a blog about a lot of things

Best Picture Most likely winner :  Alejandro Gonzalez  Iñárritu,  Arnon Milchan ,  Steve Golin ,   Mary Parent ,  Keith Redmon   for   The Revenant.   A chance for  Iñárritu to win back to back Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for this superb revenge film. Heavily carried by the strength of Leonardo DiCaprio's performance set against beautiful backdrops of Western Canada, the film seems to tread a path of literary stature in the tale of struggle and vengeance. Backup Pick :  Brad Pitt ,  Dede Gardner , and  Jeremy Kleiner  for  The Big Short .   Hard to adapt to screen with a sprawling cast and disparate stories, directed by a director taking his first foray into more dramatic material. Comedy-drama is a hard field to stand out in and do successfully because of the conflict of these two styles and they can seem to detract from each other (comedy taking away from the seriousness, primarily). B...

Rome is a cliché. Usually that isn’t a good thing but when the cliché is that a city is cool, full of life and gorgeous, the clichés can stay. Rome is possibly the only European capital that can claim to rival Paris in the popular imagination in terms of having an expectation around it. Even Paris is now succumbing to parallel narratives due to the sheer size of the city (much like London), with the immigrant experience less of an unknown story (to non-immigrants anyway. Immigrants always knew it wasn’t cities paved with gold they’d find). Some combination of smaller population, less immigration and the weight of centuries of civilization being still visible across the city has allowed Rome to actually deserve the tag of “The Eternal City”.   My idea of Rome comes to me primarily from Italian films of the 1960s. Rome is black and white in my mind just as it is on Fellini’s film reel. I had low expectations. Months in London had allowed cynicism to set in...

Best Actor Most Likely Winner: Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass in Revenant. Might actually be the year for DiCaprio to get his Oscar. They might have to change the memes about always missing out (or bring out lots more if he does). A prominent role where DiCaprio gets to play a man going through pain and torture and fuelled by vengeance. Completely different from his more heralded roles as rich playboys in The Aviator and Wolf of Wall Street. Details of the harrowing filming conditions and the difficulty in portraying the part will surely also play in Dicaprio's favour as well. But the strength of the performance of a frenzied man is what would win him the Oscar.   Backup Pick:  Eddie Redmayne as Lili Elbe/Einar Wegenar in The Danish Girl. It's a cliche that an actress must make herself look unattractive to have a better chance at an Oscar (Charlize Theron in Monster, Nicole Kidman in The Hours) . I'm not sure how the case of Eddie Redmayne looking stunning as Li...