American Gangster (R, on DVD February 19) - Back in November, I made an early prediction that Ridley Scott's underwhelming opus would not only be nominated for but win Best Picture and Director. Man, I'm glad my precognition abilities suck. The only nods tallied were for Best Art Direction and Supporting Actress contender Ruby Dee, making her five minutes the shortest amount of nominated screen time in Oscar history. Dee probably won't win, but she would've taken Best Bitch-Slap in a walk.
Near the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, spiritual-documentary filmmaker Martin Doblmeier conducted a survey on his Web site (
What, exactly, is going on this year?
The following are the nominations for the 2007 Academy Awards, scheduled to air on ABC affiliate WQAD-TV at 7 p.m. on Sunday, February 25. If all goes the way I think it will (ha ha!), the winner of the most Oscars - a whopping three - will, for the first time ever, be a foreign-language film, and the Best Picture winner will have received the same amount of Oscars as the Best Documentary Feature winner. (That this is even a possibility marks this as a zany-ass year.)
Most people think that documentaries are dull. And when they're environmental documentaries? Forget it.
Babel (R, Great Escape Theatre) - In a year that saw a spectacularly inclusive roster of nominees, the seven citations for Alejandro González Iñárritu's globe-trotting drama - Picture, Director, Supporting Actress (Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi), Original Screenplay (Guillermo Arriaga), Editing, and Original Score - seemed not only inevitable, but just. But where is Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography nod?
Most of my friends have all but given up on going to the movies, and considering the quality of most movies nowadays, it's pretty hard to blame them. But what's alarming is that the people I talk to don't seem to be boycotting the cineplex in protest of what they're showing; they're protesting the audiences. And in that case, it's really hard to blame them.
