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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by James » February 25th, 2013, 2:25 am

Congratulations to this year's winner leonorab, who got 20 out of the 22 categories we count right! See the link below for the final tally. Thanks to everyone who played this year!

http://animatedviews.com/contest/oscar2013/results.php

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by Randall » February 25th, 2013, 8:43 am

I just find the love for Brave inexplicable. I liked it okay, but it was unremarkable in so many ways, though a lot of artists did good work on it.

Congrats to leonorab! I'm even more amazed by his score than the Brave win.

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by Josh » February 25th, 2013, 11:29 am

Yeah, congrats to leonorab! That score is fantastic, especially given how unpredictable the Oscars were this year.

Regarding Brave's win, I almost wonder if voters were rewarding Chapman rather than the film itself, given the circumstances of her departure from the project.

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by Josh » February 25th, 2013, 12:32 pm

I thought this might be a little too 'gossipy' to put on AV's front page: The Hollywood Reporter says Paperman producer Kristina Reed was temporarily removed from the Oscars last night after she threw paper airplanes - complete with lipstick kisses - from her seat in the mezzanine.

Reed had hoped the airplanes would lead her to her true love; instead, they just led her to the exit door.

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by James » February 25th, 2013, 1:58 pm

Here's a list of the memorial snubs: http://www.deadline.com/2013/02/oscars- ... iam-snubs/
Josh wrote:I thought this might be a little too 'gossipy' to put on AV's front page: The Hollywood Reporter says Paperman producer Kristina Reed was temporarily removed from the Oscars last night after she threw paper airplanes - complete with lipstick kisses - from her seat in the mezzanine...
Ha! Just saw this -- after I posted that story! Not gossipy at all, kinda fun actually! And what a great story for her to have to tell for the rest of her life!

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by ohmahaaha » February 25th, 2013, 6:26 pm

Thanks again for putting this together again James! Man, I got smoked ... LOL .. oh well, I did MUCH better on the football pool this year.

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by EricJ » February 26th, 2013, 1:59 am

Josh wrote:Regarding Brave's win, I almost wonder if voters were rewarding Chapman rather than the film itself, given the circumstances of her departure from the project.
Like I'd said last night, I'd heard a lot--a LOT--of Oscar pundits in the press say "I still haven't gotten around to see Wreck-It-Ralph yet, but it's been getting some good buzz...I'm going with reliable Pixar, though."
Which seems understandable: Outside of animation buffs, it took a while for Ralph's surprise good buzz to reach out to mainstream audiences, and it was almost December before regular folks could be lured into seeing it despite its "videogame retro" image....And by the time that could take hold, The Hobbit showed up.

Animated's still the other open-voting category, so think not enough non-animator voters could see ALL the screeners, but went with TS3/Up reputation and thought "Well, for lack of anything else, Brave's Pixar, how bad could it be?" (Ohh, you'd be surprised... :roll: )

Having already put up with not enough voters who went to see Hugo last year, but said "Oh, look, The Artist is about silent films!", I think I should've seen this coming.

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by Ben » February 26th, 2013, 7:28 pm

Yeah, but Hugo was crap.

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by Dacey » February 26th, 2013, 11:15 pm

...

No comment, Ben. ;)
"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift--that is why it's called the present."

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by Randall » February 26th, 2013, 11:53 pm

Chalk up another relatively rare instance where I disagree with my esteemed colleague, Ben.

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by Ben » May 7th, 2013, 12:40 pm

Okay...the subject of me and Hugo came up in a private email between myself and Rand, so I thought I'd post my comments here rather than repeat them.

My big beef with Hugo was that the movie was, overall, a lie.

Yes, we can apply that label to 99% of anything released to cinemas, but in this case I was most disappointed because it seemed no-one knew what Hugo was and so tried to tell us it was something else entirely.

This was, supposedly, Marty's first "kids movie", except it wasn't in any true sense of the word. Sure, it was a general family film and more than suitable for kids, but it wasn't aimed directly at them. The first half clearly was striving for that: I was quite intrigued by the little boy in the train station rafters and where his story was headed. The opening shot was astounding, and the film overall made a good use of 3D perspective.

