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2011 Academy Awards

Re: Inception, here's Tom Shone:
That's an Englishman for you: negotiate the mazy depths of his psyche, penetrate the innermost sanctums of his being, crack open his deepest, darkest secrets, and what do you get? Bloody Bond.
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Just because it's an action/heist/sci-fi mashup doesn't mean it isn't a genre flick... and I for one think Best Pictures should be something more. ;)


tomalak301 said:
I will be pissed if Harry Potter is nominted for Best Picture for 8 films.
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Relax; it won't be.
 
Wow, I'm surprised and thrilled that Inception was nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best Score (although it didn't get a Best Directing nod), but I'm quite disappointed that Tron: Legacy didn't get Best Visual Effects or Best Score nods.
 
J.T.B. said:
Aragorn said:
You submit your performance for whatever you think you have a better chance at winning. Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs and Nicole Kidman in The Hours don't have that much screen time, but they won Best Actor and Best Actress.
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I understand that's how the game is played, but it makes a distinction between the two categories arbitrary and calls into question the logic of even having two categories.

--Justin
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The Academy takes the line of giving its members maximum flexibility in who they vote for, apart from that you can't be nominated twice for the same performance (after that happened once). Occasionally the voters do take it upon themselves to place people in categories other than the one they submitted (Kate Winslet two years ago, for instance), but usually the just go with it lest they risk wasting their vote.
 
Aragorn said:
The one that makes no sense for me is Jamie Foxx for Collateral when he's got more screen time than Cruise and is the one driving the story.
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That almost certainly has something to do with the fact that Ray came out in the same year. Foxx was expected to walk away with Best Actor for that, and he did. They would not have wanted to risk splitting the vote.
 
Gaith said:
Just because it's an action/heist/sci-fi mashup doesn't mean it isn't a genre flick... and I for one think Best Pictures should be something more.
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Inception is more than just an action/heist/science-fiction film, and unlike a lot of the nominated films, it has so many layers that delve into something much more philosophical and psychological.

"It's never just a dream", Cobb muses at one point in the film, and despite the basic premise, Inception is not just a movie about dreams. Like many excellent Christopher Nolan movies, the film explores various different ideas and themes. The movie most reminded me of Darren Aronosfky's The Fountain, which used science-fiction as a filter in which to explore his own meditations on life, death and ultimately grief. Inception, while incredibly tragic, is not as meditative as Aronosfky's film and instead uses the guise of the heist thriller to push along the narrative of the story, always keeping things exciting and revelatory.

Inception has its sights more so on letting go and moving on, and the feeling of guilt over ruminations on life & death. Which is quite frankly a really compelling subject matter, which jives perfectly with the state of dreaming. Dreaming often -- according to some people, perhaps even according to your own dreams -- challenges you to face something you had either repressed or neglected to deal with. On that level, Inception presents its protagonist with an extremely haunting idea of a repressed memory and through the dream world forces Cobb to deal with this and move on. In that sense, and in the non-traditional heist story that surrounds the film, Inception is a fantastically existential yet rewarding film that is driven by a fascinatingly emotional epicenter.

In fact, I would have to say that Inception is one of the most dense and complex films I've seen in a while. While it is relatively straight-forward in its comprehensive explanation of what's happening, that still doesn't mean what is going on isn't dense as fuck. The best possible comparison for Inception is that of an union: the more layers you pull back, the more in-depth you become. What begins as a relatively simplistic story gets even more and more complex when new ideas and concepts are introduced to supplement what you're already seeing. However, Nolan is such an incredibly ambitious filmmaker that he never loses sight on what he's weaving and while Inception is an incredibly tangled web, by the film's end he untangles everything in such an emotionally, intellectually and viscerally satisfying way that you can only just sit in awe of the filmmaker's relentless ability to juggle all of these ideas and themes and interweave them into something extraordinary.
 
zzzz... heh, wut? Sorry. Dozed off there, and in my dream, I dreamt that I didn't want to see Inception, because, as the New Yorker noted, what's the point of it all?

