Which movie will win or should win the A.A. BP

Originally Posted by Aliens 

Netflix - I haven’t seen any of those. This happens every year. It’ll be mid-summer before I complete this list.

Originally Posted by mr. wally 

well what have you been doing all this time?

there are some very good movies out there

Originally Posted by Aliens 

Netflix - I haven’t seen any of those. This happens every year. It’ll be mid-summer before I complete this list.

Originally Posted by gwsat 

I voted for Argo but must admit that was partially as a protest of the shortsightedness of the Academy for passing over Affleck for a Best Director nomination. This is a year when I am going to feel more disappointment for the highly deserving losers than I will happiness for the winner. In my estimation, Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, Lincoln and Les Miserables are all about as deserving of the Best Picture Oscar as Argo. I also really enjoyed Silver Linings Playbook but didn't think it was in a class with my favorites. Thus, I was stunned to see that it is in the lead in the poll. I also saw Life of Pi and was mostly underwhelmed by the overall quality of the film, although it was visually stunning. Didn't see either Amour or Beasts of the Southern Wild and based on what I've read about them probably won't.

Originally Posted by mr. wally 

i haven't seen argo or lincoln so i shouldn't vote for either, although, like you, i would vote for argo on general principles given the undeserved snub.

of the nominated movies i did see, i adore silver linings (nothing like a movie to make you connect with characters, even better than a book i think), but i would give best picture
to zero dark 30 which was stunning.

tomatometer ratings are pretty accurate to how i think the vote will come down:


tomatometer: argo 96%
zero dark 30 94%
armour 93%
silver linings 92%
lincoln 89%
django 89%

Originally Posted by oink 

It's simply a matter of looking at the competition and who does the voting.
It seems most likely, either SLP or Les Miz are the safest bets.

NEW YORK — The scene: Tehran’s Mehrabad airport, January 1980. Six U.S. diplomats, disguised as a fake sci-fi film crew, are about to fly to freedom with their CIA escorts. But suddenly there’s a moment of panic in what had been a smooth trip through the airport.

The plane has mechanical difficulties and will be delayed. Will the Americans be discovered, arrested, even killed? CIA officer Tony Mendez, also in disguise, tries to calm them. Luckily, the flight leaves about an hour later.

If you saw the film “Argo,” no, you didn’t miss this development, which is recounted in Mendez’s book about the real-life operation. That’s because director Ben Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio replaced it with an even more dramatic scenario, involving canceled flight reservations, suspicious Iranian officials who call the Hollywood office of the fake film crew (a call answered just in time), and finally a heart-pounding chase on the tarmac just as the plane’s wheels lift off, seconds away from catastrophe.

Crackling filmmaking — except that it never happened. Affleck and Terrio, whose film is an Oscar frontrunner, never claimed their film was a documentary, of course. But still, they’ve caught some flak for the liberties they took in the name of entertainment.

And they aren’t alone — two other high-profile best-picture nominees this year, Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” have also been criticized for different sorts of factual issues.

Originally Posted by gwsat 

Thanks for posting the Rotten Tomatoes numbers. Those numbers are not the be all and the end all, of course, but they are a quick and dirty indication of a film's quality. If Argo wins best picture, then my quibbles about the order of the rest will become irrelevant. Also, I note that Beasts of the Southern Wild was not included on your list and has received zero votes here. I guess that others have as low an opinion as I do about Message Movies.

Originally Posted by oink 

Thanx for the link, from the "review...."

it's also overly verbose and reliant on white middle-class guilt to achieve its emotional effects. The film has a sheen of earnestness that misleads one away from the bald calculation on display, as the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the Bathtub, with one exception, are fetishized as one-note emblems of good will and clean living that's uncorrupted by fancy-schmancy materialism. It's the implicit anti-materialism that frequently trips Zeitlin up.

The majority of the film's characters aren't differentiated, mostly portrayed as mystical hillbillies in possession of a kind of elemental wisdom. They brave quite a bit of catastrophe, but with the exception of the ongoing conflict between Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her father, Wink (a startling Dwight Henry), there's very little sense for the social tensions that manifest during times of duress. These people drink, but they rarely curse, rarely fight, rarely do anything that might complicate a sentimentality that's born of a fantasy of escaping the traps of mainstream society. Nothing, not even an act of God, can compromise the Bathtub's earthy connection to the root of the Things That Truly Matter.

That inadvertent condescension undermines the film's most impressive sequences. The Bathtub is obviously meant as a stand-in for New Orleans in its entirety, and the narrative is symbolically grappling with the storms that have crippled that city in recent years. A severe hurricane strikes the Bathtub in the second act, which affords Zeitlin the opportunity to break from the relentless sermonizing of the dialogue to relate a story of survival with clean, muscular visuals. But in the overall context of a film that too often glosses over the tolls of disaster, these passages offensively play as a mere blip on the road to formulaic self-actualization


WRONG!

White guilt isn't the aim of this movie...far from it.
If the reviewer "felt guilty," he should go look in the mirror, instead of sniveling about how this film made him feel sad.

I guess he doesn't realize there are children in this country who happen to grow up not behind a white picket fence.

This movie is about a time in a child's life where things aren't all rosy and white.
It's told from the memories and POV of a small child....you know, a NON adult.
NON adults don't interpret life LIKE adults....because they're NOT adults.
I guess the dude doesn't realize this fact....

Originally Posted by Aliens 

In fact-based films, how much fiction is OK?

Snippet.

Originally Posted by oink 

I believe Best Director nominations are limited to 5?
Otherwise, it's hard to grasp how a movie can be nominated for BP and NOT get a Director nomination.

Originally Posted by oink 

I believe Best Director nominations are limited to 5?
Otherwise, it's hard to grasp how a movie can be nominated for BP and NOT get a Director nomination.