Oscars: 2017 Best Picture nominees - ongoing tracking thread of which of the films you have seen

Cafe Society
41

This is a really interesting point, and something that I’ve always kind of thought intuitively but you’ve put it into words better than I could.

I think the best writing and acting have largely migrated to television. I shouldn’t even say “television”, since Netflix is not television. The word is becoming obsolete. I really should just say “the series format.” The series format is now also where the “middlebrow” stuff is. There are many shows that are in the “pretty good, not groundbreaking, but entertaining and well-acted” category. Decades ago these would have been standalone movies. Now they’re shows.

42

And now it appears that Loveless will open at a local movie theater before the Oscars, so now I’m down to these that I haven’t seen and apparently won’t see before the Oscars:

Roman J. Israel, Esq.
Strong Island
Last Men in Aleppo
Marshall
War for the Planet of the Apes
Kong: Skull Island

astorian, you exaggerate when you say that Hollywood doesn’t make middlebrow movies. What about Downsizing, Get Out, The Birth of a Nation, Split, Lucky, Good Time, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Meyerowitz Stories, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, The Lost City of Z, Lady Bird, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Columbus, Marjorie Prime, Wormwood, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, I, Tonya, The Shape of Water, The Disaster Artist, The Greatest Showman, The Big Sick, The Zookeeper’s Wife, Gifted, The Dinner, Wonder Wheel, and Wonderstruck, for instance, just in 2017? There’s a lot more of them that I could list if I wanted to spend enough time. I suspect you have some weird definitions of the terms “Hollywood” and “middlebrow”.

43

I’m done. This was my last year seeing all the nominees.

44

Elaborate, please?
mmm

45

Have seen, in order of preference:
The Shape of Water - Really really liked
Lady Bird - Liked a lot
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Well done, but not LIKED liked
Dunkirk - Missing something, can’t put my finger on it
Darkest Hour - Conventionally good UK period stuff

Have not seen, in order of desire to see:
Get Out - Can’t believe I didn’t catch this when it came out
Phantom Thread - Always like DDL, but I find PTA films to be tiresome, and the older man younger woman thing? Again?
Call Me by Your Name - Somehow I’m resistant to seeing this
The Post - No desire to see

46

This is actually only my sixth year in a row seeing all the Best Picture Oscar nominees, so it hasn’t really been that long since I’ve decided to see all of them before the ceremonies (and the Oscars party I go to each year).

47

I feel the same way about Phantom Thread and CMBYN.

Dunkirk: I read someone else’s critique (possibly here) that it completely fails to capture the scope of what happened. You never get the impression that there are 300,000 men and thousands of vehicles stuck on that beach, or that there was an armada of small craft coming to rescue them. It feels too small.

3 Billboards: I liked it; I was moved; but in hindsight I think it has real problems with plot. (Without giving away too much) the sheriff’s letters seem way too pat and contrived and tidy. And there are 2 violent crimes committed that the authorities seem uninterested in pursuing.

48

I’ve seen a couple more since my last post. Here are my preferences in order:

Get Out
The Shape of Water
Ladybird
Dunkirk
The Post
Phantom Thread

I’m still hoping to see Billboards this weekend, but I don’t think CMBYN or Darkest Hour are still playing anywhere around; they may not be doable.

49

Darkest Hour is available via streaming, now. It’s not cheap since you can only buy it, rather than renting it, but it’s still likely cheaper than a trip to the theater if there are more than one of you watching.

No such luck with CMBYN.

50

Darkest Hour **½
Dunkirk *
Get Out **¼
Lady Bird **
The Post **¾
The Shape of Water *
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri *½

Not Seen:
Call Me by Your Name
Phantom Thread

51

I was unimpressed with Dunkirk. The beginning was promising, and the cinematography was excellent, but It made it seem like the rescue was done by about a dozen boats. That ruined it for me. There was a damned fine story there that was missed entirely.

While I thought John Lithgow was an excellent Winston Churchill, and I’m a big Lithgow fan, Gary Oldman’s Chruchill in The Darkest Hour was even better. A lot of people complained about the subway scene, but it didn’t ruin the movie for me.

I also thought The Post was excellent. It didn’t come off as a documentary to me but took a fresh look at the newspaper industry in the days leading up to Watergate. In another thread, someone was disappointed it wasn’t All the President’s Men, but that story’s been done. Streep was excellent, Hanks was very good, and the movie’s message–journalistic integrity–was pretty timely.

I have yet to see The Shape of Water but have heard it’s superb.

Of the three I’ve seen:

  1. The Post
  2. The Darkest Hour
  3. Dunkirk
52

We just saw The Florida Project (on demand) – excellent. (Willem DeFoe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.)

53

Busy weekend. Added to the list:

Darkest Hour: excellent. Classic inspirational biopic, Gary Oldman an Oscar shoo-in.
Phantom Thread: for the first hour, I was thinking that I was enjoying this more than I expected. Then the plot made a right-turn and ran into a ditch and kept going for another hour.

