The York School Student Blogs

Ladies and Gentlemen, they have been announced! Yes, I am two days late on posting this blog entry, and I was thinking about writing this the second the nominations were posted, but, my schedule is busy, I’m watching a ton of movies, yada yada yada, so I’m posting it now!

I’m not going to get too opinionated this very moment, because to be honest, I haven’t seen a movie in theaters for QUITE a while (I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before), and, therefore, I can only assume so much. But, I do intend on catching myself up a little bit. Knowing me, this will just involve reading some scripts (something that I do in my free time), but, it’ll get me slightly more acknowledged with the nominees. The full list of nominees can be seen here.

So, I’m just going to state my biased opinions on the best picture nominees right now (I intend on making a full prediction blog, but, that’ll probably be a few days before the ceremony itself). If you hadn’t already known, the Academy decided to up the ante by making 10 (count them, 10) nominations instead of just 5.

Here they are (in no specific order… and by that, I mean the order in which I remember them):

Up

Inglorious Basterds

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire

Up in the Air

A Serious Man

Avatar

The Hurt Locker

The Blind Side

An Education

District 9

Now, there are definitely a few surprises here (to name 2, The Blind Side and District 9), and, a lot of people think that it’ll come down to Avatar and The Hurt Locker. I, on the other hand, only having seen two of the nominees (Inglorious Basterds and Up), would like Inglorious Basterds to win, for the sole reason that I am quite the Quentin Tarantino fan! Am I biased? Well… yes. Still, I’ll have more educated predictions before the ceremony (March 7th), which I will post around, say, the 1st of March.

Keep on Watching!

R.S.

p.s. Yes, I know I said I’d post a list of mini-reviews, but I assure you all, there will be a VERY long list of reviews coming up soon!

The Academy Awards, more commonly known as “The Oscars”. To some, it’s an entertaining few hours of stars, awards, and the like. To some, it’s three hours that they’d rather spend doing, well, anything else, and they’ll just read whoever won in the papers the next day. To me, The Oscars are the thing that I look forward to the most. It states what the best performances, the best movies, the best directors are. Yes, people deserve to have their own opinions, but these are the ones that have the big influences in the film community. Who would’ve expected that Slumdog Millionaire would’ve won Best Picture last year over big hits like The Dark Knight, or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?

The fact is, the Oscars are to me a great learning experience about some things that people don’t normally look at. Do people normally look at sound design, or costume design, or even writing? Some do, some don’t, but, the Oscars make it so people can pay their dues to the people who work so hard in the film business. So, leading up to the big day in a few months, I’ll be giving occasional updates in advanced, and, later on, my opinions on who I think will win.

This first update that’s showing up fairly early (considering the actual show is not for another few months) is that the hosts have officially been announced! And, the are (drumroll, please)………………. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin! Two hosts! This is the first time that there have been multiple hosts since 1986!

So, my thoughts on this? I’m pretty happy with Steve Martin being one of the hosts, since he’s done it a few times before, and he therefore has experience with hosting. Baldwin on the other hand… It could go either way for me. I’m personally a large fan of his work in 30 Rock, but, other than that, I’m not a huge fan of his work. I was personally hoping that they could’ve gotten Tina Fey to host, but, I digress. We’ll see how he does in a few months’ time!

Keep on watching!

R.S.

Do you guys have opinions on these two hosts, or the hosts in the past? If you do, feel free to comment!