It was awfully early in the morning, 5:30 a.m. Pacific, when the nominations for this year's Academy Awards were read by actor Chris Pine, directors J.J. Abrams and Alfonso Cuarón, and Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs. (Also, for the first time ever, the nominees in all 24 categories were read live, meaning we prognosticators didn't have to wait an extra six minutes to find out just how badly we screwed up Best Sound Mixing.) It might even have been a little too early for Ms. Isaacs, who, when announcing their names, approached true Travolta-ness by calling Julianne Moore "Julianne Moren" and Mr. Turner cinematographer Dick Pope "Dick Poop."
Yet it's hard to imagine anyone in Hollywood - especially anyone with a vested interest in the results - falling back to sleep after the official Oscar contenders were revealed, because as wake-up calls go, this one was frequently a doozy.
If you're reading this hot off the (electronic) presses, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences only have an hour or so to submit their online or - less frequently these days - paper ballots for this year's Oscar race. (Voting officially ends today at 5 p.m. PST.) So this seems like an appropriate time to make my own final guesses for January 15's nominees, even if a better time would be January 15 itself - preferably just after the Academy's official announcement of contenders.
There are quite a few promising titles I've yet to see, including wintertime Oscar hopefuls such as Selma, American Sniper, Mr. Turner, Still Alice, A Most Violent Year, and Inherent Vice, and most everything bound to be nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film and Best Documentary Feature. The Quad Cities area is a relatively small movie market in the Midwest, and I don't get to Chicago (or New York or Los Angeles) very often. C'est comme ça.
St. Ambrose University's educational initiative the Middle East Institute (MEI), which just began its first school-calendar year of programming, was designed to foster discussion and study of this frequently misunderstood and geopolitically critical region. And as institute director Ryan Dye says, when it came time to create an event schedule for the MEI's fall semester, "I consulted with our fine-arts department, and they were really excited about the idea of doing a film festival."
On May 4, in an event co-sponsored by the Jewish Federation of the Quad Cities, the Figge Art Museum will host the screenings of a feature-length documentary and seven shorter works, all of them by award-winning Israeli filmmakers. Yet if the you enter the Video Art from Israel: A One-Day Sensory Experience presentation with preconceived notions about the films' collective subject matter - anticipating explorations of Israel's foreign policy, say, or the country's ongoing struggle with Palestine - you're likely to be in for a surprise or two. Or eight.
Last night, at the tail end of her opening monologue, Academy Awards emcee Ellen DeGeneres took a moment to acknowledge the year's tight race for Best Picture, and stated that "anything can happen" regarding the evening's biggest prize. "Possibility number one: 12 Years a Slave wins Best Picture," she said. "Possibility number two: You're all racists."
When it comes to the films and individuals that win Academy Awards, it's easy to get defensive, and even a little pissy, about voters' collective choices. "How could those people ever vote for ______," you find yourself asking, "when ______ is so obviously better? Don't they have any integrity at all?!"
The big shock of this morning's announcement of nominees for the 86th Annual Academy Awards? The almost complete lack of shocks, especially given such an insanely competitive year.
