The Oscars!

[roddy]

Is anyone else surprised by the awards The Departed got (Best picture, best director, adapted screenplay, editing) - I thought it was good, but that good?

Glad to see both Helen Mirren and Forrest Whittaker getting best actress / actor - both the Queen and The Last King of Scotland are fantastic films, and Whittaker is, in my humble opinion, a very fine actor indeed.

Also, has anyone seen The Blood of Yingzhou District - it won best short documentary.

[Jack MacKelly]

Yeah best actor went to Whitaker, best actress went to Mirren, they have talent but I haven't seen their big movies

AlGore's movie also got an award

Of course Martin Scorsese was the man of the night. I've heard the re-make was very good but I really liked the original and thought Tony Leung, Lau, Tsang were great in the HK version

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/26-traditional-vs-simplified-characters76

I haven't seen the AIDS documentary either

Basically there were a whole load of films at the Academy Awards I haven't seen

[gato]

I just bought a DVD of "Little Miss Sunshine" last night. I can tell it's a great movie just by the opening scene. It currently has a rating of over 8.1 on Internet Movie Database.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0449059/

Two other highly Oscar nominees are The Labyrinth of Pan at 8.5 and Letters from Iwo Jima at 8.3. I got their DVDs, as well.

[gato]

So which of the Oscar nominees have the best chance of showing in theaters in China?

Here's a good article on China's movie import quota system from Variety, Hollywood's trade paper.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117935348.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

Quota fix leaves H'wood hanging

Studios vow to wow China gradually

China's quota system is riddled with exceptions and uneven application. For instance, 21 films from [Motion Pictures Association] studios were released on a revenue-sharing basis in 2005, not the strict 20 that many believe applies.

Hollywood's ambassadors have learned not to bother presenting films of genres that China Film does not expect Chinese auds to go for. In addition to horror, most U.S. comedy is out, although family-oriented laffers such as "Cheaper by the Dozen" and "Big Momma's House" were successfully released, and both have sequels hoping for play in 2006.

UIP presents films by Universal subsidiary Working Title as British and this year [2005] secured berths for "Wimbledon" and "Thunderbirds" in addition to Working Title/Mirage Entertainment's "The Interpreter" and Par's "War of the Worlds." Warner Bros. delivered "A Very Long Engagement," the only non English-language pic to get a quota release in 2005. Given the state of Sino-Japanese political relations, it seems unlikely that a Japanese film will qualify for revenue-share release any time soon, though animal drama "Quill" went out on a flat fee basis this year.

An earlier thread on quotas on Hollywood films:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?p=97427

[roddy]

I'm guessing the Yingzhou one won't get general release any time in the near future. The Queen would be fine - entirely innocuous film. Although it pokes fun at politicians and maybe that's something that we don't want to be encouraging. Letters from Iwo Jima I don't see appearing on the mainland anytime soon. The Last King of Scotland I don't know - no reason why it couldn't be shown here, but I don't see Chinese audiences going for it somehow.

Has United 93 been shown here at all? I know Stone's World Trade Center was, as I went to see it by mistake.

[Ian_Lee]

How come "Infernal Affairs" became a Japanese movie in the Oscar? Did they ever do any research?

I only watched "Little Miss Sunshine" out of all the nominated movies. I never understood why it would be nominated.

[mikelove]

The most satisfying win for me was The Lives of Others beating out Pan's Labyrinth in what many critics were calling the "real" Best Picture category. Pan's wasn't a bad film, but Lives of Others was one of the best I've seen in years, worthy of joining The Conversation and The French Connection in the annals of great surveillance movies.

I was pulling for Peter O'Toole for Best Actor, though when they started out the evening talking about how great it was just to be nominated it seemed like a bad sign. And when your career-best performance comes in the same year as Gregory Peck's in To Kill A Mockingbird I suppose you're just cursed.

But as for The Departed, the best explanations I can come up with are that it was a weak year for films in general and that it would probably be considerably more impressive if you didn't already know all of the plot twists from watching Infernal Affairs. (certainly explains the screenplay bit at least, since I imagine most Academy voters were far too lazy to familiarize themselves with the material being adapted in order to see how little Monahan actually contributed)