“Now it’s ‘how many of these nominees have I heard of?’”
Partly, this is due to the current reign of mindless sequels, prequels, reboots, adaptations, and so forth that dominate the “tentpole” pictures, which I happen to agree wityh the critical community are with few exceptions (Toy Story 3, The Dark Knight, etc.) worth forgetting. Their penchant for the old “indie” feel isn’t quite for me, and I resent the academy and critics endlessly honoring it.
Perhaps, though, they have no choice. I’d honor a great middlebrow movie like Back To the Future over pretentious one which no one will watch in five years, like for instance Secrets and Lies, The Thin Red Line, The Pianist, Lost in Translation, or Babel. Problem is, Transformers, The A-Team, and Tron are not Back To the Future.
That being said, this is not a particularly bad year. Inception and Toy Story 3 were juggernauts, and The Social Network and True Grit were respectable hits. Of course, if there weren’t now 10 best picture nominees there’s no way Inception and Toy Story 3’d be up there, which kinda makes it feel like a consolation prize.
I also thought the Thin Red Line was one of the greatest war movies ever made. Came out the same year as Saving Private Ryan unfortunately, but I liked Thin Red Line better.
Most of my favorite recent have been foreign films, I still can’t think of any recent Hollywood film that was better than “The Lives of Others.”