The Academy Awards

Feel free to add your own picks

Who is the pick for best picture and best director also major categories?

I don't have a pick for any other category.

What are your thoughts?  Have you seen many movies last year?

I saw Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.

Both excellent movies and based on true stories. 

There are so many that I didn't see that some of the catagories I'll have to skip.

Best Actress, Lilly Gladstone

I'd like to see Martin win for best director and best picture and Robbie Robertson for best musical score.

Just FYI, Emma Stone acted her behind off in Poor Things...

I think that Opennhiemer will win but my favorite is American Fiction.

American Fiction deals with a serious matter. The problem is that it didn't get much advertising.

I agree - I though Oppenheimer was a great story, but not necessarily a great movie and way too long!

According to the oscar prediction website gold derby ,Oppenheimer is a lock for best picture.  In fact, Oppenheimer seems to be on track to win at least eight oscars.

The closest contest is between Lilly Gladstone for killers of the flower moon and Emma Stone for poor things.  it is a toss up with maybe a slight edge for Lilly Gladstone.

The box office smash Barbie may come away with two, best costumes and best original song

for best actor it is between Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer and Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers.  Murphy is expected to win in what is probably a fairly close vote.

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of the main movies, I have seen Oppenheimer, Barbie, and the Holdovers and I liked all three of them.  Expected Oppenheimer to be more about the making of the bomb than it is, the larger part of the movie is spent on oppenheimer's political problems, but it was very good. I liked Barbie too, it's very clever although I thought it got too deep into the feminist argument as the movie went on. The Holdovers is very good, it'll remind you a little of Goodwill Hunting and Dead Poets Society. If Paul Giamatti manages the win best actor it will be well deserved.

I'm looking forward to watching killers of the flower moon but it hasn't come on any of the streaming channels I subscribe to yet.

I read that if Cllian Murphy wins best actor for Oppenheimer he will be the first actor or actress born in Ireland to win an Academy Award. That surprises me a little bit,  I thought Daniel Day Lewis was Irish but he was born in England. None of the other great Irish actors and actresses over the years have won an oscar. 

The event has lost much of its luster over the years.

It probably doesn’t help that there are literally thousands of other things a person could watch. Not to mention a new season of Fortnite. Back when we all had maybe half a dozen channels we could watch, the other stations basically punted whenever a network ran one of these big shows, so everybody ended up watching it. Times have definitely changed. The show could be amazing, and it still wouldn’t be like the old days.

I watched American fiction tonight, I thought it was good but not as good as Oppenheimer or The  Holdovers.

 IMO the event has lost much of its luster over the years.

I don't get to see it any more, nor do I get to see the nominated movies before they are up for an award because I don't go to movie theatres and only theatres show first run movies - a movie has to be three years old to be watched on TV, and I have been to a movie theatre only once for more than 17 years, only because I was invited to join a couple of my students and I was curious to experience 4-D for the first time.  It was years ago to watch the final Hobbit movie, and if anyone else enjoys getting punched in the back, jiggled in their seat and sprayed in their face they're welcome to it.  

IMO the Academy Awards started losing its luster once Bob Hope stopped hosting them.  There have been moments, however.  There are four I can think back to - host Billy Crystal entering wearing Hannibal Lecter's mask in 1992, Billy Crystal as host again helping make Keisha Castle-Hughes (the Whale Rider girl) dream come true by bringing Johnny Depp over to meet her, Sophia Loren as presenter at the 1999 show shouting "ROBERTO!!!" as best actor and he jumped up onto the back of his seat, and when Denzell Washington received his best actor Oscar for Training Day in 2002 he "shouted out" to Sidney Poitier  "I'll always be chasing you, Sidney.  I'll always be following in your footsteps. There's nothing I would rather do, sir." 

and if anyone else enjoys getting punched in the back, jiggled in their seat and sprayed in their face they're welcome to it.  

Sounds like the old neighborhood.

Among the things I learned after moving from there were going to the movies could be very pleasant and gambling was actually illegal.

On the eve of Sunday’s Oscars, Best Picture nominee “The Holdovers” has been accused of being “plagiarized line-by-line” from a decade-old screenplay for a film written about a decade ago never made, according to a report.

Simon Stephenson, best known for working on popular movies “Luca” and “Paddington 2,” made the bombshell allegations in emails to the Writer’s Guild of America   that were obtained by Variety .

The screenwriter alleges in the missives that “The Holdovers” director Alexander Payne likely read a script for his eerily similar movie “Frisco” when it made the rounds around Hollywood in 2013 on the industry’s “black list” of most like scripts, where it peaked at number three.

“The evidence the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarised line-by-line from “Frisco” is genuinely overwhelming – anybody who looks at even the briefest sample pretty much invariably uses the word ‘brazen,’” Stephenson wrote in the email he sent to the WGA’s director of credits Lesley Mackey, after speaking with him about the movies’ similarities.

“Frisco” is a drama that follows a cranky children’s hospital worker who gets stuck watching after his 15-year-old student — similar to how Paul Giamatti plays a prep-school classics teacher who spends a Christmas break a troubled teen, played by Dominic Sessa, and the school’s cafeteria manager, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

Stephenson meticulously compared the two films scene by scene as well as important sequences and dialogues. 

He alleges Payne reviewed the Frisco script in 2013 and had it again in late 2019 before he approached first-time film writer David Hemingson about “The Holdovers.” Hemingson also received producing credits for the movie.

In a Feb. 25 to the WGA board, Stephenson wrote  “I can demonstrate beyond any possible doubt that the meaningful entirety of the screenplay for a film with WGA-sanctioned credits that is currently on track to win a screenwriting Oscar has been plagiarised line-by-line from a popular unproduced screenplay of mine. 

“I can also show that the director of the offending film was sent and read my screenplay on two separate occasions prior to the offending film entering development,” he continued. 

Stephenson claims that only five parts from “The Holdovers” are not in his “Frisco” script  — including, ironically, a backstory about someone getting away with plagiarism, Variety reported.

“By ‘meaningful entirety’ I do mean literally everything- story, characters, structure, scenes, dialogue, the whole thing. Some of it is just insanely brazen: many of the most important scenes are effectively unaltered and even remain visibly identical in layout on the page.”

A WGA associate counsel told him it is not a guild issue and referred him to a Los Angeles law firm but told Stephenson “A lawsuit remains the most viable option under these circumstances.”

“The Holdovers” is nominated for five awards at this year’s Oscars, including Best Original Screenplay. 

Stephenson and Payne declined to comment to Variety, and they could not immediately be reached by The Post.

Payne previously won two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay for his films “Sideways” (2005) and “The Descendants” (2012).

The Holdovers’ accused of 'overwhelming' plagiarism by ‘Luca’ screenwriter day before Oscars (nypost.com)

No mention of a movie (either here or by the Academy) I haven't seen: Napoleon.

Could it have been that bad?