2009 Fangirl Awards!!!

It's that time of year again, AWARDS SEASON AHHHH, and even though I have many issues with what Awards Season has become, nothing changes the fact that I love movies and I love talking about how much I love movies. I also love being a fangirl and talking about how much I love being a fangirl.

SO

I have an idea.

I would like to follow the same schedule as the Academy Awards, with a group of fangirls voting on nominations, then winners, to see what we consider to be the best of the year. Will it differ much from the Academy's opinion? Maybe, maybe not, but why don't we find out?

This is also somewhat inspired by The Film Experience's FilmBitch Awards. I adore @nathanielr and if you aren't reading his site, get on it!

So I'm looking for 50 fangirls. Friends, Tweeps, Friends of Tweeps, anyone - as long as you are a female and consider yourself a fan, I want to hear from you!

If you want to participate: Send your email address to AllThingsFangirl@gmail.com with the subject - I Want To Vote in the Fangirl Awards! or DM me on Twitter @loquaciousmuse with the same info.

Once I have 50 participants (hopefully by Monday), I will explain the rules and everyone will submit their nominations. Nominations will be due around Jan 23nd and announced February 2nd. The categories we'll specifically be going with are:

Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Director, Adap. Screenplay, Orig. Screenplay, Score, Best Chemistry (romantic), Best Chemistry (platonic), World I Want To Return To Most (live action or animated), Best On-screen Animal (live action or animated), Best Voiceover (live action or animated) and more. Feel free to suggest categories! We're gonna have fun with this :),

Update: We may include a category each for Comics, Video Games & Television on the ballot, though the focus will remain movies this year, as it's our first time experimenting with something like this! See full post

Oscar Watch 2009 - An Update

An updated list of the movies I've seen this year, in chronological order, along with a list of what I have left to see before I feel prepared for awards season. Anything I'm missing? Let me know! I'm quite behind this year.

Movies I've seen this year:

He's Just Not That Into You
My Bloody Valentine 3D*
Coraline 3D*
Friday The 13th
Watchmen (x2)
Alien Trespass (x3)
Paper Heart
I Love You, Man
Knowing
Duplicity
The Damned United
Mystery Team*
Adventureland
Earth
Rudo Y Cursi
Moon* (x2)
Wolverine
17 Again*
Star Trek* (x2)
The Brothers Bloom
Terminator: Salvation
Up*
Drag Me To Hell*
A Serious Man*
The Hangover*
Ghosts of Girlfriend Past
The Proposal
Transformers 2: Crap of the Crap
Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince*
500 Days of Summer*
Ninja Assassin
Thirst*
GI Joe*
Time Traveler's Wife
District 9**
Inglourious Basterds **
Taking Woodstock*
The Four Faced Liar*
Zombieland**
Where The Wild Things Are** (x2)
The Invention of Lying
Whip It*
New York, I Love You
Paranormal Activity
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Monsters vs Aliens
Whatever Works*
Fantastic Mr. Fox** (x2)
An Education*
Funny People
Pirate Radio*
The Informant**
The Hurt Locker**
Sherlock Holmes
Me & Orson Welles
Up in the Air*
Avatar**
Nine
The Princess and the Frog**
Bright Star
The Last Station*
Julie & Julia
Crazy Heart*
The Blind Side
The Young Victoria*
Precious

Top ten so far, in no particular order:

Inglorious Basterds, District 9, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess & The Frog, Avatar, Up, The Hurt Locker, The Informant, Where the Wild Things Are, some sort of Zombieland/Thirst/500 Days of Summer/Star Trek situation

What's left:

A Prophet
The Messenger
The Road
9
Bad Lieutenant
Broken Embraces
The Cove
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
Invictus
A Single Man
Lovely Bones
It's Complicated
The White Ribbon See full post

Oscars & The Art Of Influence [Rant]

Disclaimer: This is from the POV of someone (me) who has interacted solely with members of the Academy who are cool, progressive & vote for what they actually love instead of what what many are pressured into voting for by studio campaigns, critics picks & general Oscar prognostication

