I have (for a change) seen quite a few of those nominated. I’m hoping The King’s Speech sweeps the Awards up, as it really deseve it.
I must say that the Oscars does not interest me one bit. The really interesting films never get nominated only mainstream crap does, with a few exceptions of course.
Not really one for the Oscars…to many people who are legends in their own minds 
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i lost interest in the oscars years ago. they mean nothing except to those who win them. many of the “best films” are IMO immensely over blown, overhyped and over rated ( a few are pretty good). has become a bit of a bore, and despite recent efforts to convince us otherwise the horror genre is on the whole shunned.
I will always remember the night jack Palance won an Oscar
The Oscars have always seemed to me to be a bit out of touch with, well, almost everything. For the most part, if a film is to succeed at the Academy Awards, it has to meet fairly specific criteria. The film has to be a big production, properly distributed and thus seen by a large number of people. It has to feature established actors and actresses. It has to be emotional, even sentimental, so that the film can pass as serious and meaningful drama. A high emotional content also provides a platform for the actors and actresses to produce more flamboyant performances.
I think these are quite obviously the sort of qualities which make a film Oscar-worthy, but these things really are not the signifiers of good filmmaking. In fact, it’s quite a familiar mould which produces such films, because making an Oscar-worthy film tends to necessitate stories about certain types of relationships, and those stories need a certain type of structure. Therefore you are left with quite conservative types of film, with several notable genres sidelined in the process.
As much as the Academy wishes to appear modern and relevant, the Academy Awards are so mired in Hollywood that they are simply unable to award films which are genuinely radical. Even worse, they can’t even properly reward otherwise excellent films which don’t have the qualities the Academy is looking for. Of course, the sad thing is that it’s often these films, and especially the genuinely radical films, which have have the greatest influence and which are most significant for anyone interested in cinema.
The Oscars leave you with a completely skewed standard for film quality which doesn’t properly tie into film criticism, doesn’t really use popularity as a benchmark either, and isn’t even a decent indicator of a film’s significance or it’s cultural influence. If you want an example of how out of touch the Academy is, look at a director like Martin Scorcese. Scorcese was passed over as Best Director for Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, all of which are on the American Film Institutes lists of 100 greatest movies in America; but he finally managed to nab a Best Director Oscar for The Departed, a mediocre film at best. Actually, all three of those films also lost out in the Best Picture picture category, despite their obvious pedigree (to Ordinary People, Rocky and Dances with Wolves respectively). It seems it’s often only in hindsight is the Academy able to recognise the significance of a particular film, it’s performances, or it’s production. This is really sad, because the Academy is often found to award Oscars almost as if they are compensation for not recognising the importance of something earlier. Getting Oscar recognition can be a steady grind, because it’s not as simple as turning in the best film, performance etc. No, you have to tick many more boxes than that.
Of course, as maddeningly irrelevant as Oscar recognition is from a critical perspective, this doesn’t mean to say the Oscars are unimportant. Quite the contrary, because the Oscar ceremony produces a huge amount of buzz and the awards carry a great deal of weight in Hollywood. It’s a crazy, insular little circus, but if you go with it and accept the limitations of the Oscars, they can also be pretty damn entertaining.
The King’s Speech sweeping BAFTAs, as expected.
Congrats to Christopher Lee.
Deservingly so - it was the best film I saw in the cinema last year.
i give it to the movie EVIL DEAD the king of gore!
Anybody watching? Is it me or does James Franco looks pretty uncomfortable?
LOL Melissa Leo dropped the F-Bomb! ;D ;D ;D
Her whole acceptance speech was… hum, special, lol. Loved that The King’s Speech writer something like “I won’t use the Mellisa Leo F-Bomb”! As of now, it’s a better show than last year’s, but I’m rather disappointed by the fact that True Grit lost in every single category it was nominated.
Yes, I too was disappointed…but it is a remake after all and was facing some big competition.
I was happy to see Eli Wallach getting honored for…well, I’m not quite sure what. Also, Kirk Douglas stole the show.
Phew, I’m glad David Fincher didn’t won. So he maybe still will make interesting films …
I actually can’t say much haven’t seen any of the films in cause, but I was amuse by the reviews Michael Bale’s performance was from new Daniel Day-Lewis to histrionic and beyond overacting, and on The king’s speech from Great film to BBC TV film standart lol.
Things were at least more unanimous about True Grit.
Anyway I got to lose this habit of not seeing the new films when they came out, but its impossible to turn of the cell phone in the cinema.
As more often, the event completely took me by surprise.
I knew it was coming, but when I turned on the radio this morning, I was surprised to hear that Mr. Darcy had beaten Mark Zuckerberg and Mattie Ross. I’m not particularly interested in this media event, that usually favors smooth & easy movies over uneasy works of real interest. From the films involved in the race I have only seen The Social Network, and I thought it would win - it had all the necessary ingredients and lacked all elements that could jeopardize it chances - but apparently Cudly Colin Cilled the Cat.
Hey it seems that Nine Inch Nails mentor Trent Reznor won an Oscar, so it can’t be all that bad.
Well, The King’s Speech won four of the five “major” Oscars, and Inception hoovered up four technical ones, so I’m happy with the result. Plus, The King’s Speech is the first Best Picture Winner I have seen in the cinema. 
You should see Winter’s Bone. A bleak, well-directed, well-written, well-performed drama masquerading as a thriller.