• OK, the big news of the Oscar nominations for today got a bit eclipsed by the surprising death of Heath Ledger. Sad to hear of that, of course. It’ll be a bit weird watching The Dark Knight. Anyway, as far as the Oscars go, I was pretty happy with the results. Frankly, I think I’m happier with this list than I have been in years. I’m finally gonna have the motivation to getting out and seeing Atonement and There Will Be Blood (both of which I have wanted to see but haven’t gotten around to). I’m absolutely giddy that Juno got 4 of the major nomination categories. And honestly, it’s the 4 categories that it most deserves to have gotten - Original Screenplay (Diablo Cody), Director (Jason Reitman), Actress (Ellen Page) and most awesome of all, Best Picture. In fact, 2 of the Best Picture nominees are in my personal top 5 list from my recently finished 2007 Film Retrospective list (Juno & Michael Clayton). I definitely liked No Country For Old Men, but think it could have been a bit better (then again, perhaps I’d have a different opinion on a second viewing). The film score category, which has sucked beyond the telling of it the last couple years, has 2 great nominees in the list: Michael Giacchino’s Ratatouille and Marco Beltrami’s fantastic 3:10 To Yuma (which amusingly I actually have playing, by coincidence, as I type this). This is the first nomination for both of them. And as two of the greatest composers currently in the game, they both deserve it. I’d be thrilled for either of them to win. I haven’t yet heard the score to Atonement, but Dario Marianelli is a talented composer, so I imagine it’s good. I haven’t heard The Kite Runner’s score yet either, but I’d have doubts about it since I was anything but impressed with Alberto Iglesias’ 2006 Oscar nominated score to The Constant Gardner. And James Newton Howard did a good job with his score to Michael Clayton (not sure that it stands out quite to the level of Oscar nomination, but it’s certainly better than nearly all the nominees in the last couple years). Speaking of Michael Clayton, it’s great to see it pick up a number of nominations, including the biggest set of acting nominations for the year, deservedly so. I had it in a number of the categories in my list as well. And it’s fantastic to see Philip Seymour Hoffman get the supporting actor nomination for Charlie Wilson’s War (he was beyond fantastic in that film). Oh, and nice to see Tommy Lee Jones get some long-overdue attention for his excellent performance in In The Valley Of Elah. Anyway, I’ll get a spreadsheet of my predictions/choices posted in the near future, as usual.
• BTW, speaking of Juno, I hadn’t been paying close attention to the box office performance of the film. I’m happy that it’s doing phenomenal. It looks like it’s amazingly going to cross the $100 million line. It’s officially Fox Searchlight’s biggest money-maker to date, by a comfortable margin, which is only going to continue to increase. The staying power of the film is impressive, and great to see.
• The teaser for JJ Abrams’ new Star Trek film has gone live on the official site. I belive Abrams may be able to pull it off. It’ll be worth it just for Michael Giacchino’s score.
• A picture is indeed worth 1000 words. Most of them amusing words.
• Cool. The real camera behind Cloverfield.
• Oh, and speaking of Cloverfield, I’ll want one of these. I’m not much of an action figure type person, but this one would be very cool. I’m sure I’ll want one even more when they post some pics. The price will keep me from picking one up, though…
• Some neato job ads from the 30’s & 40’s.
• In memory of Heath Ledger, I think I’ll pop on A Knight’s Tale (my favorite film of his) while I do some work on other stuff…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Ponderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.