I watched Moonlight (best picture 2017) last night. I enjoyed it except that I had a struggle some of the time to hear the dialogue. A sign of my advancing years rather than a flaw in the film. It was a film that made me feel uncomfortable, at different moments for different reasons, but is a worthwhile exploration of a young man growing up and his various relationships. But it ultimately left me with an impression of lifelong sadness, so it was hard for me to find positives for the character. Not a feel-good film, unlike the film it beat for the Oscar, La La Land. Other beaten films of that year I haven't seen but it seems a weak year to me.
The previous year, 2016, seems to have contained a stronger field. Non-winners (I can't really think of them as losers) include the hugely enjoyable Mad Max: Fury Road, The Big Short, Bridge of Spies and The Martian. The winner was Spotlight but the best, in my opinion, was Brie Larson in Room (she got Best Actress).
2015 had two biographical films, The Imitation Game about Alan Turing and The Theory of Everything with Eddie Redmayne (of whom normally I'm not much of a fan) as Stephen Hawking. Clint Eastwood directed American Sniper and I thought Selma, about the US Civil Rights movement and starring David Oleyowo as Martin Luther King, was perhaps the best of those. The winner was Birdman, which I haven't seen, which I something I may remedy soon.
2014 was a stellar year for me. The outstanding 12 Years a Slave won the Oscar, but the runners-up list includes an excellent batch including Dallas Buyers Club (which I would probably have chosen), American Hustle (a fun A List romp), Gravity, the tense Captain Phillips and one of Leonardo DiCaprio's best roles, The Wolf Of Wall Street.
2013 had one of my favourite softie rom-coms, Silver Linings Playbook, Tarantino's tough Django Unchained, Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (which I would make no. 2) and my no. 1, Beasts of The Southern Wild. For me it's a wonderful movie. And of course, in front of all these excellent offerings, the winner was the worst of them all and possibly the worst Oscar winner ever, Argo. Ugh.
Skip over 2012 and the dreary films such as The Artist, War Horse and The Tree Of life, and move back one final year to 2011, which had one of my favourite films of recent years - Winter's Bone. If you haven't seen it, do so! But it was listed in a truly exceptional year in which The King's Speech won and included Toy Story 3, The Social Network, Black Swan, Inception, 127 Hours, The Fighter and True Grit. One of the best years ever?
I could go on and on but I won't. You'll have noticed I skipped the latest three years. I haven't seen many of the nominations, partly because of my local cinema's dispute with one of the distributors so certain films never arrive in St Austell. But here are brief observations:
2018: The excellent Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri beaten by The Shape Of Water, a film in which a mute cleaner falls in love with a humanoid amphibian; mm.
2019: Olivia Colman wins Best Actress in the very entertaining The Favourite but is beaten by Green Book (which I have downloaded ready to watch) for Best Picture. [11pm] I watched Green Book tonight, discovered after about 2 minutes I had seen it, but it's good enough to watch again, so I did. Highly recommended.
2020: I enjoyed Little Women and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, thought 1917 was one-dimensional and haven't yet seen Parasite, the winner.
Share your opinions in the Comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment