With the Academy Awards finally taking place tomorrow (can you believe that for a long time they were regularly held in April?), there wasn’t a whole lot going on this week around the movie blogosphere except Oscar predictions and guides and other fun Oscar-related content. There was a spot of news here and there, maybe a review of one of The Rock’s billion films coming out this year, but mostly we and other sites have just been posting stories about Hollywood’s biggest night.
So, this week’s Reject Recap is solely devoted to the Oscars, a mix of our own features and great stuff we found elsewhere around the web.
Cat and Dog Pick the Oscar Winners
Sure, we’ve been posting our own predictions throughout the week, and we’ll have all those compiled later today for you. Mixed in there, though, we also shared predictions from a cat and a dog, both of them named Oscar. It was scientific, obviously: “Who says that cats and dogs can’t get along? Oscar the cat and Oscar the dog agreed on the following Academy Awards picks: Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Best Supporting Actor (Alan Arkin) and… Yup, that’s it. Wow, you’d think we were just going totally random with our pet-picked Oscar winners. Wild stuff.”
Nate Silver Picks the Oscar Winners
If you want something a little more scientific, celebrated statistician Nate Silver did some computing at the New York Times while making a few comparisons between the Oscars and the presidential race. He offered the following chances for an upset for the top prize: “‘Lincoln,’ once considered the front-runner, has been nominated for almost every best picture award but won none of them. Counting on a comeback would be a bit like expecting Rudolph W. Giuliani to have resurrected his campaign in Florida in 2008 after finishing in sixth place everywhere else.”
What Would Win the Academy Award for Best Stunts?
Among our predictions of actual Oscar winners, we also explored the idea of a Best Stunt Coordinator category, which many movie fans wish existed. Ed selected the logical nominees representing five deserving films (Argo, The Raid: Redemption, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall) and chose the following winner: “Eka “Piranha” Rahmadia, Esa W. Sie, and Yandi “Piranha” Sutsina for The Raid… I don’t know if the studio system could ever really craft a film like The Raid. These Stunt Coordinators were responsible for choreographing and organizing probably 85% of the screen time. That is how much action is packed into this film. And when you add actors who are doing their own stunts and minimal-to-no CGI work, a film like this simply takes an enormous amount of time to shoot. And who knows if Hollywood can ever afford to take a page out of these filmmakers’ book. But I vote that they try. Rahmadia, Sie and Sutsina created an action masterpiece, and what they lacked in scope and budget they more than made up for in brilliant choreography, staging, and brutality.”
More on action movies:
Dying Hard: Will Hollywood Action Movies Evolve or Become Extinct?
Argo is All About 9/11?
In this week’s Commentary Commentary, devoted to Argo, Rob listed out 20 things learned from the Best Picture frontrunner’s Blu-ray commentary track, and one of the most notable bits is what Ben Affleck says about what the film has to do with 9/11: “A brief shot of a NYC poster on the wall was an intentional choice as Affleck explains it is ‘the briefest homage to 9/11 there… the notion that all of this stuff led to further events that were all part of the cycle that led to 9/11.’”
More on Affleck:
Watch Ben Affleck’s Embarrassing Directorial Debut from 1993
Do the Oscars Make You Hate the Nominated Movies?
Our friend Matt Singer makes another appearance at the Recap this week with a worthwhile discussion of Oscar season’s effect on a nominated film’s favor, looking specifically at the Best Picture frontrunner. He wrote: “I can’t blame people who are ready to tell Affleck and company to “Argo” fuck themselves. We’ve been talking about and giving awards to this movie for five straight months. It wears you down. By late February, following these endless Oscar campaigns begins to feel like drinking the last sips of a bottle of scotch you chugged in one sitting. Sure, it tasted great at the beginning. But now you’re nauseous and exhausted and the last thing you want is more scotch. You start to hate the movies the Oscars are supposed to be here to honor.”
Kids Reenact the Best Picture Nominees