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File under: Death to Oscar

Author: Aubrey

Ell, ditto on the disinterest. I feel like everywhere I turn media crits and Joe Sucks Pack alike are bemoaning last year's paltry quality film offerings. Was 2008 really that bad of a year for movies? Or has it simply become fashionable, or perhaps just reasonable, to complain annually about the previous year's contributions to cinema? I guess what I'm asking is if 2008 was honestly any worse than 2007, or '06, or '93, or '79. Is it all relative, or was there something particularly disappointing this time around? It's hard to say without having seen everything released (and everything released in prior years for comparison's sake), but I do know that when compiling my own personal 10 Best/Worst of 2008 lists (which have since changed after having seen a few more of the year's best), I kept finding movies from my Netflix 5 star rating lists that I would get really excited about putting on my Best, only to discover that they were in fact from 2007 (Breach, Control, Diving Bell, Death Proof, King of Kong, The Orphanage, The Savages....) Oh shuckydarns.

I can't help but wonder, however, if it is paradoxically becoming popular to be discontent with popular culture. Of course, there has always been the underground/disdain for the bourgeois/romanticism of the proletariat, but in terms of complaining about the choices of nominees this year, you just can't seem to get away from it. Granted, as you mentioned, the numbers might speak otherwise (taking Dark Knight's boxoffice sales as an example), so perhaps it really only is the critics who are...well...critical. And, as we know, criticism is a dying art, with major layoffs at most major publications (but, that gets into a whole 'nother issue, so I digress.) Just thinking out loud here. Your thoughts? Are we just being snobbish whiners, or are we on to something here?

In terms of our own personal Best Pic nominees from last year, you are right, we do diverge significantly on several. As you know, I reserve a certain dark and murky corner of my blackened soul to brew the particular hatred I had this year for Dark Knight and Curious Case, but hey, to each his own (even when he is very very wrong). I agree with your shout out for Synecdoche; I thought it was a fantastically brilliant film and am going to pull a snobbish whiner move here and say that if you didn't get it, you weren't smart enough (or simply hadn't had enough wine in the theatre with you). Ballast was also a fantastic film, but didn't really have that special sumthin sumthin to win Best Pic. You are right that The Wrestler did. The movie that crawled under my skin and kept me thinking about it was I've Loved You So Long (also, no nom for Kristin Scott Thomas? Puhleez.) But I'm gonna throw a curve ball out here and say that I think the little-seen Quid Pro Quo might be my other choice behind Man on Wire. Vera Farmiga (pic above), who was also absolutely brilliant in Down to the Bone, carries this creepy little ugly duckling of a film (if an ugly duckling can be said to have some of the most beautiful cinematographic feathers of the year). Nick Stahl, the easy-to-hate-main-dude from HBO's Carnivale series, is surprising as the easy-to-like-main-dude here. It's weird, it's wacky and wonderful and challenging. And fetishistic. What more could the old geezers in the Academy want?

And back to the too-early-to-predict-early-predictions for just a moment. Take a sec and peruse imdb's upcoming releases from now until, oh, say about mid April. Thoughts on this? I could only find two movies coming out that I'm even remotely excited for, and I'm equally embarrased to report they are both going to likely be totally forgettable: once again another horror classic remake (Last House on the Left) and 3D (love!) movie that will be only mediocre in 2D (Monsters vs Aliens). And to me, that's the epitome of paltry.

So, we're still not talking about Meryl?

-Aub....