2013 Oscar Winners and Reactions

The 85th Academy Awards have come and gone, and this year featured many surprises and a disappointment here and there(at least for me).  The overall show was pretty good; Seth MacFarlane did a great job hosting and actually managed to hold back but still stay true to his brand of comedy.  The show itself was quite a success, with the exception of a pointless appearance by Michelle Obama. Now onto the awards themselves.

Best Picture:
Winner: Argo
I don't want to say this was a surprise, but in some ways, it was.  Argo didn't win any of the other Big Five awards and wasn't even nominated for Best Director.  Despite this, it managed to take home the grand prize as the Academy's best movie of the year.

Best Director:
Winner: Ang Lee for Life of Pi
Probably the biggest curve-ball of the awards, I don't think many people expected Ang Lee to beat out Steven Spielberg for Best Director.  Ang Lee has had quite a diverse career and hopefully this will get him more recognition in America and have him be known for more than that terrible first Hulk movie.

Best Actor:
Winner: Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln
No surprise here.  Presenter Meryl Streep didn't even have to open the envelope for this award.  I really liked the fact that despite all of the praise surrounding Day-Lewis' performance, he still sounded very humbled in his acceptance speech.

Best Actress:
Winner: Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook
The second biggest surprise of the night, Jennifer Lawrence has made quite a name for herself in this past year alone.  Hopefully, this Oscar will give her an extra boost in the future of her career.

Best Supporting Actor:
Winner: Christoph Waltz for Django Unchained
A big and much needed win for Christoph Waltz.  Hopefully he'll be able to get some better roles outside of Quentin Tarantino films following this award.

Best Supporting Actress:
Winner: Anne Hathaway for Les Miserables
Again, no surprise on this one.  Anne Hathaway picked up yet another award for her excellent performance as Fantine in Les Miserables.

Best Cinematography:
Winner: Life of Pi

Best Editing:
Winner: Argo

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Winner: Argo

Best Original Screenplay:
Winner: Django Unchained

Best Foreign Language Film:
Winner: Amour

Best Animated Feature:
Winner: Brave
This is the only winner that I'm actually upset about.  Don't get me wrong, I liked Brave(I even own it), I just thought that the other nominees were much more deserving.  Wreck-It-Ralph and Frankenweenie had more creativity and originality in them than Brave did.  Brave was just put together using pieces of many other, and better, Disney movies.  Again, I liked Brave, it just didn't deserve to win in my opinion.

Best Documentary Feature:
Winner: Searching for Sugar Man

Best Documentary Short:
Winner: Inocente

Best Costume Design:
Winner: Anna Karenina

Best Makeup and Hairstyling:
Winner: Les Miserables

Best Production Design:
Winner: Lincoln

Best Original Score:
Winner: Life of Pi

Best Original Song:
Winner: "Skyfall" from Skyfall

Best Animated Short Film:
Winner: Paperman

Best Live Action Short Film:
Winner: Curfew

Best Sound Editing:
Winner: Tie between Skyfall and Zero Dark Thirty

Best Sound Mixing:
Winner: Les Miserables

Best Visual Effects:
Winner: Life of Pi
This would be kind of expected from a movie people are hailing as "the next Avatar".

In the end, while Argo may have won the big award, Life of Pi swept the show, picking up four awards.  Argo and Les Miserables followed with three awards each.  Lincoln, Django Unchained, and Skyfall all took home two awards each.  Bringing up the rear was Silver Linings Playbook, Amour, and Zero Dark Thirty each taking a single award.  The 2013 Oscars were much better than last year's with many more surprises than I was expecting.  I'd say it's time to look forward to the movies for next year's show, but with the movies that are out right now we may have to wait a little while.  In the meantime, I've got some catching up to do with these movies.

2013 Oscar Predictions

The 85th Academy Awards are this coming Sunday, and they're already looking to be a lot more interesting than last year's.  The results of past awards shows this year have made it virtually impossible to say exactly who will take home the big awards, but I'll still make my predictions anyway.  Please note: I have not seen many of these movies so most of these are blind guesses.  Also, I won't talk about Best Short Film-Live Action, Best Documentary as I know next to nothing about the nominees in these categories, nor will I talk about technical awards.

Best Picture:
My initial pick for Best Picture was Lincoln, but now that Argo has been a hit at the awards shows, I'm thinking that the Ben Affleck film could take the show.  Again, it's very hard to say exactly but out of all the films nominated, I'm going with a toss-up between Lincoln and Argo.

Best Actor:
Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln.  This is one of the easier predictions seeing as Day-Lewis has been garnering so much recognition for his portrayal of America's sixteenth President.  The only other person I can see winning is Denzel Washington for Flight, but that would be a long-shot.

Best Actress:
While I would love to see Jennifer Lawrence or Quvenzhane Wallis win for Silver Linings Playbook and Beasts of the Southern Wild, respectively, I have a feeling that Emmanuelle Riva will win for Amour.  Again, this is mostly due to the fact that she has gotten widespread acclaim for her role, and has been sweeping awards shows.

