing up as a man and joining the crew.
7. She can then communicate with her ex boyfriends whilst at sea, by carrier pigeon, giving them the edge in finding the elusive white whale.
8. Unfortunately, she is found out, and the two heroes have to abandon their hunt to go rescue her. In doing so, they realise that revenge is not as important as friendship or whatever, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Now THAT'S a plot. Unfortunately, I don't think Moby Dick went like that.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
I don't get it. Really, I don't. I don't understand all the hubub around this movie. It was good. That's it. The acting wasn't all that great folks. Take off your fanboi glasses and look at it for what it really was.
I have never read the books, nor should I to fully appreciate a movie - after all, movies are never as good as books. That being said, here are a few observations about ROTK that you probably haven't heard...
The outcome was pre-determined. I knew what was going to happen, I could tell how it was going to end. It was predictable. Remember, I didn't know the story.
The whole thing where you think that Gollum was killed, then he comes back right at the climax - cheesy.
I found the Hobbits to be very annoying, especially Sam. They were just too corny for me.
Battle scenes - ugh. Sure, they were fantastic, but bordered on cheesy. Oh no, we are about to be defeated AGAIN. Whee, here come some eagles to save us. It just got a little tired.
I know a lot of people hold this story very dear and may take offense at my comments (I am sure I'll be modded appropriately), but I am looking at the MOVIE with no pre-conceptions. If anything, I watched the trilogy to see what all the hype was about. I still really don't know.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
That's absolutely true. IMO Serkis put on the best performance of the entire cast, in both TT and RotK. Not just for the actual physical acting,either--the voice of Gollum could have broken the whole thing, if it wasn't right, but it was perfect. Funny, at times, and when he accused Sam of eating the bread, that was brilliant. I couldn't have hated Gollum more than I did at that instant. My younger sister got a talking Gollum figure for XMas, I think it's great. "Cold be heart and bone and cold be travellers far from home; they do not see what lies ahead, when sun has faded and moon is dead!"
For anybody who hasn't seen the Gollum featurette of the TT Extended DVD, I suggest you rent it or whatever to check it out. It's amazing to see how...inadequate all the pre-Serkis Gollum stuff was, but once they basically redesigned his face to actually look like Serkis, it worked much better. Plus it's kinda funny to note that the one true piece of pure Serkis in TT is the spit that flies from Gollum's mouth when he 's talking about Sam's cooking.