This is going to be an interesting awards season. The most stunning is both Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow getting snubbed in the Academy Award’s best director category for Argo and Zero Dark Thirty respectively, and was especially surprising since Affleck won the best director Golden Globe just four days after the nominations were announced.
What is also interesting is that both of them received Director’s Guild of America nominations, an award that is considered to be very predictive of what happens at the Oscars.
Pundits are now speculating that without Affleck and Bigelow as major competitors and the wide array of movies that won at the Golden Globes, it bodes well for Steven Spielberg and Lincoln at the Oscars.
After his win at the Golden Globes, it looks like Lincoln himself Daniel Day-Lewis is the front runner for best actor with Les Misérable’s Hugh Jackman his greatest threat and Zero Dark Thirty’s Jessica Chastain’s major competition for best actress is Jennifer Lawrence from Silver Linings Playbook.
If you wish to make up your own mind, there are still plenty of opportunities to see the major nominees at local theatres.
Having been released in September, Argo is no longer playing but seven of the nine pictures nominated for best picture are currently playing in the area. Here’s where they are playing and their total nominations:
Lincoln—Twelve nominations (Grand 10 and Landmark 8)
Life of Pi—Eleven nominations (Grand 10)
Les Misérables—8 nominations (Grand 10 andParamount)
Silver Linings Playbook—Eight nominations (Orchard Plaza and Landmark 8)
Zero Dark Thirty—Five nominations (Orchard Plaza and Landmark 8)
Django Unchained—Five nominations (Grand 10 and Landmark 8)
The other best picture nominee is the Austrian film Amour, which is nominated for a total of five Oscars including best foreign language film (and is a shoe-in to win in that category).
I expect we will see it in the Kelowna area in the near future.
***
The Impossible opens at the Paramount Theatre this weekend.
Naomi Watts has its only nomination for best actress but a family’s astonishing real-life drama during Thailand’s 2003 tsunami has received much acclaim.
Best Actress nominee Jessica Chastain also has a new movie opening this weekend. She stars in producer Guillermo del Toro’s (Pan’s Labyrinth) supernatural thriller Mama about two little girls who disappeared into the woods the day that their mother was murdered.
When they are rescued years later and begin a new life, they find that someone or something still wants to come tuck them in at night.
If early reviews are any indication, Schwarzenneger’s first lead role in an action movie since being California’s Governator is very welcome.
In The Last Stand, he plays a small town sheriff who must face his own insecurities as well as the perceived ineptitude of his force when they must confront a drug kingpin who has escaped FBI custody.
And finally, Broken City stars Mark Wahberg as an ex-cop-turned private eye who is thrown into a hotbed of trouble when the mayor (Russell Crowe) hires him to look into his cheating wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones).
