Oscars 101: Best Costume Design

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

Since we've already covered Best Visual Effects and Best Makeup and Hairstyling, I figured that it was time to keep up the visual motiff of these posts.  That being said, here are the nominees for Best Costume Design:

The Grand Budapest Hotel
Inherent Vice
Into the Woods
Maleficent
Mr. Turner

One thing that honestly surprised me about the nominees for this category, although it honestly shouldn't have, was the absence of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  I understand that so-called "genre" movies are universally slighted by the Academy, but the technical categories is where they have traditionally gotten their due.  Hell, between Into the Woods and Maleficent there are already two fantasy films being recognized, so is it really that much of a stretch to give it to a superhero film, especially one that so radically and effectively redesigned its titular character's outfit?  They took his star-spangled getup from the first film and made it sleek, dark and covert while still remaining true to the visual core of the original.

The Grand Budapest Hotel - Wes Anderson's latest film is in every way a visual masterpiece.  His exquisite use of colors and staging makes it look in every sense like a cinematic pop-up book: with new layers and images unfolding before your eyes in every scene.  This is owed in no small part to its impeccable costuming.

Ralph Fiennes' concierge uniform boldly pops against the dark browns, tans and whites (and even the occasionally opulent reds) that typify the domestic spheres in which he finds himself throughout the majority of the film.  Zero's lobby boy uniform does likewise.  And since the film largely concerns itself with the upper social spheres, all manner of grandiose and exotic attire is paraded throughout the film - in varying styles and levels of decadence.  The magnificent details of these costumes is only matched by the sheer multitude of them that exist within the film.

Inherent Vice - This film definitely strikes me as the weakest of the five nominees - so much so that I wonder exactly why it was chosen for this category in the first place.  There always seems to be one mundane entry in the field every year: that movie that seems so ordinary and unexceptional that it can't help but stick out like a sore thumb against the increasing extravagence of its competition.  How this beat out other worthy candidates (such as the aforementioned Captain America: The Winter Soldier) I'll never know.

That being said, there's really not all that much to talk about when it comes to the costuming of this film.  The actors all wear clothes at one point or another and they generally fit that person's tastes, means and station.  The blue jean jacket covering the blue turtleneck (pictured above) is kind of cool, but is "kind of cool" really enough to win the day?

Into the Woods - Although generally excellent throughout, I can't help but feel that Into the Woods was nominated for one particular character's wardrobe.  Meryl Streep's excellent turn as The Witch is matched only by the way in which the film attires her.  Her old crone's costume is the apotheosis of witch's robes - dark, frayed and with just the subtlest flair around the shoulders - and her youthful self's dress is the most singularly eye-catching piece of clothing in any film last year.  Seriously, look at it: delicate, organic-looking ruffles, plunging (yet tasteful) neckline and an overall striated texture reminiscent of the woods in which she dwells.

But despite this singularly eye-catching pair of outfits, the remaining characters all have fittingly splendorous costumes of their own.  In particular, the two princes' outfits find the perfect balance between historical fashion and modern aesthetics: simultaneously appearing to be both ancient and modern.  Cinderella's ball gown is likewise gorgeous, blending greens and golds into a singularly majestic look that is never-the-less within the borders of modernity.

Maleficent - This film in every way seems to be playing second fiddle to Into the Woods.  Although the costumes are distinct from its fantastical cousin, they are perhaps a little too close for Maleficent to really distinguish itself amid its competition.  Likewise, although Maleficient's costumes are in every sense of the word excellent, they fail to beat out the more varied, more detailed and more impressive costumes from Into the Woods.

And whereas Into the Woods had more than just The Witch's costume to fall back on, I feel that Maleficent's iconic robes are really the only impressive wardrobe selection that the film has to show off.  Sure, the other costumes are functional and fitting, but none of them have the same kind of wow factor.  At best, Maleficent will fail to garner much support in terms of votes, and at worst it will split Into the Woods' appeal and ensure that neither film will have the requisite votes to win.

Mr. Turner - It's no wonder why the Academy loves historical films for costuming and set design nomination.  They are so singularly removed from modern  fashions that they have an instantly exotic appeal.  What's more, fashions of the past were generally more intricately complicated and visually striking than those of the present, making them truly impressive productions are a purely visual level.

In that regard, Mr. Turner is an excellent entry into the field, sporting excessive buttons, poofy sleeves and the criminally underrated ascot.  And, like The Grand Budapest Hotel, it features a large enough cast of characters with a wide enough array of garments to truly impress the costuming branch on the shear scale of its wardrobe.

