[Akalabeth Angel]

Oscar Nominations are up and thankfully the best sci-fi movie of the year is in the running for best picture: Mad Max Fury Road

In other news, star Wars is up for sound, visuals & editing.

[NGTM-1R]

Oscar Nominations are up and thankfully the best sci-fi movie of the year is in the running for best picture: Mad Max Fury Road

In other news, star Wars is up for sound, visuals & editing.

Martian. I will cut you.

[Klaustrophobia]

Agreed.  Not sure I would really classify Mad Max as sci-fi anyway.

[Vidmaster]

Well, Mad Max was the best movie full stop. If it does not win at least cinematography, the Oscars have officially become useless.

[Klaustrophobia]

As though they were ever worth anything?

[karajorma]

The Oscars aren't really that good a judge of film quality really. Certainly not long term. Take a look here. Apart from a good run in the 70's where pretty much every film they gave it to is still regarded as a good film they have had some seriously odd choices. The further back it goes the stranger it becomes too. By the time you reach the 40's you get a few real classics like Casablanca winning but the number of films that are still well known, let alone regarded as being the best films of that year become few and far between. 
 
Not to mention absolute bizarreness like what is regarded as the greatest film ever made losing out to How Green Was My Valley. Now it's not in itself a bad film but no one is ever going to hold it up as the yardstick all films should be measured against! And that's not cause of the passing of time either. Even in 1941 it was believed to be a fix.


Oh and it's not just Best Picture either. Best Director (the other big Oscar) is equally bizarre. When you have a best director award that was never won by Hitchcock you've got a big problem. When you realise they didn't give it to Orson Welles either you might as well ****ing give up paying any attention to it.

[Akalabeth Angel]

The Oscars certainly pay favor to politics and societal feelings on occasion. One easy example is how the Lord of the Rings won so many awards with Return of the King but not with the other two movies, it was if the third movie was being rewarded in part for the previous two. Which is fine except that every other movie nominated that year suffered because of it.

Another more contentious example is when  Denzel Washington and Halle Barry both won best actor awards, coincidentally on the very same night that Sidney Poiter was recognized with a lifetime achievement award. Not that black actors aren't deserving of awards, but even to my young self it was fairly apparent that it was a politics-driven night. They shouldn't reward black actors with an exceptional Oscar night, rather they should award exceptional performances by black actors on any night.

Or more debateable, a movie like the Hurt Locker winning Best Picture because it's topical despite frankly not being a very good movie. It's basically a vignette of cliche war situations.

All that said, I would still think that these represent the exceptions not the norm.

As though they were ever worth anything?

The actors certainly think so, given that say Bill Murray cried his eyes out the year he lost to Johnny Depp Sean Penn.

[Klaustrophobia]

That's telling in and of itself.  For the most part, the only people who care about oscars are the ones involved with them.  Decided on by a small, exclusive club of rich people that as kara already pointed out are almost never in line with what the rest of the world considers a good movie.   


So back to Star Wars,

http://www.cracked.com/blog/if-the-force-awakens-was-way-shorter-more-honest/

[karajorma]

Of course, this information is basically useless, since the map isn't really in the droid as much as it's on the small, portable device located in the droid's storage bay. As such, nobody would be stupid enough to leave it there and carry the droid from place to place across the galaxy, especially once they are aware that we're looking for it.

"How has neither side developed email attachments or cloud drives yet? Seriously, like half our major issues- eh, forget it."

I kinda lost it at this point.

[Akalabeth Angel]

That's telling in and of itself.  For the most part, the only people who care about oscars are the ones involved with them.  Decided on by a small, exclusive club of rich people that as kara already pointed out are almost never in line with what the rest of the world considers a good movie.   

What, so you've never watched a film because it won or was nominated for Best Picture?

The King’s Speech was initially projected to gross $30 million worldwide. After receiving 12 Academy Award nominations, the revised estimate was over $200 million. After winning the Oscar for best picture, its worldwide box office surpassed $427 million with domestic DVD sales adding nearly another $32 million.

According to Reuters, an Academy Award nomination can boost ticket sales by one-third and cause a jump in the DVD sales of movies no longer in theaters. When you add downloads, streaming and cable TV revenues, the monetary rewards from receiving a nomination can be substantial.

http://www.businessinsider.com/oscarnomics-2013-how-much-is-oscar-really-worth-2013-2

For the most part, many people do care about the oscars as evidenced by increased interest in the film.

[Luis Dias]

So I finally went to see the movie on IMAX 3D with my kid (his first movie with me, quite impressionable) and a few friends. Had never gone to IMAX (kinda new around here, more or less), it was amazing.

So I haven't read the comments for all this time for spoilers reasons and I'm definitely not going to read all the nitpicking of all the obvious plot holes and incoherences that any movie that has the baggage that SW has would inevitably have and that this forum has all the tradition of going right into those quite as fast as possible (and thus questioning the validity of the movies themselves, etc., etc.)

