King Richard - 6 nominations

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role Will Smith

Best Motion Picture of the Year Tim White (producer) Trevor White (producer) Will Smith (producer)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role Aunjanue Ellis

Best Achievement in Film Editing Pamela Martin

Best Original Screenplay Zach Baylin (written by)

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song) Beyoncé (music and lyric by) Dixson (music and lyric by) For song "Be Alive"

I love a good sports story.  Sports genre films quizzically tie with musicals as my favorite genre because win or lose,  the inspiration that comes from hard work, from never giving up, from dreaming a big seemingly unattainable dream gets me every time.  In this case, the story is less about the athletes and more about the parents (and primarily celebrating the dad) who led Venus and Serena to tennis excellence.  In fact, one could argue the strange decision to do a biopic not about the women athletes who are surely among the best of all time in the sport but instead about the man who charted their path to greatness.  

But there are moments - fewer than I'd like but still wonderful moments - where we see how this man (and you better believe his wife too) fomented the girl power that Serena and Venus displayed; how he taught them to believe in their own worth,  how he instilled their feminism into their DNA.  There's no question in his mind who these power athletes are about to become, and because of that, little question in their own minds about what they can achieve.

We can certainly debate the choice of centering the film on the father rather that the daughters, but we can't forget that there is something extraordinary (at that time especially) of a black family navigating the elite tennis world, and the leadership and vision that Richard Williams showed in his unwillingness to see anything but the best for his kids (all of his kids, actually).  

What we can't debate is whether King Richard stands up as an Oscars-worthy film.  The performances were top notch, and what a treat to see Will Smith back to his real acting chops, and Aunjanue Ellis giving life to Williams' wife Brandy.  The screenplay, the music, the directing, they all worked for me.  And of course, the song by Queen Bey is awesome.  Sometimes people ask me to choose the three films they should see from all the Oscar nominees, and I would slide King Richard into spot #4... if you can, make time for four because this one is a great one.

Nominated song:

Trailer:

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Star Trek Beyond - 1 nomination and Suicide Squad - 1 nomination

Please note that the Academy shortened the time between nominations and show by a whole week, that's seven days of reviews, so I've had to get a bit creative in order to get you reviews of all the 63 nominated films.  Today, I'm combining two of the three Makeup and Hairstyling nominees, and the third will be in the post about all 5 foreign films.  Next year, the Oscars are on March 5, so I'm hoping they will go back to a 40 day time period between announcements and broadcast.

Makeup and Hairstyling - Joel Harlow and Richard Alonzo

How to summarize Star Trek Beyond?  Our gang of fearless star voyagers encounter a murderous alien bad guy and have to protect the universe from his evil intentions.  This time on a planet where the beings already hate the Federation, and one from among them forges a bond of friendship with the officers and helps them avert the danger and win over the beings so that they can see that the true intention of the Federation is galactic peace.  So sure, variations on the theme.

But you know what?  I liked it.  I like the themes that Star Trek promotes, I like the action, I like the comedia del arte character archetypes, I like the incredibly creative makeup and hairstyling, I just like science fiction!  This is a film that is not going to change the Star Trek universe and make it something that it's not, but everything about it is engaging, if you like that sort of thing.  And I do.

Makeup and Hairstyling - Alessandro Bertolazzi, Giorgio Gregorini and Christopher Nelson

Viola Davis may be killing it by the Fences, but she did some pretty stupid stuff in Suicide Squad.  In the name of using a very big bad to aid US Defense, Davis releases a force unexpectedly too evil and too powerful to control.  Someone has to fight this supernatural being, so she assembles a ragtag group (yes, I know it's cliche, stay with me) of super villains to do the job.  We meet a whole gang of DC comics anti-heroes - Deadshot, Harley Quinn, Killer Croc, you name it.  We get to learn each of their origin stories while The Joker tries time and again to break lover Harley Quinn out of the Squad and back into his life of crime.

Followers of this blog know that I love a good superhero movie, and even a good anti-hero movie. The nomination is absolutely well deserved - the makeup and the hairstyling are unequaled.  But the movie is a little bit slow, far fetched (even as comic book movies go), and just has a little bit of work to do to compare to the genius of the Marvel universe.  Don't get me wrong, I was mostly entertained, but I'm a really easy mark when it comes to enjoying movies and I can usually find something redeeming.  There is a lot of humor in the darkness of the movie, and who doesn't love Will Smith? 