Safe Bet:  The Grand Budapest Hotel

Long Shot: Mr. Turner

Longer Shot: Into the Woods

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Oscars 101: Best Makeup and Hairstyling

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

After covering the Best Visual Effects nominees yesterday, I thought that it would be prudent to cover another kind of visual effect: makeup and hairstyling.  It's admittedly not nearly as flashy or eye-catching as the special-effects laden action sequences that populated the aforementioned category, but it is nonetheless and integrally important aspect of film making: one that is often overlooked when weighing the merits of a given film.  This year, the nominees are:

Foxcatcher
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Guardians of the Galaxy

That's right, it's one of those categories: the kind with only three nominees, rather than the usual five.  The implication behind the number of nominees is that there were not enough outstanding films in this regard to warrant any more than this, which I find simply absurd.  Into the Woods is probably my favorite for this category, given how the way in which Meryl Streep was equally convincing as the hideously twisted witch and the beautiful enchantress largely came down to how makeup artists and hair stylists were able to transform her completely from one to the other (and that's saying nothing of Johnney Depp's turn as the Big Bad Wolf or Mackenzie Mauzy's endless locks of beautifully kempt hair).  The Hunger Games, The Imitation Game, Birdman all would have been fine picks to round out the category's nominees.

Foxcatcher - Much has been made of Steve Carell's astounding transformation into John "The Golden Eagle" DuPont in Foxcatcher, and for good reason.  It's a career high for the actor, in no small part assisted by prosthetics and makeup that helped him seamlessly disappear into the role of the psychotic millionaire.

Although thoroughly convincing in the film, they did occasionally grate against the Carell's instantly recognizable personage, especially during the close-ups, where you could tell - not through any fault of the prosthetics, but through knowing what Carell is supposed to look like - that something was up with his nose and mouth.  That, paired with some flashier competition, will likely mean that the Academy will pass the film over for this category.

The Grand Budapest Hotel - This is, in my mind,the likeliest choice to win in this category.  Everything in the film - right down to the masterfully styled hair of its eclectic cast - pops out like pictures in a pop up book.

While not much can be said for the makeup side of things, the hairstyling is immaculate and showy.  Everything and everybody in this film screams of style, sophistication and money, in no part because everybody quite simply looks the part.  Don't expect this to be the last award, least of all technical award, that the film earns next month.

Guardians of the Galaxy - That's right, not even the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences could resist the wiles of Guardians of the Galaxy.  While most every branch was sadly able to shirk off its idiosyncratic charm - the Academy's technicians were at least up to the task of recognizing their accomplishments (and in a three-nominee category, no less).

Although perhaps the flashiest hair and makeup contender this year - with huge swaths of cast members painted blue, green and pink in equal measure - it will probably lose out to the more realistic offerings of its competitors.  Even here, the Academy prefers subtly to scale, augmentation to ambition, which is a monumental shame when it comes to the awards themselves.

Safe Bet: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Long Shot: Foxcatcher

Longer Shot: Guardians of the Galaxy

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100 Posts Later: The 10 Best Filmquisition Articles

Well I finally did it.  Thanks to all of your continued support, Filmquisition (formerly Just a Matter of CineMantics) has hit 100 posts.  There were some rocky times, like my extended leave of absence at the beginning of 2014, and some posts that didn't turn out quite as planned, but we finally made it.  So to commemorate this achievement, I thought that I would take a look back at the best of the best: those top tier posts that best encapsulate the raging filmquisition.

10) Random Movie #12: I Spit on Your Grave - During my hiatus from this blog, I would look back on this article in particular and wonder why I ever stopped.  The posts that came before it were admittedly rough around the edges, stiffly voiced and generally a touch to gratingly formal to feel natural.  This post, however, came off as far more organic, even conversational, and was immensely fun to write.

It is what helped rename the Random Movie series as Date Night and helped signal to me the direction that the blog wanted to go (whether I wanted to take it there or not).  It's really more of a bridge between the old way of doing things and the new, rather than a demarcation of style in of itself.  But suffice it to say that if I had stopped writing one post sooner, I might not have had the motivation to come back at all.

9) Unreality Companion: Oh Captain, My Captain - I was working through a lot of things in the wake of Captain America: The Winter Soldier's release, ranging from the post-9/11 metaphor of Phase 2 to the metafictional necessity of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  The most personal question that I faced was my complicated feelings towards Cap' when Hulk had historically been my favorite MCU hero.

The result was this surprisingly tightly written piece that placed him as the moral center of the Marvel Cinematic Universe: the "best" hero, if not my favorite one.  Hulk might be more exciting and Stark more fun, but nobody - but nobody - beats out the Captain.

