Oscars - Picks & Predictions

Gotchya.

They'll never do it though. :\

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all a bunch of crap if you ask me

Nobody did ask you, but excellent analysis. Very intelligent and well thought out response. Thanks ever so much for sharing.

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I very much agree and thanks for the ok Holden.

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-Aragorn: The Lord of the Rings the Return of the King

Harry Knowles has a piece up about the Oscar changes etc and I'd just like to copy over my biggest complaint, because he summed it up pretty nicely:

You seem very passionate about this OG...and...I’m in a stubborn mood soooo....

You’re not taking into consideration that everyone has different tastes and perceptions of what they consider funny. Just because someone is labeled a comedian doesn’t automatically make one funny to everyone. I remember when Joan Rivers was in her hey day...not everyone liked her brand of humor. Even now some find her trashing of celebrities styles funny while others find it irritating and grating to listen to. Yes, people take things as jokes, but sometimes lines are crossed into just plain meanspiritedness, which some don’t find funny. I don’t think it’s wrong for people to voice their opinion when they think someone has gone too far.

As far as Rock and the 'boring political ramblings' comment on Tim Robbins. It was a one time “WTF was that?” type of comment. Not a riping into joke...,but we could be percieving this differently.

You made me think with this...”When a comedian makes a joke, take it as a joke.” I can see your point in general, and especially with the late night shows. However, I think with the Oscars, people have higher expections of respect, taste and diplomacy...even if your looking to give the program an updated feel.

I can’t. You tired me out...and I’m feeling much too pighead at the moment.


At least we agree on the little people (make-up and special effects people) recieving their awards in the aisle. That's something.

Well to be fair I laughed at the Jude Law comment, but only because I had just finished talking to someone online about all the films he has been in recently. I mean 8 some odd films in the last two years is more than the norm. Now is there anything wrong with this? Heck no, more power to him. Some of his acting in the past couple of years has been good, nothing great, but good nonetheless. Now just because I laughed, does it make it okay? I say sure, why not. I mean it was nothing truly harming. At the same time however, I think people have a right to say how they fell , so Penn's comeback was well warranted in my opinon also.
Bottom line: Was it okay for Rock to bash Law? I say yes.
Was it okay for Penn to comment on it? I say yes.
It at least made the Oscars a bit interesting, at least at that point.

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What the...

What exactly did Rock say and what did Penn say? The award show was on in the middle of the night and I had to get up early the next day so I didn't watch it.

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

I don't remember the exact wording, but Chris Rock was doing a riff about 'stars versus popular people' and made a string of jokes about how Jude Law was a popular person and was in every single movie, regardless of his role etc. Then when Sean Penn went to present on stage he said something along the lines of 'I have to address the host's question about Jude Law, who is one of our finest actors.'

It isn't like it was some all out verbal war between the two, it just seemed to me like Sean Penn felt the need to defend against an attack that never took place. If anyone got attacked during Rock's monologue, it was Bush and I don't see any rebuttle from the Bush Administration...

Because afterall, Chris Rock is a comedian.

Chris Rock did make some reply to Sean Penn later in the show, about "his [Rock's] accountants wanting to speak with him[Penn]", which people laughed at, but I personally didn't get?

The riff on Penn from last night's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" made the whole silly broo-ha-ha ever so worth it.

Yes, yes it did and I was actually going to mention something about catching the reair of it tonight, but it slipped my mind.

I think they're back to running the previous night's show right after the new one at 11:30pm (thank goodness), so if you miss the 7:00pm rebroadcast you can catch it late tonight.

So Eastwood is now a double Oscar winner as a director, a double Oscar winner as a producer, and four of the last eight acting winners have been overseen by Clint's direction - Sean Penn & Tim Robbins for Mystic River last year, and Hilary Swank & Morgan Freeman for Million Dollar Baby this year. They join Gene Hackman who won Best Supporting Actor for Unforgiven. Clint's previous Best Actor nods from Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, Meryl Streep in The Bridges of Madison County and Marcia Gay Harden from Mystic River are the other acting nominations in Eastwood-directed films (Jeff Bridges also received a Best Supporting Actor nom in the Malpaso/Eastwood produced Thunderbolt & Lightfoot, directed by Michael Cimino).


