Official 2014 Oscar Nominations Thread (1 Viewer)

[Tino]

Looks like Gravity has picked up some steam. From Deadline Hollywood. First ever tie for Best Picture.

The Producers Guild Awards at the Beverly Hilton ended with a stunner: The first tie for the top film prize in the PGAs’ 25-year history. Gravity and 12 Years A Slave shared the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures. The award for Gravity catapults the Warner Bros picture squarely into the Best Picture Oscar race, whereas up until now, it seems that 12 Years A Slave and American Hustle were the front-runners.

It a real race now. Further proof that it has been an exceptional year at the movies.

 

[Aaron Silverman]

That's not an unreasonable statement to make about Woody Allen. The number of films he's written (and co-written with Marshall Brickman) is approaching ludicrous, especially considering how few of them weren't at least decent, not to mention how many are really great. His upcoming feature will be number 49!

re: brief BSA performances, remember Viola Davis in Doubt? She didn't win, but appeared in just one scene, which ran around 7 minutes.

I've seen four of the nominated movies: Gravity, Despicable Me 2, The Great Gatsby, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. They were all good, and Gravity was spectacular.

 

[Tino]

Saw Dallas Buyers Club today. Great film. And sure Oscar wins for Matthew Mc and Jared Leto.

 

[Tino]

With Alfonso Cuaron winning the DGA award for best directing, his Oscar is pretty much assured. So it's pretty much a three way race between 12 Years A Slave, American Hustle and Gravity for BP. I think 12 Years will take it though still hoping for a Gravity upset.

 

[Bryan Tuck]

Quote:"It's all political, lots of money is spent on getting these nominations, it's never about the best film or best actor."Disagree completely Malcolm. That sentiment has been thrown around for decades. I just don't see it that way. For the most part, I think the Academy has a great track record in honoring films. Sure there are aggressive campaigns by producers and studios, but never for a moment do I believe an Oscar was "bought". I believe they just reflect the thoughts and opinions of the academy at that time.

I don't know if the awards are directly bought, as in "Here's some money; vote for me" (although I imagine that's happened). But the marketing campaigns for certain films are without question designed to convince Academy voters that that movie they saw last month or the other one that everyone is talking about is the greatest thing EVER. And distributors with more money are able to make their films more visible. So money and politics do indeed have a lot to do with it, even if the films being honored are genuinely good.

There's a great book called Pictures At A Revolution by Mark Harris, which describes the making of the five 1967 Best Picture nominees and their subsequent Oscar campaigns. Doctor Doolittle is a great example of a film whose studio essentially "bought" its nomination with a series of VIP dinners and screenings.

Incidentally...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/academy-disqualifies-oscar-nominated-song-675480

 

[Cinescott]

Saw Dallas Buyers Club today. Great film. And sure Oscar wins for Matthew Mc and Jared Leto.

I agree with this completely. Great film, and an amazing achievement on such a low budget.

The two near locks I see are McConaughey and Leto in Dallas Buyers Club. They were both just outstanding, and I never thought I would say that about McConaughey.

I still can't believe Robert Redford was snubbed a nomination for "All Is Lost". He was great in that film and it seemed like a very groundbreaking movie with its lack of dialog.

 

[Freddie Z]

Incidentally...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/academy-disqualifies-oscar-nominated-song-675480

Which makes me wonder, how the hell did The Lone Ranger get nominated for Visual Effects over Pacific Rim? If members can be bought out influenced to vote for a song in a hardly seen movie...

 

[Brandon Conway]

Typically one only needs to watch the visual effects demo reels to vote on that award.Sent from my VS920 4G using Tapatalk

 

[TravisR]

Pacific Rim had great CG but it was all obviously CG. The Lone Ranger- despite its many failings as a movie- still had a great blend of practical stunts & practical effects and CG work. Pacific Rim is a much better movie but The Lone Ranger has better and more believable effects work.

 

[Hanson]

Considering all three Transformers films got nominations for Visual Effects, stiffing Pac Rim is puzzling,

 

[Tino]

By the time Pacific Rim came out, it seemed to me the visual effects were more of the "been there done that" variety due to the three Transformers films that came before it. They were great effects but nothing we haven't seen before. Regardless it should have been nominated over The Turd Ranger, even tho I agree with Travis' assessment above.

 

[Citizen87645]

Interesting...

