So, the Oscars are coming tomorrow, and luckily we can expect a traditional, full-scale televised event, thanks to the recently sort-of resolved writer’s strike. Before, nobody was really sure if the event was going to be some tiny 20-minute handout event that The Golden Globe awards apparently had to do this year. In any case, I’m naturally excited for the award season. This seems like it’s the only award show that for a decent amount of the time gives recognition to movies that actually deserve it (Of course there’s always a big scandal like Crash). It’s like my version of getting excited for the Super Bowl.

Of course, what Oscar ceremony wouldn’t be complete without Dan K. having his opinion published? Here I have made a list of the movies that would be nominated for the awards if I were the nomination committee, followed with commentary. All the films should be eligible for the real Oscars in terms of release date, and they are limited to the movies that I have seen (I’ve seen a lot). I try to be strictly reasonable in terms of artistic quality and merit for acting, but sometimes the fan-boy-ism will ring through and I will decide to nominate something that in a truly serious state I wouldn’t honestly consider to nominate.
(Note, if the movie has an (X), it means it was nominated in the real Oscars).

I am a little disappointed to say that this year there weren’t really any movies that came out and bit me in the butt real hard like The Departed did last year. No film that I consider the best of films really kept me on the edge of my seat in such an intense manner (somehow X-Men 3: The Last Stand last year was successful in that area). I find this a little odd, but I guess we don’t always go to the movies for the suspense.

Into The Wild was the most inspiring movie—not necessarily in the sense that I want to drop out of school, wander across the country, and go die in a bus in Alaska. But, I agreed with the main character’s perspective in which he really didn’t want a moneymaking job. I guess I really do want to drop out of society in some sense. Being in college and all, my intentions aren’t what the average adult patting my back probably assumes. I’m not here to go to the business world to make a lot of money or help countries threat other countries with politics as a translator as people usually suggest. I’m here to just learn a few items and then go dump myself in the jungles of Cambodia or something. So I nominate Into The Wild for heavily tapping my inspiration to the future as a man.

Speaking of Cambodia, Rescue Dawn is the next nominee. My mind’s really looking for an edge-of-the-seat action film and this one will have to be it. I think it captivates the sense of being a war prisoner during the time very well (of course I can’t say I’ve been in it myself). Like the line went, “The jungle is the prison.” The escape creates a really strong urge and it’s all too brief. I’m going to have to shun the person that edited the movie for the DVD though, because the (spoilers) slow motion scene where Crazy Horse gets shot is de-emphasized to normal speed. Boo to those guys, that was my favorite scene.

There Will Be Blood is the top contender here. The film, in an independent filmgoer’s mind, is un-startlingly abstract, and, in my mind, startlingly easy to follow. I don’t think a film has ever done such a great job of emphasizing us with a true business asshole. Johnny Greenwood’s music completes the film’s dark sharp edge, as one should expect. The believable story helps. And, finally, the ending is perfect for it’s two and a half hour duration: debatably incomplete and humorous.

The Coen Brothers didn’t fail one bit sustaining their chi in No Country For Old Men. There is no shortage of awesome characters. We have a great assassin, a charming counter-assassin, and a trailer park protagonist that reminds me of the guy my aunt married and divorced a year later (he’s respectable as a trailer park man). It’s excellent as a chaser film, and I guess puts you near the edge of your seat. Oddly enough, I didn’t find it to strike anywhere deep, emotionally and philosophically, which is odd for the Coen brothers. It’s a realistic kind of movie though, so we can pretend we’re watching the highlights of a real chain of events. That’s my kind of movie.

I’m easily swayed by the points of view in documentaries, so I doubt myself a little for recommending No End In Sight. If you don’t believe me, plenty of other critics have praised it as well. I think it is key to looking back to the mistakes in the Iraq war. There are penetrating interviews with the people who were supposed to be in control of dealing with the Iraq aftermath. You will learn some shocking tidbits about how poorly the looting was handled (that’s the part I found the most bothersome. Nobody of the U.S. guarded the libraries or museums or ammunition, just the oil). Do yourself a favor and see the movie; it’s easily one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. And, we don’t have some pressing opinionated guy like Michael Moore behind the camera as well. I found the narrator to be soft-spoken, and we never see him anyway.

Tommy Lee Jones seems on the verge of acting like a drone in No Country For Old Men, but after seeing him play Two-Face and the quite colorful protagonist in The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada, a movie in practically the same setting as No Country For Old Men, I’m pretty sure he had to at least put some effort into acting like this rusty old man, often lost in thought. He’s a great narrator too, with a voice dry and rocky like the desert made it.

