Good Day ladies and gentleman. Two weeks ago the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science released the nominees for the Academy Awards. Well not all of us were really happy and no person personifies this hate the David Zafra of the blog philm-with-dzafra.blogspot.com who has been so nice as to rant for us on the Academy Awards.
Here we are ladies and gentleman our first guest blog.
Unfortunately for me I ranted before, and didn't save it. Since then my anger has slightly dissipated, but all I have to do is look at that shity list of best picture nominations to feel angry again.
"But David, didn't you like Moneyball, The Artist and Midnight in Paris"?
Why yes I did "imaginary guy", but we have a much larger probllem at hand and that problem is: the Academy is regressing! You may be asking
"Why do you say that"? To which I respond with the question,
" What did the subsequent two years have that no other year has had"?
To which I answer,
"AWESOME MOVIES"!
Every year has some really good movies, but the last two years had a great range of different genres and styles. Nothing delighted me more than seeing the critics putting Inception in the same list as The Kings Speech or District 9 vs An Education. As Peter Travers stated in his most recent rant on the Oscars, the new number of nominations were supposed to made to add popular movies to the mix.
What doesn't make sense to me is that the Academy seemed to want to try something different in an attempt to either a) try something new to catch up to the times or b) attract a different audience. I assumed "b" was the reason they hired James Franco and Anne Hathaway to host last year.
"This is what the kids are into, right"?
The list of best picture nomination would have been fine if they had stuck with 5 movies that were expected. Tree of Life, Midnight in Paris, Hugo, The Artist, and Moneyball, were all movies that the critics had been talking very well about, and would have made an acceptable list; give or take The Descendants. Even add The Descendants, (which I didn't like, but the critics did) and make 6. However the last 3 or 4 nomination should have been given to films that actually mattered. The Help did well, so it makes sense, though other movies did much better. And The Help would be fine, if it wasn't clear Oscar bait. But then add two other Oscar bait movies? War Horse and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close were not popular enough with viewers or critics to be nominated for a best picture award. It really doesn't make any sense. I loved Moneyball too, but it was enough of an Oscar bait movie, that we didn't need the other ones when they could have been replaced with something DIFFERENT.
I hate you
It's like the Oscars stopped trying to avoid the stereotype and chose to accept it instead. I don't get why. I ignored the Golden Globes the best I could and assumed that the Oscars would come around and do much better. Boy was I wrong. I know I'm repeating a lot of the same complaints that have been going around, but the real disappointment is not that the Oscars are bullshit, because we always knew that. It's that they picked a bunch of stupid movies to TRY to impress us with how relevant they were, but ACTUALLY ruined their credibility. There's plenty of movie-smart-non-critics that would rather see Drive nominated than Extremely Loud, and that's the audience that is being pushed away. So fuck you Oscars. Fuck you for picking movies you THOUGHT people liked, instead of picking movies like Drive, 50/50, Harry Potter or Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I don't much care for the other categories either, but I feel like I made my point.
