Time for a Random List: The Ten Best Best Picture Oscar Winners

1. Gone with the Wind (1939)
2. Annie Hall (1977)
3. The Godfather Part II (1974)
4. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
5. The Godfather (1972)
6. The Apartment (1960)
7. On the Waterfront (1954)
8. Schindler's List (1993)
9. Casablanca (1942)
10. Unforgiven (1992)

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The Pizza Project
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Time for a Random List: The Five Worst Best Picture Oscar Winners

5. Ordinary People (1980)
Should Have Won: Raging Bull

4. Gandhi (1982)
Should Have Won: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

3. Crash (2005)
Should Have Won: Brokeback Mountain

2. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
Should Have Won: High Noon

1. Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
Should Have Won: Giant

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The Pizza Project
Just a nibble: http://twitter.com/ThePizzaProject
Single slice: http://www.facebook.com/ThePizzaProject
The full pie: http://thepizzaproject.blogspot.com/

Monthly Roundup: January's Top Posts

To close each month, we'll do a quick roundup of the not-to-miss posts. In a blog with so much fascinating content, it could be easy to miss one or two good posts.

Yep, it's February already. Hopefully your new year's resolutions are still going strong. I'm struggling to remember what mine were. Fortunately, it's not tough to remember what the top posts of January were.

• This month will bring us Tinseltown's biggest night of the year. Gearing up for the Oscar's? Check out Saucy's predictions for the winners, losers and everyone in between.
• Sports more your speed? Or middle-aged men sitting at home in their underwear glued to the TV and Internet "playing" fantasy basketball?
   
• Local BYOB shines during Ambler Restaurant Week: Zake's Cafe is definitely worth a visit
   
• The post that drew the most traffic last month? 10 best pizzas of 2011
   
• Speaking of pizzas, we ate some pretty terrible ones last month. Luckily, SliCE was an exception.

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The Pizza Project

Just a nibble: http://twitter.com/ThePizzaProject
Single slice: http://www.facebook.com/ThePizzaProject
The full pie: http://thepizzaproject.blogspot.com/

Twenty Bold Predictions on the 2011 Oscars*

1) The Artist will shock absolutely no one by winning Best Picture. It’s a silent movie and there are a lot of old heads in the Academy who will feel really good about themselves by carrying it to a Best Picture Oscar.
2) There will be a shocker in the Best Actor category. George Clooney already has an Oscar and people will not want to vote for the French guy who didn’t do any talking (Jean Dujardin). The vote will be split between Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Brad Pitt for Moneyball. This leaves the winner as Demian Bichir, star of the little-seen Bicycle Thieves rip-off A Better Life.

Time for a Random List: Ten 2011 Movies that Haven't Come Out Yet That Probably Won't Suck

So far this year, I count two movies that actually grabbed my attention and made me want to go see them - Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. Otherwise, the stuff that has been coming out of Hollywood has been pretty awful. Then again, I don't get to the movies much anymore. So for all I know, The Smurfs could have been the shizznit. Anyway, here is a list (in chronological order) of ten flicks that will come out between September and the end of December that certainly seem like they have the potential for "decent status."

1) Contagion (Sept. 9)
It is directed by Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Out of Sight) and stars luminaries Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, and Laurence Fishburne. Soderbergh's recent output has been the definition of uneven (The Informant!) if not WTF (The Girlfriend Experience), but with a cast like this it is hard to believe that the medical outbreak thriller does not satisfy.

2) The Ides of March (Oct. 7)
This film about an idealistic political newbie who gets involved in a perspective-shattering Presidential election has another virtual sh*tload of great actors in it (Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Paul Giamatti. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, et al), and it's directed by Clooney, who may not hit a home run every time (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Leatherheads), but has come up with at least one sublime creation (the unfortunately punctuated Good Night, and Good Luck.).

Ten Quick Thoughts about...True Grit (2010)

1) I am certainly not a fan of the whole sequel/remake/reboot fascination that is running rampant through Hollywood in this foul era of our cinema (heard today they are remaking Total Recall), but this is one that I think was well worth the effort. Supposedly, the film is more loyal to the intent of the book than the 1969 version that starred John Wayne so it doesn’t really count as a remake; it is better termed a reinterpretation (I must be honest and say that I have not read the novel by Charles Portis, nor have I seen the entire film – saw enough to see that John Wayne was good fun, but probably not award-worthy, and that the girl playing Mattie Ross was kind of annoying and awkward). In any event, the new version is a strong story of retribution with the customary dark wit of the Coen Brothers.

Ten Quick Thoughts on...The King's Speech

1) The first two times I tried to watch The King's Speech, the story of King George VI and his struggle with his speech impediment, I fell asleep. I thought it was because I was tipsy both times or I turned it on too late. The third time, I made it through and I realized that the two times I conked out during the film were not due to alcohol consumption or need for shut-eye. No. It was because the film is kind of boring.