8) Why I'm Okay with No Iron Man 4 - Sometimes I start pieces out with only the vaguest idea of where it will end up at the end.  I don't go in trying to say something so much as I am trying to figure it out myself.  And then gradually, over any number of stream-of-conscious paragraphs, I get at what I'm trying to say myself.  Those are my favorite kinds of posts to make, and it's no wonder why this one made my list.

By trying to work out why exactly I was fine without a fourth entry into the Iron Man series, I realized the beauty behind the "Marvel experiment."  The meta-franchise wasn't beholden to any one character.  One could be retired - could rotate out of the standard lineup - or be straight-up killed off, and the series was both strong and flexible enough to endure.  It made me realize that Marvel hasn't even begun to tap its franchise's potential and that solo projects involving Nick Fury, Black Widow, War Machine and others weren't just possible, but in many cases increasingly likely.

7) From the Vault: In the Mood for Love - In the Mood for Love is a hard film to pin down.  While I continue to stand behind every single word of the review that I did write, the opinion that I hold of it now is vastly different from the one that I wrote down in that post (which, in turn, is vastly different from what I held when the credits began rolling).  It's the kind of spellbinding movie that improves the more that you think about it, and were I to make a list of favorite movies now, despite its then 7.5 rating, it would surely rank favorably within it.

Like the previous entry in this list, my review wasn't so much about conveying a set opinion, but rather exploring a nebulous one.  I was figuring out for myself what I thought about the movie as I wrote it down, and a revised review would invariably come from that same place of introspection and exploration.

6) Unreality Companion: Interstellar - I'll admit that my reviews tend to be on the wordier side of things.  I'm the kind of person that feels compelled to share every thought of any perceived merit on any subject that I write on.  And trust me, I had a lot on my mind when it came to Christopher Nolan's latest film, which was a singularly mind-blowing experience to walk away from.

That's why it was so perplexing to me that this review was so concise.  Rather than going on and on about everything the film did right, I was able to surmise my opinion very efficiently, proving that sometimes scaling back my intentions and letting the articles write themselves is in everybody's best interest.  I can credit this review for the reason why I typically constrain myself to top 5 lists rather than top 10s most of the time: I would rather get my main point across than have it get lost in the rest of what I have to say.

5) Unreality Companion: Why Blumhouse Productions is the Only Real Name in Horror Right Now - If most of my posts are exploratory, this was deliberately predestined.  I had been ruminating over the points I listed off in this article for months beforehand, expressing them in half a dozen different ways.  So when it came time to set them to print, I knew precisely what to say and precisely how to say it.

And despite a few hiccups of less-than-amazing and co-produced with Platinum Dunes films, I stand by my assessment that they're the only real, consistently good, always worth a look production company working in the horror genre today.  And yes, you really do need to watch out for what other production companies they choose to work with, but on the whole, if they can make good movies spun off from demonic dolls, they really can't go wrong.

4) Extra, Extra!: Marvel's Phase 3 Lineup - This was a monster of an article to undertake immediately following the announcement proper.  I had no time to prep, research or even think through what I wanted to say.  Everything was an immediate reaction: (relatively) uninformed, unrefined and unfiltered.  Remember what I said about using this blog to explore my own thoughts on different subjects?  This is probably the best example of that.

Looking at this timeline still pumps me up for the next four years of Marvel movies (something that DC's similar announcements still can't manage to do).  Marvel has proven unerringly right in every decision that they've made since Iron Man - other than maybe rushing Iron Man 2's production - and I can't wait to see what out of left field films they produce that, but the laws of all common sense, should be terrible.

3) Unreality Companion: Ten Movies to Look Forward to in 2015 - This was another article that was just a lot of fun to write.  I got to take a look through the end of the year and see what awesome, stand-out films I had to look forward to.  And even though I admittedly forgot some (Mockingjay Part 2) or wasn't aware of some others (Resurrection of F), 2015 continues to promise to be one of the most insane years in film this century.

There were so many films that I had to look forward to, I had to write a sequel to cover even some of them.  And even now I'm debating making this duology a trilogy.  No matter what else happens, 2015 is the definitive year to go to the movies this decade (at least).

2) Unreality Companion: 10 Movies You Need to See Before Oscar Night - This article was as much a check list to myself as it was to anybody who read it.  Here were ten movies that I (and others) absolutely have to see before February 22nd.

