War Witch (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Foreign Film    For a movie about child soldiers, this was surprisingly cute.

Komona (Rachel Mwanza) is a twelve-year-old when she is kidnapped and forced into the rebel army of her country.  Viewed as a witch by the rebel leader, she is safe as long as they keep managing to win against the government forces.  However, a boy known as The Magician (Serge Kanyinda) knows that they are in danger and convinces her to run away with him.  Over the next year, they get married and move in with his uncle, The Butcher (Ralph Prosper).  Unfortunately, they are unable to run from their past.

It's not as depressing as Pan's Labyrinth and I think Rachel Mwanza would have been much more deserving of a Best Actress nod than Quvenzhane Willis.  Mwanza had to convey a great deal more range than Willis.  It's probably not one that you could watch over and over but it's a great film and I would encourage everyone to at least rent it.

The Master (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress    This movie sucked.  It has to be one of the biggest wastes of my time I have had yet.  I'm really starting to dislike Joaquin Phoenix.  It's like he's trying to become Daniel Day-Lewis without the talent and just buckets of weirdness instead.

So, this is a thinly-veiled story about scientology.  An author and demagogue named Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) takes in a shiftless alcoholic (Joaquin Phoenix) after World War II and begins to "process" him through his past lives.  His wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), a true believer, has serious reservations about allowing this drunk moron into their Cause. 

It is awful.  There's no real story, no background, just a fucked-up bromance between a ne'er-do-well and a guy who is completely full of shit.  I have no idea why anyone thought this was a good film to make and I sincerely hope everyone nominated loses tonight as punishment for loosing this film onto the world. 

The Sessions (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Supporting Actress    Seriously?  This only got nominated for Best Supporting Actress?  No Best Actor?  No Best Adapted Screenplay?  Really?  That just seems wrong to me.

Not that Helen Hunt doesn't deserve a nomination.  For a 49-year-old woman, she showed a great deal of courage by willing to be shown naked on screen.  It helps that she still has the body of a 25-year-old but still.

But, holy shit, John Hawkes.  How has this man not won an Oscar?  Especially after Winter's Bone.  Everybody thought that was a shoe-in and here he is playing a quadraplegic and nothing?  Maybe it's like the Tropic Thunder curse.  You never go full Disabled.

Based on an article written by poet Mark O'Brian, this is the story of a man (John Hawkes) who decides to lose his virginity at 38.  Difficulty:  he is completely paralyzed by childhood polio and sleeps in an iron lung.  After discussing the situation with his priest (William H. Macy), he decides to seek the services of a professional sex surrogate (Helen Hunt). 

It's funny, it's sweet, and it's readily accessible.  One of the best of the bunch so far.

Speaking of, today is the day, people!  Tonight we get to find out who's walking away with what and who wore something stupid in a desperate bid for attention.  That's right!  Oscar Sunday, coming at you tonight.  Which means that I have until then to post as many nominees as I can find.  I was super-busy at work this week so I didn't get a chance to really watch more than this one and the last short.  So stick around because today is going to be a good old-fashioned movie marathon.

Maggie Simpson in The Longest Daycare (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Animated Short    Finally!  I can knock this one off the list.  I'm actually kind of pissed I had to go through so much trouble for it considering that it's only 4 minutes long and not really worth the effort.  If I had to run around to four different sites for Paperman that would have been different. 

Maggie Simpson is carted off to the Ayn Rand Daycare, which might be funny if I had actually read anything by Ayn Rand.  She just wants to play with butterflies but a creepily-unibrowed baby keeps smashing them.  She finds a chrysalis and does her utmost to protect it from Evil Unibrow. 

Half of what makes The Simpsons funny are the pop culture references but the other half are the voices and without any dialogue, this movie falls kind of flat.  Maybe that's an Oscar requirement, since none of the nominees had any speaking but I found it off-putting here.

Flight (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay    And people thought Lincoln was Oscar bait...

So this is a fairly straightforward morality play about a pilot (Denzel Washington) who saves a planeload of people from certain death but must face his rampant drug and alcohol problems in the ensuing investigation.  Aside from the spectacular crash sequence and Nadine Velasquez's boobs, pretty boring. 

So we're going to skip right past all of that nonsense and talk about John Goodman.  He is easily the most watchable character in the whole movie as Denzel's drug dealer.  Between this and Argo, I'm kind of surprised he hasn't been talked about more.  Of course, it's not like he's some obscure dude that no one's ever heard of but he's been out of the serious limelight since The Big Lebowski.  He's done a lot of voice and TV work in the intervening time but it's really nice to see him owning the silver screen again.

I had President's Day off so you get a bonus post!  yay!

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay    I seriously don't get what all the fuss was about.  Everything I've read said that this movie was basically the best thing since sliced bread and I just don't see it. 

Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Willis) lives with her daddy (Dwight Henry) on a small island in the Gulf of Mexico outside the levees that residents call the Bathtub.  She is surrounded by alcoholics and societal rejects and raised with the most minimal of care.  When her father contracts an illness and the Bathtub is hit by a hurricane, Hushpuppy can hardly be blamed for thinking that it is the end of the world.  Her imagination has the ice caps melting and prehistoric child-eating beasts awakening to ravage the land.  What's a six-year-old to do?  Go looking for her missing mother, of course. 

Honestly, minus the aurochs, this could have been a documentary.  If it were, maybe I would understand why people were all gaga over it.  As it is, it's not a great movie.  It's interesting, sure, and young Miss Wallis does a great job but Best Picture?  Not even close. 

Argo (2012)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Adapted Screenplay    This is probably one of the most watchable of the Best Picture noms.  That probably means it doesn't have a shot in hell of winning.

Based on a true story, the movie is about the CIA-led extraction of 6 Americans from Iran during the 1979 Hostage Crisis.  As the embassy was being taken over, six workers fled out the back door and hid in the Canadian ambassador's (Victor Garber) house.  Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) is called upon to find a way to extract them before they are found and killed.  After watching a movie with his son, Mendez comes up with the idea to fly to Iran and take the Americans out by pretending they're a Canadian film crew on a location shot.  He recruits the assistance of a make-up specialist (John Goodman) and a producer (Alan Arkin) to help him fake the existence of a movie.  Since that's 90% of Hollywood anyway, they jump at the chance. 

This is definitely one of the most quotable of the nominees and, overall, I think it's a very good movie.  Alan Arkin is a scene-stealer and it's nice to see Affleck being a little more subdued.  I don't really know anything about the technical process of editing or mixing film and sound but I did very much like the intercuts of real news footage from the period and the attention paid to finding people who resembled their real-life counterparts.  The score was pretty and unobstrusive, which I'm pretty sure is what it should be. 

As a side note, I've been trying to work my way through the second season of Alias and I couldn't help but wish Jennifer Gardner had made a cameo considering that her fake dad was the ambassador and her real husband was the director of a movie about a CIA agent.