I really enjoy The Rotten Tomatoes Show on Current. As much as I like reviews by Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin I put more trust in the vlog reviewers on The Rotten Tomatoes, plus their funnier. Anyway, last week they did a segment called Homage or Stealing in which they looked at the Death Star trench run from Star Wars and compared it to the climactic bombing run in a little known WWII film from the fifties called The Dambusters. Just to make sure you got the point, Rotten Tomatoes jumped back and forth between the two films as they played the scene, comparing shot for shot and line for line of dialogue. Want to guess how close they came to looking exactly alike?
Archive for March, 2010
There is one Academy Award Winner from this year that just doesn’t make sense to me. Avatar wins for best cinematopraphy. Seriously? A film in which almost three fourths is completely CGI wins for best cinematography? How does that work exactly? Does the ciniematographer stand looking over the shoulder of the computer programmer and tell him how the animation he is working on should look if he was setting up a shot in the camera? How does computer animation even qualify for the award? No wonder no one takes the Oscars seriously anymore.
I didn’t do toobad this year with my Oscar predictions, here is thhe list of predictions I made:
Best Picture–The Hurt Locker
Best Actor–Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart
Best Actress–Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side
Best Supporting Actor–Christopher Waltz in Inglorious Basterds
Best Supporting Actress–Mo’Nique in Precious
Best Director–Katheryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker
Best Animated Film–The Princess and the Frog
Best Documentary–Food, Inc.
Best Song–Almost There from The Princess and the Frog
Best Score–James Horner for Avatar
Best Screen Play–Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker
Best Adapted Screen Play–Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious
Not too bad, I only missed four, Animated Film, Song, Score and Documentary. I really underestimated the nolstalgia factor when it came to Disney animation. As for the rest, those were gimme picks this year. Picking the major Oscar winners was like playing poker with all the cards face up.
A funny thing happened the next day, while at work I heard someone constantly complain that Avatar should have won. Reminded me of a friend who to this day still complains about Star Wars not winning best picture back in the seventies, or as he likes to put it, “Annie Freakin’ Hall!?!?!?”
