That a little surprising since it’s everything the Oscars love - boring, pretentious, arty, un-entertaining. 
ETA: I do understand why it wasn’t nominated - has the Science Fiction kiss of death on it. Everyone knows there has never been a quality science fiction movie made.
(Damn, I’m bitter today!)
Its a hell of a performance. Its a hell of a movie and he owns it.
It’s weird because I’ve said the same thing about Saving Private Ryan. Both were attempts to bring the massive scope of the war down to a scale where audiences could follow it - you had a small group of soldiers traveling across the battlefields of Europe to carry out one mission within a timeframe of a few days as an symbol of the millions of men who fought the entire war over a span of years. I didn’t see that in The Thin Red Line - there the message seemed to be that small groups of soldiers just get lost in something as big as a war.
Okay, got a new one to add, for this year, no less. I just finished watching Winter’s Bone. Are you kidding me? People in the Academy think this was one of the year’s ten best movies?
Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawke were very good, and deserve their acting nominations. But the movie itself … it’s just, not that special, at least for me. Maybe part of it is because I grew up in southeast Iowa, where the terrain and the outlaw/meth/drug cooking culture isn’t all that far off from what’s depicted in the movie. Heck, I have a cousin who damn near blew himself up in what was either a homemade explosives accident or a meth lab gone wrong. So it just didn’t grab me as a particularly good story.
While I haven’t yet seen The Town or Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, I heard Oscar buzz about both before the nominations came out. No doubt there are other worthy candidates that I can’t think of at the moment. I have seen the trailer for The Town … that trailer made a better movie (for me) than Winter’s Bone. It’s not a bad film, I just can’t imagine it’s one of the top ten of the year.
Just one man’s opinion.
Driving Miss Daisy winning while Do The Right Thing wasn’t even nominated.
That’s because in the nominating process, except in certain categories*, each branch nominates their own. Directors nominate the Directors. Actors nominate the Actors. Editors nominate Editors. Cinematographers nominate Cinematographers, and so on. Norbit was nominated for Best Makeup by the Makeup branch not because it was a good movie, but because the Makeup was considered by those people who know makeup to be exceptional. They only look at the technical aspect of the movie, not the movie as a whole. That’s why a lot of bad movies/blockbuster get nominations in categories such as Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Makeup.
At least it didn’t win. La Vie en Rose won for making Marion Cotillard look like Edith Piaf.
The categories it won in were Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Editing. I’d argue with Editing but that’s because I rooted for There Will Be Blood in every category it was nominated in. I don’t know enough about Sound Editing and Sound Mixing to say it shouldn’t have been nominated or win. Do you? I would guess that a lot of voters either vote for their favorite movies or just don’t vote at all in those categories, leaving it up to the people who do know the technical achievements to vote.
I agree with them. I saw a LOT of movies last year and it’s still my favorite. I think it is a great film, with great writing and performances. I saw it several times in the theater and called those exact 4 nominations in May of 2010. Since I don’t think anyone in the Academy particularly cares about making my predictions come true, it must mean that they independently thought it was one of the year’s best movies too, and that those 4 nominations were deserved. It was a tiny indie with zero budget for campaigning, so it was special enough to stay on those people’s radars for 6 months.
It’s very quiet and slow, so I can understand not liking it if a person can’t get into the mood and rhythm of it.
Threads like this always make me sad, because good-to-brilliant movies always get shit on, but other than the above and offering the opinion that The Thin Red Line belongs in the brilliant category, I’m too tired and busy to defend anything. I will express my Go To continuing bitterness that at the 1989 Academy Awards (rewarding 1988 films) Jevetta Steele was horribly mistreated, robbed of a chance to become a star. One of the THREE (only 3!!) Original Song nominees was the haunting and phenomenal “Calling You” from the wonderful film Bagdad Cafe. I knew it wouldn’t win. Not many people had seen Bagdad Cafe while everyone had seen Working Girl and heard the hit “Let the River Run” by Carly Simon. What I was really looking forward to was seeing Jevetta Steele get up there and sing the song. It would have blown everybody away. It would have shamed the people who never listened to the song before voting for the Simon song. It would have made Steele a star, caused more people to see Bagdad Cafe, which would have helped the director and others involved in the movie in various ways.