My rankings of the 7 I’ve seen:

  1. Lady Bird
  2. Darkest Hour
  3. Get Out
  4. The Post
  5. Three Billboards
  6. Dunkirk
  7. Phantom Thread
54

Have Seen (in order of appreciation)

**Lady Bird: **I thought this was a wonderful character study. Laurie Metcalf is stellar.

The Post: It’s good, not great. Streep is outstanding. Hanks is fine. The story is good. A little too Hollywoody, but it’s good.

Darkest Hour: This works well and Oldman did a great job. It’s interesting that it covers some of the same ground as Dunkirk from a completely different perspective (though neither of them really look at the events head-on. Which is fine, nothing says they have to do that!)

**Phantom Thread: **It’s well done, but I hated every character and it felt long.

Dunkirk: God, I hate war movies.
Will see

Call Me by Your Name

Won’t see

Get Out
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

55

We’re in our week of watching all the movies. So far:

GET OUT

A stellar movie. high level of craftsmanship, with the small quibble that whatshisname, the white brother, is a useless character. Get Out is a hell of a thriller hat managed to combine a solid horror movie with a smart commentary on how black people are afraid of white people. It isn’t otherwise the most ambitious movie ever made, but it does what it sets out to do more or less perfectly.

THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

On the offchance this wins Best Picture, I’ll come out and say it; it will be one of the worst movies to ever win the award, if not THE worst. I was shocked at how poorly conceived it was, how uneven the tone was, how uninspired the direction was. The ending is preposterous, the characters nonsensical, and the costing choice of Abbie Cornish was… uh, terrible. I could write a 1000-word post on why I disliked ths movie.

THE SHAPE OF WATER

It was better than Three Billboards.

After I watched this I read a bunch of review on Rotten Tomatoes. Fifteen raved about it and then one, I think Rex Reed, finally said “Look, this movie is fucking dumb.” Reed is correct. The movie is fucking dumb. I’ll say this too; I can see why Sally Hawkins is up for Best Actress. She is legitimately great, though it was not as worthy a performance as her work in “Maudie.” Octavia Spencer’s nomination, however, is a joke. Spencer is a great, great actress, but her performance is not one of the 50 best performances by an actress in 2017 and isn’t one of the 15 best of her own career. I laughed frequently, but at the movie, not with it. It was a logically executed story with consistent characters, however dumb those things might have been, though, and that makes it better than Three Billboards.

This week we’ll see Lady Bird and Dunkirk, and on the weekend we’ll polish off the rest.

56

I just wanted to voice my agreement with this. She’s got one reasonably powerful scene in the movie, and is otherwise a wisecracking sidekick. I have to think she was surprised by this nomination.

57

Updating this list, having now seen 8 of 9:

  1. Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (4.0)
  2. The Post (4.0)
  3. Get Out (4.0)
  4. Phantom Thread (3.5)
  5. The Shape of Water (3.5)
  6. Dunkirk (3.5)
  7. Darkest Hour (3.5)
  8. Ladybird (3.0)
58

Only seen two of them, and have no particular interest in seeing the others.

Dunkirk: I think those who wanted something more ‘spectacular’ missed the point; war (and for that matter any great events) are defined by many individual actions. The director chose to focus on several individual stories to reflect all of the several hundred thousand stories of that week/day/hour. I thought it superb.

Darkest Hour: Not a bad movie, but not one I would say was Oscar-worthy as Best Picture. Gary Oldham, however, makes the entire movie worth watching and should be a strong contender for Best Actor.

59

I saw Three Billboards for the second time over the weekend and I think I liked it even more. It was easily one of my favorite films from 2017.

I have now also seen all 15 of the Short films and all but one of the Foreign Language films.

60

Have Seen (in order of appreciation)

**Lady Bird: **I thought this was a wonderful character study. Laurie Metcalf is stellar.

The Post: It’s good, not great. Streep is outstanding. Hanks is fine. The story is good. A little too Hollywoody, but it’s good.

Call Me by Your Name: I like little movies. A little self-consciously arty at times, but I enjoyed both the story and the characters. Loved the setting.

Darkest Hour: This works well and Oldman did a great job. It’s interesting that it covers some of the same ground as Dunkirk from a completely different perspective (though neither of them really look at the events head-on. Which is fine, nothing says they have to do that!)

**Phantom Thread: **It’s well done, but I hated every character and it felt long.

Dunkirk: God, I hate war movies.

Won’t see

Get Out
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
[/QUOTE]

This is one of those years when I feel like I’m missing out too much by skipping the movies that I’m skipping, but I wasn’t blessed with a strong stomach, so I’m sticking with it. None of the films I was able to see strike me as of the same quality as some recent nominees. There definitely wasn’t a Moonlight among them for me.