Rocky isn’t a comedy, and isn’t really even an action movie.
I will give the Academy some credit; they are very willing to give awards to less popular stuff. The Grammy Award for Best Album usually goes to a very popular mainstream artist, something inoffensive that sells well. Four years in five they give it to the musical equivalent of Top Gun Maverick. The Oscars, though, just haven’t been doing that at all:
2023: Everything Everywhere All At Once
2022: CODA
2021: Nomandland
2020: Parasite
2019: Green Book
2018: Shape of Water
2017: Moonlight
2016: Spotlight
2015: Birdman
2014: 12 Years A Slave
2013: Argo
2012: The Artist
So on and so forth; they don’t always get it right, IMHO, but they are totally willing to give it to pictures clearly chosen for quality, not popularity, like Moonlight (IMHO the greatest movie of the last ten years.)
The last real blockbuster that won was Return of the King twenty years ago, which in my opinion is the WORST winner in my lifetime.
It’s to their credit they do try to find the best movie.
It’s easy to forget how good Rocky is. The sequels make it easy to forget that the first movie is a well written character study with a fight at the end. He basically became a superhero later. The whole point of the first movie is he’s a bum, but a bum who refuses to go down. There is no way that Rocky should have been a champion. I enjoyed most of the sequels for what they are but it might as well be a completely different character.
Wow, are we different(which is OK!). I did not like Moonlight, at least not past the opening chunk where he is a child, which I did rather like. Looking at that list since 2012, I’d say the following are really good movies:
Everything, Everywhere <—excellent!
Parasite <—probably the best overall winner of the bunch
Note: I have not seen Nomandland, Green Book, or The Artist. The others I did not list above I thought were OK at best. None terrible that I’ve seen.
Apparently that Hugh Grant interview on the red carpet was the subject of much discussion on the internet. She was giving the typical Hollywood red carpet interview (What is the name of the designer for your clothing?) while he was being British in his modesty.
It was just on in the background when I was reading something on my phone, and I immediately caught his vibe and my ears perked up: oh, shit, he gonna go full-on British understated snark (basically, “taking the piss”) with these vacuous questions isn’t he? And he did not disappoint. The eye roll at the end was the topping on the cake.
Most are excellent movies and I recommend them. “Shape of Water” is honestly a stupid movie that has not aged well, but it does try to be original so who knows. “Green Book” is cliche and changes history, but it isn’t a bad movie.
That’s a really good one. Even more extreme, actually; the first movie didn’t even have “Rambo” in the title. It was a serious and sad film. The protagonist ends the movie a broken human being headed inevitably for prison; it has no winners. The sequel was 80’s action junk. “First Blood” and “Rambo: First Blood Part II” were about as similar as “The Godfather” and “Jack and Jill,” both of which had Al Pacino in them.
The second and third highest grossing movies in the USA in 1985 were “Rambo: First Blood Part II” and “Rocky IV.”
I thought EEAAO was OK but it could have been so much better. An interesting premise and some fine performances but let down by the kungfu/metaverse sequences which just became increasingly silly and overstuffed. By the end I would have just preferred a straight up drama about an immigrant family and their laundromat.
I would compare it with Pixar’s Inside Out which has a similar premise of a family drama alongside a complicated alternate universe. But in Inside Out that universe is brilliantly imagined and thought out whereas the EEAAO multiverse is just an incoherent mess.
Modest? I thought he was being insulting to Ashley Graham. Don’t stop and be interviewed if you want to crap on the process. By this time in his life, he knows what the process is. He made me feel bad for Graham (who I have no feelings for otherwise), and I thought he was a jerk. Just walk on by. Wave, maybe.
No, I agree he was rude. It’s not like this was his first appearance at the Academy Awards; he’s been working in Hollywood for at least three decades, so he should know what to expect and those questions are part of the game.
No, I don’t like rudeness per se, but I can understand celebrities/sports stars getting annoyed endlessly by the same old stupid/vapid questions and once in a while answering accordingly.