Admittedly, most of them were Best Picture nominees, but that's largely the point.  At the ceremony, Best Picture rules the day, and most other categories fall in line from there.  How many acting nominations, screenplay nominations or technical nominations go to other movies?  And even then, how many of those outliers get multiple nominations.  At any rate, the gauntlet has been thrown, and there's less than a month to meet the challenge.

1) Unreality Companion: Modern Horror Classics - It should come as no shock to anybody who knows me (or has long read this blog) that my favorite film genre is horror, so much so that I had inadvertently become the resident expert on the subject.  Every year, friends and family members would elicit me for Halloween screamers to take in the holiday with.  And every year, I more than happily obliged them.

The fact that it took me so long to come up with a definitive list of twentieth century favorites is the only real mystery here.  I got to look back through my favorites from the past decade and a half and pick out the celebrated masterpieces, the reviled gems and the forgotten terrors that made up this century of terror.  I even got to look back and revise my opinion of films I had previously passed over as interesting, but average, which is always something I love to do.

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Oscars 101: Best Visual Effects

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

With the Academy Awards looming ever larger on the horizon, I thought that I would start breaking down each category's nominees and the likelihoods of any one of them winning an Oscar.  We have 24 categories to cover, so expect to see a lot of these in the weeks to come.  Now, here are the nominees for Best Visual Effects:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Guardians of the Galaxy
Interstellar
X-Men: Days of Future Past

What immediately strikes me about these films is that Transformers: Age of Extinction is not among them.  Now, say what you will about the film as a whole (I personally thought that it was the only good film in the live action franchise), but it was certainly one of the year's biggest visual marvels.  I almost want to call it a snub, but there's no denying that every nominated film deserved to be there.  I guess it simply lost out to an especially strong crop of nominees.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier - This is probably the subtlest film on this list, which is really saying something.  The majority of the action in The Winter Soldier is punctuated by a series of punches, stabs and gunshots: nothing particularly flashy of effects-driven.  The whole production is so comparatively mundane that I didn't even think of it in the context of this category until it was nominated.  It's not until the last third (or less) than the CG kicks in.

The Battle Over the Triskellion really is a sight to behold: three hellicarriers and a Hydra insurgency (including the titular antagonist) locked in mortal combat against three superheroes and what few S.H.I.E.L.D. agents remain.  There are the three Insight Hellicarriers, a myriad of smaller ones, Falcon's exoskeleton (which really is the most visually striking piece of movie hardware since the Iron Man armor) and the high tech wreckage that ends up on the bottom of the Potomac.  At least in terms of its category, the battle is undoubtedly a case of too little, too late.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - There is no question that the special effects in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes are as exceptional as they come.  Any film that can base so much of its visual iconography off of purely computer generated effects and still look this convincing and fresh over a more than two hour run time is clearly doing something right.  Pair that with one of Andy Serkis' more engrossing motion capture performances, punctuated only sparingly with actual dialog, and you're left with what is perhaps the best realized cinematic worlds within recent memory.

The Apes blend seamlessly with their forested surroundings and human costars.  They are so realistically rendered that it's easy to forget that you're not looking at actual animals.  In virtually any other year, this would have been an easy choice for the win, but its facing some extremely stiff competition from this year's front runner and I am honestly unsure if it is up to the challenge.

Guardians of the Galaxy - It's really telling of the quality of this year's nominees when I can safely say that Guardians of the Galaxy has absolutely no shot whatsoever at winning the Best Visual Effects Oscar.  Like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, it would be an easy favorite in most other years.  The problem is that what it does well (and it does them extremely well), its competition simply does better.

Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel star in this movie as an anthropomorphized raccoon and a superpowered Ent.  They are so perfectly rendered that the most emotionally moving scene from the year was an muscle-headed alien consoling a crying raccoon clutching the splintered remains of a tree.  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, however, already has the computer generated character vote secured.  Its shots of space are pure spectacle, but it loses out to Interstellar's infinitely superior effects.  Even its aerial combat over Xandar loses out to fellow Marvel nominee Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  Its only hope at pulling off a win in this category is to simply have broadly unoffensive appeal: something that everybody can agree on, even if nobody's particularly happy about it.

Interstellar - Without a doubt, Interstellar is the one to beat in this category.  What Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has going for it with ingrained and seamless realism, Interstellar has in epic majesty: awe-inspiring shots of black holes, nebulae and planetary bodies.  2001: A Space Odyssey won this category back in 1968 and Interstellar, quite simply, makes it look like an absolute joke.  That positive comparison alone puts a lot of Academy votes behind it.

