Oscars 2017!

Last week the announcements went out, and as per usual I'm now going to dedicate the next month to watching all of the fancy films recommended to me by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I figure that as I spend the rest of my year watching various super-hero, monster and robot films, I can spend a month catching up with some pretty great drama.

This year I started with two Best Picture nominees already in my hand, having seen both La La Land and Moonlight before the nominations had gone out, but that leaves me with seven films to see, Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, Lion, and Manchester by the Sea. I do try to work my way through the other categories with varying degrees of success (Production Design usually requires me to see one new movie, while Best Documentary Short goes unseen every year).

I made it out to see Hidden Figures with the family yesterday, and will post a review on it tomorrow.

Short version - It was pretty darn great!

Genre at the 2012 Oscars

Often I'm asked by friends and co-workers why it is I get so excited about the Academy Awards every year considering how little genre is represented in the nominations. Basically if you remove Art Design, Makeup, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Cinematography, Visual Effects and Music (Original Score), you've basically cut out every movie involving Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction.

This year, however, after working my way through seven of the nine Best Picture nominees and the entire Live-Action and Animated short categories there were actually three films which stood out to me as genre films worth watching.

So here you go - my cheat sheet of the 2012 Academy Awards if you just want the good genre stuff.

1. Watch the Live Action-Short and Animated Short films Time Freak, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, and A Morning Stroll. These films involve time travel, mad science and even (SQUEEE!) Zombies.

2. Give the movie Midnight in Paris a shot. Considering I've tended to shy away from Woody Allen films in the past (They all seem to merge into one amorphous blob of neurotic New York self-indulgence for me), I really fell in love with this movie about a man (Owen Wilson) in love with the past and then getting a chance to visit it.