Nom, Nom, Noms, by Matt Warren

With the recent announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations, we can finally say that the cinema year 2010 is on the books.  The nominations are an opportunity for culture-watchers the world over to compile their own should-win/will-win lists and compare notes, taking stock of the attitudes and trends that helped shape what appeared in theaters and on our screens over the past 12 months.From the Tea Party to Teen Moms, MMX was one big messy pile of contradictory and inexplicable human behavior.  And the film year told the tale of our anxiety, with certain key themes popping up over and over: our fear of/dependence on technology, the elasticity of truth, the relevance of identity with virtual realms, the impossibility of obtaining any measure of real justice in a chaotic world, furry vengeance, etc.It wasn’t a great film year, like 1999 or 2007, but this year’s Academy Award nominees are at least able to hold a mirror up to our fractured psyches and force us to think about the complex world we’ve build for ourselves, and our unsteady footing therein.  Or maybe not.  Maybe they were just a bunch of random movies that were mostly okay.  I don’t know.  I’m just trying to find a way into the rest of this article.So without delay, here’s a rundown of some of the films in the hunt for Oscar gold…127 HoursBest Picture, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Score, Song, & EditingIf I found myself in the same predicament that protagonist Aron Ralston finds himself in in 127 Hours, the film made out of my ordeal would’ve been called 45 Minutes, because arm or no arm, I’ve got shit to do.  Maybe I’m impatient, but that’s just how God made me.  Anyway, the moral of Ralston’s story is this: if you’re going spelunking, be sure to bring something that’s easy to masturbate to.  Also, don’t go spelunking.  Stay indoors, where the chance of accidentally getting your arm pinned underneath a boulder is extremely slim (unless your name is Fred Flintstone.)Black SwanBest Picture, Director, Actress, Cinematography, & EditingBlack Swan is scary, schizoid fun, but waifs Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis are hardly believable as ballet dancers.  Have you ever met a professional dance company member?  Those chicks are yolked.  Portman and Kunis are two seriously skinny, lawn gnome-sized young women.  It really stretches the suspension of disbelief to think they have enough muscle mass to even keep their oversized Kewpie-doll heads supported atop their quivering tinderstick bodies, much less engage in any sort of physically taxing athletic pursuit.  Plus I could probably count on one hand the number of periods they’ve both had in the last 10 years.  But hey, eww.  Let’s all grow up.Exit Through the Gift ShopBest DocumentaryGreat art about bad art about great art.  This is my own personal favorite film of the year, both because it’s a remarkable story told well, with lots of exciting footage of street artists in action, and also because it was the most exciting film-going experience of my life.  I was lucky enough, through some combination of connections and standing-outside-in-the-snow-for-hours-and-hours-ness, to snag tickets for the film’s world premiere at last year’s Sundance, where I was seated one row behind Jared Leto (aka Jordan Catalano) & 30 Seconds to Mars (aka Frozen Embryos), and one row in front of Hyde and Fes from “That 70’s Show.”  Plus, the Vikings lost the NFC championship that day.  Sometimes everything just seems to work out all at once.  Unrelated: Go Packers!The FighterBest Picture, Director, Supporting Actor & Actress, Original Screenplay, & EditingOne can only imagine what kind of hotheaded shenanigoats went down behind the scenes between legendarily temperamental geniuses/total assholes David O. Russell and Christian Bale during the filming of this movie.  I imagine the terms “cunt,” “motherfucker,” and “up da da dah da” were invoked with such frequency and vigor as to leave the words themselves completely devoid of meaning, instead becoming something like the aural equivalent of the “Jupiter Beyond the Infinite” section of 2001, a transcendental inter-dimensional light corridor made of sheer rage and profanity.  Also, crazy Boston accents!InceptionBest Picture, Original Screenplay, Score, Editing, Mixing, Art Direction, & two moreIn late 2008, flush from the success of that summer’s The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan sat down with his family to enjoy a nice Thanksgiving dinner.  His gaze fell lazily upon the Turducken at the center of the table.  Then, inspiration struck.  His eyes widened as a light bulb went off above his head.  A duck inside a chicken inside a turkey?  “This,” he pointed excitedly at the bird(s), “is my next film!”  He then rushed upstairs to write the entire first draft of Inception in one manic burst, and was back downstairs again in time for pie and ice cream.The Social NetworkBest Picture, Actor, Cinematography, Dir., Editing, Score, Sound, Adapted Screenplay<Error 404: File Not Found>Tron: LegacyBest Sound Editing01000110011101010110001101101011011101000110100001101
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True GritBest Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Director, & five moreTrue Grit may be minor Coen Brothers, but Joel & Ethan’s most commercially successful film will likely go down as perhaps the best of their good-not-great films, ranking somewhere above the likes O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Burn After Reading, but well below classics like Fargo and No Country for Old Men.  And with Rooster Cogburn raking in the dough at the box office, look for Paramount to extend the franchise with the sequels Truer Grit, Truest Grit, the Stephen Colbert-crossover Truthy Grit (thanks, Viacom synergy!), its sequel Truthy Grit 2: Electric Boogaloo, and its sequel’s sequel Truthy Grit 2: Electric Boogaloo 2: Electric Boogaloo.Winter’s BoneBest Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, & Supporting ActorFor added fun, try imagining Winter’s Bone as a stop-motion animated Christmas special, à la the old Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  Try to picture Bone protagonist Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) as Rudolph, and Ree’s terrifying Uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) as crusty-but-loveable gold speculator Yukon Cornelius.  Now throw in various Hermey the Misfit Elves and Abominable Snowmen where appropriate.  But what, you may ask, is the purpose of this thought experiment?  The answer is, I don’t remember.  I think it was because the film’s villain looked a little bit like Santa Claus.  Spoilers.There you have it.  Rejected ideas for this post include a thing about The King’s Speech written all like th-th-this, something about the Who song “The Kids Are All Right” being used as the theme for the next entry in the “CSI” franchise, and a really atrocious bit about sentient sex toys in the world of Toy Story 3, including speculation as to which SNL alum might be good as the voice of the Fleshlight.  Awful.  Just awful.So let’s all make giddy little handclaps in anticipation of Oscar’s big night, when Catwoman and the Green Goblin will at last decide which movies are quantitatively superior to other movies.  And just like every other year, I can’t fucking wait.

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