It has more than just quietly imposing visuals on its side, however.  The monumental, planet-engulfing tidal wave sequence is among the most exciting of the year: exciting specifically because of how realistically rendered it appears to be.  The robotic marines, although head-scratching in their design, move with inventive flourishes that make them  both memorable and fascinating.  Interstellar is, quite simply, this category's heir apparent.

X-Men: Days of Future Past - This seems to be a common trend for Visual Effects nominees this year.  In any other year, things might have turned out very different for Days of Future Past's awards chances.  It would have been a titan among its competitors.  The Sentinels are beautifully rendered: rippling with an organic kineticism that is completely unlike any other version of them in comics or on screen.  The teams' mutant abilities were never better realized: offering spectacle upon differing spectacle throughout the film, used in increasingly interesting and interconnecting ways.  The effects are, without a doubt, absolutely sublime: flawless in every sense of the word.

Marvelous spectacles, brilliantly rendered, however, will not be enough for this film.  Its facing competition that is no less dazzling, but it far more nuanced and better showcases those effects that it does bring to the foreground.  It seems like Marvel adaptations really can't catch a break this year despite themselves.

Safe Bet:  Interstellar

Long Shot: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Longer Shot: Guardians of the Galaxy

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Netflix Update: What's Leaving in February 2015

It's time to take stock of what's coming off of Netflix's streaming services at the end of January and what's going to stay.  I have to say, though, these last couple of week's have been some of the tensest in terms of what was going to get the axe, and the end results were just as surprising.

For those of you who were paying attention earlier in the month, Doctor Who - and other BBC favorites - were all set to leave Netflix on February 1st.  Fans of the BBC are likely to have mixed feelings when it comes to the pyrrhic victory they've received.  Doctor Who (both the older and the newer episodes), House of Cards, Luther, The Office and North & South are all staying (which is good).  Black Adder, MI-5, Red Dwarf and Fawlty Towers (remade in the US as 2 Broke Girls) are all leaving, howver (which is bad).

Red Dwarf's following, although not as omnipresent as Doctor Who's, is just as intensely passioned.  The classic science fiction show has an incredibly energized cult following that's likely to stagnate with the series' now lessened exposure in the US.  The other big exclusion is Black Adder: the classic era-spanning comedy which stars a pre-Mr. Bean Rowan Atkinson and a pre-House Hugh Laurie.  It's as intelligent, fun and all-around hilarious tv series as I have ever found and, along with the long defunct Black Books, will join the ranks of the best television shows ever pulled from Netflix.

More British productions will follow their ranks.  A huge swath of Bond films will also be disappearing in February, including A View to a Kill, For Your Eyes Only, Live and Let Die, Never Say Never Again, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger.  These easily rank among the best of the franchise's lengthy history.  Anybody who has not seen these six films - particularly Goldfinger and From Russia with Love - and can stomach spy films absolutely owes it to themselves to check these out before they disappear next week.

You can imagine my surprise when I discovered that Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux were being pulled from Netflix next month, since they were scheduled to be terminated back at the end of October.  I guess that Doctor Who isn't the only thing to be saved by a last minute surge of fan outrage.  I will say now what I said back then: Apocalypse Now is easily one of my favorite movies and one that most people have (and will) enjoy - featuring great performances by Harrison Ford, Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando and a tightly-rendered script that marries Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness with the insanity of the Vietnam War.  It's one that you cannot go wrong with making time for between now and Sunday.

Horror fans would be remiss to pass up one last chance to check out Wes Craven's criminally underrated Wshmaster, while crime fans would be equally derelict in not taking advantage of the time remaining to David Fincher's Zodiac.  Bronies and Pegasisters also have just enough time to binge watch the first four seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  M*A*S*H, Mad Max, Airheads and three of the original four Batman movies are all set to disappear in February as well.

Netflix has a lot of ground to make up in February if it hopes to fill the gap left by these series and films.  Doctor Who and House of Cards sticking around is a good start, but only a start.  Whether or not they can finish the job remains to be seen.