But NOOOO, even with only 3 nominees, they decided not to have the Best Song nominees sung that year. Not even a tiny bit of each song was played! NO ONE got to hear even a tiny part of “Calling You.”
It’s gratifying to know that the song has become more popular thanks to many different covers, such as by Jeff Buckley, Naomi Nsombi, Holly Cole, Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion, George Michael, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson and others.
Btw, the other nominee that year was “Two Hearts” by Phil Collins from the movie Buster.
The Thin Red Line has a 79% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, 95% from “Top Critics,” and 75% from the general audience.
Calling it “shite” is a minority opinion.
One contributing element is that category nominations like Sound Editing and Makeup are decided via “bake-offs”, where short clips of each contender are played for the voters. Nobody who voted for Norbit for best Makeup had to actually sit through Norbit.
I love that movie. I love Carly Simon. I think she is usually a brilliant songwriter. But that song was a piece of shit. It had nothing to do with the movie, it was just a generic late-career Carly Simon song.
Cecil B DeMille’s film “The Greatest Show on Earth” was voted Best Picture over “High Noon”, “The Quiet Man” and “Singing in the Rain”. Lots of critics feel this is the worst best picture award winner. I’ve never seen it so I’ll withhold judgment but “High Noon” and “The quiet Man” are two of my favorites and “Singing in the Rain” is pretty good too.
Feh. The wrong Capote movie won the Oscar.
SPR has a 91% from critics, 92% from general audiences, but somehow that doesn’t stop those who think it wasn’t a great war movie. Rotten Tomatoes ratings are not the be-all and end-all of movie opinions.
Who said they were?
Dances with Wolves from a distance was a technically well made film, but the inherent problems with the story absolutely do not allow its many kudos to stand the test of time. Definitely a mess.
Abso-freaking-lutely. And as a plus, it wasn’t written as Oscar bait, whereas the song that won, You Must Love Me was written specifically as an unnecessary insert into the film version of Evita so that something from it would be a new song and eligible for awards. Something so blatantly and greedy should never be rewarded, especially not under those circumstances.
Where, exactly, was there room in that category for Madonna, is the problem. In 1996, the lead actress category was filled with women whose portrayals were each part of a complex, excellent film and ensemble of actors, each was part of a greater whole, and each whole was entirely underpinned (but not completed) by each woman’s performance. You can’t say that about Evita. Evita was all about Madonna, everyone else, every other performance was generic and interchangeable. She wouldn’t have won the Golden Globe, had Evita not more accessible to the Hollywood Foreign Press than the quintessentially American Fargo.
Oh, and Julia Roberts Erin Brokovich over Ellen Burstyn Requiem for a Dream or Laura Linney You Can Count on Me?
Jesus wept.
The biggest Oscar miss was “Chocolat” being nominated for BP over “Almost Famous.”
“Chocolat” was a fine movie, but was only nominated because the Weinsteins know how to market a film to voters.
At the risk of extending the hijack, Malick was making no such point, because his movie directly contradicts cause-and-effect. If things fell up, sideways, and down at random during the movie because gravity had gone haywire, would people still say it was a comment on narrative? He’s got people contradicting what the audience has seen with it’s own eyes, for God’s sake. We WATCH them come out of a line of trees, turn around and say “We’ll never get through there,” or words to that effect…when we just watched them do it. It’s stupid – empirically so.
Now, I suppose the argument could be made “Malick is imposing stupid contradictions on his movie to send a message to the audience,” but what would that message be?
“They’ll let anyone direct.”
“I like cocaine.”
“I hate audiences.”
If Malick thought his objective was “audiences could follow it” he’s got some kind of serious problem.
I can see the point there and I suppose it’s an interesting interpretation, but at least in my mind it doesn’t really make for a great movie. Write a bunch of scenes about a small group of soldiers covering a few days and put them together. No thread to connect them, no larger message, no quest, nothing. Just a bunch of not-really-connected scenes. Seems pretty easy to create. You can film it nicely and have good performances but in the end you just have a pile of scenes, not a movie.
I think that’s in keeping with Malick’s message. A war is a massive thing and not only is it impossible for the actions of any individual in it to make a difference, it’s too big to anyone in it to even understand what’s really going on. The soldiers are just seeing their own little piece of the war.