Now it's "how many of these nominees have I heard of?"
Aint’ it the truth! I know who Bridges is and don’t care who the rest are.
“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.
Agreed. I haven’t heard of most of these movies. Haven’t heard of some of the actors and actresses either.
I wonder what the ratings will be for the Oscars. Will middle America sit through a 3 to 4 hour show about movies they don’t care about?
Many of these movies did poorly at the box office, so I’m thinking that many people don’t know and don’t care if the movies they haven’t seen win awards.
One you never heard of before is Hailee Steinfeld in “True Grit.” She carries the picture but was only 13 years old and never had been in a movie before. She was chosen out of 15,000 applicants -- the Coen brothers, Bridges and Matt Damon have nothing but praise at her acting, especially the stilted dialog. Much, much better than Kim Darby in the 1969 original.