Leaving Feb. 1st

• Blackadder: Seasons 1­-4
• A View to a Kill
• Airheads
• Apocalypse Now
• Apocalypse Now Redux
• Babes in Toyland
• Batman & Robin
• Batman Forever
• Batman Returns
• Cocoon: The Return
• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• Down Periscope
• Fawlty Towers: Seasons 1­-2
• For Your Eyes Only
• From Russia with Love
• Goldfinger
• Hotel Babylon: Seasons 1­-4
• Jane Eyre
• Live and Let Die
• Mad Max
• MASH
• MI­5: Seasons 1­-10
• Nacho Libre
• Never Say Never Again
• Red Dwarf: Seasons 1-­9
• Revenge
• School Daze
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie
• The Juror
• Wishmaster
• Zodiac

Leaving Feb. 2nd

• Jem and the Holograms: S1­-3
• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: S1-­4
• Pound Puppies: S1-­3
• Transformers Prime: S1-3
• Transformers: Rescue Bots

Leaving Feb. 5th

• Arbitrage

Leaving Feb. 23rd

• Dredd

Leaving Feb. 28th

• Ali
• Monkey Trouble
• Panic Room

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Unreality Companion: 5 Big Oscar Nomination Upsets

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

Since this week at Unreality I again talk about the Oscar nominees, I thought that there would be a certain poeticism in addressing the opposite here.  There's always a few every year: the snubbed, overlooked movies that the Academy simply ignores.  I'm not talking about in general; many of the films listed here have been nominated (in some cases multiple times) for Academy Awards.  Herein, however, are the specific categories that were expected to, and often as not should have, been nominated for, but for whatever reason were passed over for other candidates.

5) Snowpiercer for Best Production Design - 2015 was a good year for post-apocalyptic sci-fi.  Interstellar took things cosmic, Mockingjay Part 1 took things to the bank and Snowpiercer became a cult hit.  Unlike some people, I am not at all surprised that Snowpiercer didn't take the Oscars by storm.  This is not at all the kind of movie that the Academy tends to watch, let alone like.  It's the same reason why I wasn't surprised by Captain America: The Winter Soldier's lack of nominations despite being my hands down favorite movie of the year.\\

What does surprise me, however, is that the film was completely overlooked by the technical branches of the Academy, which tend to honor the less seen, less likely and less traditional of the year.  Snowpiercer was able to distill an entire geopolitical world - from lower-class squalor to upper class decadence - into a series of train cars.  Fruit gardens, aquariums, sushi bars, elementary schools, day spas, prisons, industrial machinations: all linked together in an utterly surreal procession.  Now having seen the film, I wonder if anybody at the Academy had bothered to do likewise.

4) Ava DuVernay for Best Director - Don't misunderstand me, I'm not part of the #OscarsSoWhite movement.  I don't believe that there was some racially motivated conspiracy trying to keep Selma out of serious awards contention.  I mean, if that was the case, why would they even bother at nominating the film, let along for Best Picture?  Selma suffered not from being a "Black movie," but from a crowded field of showier, more proven directors.

That being said, it does come as a surprise that the indelibly progressive Academy did not make room for the first black woman nominee in the category.  12 Years a Slave gave them their first Black nominee and Zero Dark Thirty gave them their first woman.  It only seems natural for them to keep up their momentum on awarding worthy minority filmmakers who are plagued with fewer opportunities in Hollywood than their white, male colleagues.

3) David Oyelowo for Best Actor - Again, I swear that I'm not shouting #OscarsSoWhite.  David Oyelowo gave the breakout performance of the year in a film centered entirely around his performance as an American icon.  He successfully captured the timber and resonance of King's voice, and absolutely nailed every scene that he was in.

And given how enamored the Academy is of actors portraying actual people, it's especially surprising that such a monumental performance portraying such a monumental individual somehow escaped their notice.  Granted, the category seems to be especially crowded this year, but Bradley Cooper, nominated for the third year in a row for an excellent but comparatively weak performance, seems like an easy cut to make, or Eddie Redmayne's generally uncelebrated performance as Stephen Hawking, whose nomination came as a real surprise to me.

2) Interstellar for Best Picture - This is one that I was completely expecting to make the grade.  With the Academy's 10% rule - in which Best Picture nominees had to secure at least 10% of the overall vote to earn a nomination - Interstellar seemed like a virtual lock in the category.  Nolan's most recent film inspired intensely passionate responses in virtually everybody who saw it, what I like to call the Whiplash effect.  How Academy voters could be immune to this I honestly have no idea.

Interstellar actually calls to mind an interesting thought.  Originally, the Academy Awards were used as a marketing tool to promote little seen films with lower profiles.  This changed after The Dark Knight's snub in the category, prompting an immediate and visceral backlash against the organization.  They expanded the nominees to ten in order to include more popular choices worthy of recognition, but in recent, and especially this, year(s) have failed to live up to the promise of the reconceived category.  If Interstellar isn't a worthy popular movie, then what is?

1) The Lego Movie for Best Animated Feature - Everything is, in fact, not awesome.  Going into the nominations, The Lego Movie was the obvious favorite in this category.  Hell, arguing against it winning would have been like making a case for any film not named Frozen last year.  And yet nominations came and went and The Lego Movie was nowhere to be found in the category that it was sure to win.