Now here's some Best Director Oscar trivia to digest. As a double winner, Clint joins pretty rare company. There are only three other living and currently working directors who have two Oscars as Best Director: Milos Forman, Oliver Stone and Stevie Spielberg (Robert Wise is still with us but has retired). Here's the list of all multiple winners as Director...

• John Ford
  four wins in five nominations
  (The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green was My Valley and The Quiet Man)
• Frank Capra
  three wins in six nominations
  (It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and You Can’t Take it with You)
• Leo McCarey
  two wins in three nominations
  (The Awful Truth and Going My Way)
• Lewis Milestone
  two wins in three nominations
  (Two Arabian Knights and All Quiet on the Western Front)
• Frank Borzage
  two wins in two nominations
  (Seventh Heaven and Bad Girl)
• Frank Lloyd
  two wins in four nominations
  (The Divine Lady and Cavalcade)
• Joseph L. Mankiewicz
  two wins in four nomination
  (A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve)
• Elia Kazan
  two wins in five nominations
  (Gentleman’s Agreement and On the Waterfront)
• George Stevens
  two wins in six nominations
  (A Place in the Sun and Giant)
• William Wyler
  three wins in twelve nominations
  (Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur)
• Billy Wilder
  two wins in eight nominations
  (The Lost Weekend and The Apartment)
• David Lean
  two wins in seven nominations
  (The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia)
• Robert Wise
  two wins in three nominations
  (West Side Story and The Sound of Music)
• Fred Zinnemann
  two wins in seven nominations
  (From Here to Eternity and A Man for All Seasons)
• Milos Forman
  two wins in three nominations
  (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus)
• Oliver Stone
  two wins in three nominations
  (Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July)
• Steven Spielberg
  two wins in five nominations
  (Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan)
• Clint Eastwood
  two wins in three nominations
  (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby)

Milestone, Lloyd and Borzage won their multiples under the older nominations system during the initial years of the Academy Awards, which among other oddities had director broken up into drama and comedy subcategories. And no, that's not a typo for William Wyler's stats: he received an astounding twelve nominations in his career.

Clint has a damn good chance (especially with Momma's genetics) to get at least one more trophy to tie with William Wyler and Frank Capra at three, and an outside chance to get a fourth and tie the all-time champion John Ford (who strangely enough never won an Oscar for one of his Westerns, which is what he's most known for). At sixty-years-old and given the kind of sentimental big-budget material he usually helms, Spielberg probably has an even better chance at going for three and four.



And for us who are Scorsese fans too, here's a pretty encouraging list to comfort us in a way...

NEVER BEST DIRECTOR at the OSCARS (the honorable company)

• Alfred Hitchcock
  five nominations & zero wins
  (Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window, Psycho)
• Robert Altman
  five nominations & zero wins
  (MASH, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, Gosford Park)
• Martin Scorsese
  five nominations & zero wins
  (Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas, Gangs of New York, The Aviator)
• Stanley Kubrick
  four nominations & zero wins
  (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon)
• Sidney Lumet
  four nominations & zero wins
  (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict)
• Federico Fellini
  four nominations & zero wins
  (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Satyricon, Armacord)
• Ingmar Bergman
  three nominations & zero wins
  (Cries & Whispers, Face to Face, Fanny & Alexander)
• David Lynch
  three nominations & zero wins
  (The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive)
• William Wellman
  three nominations & zero wins
  (A Star is Born, Battleground, The High and the Mighty)
• Otto Preminger
  two nominations & zero wins
  (Laura & The Cardinal)
• Orson Welles
  one nomination & zero wins
  (Citizen Kane)
• John Cassavetes
  one nomination & zero wins
  (A Woman Under the Influence)
• Howard Hawks
  one nomination & zero wins
  (Sergeant York)
• Terrence Malick
  one nomination & zero wins
  (The Thin Red Line)
• Krzysztof Kieslowski
  one nomination & zero wins
  (Three Colours: Red)
• Jean Renoir
  one nomination & zero wins
  (The Southerner)
• Akira Kurosawa
  one nomination & zero wins
  (RAN)
• François Truffaut
  one nomination & zero wins
  (Day for Night)
• Joel & Ethan Coen
  one nomination & zero wins
  (Fargo)
• Sergio Leone
  never nominated
• Jean-Luc Godard
  never nominated
• Nicholas Ray
  never nominated
• Werner Herzog
  never nominated
• Charlie Chaplin
  never nominated
• Roberto Rossellini
  never nominated
• Preston Sturges
  never nominated
• Fritz Lang
  never nominated
• Sam Peckinpah
  never nominated
• Luis Buñuel
  never nominated
• Spike Lee
  never nominated
• Luchino Visconti
  never nominated
• Wim Wenders
  never nominated
• Andrei Tarkovsky
  never nominated
• John Sayles
  never nominated
• Vittorio De Sica
  never nominated
• Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
  never nominated

