So, I yawned my way through the Oscar nom announcements this morning. No, not because I woke up at dawn to watch the announcement (a practice I’d compulsively followed for 12 years till now), but because the noms are so routinely, predictably, underwhelmingly lame. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because the Academy holds less and less relevance in my book each and ever year, maybe it’s just the mind-numbing predictability of the movies and movie stars nominated, but this year the announcement was greeted by a shrug and a cuss word. I wonder if it’s just me or if a lot of Oscar fans felt the same way this year.

Here’s IMDB’s recap.

In more interesting news, I saw two flicks today. Alan Ball’s “Towelhead” and Morgan Spurlock’s much-buzzed-about “Where In the World Is Osama Bin Laden?” Both movies were problematic but, as you can guess, in different ways. For now, let me say there’s no excuse for a foul-up like “Towelhead” — a film that may bear the unfortunate distinction of being increasingly offensive in retrospect — to exist at all, and Morgan Spurlock needs to stop going through so much trouble to impress a point we all agree on anyway. You eat McDonalds for thirty days, and, guess what, you get really sick. Um…duh?

More specific notes on these movies later. Right now, I gotta get up out of this diner. Good fries, by the way. The veggie burger left much to be desired.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Sundance, Look! New!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.