The List Hero View: The Oscars

In case you haven't heard, the Oscars were held last night.  Ellen DeGeneres took a selfie that contained a celebrity net worth of over a billion dollars; a photo that was so popular, apparently, that it caused a Twitter meltdown.  Leonardo Di Caprio, yet again, had to put on a fake smile as somebody waltzed away with his Academy Award.  And Steve McQueen was robbed of becoming the first black director to win the top directing award.

So, here are the results, and whether or not I agreed....

Best Picture • 12 Years a Slave
Do I agree?  Yes.  Among a selection of great films, this was certainly a worthy winner.

Best Actor in a Leading Role • Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club)
Do I agree?  Yes.  Sorry Mr Di Carpio but this was the performance of a lifetime.

Best Actress in a Leading Role • Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)
Do I agree?  Yes.  To be honest, nobody else came close.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role • Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)
Do I agree?  Yes.  This was easily the strongest acting category, with solid performances from Jonah Hill in The Wolf of Wall Street, Michael Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave and Somalia's Burkhad Abdi in Captain Phillips. However, Leto's performance alongside Michael McConaughey as an aids-riddled transvestite is truly exceptional.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role • Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave)
Do I agree?  Probably.  Despite an outstanding performance in the year's best film, Jennifer Lawrence's performance in American Hustle went some way towards carrying that particular film and was my personal favourite.  However, it can't be denied that Nyong'o is excellent in 12 Years.

Best Animated Feature • Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, Peter Del Vecho)
Do I agree?  Absolutely not.  Hated this movie from start to finish.  Anything else would have been preferable, especially the Academy-snubbed Monster University.

Best Cinematography • Gravity (Emmanuel Lubezki)
Do I agree?  Nope.  12 Years a Slave was the most beautiful film of 2013.

Best Costume Design • The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin)
Do I agree?  No.  American Hustle did a fantastic job of transporting audiences back to the 70s and should have grabbed this award.

Best Directing • Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
Do I agree?  No.  Despite its admirable technical achievements, I cannot support a film that is so utterly boring.  Steve McQueen should have picked up the award, or Martin Scorsese (but I'm always biased towards Scorsese).

Best Foreign Language Film • The Great Beauty (Italy)
Do I agree?  No.  I could not get on with this film at all.  For me, it had to be Denmark's The Hunt.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling • Dallas Buyers Club (Adruitha Lee, Robin Mathews)
Do I agree?  Yes.  Although many would have wanted American Hustle (which, bizarrely, wasn't even nominated) to win, the detail on Jared Leto's make-up is outstanding, especially as the character falls deeper into the clutches of the Aids virus.

Best Original Song • Let It Go - Frozen
Do I agree?  No.  Cheese-on-toast.

Best Visual Effects • Gravity (Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, Dave Shirk, Neil Corbould)
Do I agree?  Yes.  Obviously.

Disney's Frozen (2013) - The List Hero Review

Like a critical supervillain, the first two months of my calendar year is usually spent observing Hollywood's awards season from my lair in the Midlands.  It has been one of my favourite pass-times for the last five or six years.  And this year has been no different.  As usual, there are the select few films that appear to be sweeping the board (12 Years a Slave & Gravity this year) and the Best Animated Feature category is no exception.  Frozen is a red-hot banker to become Disney's first non-Pixar movie to win the prestigious Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.  The box-office-smashing hit has already won the corresponding accolade at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, the Critics Choice Awards and the renowned animation honors, the Annie Awards - where it won four other gongs too!

But my question is this:  how?

Having laughed my head off to two of the other major animated movies of 2013 - Despicable Me 2 and Monsters University - I felt that Frozen had a lot to live up to.  However, seeing all of those accolades, I felt sure that Disney would do the trick.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

The film is set in the fictional kingdom of Arendelle, where two princesses live.  One is a normal girl, the other one has magical powers... for some reason.  However, after an accident, the one with the magical powers needs to keep the magical powers a secret from her sister... because some trolls told her so.  I hated this film.  Other than a talking snowman called Olaf, I really couldn't work out what Frozen had going for it.  The "jokes" were few an far between, and when they did arrive it was mainly Princess Anna (the non-magical one) saying one thing but then, in  a very modern-America kind-of-way, jokingly meaning another.

By Disney standards, the songs were utterly useless too.  Here are the opening lyrics to one of the early songs:
The window is open, so is that door,
I didn't know they did that anymore.
Who on Earth wrote that song?  Mickey Mouse?

So the jokes are rubbish and the songs are worse.  However, there must surely be an uplifting, meaningful message behind the film, right?  Erm... not that I can work out.  Here's a plot summary (let me know if you can work out the meaning):  Girl has (completely unexplained) magical powers that she doesn't want.  Then everyone finds out about the powers so she runs away.  Her sister goes to fetch her back.  They meet a friendly snowman (by far the highlight of the film) and fight a nasty snowman (not sure why).  Then the magic princess comes back to Arandelle.  In a parallel side-plot, that I couldn't have cared less about, the non-magic sister falls in love with a prince on the day she meets him but he turns out to be a nob (not that anyone cares because he's barely in the film) and then, at the end, she gets it on with some ice-chopper bloke that talks to his moose/reindeer.  Utter garbage.

Although the Best Animated Feature Oscar is a category that's only been open since 2001, it seems amazing that Disney (other than their Pixar movies) have not won this gong.  There have been some excellent Disney animations in recent years such as The Princess & The Frog and Tangled, which were understandably beaten to the award by Up and Toy Story 3 respectably.  However, this time last year, I was on the opposite side of the fence, hoping that Disney's Wreck It Ralph (in my opinion, one of the best films of 2012) would beat Pixar's fairly average Brave.  Sadly, it didn't.

So it seems amazing to me that a movie as terrible as Frozen is sweeping the board and taking every award in sight.  The Academy seem to have lost the plot with this award recently; I disagreed with last year's decision, I disliked Rango the year before that, and I dislike Frozen now.  And what's even more amazing is that Pixar's Monsters University didn't even get a nomination!  This means, as we watch the awards being dished out on the TV in our super-lair, the minions and I will have to keep my fingers crossed for Despicable Me 2 to snatch a shock victory.

Rating for Frozen:  It would have been 1 but I did stick with it until the end and at least children (the film's target audience) will enjoy the visuals, overlook the terrible lyrics and laugh at Olaf.  So, it's an extremely generous 2 out of 5.