Oscar night is almost here and the blogs are a-buzzin’. Once you’ve made your way through our definitive look at the All-Time Best and Worst Best Picture Winners, head over to Future of Classic to compare notes with Flashback Five - The Worst Best Pictures in Oscar History. Here’s a hint on the number one choice: This “shaggy-dog story about a lovable dimwit was technically accomplished, cloyingly sentimental, and politically suspect.”
At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir checks out the Foreign Film nominees. “Instead of trying to write a bunch of new jokes about the lameness of the Academy's foreign-language film nominations, I wonder if anyone would notice if I just republished a few greatest hits from my last three years' worth of bitching and moaning?... It should go without saying that the foreign-language Oscar bears no relationship to whether given movies are, y'know, actually any good, or to whether any paying audiences, American or otherwise, want to see them. In fact, it's difficult to say what the furrin-film Oscar measures, other than providing readings from an especially eccentric focus group: What kinds of movies with subtitles would a bunch of cranky, seniorish film-industry professionals in Los Angeles County like to watch, if they actually liked to watch movies with subtitles?”
Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule makes the Best Actress case for someone who isn’t even nominated. “In a perfect world, one in which the academy supposedly devoted to excellence in motion pictures, but which routinely ignores genius-level comic performances or finds a way to ghettoize them in supporting role categories, actually acknowledged the age-old dictum that comedy is hard, Angelina or Melissa would have been kicked to the curb to make room for Anna Faris's hilarious sunburst performance in The House Bunny…she makes every scene she’s in feel like it’s something brand-new through a combination of brilliant timing, vocal mannerisms, physical grace (and its opposite, cannily choreographed clumsiness) and pure movie star charm.”
At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny takes a look at the unusual Blu-ray release of a previous Oscar winner. “One supposes that it was inevitable—that someday, some extremely conscious men of vision would use the most advanced, sophisticated, versatile digital imaging technology extant for the purpose of making a given film look like an immaculate, scratch-free print of a '70s eight-millimeter porno loop. Do I exaggerate? A little. Maybe. I'm still not sure. I looked at the new Blu-ray of William Friedkin's 1971 The French Connection last night and have to say I'm still of several minds about it. Rather than use digital technology to make obvious, you know, fixes—like really nail down whether that Santa Claus bust scene at the beginning takes place at night or during the day—Friedkin and his tech cohort performed a radical overhaul of the film's look, stripping away any traces of studio-process sheen and going for a very detailed brand of grit.”
Finally, get an edge on the rest of your Oscar viewing party guests with Defamer’s “In Memorium” Oscar Montage Pool. Will Mr. Blackwell make the montage? Will Charlton Heston end it? And who will get the montage’s first sound clip? (I’m betting it all on Harvey Korman.)
