I try to see all the movies nominated for Oscars in all the categories. I haven’t yet done that yet, but I’ve come close. The only movies left to see nominated for some Oscar this year are these:
At Eternity’s Gate
First Reformed
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Border
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Minding the Gap
Of Fathers and Sons
Incredibles 2
Mirai
Never Look Away
Avengers: Infinity War
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Black Sheep
End Game
Lifeboat
A Night at the Garden
Period. End of Sentence.
I will be seeing a lot of them before the Oscars. I liked particularly this year Widows, A Star is Born, A Quiet Place, *Paddington *2, and Tully.
I just saw the documentary shorts. I will be seeing the three full-length documentaries I haven’t seen yet next weekend. That means that I will only need to see these to see everything nominated for some Oscar:
At Eternity’s Gate
First Reformed
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Border
Incredibles 2
Mirai
Never Look Away
Avengers: Infinity War
Solo: A Star Wars Story
I’ve seen every single film nominated for an Oscar (including all 15 shorts) except for:
At Eternity’ Gate
Mirai
Capernaum
I started watching the doc “Hale County” last night and it was so incredibly boring I turned it off after 15 mins. Maybe I’ll try again.
O.K., as of the Oscars ceremonies, I will have seen everything nominated in every category except the following:
At Eternity’s Gate
First Reformed
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Border
Incredibles 2
Mirai
Avengers: Infinity War
Solo: A Star Wars Story
I saw all the Shorts, Never Look Away and First Reformed so now I’ve seen everything (in the theater) except
Hale County
RGB
Of Fathers and Sons
Usually it’s the Foreign-language films that kill me, this year it’s the documentary features. I don’t even think Hale County opened in Chicago. I never saw that it played except once during a documentary festival that one theater had, and they played it at 4:00pm on a Tuesday, when I was at work. I had the opposite problem with RGB. It played in several different theaters for weeks and I took it for granted that I’d see it at some point, but then, it was gone and I had missed my chance. I knew precisely when Of Fathers and Sons played, but I read a synopsis and thought Nope, don’t wanna see that. So of course it was nominated.
I think Minding the Gap will win anyway. We’ll see.
Updating my list of 2018 movies I have seen.
Ranked in order, best to worst:
Roma
Leave No Trace
A Star is Born
Eighth Grade
Won’t You Be My Neighbor
The Wife
Green Book
Three Identical Strangers
BlacKKKlansman
Tully
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Beautiful Boy
First Reformed
Vice
Black Panther
Crazy Rich Asians
mmm
I went to a local theater that’s showing movies from 2018 that people might have missed, so I’ve now seen At Eternity’s Gate and Mirai. That means that the following are the only Oscar-nominated films in all categories that I haven’t seen:
First Reformed
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Border
Incredibles 2
Avengers: Infinity War
Solo: A Star Wars Story
At the showing of At Eternity’s Gate something strange happened. It’s a movie about Vincent Van Gogh. As the film began, I think a lot of us in the audience thought, “Look, I know that Van Gogh was an artist, but the filmmakers are making a really weird artistic choice. Why are all the camera shots close-ups? Why is the film concentrating so much on small parts of the background?” Gradually those of us in the audience realized that what had happened was that someone in the projection booth had set the aspect ratio wrong for the film. We were only seeing a little less than half of the area of what was supposed to be shown on the screen. Finally enough people went out and complained to theater people to get them to do something. They stopped the movie about ten minutes into it and restarted it from the beginning with the right aspect ratio. Afterwards, I told people around me that I was going to start a new school of filmmakers. We would take old films and cut them down to just a single small rectangle of what was to be shown on the screen. We would then weave together the rectangles to make a complete film. We’d do the same thing with the dialog. We would be the quilting school of cinema.