Best Supporting Actor:
This one is also a toss-up.  While it's more likely that Alan Arkin or Philip Seymour Hoffman will win for Argo and The Master, respectively, I would love to see Christoph Waltz win for Django Unchained.  He was easily one of the best parts of the movie, and it would really help him gain some more recognition in America.

Best Supporting Actress:
This one's a no-brainer; Anne Hathaway for Les Miserables.  Again, her portrayal of Fantine was easily the best part of the movie.  With the recognition she's gotten and the awards she's already picked up, it's easy to see her winning this award with no problem.

Best Director:
This one is also very easy: Steven Spielberg for Lincoln.  It would have been harder to decide if Ben Affleck had been nominated, but enough has been said about his snub.  As it is, I am fairly confident that Steven Spielberg will take home the award.

Best Writing:
In the Original Screenplay category I would love to see Django Unchained win.  This was some of Tarantino's best writing I've seen yet.  However, Zero Dark Thirty and Amour seem more likely to win.  As for Adapted Screenplay, it's another toss-up between Lincoln and Argo.

Best Foreign Language Film:
Amour will win this one.  There's not much else to say about this this category or the other nominees so let's just move on.

Best Animated Feature Film:
Yet another category where I have absolutely no idea who will win.  It would be great to see Frankenweenie or ParaNorman win as it will be a tremendous victory for stop-motion animation.  I wouldn't be displeased if Wreck-It-Ralph wins as it will be the first time a video game based movie will have won an award like this.  The only nominee I don't want to win is Brave.  Not that I didn't like the movie, I just thought the other nominees were much better.  Studio Ghibli's The Secret World of Arrietty was much more deserving of a nomination.

Best Animated Short Film:
I'm really hoping Disney's Paperman will win this award, as it was very creative and, in some ways, groundbreaking in mixing traditional animation with computer animation.  I was also hoping to see Pixar's La Luna get nominated, as I thought that was much better, but I still enjoyed Paperman.

I could be completely right, or I could be completely wrong in these predictions.  My guess is as good as yours.  The 85th Academy Awards will take place Sunday, February 24 at 7 pm Eastern and 4 pm Pacific on ABC.

Review: Dr. Seuss' The Lorax

As I sat in my room, one rainy March day, I decided to see what movie critics had to say.  A brand new movie was about to come out, Dr. Seuss' The Lorax was making people shout.  "It's atrocious! Abysmal! Dr. Seuss would be ashamed!" "But it's well-meaning and cute, it's really not that lame!"  I was sitting confused as I ever could be.  Was this a film that I should go see? Myself unsure and the reviews quite mixed, I avoided the film, until it popped up on Netflix.  I was still unsure, as I went to click Play. Would I find enjoyment in the film, or dismay?

Unfortunately, despite good intentions and some great ideas to make the original story work as a feature length film, The Lorax is another miss in the series of film adaptations of Dr. Seuss' works.  All the pieces were in place for the movie to join Horton Hears a Who as one of the better Seuss adaptations, but somewhere along the way the filmmakers lost sight of not only Dr. Seuss' vision, but of their own vision as well.

Dr. Seuss' story of a boy who goes to the Once-ler(voiced by Ed Helms) to hear the story of the Lorax(voiced by Danny Devito) and the destruction of the Truffula Trees remains largely unchanged. Except for the addition of an entire second plot involving the boy, named Ted(voiced by Zac Efron), and the citizens of the entirely-made-of-plastic Thneedville.  Ted wants to find a real, organic tree to get the attention of his neighbor Audrey(voiced by Taylor Swift). Led to the Once-ler by his grandmother(voiced by Betty White), Ted discovers that Thneedville lies in the center of a wasteland of smog and dead tree stumps.  Ted's actions attract the attention of Aloysius O'Hare, a powerful bottled air magnate who keeps the citizens Thneedville unaware of their surroundings.  As Ted listens to the Once-ler's story, he discovers that restoring the Truffula Trees may be more important than he could ever imagine.

As you can see, there's a lot going on in The Lorax, and that's it's biggest problem.  In stretching the material to feature length, the filmmakers ended up adding too much additional material.  There are too many sub-plots and side characters, and the movie actually devotes more time to these than the main story.  On top of that, a lot of the extra characters are just unnecessary.  Too much time is spent with the families of Ted and the Once-ler.  They're just included for more jokes that didn't do much for me.  The new villain O'Hare is about as boring a villain as you can get, he just wants money and power, and the movie would have greatly benefited from his exclusion.  Also, the pacing can be pretty off at times.  The movie alternates from Ted's story to the Once-ler's throughout most of the movie, and it's a good balance at first.  However, the final part of the Lorax's story is reduced to a two minute song(yeah, The Lorax is also a musical), and the last 20 minutes of the movie focuses on the boring sub-plot with the boring villain.

Also lacking is the voice acting.  Not that it's bad, it's just that I can tell that these are celebrities talking into a microphone.  Also, some of the actors have such distinct voices it's hard not to be distracted.  Every time Ed Helms speaks or sings, I just hear Andy from The Office or Stu from The Hangover.  However, his voice for the much older Once-ler is very good.  By far the weakest link in the chain of celebrity voice actors is Taylor Swift.  She's trying her best, but half the time her voice acting doesn't match with the animation in the expressions on her character and it's really distracting.  The rest of the cast does a fine enough job, but you can tell they were cast for marketing reasons.

