No that we've had time to get around to see Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winner of '08, it seems like a good time to talk about the little golden trophy, more specifically the winners we love, hate, and the ones we feel were overlooked.
I, for one, can't help but feel that No Country for Old Men was far from what I'd call Best Picture. None of the characters have any depth, and they're only pawns for the Coen Brothers to show how skilled they are at making violent, thrilling, violent, suspenseful, and, most of all, violent movies.
It's a pretty played-out opinion, but Crash wasn't even a good movie, let alone the Best Picture of 2005.
It's exactly the kind of movie shut-in nerds complain about when they say the Oscars are only for artsy, pretentious snore-fests with no actual entertainment value. Why this beat out Munich is beyond me, but I suppose a boring semi-racist message is Oscar-bait?
Also, why the hell wasn't Brokeback Mountain nominated that year anyway?
All my love goes to Gran Torino. I didn't see the Oscars or anything, so I have no idea if it won anything (hell, for all I know Gran Torino was last year's Oscars), but it's an absolutely amazing movie.
Gran Tarino was never nominated. Probably because Clint has an entire room filled with Oscars by now.
I'm somewhat mixed about Crash. On the one hand, it does say a lot about the current state of ratial relations in LA, and the several character remain well-developed, if some of them aren't believable. On the other hand, it isn't likely that so many people who don't know each other will meet so many times in 24 hours, and Eastern Asians aren't treated as well as the other races (they're practically antagonists). Plus, I don't like how the "blanket" stopped that girl from getting shot. I usually lean towards the latter hand. I can't really think of any other Best Picture that divides me so much, besides The Deer Hunter, which is rascist to Vietnamese and overly long, but it does say a lot about how shocking war can be and the foolishness of machoism. I usually tend to like it a little, but not as much as, let's say, Apocalypse Now.
I'm also very upset by how Driving Miss Daisy took the Oscar when Do the Right Thing wasn't even nominated.
Some movies use racism to prove a point, you know. It's not saying the director is racist.
Okay, the Vietnamese are portrayed as evil savages who torture "completely innocent and harmless" Americans relentlessly and cruelly, and with a big smile on their face. Not exactly something that's easy to forgive.
Was it the Vietnamese, or the Vietnamese soldiers? Because honestly, unless they had some civilians and children just walk into the PoW camps and rip off the soldier's nails, I don't see it reflecting on the Vietnamese population.
It's rascist because the Vietnamese were presented as evil and completely different from Americans, who were presented as completely innocent. The Vietnamese also suffered, they weren't just torturers; and the Americans probably did worse to the Vietnamese than we think they did to us.