82nd Academy Awards Blogathon: Best Visual Effects

Avatar, District 9, Star Trek

… Does anything really need to be said about this category?

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82nd Academy Awards Blogathon: Best Original Score

Avatar, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Hurt Locker, Sherlock Holmes, Up

Musical scores can both make (Psycho, Jaws) or break (anything of Michael Bay’s) a film. They can add a sense of spine tingling suspense or yank those tears right out of the toughest of people. A great score compliments a film like a great white wine does to a helping of exquisite salmon.  Sorry, I’m hungry. The musical accompaniments we have this year range from the whimsical to the adventurous, and everything in between.

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82nd Academy Awards Blogathon: Best Animated Feature

Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog, The Secret of Kells, Up

Each year I’ve been more and more pleasantly surprised than the year previous for the quality of the nominees in this category. It fills me with so much happiness that animated films are starting to be regarded as highly as any other type of film.

Pixar has a stranglehold on this category, but perhaps soon we shall see something step up to their level. Up is, for me, the best film of the year, so no doubt it’s my pick for Best Animated Feature. It has probably one of the strongest openings of any film, maybe ever. It has a sense of adventure that I hadn’t felt since I saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in the theaters twenty years previous. On top of that, it’s almost as risky as 2008’s Wall-E, setting an elderly man as it’s main character/action hero.

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82nd Academy Awards Blogathon: Best Editing

Avatar, District 9, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious

Editing is a very vague concept to general audiences, and for good reason. The best editing doesn’t draw attention to itself, if it did, you’d be completely aware that you’re watching a film at all times. Well, by that standard, how does one differentiate what should be nominated and what shouldn’t?

More than any other aspect of filmmaking, editing is the most definitive thing about movies as an art form. It’s the way in which images are juxtaposed in order to create a story.  And just like any other aspect of films, some editing is more exemplary than others.

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82nd Academy Awards Blogathon: Best Cinematography

Mauro Fiore – Avatar, Christian Berger - The White Ribbon, Bruno Delbonnel - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Barry Ackroyd - The Hurt Locker, Robert Richardson - Inglourious Basterds

Cinematography is the first category in a bucketful that general viewers of the Academy Awards doesn’t fully understand or at least care about. Or perhaps that was only me years ago before I fully appreciated all aspects of filmmaking.  At any rate, cinematography is a gorgeous thing and should be embraced as such.

Designing the look of a film is as much as part of the storytelling as any other aspect of filmmaking. From the lenses to the lighting, everything contributes to the whole story in more ways than you might be aware. What would The Godfather have been like if Gordon Willis had filmed it with the studio gloss of The Bucket List? Well, it wouldn’t be The Godfather, that’s for sure.

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82nd Academy Awards Blogathon: Best Adapted Screenplay

Nick Hornby – An Education, Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tachell – District 9, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci & Tony Roche – In the Loop, Geoffrey Fletcher – Precious, Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner – Up in the Air

What we have this year is a break in a tradition that’s been going on for the last three or four years which is that the Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay categories have gone hand in hand. Slumdog Millionaire, No Country For Old Men, The Departed have all won simultaneously for both categories, and before that Crash won for Best Original Screenplay, (with Brokeback Mountain winning Adapted… for those of you who believe in an alternate history of the Oscars.)

This year, the two main contenders for Best Picture (Avatar and The Hurt Locker) are both original screenplays, and only one of them was worth the Oscar nom.  Instead we have a slew of the other Best Picture nominees nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, (“other” meaning great films that unfortunately for one reason or another lack the buzz of Avatar and The Hurt Locker.) And with so many great scripts in the running, it’s anyone’s guess who’ll take the win.

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82nd Academy Awards Blogathon: Best Original Screenplay

Ethan & Joel Coen – A Serious Man, Quentin Tarantino – Inglourious Basterds, Mark Boal – The Hurt Locker, Alessandro Camon & Oren Moverman – The Messenger, Bob Peterson, Pete Docter & Thomas McCarthy – Up

Naturally, as a writer, I’ve always been most intrigued by the screenplay categories. Quite often I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the winners of Original Screenplay, (Juno, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Miss Sunshine.) This year proves to be an interesting year.

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