Unreality Companion: 5 More Oscar Nominations that Should Have Happened

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

Since I elaborated in my Friday Unreality article about the supreme injustice that was The Lego Movie's snub for Best Animated Feature at this year's Academy Awards, I thought that I would extend my previously mentioned list of Oscar Nominations that should have happened.  And yes, every year has their share of surprises - even outright snubs - but 2014 seems so wholly homogenized around a few big films that smaller films with worthy qualities didn't seem to stand much of a chance.

5) Boyhood for Best Actor (Ellar Coltraine) - I know that this kind of flies in the face of my previous statement about big films absorbing too many of the big awards, leaving only scraps for every other worthy film from 2014, but after having now seen Boyhood, I can firmly attest to Ellar Coltraine - the young boy who played the same character over the span of 12 years, from the time he was seven until the time he was nineteen - being one of the best actors from any film from this last year.  And although he is not quite operating on the same level as Michael Keaton, Benedict Cumberbatch or Eddie Redmayne, I thought that his performance was decidedly better than those of Bradley Cooper and Steve Carell (excellent though both of those men were).

The death knell of any film - even good ones - is relying on the talent of child actors.  Beyond simply being untrained and inexperienced, they have proven, as a general rule, to be notoriously untalented.  This is one of the chief reasons why The Phantom Menace was such a terrible experience to sit through (although certainly not the only one).  Not only did Coltraine prove to be a truly exceptional actor, but he was one at every stage of the film - from the seven-year-old watching Dragon Ball Z to the young college Freshman trying to find his place in the world.  Coltraine honestly doesn't give one great performance, but twelve, and will have an incredible acting career ahead of him if he decides to pursue one.

4)  The Book of Life for Best Animated Feature - I have made no secret of my love for this film.  Not only is it one of the singularly best animated films from a year where there were an impressive many of those to begin with, but it was straight-up one of the best films of the year as a whole, and certainly the most visually striking (sorry, Interstellar).

But despite being such an amazing year for animated films, the Academy's selection in this category has been somewhat less than inspired.  The Book of Life an honest gem in an incredibly commercial industry: celebrating the vibrancy and nuances of a culture that too often gets slighted for more exotic minorities.  The Boxtrolls and Song of the Sea will prove to be the animated equivalents of Unbroken - inoffensive, if forgettable films that nobody will remember five years from now - while ambitious, visually arresting films like The Lego Movie, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya and The Book of Life will be viewed with fondness and fresh eyes for generations to come.

3) Interstellar for Best Director (Christopher Nolan) - Interstellar is without a doubt that most awe-inspiring piece of filmmaking from the last year.  And although this vision was in part due to the astoundingly well-rendered visualization of intergalactic space, it was chiefly due to Christopher Nolan's auteur vision.

Even more than its lack of a Best Picture nomination, it's snub with the directing branch was utterly baffling to me, since that is where his films draw their chiefest support from.  Without his singularly striking direction, the entire narrative would have collapsed in on itself.  He brought equal life to the Dust Bowl-styled terrestrial scenes as he did with the exotic extra-terrestrial ones.  He levied just heavy enough of a hand against the story to keep it from meandering into convoluted science or star-crossed schmaltz, forcing us to stay focussed on the narrative unfolding before us with rapt attention.

2) The Raid 2 for Best Foreign Language Film - There is no question in my mind that The Raid 2 is the best action movie of 2014.  Sure, some films were superior to it (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and many more had better acting (Foxcatcher), direction (Interstellar) and writing (Birdman), but no one film better drew us into the visceral thrills of physical combat and chases nearly so effectively as this Indonesian cross between The Departed and The Killer.

What's more, Iko Uwais is mind-bogglingly good as the film's central protagonist, especially considering that he wasn't a professional actor before 2012's The Raid Redemption.  And for as convoluted as the plot does end up becoming, both the script and director impressively drive the film forward with the confidence and clarity needed to keep it from becoming too confusing.

It's snub, however, is actually not the Academy's fault at all.  It is the responsibility of a country to submit the film that they want to be considered in this category.  And rather than going with their criticially successful, internationally blockbusting hit (especially in a category where name-recognition often proves to be more important than it really should be), they went with Soekarno - a historical biopic and propoganda piece about the man who led Indonesia to declare independence from the Dutch government: a film that wasn't even nominated for the category when the dust had settled.  I can't say if things would have ended differently if they would have nominated The Raid 2, but their chances would have certainly improved.

1)  Guardians of the Galaxy for Best Adapted Screenplay - It has long been the Academy's shame to fail to recognize worthy popular films in the major categories.  And while it's true that the Oscars were initially used as a marketting tool to promote less popular, less seen movies from any given year, that purpose has since become vestigial.  Recent Oscars have prominantly featured blockbusters like Inception, Up, Toy Story 3, Gravity, Avatar and all three The Lord of the Rings, proving that quality and budget are no longer mutually exclusive (an assumption that was dubious at best to begin with).  And while it was certainly a long shot to begin with, Guardians of the Galaxy's exclusion from the screenplay nominees highlights this bias more than any other film this year (even more, arguably, than Interstellar's snubs).

There has been no other movie from 2014 that was as intelligent, quick-witted, memorable or endlessly quotable as James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy.  The incredibly tight screenplay balanced the action, humor and interspecies drama with unprecedented grace for any film, let alone a studio-driven, franchise-spanning summer blockbuster.  Not only was the film tasked with introducing five protagonists, an additional supporting cast and an escelating series of antagonists, but it managed to do so while rendering each distinct from one another: with a surprising degree of character development afforded to each of the main cast.

For God's sake, the denouement of the film had meat-headed brawler comforting a raccoon who was crying over the splintered corpse of a tree who died to save his friends from the impending crash of the double helixed spaceshipt that they were on.  If a film can not only do that with a straight face, but make it one of the most emotionally resonating scenes of the year, the script had to be doing something right.

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