With the 87th Academy Awards coming up later this month, the buzz surrounding the many nominees throughout the various categories has been building steadily.
The Best Picture category, as always, features a wide assortment of films ranging from blockbusters to under-the-radar indie films, pitted against one another while vying for one of the industry’s premier filmmaking awards, the Oscar for Best Picture. And that’s what makes the category so much fun.
This year’s nominees (click here for a list of the nominees) include a wide variety of films, from Clint Eastwood’s blockbuster American Sniper, to Richard Linklater’s indie epic Boyhood. I’ll discuss my favorites in the running for the 2015 Best Picture award.
My frontrunner for the award would be Boyhood. This groundbreaking film was shot over a series of 12 years, using entirely the same cast. The film centers on Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, a boy simply growing up. Not a groundbreaking plot concept of course, but the plot is not what makes this film so great.
Boyhood‘s greatest attribute is simply how well it captures the essence of life. Mason is simply a boy, living with his sister and mother, experiencing the highs and lows of life as they come. I couldn’t help but reflect back on my own childhood as I watched Mason live his.
This brings me back to the film’s proprietary quality of being filmed over a 12 year span. Because we literally watch Mason, and Ellar Coltrane, grow up before our very eyes, we feel as though we lived his life and experienced all of the highs and lows right along with him. No other film has been able to capture the essence of growing up in the way that Boyhood has done so beautifully.
The blockbuster on this year’s list is Eastwood’s film American Sniper. While this film may not have a big shot at the Best Picture award, no pun intended, it definitely earned its place on my personal list of the greatest war movies of all time.
While many would disagree with me, I felt that American Sniper did an great job of remaining politically neutral. A war movie, especially regarding this particular war, could have easily gotten very political very quickly. But American Sniper used the war as the setting, not as the main focus of the story per se.
The story focuses on Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, portrayed excellently by Bradley Cooper, who becomes one of the greatest snipers in American war history. But while the film does portray Kyle’s war heroics and related achievements, it instead focuses on Kyle’s personal life, and his struggles re-acclimating to life back in the States.
That’s what makes this film so great to me. Yes, it is a really cool war movie. Yes, it portrays war. But it also portrays an often unexplored side of war, the aftermath in one’s own psyche after experiencing such horrors firsthand.
The final nominee that stood out to me personally was Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film Birdman. Birdman‘s plot, especially at first glance, appears to be nothing special: a washed up actor attempts to revive his career through his latest starring role in a play. But similar to Boyhood, it’s a certain aspect of the filmmaking process that makes this movie stand out.
Birdman is made to look as though it’s filmed continuously. To truly understand this, the film simply must be seen. But to explain it as best I can, the camera continuously follows the characters around and flows from scene to scene, giving the appearance of no cut scenes and no jumps from one location or time to another, it simply appears seamless.
In journalism, this storytelling technique is called “spatial” storytelling. As Marvin Olasky describes it in his book Telling the Truth, “A spatial story, instead of bringing readers circularly to the place where they began, tries to give them a closer look at a subject by moving them from outside to inside, or room by room through a house, or house by house down a street.” This is exactly what Iñárritu’s film manages to do, and in an incredibly fluid and successful manner.
Along with the incredible cinematography, Birdman weaves in some entertaining plot twists, particularly towards the end of the story, bringing a compelling and memorable conclusion to the story. Some may write the film off as “too slow” or “dry,” especially due to the continuous cinematographic style. But Birdman is a unique film, and one worth watching, if only due to the ingenious cinematographic style.
These are my favorites of the nominees. While all of these films are entirely different from one another in most every way, they are all equally brilliant in their own Oscar-worthy ways.
Sources:
http://oscar.go.com/nominees
Telling the Truth by Marvin Olasky
On The Reel 