Academy Awards (Oscars 2023)

Delighted to see Brian Tyree Henry get a nomination in supporting.

The Sea Beast getting into Animated was a nice surprise too. I was still desperately hoping they'd see the light and nominate My Father's Dragon, but it wasn't to be. I'm now desperately hoping literally anything will beat Pinocchio on the night.

Nice to see Paul Mescal in the mix. Haven't seen all the films there, but of the ones I have, his performance moved me the most. I did only watch it last night mind, so some recency bias maybe.

I'd like to see EEAAO win best film for the simple fact it's fun. All the talk around a lot of the other nominees there has been way too serious, like Top Gun saved the cinemas, and Avatar is changing the future, blah, blah, blah.... give me rocks with googly eyes any day of the week.

I was really enjoying Decision To Leave for the first like 90 minutes, but then it switched location and it just felt like an unnecessary extra film on top of the first film. Visually though, it's fantastic, and Tang Wei definitely was awards worthy.

I haven't seen them all yet, but by all accounts Williams shouldn't be in that category. I enjoyed Everything, Everywhere.... but I can't say Yeoh's performance was anything special. Hsu's performance was the standout for me from that film.

Apparently the Risborough nomination is being investigated by the academy now to see if it breached their rules.

EEAAO is a lot of fun. I've seen people say there were pacing issues, personally I didn't find that, and I didn't find the run time at all. Maybe if I thought about it a bit there may have been some level of repetitiveness as it went on, or one or two scenes that were just there to be silly, but overall I thought it flowed really well. If you've only watched half an hour of it I'm not even sure you've gotten to where it really takes off?

There's no real action in Aftersun. It's a very slow film, where not a lot is happening on the surface. It's definitely a cumulative kind of thing. Personally I found it pretty engaging throughout and was really floored by the end, but if after half an hour you're still waiting for something to happen then it might just not be your kind of film.

They've said if she was removed nobody would take her spot, there'd just be the 4 nominees.

Apparently there's very strict rules about campaigning and you're not supposed to be seen to be actually trying to influence voters. Which is why the campaigns are usually "For Your Consideration" campaigns, rather than "Please Vote For Me" campaigns.

One of the rules says you're not allowed to mention the competition and apparently there was an Instagram post that quoted a review mentioning Cate Blanchett. They've now taken it down, but it may be a problem for them.

If you belive the stories Risborough had very little to do with it and it was the wife of the director who spearheaded the whole thing. They apparently spent more money than they'd like you to think too.

It's all very messy really, and it's a shame because Risborough has given many excellent performances and probably deserves to have been nominated before, bit whatever happens now, this one will always have a cloud over it.

Riseborough gets to keep her nomination, and the people responsible for the social media campaign will be dealt with directly by the Academy, whatever that means. I saw Frances Fisher's name thrown around quite a bit, she was the one posting the exact number of #1 votes they needed to secure to get Riseborough a nomination, and she also posted about how Blanchett, Williams, and Davis were guaranteed nominations, which is apparently a big no no. (She also, strangely, edited that post after the nominations were announced to include Deadwyler in the list of actresses locked in for a nomination.)

Will be interesting to see if she actually wins it now, I'd nearly want it to happen just for **** and giggles.

https://variety.com/2023/awards/news/andrea-riseborough-keeps-oscar-nomination-to-leslie-investigation-1235507099/

I feel like Will Smith was a storm in a teacup, really. He's been banned from the Oscars for 10 years too. All a bit much for what was a stupid embarrassing decision on his part.

It got 9 nominations at the Oscars so they obviously liked it a bit.

I'm surprised it won the big ones at BAFTA, to be honest. It deserves all the technical awards but it's not really that great a film beyond the sensory experience of it all.

All Quiet is an anti war work though, written by someone who was there and witnessed the horror and returned to see how futile it all was, so I don't think they needed to come along in 2022 and adapt it from a "war is bad, but sometimes its not" point of view. That, in my opinion, would have been even worse than what they did do with it.

My problems with this film, for what it's worth, was simply how little I cared about the characters. I know war is bad, I know WW1 trench warefare was particularly horrific, I know the people calling the shots were not the people on the front line dying in their hundreds of thousands. Aside from a few pretty impressive set pieces, this didn't really have anything about it that made it stand out from a lot of other films about WW1. They removed the bits from the book and first film that humanised the main character. I mean, he could have died 10 minutes into this version and the camera could have started following literally anyone else and I'd have been exactly the same level of invested.

Of course it's entirely possible this was a deliberate decision, intended to strip all the men of any sort of personality to emphasise the fact they were all completely disposable and it didn't matter what they thought of the war, or how their lives at home were changed, or anything outside of them being another dead body in the mud. But unfortunately I don't think that's what they were going for.

Long story short, impressive battlefield sequences aside, there are a lot of other films set in and around this period of history that do a better job of being complete films.