If The Hurt Locker wins big at the Oscars this year it will be a travesty.
The film has already undeservedly won all sorts of awards including six recent BAFTAs for: Best Film (bah!), Best Director, Editing, Original Screenplay, Cinematography and Sound.
The Best Screenplay award is the most ludicrous of all because there's hardly any speaking in it!
These are the Oscar categories that it's been nominated in:
Best PictureAvatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt LockerInglourious Basterds
Precious
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air
Best DirectorJames Cameron (Avatar)
Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
Lee Daniels (Precious)
Jason Reitman (Up in the Air)
Best ActorJeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)
George Clooney (Up in the Air)
Colin Firth (A Single Man)
Morgan Freeman (Invictus)
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)Best Original ScreenplayMark Boal (The Hurt Locker)Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
Alessandro Camon, Oren Moverman (The Messenger)
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen (A Serious Man)
Bob Peterson, Pete Docter, Tom McCarthy (Up)
Best CinematographyAvatar
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The Hurt LockerInglourious Basterds
The White Ribbon
Best Sound MixingAvatar
The Hurt LockerInglourious Basterds
Star Trek
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Best Sound EditingAvatar
The Hurt LockerInglourious Basterds
Star Trek
Up
Best Original ScoreAvatar (James Horner)
Fantastic Mr Fox (Alexandre Desplat)
The Hurt Locker (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders) -
yup, for all those bomb blastsSherlock Holmes (Hans Zimmer)
Up (Michael Giacchino)
Best Film EditingAvatar
District 9
The Hurt LockerInglourious Basterds
Precious
It should win: NOTHING.
For starters it's so full of unmemorable moments, I can't remember the first thing about it except that it sort of gave an idea of how slowly time passes if you're a bomb diffuser in Iraq.
There were huge stretches of time when I zoned out completely because it was all so boringly more, and then
more of the same.
Also, none of the acting was spectacular, the effects were okay and there wasn't a single wow moment through any of it - not emotionally, not visually nor plotwise.
These aren't the main reasons I think it shouldn't win though - it's these mixed with the fact that the director is a woman - the VERY reason I believe it's won so many awards so far.
It's as if the award-givers have said: "Can you believe a woman has actually managed to make a war movie?? We can't believe they're able to do such things. Let's give her two hours out of the kitchen as a treat. She must win a
lot of things for that, no matter how much better the competing movies are," - so unbelievably sexist and patronising.
Also, there's been the controversy surrounding the film's co-producer Nicolas Chartier. He recently sent out an e-mail spam message to Academy voters encouraging people to campaign for the movie to win Best Picture - badmouthing Avatar as a Big Budget that shouldn't win because of it.
He's subsequently had to make an apology and he's been banned from the Awards, but the fact remains: he did it.
He clearly wanted The Hurt Locker to come across as the "victim" of the awards - the movie that could be hard-done-by because of everything that supposedly makes it an outcast in the movie industry: it's smaller budget, the fact that it was directed by a woman.
Totally NOT what women's lib is it
all.
Related Links
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