It’s been interesting this week gauging reaction to the Oscar nominees.

The first bit that gets me is all of the preconceptions. If I had a dollar for every time this week I heard “I haven’t seen it, but…”, I’d  have had a pretty capital week. Yes, it is entirely possible – maybe even likely – that your preconceptions are correct, and that a film you haven’t seen isn’t for you. However, I must remind people of  question I ask every returning Matineecast guest: “What’s a film you love that everyone else dislikes?”. For all you know folks, EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE is your new favorite movie.

The other quirk, which goes hand-in-hand with the previous one, is people deciding what they want to do in terms of watching nominated films. For my money, I focus on acting, directing, picture, and writing (with tendencies to trickle over into docs and foreign). My advice? If nothing else, track down the nine Best Picture nominees. I’ve seen eight of ’em and they’re all pretty solid. Now of course you don’t have to follow my suggestion (Simon), but in the past it has pushed me towards titles I otherwise might have missed out on like ANOTHER YEAR, MARIA FULL OF GRACE, and MATCH POINT.

For your listening and reading fulfillment, I give you…

First things first – Sebastian is a man about town at Sundance, and is making this sometimes festival correspondent proud. Check out his dispatches.

The podcast choice this week was an easy pull – Viva Simon and Jo!!!

A new site I’ve started following is my pick for Oscar nomination wrap-up. Check out All Eyes On the Screen and Kristin’s take on the good, bad, and weird nominees.

Jess is on her Oscar bender again this year. Yesterday she tackled last year’s winner of Best Foreign Film, which brought me a particular smile since that meant she’d watched a dvd I sent her.

Speaking of Oscar, Stevee has a review up of a Best Picture nominee, and I’ve been waiting for three months to get her take. She doesn’t disappoint. (Sidenote – I love what she’s done with her site).

Then there’s Darren, the Dubliner who examines how accurate a particular footchase in HAYWIRE is from a local’s point of view.

Speaking of HAYWIRE, it inspires the Tweet of The Week from the Forager herself:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/filmforager/status/162308054883368960″]

14 Replies to “Everybody’s Talkin’ 1 – 27 (Chatter from Other Bloggers)”

  1. I think you make a very quality point about preconceptions with films.

    That said, I look at “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” as being the same as the “Transformers” films. Most of the time you don’t know whether or not a film will be good, but on very specific occasions you just do.

  2. Thanks for the mention, Ryan! I appreciate that. I really look forward to keeping up with your writing as well. You seem to have a large knowledge base and an open mind, two very appreciated qualities for being a movie blogger 🙂

    I would completely agree with the preconceptions remark, considering that I am one of those people, haha. You have a good point. So I’m going to see EL&IC and find out whether I was completely off base or ended up being right, and then give a full report. I do like that you mentioned that often we all have a film that isn’t popular by mass appeal, but we love it. Good point.

    1. You’re welcome for the mention – I like what you’ve got going at AEOS.

      I make my own preconceptions, so I’m no saint either. It just felt like there was a lot of griping last week swirling around things that people hadn’t seen. Once you’ve seen EL&IC, I look forward to reading your rant about how right you were on its awfulness.

  3. Ha ha! Thanks for the link! I don’t think you need to advertise how we should watch all the Oscar contenders – that is indeed the point of all the adverts/tags saying “blah blah NOMINEE”. But don’t you think other than THE ARTIST, aren’t all the films American. Pretty good for a market which has dipped recently to have awards that help only themselves … eh?

    1. Now now, let’s not gripe too much about how American Oscar is. I too would love for them to be a celebration of the world’s films, but that’s not the way they’ve ever worked. Look at the bright side, at least over the last ten years screenplays and actors from foreign language films have been joining the fray, even if the films they are in aren’t up for best picture.

      Let me ask you this: Without specifying what you do or don’t want to see, which films in the top eight categories haven’t you seen?

  5. You’ve been waiting three months for my take on that horse movie that hardly anyone likes? Thanks! I’m glad it didn’t disappoint (even though it was so personal – I think I was in tears while writing it, haha).

    And I’m glad you like what I’ve done with the site! I always like doing something different and I’m really happy with the way it turned out.

    As for the Oscar nominees, I’ve seen six (which is better than I usually do at this point in time). I’ll see Moneyball when it comes out in cinemas here in four weeks (not joking), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close if I absolutely have to when it comes out in just under a month, and The Artist if it *ever* comes to a cinema near me. Which it probably won’t 🙁

    1. Sure! When you ran that personal post up the flagpole I could tell that you were going to craft something that went a little deeper than most. Your comment on my review of it confirmed it.

      Which reminds me, I still need to leave a comment on yours…

    1. Anytime – I’ve been rather impressed so far because you’ve been choosing several titles that even I haven’t seen. Hope you’re enjoying the syllabus!

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