But Marty's directorial touch seemed to desert him, I felt. His comedy timing was way off: how did he make Sasha Baron Cohen so unfunny!? When he fell and was dragged by the train/baggage, the editing didn't play the joke as well as it should. I remember feeling distinctly embarrassed for the director at that part, worried for him what his perhaps more versatile colleagues might have thought at the ineptitude of this and some other similar moments.

I was interested in the story of the boy, his Dad and the mechanical man contraption, but also started to become wary of it when it was proving to go nowhere. I thought the movie lost something when it lost its Cabret surname from the title, mostly as a way to remove something too foreign sounding, I suppose. But it seemed to me that other elements got watered down too, the budding romances of the station dwellers included.

The film's very poster was a lie, too. You can see the marketeers' worried faces, on seeing the movie, and thinking, "okay, how the heck to we sell this!?", only to pick the one *potentially* exciting moment and make a bigger thing out of it than there was. Going for dark blues and a golden hue for the title treatment would surely remind the subconcious of Harry Potter, so they went with that as a start.

But I *hated* that they made a non-dramatic scene the center of the marketing. In the movie, Hugo is chased to the top of a big clock. With an inspector after him, he steps out onto the clock ledge and...waits for the inspector to leave. He does and Hugo comes back in. The poster would have you believe that in this moment, Hugo would have to grab the clock's hands and be left dangling perilously from the clock while snow billows around him, surely as part of a bigger action sequence.

Naturally this never happened: the image of Hugo hanging from the clock hands is never in the actual movie. You can see that they freaked out, took a moderately potentially exciting sequence and had some dramatic license with it to make the movie look more exciting. Like the poster for Inception (which has all its characters looking up at the twisting buildings when this never happens) I thought this was a disappointment that they had to lie to get us to see the movie (it's true that posters shouldn't be "trusted" as images depicting linear moments in the movie itself, but they very rarely portray a scene or moment that doesn't actually appear in the film, and this was a clear attempt to dress something up and make more of it than there was).

There was *one* exciting moment in the movie, but this was fumbled directorially too. When Hugo is on the train tracks as the train approaches the station, I had major problems with this sequence. It goes on forever, with the apparently speeding train zooming into the station. "Poor" Hugo is on the tracks, but if you look, the train is SO far away that the kid has more than enough time to get up and out of the way. At the very least, there's time (imagine it in real time) for someone to jump down and help him out.

At best, everyone just looks on as the train hurtles in. And there's another problem...what train entering a packed station like this would be coming in at that kind of speed!? It's literally racing in and, had it really been going that fast, would never have had enough time to stop. And it never, ever really gets close enough to Hugo to be a real threat. The boy is, as I remember it, out of the way before the train gets in, at which point it's suddenly moving at a much slower pace, again the result of bad staging and editing. I can't believe this was a Scorsese movie I was watching.

So...I wasn't thinking it was that technically well made but the oddest was still to come: so far a quite cute movie about a young boy and the mystery he has to unlock, the film suddenly - and just as I was getting bored at that particular storyline not really going anywhere - takes a complete turn to become a lecture on early movie-making.

"Just who is this movie for?" I found myself wondering. Kids? They're not really going to appreciate the film history lesson. Movie nerds? They're not going to appreciate that the film history lesson isn't actually factually correct (read up on Melies...his life was so much more interesting that the sugar coating here). So what, really, was the point of this weird mesh? I was also disappointed, when we saw moments of Melies' films, that they looked as scratched as ever.

Now, they wouldn't have been pristine, but they wouldn't have been as beat up as that. I'm not suggesting that they digitally restore all the films, but why not perform decent restoration on the sequences they used so that the films looked more appropriate to their age and not over a century old? Of course I do realize that a lot of this came from the original book (which I haven't read but that clearly attracted Marty due to the content), but I just found it all too disjointed.

I don't think I'm alone: Hugo isn't, at the end of the day, seen now as one of Scosese's highpoints, and the film got a mixed response from critics and audiences. The awards it did get nominated for were not all supported by some of the guilds that awarded it and even the production design got some grumbles since it was all CG and not really a production accomplishment.

