1.22.2008

And the Nominees Are...

...not terribly inspiring, given that I haven't seen most of the stuff that's up for awards. Sorry, but titles like No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood just don't scream "get off the couch" for me. I'll prolly get to the big hitter of the year (Atonement) and I've seen the little movie that could (Juno) and Michael Clayton was... you know... a nice tight thriller, but I didn't come out of the theater with Clayton-mania runnin' wild. Far as I'm concerned, the best movie I saw all year was the six-minute Batman short that played in front of I am Legend at IMAX.

So instead I'll comment on the poster.

This year the Academy turned to Drew Struzan, best known for collages of photorealistic heads of science fiction stars. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, Hellboy, Back to the Future... he's done 'em all. Apparently he "conceived" it, while the actual illustration was executed by his son Christian. I'm not quite sure what the conceptual role was here, given that it's... you know... the Oscar statue backed by flashbulbs.

But it's a solid effort. Doesn't measure up to a recent fave from another well-known comic artist, Alex Ross, but it's worlds better than, say, this one which has a definite thrown-together-in-the-last-ten-minutes-with-clipart feel to it. And given that if it stuck to true Struzan style, we'd be looking at the blended heads of Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton and an animated rat, I'd say we made out ok.

2 comments:

Moderator said...

I went into "No Country for Old Men" with very low expectations. I didn't know it was a Coen Bros. movie and I only saw it because all the other movies showing sounded crappy.

I came away very impressed. It's a cowboy movie. But a modern Cowboy movie. And I'm someone that has seen plenty of Westerns and generally hates the genre.

But this one worked.

Geo said...

Good to know, altho it's likely still only gonna go on the Netflix list.

After several years of seeing basically every movie that comes out in the theater (including things like Supercross), I've started to evaluate what needs to be seen big screen and what can wait 'til it hits the slightly smaller screen.