Preface
- I’m getting this to you guys a couple days late, and I’m sorry about that.
- I just had to find the chunks of my brain that flew out after The Lego Movie wasn’t nominated for Best Animated Feature, and try to reassemble those chunks in the proper fashion.
- Yeah we’ll talk about that snub later, but seriously: yeah I had a ton of projects to finish for the semester at school all day Thursday.
- Friday I was busy too and worked hard to crank out Night at the Museum Spoiler-Free and Spoiler Filled (you’ll get that later tonight) Reviews.
- I spent like 2 and a half hours on Spider-Man yesterday and just spent the rest of the day hibernating.
- NOW here’s the Oscar Nominees Reaction Post!
- And the American Sniper Review should be out in the next couple days too.
- Man, January is so much busier for movies than I thought!
- (Before I start, too, click here for a full list of nominees in the categories I’m gonna discuss!)
Best Animated Feature
- Alright, so we’re starting it off with the big one.
- Usually the Oscars are pretty fair.
- People, including myself, give them crap for not nominating really great movies that deserve recognition, or snubbing someone that deserves a nomination.
- But at the end of the day, they get about 80-85% of the nominees right, and each film on the list is something we can acknowledge as a great film.
- Which is why I don’t flat-out call something a snub immediately.
- There have been 3 SNUBS in the past 20 years of the Academy, if you ask me.
- (I’m probably forgetting one, but here they are in my mind now!)
- The first is in 1995 when Forrest Gump beat both Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption out of winning Best Picture.
- Both are two of my favorite films of all time.
- Forrest Gump is good, but not masterpieces like Shawshank or Pulp Fiction.
- The second is in 2011 when The Town wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, or Ben Affleck for Best Director.
- Another one of the greatest films ever made, because it combines the old style of crime and gangster films with the new style of grit, action and ties it all up with beautiful emotion.
- I think The Social Network should have won that year anyway, but the nomination was well deserved.
- And the 3rd was this past Thursday when The Lego Movie wasn’t nominated for Best Animated Feature.
- I could make an argument that Silver Linings Playbook should have won in 2013 also, but Argo was a really good film.
- Anyway, let’s talk my thoughts on The Lego Movie.
- It was actually one of the final films I saw in 2014, and well… It was good!
- Out of the 3 animated movies I saw in 2014, I would actually say it was the 3rd in quality, but it was really good!
- 5/5 or so.
- I see why everyone loved it, I think the emotion at the end was absolutely great, and made up for the first hour or so that felt a little too silly in my eyes.
- Still, it was really good and I wanted it to win Best Animated!
- Three really good animated movies in 2014, and Big Hero 6 was my favorite, but I can see why Lego Movie deserves to win.
- Because it definitely deserved to.
- But it didn’t even get nominated!?!?
- WHAT!?
- You know who’s really happy right now?
- The team over at Dreamworks who are clearing space in their lobby for an Academy Award.
Gone Girl
- I’m gonna go through the rest of these by category, but let’s talk about Gone Girl for a second.
- If this was still 2009 and there were only 5 nominees, I could see why Gone Girl wouldn’t get a Best Picture nomination.
- But when you’re allowed to nominate up to 10 films for Best Picture, it almost seemed like a fact.
- I can see Nightcrawler not getting nominated just cuz it was a little too indie for the Academy (more on Gyllenhaal later) but Gone Girl was dark, it had rich substance, and it had just enough emotion.
- I think Prisoners deserved a nomination last year, but totally understood why it didn’t get one.
- It was a smaller film, didn’t have a huge budget, and maybe if it did Hugh Jackman could’ve been nominated, but the film itself was too small and too emotionally heavy.
- Fair.
- But Gone Girl was much more of an Oscar-worthy film.
- It wasn’t gonna win at all, but on the Blu-Ray in 3 months it would say, “nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.”
- Not just Best Picture either, because this film should’ve been nominated for about 8 awards.
- Best Picture, Best Director, Best Lead Actress (only one it got!), Best Cinematography, Best Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound Editing.
- And yeah that’s a lot of awards.
- Had it gotten those, it would’ve had the second highest number of nominations.
- But realistically speaking, it could have seriously won at least 2 of those.
- Best Film Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay.
- I wouldn’t discount an upset with Rosamund Pike over Julianne Moore either.
- I don’t think it will happen, but I still think it’s possible.
- I get that the Fincher for Best Director is a bit of a reach, but even taking that out, I seriously think that it could have gotten these nominations.
- I thought that it easily had the WIN for Adapted Screenplay, and could have come really close for Best Score.
- But I guess not…
- I’m disappointed Academy.
- I’m expecting Neil Patrick Harris to make at least a couple jokes about it in the ceremony.
- That would be awesome.
Best Lead Actor
- My two favorite performances in 2014 were Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl.
- Quickly trailed by James McAvoy in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
- I guess you guys can tell I like the creeps?
- And I thought that it would either be Carell, Gyllenhaal, or Oyelowo that got snubbed, but not more than 1 of them!
- Bradley Cooper seems like he’s a great guy, and he’s one of my favorite actors in Hollywood right now, but I didn’t see his nomination coming from anywhere.
- I haven’t seen American Sniper yet, but with all the buzz, I would’ve expected McConaughey for Interstellar or Serkis for Apes to be nominated before him!
- Good for him I guess!
- I was really disappointed that Gyllenhaal was beat out by Carell and Cooper, because he completely transformed and went all out for this role.
- Like Gone Girl, even though it/he wouldn’t win, it could still be on his resume for the rest of his life.
- As for Oyelowo, I haven’t seen Selma (I’ll see that maybe next weekend) but I was assuming he’d get nominated.
- As for the whole “no diversity” thing, I recognize that there wasn’t a ton this year at the Oscars, but the Academy determines who each of them believed to be the best of 2014.
Best Picture
- Like I said, I was disappointed by the absence of Gone Girl.
- I was surprised that Foxcatcher wasn’t on there also.
- Since it’s nominated for so much else.
- And like I said in my predictions, I was expecting a surprise from Love Is Strange, but I guess American Sniper was the surprise.
- I got 6/8 nominations right which is pretty good in my eyes.
- They were all pretty predictable nominations, you knew Theory of Everything wasn’t gonna get snubbed.
- I am happy that Whiplash got nominated too, because it was a brilliant, brilliant film that deserves so much recognition.
- And like I said in my predictions of nominees, the Academy could’ve easily walked over it because it was a much smaller-scale film.
In Conclusion
- In conclusion, there was one major surprise, a few good surprises, and mostly typical nominees at the Oscar nominations this year.
- The Oscars are my favorite day of the year after Christmas because, even though the winners and nominations aren’t always what I want them to be, it’s a day where everyone gives all their attention to film.
- And that makes me happy, since I get to share my love for movies with everyone else on that one day!
- It’s like the Super Bowl Part 2!
- Cuz everything is split into 2 parts these days…
***
Anyway guys, those are my late thoughts on this year’s Academy Award nominations! I’ll do another post (perhaps a video…?) of my predictions for the winners when we get closer to the ceremony. But what are all of your thoughts on these nominees? Let me know down below, and as always, thanks for reading guys.
My Movie Thoughts 