My Oscar Favorites

Anyone else excited about the upcoming Oscars on Sunday evening? No! Only me? 😁 I often listen silently when I hear acquaintances say that they have never seen any or have only seen one or two of the films nominated for the Oscars because invariably by the time the Oscar nominations roll around I have seen every single film nominated and am usually able to predict which films will be nominated for the coveted award as soon as I leave the movie theatre, or even while watching the movie, as was the case when I saw Rami Malek in his stellar portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie about the rise of the British rock band Queen.

I was so blown away by Malek’s performance that before I even left the movie theatre I texted my friend, Carmen, who is a big fan of Queen and told her that not only should Malek be nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his iconic performance at the Oscars this year but that he should also win.

That’s Malek on the left, during my favorite scene in the movie, and the legendary Mercury on the right.

I had never even heard of the actor Rami Malek before watching Bohemian Rhapsody but I grew intrigued after seeing the film and did a little research. I watched a few YouTube videos of him being interviewed and his general presence is so endearing. What a humble and grateful guy. His humility alone makes me want him to win Best Actor.

Admittedly, the Best Actor race is pretty tough this year. Among them we have the likes of Christian Bale, who did an amazing portrayal of Vice President Dick Cheney in Vice and the always immaculate, absolutely gorgeous Bradley Cooper, who plays an unkempt, washed-up Country singer suffering from alcohol addiction in A Star is Born.

Cooper himself has been nominated for the Best Actor Oscar a total of 4 times (including this year’s nomination) and to date has never won. He is also the first actor to be nominated 3 years in a row, with a nomination in 2013 for Silver Linings Playbook (among my top 5 favorite movies ever), in 2014 for American Hustle and again in 2015 for American Sniper. I wouldn’t be upset if Malek lost to Cooper since Cooper, who is an incredibly brilliant actor, has gone home empty-handed so many times, but my money is on Malek.

The other 2 Best Actor nominees are Willem Dafoe, who was fantastic, I mean really fantastic playing the tormented and troubled painter Vincent Van Gough in At Eternity’s Gate and Viggo Mortensen, whose most famous roles were in The Lord of the Rings and Captain Fantastic (another movie I loved), where he was also nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Lady Gaga has been bestowed with the honor of a nomination for Best Actress for her leading role alongside Cooper for A Star is Born. There is no doubt that there was undeniable chemistry between Gaga and Cooper in the movie, but steamy love scenes and impeccable vocals are not enough for her to take home the coveted Best Actress statue this Sunday. Don’t get me wrong, I love Gaga, she is an incredibly talented musician and she played the hell out of Ally, her character in the movie, but compared to the other ladies she is up against in the Best Actress category I honestly don’t think her role was the best performance.

I would like to see either Glenn Close, who is nominated for her role in The Wife, which I reviewed in a past blog post you can read it here Let’s Go to the Movies! or Olivia Colman, who is nominated for her role as the eccentric Queen Anne, who was the Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1702 to 1714, for her role in The Favourtie.

Both actresses, Close and Colman, gave stellar performances in their respective movies, but if I had to pick just one I would go with Close since I have been a fan since she tormented the duplicitous and unfaithful Michael Douglas back in 1987’s Fatal Attraction. Close was a force to reckon with then and now 30 plus years later she’s still a force to reckon with. She is an accomplished actress, who has been nominated for an Oscar 7 times but still hasn’t taken home the coveted statue. If Lady Gaga gets an Oscar before Glenn Close I would not be pleased.

Glenn Close and Lady Gaga at The 2019 Critics’ Choice Awards, where they both won the Best Actress award. It was a tie.

Olivia Coleman, despite being an accomplished actress herself is pretty new to me. Further research has shown that she’s a British actress that came on the scene in 2000 with her most well-known role being that of the more mature Queen Elizabeth II in Season 3 of the popular Netflix series The Crown.

The other contenders for Best Actress are the newcomer, Yalitza Aparicio for Roma and the very funny and popular Melissa McCarthy. McCarthy has been nominated a few times and has won an Emmy for her role as Molly in the CBS hit sitcom Mike and Molly but this is only her second Oscar nomination, her first being for Supporting Actress back in 2012 for her laugh out loud, hilarious role in Bridesmaids, another one of my faves. McCarthy is nominated this year for her work in Can You Ever Forgive Me? A very gripping tale, the true story of Lee Israel, a reclusive, bestselling novelist who had to resort to illegal activities just to pay her rent when she was no longer able to get published. An excellent biographical film, which I truly enjoyed.

