Currently browsing the "Academy Award Nominee" tag.

A Better Life

If there was one surprise in the 2011 Oscar nominations, it was Demián Bichir’s nod for Best Actor in a really small film called A Better Life. I’m not sure how many people could have seen this movie. It didn’t even gross $2 million. To be fair, it was named one of the top ten films by the National Board of Review and Bichir was nominated as Best Actor by the Screen Actors Guild and the Independent Spirit Awards. But it is refreshing that this little indie flick did not fly under the Academy’s radar. And that they appreciated Bichir’s outstanding performance.

Incendies

Incendies is a French Canadian drama that was nominated for the 2011 Academy Award for Best Foreign language film and is totally deserving of the honor. Living in small town USA can be frustrating for the lag time in getting to see these films in a theater, but finally, it arrived. (Only 2 left now.)

Restrepo

Gasland

Fracking! That is what Gasland is all about. If you haven’t heard of fracking, you’ll know more than you could imagine after watching this frightening documentary. It all begins when filmmaker Josh Fox gets a notice that a gas company wants to lease the rights to extract natural gas from his pristine land in Eastern Pennsylvania. They are offering him $100,000, which is pretty enticing. So he visits a nearby town Dimock, PA to see how they are doing, since they are already an active drill site. There he sees the first evidence of the immense damage that fracking causes, most dramatically demonstrated when the residents show him that the water coming out of their kitchen faucets can be lit with a match.

The Last Station

This is a wonderful film! It should be on the expanded Academy Awards list for Best Picture, but sadly it isn’t. At least both Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as his wife Sofya are nominated in their respective acting categories. The Last Station is the story of the last years of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s life, his tempestuous relationship with this wife, his coterie of adoring sycophants who turned him into a cult figure, and a young man who became his personal secretary and family confidante.