2) Colin Firth is a darn fine actor, and he does a very good job in the movie. This being said, I don't see why people were in such a rush to crown him with Oscar for this performance. I went into it expecting to be blown away by his work, and really it was a little underwhelming. I am now convinced that he was given the Oscar for portraying a guy with a speech impediment (the Academy loves characters with physical handicaps) or as a make-up call for not rewarding his incredible performance as a gay college professor struggling to recover from the loss of his partner in A Single Man. Maybe they should have given Firth the Oscar last year, and Jeff Bridges the Oscar for True Grit this year.

Ten Quick Thoughts on...Black Swan

1) Like most people, I have never really been a fan of Natalie Portman's acting. She tends to end up being either annoyingly cutesy or distractingly wooden in just about everything she's been in. Even something like Garden State, where her performance was somewhat memorable seems to suffer in hindsight (to be honest, I thought both she and the movie were kind of overrated at the time that I first saw it). I would say the only performance of hers that I have enjoyed thus far in her career was the stripper she played in Mike Nichols' Closer. That is, until I saw this movie. Portman is actually a revelation in Black Swan. I bought every paranoid, high-strung moment that her character, fragile ballerina Nina Sayers, spent on the screen (and no I don't care how much of her dancing she did). She totally deserved the Oscar she received for the role. Her incredible performance in fact was enough to forgive her for co-starring in an Ashton Kutcher film as her follow-up. Come to think of it, that Your Highness slop she just put out didn't look like such great shakes either. But look, man, she could use a break after that heavy lifting! Let's just hope she doesn't pull a Nicolas Cage after Leaving Las Vegas and never make another decent film.

Six Quick Thoughts on...Inside Job

Inside Job, a film about the reasons - and culprits - behind the financial meltdown of 2008, was named Best Documentary at the 2011 Academy Awards.

1. I really liked the beginning of the film, which featured an interesting diversionary story about the economy of Iceland and how it was sent spiraling because of the chicanery of a bunch of greedy American bank-pillagers. Plus the credits were set to the monstrous-at-the-time, yet somehow forgotten, greatness that was Peter Gabriel's "Big Time." It reminded me that the 80s are known for a lot of sh*tty music, yet when you think of it a lot of the stuff that you think of as sh*tty you really enjoyed at the time and it really isn't even that sh*tty now. Know what I'm sayin'?

2. If I had it to do it over again, I probably would not have started this flick at 10 o'clock. It was interesting enough to keep me awake, but it definitely cost me some of my ability to concentrate on complicated issues. The fact that I knocked back about four or five beers from Flying Dog Brewery prior to (and during) the viewing probably didn't help either.

Ten Quick Thoughts on...The Fighter

1. It's funny how there was a Christian Bale backlash around awards season talking about how he played Dicky Eklund over the top. I don't know, the guy was a crackhead, and if you have ever seen footage of the real guy, he is a kook. As Eklund, Bale was never less than interesting. The movie usually benefitted when he was on the screen. Now, I guess an argument can be made that that shouldn't be what being a great "supporting actor" is about. But, for me, I thought it was a great performance. Plus, if anyone deserves one of these performances, it's Bale. He has been playing the anchor to a wildman performance since, what, American Psycho?

Random Thoughts about the 2011 Oscars

Usually, if I were to write about the Oscars, it wouldn't be in the form of a wrap-up. Instead, I would write something predicting all the winners. When I was proven to be correct, I would return the next day to gloat over my superiority in the area of trivial knowledge. If I were proven to be wrong, I would never mention the predictions again, promptly pretending that they never existed (I would probably remove the post for good measure because I am very insecure). Alas, I can not publish these sorts of predictions anymore. You see, we have a party for the Oscars every year, and this party includes a ballot contest wherein the person who gets the most correct wins a wonderful prize. Since my friends now know about this blog, if I were to print my thoughts, dishonest scalawags could invade the blog for clues and the contest would therefore be compromised (plus, you would have a lot of people dumb enough to vote for the True Grit Girl over the shoe-in of the year, Melissa Leo). This, by the way, is the circuitous route to saying that a commenter (WE HAD A COMMENTER!!! PLEASE KEEP READING AND COMMENTING!!! AND INVITE FRIENDS!!!) asked us what our thoughts were on the Oscars. Well...here they are in a completely random yet incredibly voluminous manner.

1) It is nice that a lot of people have seen fit to get in Kirk Douglas's corner. They say that he was charming. They say that he was witty. They say that he was a good sport. But let's be honest: Dude had no business being on that stage. His appearance was trainwreck television of the highest order. It couldn't get more uncomfortable if you asked Mel Gibson to cut the ribbon at the groundbreaking for a new Holocaust museum. By saying this, I in no way disparage Douglas, who suffered a debilitating stroke and is 94 years old for God's sake. But the douchebag producers who put him in that position probably should have been tarred and feathered in the middle of Sunset Boulevard.