Oscars

The Oscar nominations have, as usual, snuck in on little cat feet, in contrast to the hoopla attending the announcement of the actual winners.

Of the movies nominated this year, I've seen 5 so far. None of them make me wonder, "Why did it get nominated for that?", though I didn't like all the movies. Lincoln and Argo, which I saw because of my weakness for putatively accurate historical dramatizations, were both pretty good movies. Les Miserables, which I saw for the music at B's suggestion, was pretty good too. The Hobbit was impressive in the technical categories in which it was nominated, no doubt about that. And Brave, which we watched on DVD, again at B's suggestion, was gorgeously animated, and well-enough paced on a scene-by-scene level, but the overall plot was stunningly lax, sloppy, and meandering. It would have been better at half the length. But that's also true of other well-regarded animated features of recent times, like Ratatouille.

What astonishes me is my lack of interest in seeing any of the other major-award nominees. By this time, I've seen 11 of last year's major-award nominees, mostly on DVD, but this year there are only a couple, like Life of Pi or The Master, that I've been thinking I might rent on DVD so that I can turn them off if I don't like them. (I saw the previous movie by the director of The Master in the theatre, and wished I could have turned it off, I don't care how many Oscar nominations that crappy movie subsequently got.) But that's about it. Particular aversion towards the possibilities of Silver Linings Playbook, a movie whose mere existence had previously escaped my attention, and which sounds like exactly the sort of domestic drama filled with repellent and nonsensical characters that I most dislike.