Let's get something straight here. I LOVE the Oscars. Love. Every year since I was old enough to have an appreciation of movies, I have made a point to see as many Oscar nominated films as possible, every year. This soon evolved into seeing every movie that COULD be nominated for an Oscar, getting the bulk of my viewing in before the Academy released their noms. I like making my top 10 lists, my top 25 lists and up until this year, my top 5 list, which has always taken careful thought & lots of deliberation, mostly due to having to fight against the influence of Golden Globe winners, Critics choices, etc. My #1 movie of 2005 was Shaun of the Dead. My top five last year consisted of a Swedish Vampire movie & a British movie about a genuinely happy woman from one of my least favorite directors of all time. In 2001, my top 5 was Lord of the Rings and 4 movies that began with the letter M, that are also all considered genre flicks in my book. I've never appreciated being told what to like by critics, but this year, I feel a line is being crossed...

See, every year, the internet gets bigger, but smaller at the same time. More and more blogs get recognition, more sites become well known, more bloggers are invited to screenings, earlier and earlier, so the word gets out sooner and sooner. Opinions are instantly formed and blasted across Twitter and within hours, we have a new front-runner.

Take the past two days. Thursday night my Twitter exploded with 140 character reviews of Avatar, which screened for press for the first time that evening. They were all GLOWING, (save for the seemingly universal thought that the dialogue sucks and the story could have been slightly better) and by Friday morning there were blog posts galore positing that Avatar had a chance not only of being nominated for Best Picture, but winning. That's funny, cause you know who HASN'T seen Avatar yet? ACADEMY MEMBERS.

The rest after the jump

Let's take a look at the Up in the Air, the so called front runner to win Best Picture right now. In December. For weeks, if not months, I've been hearing that this is the movie to beat, it's fantastic, amazing performances, etc etc. But...Paramount only sent the film out to Academy members YESTERDAY. So now, members remotely connected to the Internet at all are going into this movie with incredibly high expectations and perhaps with a bit of a chip on their shoulders. Instead of getting to discover this gem for themselves, they are acutely aware that they are watching the front runner...for the awards THEY nominate. A film that was considered a front-runner before it even opened in theaters or had a single screening for the Academy. Does something not seem off here?

This just adds fuel to the fire that's been steadily rising in my universe of Oscar prognostication. I used to have so much fun guessing the Oscar nominations, but a lot of that fun has been taken away, a little more, year by year, by not only Internet influence, but Critic's Awards.

Children of Men (and frankly, Shaun of the Dead) is now highly regarded as one of the best films of the decade, yet was hardly recognized at the Oscars. I credit this with the fact that it hadn't appeared on any other Critic's list, so what chance did it have? ::Also, Universal, grumble grumble:: Academy members thought, "Oh, it's not on anyone else's best list, so I guess I don't have to watch it" meanwhile, those who DID watch it, had it in their #1 nominating slot. Jennifer Hudson said some lines and sang a song well and because all the other Critics chose her, the Academy certainly had to, right? I'm so sick of this direction the Oscars are heading, where they simply fill in what was outlined by everyone else who didn't work their asses off in this industry to make it into the Academy. (No offense to us bloggers & you critics, you've worked incredibly hard to get where you are, I'm simply saying the Academy should get to do the job they were voted in the Academy to do and that's becoming increasingly difficult.)

Don't get me wrong, politics have been playing a huge role in the Oscars for a long time, especially in the 21st century (Julia Roberts over Ellen Burstyn, anyone?), but we're almost to a place of no return. Up in the Air is officially fucked. Either it's been way too hyped up and a movie that could have taken every Academy member by surprise is swept under the rug as "overrated" or it goes on to win Best Picture and once again, the Oscars are grossly predictable and the new 10 movie nominating format has done nothing.

