A Rather Less Explosive Oscars This Year...

I've actually found the build-up to the Oscars to be pretty exciting for the last couple of years. In both 2010 and 2011 there's been a personal favourite, a dreadful film expected to win and eventual success for the deserving underdog. During the 2010 Oscars I wanted A Serious Man to win, I was worried that Avatar would win and breathed a sigh of relief when The Hurt Locker won. During the 2011 Oscars I wanted Black Swan to win, I was worried that The Social Network would win and breathed a sigh of relief when The King's Speech won.

This year, I haven't seen any of the nominations at all. The film expected to win is The Artist, and that along with The Descendants are probably the only Best Picture nominees I'm at all interested in seeing. Below are my comments on all the nominees. Since these are mostly films I haven't seen and know rather little about, I'll probably regret these comments based purely on first impressions. Nonetheless, the following comments represent how I feel right now....


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The Nine Main Nominees:


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My Favourite 23 Movies Released In The UK In 2011

It always annoys me that lists at the end of the year often contain many films that have not even been released in the UK at the time and miss out films that were released the previous year in the US. While my 2010 list included anything that IMDB classes as a 2010 movie (whether because first aired abroad in 2010 or even sometimes because it appeared at a film festival or two in 2010), this list combines anything that did not receive a cinema release in the UK prior to 2011. That means some crossover, but it also means that this isn't a list of just 9 films I really liked, rather than a gradual build up to the best of the best.

There's a few cases below where I've reassessed a film's original score after a second watch.



23. Attack The Block (2011)

While I really enjoyed this, I think there were problems with the underlying morals. I liked that there was a message of taking responsibility for your actions. However, it's not clear that at the end of the film the protagonists have actually learnt their lesson. Trying to get us to not only empathise but sympathise with a teenage gang who are happy to mug a nurse as she comes home from work was always going to be a rather ambitious project, particularly when the gang are, essentially, the protagonists of the film. I can't help but feel that Jodie Whittaker's part should have been bigger, partly because she is an awesome actress and partly because she very much acts as the voice of reason during the story. Some might say that it is not only classism but also racism that is being tackled here, so making the story all about a white woman could miss the point. Still, it seems like they could have put someone like Lenora Crichlow (from Being Human) in the role if that was really an issue. The problem is that it is difficult to care about the protagonists for the first third of the movie and the introduction of an even bigger baddie in the form of the drug dealer Hi-Hatz (played by Jumayn Hunter) is of limited help. Still, this is a good little feature film with a good mixture of comedy, action and horror in even measure and, to my mind (speaking as someone who liked Raiders of the Lost Ark and hated E.T.), actually does a good job of capturing some of that old 80s Spielberg magic.


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