The Best Picture Profanity Reel

This is our last Oscar update before tonight's show. (Just a reminder, we've got loads of Oscar coverage for you, including interviews, predictions, and features about the best of the awards).

Someone spent a lot of time putting together the 2009 Best Picture Profanity Reel, which is exactly what it sounds like: Showcasing the bad words in Frost/Nixon, Benjamin Button, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire, and Milk. We take the language of movies for granted - Scorsese's f-bombs, the c-word in Atonement, of all things - but as we wrote in our Best Best Actresses column, it was only about 40 years ago that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? couldn't get away with saying "screw." You've come a long way, baby. Check it out if you've got five minutes. Oh - there are some spoilers in these clips, so if you haven't seen all the movies, this might not be for you.

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Did Rex Reed See the Same 'Reader' I Saw?

I noticed an ad running for The Reader here at The Big Picture, and I'm happy for the business. But something really stood out to me about the ad, and it wasn't the plaudits for Kate Winslet's Oscar-nominated performance, but rather the blurb from Rex Reed.

Reed has been at this movie criticism game for years. He tends to take a home run swing if he loves something or if he hates it. So when you see in big, bold letters, "A masterpiece," don't pay attention to that. It's just his style. I rarely call anything a masterpiece because I don't believe they come around every year. In Rex's case, there were at least four masterpieces in 2008, because this was his number four film of the year.

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81st Annual Academy Award Nominees

There were some definite surprises in this morning's announcement of the Academy Award nominees; accurately predicting all five contenders in each of the major categories was difficult, because there were curveballs thrown all over the place.

The Reader earned a Best Picture nomination, and Kate Winslet's performance vaulted her into the Best Actress race, meaning she only got one nomination. The Dark Knight was nearly blanked, despite its strong end-of-the-year showing in other lists and awards, netting only a nomination for Heath Ledger among the major categories. Richard Jenkins and Melissa Leo brought indie cred to the lead acting categories, and Clint Eastwood was left out in the cold. Here are the nominees, as announced by AMPAS President Sid Gannis and Best Actor winner Forest Whitaker: Best Picture:
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire Best Actor:
Richard Jenkins - The Visitor
Frank Langella - Frost/Nixon
Sean Penn - Milk
Brad Pitt - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler Best Actress:
Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie - Changeling
Melissa Leo - Frozen River
Meryl Streep - Doubt
Kate Winslet - The Reader

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Winslet Nabs a Pair of BAFTA Nominations

The BAFTA nominations have been announced, and as we know, BAFTA stands for British...uh...British (Something) Film (Something) Academy/Association/(Something).

There's a strong likelihood that these films will be similar to the ones announced in one week, when the Oscar nominations hit us over the head. Last year, for example, four of the BAFTA nominees earned Oscar nominations, and for the past five years, that's been fairly consistent: 19 out of 25 Best Picture nominees at the British Academy of Film and Television Awards have earned Academy Award nominations, as well. We won't go through the whole list, but the highlights are that Kate Winslet is nominated twice for Best Actress, something she can't do by rule with the Oscars. Individuals can be nominated twice, but it has to be in different categories. The Dark Knight received nine nominations, all but one for a technical award. Heath Ledger was among the five Best Supporting Actor nominees, but the film did not pick up nods for Best Picture, Director, or Adapted Screenplay. As expected, Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are the top nominees, with 11 each. The Dark Knight finished third in the tally, followed by the surprising Changeling with eight, and Frost/Nixon with six nominations.

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Movie Review - 'The Reader'

The Reader Starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, and David Kross Directed by Stephen Daldry Rated R

You should not feel comfortable watching The Reader. There are so many things about it that should crawl under your skin, that should push your morality one way or another. Based on Bernard Schlink's bestselling book, The Reader tackles a lot of weighty subjects, what would qualify as statutory rape and the Holocaust among them. But director Stephen Daldry (The Hours) never uses these extremes as extremes, presenting them as smaller parts of a bigger life. That life belongs to Michael Berg, whom we meet in the 1990s as Ralph Fiennes. Berg soon flashes back to when he was a teenager in the late 1950s (David Kross). Never a sickly boy, he nonetheless comes down with Scarlet Fever. The first symptoms are revealed as he is taken in by a public transit worker named Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). He is awestruck by her, but not she by him. When he returns home later that night, the doctor tells Michael he must stay in bed for several weeks. As soon as he's well enough to leave the house, he pays Hanna a return visit to thank her for her kindness, and as if it was preordained, they make love. It's not the last time. Over the course of a few months, Michael and Hanna meet at her one-room apartment, and after he reads to her, the 36-year-old woman and the 15-year-old boy have sex.

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