Reactions to the 2009 Oscars - Page 4

In total tallies of awards, Slumdog Millionaire scored eight, Milk scored two with Penn’s win and Best Original Screenplay for Dustin Lance Black, and I was relieved that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ended up taking home just three technical awards, including Art Direction, Makeup, and Visual Effects, all of which were deserving despite the movie’s general failure as a sweeping story. I can also understand why Best Sound Mixing ended up being awarded to Slumdog Millionaire because sound mixing is about controlling sound levels and getting that right was crucial to giving a sense of spatial reality in the slums of Mumbai, along with providing a great Bollywood musical number at the end. But why, oh why did WALL·E, which unsurprisingly won the Best Animated Feature Oscar, lose out on the Oscar for Sound Editing (which gave The Dark Knight its second Oscar)? I guess that the flashy whiffs, booms, and bangs are easier to notice than the carefully timed electronic noises and space object movement that are more subtly buried and therefore more notably crucial to the story.

Another somewhat shocking result was the awarding of Best Foreign Language Film, which went to Departures from Japan, which has been seen by virtually no one in the US other than in the Hawaii Film Festival. I would have loved to see an innovative and daring film like Waltz with Bashir become the first animated film to ever win this category but since I have not seen Departures and the Academy requires voters to have seen all five films in this category, I will wait on full judgment. But I have to say it would have to be quite something to shoulder off Waltz with Bashir or even The Class and with the Academy’s questionable track record of properly judging merit in foreign films, the award leaves me somewhat skeptical to the point of guessing one of the following. In the case of Waltz with Bashir, either a) they were not ready to award their first foreign film Oscar to an animated film or b) they did not want to give the Oscar to Israel in light of the political conflict in the Gaza strip. And in the case of The Class, they perhaps did not want to stack up the Oscar along with the Palme d’Or it already received at Cannes.

Article Author: moviejohn

Joo-Wang John Lee is a computer programmer at Binghamton University by day and a movie critic by hobby. Upon insistent suggestion from people around him, he finally decided to start critiquing movies in writing instead of just verbal form among his friends. …

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