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Sunday, November 28, 2010

Fresh Oscar Grub, Post-Thanksgiving Edition

Just like the rest of America, we here at East Village Afternoon had to take a couple of days off to stuff ourselves with turkey and mountains of pie, but after emerging from our tryptophan-induced vacay, we've found that Hollywood is buzzing louder than ever about the year's best movies. And one of them is going to take home the big prize, the Oscar for Best Picture.
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If we had to guess today which movies will fill the ten slots for Best Picture noms, we'd list: "Black Swan", "The Fighter", "The Social Network", "The King's Speech", "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1", "The Kids Are All Right", "True Grit", "Inception", "127 Hours" and "Toy Story 3/How to Train Your Dragon".
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Look for "Harry Potter" to snag a nom, not necessarily because it's a great movie, but because Hollywood likes to reward any movie franchise which hauls in ga-dillions of dollars. Remember when the third installment of "Lord of the Rings" won everything in sight, including Best Picture? And in that last slot, look for an animated movie to take a slot; at this point who knows which one will get it, "Toy Story 3" or "Dragon", but Hollywood likes to recognize at least one movie from the animated branch of the industry.
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As for the other eight contenders, "The Fighter", "Black Swan" and "127 Hours" are already being crossed off the list of potential winners because they're too gritty, horrific or just too strange for the older, more conservative-skewing Academy voters. At screenings of "127 Hours", people actually fainted. "Inception" gets high marks for its creativity and special effects, but not much else. A similar movie, "The Matrix", only won four Oscars, all for sound, editing and effects, but it wasn't even nominated for Best Picture.
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That leaves four movies which have a real chance at taking it all. Of those four, America has a real love/hate affair, mostly hate, with Facebook, so don't look for a movie about Facebook, "The Social Network", to engender a great deal of affection. "The Kids Are All Right" would normally be a serious contender, it's sort of like a friendlier, less-dark "American Beauty", but it has a big problem: the fact that the two central characters are lesbian. Yes, that's right, they're gay, Hollywood, gay, gay, GAY! And remember how it turned out when "Brokeback Mountain" went up against the much-lesser "Crash"? "Mountain" didn't win, let's put it that way. And even more horrifying to a lot of Academy members, the gay characters are happy, successful, wealthy and have two great kids who love them. The movie sort of gives the middle finger to those homophobic-riffic Academy members who can't fathom gay people unless those Sodomites are miserable and ready to commit suicide.
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So that leaves "The King's Speech" and "True Grit". Both are "safe" movies, which means they don't make older Academy members squirm in their seats, and from all accounts, they're both really, really good. "True Grit" hasn't even been released yet, but it's had a couple of private screenings, and some viewers of those screenings have Twittered that "True Grit" is a masterpiece. So which one will win? If it comes down to all other things being equal, we'd guess "True Grit", if for no other reason than the older American Academy members will vote for a good old fashioned, classic American western over a movie about those rich, snooty members of the British royal family. Americans love stories about themselves and stories which continue to add to the great American myth. We're guessing The Coen Brothers should probably start writing a second acceptance speech for Best Picture.

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