#oscarquest

tagged by @userpitgirl (ty!)

@planet4546b and i have been watching all oscars best pictures & cinematography winners starting from the first oscars so several of these are going to be from the 30s, as i didn't watch a whooole lot else outside that. its a strange collection. in release order:

going to put a little review of each just for fun & bc i do not have a letterboxd but i really should atp.

Shanghai Express (1932): surprisingly interested in engaging with race in a way that all the rest of the movies we watched from this decade are nottt interested in. Still has a Swedish guy playing a Chinese man due to. 1930s hollywood though. Marlene Dietrich & Anna May Wong are spectacular in their scenes together, especially when contrasted with the very very clunky scenes between Dietrich and the love interest.

Grand Hotel (1932): really neatly done, some fun camera work, good characters, really satisfying way of interconnecting the vignettes, and some cool matte paintings. spoilers for a movie from 1932 i suppose, but there's a scene where a character dies and the remainder of the scene is filmed from the eye level of his corpse which delighted and surprised me.

It Happened One Night (1934): did not expect to enjoy it as im not a romcom guy but this created an entire genre for a reason. really really a delight and i understand why Clark Gable was the leading man for so long.

Midsummer (1935): i mean hard to go wrong with shakespeare really but this was so fun regardless. the costumes are such a joy (oberon's entire retinue is buff men in skintight suits with bat wings?) and the whole thing was filmed in a way to end up with these very cool sparkling reflective artifacts sprinkled across the shots. they also used 700,000 YARDS of cellophane during filming.

Those are my Oscars Worth Watching from 1929 thru 1939. Honorable mentions would go to Sunrise (1927), just because its a really neat example of a silent film & also has a lot of the camera tricks etc that would define the first 5-7 years of cinematography winners.

More recent ones:

Aliens (1986): fucking absurd that they decided to remove the scene that tells you Ripley had a daughter from the final cut. anything that would have been a character moment is now a sweeping statement about How A Woman Will Behave Around A Child.

Erin Brockovich (2000): good procedural & i found the love interest charming and the set etc felt very real in a way i think a lot of more recent movies are lacking. the home felt lived in, the clothes felt like something a person was actually wearing, etc etc.

New Releases:

Sinners: idk what i can say that others havent. fucking incredible movie. i need to rewatch it.

Weapons: ive watched this three times i think. possibly four. i love the framing and the structure and the ambiguity/interpretability of what you want to take away from the movie as the main "message."

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You: stressful and nauseating to watch, really really good, the super super close POV so that we're in the main character's perceptual reality was sooo much fun and the refusal to show the kid, just the things about the kid that she has to deal with, was such a neat trick.

ID. series of phone photos of a computer screen playing a black and white movie. they show: a close-up on an almost floral lens flare, a close up on scattered lens flare artifacts that look like the shadows of branches on the ground with bat-winged fairies in the background, oberon with a tall crown of twigs covered in sparkles, a fat furry pony with a unicorn horn clearly strapped to its head, and oberon disguised as a tree stump making a shocked expression as demetrius and helena argue in front of him. End ID.