Richard E. Grant, McCarthy’s co-star in Can You Ever Forgive Me, is up for Best Supporting Actor. I like Richard E. Grant from his days of playing Simon in Downton Abby and I thought his performance as a lying yet endearing copycat and imitator in Can You Ever Forgive Me? is worthy of the Oscar nomination he has received, but I would like to see Mahershala Ali win for his role as the pompous, classical pianist Don Shirley in Green Book.

Mahershala Ali, who first came to my attention as Remi in the Netflix series House of Cards, has been on the rise ever since and was the Oscar winner just 2 years ago for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Moonlight. I am hoping he does it again and delivers one of his insightful, very appreciative thank you speeches.

Sam Rockwell, who currently holds the most recently awarded Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, is nominated again this year for his portrayal of George Bush Jr. in the movie Vice. If he wins this year then he would be the second actor in the history of the awards ceremony to win consecutive Oscars for Best Supporting Actor. The only other actor to have done so was Jason Robards, remember him?

The 2 other contenders for Best Supporting Actor is Adam Driver from HBO’s Girls fame, who is nominated for his performance in BlacKkKlansman and Sam Elliot for A Star Is Born.

I am disappointed that Driver’s fellow co-star in BlacKkKlansman, John David Washington, son of Denzel Washington, did not pick up a nomination for his brilliant leading role in the movie. I thought for sure he would have been nominated for lead actor.

For Best Supporting Actress the contenders are Amy Adams, who gave a masterly performance as Lynn Cheney in Vice. I am a huge fan of Adams and was rooting for her the other 6 times she was nominated for an Oscar, especially for her nominations for Doubt and American Hustle but this year I am going with my girl, Regina King, for her candid Mama Bear performance in If Beale Street Could Talk. Loved the book, liked the movie, loved Regina King in the movie.

Regina King happily accepting her Golden Globe earlier this year for her role in “If Beale Street Could Talk”.

I have been a fan of King since her days on the TV sitcom 227 and later on when she played the annoying next-door neighbor in the hit movies Boyz in the Hood and again in Friday. King has been cleaning up on the awards circuit this year bringing home both the Golden Globe and the Critics’ Choice Awards for her Beale Street role, here’s hoping she does it again on Sunday night at the Oscars.

The other nominees for Best Supporting Actress are Marina de Tavira, whom I have never heard of but liked her acting in Roma and Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz both of whom played alongside Olivia Colman in the historical period piece, The Favourite. Stone and Weisz are extremely talented actresses in their own right, Stone has been nominated for an Oscar 3 times already and has won once, for her role in La La Land, a movie I thoroughly hated. I like Stone though and think she should have been nominated last year when she played the role of tennis great Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes. While Weisz won an Oscar for her 2005 supporting role in The Constant Gardener, a movie I still haven’t seen.

There are 8 movies nominated for Best Picture this year, all of them very good films, despite being very different from each other. This year we have our first superhero film nominated for Best Picture, it was the highest grossing film of 2018 and perhaps the most popular film of 2018. I loved Black Panther, saw it in the movie theater not once, not twice but three times. In as much black pride as I was filled with watching Black Panther I don’t think it deserves to win Best Picture, simply because it’s a movie about make-believe and fantasy in general.

BlacKkKlansman, the true to life story of a black man who was able to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan is the movie that deserves the Best Picture award. Brilliantly acted, well written, with some laugh out loud funny lines, and relatable experiences permeate the entire plot of this must-see film. Spike Lee, who is one of the producers and the director of BlacKkKlansman, has been in the movie-making industry for decades and this is his first nomination from the Academy. It would be a joy to watch him take home both the Best Picture and Best Director statutes on Sunday night, if not both, then one or the other.

Spike Lee is nominated for his first Oscar this year.

My other favorite to win Best Picture is The Favourtie. Period pieces are some of my favorite films and this was a remarkable movie. This film had 3 powerhouse actresses, Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz sharing equal screen time playing off of each other in a very dramatic story filled with unbelievable twists and turns, which made The Favourite a very entertaining film. It’s up for Best Director as well and leads this year’s Oscars with 10 nominations alongside Roma, that also has an equal 10.

