I’m looking at the list for best picture Oscar 2014 and I’m thinking… meh. The race for the Academy Awards is in the final stretch but for once I couldn’t care less who wins.
That’s a strange thing for an entertainment writer to write, I’m just not excited by the race this year.
I’m not saying the films are bad, miles from it. Every film nominated is very good. There’s just nothing outstanding or unusual. There’s no set-up for a surprise.
They are probably the best nine films of the year with no glaring omissions but will I ever sit through any of them again? Probably not.
For example The Wolf of Wall Street was great, and Leonardo DiCaprio is currently Hollywood’s finest actor. But there are only so many drugs I can watch one person plough through.
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(And I’m not saying I know more about film editing than Martin Scorsese, I just think at that at three hours, that film could have been clipped a little.)
Her, while an excellent concept, really could have been a radio play. You didn’t really need to look at the screen at all. And not just because Scarlett Johansson wasn’t going to be on it.
Again, I can’t stress enough that I enjoyed all these films, it’s just that the competition between them seems uninteresting. This year’s race doesn’t feel like it’s going to be a vintage one.
Remember the 2007 scrap between No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood?
Or when Crash somehow beat Brokeback Mountain two years earlier?
Or when Lord of the Rings needed all three attempts to become the first fantasy flick to ever win?
Or when everyone held their breath in 2009 waiting to see if Avatar would become the first ever sci-fi best picture or would Up become the first ever animated best picture, or would it just go to blatant Oscar bait The Blind Side and they were all blind sided by The Hurt Locker?
And then there was 2010, the year after the best picture category was expanded from the maximum five.
Just as people thought the Academy had made a huge mistake, along came ten films that could have each won it, remember? The King’s Speech, 127 Hours, Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Winter’s Bone… It was simply one of the best years for cinema in recent memory.
This year’s race has none of that. The awards will be distributed out evenly, one will get best picture, another best director, another best actor and so on, just like they did at this year’s Golden Globes.
Or did they? I can’t remember…
