zwolanerd

For most sites that talk about movies, this time of year is their favorite. Speculation about Oscar winners and griping about things that didn’t get nominated can fill weeks and weeks worth of posts. I enjoy reading some of them here and there, but am in no way equipped to do similar things. I like a lot of things, but I have difficulty telling you why sometimes (you may have noticed?). I can look at a list of Best Picture nominees and tell you my personal ranking of the list, but you start talking about Sound Editing and Cinematography and I don’t even have a foundation of information to build on. Did Gravity sound better than The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug? To me that’s apples and oranges, because I don’t remember any dragons in Gravity. They would’ve had to be space dragons, anyway, and comparing space dragons to regular dragons is an exercise in futility, my friends.

I tend to go to the theater for “big” movies, the spectacles. I generally save dramas for home viewing, for two reasons. One, a smaller screen doesn’t diminish the experience for those, in my opinion. Two, there’s something about theaters that makes my eyes water easily which people tend to take as me crying. I can cr– er, have eye-watering problems at home and save myself the public embarrassment. But back to my point, which is that The Academy doesn’t tend to choose the kinds of movies I tend to go see in the theater. So out of the [however many] movies nominated for Oscars in all of the categories I only have seen eight of them.

Eight!

That seems terribly low. Of those eight, I saw seven in the theater. To put that in context, I saw 37 movies in the theater last year, a number that kind of blew my mind just now when I looked it up, and reminds me I need to do my movie journal wrap-up for 2013 some time soon.

ANYWAY.

The eight movies nominated for Oscars this year that I have seen are as follows (number of nominations in parentheses):

• Gravity (10)
• Her (5)
• Prisoners (1)
• Despicable Me 2 (2)
• The Great Gatsby (2)
• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (3)
• Iron Man 3 (1)
• Star Trek Into Darkness (1)

I liked all of those movies, but there is literally no way I can make any sort of predictions this year. Even if Best Picture was only between the two I’ve seen (Gravity and Her), I’d have a hard time picking.  They were both amazing in completely different ways. My best guess is that Her will win for original screenplay, but maybe the other nominees are great and I just don’t know because I haven’t seen them.  There are plenty of other nominees that I planned to see, but I see now how much of a failure I really am.

…if I’m judging movies based solely on how many Oscar nominations they got, that is, but that is something I’ve never really done. Pretty much the only times I’ve ever used “it was nominated for [x number of] Oscars!” in an argument is when someone doesn’t know if they want to see a movie or says “that movie was awful,” but even in those cases I’m not using the argument because it works on me, I’m using it because it seems to have an effect on other people.

So, hey, sorry you can’t use my list here as a help while you’re putting money on the Oscars.

 

Tags: Oscars

Written by: Mark