What the Academy thought of Avatar…
Basically, it looks like they pretty much thought "Avatar" was a gimmick. The best-performing gimmick of all time but not a "real film." Whether that judgment will stand the test of time or we'll […]
Awards
The Academy Awards 2010
So, Adam “So You Think You Can Direct The Academy Awards” Shankman. I guess that’s what you get hiring a choreographer and dance-minded director to do an awards show. Dancing. Completely irrelevant, indulgent dancing and lots of it. Loved the idea of cutting out all those excruciating song performances, but that dance number featuring big hunks of score…maybe it worked like a charm in the room, but not so much at my house. How about yours? Can you say, “Bathroom Break”?
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The Results of Our 2009 Sci-Fi Poll
With the Oscars done, we close down our Movie Smackdown poll about what was the Best Sci-Fi Film of 2009. It was a good year for sci-fi respect in that two of the ten Academy-nominated […]
And the Smacky Goes To…
This year’s poll of the Oscar favorites attracted hundreds of our most intelligent readers (see how much we’re willing to pander to those activists?) and they have spoken. We asked them not to vote for the film they think will win but for the film they think should win. They’ve given us a statistical tie between…
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Why the Oscars Will Never Be Exciting
Even here in Australia, there's been a lot of talk (again) this year post-Oscars about how boring the show is. Again we're regaled with sub-standard humor, dance routines and music that do not mix well, […]
Costume Guild Crowns Young Victoria
SMACKDOWN-UPDATE: No surprise here. The Costume Designers Guild has awarded Sandy Powell for her impeccable period work in "The Young Victoria." Academy voters saw fit to ignore Emily Blunt's stellar performance but did the right […]
Movie Smackdown Comix – Oscar Edition
We call them Comix. You’ve seen them in most of our reviews where we take the studios’ standard garden-variety publicity stills and armed only with an iMac, some Comic Life Magiq software and a serious […]
Writers Guild Award Winners Declared Early!
Okay, well, not officially. You won’t hear the actual words, “And the award goes to…” until Saturday night, February 20 when the WGA kudofest hosted by Seth MacFarlane takes place. No, we’re talking about the […]
I ♥ UK: The BAFTA Awards
Did you ever get the feeling that you woke up on the wrong side of the bed? I can top you. Every day, I wake up on the wrong side of the world. A longtime (perhaps even lifetime) Anglophile, I’ve always preferred Britcoms to sit-coms, the BBC to ABC. Cary Grant and Hugh Grant light my proverbial fire. I wouldn’t want to face a movie world without my dear Merchant-Ivory, Richard Curtis, and Mike Leigh. Without Monty Python, Blackadder, The League of Gentlemen, Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan, Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, AbFab, Eddie Izzard, Stephen Fry, Simon Pegg, and other comedy geniuses too numerous to list here, life would be a darker and far less entertaining slog. Still, I’ve made my peace with my circumstance. My ancestors left the steppes of Russia for the promise of American freedom, and I accept that. I do.
But then I read this year’s list of BAFTA nominees.
It’s official. I do not belong here.
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Precious -vs- Precious: Based on the Novel “Push†by Sapphire
Sorry. Just can’t do this any more. Can’t waste any more of my precious life energy writing it all out. So, here it is, one last time… all 38 blessed characters…
“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire”
Okay, we’re done here. From now on, it is the policy of this website to refer to this Oscar nominated film as “Precious.”
How did it happen that a film could be called by a title that sounds this unnecessary and pretentious? After all, all of the films in the “Adapted Screenplay” category could give themselves the same treatment. Then we’d be looking at films like “Up in the Air: Based on the Novel ‘Up in the Air’ by Walter Kim.” Or how would you have liked to see this on the big screen — “Star Trek: Based on the TV Series ‘Star Trek’ by Gene Roddenberry.” Ugh… […]