Yesterday I blogged my overview of the best picture nominations, and you can CLICK HERE to read those.  Here are some thoughts I have about the nominations as a group.

Thought One:  This is the year of the troubled genius.  The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything both feature brilliant scientists.  Alan Turing (brilliantly portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in Imitation) and Stephen Hawking (equally brilliantly portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in Theory) both are super-duper-smart but also have troubles.  Hawking’s trouble is the motor-neuron disease while Turing’s is his antisocial, asperger-like behavior.

These are the obvious ones, but not the only ones.  Chris Kyle, the main character in American Sniper, is in the same category.  He is the ‘best’ sniper in American history, but he also suffers from guilt, PTSD, and a very exaggerated sense of duty.  Martin Luther King is the genius orator and leader of the Civil Rights movement in Selma, but his marriage and personal life is in tatters.  Andrew Neiman is a brilliant drummer in Whiplash, but he is unable to live any kind of meaningful life other than to consistently take the verbal whipping of his abusive music teacher.  The actors in each of these roles, Bradley Cooper, David Oyelowo, and Miles Teller do wonderful work tapping into that complexity.

Thought Two:  Words.  None of these, really, are wordy films.  Budapest and Selma are the wordiest, but Sniper, Imitation, Theory, and Whiplash amaze me with how much they communicate without words.  This is also true of Foxcatcher, which should have been listed instead of Birdman.  I hated Birdman.  I bet the entire screenplay for Foxcatcher is only about five pages single spaced.

Thought Three:  Boyhood and American Sniper have more in common than you might think.  These two films are about as different as night and day in terms of what you see, but they both cover the same period of time and they are both anchored in the Texas experience.  Kyle grew up in Texas and it was a tough, Texas childhood and early adolescence that lead him to join the military.  It was a unique Texas testosterone that fueled his view of duty, guns, violence, and family.

In Boyhood we see Mason grow up in a different Texas.  He is led by his mother (Patricia Arquette) and father (Ethan Hawke) to go on a voyage of self-discovery and self-obsession.  He plants yard signs for Obama in Houston with his dad, slackers around Austin, and becomes an artist in San Marcos.

Of special interest in this comparison, remember when Mason’s grandfather gives him the shotgun for his birthday?  Maybe Mason’s grandparents hung out with Chris Kyle’s parents?

Their lives are so different, but it is altogether possible that if these were real tellings, Mason might have been at Pedernales Falls State Park with his father when maybe Chris Kyle was there with his wife and kids.  More pointedly, it might not be too much of a stretch to think that Kyle, when he was a rodeo professional, might have been a possible love interest for Mason’s mom.

Seriously.  These two movies overlap in so many ways, but they portray two different Americas, two different kinds of Texas.

Thought Four:  Thankfully, the nominations this year are not as sex-laden as last year.  I wonder if Hollywood has realized that they went too far last year with The Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle, Her, and Dallas Buyers Club.  You can read last years reviews to see how I felt about those, but for now it is proper to acknowledge how ‘unsexual’ the 2015 movies are.  The only one that comes close to anything graphic is The Grand Budapest Hotel, and that is more ‘yuck’ factor than anything else.

Why is that? It could be that the last three winners have been The Artist, Argo, and 12 Years A Slave.  None of those were overtly sexual.  Sure, 12 Years has nudity, but it is not sexual.  It portrays the ugly exploitation of slavery.

Thought Five:  Not much to say except, this years Oscars is about as male-centric lily white as one can imagine.  Diversity has been kicked to the curb.  Consider this piece (Click Here) from the L. A. Times.

I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on the films.  Tomorrow, if time allows me, I will blog my predictions as to who will win the major awards.

image from telegraph.co.uk