Kneejerk Reactions to This Year's Oscar Nominations

I was hoping that this year's Academy Award nominations would have a few pleasant surprises scattered throughout the boring, predictable nomniations. But instead, I just find myself needing to vent. So let's go through this category by category:

The full list of nominations can be found here.

Best Picture
Ugh. For the past few weeks, the expected nominations for this category were Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, and The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight always seemed like the wild card in the bunch: a summer blockbuster in the midst of "serious" movies with fall/winter release dates. But it still had enough widespread critical acclaim and excitement generated among the general public to earn it a Best Picture nomination. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, as it was left it out in favor of The Reader, a paint-by-number prestige picture that's only managed to get mixed reviews. Limited release wonders like Rachel Getting Married, Happy-Go-Lucky, and The Wrestler were predictably ignored, because the Academy only pays attention to studio-financed pictures with buzz and huge PR campaigns surrounding them. As a result, the only surprise nomination that we're left with is one that nobody wanted. Slumdog Millionaire and Benjamin Button are both highly overrated. Slumdog Millionaire, a conventional, predictable fable with nothing you haven't seen before, has positioned itself as this year's front runner, somewhat expectedly racking up ten total nominations. And Benjamin Button, a fairly enjoyable Forrest Gump rehash, somehow picked up THIRTEEN nominations, for which I have to comment, "Really?" I haven't seen Frost/Nixon or The Reader yet, because they just look like standard Oscar bait and I don't have much interest in watching either of them. And that just leaves Milk, the only film in the bunch that might actually deserve to be called great, so hopefully that'll win.

Best Director
Usually, the Best Director category follows a pattern: the directors from four or five of the Best Picture nominees get nominated, and usually one of the directors gets left out of the directing category in favor of a widely-respected director from another movie. This year, the director nominees simply mirror the Best Picture category, which again means that Christopher Nolan gets shafted in favor of The Reader. Danny Boyle gets nominated for making a feature length music video. David Fincher gets nominated for making an Oscar movie that looks and feels about as unspectacular as you can get. And again, I haven't seen Frost/Nixon yet, but Ron Howard? Come on, that guy directed THE DA VINCI CODE for crying out loud. He just throws stuff on the screen without giving any life or depth to any of it. You guys are really considering giving him another Oscar? So again, that just leaves Gus Van Sant, who didn't do an amazing job with Milk, but at least managed to make a totally solid picture. And of course, Jonathan Demme, Mike Leigh, and Darren Aronofsky are forgotten, along plenty of others who produced more interesting work than most of the Best Picture nominees. C'est la vie.

Best Actor
The only omission that immediately comes to my mind is Josh Brolin's awesome performance in W. He totally immersed himself in the character and turned an obvious, mediocre script into a pretty interesting movie. I would've much rather seen him get a nomination than Brad Pitt, whose wooden performance in Benjamin Button can be best described as "a cardboard cutout standing around while everything happens around him." However, it wouldn't be first time that an actor won an award for a dull, hollow, lifeless performance (see: Kevin Spacey, American Beauty). That aside, Mickey Rourke deserves to win, and it's looking like he has a good shot at doing so.

Best Actress
Okay. What the FUCK. I finally saw Happy-Go-Lucky last weekend, and I don't know how it's possible for Sally Hawkins to not get nominated. Like Brolin in W., she gives a memorable performance that serves as the driving force of the entire movie. Oh well, her baffling exclusion means that now I can wholeheartedly root for the lovely Anne Hathaway, who was outstanding in Rachel Getting Married.

Best Supporting Actor
Heath Ledger. He should win. He will win. End of story.

Best Supporting Actress
Rosemarie Dewitt should've been nominated. Other than that, I don't have much of an opinion in this category.

Looking through the other categories, there isn't really that much that stands out, partly because I haven't seen a lot of the movies that are nominated, but also because most of the nonimations just aren't that interesting. There are the usual glaring omissions in technical categories. Two years ago, it was Children of Men losing Best Cinematography to Pan's Labyrinth. This year, it's the fact that The Wrestler's great cinematography wasn't even given a nomination. Stuff like just furthers the impression that Academy voters don't actually WATCH most of these movies before they choose these nominations or vote for the winners. (Fun fact: the movie Wanted got just as many nominations as The Wrestler.) The only other thing that stands out is Bolt getting nominated for Best Animated Feature instead of Waltz With Bashir. Apparently it's illegal for a movie to get nominated in both the Animated and Foreign categories. Oh well, those categories have always been screwy.

