Awards Season – Page 2 – the Addison Recorder

Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Remember When I Found Out I Had a Daughter?

October 16, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every week, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

Carrie Nelson warned me about Freeheld.

Carrie and I have been friends since we attended Emerson College together, and among many things she is a terrific documentary filmmaker who is steeped in the language and lore of cinema. I say “among many things” because she is also a regular contributor to The Daily Dot and an outspoken voice on LGBTQ and feminist issues. She has taught me a great deal, and thus when she revealed she had seen Freeheld I eagerly asked her opinion on this early Oscar contender.

She looked at me with a grimace.

“It is such a bad film. I wanted to like it so much…but all the dialogue is pretty awful. Very literal and expository.”

I have now seen Freeheld…and it is even worse than that.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: Movies For Grown-Ups

September 11, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every two weeks, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

One of the greatest moments of 2015.

The weather turns cooler, American football begins, and movie theaters transition away from four-quadrant effects-laden corporate blockbusters to more personal visions. The Oscar season begins in earnest, and I’ve often noticed how the first films to get released in the weeks after Labor Day are among the smaller, less sweeping pictures: films more Sundance than Telluride or Toronto and with less appeal for the younger moviegoer. These are movies for grown-ups, built around minutely observed characters and tight dialogue. This week I caught two movies of highly varying quality.

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Mr. Rostan at the Movies: The Power to Believe

August 28, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, and he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every two weeks, he’ll opine on current pictures or important movies from the past.

Two of the finest documentaries released this year concern themselves with the power to believe, which is crucial to human existence. We believe in things instilled in us after being passed down through generations, and these things, be they faiths or ideologies, help us integrate into society. We also believe in ourselves, which on the one hand is vital to our well-being; self-confidence and finding a worldview that help us deal with existence are important. But it also can be dangerous to if we elevate our ideas too highly, for sometimes they have the power to infect society.

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Conversation Piece: “The End of the Tour”

August 10, 2015 by Travis J. Cook 1 Comment

There’s a certain subset of the populace that The End of the Tour, a new movie from director James Ponsoldt, is specifically designed to appeal to. During one portion of the film, David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) describes the ideal reader for his novel Infinite Jest to writer/reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg): white, male, upper middle class, and “obscenely well educated”.

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2015 Academy Awards Re-Cap, or (The Unexpected Virtues of Birdman)

February 23, 2015 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

Travis: Well, that happened.

The 2015 Academy Awards Ceremony was last night, and Birdman cleaned up, winning awards for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and Cinematography. Alex, I know you’re feeling…well, feelings about this. Talk me through what you’re going through right now. And remember, you’re in a safe space. Don’t hold back.

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Oscar Round-Up 2015

February 22, 2015 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

The Oscar Season proper runs from about mid-December to whenever the actual ceremony gets up and going. However, the movies it celebrates come out (sometimes) year round. Below is a collection of Recorder articles about many of the various Oscar films, centralized for your reading pleasure before the big event!

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Oscar Picks 2015

February 20, 2015 by Alex Bean 1 Comment

The Addison Recorder has a lot of movie nerds on staff. Not all of us, of course, but enough to make the others bend to our will. So in anticipation of this week’s Oscar ceremony the staff is going to do their Will/Should/Dream winners picks for the category we care most about with some brief accompanying comments. The cinema nerds will have seen enough (or feel self-righteous enough) to really make it seem like their opinions have weight. The others have said they are throwing darts. Either process is as valid as actual Oscar voters filling out a ballot proclaiming one work of art objectively better than another.

Also, sometimes Alex can’t help himself and has to respond to the other writers. It’s just something Alex does when shaken. [Read more…]

Bean’s Oscar Predictions

February 18, 2015 by Alex Bean 4 Comments

Just like last year, I am going to make my best guess about what will win at the Oscars this weekend. I’ll provide commentary for the major categories and then just highlight my predicted winners on the rest of the ballot.

Best Picture

You have no idea how much I would prefer this Birdman sweeping towards Osar glory.

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In Defense of “The Best”: Why The Oscars Matter

February 17, 2015 by Alex Bean 2 Comments

Don’t let the self-congratulatory nature fool you, the Oscars really do matter.

Most dedicated moviegoers can agree that the Oscars are the film industry’s most high-profile and solipsistic exercise in self-promotion. Their whole existence is transparently crass and has been from the start. They were initially conceived of as a marketing ploy by industry bigwigs. The annual awards, are a reward for “merit” after a race dominated by tens of millions of dollars in “campaign spending.” Perhaps worst of all, they have given rise to a whole industry devoted to awards-centered navel gazing that takes up nearly half the year. Even if one did ignore all of those sins and just viewed them as a reflection of the taste of Hollywood’s elites then…ye gods. Every year they find new ways to ignore great movies and reward bland or mendacious crap. To view them with disdain is probably the only rational reaction.

And yet, I think the Oscars really do mean something and hold an important place in our cinematic culture. Almost in spite of themselves, the Oscars matter. The more easily defensible reason to love the Oscars is because they encourage the general public to engage with the quality of movies. The Oscars taste may tend towards middlebrow melodramas and biopics, but they still ask anyone watching to ask what movie they preferred and why. Actual critical analysis, of course, should not be based around a horse race mentality. And it’s even more reductive to presume that there can even be a “best” movie. Personal opinions and judgments cannot be reconciled with a term that absolute. [Read more…]

Mr. Rostan at the Movies: The Short Program

February 13, 2015 by Andrew Rostan Leave a Comment

Andrew Rostan was a film student before he realized that making comics was his horrible destiny, but he’s never shaken his love of cinema. Every two weeks, he’ll opine on either current pictures or important movies from the past.

The Outlier of the Oscars

The Short Films are the Academy Awards that too easily get overlooked. Casual moviegoers recognize the candidates in almost every major category and can often pick out most of the Animated Feature, Documentary, and Foreign Language Film nominees, but for the ten minutes the Shorts take over the program, 99% of the time movies people have never heard made my equally anonymous filmmakers receive the honor that has proved elusive to so many titans of history.

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