The other Best Picture nods are A Star Is Born, which in my opinion shouldn’t win since it lacks originality. This is the 4th time A Star Is Born has been made. I enjoyed the movie but enough already. We also have Vice, which is an excellent political drama. It’s very one-sided in its liberalistic story-telling but a good movie nonetheless. Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book and Roma round out the Best Picture list, of which Roma has also been nominated for Best Director.

Roma, a Netflix movie, was the last of the nominated films that I watched. It’s a subtitled Spanish film done entirely in black and white, with excellent cinematography. It tells the story of Cleo, a Mexican maid (the role is played by Yalitza Aparicio, nominated for Best Actress), and the trauma she endears in 1970s Mexico City. The story also parallels the life of her white employee played by Marina de Tavira, who is nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Roma, which is directed by Oscar-winning Alfonso Cuaron, has been doing well on the awards circuit this year and I wouldn’t be surprised if they also cleaned up at the Oscars. Despite being a decent film it’s not my favorite to win in any category. The Academy has been known to blaze its own trail and not necessarily follow the choices of the Golden Globes, The Critics Choice or even the SAG awards. Let’s hope this rings true for this year as well as it relates to Roma.

The movie-junkie in me is excited for Sunday night and I can’t wait to see who this year’s winners will be. Let’s hope I won’t be as disappointed as I was last year when, as my friend so eloquently puts it “the movie about the strange fish in the water” won for Best Picture. She was referring to the Shape of Water. Oh, what a stupid movie that was!

Let’s Go to the Movies!

I love going to the movies! My love affair with the movies started with Saturday Night Fever, which is the very first movie I ever saw at the cinema. As silly and juvenile as it may sound I thoroughly enjoy the movie-going experience, from the freshly popped buttered popcorn to the reaction of the other movie-goers when something exciting happens on the big screen, its sheer joy for me to sit there in the dark with complete strangers and get transfixed with the plot unfolding on the screen. I try to get to the movies at least 4 to 6 times a month but this Summer as work and deadlines came at me expeditiously I realized to my dismay that the summer was ending, a few summer blockbusters had come and gone, weeks had passed and I hadn’t gone to a single movie. Gasp! The horror! 😃

I decided to remedy that situation and for the last 2 weeks I took advantage of a not too demanding work schedule and saw not 1, not even 2 but 5 movies and I enjoyed each and every one. Nothing is more disappointing to me than when I hand over my $15 at the box office and the movie falls short of my expectations, and might I add that I’m not the type to actually walk out of a movie because I always sit there hoping it will get better. 🤦‍♀️ Thankfully, I was happy with all 5 choices recently – The Wife, Searching, Crazy Rich Asians, Juliet, Naked and Blackkklansman – five completely different genres of movies that would appeal to different types of audiences for varying reasons yet all five movies appealed to me and left me with some deep-seated thoughts. There is nothing like a well-scripted, thought-provoking movie.

The Wife

She’s back, folks! Glenn Close, who rose to fame playing the diabolical one-night stand in Fatal Attraction is back with a truly brilliant performance in The Wife; it is the story of a devoted and loving spouse who walked away from her own fledgling career as a writer to wholeheartedly support her husband’s writing career instead. While being the devoted and sensible wife Glenn Close’s character, Joan, manages to turn a blind eye to her husband’s infidelities as his fame grows as a great American novelist.

The Wife had me thinking about the patriarchy and the general sacrifices so many women make in their own lives, happy and content to stand in the shadows of their husbands, being the perfect spouse instead of being great for themselves.

My favorite line in the movie was delivered by Close when she warns her husband that “Nothing is more dangerous than a writer that has been rebuffed”. I love that line because it is an excellent reminder that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. A fantastic film that every writer should see.

Searching

Searching was shot in an entirely digitized manner, from the face time calling conversations, to the movie’s plot unfolding on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, this movie serves as a reminder that what we see on social media are oftentimes not the way things are in real life. Things may look one way and be entirely the opposite. The person with over a thousand “friends” on Facebook could very well be the loneliest person in the world, who doesn’t even have one real friend. Further, how do we know who we are really talking to when we engage in online conversations with strangers?

John Cho, who is known for playing Harold in the Harold and Kumar films, plays a father whose teenage daughter goes missing. He uses social media to try to track down his daughter’s last known whereabouts and as he investigates her mysterious disappearance he comes to the sad realization that he really didn’t know his own child.

