Matt vs. the Academy

Here we are again, only a mere three and a half months since the last verdict... Sarcasm aside, I will obviously need to pick up the pace a bit. At this rate, it will take another 20 years to finish this project. Not ideal. Nonetheless, we're all having fun, right? The nominees for Best Picture of 2006 are: Babel The Departed Letters from Iwo Jima Little Miss Sunshine The Queen The five contenders for 2006 are quite an impressive bunch. All five are engaging and thought-provoking, and any of them could appropriately be named my favourite. But a five-way tie is not what this verdict is about, so... Little Miss Sunshine is quirky and lovable, and while its climax is deeply moving, it doesn't quite match the consistent intensity of the other films. Call it the comedy curse, but such is the tendency of those who give out accolades, even insignificant ones like mine. I will remove The Queen from the running also, for similar reasons. It's not a com...

As we finally wind down the current year of review, don't forget to cast your vote for the next one. Just use the poll sitting on the right hand side of your screen. The final nominee to ponder from 2006's Best Picture competition is... Little Miss Sunshine Directors : Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris Screenplay : Michael Arndt Starring : Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, Alan Arkin Academy Awards : 4 nominations 2 wins, including Best Supporting Actor (Arkin) and Best Original Screenplay The dysfunctional Hoover family is certainly unique. Dad Richard (Kinnear) is a less than successful motivational speaker with a disdain for losers. His long-suffering wife Sheryl (Collette) tries to keep the family together as best she can. When their naive daughter Olive (Breslin) is unexpectedly selected to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant in Redondo Beach, California, the family packs into their yellow and whit...

And the Oscars have come and gone for another year. There were a couple of minor surprises - Meryl Streep winning again for the first time in almost 30 years, and the editing team of Angus Wall and Aussie Kirk Baxter scoring back-to-back wins in Film Editing. It was also nice to see Billy Crystal again. He's like a comfortable blanket. It just feels  like the Oscars when he hosts. My predictions were not too embarrassing. I correctly pegged 16 winners, one better than last year, so I'll take it. For a chuckle, take a look at the menu for my annual Oscars party . The next nominee from the Best Picture competition of 2006 is... Letters from Iwo Jima Director : Clint Eastwood Screenplay : Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis (based on the book Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi, edited by Tsuyuko Yoshida) Starring : Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase, Shido Nakamura, Hiroshi Watanabe, Takumi Bando, Yuki, Matsuzaki ...

After a whirlwind two weeks in Sydney, I'm back in New York, gearing up for the Oscars this weekend. In preparation, I've selected my  predictions  for who will take home each award. Let me know how they match up with your picks. But before this year's Oscars, we continue our look at the race from 5 years ago with another 2006 Best Picture nominee... The Departed Director : Martin Scorsese Screenplay : William Monahan (based on the film Infernal Affairs, written by Alan Mak and Felix Chong) Starring : Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, Anthony Anderson, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Corrigan Academy Awards : 5 nominations 4 wins, including Best Picture and Best Director The ultimate double cross story, The Departed follows two fresh police academy recruits who operate on separate sides of the law. Colin Sullivan (Damon) is immediately assigned to the unit investigating organised c...

I am writing to you now from cloudy Sydney, where Kat and I are visiting friends and family. Despite the lack of sunshine, it is still warm here and certainly more preferable than a New York winter. My predictions for the Oscar nominations (in the last post) resulted in a fairly average hit rate overall. However, I managed to peg eight of the nine Best Picture nominees, and scored five for five in both the Best Director and Best Cinematography categories. On the other end of the spectrum, I had selected five tunes to be nominated for Best Song and still didn't manage to correctly guess either of the two actual nominees. We now turn our attention to another nominee from the Best Picture race of 2006... The Queen Director : Stephen Frears Screenplay : Peter Morgan Starring : Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell, Helen McCrory, Alex Jennings, Roger Allam, Sylvia Syms, Tim McMullan, Mark Bazeley Academy Awards : 6 nominations 1 win, for Best Actress (Mirren) ...

Well, that was an unexpectedly lengthy hiatus. Late December contained a fair bit of catering work for me, plus a new job that was initially intended to be part time, but somehow took over every waking moment of my life until this past weekend. The timing couldn't have been better, though, since tomorrow morning the Oscar nominations will be announced, allowing just enough time to get my predictions in order. If you're interested, here are my somewhat educated guesses as to which films will be cited by the Academy. The Best Supporting Actor contest was by far the toughest to figure out. It could go a number of different ways. If I were braver, I would have backed Jim Broadbent to upset Jonah Hill by taking that final spot ... but I'm not brave. And keep in mind, the Best Picture category will have somewhere between five and ten nominees. I have listed ten predictions in order of nomination likelihood. I'll let the rest of the predictions speak for themselves for now,...

One of the things I'm enjoying about this silly little project is the opportunity to watch some of cinema's early offerings, an activity that I previously did not engage in very frequently. While it is clear to me that my tastes lie with slightly more modern filmmaking, I am always pleasantly surprised by how fascinating I find some of these vintage pictures, and even more surprised when I come across a forgotten gem. I may not have uncovered one of those gems with the current crop of films under review, but they each contained elements worth appreciating and I'm genuinely glad to have experienced them. The nominees for Best Picture of 1929/30 are: All Quiet on the Western Front The Big House Disraeli The Divorcee The Love Parade When sound was introduced to moving pictures in the late 1920s, it forced a change not only in the obvious technical aspects of filmmaking but also in the conventions that cinema used to tell a story. It took a few years ...