Rather, just to point out that Star Wars is finally back, I loved it and I want more of it, period! I love Rey already more than I ever did Luke, Han's death was flawlessly written, beautiful and sad (yeah it "rhymes" with Qui Jong and Obi Wan's deaths, but hey, it's still Star Wars and we all know how it "rhymes"... ). I really loved Kylo Ren. He's struggling to go full dark side, and he's still a poor Sith master. I get the feel these guys would have written a really good Anakin downfall (but let's forget the prequels). Harrison was great, he was really into the part (which is something lacking in his latest movies). I liked Boyega and his pal "best pilot of the Resistance".

I didn't like a few things, and I could write a TL DR about them, but overall, they are mostly nitpickings. I think the next movie is well set up and has a good potential. I also look forward for the baddies to learn their lessons once and for all and stop building planet-sized monstrosities.

[zookeeper]

What, so you've never watched a film because it won or was nominated for Best Picture?

I think the first and last time I did that was with Birdman. I wouldn't say I had ever cared or followed which films win, but I had at least assumed that only good films do.

[StarSlayer]

I also look forward for the baddies to learn their lessons once and for all and stop building planet-sized monstrosities.

"Can it be destroyed by snubbies?" Will never be added to the Flow Charts in Imperial Design Studies.  Most technical subjects are open to debate in the Star Wars Universe but the above it pretty much Scientific Law.

[MP-Ryan]

So, my wife and I are watching the Original Trilogy, because *gasp* she has actually never seen it.

It's been about 10 years since I last watched any of the original films, and this had led to some startling revelations for me.

1.  The plot of the original three films is pretty damned narrow; little time elapses between the three films, and in themselves they're pretty tightly-timelined.  Contrast to the prequels, which span an enormous amount of time and are worse off for it.  The Force Awakens learned this lesson and arguably did it even better, though it's nearly a sequence-clone of A New Hope.
2.  The Force Awakens is an objectively better film and possibly even an objectively better *Star Wars film* than any of the original trilogy, if compared today without the benefit of nostalgic reminiscings.  Yeah, I said it, and that's after literally just finishing The Empire Strikes Back.
3.  Rey, Finn, and Kylo Ren are much better-developed and more interesting characters in one film than Luke, Han, and Leia were by the end of A New Hope.
4.  Bringing back Solo for episode 7 was brilliant, much-deserved, and a very fitting transition.

[Akalabeth Angel]

2.  The Force Awakens is an objectively better film and possibly even an objectively better *Star Wars film* than any of the original trilogy, if compared today without the benefit of nostalgic reminiscings.  Yeah, I said it, and that's after literally just finishing The Empire Strikes Back.

 

[Luis Dias]

I wholeheartedly agree with MP Ryan on that one. I think ESB was amazingly good for its time, and TFA is merely "Good" for this time, but if we are to analyse them without any concern for the time when it was released, TFA is a lot better than the other.

Which just means that, when Hollywood doesn't **** around, they actually iterate and learn from their mistakes and sucesses. And in this case, 35 years did well for this movie.

[swashmebuckle]

I don't wanna get into the whole "objectively better" thing, but I will say that my enjoyment of TFA is far more dependent on nostalgia than my enjoyment of the OT is. TFA is a movie that positively glides on a cushion of nods, winks, and sometimes direct shout outs to the audience in reference to stuff they've internalized from the OT.

You might think that it's a cynical way of papering over the movie's weaknesses or you might think that it's a completely legit device for saving time and giving the audience a good feeling, but either way, I think you would be hard pressed to argue that the OT gets a bigger boost from nostalgia than TFA does. TFA is a clinically precise Disney-tuned nostalgia exploiting machine. It is a fan service movie. The telltale sign is Harrison Ford doing literally anything and you grinning like an idiot. Anyway, just something to consider.

[Akalabeth Angel]

An English lesson for everyone:

Objectively - "not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased"

So unless someone is prepared to do a cold analysis of the structure of each movie, the word you want is "subjectively" or "in my opinion".

Which just means that, when Hollywood doesn't **** around, they actually iterate and learn from their mistakes and sucesses. And in this case, 35 years did well for this movie.

TFA isn't an iteration. It's a regurgitation.

[Mars]

I have never really liked Star Wars, didn't like the original. Thought that Luke was whiney. Han Solo was alright but pretty much just Indiana Jones. Throughout the trilogy the acting was cheesy and by the end none of the characters ever seemed to have legitimately changed. (At least in a progressive and believable way)

I loved tfa.

[NGTM-1R]

So unless someone is prepared to do a cold analysis of the structure of each movie, the word you want is "subjectively" or "in my opinion".

This MP-Ryan, known for crushingly long and precisely reasoned arguments that have silenced all comers in debate in GenDisc and a grasp of English that exceeds any poster save perhaps Battuta when Battuta is actually trying to English.

If he says objectively, he means objectively. If you don't like it, that's too bad, but your hatred for this movie is well-established in its immunity to reason by now, so maybe you should just stop talking about it if it's all you've got to contribute.