It's not a great film, but if the filmmakers can learn from this film and screen a few more Marvel movies to analyze what makes them great, there could be a great sequel in the mix.

Welcome Back for Another Oscar Blog Year!

Welcome back to the blog!  This year, we have a little more time between today and the day the winners will be announced, so we have a little more time to play.  By my count, there are 57 nominated films this year (down from 60 last year), but since I group into one blog for each of the short subject categories, that gives us exactly the number of days we need, plus one to release my predictions.

As always, here's my general observations about this year's list.

1. I'm still not a fan of more than 5 nominated best picture films.  It's usually pretty easy to pick out the top 5 from the list, and though I'd include six of the eight nominees pretty easily, I believe we should go back to the old system.  I could easily pick out 3 additional male leads who deserve acting nominations, but we don't do that.  We pick five and we go with them.

2. There are a couple of snubs about which I am deeply disappointed.

• Will Smith played possibly his most engaging and difficult role in the film Concussion, which didn't receive a single nomination.
• Jacob Tremblay (the child who was the lead actor in the film Room), gave one of the best and most difficult performances in a film this year.  He has not been on anyone's list, the studio doesn't seem to have been promoting him, and he could have taken down the whole list of lead actor nominees with any scene from that film.  His age only reinforces the quality of the work.
• Idris Elba was robbed of a Best Supporting Actor nomination for the film Beasts of No Nation (on Netflix).  I suspect that the difficulty of getting academy voters to watch a film about child soldiers combined with the ruthless nature of his character stood in the way.
• The Good Dinosaur was one of my favorite films this year and it didn't get nominated in the Animated Feature category.  (As a friend pointed out to me, only the second Pixar film ever not to be nominated.)
• Finally, I'd have to check the eligibility for Best Original Score, but I thought the score for the film The 33 was one of the best this year.  That category has some tricky rules (which I'll explain in a future blog), but if it met the criteria, it was a shame not to have been nominated.

3. There are a couple of nominations about which I am incredulous.

• At some point, the Academy is going to have to deal with category shenanigans.  Rooney Mara was the lead in the film Carol and Cate Blanchett was the Supporting Lead.  But each of the actress' stature in their careers and in Hollywood has them switched so that the former is nominated for Best Supporting Actress and the latter is nominated for Best Actress in a Lead. Ridiculous.  See the movie and you'll see what I mean.  Between the fact the Mara had more screen time and the fact that the film is about her, this makes no sense.
• Not to give away what I'm going to say in my review, but Mad Max: Fury Road is a spectacular movie about a car chase.  It has some cool makeup, sets, and special effects, but it is one long car chase.  Does that make it Best Picture?  No it doesn't.  If they wanted a populist film, Straight Outta Compton is the clear choice, and being a nerd, I would also take Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

4. #OscarsSoWhite

I've been thinking about this quite a lot over the last several months and at the risk of being internet threatened, I'd like to say that the problem does not lie with the Oscars.  It's like breaking a nail and blaming the nail polish.  The real hashtag should be #HollywoodSoWhite.  If you look at the Best Actor category, four of them are biopics or are based on true stories.  But did The Martian require a white male lead? Nope. Do all Directors need to be white (exluding Innaritu, of course)? Nope.  Guess what, people of color can direct stories that have nothing to do with ethnicity, but are they given the opportunities at the same rate?  I suspect not.

I do believe this is a serious issue, but I think the problem with blaming the Oscars is that when you review the 20 acting nominations, 12 of them are from biopics (you can't change the race of the actual people whose stories are being told), and one is about an Irish girl who would likely have been white in the context of the story.  We need to focus our attention on why opportunities for more diverse stories aren't presenting themselves in the Hollywood studio system, and solve the problem where it lies.  The fish rots at the head, so to speak.  You can't nominate what hasn't appeared on the screen, and the solution lies in more diversity appearing on the screen and behind the camera.  

So, those are my initial impressions, and stay tuned for reviews of the 57 films over the next 46 days. It can't help but be so much fun.  See you at the movies!