The 2009 Academy Awards

[Duke]

Here you go. A little surprising to me. How Titanic got the gazillion oscar nods when it was made, yet The Dark Knight get's only a token handful. While 'best picture' would be a bit of a stretch, I thought there was enough fine work in that movie to garner a bit more attention.

Discuss away here. It's movie time.

Best Actress:

Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married

Angelina Jolie - Changeling

Melissa Leo - Frozen River

Meryl Streep - Doubt

Kate Winslet - The Reader

Best Actor:

Brad Pitt - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Frank Langella - Frost/Nixon

Sean Penn - Milk

Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler

Richard Jenkins - The Visitor

Best Actress In A Supporting Role:

Amy Adams - Doubt

Penelope Cruz - Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Viola Davis - Doubt

Taraji P. Henson - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Marisa Tomei - The Wrestler

Best Actor In A Supporting Role:

Josh Brolin - Milk

Robert Downey Jr. - Tropic Thunder

Philip Seymour Hoffman - Doubt

Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

Michael Shannon - Revolutionary Road

Best Picture:

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Slumdog Millionaire

The Reader

Frost/Nixon

Milk

Achievement In Directing:

David Fincher - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Ron Howard - Frost/Nixon

Gus Van Sant - Milk

Stephen Daldry - The Reader

Danny Boyle - Slumdog Millionaire

Adapted Screenplay:

Eric Roth, Robin Swicord - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

John Patrick Shanley - Doubt

Peter Morgan - Frost/Nixon

David Hare - The Reader

Simon Beaufoy - Slumdog Millionaire

Original Screenplay:

Courtney Hunt - Frozen River

Mike Leigh - Happy-Go-Lucky

Martin McDonagh - In Bruges

Dustin Lance Black - Milk

Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Pete Docter - Wall-e

Best Animated Feature Film:

Bolt

Kung Fu Panda

Wall-e

Achievement In Art Direction:

James J. Murakami, Gary Fettis - Changeling

Donald Graham Burt, Victor J. Zolfo - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Nathan Crowley, Peter Lando - The Dark Knight

Michael Carlin, Rebecca Alleway - The Duchess

Kristi Zea, Debra Schutt - Revolutionary Road

Achievement In Cinematography:

Tom Stern - Changeling

Claudio Miranda - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Wally Pfister - The Dark Knight

Chris Menges, Roger Deakins - The Reader

Anthony Dod Mantle - Slumdog Millionaire

Achievement In Costume Design:

Catherine Martin - Australia

Jacqueline West - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Michael O'Connor - The Duchess

Danny Glicker - Milk

Albert Wolsky - Revolutionary Road

Best Documentary Feature:

The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) Encounters at the End of the World

The Garden

Man on Wire

Trouble the Water

Best Documentary Short Subject:

The Conscience of Nhem En

The Final Inch

Smile Pinki

The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306

Achievement In Film Editing:

Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall - Bottom of Form 1

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Lee Smith - The Dark Knight

Mike Hill, Dan Hanley - Frost/Nixon

Elliot Graham - Milk

Chris Dickens - Slumdog Millionaire

Best Foreign Language Film:

The Baader Meinhof Complex (Germany) The Class (France) Departures (Japan) Revanche (Austria) Waltz with Bashir

 

[Dory Berkowitz-Bukowski]

Heath Ledger will win all of them. Because you couldn't possibly say that a dead guy isn't the best.

I hate sucking up to people just because they're dead.

 

[Duke]

Heath Ledger will win all of them. Because you couldn't possibly say that a dead guy isn't the best.

I hate sucking up to people just because they're dead.

I agree, but in this case, I really do think he deserves the aware because his portrayal of the joker was really that good.

He wasn't Heath Ledger, or Heath Ledger playing a guy, he was, in all ways of the form, The Joker. That to me is, if nothing else, well deserving the nomination, if not the big prize.

 

[Sarcasmo]

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button—is it one of the worst American films of 2008, or THE worst American film of 2008? Can’t be the worst, you’ll argue, not while we have Australia to kick around. True. But both are examples of a rotten tendency in American filmmaking toward what critic Manny Farber used to call “White Elephant Art”: big fat overblown pompous moralizing messagey inert bathetic crap that wins awards. Button also features leaden whimsy, a cast of thousands of dull characters spouting folksy sayings, and thick golden visuals that look as if all the scenes of the past were dipped in maple syrup.

In fact, I think it merits the First Annual Stilly Award for the unmovingest movie of the year.

People will try to tell you this film’s just crammed with action and incident and emotion, but then, people will tell you all sorts of shameless lies just to hear you say, “Really?!?” Slide shows are more kinetic than this film, scrapbooks are more riveting, Hummel figurines are livelier and more aesthetically daring. It’s so constipated, so stodgy, so snivelling, so cruelly slow, so unintentionally funny in spots, I see no reason why it shouldn’t win ten Oscars in addition to the Stilly.

In case you’re wondering how you go about making something worthy of a Stilly, Benjamin Button provides a good model.

Well, first, you start with appalling source material. In this case it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s deservedly forgotten short story, a stiff attempt at humor that lands like a dropped brick. Make sure you preserve Fitzgerald’s original title, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which sounds like the twee tale of Winnie the Pooh’s even more nauseating stuffed pal.

Then you take the story’s weak premise—a man born old and aging in reverse toward youth—and assign it to Eric Roth, the screenwriter responsible for Forrest Gump. He pumps it full of lard. Now you’ve got a naïf aging backwards through American history, touching people’s hearts and acquiring cornpone wisdom all over the place from 1918 on up, and by God we’re gonna plod through all of it, the Depression and World War II and Meet the Beatles and all the tiresome changes of costume styles and hairdos and the make-up and CGI work to make Brad Pitt’s Benjamin younger and younger and Cate Blanchett’s Daisy older and older. The moral of the story, see, is “Nothing lasts,” and it’s crueler each time one of the characters says it, because Benjamin and Daisy last and last and last and last and last…

You frame that mess with a story of old Daisy dying in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina is bearing down, and while she waits to kick the bucket, her daughter reads to her from Benjamin’s diary. Why? Because that is hands-down the worst framing device anybody ever came up with, so naturally you’ll return to it many, many times over the course of the crushingly long film. Is she still dying? Is her daughter still reading? Is the hurricane still coming? Check, check, and double-check.

It’s director David Fincher’s perverse accomplishment to make us love and long for Hurricane Katrina. At least it kills off Daisy and ends Benjamin Button’s curious case, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I’d like to report that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button represents the end of an era, one of those turning-points when American movies just have to change because they can’t get any worse. We had one of those epochal shifts back in the mid-1960s when the Hollywood studios kept stubbornly erecting those monumental, overstuffed, weirdly inert celluloid cheesefests like Cleopatra and Hello Dolly! and Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang and the public couldn’t take it anymore and suddenly wanted to watch Easy Rider and Stan Brakhage experimental films instead. The new stuff was often pretty painful too, but at least it hurt in different places.

But nothing’s going to change. The audience for this kind of crap never goes away for long. Sentimental saps come out of screenings of Benjamin Button saying it teaches us all a valuable lesson about mortality, and dreary highbrows come out praising the way the drab, uninvolving, sepia-toned cinematography represents the mediated nature of human memory, and between those two groups we will never, ever be free of ponderously stupid films like this one. It’ll win a bunch of awards and we’ll all limp along till they make Benjamin Button II: The Five Billion People You Meet in Heaven.