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Well, yesterday, Comic-Con began in San Diego.  I have the misfortune of missing this one and will hope to go to the Comic-Con in New York in October.  Well, Comic-Con is the place where new comic books are unveiled and recently, since the popularity of comic book movies, directors and studios have showcased their upcoming projects.  Neil Blomkamp, in 2009, actually held a screening of his first feature, District 9, at Comic-Con.  That generated word-of mouth and was one of the ten films nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 2010. 

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Art Directors Guild Announces Its Nominees

Screw Best Picture and Best Director, the prizes most of us are concerned with are in the art direction category. Hell, yeah! Actually, without good art direction and costumes and make-up, things that generally don't register with many in the opening weekend crowd, even a great movie will lose its footing.

The Art Directors Guild has announced its nominees, and as you read through them, you'll start to see why these technicians are so important to the success of a good film. There's no slouch in the bunch. The ADG also honors TV, so if that interests you, check the guild's website and read through the entire list. Because the concerns of different types of films bring separate challenges, the Art Directors Guild divides films into Period, Fantasy, and Contemporary categories. Fantasy includes sci-fi, so there you go.

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Which Films Fill the Void at Best Picture?

Is there an upshot to having ten Best Picture nominees? Well, the industry thinks it's great because of all the extra promotion, but what about the rest of us who just watch and enjoy the films? I think there is a possible silver lining, and we're about to find out who the beneficiaries are. The ten films that had reservations at the main table won't all be attending, and that means we need to find replacements.

I've seen this topic at InContention and AwardsDaily, the two sites I follow for all the updated awards news, and I thought it was worthwhile enough to bring up here, since we've long been critical of the ten nominees idea and you've been thoughtful in your responses to it. I'll go a little further than those two sites, though, both of which tend to believe we're still looking at 90% of the same movies. The one exception: Nine won't be nominated for Best Picture. I don't disagree with that, not at all. But I'm not so sure all the other films are safe, either. So what films - which stand absolutely no chance of winning Best Picture, by the way - slide into the category? We'll go through the whole mess, so bear with me.

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Even if you're the kind who waits to see everything on DVD, you have no doubt heard a thing or two about these performances. No, it was not Hollywood's best year; several of the awards favorites released in November and December miss the mark a little bit, and it was already a weak year before that. But what is fascinating to me about the performances from the past 12 months are how many new artists we met along the way.

There's no Winslet, no Day-Lewis, no Depp in this year's crowd. Of the ten we've picked, six are names almost nobody knew a year ago and a seventh would have never been pegged to be anywhere near such a collection, much less leading it. There are, in fact, only three performers you'd immediately recognize, and even one of those hadn't touched his best work in a few years. Perhaps, though, I was looking for that. Perhaps I was avoiding the Clooneys and the Freemans and the Cruzes, but I don't think so, at least not consciously. I can say in all honesty that the top half of this list came to me immediately, and of the second five, they'd all been bookmarked somewhere along the way. So it's not an effort to shortchange the work of any of the actors in Up in the Air or Invictus or Nine. These performances just meant more to me.

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The Big Picture's Top Ten Films of 2009

What makes a great film? Or better yet, what makes one film greater than another? It's impossible to answer although we can all usually agree on a few things: The Godfather is better than Jane Austen's Mafia, Casablanca beats Gigli, and Toy Story is superior to Toys.

There's never one thing that we cling to (although, certainly, in the right or wrong hands, any one thing can shift 180 degrees), but a well-written, well-directed, well-acted film tends to stand out against the average, and there's more average every year in the movies than there is good or bad. But ranking them? That's a thankless task. This list may not be like yours. All I can tell you is that these are the films that resonated loudest with me, and some longer than others, a couple not even upon first viewing. Some of them add technical achievements to that appreciation, but that isn't mandatory unless the film itself can't exist without it. I will say that I didn't love 2009 at the movies as much as I did the previous two years, and I hope to see more of the documentaries and foreign language films that have not yet made it to our shores. Those are usually a staple of my top ten lists (30% last year), but none made the cut in 2009, I'm afraid.

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