This upset actively throws the Best Animated Feature race into complete chaos.  The four other snubs, although each shocking and infuriating in their own right, would not likely have changed the eventual outcome of their respective races if they had been among the nominees.  The Lego Movie's absence makes this any film's game (although the likeliest to capitalize on the removed competition in How to Train Your Dragon 2).

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Unreality Companion: 5 More Films to Look Forward to in 2015

In which I expand on the content from my weekly Unrealitymag.com article.

With my unpredictable work schedule, sometime I get stories out later than I mean to.  And with this being an especially hectic couple of weeks, I fell more than a little behind on what should have been last week's companion piece to my Unreality article.  Pair that with the fact that the story posted a day late, and we come to the here and now.  And while I have already covered my ten most anticipated films of 2015, the year is looking so pleasantly crowded with great-looking films, I couldn't help but touch on some of the honorable mentions that didn't quite make the previous list.

5) Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection of F - Akira Toriyama's return to the Dragon Ball Franchise with 2013's Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods marked the single greatest entry into the excessively thoroughly developed series.  It combined Dragon Ball's ingrained humor with Dragon Ball Z's omnipresent fighting (and ignored whatever the Hell was going on with Dragon Ball GT).  It was intelligent, exciting and throroughly entertaining: promising to continue to the series in bold and interesting directions.

That's where Resurrection of F(rieza) comes in: reviving the series' most iconic antagonist and throwing him back into the ring.  The needlessly entertaining Beerus and Whis appear to be returning, as does Krillan's classic haircut.  Frieza's return promises that the film will be a shade less Dragon Ball and a shade more Z, which will be perfectly fine by me (as Battle of Gods' fighting was a little on the scant side).  The only reason why this is  not higher on the list than #5 is because I'm pretty sure it won't make its way stateside until 2016.

4) Insidious: Chapter 3 - I swear, Blumhouse Productions can do no wrong.  Whereas any other series would smack of its third entry being a shameless cash grab (and don't worry, I do realize that that's exactly what's going on here), I have such absolute confidence in Insidious: Chapter 3's producers - born from their skillful management of any number of horror franchises - that I don't doubt this film will be worth seeing.

Like Marvel, even obviously bad-sounding ideas and troubled productions are invariably trivial issues when dealing with Blumhouse.  They bought the lackluster Paranormal Activity franchise from its independent roots and made it something truly excceptional.  They made a second nstallment to this very series that made me appreciate the first film in a new light.  They turned a poorly-conceived spinoff of a surprisingly successful film and turned it into a thoroughly solid frightener.  I have no doubt that they'll return to the Insidious franchise with the same kind of macabre magic.

3) Ted 2 - Nobody was more surprised by how completely hilarious Ted was than me.  Sure, I trusted Seth MacFarlane to make me laugh, but even my trust has limits.  A foul-mouthed, foul-mannered Teddy Bear and his man-child owner didn't sound like the year's must-see comedy, but that's exactly what it became.  MacFarlane's live-action debut was a thoroughly funny, strangely intelligent and surprisingly dark narrative built around all of the absurdity and cut gags that made Family Guy a television staple.

Coming off of Ted's success, I can't help but be excited about its long-awaited sequel.  Sure, A Million Ways to Die in the West spoiled a bit of MacFarlane's hard-earned good will, but he's already figured Ted out: what makes him funny and, most importantly, why.  I'd be hard-pressed to think of any movie that is as likely to make me laugh so hard in 2015.

2) Justice League: Throne of Atlantis - The best movies of the year are not always theatrical releases.  Justice League: War proved that in 2014.  This continuation of DC's animated cinematic universe may well prove that point in 2015.

The animation released thus far looks to be of as good a quality as one could hope for and the released plot-points more intriguing than they really have any right to be.  Promising to deal with the immediate fallout of War's action-packed climax, it promises to explode the cinematic universe in bold and far-reaching ways.

1) The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 - Although I've long been a critic of breaking up the last book of a series into two (and sometimes three) movies, I've just as long been accepting of "broken movies" - the idea that films can be so deeply interconnected to one another with a franchise or metafranchise that you basically need to watch them all in order to "get it."  That being said, Mockingjay was a mess of a novel and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 cleared up every issue that I had with its first half.  It didn't retcon Katniss into an emotionally shattered little girl who is incapable of acting independently of the governments that desperately seek to use her in their larger, geopolitical game.  It showed the impact that the propoganda war was having on the rebellion proper.  It made an interesting story told from the least interesting perspective imaginable interesting again.