Who cares if Cobb gets back to two kids we don’t know? And why would we root for one energy company over another? There’s no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream-world struggle between C.E.O.s. It can’t be a coincidence that Tony Gilroy’s “Duplicity” (2009), which was also about industrial espionage, played time games, too. The over-elaboration of narrative devices in both movies suggests that the directors sensed that there was nothing at the heart of their stories to stir the audience. In any case, I would like to plant in Christopher Nolan’s head the thought that he might consider working more simply next time. His way of dodging powerful emotion is beginning to look like a grand-scale version of a puzzle-maker’s obsession with mazes and tropes.
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But then, as noted, I woke up.

So, should I bother watching Inception? I don't really see why.
 
Wow...the Academy has found a way to both honor Christopher Nolan and slap him across the face. I guess just nominating a surefire movie like Inception for Best Picture was too painful for them. Seriously...what director did more with a film than Nolan that was nominated? And the editing was ignored too. Amazing...
 
Gaith said:
So, should I bother watching Inception? I don't really see why.
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Are you saying you haven't actually seen it? Because if that's the case you shouldn't take one negative review, amongst many positive ones, as representative of the film's quality and emotional resonance. There are a lot of ways to read the film and, unlike David Denby, a lot of people found it to have an emotional kick (no pun intended).
 
Gaith has a philosophy with regards to films he does or does not see which is if I recall...

Does it have anything to say about the time in which it's set, either explicitly or subtextually, or could the same story, with minimal alterations, be told in pretty much any era?

So I would be surprised if he saw Inception. Strange that he still feels the need to comment on films despite not seeing them.
 
Inception, to my mind, had a severe weakness in the directing department (which I had previously noticed in TDK): Nolan just cannot direct action scenes. Sorry, he can't. These scenes in his films are always confusing, you never get a sense of the geography of the scene: Where are these people in relation to each other? Who fights whom? Why is this important to the story? Et cetera. That is why these scenes are always so frantically edited. It's to cover imperfections in the basic storytelling of such a scene. I liked Inception very much, but this was the first thing I pointed out to my friends after we left the theater. That, and that my ears were bleeding because the sound was so effin' loud.

I figure both the director's branch and, this time, the editors have realized that cutting a lot and being stylish and star-studded doesn't necessarily constitute great directing. Also, there was fierce competition.
 
Eddie Roth said:
I figure both the director's branch and, this time, the editors have realized that cutting a lot and being stylish and star-studded doesn't necessarily constitute great directing.
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Nolan was nominated for Inception, though, by the Directors Guild of America, as he was for The Dark Knight and Memento. DGA nominees historically have a very strong chance of also being nominated for the Best Director Oscar. Typically four of the five DGA nominees will go on to get Oscar nominations. So it's not as if other directors are snubbing Nolan's work overall. He's just had bad luck at losing out in the musical chair game when it comes to the Academy. Inception was also nominated for an Eddie Award by the American Cinema Editors.

Edi to add: on another topic, here are the Oscar promo pics of Anne Hathaway and James Franco:

james-franco-anne-hathaway-oscar-promo-pics-01.jpg


james-franco-anne-hathaway-oscar-promo-pics-02.jpg
 
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Gaith said:
zzzz... heh, wut? Sorry. Dozed off there, and in my dream, I dreamt that I didn't want to see Inception, because, as the New Yorker noted, what's the point of it all?

Who cares if Cobb gets back to two kids we don’t know? And why would we root for one energy company over another? There’s no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream-world struggle between C.E.O.s. It can’t be a coincidence that Tony Gilroy’s “Duplicity” (2009), which was also about industrial espionage, played time games, too. The over-elaboration of narrative devices in both movies suggests that the directors sensed that there was nothing at the heart of their stories to stir the audience. In any case, I would like to plant in Christopher Nolan’s head the thought that he might consider working more simply next time. His way of dodging powerful emotion is beginning to look like a grand-scale version of a puzzle-maker’s obsession with mazes and tropes.
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But then, as noted, I woke up.

So, should I bother watching Inception? I don't really see why.
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The New Yorker had very good points, especially how imagination-deficient it is for Nolan to turn dreams - which can be anything, after all - into splosions-and-video-game-levels. After I saw the movie, I really understood what he meant. However, it's still a fun flick, so see it. Just don't buy into the more extreme hype about it.
 
I don't quite understand all the hubub about the Social Network. I admit I have not seen the movie but I don't see how the story of the founding of a web site could be all that compelling.
 
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