Ah hah. But there IS something changing this year. The Academy saw what was happening and decided to get old school in an attempt to defy the new school. 10 nominees. If you look at the Best Pic nominees of this decade, they all consist of the following: the epic, the indie fav, the biopic, the musical, the period piece/British fare, the arty farty, the scorsese/eastwood/spielberg or a double up like last years Milk Frost/Nixon double bio pic snooze fest (Sidenote: I enjoyed both films). Now take a look at the 90s - the films DO NOT follow this format to a tee, often the nominees may GASP actually have been the best of the year. In the 2009 Oscars, as we enter a new decade, I'm hoping we may see a marriage of the aughts and the 90s in the Best Pic nominees...sure, there will still be at least 5 noms that are selected out of guilt, or being cornered, or politics, but what if there are also 5 that are ACTUALLY favorites?! Perhaps an animated movie or two! A non-epic genre movie or two! The best romantic comedy in years?! God forbid, a movie directed by a woman?! Movies based on children's books?! A doc about an aging metal group?! A brilliantly disturbing Korean vampire movie?! Okay, maybe I'm aiming too high bringing Thirst into the picture, but you get what I mean.

If you think I'm way off base here, please comment below. I've just been having lots of thoughts on the matter lately so I thought I'd throw them out to you loyal readers & see what you think. There are tons of holes in my argument, I'm sure, I'm not going for an air tight dissection of the movie industry here, just looking to encourage thought & discussion.

And hey, just for fun, if we follow the format this decade has set up for us, the top 5 would be:

Invictus (Eastwood/Biopic. Haven't seen yet)
Up in the Air (Indie fav. Haven't seen yet)
Nine (Musical/Epic. Haven't seen yet)
An Education (British Period Piece - 60s counts!. Seen, loved)
A Serious Man (Arty farty. Seen, loved)

....boring, right? Can you think of some other boring mix a 2009 top 5 would bring us, using those categories?

What other categories do you think the aughts were prone to? War movies? Message movies? World War 2/Holocaust specific movies? Which years in the aughts are the exceptions that prove the rule? Was 1994 the best top 5 ever nominated?

Please comment below. Very interested in your thoughts.

Update 12/15 And then there are times when the buzz sets up a scenario that I would DIE to see - check out Erik Lundegaard's tally and check out who is sweeping the Best Director category. It's time for a woman to win Best Director and since in my opinion, based on what I've seen so far this year, she IS the best director, things are looking good. Almost makes me want Cameron to be nominated too, just so he can lose to his ex-wife.
See full post

Academy Watch, Movie #1 - Whatever Works

This week marked the beginning of Academy Movie Watching.

Every year from November to February, we get sent every movie being considered for an Oscar because one of my immediate family members is a voting member of AMPAS.

This year, I am gonna chronicle every Academy movie I see.

First up, Woody Allen's Whatever Works


This is the second year in a row where one of Allen's films has immediately become one of my favorites of the year. The overall reviews of Whatever Works say bizarrely disparaging things about the movie that I didn't find to be the case at all. "Medieval torture?" "Complete failure?" "Stepped in dog doo-doo but doesn't know it?" Did half the critics at Rotten Tomatoes see the same movie I did?

The moment Whatever Works began, I was laughing my face off. Larry David & Evan Rachel Wood play off each other beautifully in what is by far her best work to date. Somehow she managed to look utterly unlike herself & deliver a joyful performance I had no clue she could pull off so seamlessly. The film had a very theatrical sense about it - I can easily imagine a staged production. That quality, hated by many critics, actually made it easier to go along with the far-fetched, but nevertheless delightful, story.

Maybe it's because my entire family relates to Larry David's curmudgeonly Boris or because we all are quite familiar with the seductive, freeing nature of New York City, but we were with the movie 200%. It's movies like this that make me question my habit of deciding whether or not I see a movie based on its Rotten Tomatoes score and grateful that we have an AMPAS member in our midst forcing us to see every film sent our way.

Whatever Works: My heart says A-, my head says B+

Possible Oscar Nominations:
Best Original Screenplay See full post