I guess writing is therapeutic, because the inital sense of frustration that I felt went I started writing this has now subsided into apathy. In the end, this year's Oscars just follow in the tradition of the previous years. Run of the mill Oscar bait gets recognized, while universally-acclaimed action movies don't. Movies are judged less on skill and talent than they are on media-fueled hype and momentum. Actors and directors are judged less on performance than they are on repsect within the industry, and the all-important "buzz". And most of the genuinely fresh and unique films get passed over in favor of glossy multi-million dollar pictures with a famous cast, or a reputable director, or the backing of a major studio. Same as it ever was.

I'll still probably end up watching though. But I also feel more motivated to find someone with IFC so I can watch the Independent Spirit Awards, which look a lot more interesting than the Oscars this year.

A Letter to Mr. Bush on His Last Day in Office

Dear Mr. Bush,

It goes without saying that your eight years as President have been a complete and utter failure. Years from now, historians will look at your presidency as one of the worst in American history. The only positive aspect of your years in office was that your incompetence inspired millions of people to unite and elect a President who actually seems to have compassion for the American people and good ideas for how to fix this country's problems.

Let's take a few minutes and break down the Bush legacy:

• Launching a woefully mismanaged war based on fabrications and faulty intelligence
• Thousands of dead U.S. soldiers
• Tens of thousands of injured U.S. soldiers
• Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians
• Turning a triple-digit budget surplus into a triple-digit budget deficit
• Financial deregulation policies leading up to America's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression
• The systematic disenfranchisement of thousands of eligible voters
• An education policy that actually reduces funding for the school and students that need the most help
• The rollback of environmental regulations and protections
• A failed attempt to privatize the country's Social Security system
• Planting administration spokespersons within the media to drum up support for administrative policies
• Awarding no-bid contracts to defense contractors with ties to administration officials
• A lack of funding for veterans' benefits, armor for troops, and other critical military expenditures
• Spying on American citizens through warrantless wiretaps
• An unprecedented level of secrecy and dishonesty with the American public
• A culture of corruption, immortalized by crooked politicians and lobbyists like Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Tom Delay, and several others
• The abolition of habeas corpus
• The destruction of America's moral standing in the world
• Torture
  
• Failure to act while millions lost their jobs
  
• Failure to act while millions lost their homes
  
• Failure to act while gas prices tripled and oil companies posted record profits
  
• Failure to act while people were stranded and drowning in New Orleans
  
• Failure to act on pre-9/11 intelligence
  
• Failure to capture Osama Bin Laden
  
• The lowest measured Presidential approval rating of all time
  

Clearly, your track record is something that only Nixon and Reagan could be proud of. I can only take consolation in the fact that before long, you'll be joining the two of them in hell.

Fuck you.

Love,
Colin

Save the Cheerleader, Save the World, Jump the Shark

A warning to anyone who hasn't seen every Heroes episode up until now: plenty of spoilers ahead.

The first Season of Heroes was somewhat of a breath of fresh air. I'll admit that it was slightly overrated. It quickly built up a devoted following of viewers claiming it to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. I never felt that it quite lived up to most of the hype and buzz that surrounded it, but I definitely liked it. It was a cool, interesting show that was entertaining enough to watch every week. It became a weekly tradition to get together with my friends each week to watch the new episodes. Again, not an amazing show, but an entertaining show worth following.

The series stumbled in the second season. It got off to a slow start, but it was still definitely watchable. Viewers and critics alike complained about the season's slow pace and less captivating storylines. But to be honest, I never really had too much of a problem with the season in the early stages. The "Hiro In Japan" storyline wasn't nearly as bad as everyone made it out to be, and the rest of the show was still alright too. Nevertheless, the season did have some notable issues. Of course, the biggest problem was the fact that the season was cut short by the writers' strike. So storylines that could've been more effectively developed and fleshed out had to be abruptly wrapped up. The way that the British samurai dude was finally taken out of the picture felt rushed and anti-climactic. Peter's Irish girlfriend got trapped in the future, and then they never really went back and revisited that part of the storyline. (That's one way to write a character out of the story, I guess.) I was expecting/hoping that the show would go on hiatus in November and then come back for a few episodes in the spring after the strike was over so they could wrap things up more effectively and have a more satisfying end to the season. But instead, the season just came to an abrupt end after 11 episodes.

