Conspiracy theorists, start your engines. When early front-runner Zero Dark Thirty won but one Oscar on Sunday night, it marked quite a fall from grace. For most of awards season, it was the prohibitive favorite for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and most of the technical awards. Of course, we all know what happened.…
Earlier this week, The New Republic published a scathing and moralistic piece by Thomas Hackett about the Oscar-nominated Beasts of the Southern Wild. While he begrudgingly praises the film’s “excitement for the surprising places artful imagery and editing can take us,” he ends up making the rather inflammatory claim that the film is “patronizing and…
At various points during this awards season that culminates Sunday night at the Academy Awards, there have been three prohibitive favorites for the Best Picture Oscar. For most of the fall, prognosticators assumed Zero Dark Thirty would take home Oscar gold. After the controversy over that film’s depiction of torture reached a fever pitch and…
When I told my friends I was going to see Top Gun during its brief 3D theatrical re-release (which ends this week), nobody was particularly impressed. When I mentioned that I had never seen it before, their eyes widened, and each put forth some variation of the same question: “How is that possible?” The film…
The mind behind the words of the White House’s most accomplished orator is leaving for Hollywood. Yesterday, news broke that Jon Favreau, who has been Obama’s lead speechwriter since the early Senate days, will leave the White House on March 1st and try his hand at screenwriting. File this one under “another one bites the…
So much has already been written about Zero Dark Thirty, and yet we seem no closer to a consensus on whether the film depicts torture as producing information that led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian has argued passionately that the film suggests that it does, and that it…
In the wake of the shootings last year in Aurora and Newtown, movie violence is under heavier scrutiny than we have seen in years. Many pundits and elected officials have raised the issue as a potential part of the problem of gun violence, but due to Wayne LaPierre’s polarizing press conference, it seems less likely…
Yesterday, Politico reported on a screenplay making the rounds in Hollywood about Hillary Clinton. If production on the script were to begin soon, the film might be released somewhere in the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign, which many expect Clinton to be a key participant in. But this is not the story of Clinton’s…
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