Post by normadesmond on Dec 5, 2009 15:38:42 GMT -4
I think that Gwyneth Paltrow has no shot this year at all, so at least we're safe with her. She did score a Spirts nomination, but there's very little correlation between those and the Oscars for most of their nominations.
Your posts are so.... detailed.
I think it's funny you've thought this through all the inner workings of the whole awards process in that much detail. I kind of don't understand it at all. It's a mystery to me why one movie gains traction and another doesn't. My logic was that I expect Carey Mulligan and Gabourey Sidibe to be nominated, and Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren to be back again. That's four.... so who's the fifth? I was thinking they might let Gwyneth or Natalie back into the fold.... but hopefully you're right. I'd be surprised if the nominee list doesn't include Mirren, Mulligan, Sidibe, Streep.... but the fifth nominee is a question mark.Natalie Portman does have a small chance, but I think that it was a big mistake to go supporting since I think leading is slightly less competitve than supporting, and sometimes they just won't go with category fraud at all although admittedly more often they do than don't. I think the reviews are going to be too mixed though for Brothers even if Jim Sheridan is an Oscar friendly director, and that Lion's Gate is more concerned about pushing Precious which may have peaked too soon and may need more help now to get it back ontrack to a Best Picture win.
On second thought, the reviews aren't all that good: see here's the Metacritic ranking[/color].
You got David Edelstein - the guy who said Gabourey Sidibe looks like a freak of nature - who absolutely loves it - saying:
Sheridan’s actors work with their intellects fully engaged--and they engage us on levels we barely knew we had.
I have a hard time believing a movie headlined by Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman contains unprecedented levels of brilliance in the acting - if that's true, Jim Sheridan's a miracle worker. More likely is that Mr. "Sidibe-has-the-body-of-a-zeppelin" Edelstein is completely full of shit. "Engage us on levels we barely knew we had"?
But the total Metacritic estimated score is only 59 - which equates to "mixed or average reviews." 15 reviewers are lukewarm or disliked it, compared to only 10 who thought it was good or great.
I also noticed this in the excerpted comments. From Dana Stevens' review published in Slate:
Portman doesn't overact or underact; she just stands around with whatever the appropriate expression for the scene seems to be on her sweet, pretty, childlike face. If there's something going on behind that face, I neither know nor care what it is, which means that long stretches of Brothers involving her character's interiority struck me as dramatically inert.
I almost fell over when I read that. Has a certain critic been scouring the internet, perhaps, finding out what normal viewers actually think of Portman's abilities? She's practically saying what professional critics up to now have never said: Portman cannot act. I'm sorry, but between Dana Stevens and David Edelstein, Stevens' opinion sounds way more plausible.
There's also this from Thelma Adams[/color] in US magazine (not linked by Metacritic):
In this plodding drama, Captain Sam (Tobey Maguire) goes to Afghanistan just as his bro Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets paroled. Soon, his wife Grace (Natalie Portman) gets the news that Sam was shot dead, and takes comfort in Tommy's presence. Oops! Sam was actually captured by the Taliban, and he returns home on edge and obsessed with Grace's possible infidelity. A lip gloss-wearing Portman is miscast as a suburban mom, giving the love triangle zero credibility. And though Maguire and Gyllenhaal succeed as brothers, Maguire works too hard unloading his scarred, crazy exterior -- and Gyllenhaal is tragically underutilized.
Two whole reviews that essentially say Portman didn't create an actual character: she just stood there and recited her lines. Outside of Star Wars movies, that's got to be a first (and even there the reviewers shifted the blame onto George Lucas).
Suck it, David Edelstein!
