the Oscars are pretty depressing. The Help and Extremely Sentimental & Incredibly Pandering both got best picture nods at the expense of Drive, Fassbender got ripped off, and The Artist got a "Best Original Screenplay" nomination for a silent movie with a cliched plot (seriously, the best picture, best actor, and best director nods here are defensible. a best screenplay nod is fucking ridiculous. that's coming from someone who enjoyed the movie).

SOOOO, let's get happy and focus on the good things. of which i could only think of 5 lol. shit, even this is kind of depressing. oh well...

tree of life

Oldman.

Since I'm a fanboy, and it actually made me a little bit giddy, Oldman. The Tree of Life nods were awesome though, too bad it doesn't have a snowball's chance of winning anything.

Guess I'll go with Oldman. Tree of Life gets deserved nominations but I thought it would get them anyway.

As I've already mentioned to you if a cliched plot were reason for disqualification you'd have to disqualify nearly everything.

It will win best Cinematography (or it better).

I wouldn't put it past them to give it to The Artist just for looking "old-timey". Since y'know, that's the reason it got all the other nominations.

BUT, there is a difference here. the bulk of any screenplay is the text. there are really only two things you get from the screenplay itself: narrative and text. this has literally NO text (aside from some title cards). there is no dialogue here. no poetry to the language because there is no language.

i've already said many times that i really liked The Artist. and i think its Best Picture, Best Actor & Supporting Actress, and Best Director nominations are justified. but imagine you have The Artist's script in from of you. literally all you are reading is a breakdown of action, and the action itself is borrowed from the conventions of an era and the overall narrative is borrowed directly from a couple other movies that they are paying homage to. how on earth does that deserve a Best Original Screenplay nomination? there is barely a screenplay to judge!

the Writers Guild of America knew this, and appropriately shut out The Artist from their awards. the actual writers said "NO!". what happened was everyone else was lazy and always just pencils in the big buzz movies for a best screenplay nomination no matter what.

provide me with a reason that The Artist's screenplay should have been nominated. it was a great movie because the direction, cinematography, acting, art design, etc. but not because of the screenplay.

It's a movie about movies. The Academy eats that shit up. All they'd have to do to seal it is have a famous person gain weight.

what if it was a movie about movies about 9/11...starring Leonardo DiCaprio, who dies in real life the day filming is ends.

It kind of blows that in the best year for film since 2007 we talk about The Tree of Life getting director and picture nominations as if it's something we should be pleasantly surprised about rather than something that should have been the biggest duh in the world.

Between the pretentious douche who put up the notice and the ignorant fucks who couldn't handle the film this piece of paper makes me hate pretty much everybody

Now I just need to remind myself that Citizen Kane lost to How Green Was My Valley and wonder why I ever thought about the Oscars in the first place.