There were other problems that had nothing to do with the strike, like questionable story developments and lame payoffs. There was the romance between Claire and the flying kid, during which I often felt like checking the channel to make sure that I hadn't accidentally switched over to The CW instead of NBC. Speaking of Claire, the show kind of wrote itself into a corner with respect to Claire's healing power. Throughout the season, they started focusing more heavily on the notion that powers can be transmitted through blood. So anytime someone gets killed or seriously injured, the answer is simple: just give 'em some cheerleader blood, they'll be good as new. So now we have all these characters walking around who have healing powers and can't be killed, unless of course they get shot in the head or decapitated or something, because the rest of your body can't heal if your brain gets destroyed. So by the last few episodes, we were stuck with the old mantra "remove the head or destroy the brain" in regard to any characters actually getting killed off. In essence, Heroes became a zombie movie, minus the gore and the rotting corpses.

Speaking of deaths, they found some pretty mediocre ways to kill off characters. First there was D.L. getting shot by some jerk at a nightclub in a flashback episode. Then Nikki/Jessica/Ali Larter/whatever got blown up trying to rescue her son or niece or something from a burning building. It was a death that felt so unnecessary and unsatisfying that my first impression was that she had to have lived through it. More on that later. The whole subplot with the girl and the comic book and the burning building was just plain lousy from start to finish. Bad guys steal the kid's priceless comic book. His cousin has the power to imitate whatever she watches on TV, so she decides "If I watch Spiderman climbing a wall on my iPod, then naturally I should be able to break into the house of dangerous gangsters and get the comic book back without ever being in any danger!" Ugh. Bad, bad writing. And then the gangsters catch her and she winds up tied to a chair in a burning building. What, they couldn't just tie her to the train tracks instead? So Nikki shows up and saves the girl, and then Nikki gets blown up for no reason whatsoever. Unnecessary story developments like that ended up weighing down what could've easily been a decently satisfying season. And don't get me started on Mohinder's clumsy, unconvincing progression from being one of the smartest, most interesting characters on the show to being a lackey for "the company". But in retrospect, that deterioration was nothing compared to the shit they tried to pull with the character in the third season. More on that later.

The year-long gap between the end of season two and the start of season three proved to be devastating, primarily in terms of ratings, but also in regard to holding the interest of the loyal fans. If there's a year-long gap in between episodes, then you almost have to start from scratch and find a way to draw people in just as effectively as when the show started. Sadly, the third season just hasn't accomplished that.

I obediently made it through all thirteen episodes of Volume Three, titled "Villains". I never really felt that the volume lived up to the title. Sure, early on, there were all these new villains running around causing problems, and the show did try to adopt a darker overall tone. But in the end, it didn't really feel like a story arc about "villains" per se, because... well, I can't really figure out what this season has really been "about" in the first place. The writers seemed to be under the impression that more plot twists equals a more solid show, but that wasn't the case. Characters jumped from the light side to the dark side so frequently that in the week between each episode, you had no idea who was on whose side anymore. The Sylar character was thrown back and forth so much that it's a surprise Zachary Quinto didn't suffer whiplash as a result. I lost count of how many times he jumped from good to bad and vice versa, not to mention the whole "We're your parents. No we're not. But actually we are. Just kidding, we're not," thing. By the end, all that was left was an unintelligible, jumbled mess.

Now, if a TV show or a movie is crazy and impossible to follow, that's not always a bad thing. Look at David Lynch movies for example, which can be awesome viewing experiences because you have no clue what's going on or what's around the corner. It's a different story, though, if something is impossible to follow in a frustrating, unengaging way. Unfortunately, that was the case with Heroes this season. It became tough to follow because so much stuff was thrown out there, often with no rhyme nor reason for doing so. And all the while, they never managed to give you that much of a reason to care about what was going on, so there was no real urgency in trying to make sense of everything. I mean, I still watched because I was interested in seeing how things would develop. But this season, I noticed that watching the show felt like more of an obligation than a pleasure.