That's enough to make me more than just cautiously optimistic going into Part 2.  Sure, the worst parts of the book have to be addressed in it, but the most exciting parts are too: the clandestine insurgence into the heart of the Capitol to assassinate President Snow.  Part 1 already established that Francis Laurence knows what he's doing with this franchise, so I have no problem tuning in for its conclusion with bated breath.

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Extra, Extra!: The Interview Coming to Netflix (And Sooner Than You Might Think)

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

Netflix announced on Tuesday that the highly controversial film The Interview will be available to stream as of January 24th.  Come Saturday, you can be sitting down to the Seth Rogen / James Franco comedy from the comfort of your own living room.

With the unprecedented uproar that the film caused, it's easy to forget exactly why that it.  And no, it's not just because Kim Jong-un is an unstable dictator who takes extreme offense to being made an international laughing stock (although that is certainly the case).  While cinematic satire often does take aim at the sitting rulers of unfriendly countries - such as Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which lampooned Hitler before the United States entered World War II - I am at a loss to think of any that revolve around his assassination, especially when turned into a farce by two of Hollywood's biggest clowns.

Months before its release, North Korea threatened to go to war against America if the film was allowed to run in theaters.  Other than a nebulous sense of unease among those who actually paid attention, these threats went unnoticed.  When North Korean hackers broke into Sony's data bases and threatened immediate and catastrophic acts of terror against theaters that chose to run the film immediately before its release, people took notice.  A number of theater chains (including AMC) refused to distribute the film at all, prompting Sony to pull distribution of the film altogether (a decision that was almost as quickly reversed).

Later this week(end), I will retrace 2014's craziest entertainment story in greater depth, but suffice it to say that North Korea balked at being so brazenly lampooned by two popular American satirists and threatened varying degrees of violence before theater chains, and eventually Sony, caved in to their demands.  Sony, realizing that the film had somehow galvanized the free-speech crowd, patched together a Frankenstein's monster of distribution in order to cover as much of the film's $44 million production costs as it could, including a hodgepodge theatrical release (mostly by smaller, independently run theaters), digital download and now Netflix streaming.

While it will doubtlessly not rank among the best films of the year, it will invariably be among the most interesting, if only for the stranger-than-fiction, geopolitical ruckus that it inadvertently caused.  It went from something that I would begrudgingly see because other people wanted to see it to something that I simply have to see just to make sense of the absolute cluster-fuck that surrounded its release.

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Extra, Extra!: Happy Decemberists Day!

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

It should come as little surprise to those of you who are familiar with my musical tastes that The Decemberists - a Portland-based indie rock band - are hands down my favorite musical group.  Their hyper-intellectual lyrics and often dissonant melodies represent everything that I look for - and infrequently find - in contemporary music.  They are, for instance, the only group that I can think of you can rhyme "Sycorax" with "parallax" and somehow not come off as pretentious, pseudo-intellectuals.

Fans of the band were treated to a double-helping of good news yesterday.  Not only was their new album - What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World - their first since 2011's The King Is Dead, released on Tuesday, but the city of Portland declared that day to be Decemberists Day, honoring the band's fifteen years of intelligent, literary and altogether off-beat music.

According to Mayor Charlie Hale, the band “embod[ies] the Portland values of passion, engagement and communitarianism with the Portland aesthetic of homegrown, forthright, slightly hippie and often bespectacled glory.”  The ceremony, held at 2:00 yesterday afternoon, included a reading by author Lemony Snicket.  Over fifty local businesses unveiled a quilt honoring the storied history of the band, with each business contributing a square to the final product.

Rather than spending their day marveling at their own magnificence, the band very matter of factly set to work, providing attendees with a free concert and album signing before heading to the airport in preparation of tomorrow's performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.  They performed three songs at the event: "Make You Better" (from the newly released What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World), "Eli the Barrow Boy" (from Picaresque) and "Sons and Daughters" (from my personal favorite, The Crane Wife).

I cannot recommend the band highly enough.  Rather than relying on catchy refrains and repetitive choruses, their music is deeply ingrained in literary and folk traditions.  Their album Picaresques draws from a rich, if obscure, Spanish genre portraying the adventures lower class  rogues in a corrupt and overbearing society, while The Crane Wife draws heavily from Japanese mythology.  Throughout their discography are songs based on Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Keith Waterhouse's novel Billy Liar, American novelist Myla Goldberg, the Dadaist painting The Bride Stripper Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and the real-life Shankill Butchers.

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