Awesome post, man. I didn't watch the Oscar's this year. I have no repect for it. Oh well.

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The honorable company part is really mindblowing... At least five or six of the multi-nominated directors I respect a lot more than all of those mentioned in the list of directors who actually won the award.

Nice observations, Holds.

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt...36.html#001136

A quick, interesting read from one of my favorite bloggers.

It's much simpler than the ramblings there. Once the buzz is around one or two of the nominated films for Best Picture and the Oscar voter makes their choice for the big award, when it comes to technical awards from set design to cinematography and all the others, if that movie is nominated in lots of the technical categories they simply check the box for it over and over again on down the ballot. Because sadly, by in large much like the public, the Academy voters could give a crap about which director of photography actually did the most impressive work. It's just easier for them not to have to think about it and automatically vote for one film whenever they see it listed.

This is how a movie like Gandhi wins for Best Costume Design when the majority of characters are essentially wearing sheets and sandals and the others are wearing period British military uniforms that were probably sitting in a BBC warehouse or somewhere since Michael Caine wore them in Zulu twenty years before. But Gandhi won Best Picture, Director, Actor, Original Screenplay then Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design and Editing.

This year's Oscar was one of them, like the '99 ceremony with Shakespeare in Love and Saving Private Ryan, where the frontrunner film that didn't win Best Picture scoops up most of the techinicals as a sort of consolation prize for not being voted in for the top prize. Million Dollar Baby might have actually had more of a sweep if it had been nominated for more awards outside the big eight categories (Best Editing was the lone MDB nod, whereas The Aviator had nominations in five of 'em, winning four).


People are simply lazy. It's easy to pick one movie and vote for it whenever you see it in the technical awards.

No, it's not supposed to be taken as a fact, but it has to have some tiny grain of truth in it to be funny. It should be ironic or hyperbole or any of the other comedic devices, and they all have a regard for trutn. Rock's statement about Jude Law was actually none of those, it was just this wild jab out of nowhere. I winced, and I'm not one of your more sensitive people when it comes to humor. I think Penn went too far the other way, and turned the whole thing into an awkward gooey mess, but I was glad someone said something because while you might stretch the term "joke" to include anything a comedian says, it surely wasn't funny.

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Seriously, everyone. Were Chris Rock's comments about Jude Law really that bad? Rock didn't say anything about Law being a bad actor, all he said was that he's not a star and that he's in every movie he's seen lately. Not a highlight in Rock's monologue, but not offensive in any way.

What if Rock didn't mention Jude Law at all, and instead said the same joke about Ben Affleck or Ice Cube? Do you think Sean Penn would have said anything, do you think anyone would even be discussing it?

But it started in the early hours of the morning in Britain, and I didn't tape it or anything, so maybe I missed something.

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Now they showed a 1½ hour version of the show last night. Of course I missed the part when Rock made jokes about Law but I saw when Penn said what he said. Frankly, I thought his comment was going to be a lot sharper after following the discussion. Then I saw Rock's kind of funny response about wanting to meet Penn's accountants. Still need to see the initial joke though...