I don't want to just bash the movie for the sake of it: I actually went in very excited. But I got bored, didn't think it was staged very well, was not the film it was sold as, and then the second half became something else that was as bogus as the first half. I wouldn't mind catching it on TV in another couple of years but I'm in no rush to view it again soon.

I can appreciate others can hopefully see more in it, but for me, Hugo was a big fat dud. :(

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Re: 2013 Oscar Contest

Post by Randall » May 8th, 2013, 12:02 am

Once again, I find myself in full agreement with you, but (like our viewpoints on Beowulf) those things ultimately did not get me to dislike the film. The marketing was pretty bogus, though, as you say.

I did read the book before watching the film (as my daughter had just received it as a gift at the time), so I was perhaps more prepared for the schizophrenic nature of how the themes of the story were presented. (Dickensian moppet-mystery robot tale-mystery old guy tale-film appreciation lesson-and back to the moppet.) Somehow that type of thing comes off a tad better in a book than a film (though it was a little odd in the book too), but reading the book first made me more forgiving of the film that emulates it. I could get past the disjointedness because I already knew the story as told in chapter-form.

Ultimately, I loved the rediscovery of Melies at the end, even if the circumstances were fictional. I do admit that I found the entire (book and film) story laughably implausible (way too many coincidences), but tried to keep in mind that this was actually a fairy tale for children, more or less. The end result was pleasing to me, though the story can be critically picked apart with ease.

The station romances were a not unwelcome add-on to the film, though the film also drops at least one important character too. Overall, I found it a decent adaptation, though I would have tried to keep the deleted character (IIRC, he brought them to the film library). It was nice seeing Christopher Lee given an important role, however, which somewhat took the place of the other character.

My daughter, now 11, enjoyed both the book and the film. They also got us watching Meliés films together, so that’s cool too. I do see that the “film buff” angle doesn’t present itself as necessarily kid-friendly, but it worked for my kid. And my 5-year old son later watched the film at home on our 3D set-up, and he also quite enjoyed it, so there ya go.

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2014 Oscar Contest - RESULTS ARE IN!

Post by James » February 3rd, 2014, 12:50 am

Animated Views is giving away $50 worth of movies — your choice of either an Amazon gift card or a Fandango gift card — in our tenth annual Oscar contest! All you have to do is predict who is going to win at the 86th Annual Academy Awards (to be held on Sunday, March 2nd, and televised on ABC). The person with the most correct picks will win!

Make your prediction in each category using this form. Don't forget to fill in your Animated Views forum username and password (check your profile if you have forgotten and to confirm that your email address is still correct). Not a forum member? Registration is free and easy so why not sign-up now! Forum registration is required to confirm your email address (so we can contact you if you win) and to weed out spambots — no posting is required and other than a message to confirm your email we do not send forum members any emails.

All entries must be received by Friday, February 28, at 11:59pm ET. One entry per person please. If you send more than one entry, only the first one received will be counted. You can view and print your ballot any time on the ballot review page.

And don't forget to join us on Oscar night for a live chat! We'll talk about the people, the fashions, the story-lines, and the awards. We'll also be keeping track who is winning our contest in real time! Results will also be posted online as the awards are announced.

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Re: 2014 Oscar Contest

Post by James » February 3rd, 2014, 1:13 am

Here are a few links that might be useful.

- This is the contest page with the ballot and rules: http://animatedviews.com/contest/oscar2014/

- This is a list of all the people who have entered. On Oscar night this link will keep a live running score of who is winning the contest: http://animatedviews.com/contest/oscar2014/results.php

- This link will allow you to review what you picked and give you the option to download/print a PDF file of all the nominees with your picks highlighted: http://animatedviews.com/contest/oscar2014/review.html

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Re: 2014 Oscar Contest

Post by James » February 3rd, 2014, 10:16 am

PREVIOUS WINNERS:
(and the number they predicted right out of the 22 categories we count)

2005 - DarrenBest (18)
2006 - dgaspar (18), Mercury52 (18)
2007 - Jim Figley (14)
2008 - MrDy83 (16)
2009 - MileHighCinephile (20), Bobbleheadbuddha (20)
2010 - Jafar (19), reeg2223 (18)
2011 - rmh (20)
2012 - Bobbleheadbuddha (18), Soraly (18)
2013 - leonorab (20)

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