Once great characters were rendered either useless (Peter) or retarded (Mohinder). Peter, formerly the wunderkind who could absorb any power he came in contact with, became irritating and inconsistent. In the whole "Future Peter coming to the past to fix things" plot in the beginning of the season, he came off as this jerk who had no idea what he was doing. And for the rest of the season, he remained this snotty jerk running around trying to fix things. Looking back, I'm not sure what Peter actually was trying to do all this time. And then once he lost his powers, the little about him that was still interesting was wiped away. I blame this not only on the writing, but on Milo Ventimiglia's boring, one-dimensional performance throughout the season. Remember in X-Men 2 when Cyclops is begging Jean Grey not to sacrifice herself, and he's trying to be serious and emtional, but he's wearing that laser visor thing over his eyes so he just looks really goofy instead? That's what the Peter Petrelli character reminded me of all season.

That character's weakness is nothing compared to what happened to poor Mohinder Suresh though. In the first season, Mohinder was the lone primary character without powers, a brilliant mind trying to study the mystery of this phenomenon. In the second season, as I mentioned earlier, he made some uncharacteristic lapses in judgment. In season three... hoo boy... while doing his research one day, he impulsively decides that he wants powers, so he injects himself with superhero blood and turns into The Fly. I really wish I was making this up, but alas, that's what happened this season: significant changes to characters without any real rhyme or reason for doing so.

Let's see, what else happened... Ali Larter came back. Nikki's still blown up, and poor little Micah is still an orphan, but it turns out Nikki has an identical twin living on the opposite side of the country, and she also has powers. Oh, and Hiro had his mind erased and thought he was ten years old for a few episodes. Don't worry though, because could still time travel by closing his eyes. Ah, the time travel! That was another problem this season. In the first two seasons, the show largely steered clear of time travel paradoxes by never having the characters anywhere near themselves in the past or the future. This time around, Hiro hangs out with himself as a kid, and Claire even takes care of herself as a baby. But on the two or three occasions when a character teleported back in time a few minutes to the same location, one of the two of themselves simply disappears when time passes and they reach the present again. Ow, my brain!

The season's biggest attempt to try to recapture the magic, so to speak, was with the "eclipse" story arc that lasted two or three episodes. Apparently, all of the characters first gained their powers during an eclipse (a key plot point I don't remember them mentioning before this season, meaning that they're just making up explanations and backstories as they go along). So for the duration of this new eclipse, they temporarily lost all of their powers. It was interesting to see everyone fighting and trying to figure out problems using solely their strength and intellect. But the event, in the lead up to it and in the advertising for the episodes, just still kinda felt like a big thing happening for the sake of having something big happen, as a desperate attempt to attract viewers and get people to start caring again, of which it was only partly successful at doing.

There were a few interesting touches this season that did work, like the development of Claire's character after Sylar stole her powers and she became determined to revenge and never be a victim again. Then there was that one episode with the creepy puppet master guy, which stood out this season as some of the most genuinely unsettling stuff ever done on the show. And then the chick who could run really fast was pretty cute (which I guess is some kind of compensation for the fact that Kristen Bell's character got killed off this season). Beyond all that, there aren't too many positives about this season that stick out in my mind, so I don't really feel the need to keep watching again when the show comes back in February. Volume Three had a nice enough ending to go out on. They destroyed the formula, Claire killed Sylar, and the all-powerful Arthur Petrelli is dead too. All is well, the end.

The last episode ended with a prologue for Volume Four. Nathan is sitting in a limo with the president talking about people with abilities and the threat they pose to society. He hands over a folder with information about everyone with powers and what they've been involved in, and the president vows to deal with it. The title of Volume Four is "Fugitives". Now I'm no psychic, but let me try to guess what's gonna happen: The existence of people with powers is made public, they all become outcasts and start being hunted down, some of them decide to use their powers against the humankind that turned its back on them, while other seek to use their powers for good, alliances form, battles ensue. Sounds familiar? That's because it's X-Men. If the show manages to find a way to defy my expectations and return to top form, then maybe I'll give it a shot again. But for now, I think I'll pass.

It's a shame: A few years ago, it was one of the most promising new shows on TV. Now, it just appears to be another show that started off strong but then faded out much earlier than it should've. Gotta love that first season though.