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/moviesnow/la-et-mn-oscar-song-alone-not-yet-alone-reaction-20140131,0,3214466.story#axzz2s1mekO00

 

[Brandon Conway]

The double standard is the problem, as the infamous Hurt Locker email shows.Sent from my VS920 4G using Tapatalk

 

[Hanson]

My ranking of the 9 Best Picture nominees:

• "American Hustle" - It's one of my favorite films of the year (it's a toss up between Hustle and The Spectacular Now), full of fantastic performances and a script that's constantly funny and engaging with plenty of belly laughs. But Jennifer Lawrence steals the show, the most spectacular element of a movie that includes Bale's remarkable comb over and pot belly. 5 out 5 stars

• "Dallas Buyers Club" - After a series of panned rom-coms painted him as a lightweight who was more famous for stoned naked bongo than anything else, McConaughey has morphed into a brilliant actor and is a shoo in for the Oscar. Great movie, great cast, great script. McConaughey is also fantastic in True Detective on HBO, so it looks like I'll have to check out Mud, the little seen movie that started the McConaughey renaissance. 4.5 out of 5 stars

• "Nebraska" - Way funnier than I had expected and the best Alexander Payne movie since Election. I especially loved June Squibb, who was the best thing in the movie. 4 out of 5 stars

• "Gravity" - I way more impressed with Gravity on a technical level than anything else. But it's a hair raising roller coaster ride from start to finish with a refreshing brevity -- it clocks in at exactly 90 minutes with credits. 4 out of 5 stars

• "The Wolf of Wall Street" - A rollicking and profane crowd-pleaser if you can stomach the amorality. I didn't think it was too long (even though you could have seen Gravity twice by the time Wolf was over), and I'm looking forward to the 4 hour director's cut on Bluray. But as entertaining as it was, nothing about the film particularly wowed me or stuck with me. 4 out of 5 stars

• "12 Years a Slave" - I appreciate this movie for quality of the performances and direction. But I have no desire to ever watch it again because it is so brutal and humorless – it’s a litany of horrors without anything for me to latch on to (which may have been the intent). I'm glad to have seen it, but once is enough for me. 4 out of 5 stars

• "Philomena" - Don’t get me wrong – Philomena is a good movie. But it isn’t quite a great one, and it doesn't stack up against most of the Best Picture field. Perhaps a little too light in tone to allow the subject matter to make a real visceral impact. 4 out of 5 stars

• "Captain Phillips" - Everything about this movie was too straightforward for my tastes. If you're going to walk into a movie knowing how it was going to end (spoiler alert, they rescue Captain Phillips), at least make the journey interesting. But it all kind of went in a straight line. Hanks starts the film with a wicked strong New England accent that goes AWOL for the rest of the movie. I couldn't stop giggling during the emotionally charged climactic scene because Hanks sounded like Forrest Gump. "I'm not a smart man... but I know what pirates are". 3 out of 5 stars

• "Her" - I did enjoy about the first 20 minutes as they set up their "not too distant future" world. And then I started disliking just about everything about the movie. The ultimate fate of the OS is pure scifi cliché. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Don Jon is a much better film, a sort of analog analogue to Her, mining similar themes of emotional attachments to inanimate constructs (both even co-star Scarlett Johansson!). The big difference – I thought Don Jon was actually good. Her is the only nominated film that I did not like. 2 out of 5 stars

 

[mattCR]

Which makes me wonder, how the hell did The Lone Ranger get nominated for Visual Effects over Pacific Rim? If members can be bought out influenced to vote for a song in a hardly seen movie...

I think Best Song is probably the one category this year that is the most forgone conclusion.

 

[Edwin-S]

Pacific Rim had great CG but it was all obviously CG. The Lone Ranger- despite its many failings as a movie- still had a great blend of practical stunts & practical effects and CG work. Pacific Rim is a much better movie but The Lone Ranger has better and more believable effects work.

You have got to be kidding. The only way to tell that the CG was "obvious" was because the film could only be made using CG. The CG in that film looked as good as any physical model work could have made it look. I guess films should have been disqualified from visual effects consideration because they were obviously made using models and green screen too.

 

[Edwin-S]

By the time Pacific Rim came out, it seemed to me the visual effects were more of the "been there done that" variety due to the three Transformers films that came before it. They were great effects but nothing we haven't seen before.Regardless it should have been nominated over The Turd Ranger, even tho I agree with Travis' assessment above.

Exactly what was in Lone Ranger that hasn't been seen before? Nothing that I can think of. A train crash? It's been done. If "been there, done that" is a criteria for disallowing a film's nomination in visual effects then the entire category should be empty, because I doubt that there is any visual effect that hasn't been done in some film by now.

 

[Tino]

Hey, I'm not defending The Lone Rangers nomination. I hated everything about that film. I'm just saying that while the fx in Pacific Rim were excellent, they were not groundbreaking. Usually when a film wins an fx Oscar , it is generally for propelling effects forward, like Terminator 2, Forrest Gump, Star Wars etc..

 

[Tino]

And I would argue that Gravity, which will win this years Oscar, we are seeing visual effects as we have never seen before.

 

[TravisR]

The only way to tell that the CG was "obvious" was because the film could only be made using CG.

Don't get me wrong, it was great effects work. However, the effects in The Lone Ranger are, for the most part, seamless illusions and the effects of Pacific Rim, as good as they are, are not seamless. Presumably, the people who work in the effects industry agree if they nominated TLR over PR.