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Mad Max: Fury Road was the weirdest, wildest movie nominated for Best Picture in the past several years, as well as possibly the most-deserving. I wrote a piece a month ago highlighting some of my favorite films from the past year — some categories I agreed with the direction the Academy nominations pointed, and others I didn’t really know what was going on. I do not want to underscore the achievements of any of the winners or losers in the category, and I can’t say that any of the winners in the past few years didn’t “deserve” the win… except (probably) Argo. Many or most of these movies absolutely deserve to be recognized among the best of the year — but it has never made sense to me, especially in a category as wide as ten nominees, that nearly all of them end up being the same types of films over and over. They are dramas, many of them period pieces and “based on true events,” and they feature some of the most recognizable actors and actresses in the business, working for the most...

Sunday night is Oscar Sunday, or the Superbowl for people who hate sports and love complaining about golden statues that don’t mean anything. There, eight films (eight? don’t ask me, Oscar rules make no sense) will compete for the grand prize of Best Picture, dooming them to a lifetime of thinkpieces about how they were overrated and how they snubbed x-movie. So for the purpose of making sure you have at least some knowledge of what you’re talking about when you inevitably start ranting on Twitter Sunday night (and so I can shamelessly rip off the format of my last post), here’s some basic info on The Oscars’ nominees for Best Picture. The Big Short The one that you thought was really cool and important, but you still don’t understand it This was directed by the same guy who did Anchorman 2. Good conversation starter. Yeah, banks are so evil. They really screwed us over, huh. You know, with the trading, and the lending, and the lack of regulation, and the, uh… Ok, no matter how many Ma...

While Gene Kelly’s death is sad in itself, it is also fraught with controversy. Twenty years ago today, the world lost one of Hollywood’s greatest entertainers, dancers, choreographers, innovators, cinematographers, and genuine movie stars. What follows is a brief tribute to Gene Kelly including an explanation of his death and the industry’s response(s) thereafter. In July 1994, Gene Kelly suffered the first of two strokes. Although doctors at UCLA’s Medical Center labeled it “mild,” the stroke kept him in the hospital for nearly seven weeks. Kelly suffered another, much smaller stroke in Feburary 1995. “He was neurologically stable, aware, and conversational,” the Associated Press reported the following day. But sadly, Gene would never fully recover from this one. At age 84, he died in his sleep on Friday, February 2, 1996. No Friends, Food, Tears, or Embraces While Gene Kelly’s death is sad in itself — in that such an energetic man/body was overtaken by such a debilitating condition ...