Ryan Gosling is sort of a wild card here. I was scrolling through the list of movies I saw this year and no actor of merit came to mind until I saw Fracture on the list. It’s honestly a decent movie for how much it will be remembered in the future. I think Ryan Gosling can have a big future as a mainstream actor if he keeps going this direction. He has the charm and he’s good at delivering sly bits of humor. Keep an eye on him at least. I read that he thinks his role in the new movie Lars And The Real Girl is the kind of role he thinks closely resembles himself. That movie could possibly be more appropriate for this list if I had seen it.

Critics agree, there’s been a shortage of female roles this year. Most of the actual nominees are from independent films, and Cate Blanchett got nominated twice for two categories, in this category for Elizabeth: The Golden Age (did anybody even see that?).

Ellen Page is the most deserving here. Her career is about to skyrocket all thanks to her well-received critical sense of humor in Juno, the semi-independent movie that’s somehow still playing at movie theaters. Have you seen her serious roles in X-Men 3 or Hard Candy? Her characters seem to like to bring independent pop-culture and namedropping to the big screen so I guess we can expect more middle school kids to start listening to Sonic Youth and Iggy Pop.

Amy Adams wins my nomination just for being oh-so-attractive. Casting her into Enchanted makes it best eye-candy movie Disney has ever released (Take that, Fantasia). She pretty much had a nude scene; it’s a family movie! (By the way, she can act).

The contest is over. Javier Bardem already wins. That is, as long as nobody manages to burn him alive after mistakenly watching Love In The Time Of Cholera. Be prepared to see him wipe Darth Vader off the map in Top Villain lists for his role in No Country For Old Men.

I had a hard time deciding which supporting actor was better in Rescue Dawn: Steve Zahn plays the soft-spoken bearded guy who eventually goes a little cuckoo (The whole time I thought to myself, “snap out of it! You’re almost there!”), and Jeremy Davies play the longhaired, cowardly antagonist who threatens to squeal about the entire escape mission because he doesn’t want to be penalized from release (nobody knows when that’ll be). So, I just picked both. It’s legal after all; Babel last year had two nominations in the female category. Jeremy Davies acts, you know, like he is super high in this movie, and I wonder if he is just like that in real life. In Solaris he’s exactly the same way.

You have to give Ruby Dee the thumbs up for having the only emotional monologue of the year that brought tears to the audience’s eyes (Spider-Man 3’s abject emotional pieces do not count). She played Gangster Denzel’s sweet old south-countryside mother who suffers the victim of living in her son’s criminal inheritances. The scene that won her on this list and hopefully the real award is when she goes all mama on her son for shooting a cop. “She will leave you… I will leave you!” Nothing wrenches a gut like a mom threatening abandonment for your wrongdoings. Excellent performance.

Atonement’s that movie of the year that gets more hype than it’s worth. I was expecting it to be terrible judging from the preview, but it ended up seemly enough. It had a cast of females that reminded me of summertime day-romance, two of them were Saorise Ronan (too young for me) and Kiera Knightly (babe). Kiera Knightly here is just a humorless Elizabeth Swan, so Saorise is ironically the one with more merit (what’s with all these little girl actors getting nominated for awards?). Saorise does a splendid job as a girl who acts like she’s older than she is, only to make mistakes and judgment any girl her true age would make. Coming from a girl who really is this age is moderately impressive.

If any movie impressed me the most this year in terms of directing, I’d have to say it was Knocked Up. It’s the most realistic, non-situational comedy film I’ve ever seen (Well… maybe not more so than Annie Hall). And it strikes a deep nerve too, with the relationships between the characters. The jokes are kept on camera at such an appropriately paced timing; I don’t think they could have made it any funnier. It has quite an epic length for its category too, so there’s plenty of work to show on the screen.

Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers do the same trick in these two desert-themed movies. Both start with a slow, breathing pace and eventually launch into their crazy psychological shenanigans. Both have debatably incomplete endings, though they go out with obviously different tones—There Will Be Blood pushes itself as a black comedy. There’s practically a draw between the skills of these two directors in this year’s competition.

It’s usually an unforgivable sin to tinker with the original plot of the story when changing it into a feature length film. It’s a sin that’s too often committed, at even the most precious of ancient works, such as The Cat In The Hat, which a few years ago was exploited far enough to make its viewers braindead.