And that's how a lot of The Lorax feels; like the filmmakers got more concerned with making the movie more marketable, and that really betrays the message of the original story.  The message is still there, in fact it felt like the movie was trying to force it down my throat half the time, but it gets lost in the movie's huge Hollywood production values.

If there's anything good that came out of The Lorax, it would be the animation and design of the movie.  Everything looks like it was plucked right from the brain of Dr. Seuss.  The comedic timing is also very good, with character's expressions getting more laughs than the jokes that come out of their mouths.  The scenes involving the Once-ler's story are pretty good, as they're the parts that are the most faithful to the book, and I'm fine with giving Ted his own story, but there was just too much time devoted to it.  As the credits roll, artwork from the book is shown, which I'm sure was meant to pay tribute to the original, but to those who cherish the book and original TV special, it feels more like a slap to the face.  Everything looks like Seuss' original vision, but pretty visuals can't make up for the bad choices on the part of the filmmakers.  Just like the Once-ler got caught up in "biggering and biggering" his Thneed industry, the makers of The Lorax got caught up in biggering and biggering the movie's profits.

Score:
2.5/5 Stars

The Lorax means well and has some good moments as well some great animation, but everything the original stood for gets lost in the larger-than-life production values.

Why Disney's 3D Re-releases Failed

UPDATE: Despite the numerous reports saying that Disney shelved The Little Mermaid 3D, the recently released Diamond Edition of Peter Pan features both an insert and a full-length trailer advertising it.  A few days ago Disney released the exact same trailer online, however this trailer didn't make any mention of 3D, and only advertised a Blu-ray release for this fall.  This post will be updated again once Disney officially clears up the confusion regarding The Little Mermaid 3D.

For those of you who haven't heard, Disney has scrapped the planned theatrical 3D re-release of The Little Mermaid this September, and it's unlikely we'll be seeing more 3D re-releases anytime soon.  This news comes in the wake of Disney's previous 3D releases not matching up to the success of The Lion King 3D.  The re-releases of Beauty and the Beast and Finding Nemo each earned a little less than half of The Lion King's earnings, while Monsters Inc. only earned roughly a third.  With these numbers, it's easy to see why Disney lost their faith so quickly.  But these re-releases didn't have to perform as badly as they did.  There was definitely a public interest in the idea of seeing a classic film in a new way, let alone on a big theater screen.  The reason Disney's re-releases failed is a dual-headed failure in marketing on Disney's part.

The Little Mermaid 3D may never see daylight, but it didn't have to be that way

1. Audience Overload

When The Lion King 3D unexpectedly performed well, Disney must have gotten a big sugar rush  of excitement and announced four 3D re-releases throughout 2012-2013, three of those in 2012 alone.  That's simply too much for an audience to handle in a year.  Disney should have spaced them out to about one or two a year, or they simply could have nixed the Pixar movies and released classics that people actually wanted to see in theaters again.

2. Bad Timing

This one mostly pertains to Monsters Inc. but there's an argument for the other releases as well.  The reason Beauty and the Beast and Finding Nemo had more success was because Disney released them during times when there were hardly any high profile movies coming out.  But the problem with all three of the releases that came out was that they were already available on home video, whereas  The Lion King DVD had been out of print for a number of years.  Beauty and the Beast 3D was originally scheduled for release before the Blu-ray, but it kept getting delayed and eventually shelved because Disney didn't want to "over-saturate the market"(how ironic).  By the time it hit theaters, audiences had access to the new home video issue of Beauty and the Beast for over a year.  Where Disney really faltered was with Monsters Inc. Disney, for some reason, decided to release it during one of the busiest times in movie-going.  It got crushed by movies like The Hobbit, Les Miserables, and Django Unchained.  

The cancellation of The Little Mermaid 3D is unfortunate because it had a similar background to The Lion King 3D (out of print home video) and I believe that it could have been the most successful out of the four re-releases.  And who knows? Maybe we'll see it sometime down the road much like Beauty and the Beast.  But for now, Disney has delivered a pretty bad stab wound to the novel idea that they created in the first place.

Studio Ghibli's Latest gets a U.S. Release Date

Walt Disney Pictures has released an English-language trailer for Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli's latest feature, From Up on Poppy Hill, as well as given a release date of March 15.  The story, written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by his son Goro Miyazaki, centers around two teenagers who discover life and love in post-war Japan.  Unlike previous Studio Ghibli features, Disney is not producing the English dub of the film.  The English dub is instead being produced by GKIDS, notable for The Secret of Kells and Summer Wars, though Disney will still be responsible for the international distribution.  It's currently unknown how widespread the U.S. theatrical release will be because of this.  My only reservation about the movie so far is the lackluster reception of Goro Miyazaki's last directorial effort, Tales From Earthsea, but the father-son team up has already garnered praise in Japan, so I'm looking forward to seeing it.

From Up on Poppy Hill will be in U.S. theaters March 15