Best picture nominees

A small, art house theater in Peoria will be showing the Oscar-nominated documentary and animated short films starting in a couple of weeks. So looking forward to that.

 

Documentary nominees "Restrepo" and "Exit Through the Gift Shop" are on Netflix instant watch. Enjoyed them both thoroughly, but "Restrepo" requires some patience and an appreciation for the limits of war documentation.

 

I liked Winter's Bone overall, but I thought it was a little too understated. I didn't expect a Michael Bay production, but I was waiting a while for the pace to pick up and then the movie ended.

 

Saw "True Grit" (I'm abnormally way behind on them this year)...loved Jeff Bridges and the girl, but was underwhelmed with the flick as a whole.

Of the three I've seen, Social Network is the best, so far, although Inception was quite interesting.

 

So, just wondering, if the best picture nominees were limited to five, what would the five movies be?

I've now seen six of the 10 and I figure that Social Network, King' Speech and Black Swan would be givens, but I don't know about the others.

Thoughts?

 

I hated Black Swan.

I wish I could go to that two-day extravaganza, but it's a bad time of year for me to take all Saturday and sit in a movie theater.

 

I think people have forgotten just how great Toy Story 3 really was. I'm not saying it should win, but it's a bit surprising how quickly it's been dismissed as a nominee.

 

From what I've seen I would rank them like this:

The Fighter
True Grit
The Social Network
Inception

But I really liked each of them. Still haven't seen Black Swan and The King's Speech, so I could be swayed yet.

As a group, I don't remember a time when so many really good movies were released in the same year.

 

The Fighter and Toy Story 3 - TS3 would get the last slot mostly on the virtue of worldwide box office and the near-universal critical reception. Still seems a little odd that the Academy is unwilling to reward individual performances in animated features, though.

Thanks to the way AMC chose to split up the ten films, I'm only going to bother with the 19th. I've seen three of the five scheduled for the 26th and have next to zero interest in the other two. If you change your mind, ijag, shoot me a PM.

 

Of the Five I have seen:

The Fighter- Excellent. Bale stole the show, and as a boxing fan, it's rewarding to see Ward get some mainstream pub.

The rest I'd rank: 127 Hours, Inception, Winter's Bone and True Grit (one of the few people, I guess, who was bored by it).

 

I've seen nine and I really liked all of them.

The Social Network would probably be my No. 1 and Winter's Bone or Black Swan would likely be at the bottom of the list, but I thought both were very good films.