Puss in Boots: The Last Wish - 1 nomination

 

Best Animated Feature Film
Joel Crawford
Mark Swift

Puss in Boots discovers that he has burned through 8 of his 9 lives acting as a hero and sometimes, just acting like an idiot.  He hangs up his crime fighting hat and plants himself at a safe house full of cats with little to threaten his last life.  There he meets Perrito, a little dog full of sunshine and kindness. One day, the Goldilocks and 3 Bears crime family comes along to hunt Puss down, and he overhears them say that a magical wishing star exists and they are looking for the map, which is about to go to Jack Horner who hordes magical objects so that only he can access their magic. Puss goes to steal the map and runs into his ex-fiancee Kitty Softpaws, who he left at the altar. Now the hunt is on to use the map, to be the first to the magical wishing star, and to reap its rewards no matter the cost ultimately recharging his lives back to 9.

This is the 3rd in the Puss in Boots trilogy, itself a spin off from the Shrek series, and I have to say, the films hold up.  This one was fun, had incredibly beautiful animation, and a compelling storyline.  I'm generally not a fan of pushing any one series to its limits (save Star Wars and the MCU, they can keep making them, I'll keep watching them) because the more stories you add onto a character, the less interesting they tend to become.  Not so with the Puss in Boots series, I enjoyed every single one of them, and I'll happily take more if they've got 'em.

Pain and Glory - 2 nominations

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role - Antonio Banderas

Best International Feature Film - Spain

Pain and Glory is an exquisite film about a famous movie director who recalls the key moments of his life, those that shaped everything he knows about himself in the present day.  Antonio Banderas is nominated for playing Salvador Mallo, the man who is about to celebrate a significant anniversary for his most enduring film, SABOR.  (This is inexplicably the first Oscars nomination for Banderas.) This means reconnecting with the wild lead actor, a man with whom he had a terrible falling out, who turns Mallo onto the "wonderful world" of heroin addiction.  All the while, he is suffering from a series of very serious ailments, including chronic and severe back pain.  Alone and depressed, he thinks about the history of his life, when he began to discover his homosexuality, what his life was like with an absent father and living in an underground cave as an apartment, and all of the key moments in his autobiography, happy and sad.

The film is more than a character study, it's touching, it's engaging, and Banderas is magnetic. We feel his pain inside our own bodies; both the physical and the emotional.

Almodovar's films are powerful, and I have yet to see one I haven't liked.  Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is wonderful, but for today I'll recommend Talk to Her for which Almodovar won an Oscar for Original Screenplay.  All About My Mother is another of Almodovar's films to have been nominated for the International Feature award, which it won in 1999. When you have finished that film... just watch everything he's made.  I'm a fan.

Watch the trailer: