The 84th Academy Awards

The official trailer of the 84th Academy Awards®.

Visit the official site of the 84th Academy Awards, or the page of the Academy for up to date Oscars news

Why Do the Oscars Hate Laugh-Out-Loud Comedies?

In an article for The Atlantic, Kenneth Fallon, assistant editor at TheWeek.com and a former producer of The Atlantic's Entertainment channel, argues that funny, well-reviewed films with broad appeal almost never get nominated for Best Picture. Read Fallon's article, and look through the slides of popular funny movies that never got an Oscar nomination, at The Atlantic.

'Hugo:' A Dazzling 3-D Display Of Movie Magic

Read this movie review of Oscar nomminated film, Hugo from npr, then watch the clip from the film below.

by DAVID EDELSTEIN

In Hugo, Martin Scorsese has hired himself a bunch of A-plus-list artists and techies, and together they've crafted a deluxe, gargantuan train-set of a movie in which the director and his 3-D camera can whisk and whizz and zig and zag and show off all his expensive toys — and wax lyrical on the magic of movies.

The source is Brian Selznick's illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which takes place in 1930 and centers on an orphaned 12-year-old, played in the film by Asa Butterfield, who lives in a flat in the bowels of the Paris station.

Hugo's drunken uncle, until he went missing, had the job of setting the station's clocks, so now the boy, to cover for the disappearance and stay out of the orphanage, does the job in secret, stealing through tunnels, up rickety ladders and over catwalks, careful to avoid Sasha Baron Cohen's stationmaster with his relish for orphan-catching.

For a while, Hugo's only company is a semi-complete automaton, a kind of primitive mechanical man that his late machinist dad (Jude Law, seen in flashback) discovered in a museum storage area. Hugo thinks the automaton holds the key to his future; alas, the key it doesn't hold is the one that would wind it up and set it in motion.

Scorsese, working from a shapely script by John Logan, is hell-bent on bedazzling us. He and production designer Dante Ferretti pack the screen with clocks and gears and cogs and other round objects that also evoke the film canisters that show up later, when pioneer fantasy filmmaker Georges Melies turns up as a character.

The 3-D cinematography by Robert Richardson is calculated to tickle you, most obviously in shots in which the stationmaster's Doberman pinscher sticks its long snout into your face, but more subtly when the train station is layered with booths and passengers at all kinds of levels, and when overhead shots create odd spatial tensions in the frame, obstacles around which bodies invariably hurtle.

Scorsese has studied the best 3-D films, not just Cameron's Avatar but Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder, and, as far as I'm concerned, redeemed this increasingly tiresome form. Cameron has agreed, calling Hugo at a recent screening a "masterpiece."

I liked the film a lot, but am not so ready to use the "m" word. When Melies appears, the movie becomes a plea for Scorsese's film-preservation cause — which I'm 100 percent behind, but which introduces an element of self-consciousness that pulls the narrative off the rails.

Jaap Buitendijk/Paramount Pictures

Abandoned by an alcoholic uncle after the death of his father, Hugo services the train station tower clock by day and sleeps in it by night.

For all the wizardry on display, Hugo often feels like a film about magic instead of, well, a magical film — something Steven Spielberg has made with his 3-D movie Tintin, opening in December. Wonderful insights into Hugo's mind about the overlap between man and machine get a bit upstaged when he expresses them to his new 13-year-old friend, played by Chloe Grace Moretz.

Those two kids, Butterfield and Moretz, have a wonderful transparency, and the cast is a treat. Baron Cohen finds all kinds of bizarre notes with which to express his ardor for a flower-stand owner (Emily Mortimer), among them a rictus grin that suggests Peter Sellers. That hoary genre veteran Christopher Lee — now Sir Christopher — lends majesty to the role of a librarian, and Michael Stuhlbarg is winningly geeky as an early film scholar.

Ben Kingsley as Moritz's godfather, who runs a toy stand, is mysteriously cold and brittle, even cruel — but when all is revealed, we warm up to him.

At its best, in scenes with the automaton and its Mona Lisa smile, and in an explosive runaway-train nightmare, Scorsese is as deft as Spielberg. When he shows us a famous clock-hanging sequence in Harold Lloyd's Safety Last and tries to replicate it, he's trying too hard. The clips from such Melies wonders as A Trip to the Moon show a delirious unreality that's a world away from Hugo's literal-minded wonders.

Watch Clips

'Someone Is In Trouble'

 

'Can We Fix Him?'

 

'One Big Machine'

 

But I carp. You must heed the subliminal advertising in the title. YOU GO.

Biopic Pictures & The Oscars

To say that the biopic picture and performances have dominated the Academy awards over the years would be a bit of an understatement.

The Academy and cinema audiences seem fascinated with these real life stories and characters brought to life - and next years awards season looks set to be no different.

My Week With Marilyn and Moneyball, both of which are released this week, are already amongst the early Oscar favourites.

Michelle Williams looks set to bag a Best Actress nod while Brad Pitt will most likely receive a nomination for his central performance as Billy Beane in Moneyball.

Also keep an eye out for Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Land and Leonardo DiCaprio as J Edgar Hoover in J Edgar who you would also expect to be in the mix when the nominations start rolling in.....

 This article was written in November, 2011. How accurate were the predictions on Oscar nominations?

- Read the rest of the article and take a look at some clips from Moneyball.