Oscars 2007

Well the Oscars have been handed out. As usual, the results are mixed feelings all over, not to mention it's always unsettling that rather obscure movies end up being nominated to contend for the statues.

Nominees for Best Picture were:
The Departed - $131.5m
The Queen - $51.3m
Little Miss Sunshine - $59.7m
Babel - $33.2m
Letters From Iwo Jima - $11.8m

Next to the titles are their Cumulative Gross as of last weekend. Only The Departed crossed the $100m mark. The other movies have the nominations to thank for a fair part of their box office total but yet didn't make that much money.

I'm fairly happy The Departed won the Oscar for Best Picture as it's most likely to be the only one out of the 5 nominees that I'll bother to watch.

By the time 2006's Oscar ceremony came along, I had watched only Crash and it's still the only one of the 5 nominees that I have watched. Fairly safe to say that I won't be watching the rest.


About the other Oscars handed out:
- I'm glad The Departed won an Oscar for Best Director for Martin Scorsese. It was about time.

- In the Best Actress category, I had hoped Meryl Streep would win the Oscar for her icy queen role in The Devil Wears Prada. But instead it went to Helen Mirren for The Queen, once again a movie with rather limited appeal.

- Not entirely displeased to see Forest Whitaker take the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in The Last King Of Scotland. I don't like Leo DiCaprio much, he still looks too much like a small boy to be taken seriously. And I didn't like Will Smith taking on that boring role in The Pursuit Of Happyness and meddling to put his own son in the movie.

- I'm happy that Pan's Labyrinth won a few Oscars but it's a travesty that it didn't win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. At one point, Pan's Labyrinth was a reasonably serious contender to be nominated for Best Picture!! But it was shut out of that category and now it's lost the Best Foreign Language Film award to some half-assed movie from Germany.

- Throughout the Award season, I have been mystified as to how people rate Dreamgirls and its cast so highly. While Eddie Murphy didn't end up with the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (I wonder whether his Norbit roles cost him), I'm mad to see that Jennifer Hudson won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. The woman is a singer struggling to make a name for herself and was asked to play a singer struggling to make a name for herself. Not exactly the hardest role, was it? They could have put any young black singer in the role and she'd have done as good a job of it. Hopefully she'll catch the curse of the Oscars and end up being forgotten.

- I'm not happy to see how movies that are essentially musicals are increasingly a feature at the Oscars. I think Moulin Rouge startedthis all. Then there was Ray. Last year, we got served Walk The Line and the Best Actress award went undeservedly to Reese Witherspoon. And this year, the hype was all about Dreamgirls. I don't like the genre and certainly wouldn't mind seeing less of these movies being made.