But, somehow, Beowulf, this year’s classic turned not-really-like-the-story film, is quite excusable. The old epic story is a bit hard to translate into an actual narrative, as it’s just about a man who fights a beast, fights its mother, and then many years later fights a dragon. The film tries to connect the dots between the first two monsters and the dragon, and the new story effectively fits the manly ego of Beowulf’s character. The script itself is very witty and fresh with ideas. It has much of the adult humor synonymous with Shrek’s, and the “cinematography” guides the “camera” in all the coolest places (it’s an animated film). One of my favorite scenes is when the camera follows the fate of a rat snatched by a raven from the roof of Herot, the loudly chanting mead hall. The raven flies miles away towards the cave of Grendel, the monster greatly suffering from the noise. All the way the camera wisks through tree branches and clouds, and it zooms out with all of the town and surrounding area in view. It’s one of the best pieces of scenery caught in animated film.

While I’ll I’m happy to support Atonement as a nominee for best cinematography, I really hope it doesn’t win. I think the main reason Atonement won the nomination was because of its impressively eventful five-minute single shot sequence of the war-torn French coastal city when our protagonist Robbie looks for the ship back home to England. In this single scene we follow Robbie around the beach, and on the way we see a gigantic crowd of distressed soldiers, horses getting shot to death, a singing choir, and cannons being fired—all of these things we encounter with the camera up close, and there’s a lot going on in the background, like the crazies hanging off the Ferris wheel.

I don’t want this movie to win just because last year Children Of Men didn’t win best cinematography. Children Of Men consisted of several single-shot scenes much like this one, and all of them were busy and loaded with special effects. For Atonement to take the award is to insult the movie that I think inspired its cinematography.

Hot Fuzz had a great, fast, action pace. The scene that best describes my opinion of the movie’s editing is when Simon Pegg runs up toward the old woman sporting the shotgun and kicks her righteously in the face. “Hag.” Think the old lady as the audience and the kick to the face as the movie’s editing. I’ll give it props too for providing a scene that metaphorically represents the entire movie.

The best decision for The Darjeeling Limited was to shoot it in India. That’s half the work for art direction right there. Everything in the movie is beautiful, the train, the churches, the Hindu shrines, the desert, the woman. There’s a great scene too at the end where all the people from the movie are symbolically placed in different compartments in the train, regardless of whether the room they’re in is really part of a train or not. I don’t see why this movie didn’t get a nomination for art direction in the real awards. The Golden Compass was a CGI eyesore; surely they could have put in this movie that slot.

There essentially was no Marie Antoinette or Memoirs Of A Geisha this year. That’s right, not a single overwhelmingly pulchritudinous costume set. I’d most likely hand the award to Atonement, for the all the white, summer-time, romantic garments; or Harry Potter, in which appears that all the girls took a fat Hollywood check to H&M and did the shopping on their own.

Here comes the joke award. This is the chance for critical duds like Norbit and Click to have “Academy Award Winning Picture!” printed on future editions of DVD releases for truly minor achievements in making things look stupid. I guess thanks to Norbit we can look forward to a bright future in fat suits.

Grindhouse receives the best of my recognition for that fruitful minute in “Planet Terror” when the truck mobilizing our heroes plowed through zombies on the road. One moment you swear you saw an actor and then the next second they exploded into a cloud of blood, only clothes and some flat skin remaining on the grill of the truck. It’s about time the Academy recognizes make-up just for it’s gore factor.

People usually complain that there wasn’t enough screen time for the Transformers in Transformers. I think this is the secret to the visual success in the film. If there were machines that big fighting each other, it’d be truly difficult to distinguish what’s going on. To attempt to show every moment of these gigantic machines, and heighten their momentary eventfulness and our understanding would effectively overwhelm the audience. Or at least it would overwhelm me.

Spider-Man 3 made this mistake. They threw more money than ever before into the special effects and produced a movie so rubbery with CGI that I couldn’t stop sinking in my chair in disbelief. Not only did nothing seem like it could actually happen (bounce off two moving subways and fall one hundred feet to the floor and walk away), but nothing even looked close to real. Experiencing movies like this is getting closer to just watching people play PS2 while on speed. There’s no suspense, no imagination, just information that’s 98% unbelievable and it’s flying at you at 3,000 mph.

Thankfully Spider-Man 3 didn’t get nominated.

The achievement of two of these movies is breaking away from the standard expectation of what is achievement. In these times where computer animation has ruled out the old-fashioned 2-D stuff, it’s more fun to enjoy the classical approach. Besides, Aqua Teen and The Simpsons have better stories and imagination—which is far more important than computer graphics—than the animated films that actually did get nominated.

Movies like these I guess are the punk rock of modern animation. We’ll appreciate them more in the future even though they won’t win any awards.

So, there you have my choice nominations and fantasies. I’m about to print my IMDB pretend movie ballot, mark my choices, and highlight the ones I’ve seen. Tomorrow I’ll watch the awards, keep record, and then hang the ballot on my wall to cherish history.