This one had me thinking about my own 14-year-old and how much do I really know him. I almost invaded his privacy after watching this movie. I wanted to go into his phone and his laptop to find out who he has been talking to online and what they have been talking about. I restrained myself though and instead tried to have a conversation with him about the perils of online communication with strangers. What I got from him was some serious eye roll and a comment that I should lay off of the movie watching with my paranoia.

Crazy Rich Asians

This movie had me believing in love again. Are you in the mood for a feel-good movie? Well, Crazy Rich Asians is it. Admittedly, when I first saw the promo for this movie in the Coming Attractions I was like WTH is this garbage. Yes, I was judgemental because the title totally turned me off. It’s like saying “crazy rich white people” or “crazy rich blacks”; it just sounds off-putting and wrong.

The fact that this movie remained #1 at the box office for 3 weeks in a row, seriously piqued my interest so I figured I would go see what all the hype was about. I loooved it! It was such a romantic, almost fairy-tale like film that you can’t help falling for it and rooting for Rachel, the female lead, played by Constance Wu. Rachel, who is Chinese American and lives in New York meets and falls in love with her Chinese boyfriend, Nick, who hails from Singapore. They are a year into their relationship when Nick has to go home to attend his best friend’s wedding. He invites Rachel to go back to Singapore with him and she does. What ensues is everything fairy tales are made of. Rachel discovers that her Nick is not just rich but “crazy rich” and is snubbed by Nick’s mother/family/friends because not only is Rachel from a working-class family but she is American, and doesn’t and will never fully understand the real Chinese culture or fit into their world. So so good. The opulence in Singapore was superfluous and astounding and had me thinking how lucky is Rachel.😉 I wanna be Rachel, just for a day. Ha!

Juliet, Naked

Who doesn’t love Ethan Hawke?! Such a great actor with a list of box office hits to his name. Such a natural on the big screen, you sometimes forget that he is a movie star and feel like he is the guy next door that you can chill with in the backyard and sip on a cold brew. He is so cool and cool he is in Juliet, Naked.

Hawke plays a washed-up rocker, Tucker Crowe, who disappears from the music scene decades before the movie takes place. He still has a following though and one obsessed fan, played by Chris O’Dowd, with his heavy, sexy Irish accent has an online fan club that idolizes Hawke’s character. O’Dowd’s character, Duncan, is in a relationship with Annie, who absolutely cannot stand the obsession her boyfriend has with this washed-up, has-been rocker that no one has heard from or seen in a million years. As the plot develops, a series of events unfold (no spoilers here) and Annie ends up meeting Tucker Crowe, the has-been rocker himself. The film also contains a few sub-plots that come together to make this a super cute, relatable movie that encourages second chances and forces the movie-goer to examine one’s own life and answer the question. “If I had a chance to do it (life) over, would I make the same choices?”

Blakkklansman

Directed, co-produced and co-written by Spike Lee, Blackkklansman is the incredible true story of how the first African-American police detective in Colorado Springs was able to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. Unbelievable! It spins an embarrassing tale (embarrassing for the KKK, that is) on how seemingly easy it was for a Black man and his Jewish partner to go undercover and uncover, and later reveal the plots and plans that the Colorado Springs Chapter of the KKK had to murder innocent black students, who spoke openly against white supremacy, police brutality, and racism.

The hate that spews from the characters who play members of the KKK against Blacks and Jews made this film hard to watch. Luckily, Spike Lee punctuated what could have been a potentially dark and heavy film with moments of humor and ridicule at the Ku Klux Klan thus illustrating the stupidity and simplemindedness of even the highest member of this hate organization making this movie enjoyable, despite its outrageousness. Blackkklansman, which was set in the early 1970s, left me with the raw thought that the more things change the more things remain the same. The sad reality is that the United States is even more divided today than it was in the 1970s.

I can’t bid you adieu without mentioning that Blackkklansman stars John David Washington, who is the son of Denzel. His acting was phenomenal in this his first feature film and I wouldn’t be surprised if he embarks on an illustrious acting career comparable to that of his famous father.

What are your plans for this weekend? How about grabbing your favorite person and heading to the movies to see one of the five mentioned above. Wait, what’s that? You have no one to go with…Then go alone. Three out of these five movies I saw alone and of the two my husband saw with me he fell asleep in one of them. I won’t tell you which one though. 😉

So how was your week?