Image Credit: Ron Phillips
Just about every year, brilliant movies are utterly ignored by the Oscars. The Searchers, Groundhog Day, Breathless, King Kong, Casino Royale, Touch of Evil, Caddyshack, Mean Streets, The Big Lebowski — the Academy has a long history of overlooking comedies, action movies, horror flicks, hard-boiled genre pics, artsy foreign films, and documentaries that aren’t about World War II. This year, we’ll be taking a closer look at films that were too small, too weird, or perhaps simply too awesome for the Academy Awards. These are the Non-Nominees.
The Film: The Dark Knight Rises, the final film in director Christopher Nolan’s massive, box-office-record-busting, heretofore-oft-Oscar-nominated Batman trilogy. Featuring Christian Bale as a broken down Bruce Wayne (a.k.a. Batman), Anne Hathaway as the (kinda) amoral safecracker Selina Kyle (a.k.a. Catwoman), and Tom Hardy as the (almost entirely) inscrutable masked villain Bane (a.k.a. Bahrjghalfragl) bent on destroying Gotham City once and for all.
Why It Wasn’t Nominated: One of the less explored ironies tucked inside this year’s Oscar snubs is the fact that the Academy chose to expand the field of Best Picture nominees to 10 in part because Nolan’s previous Batman film, The Dark Knight, failed to land a Best Picture nomination despite widespread acclaim. Four years later, The Dark Knight‘s sequel failed to land any Oscar nods at all. READ FULL STORY »
SUNDAY, Dec. 2
10 things we learned from Christopher Nolan's 'Film Comment' interview
Image Credit: Michael Buckner/Getty Images
In a new interview with Film Comment, the magazine for the Film Society of the Lincoln Center, Christopher Nolan responds to basically every question you ever had about his Dark Knight trilogy. The thinking behind Gotham’s notorious realism? Check. The maybe-maybe not presence of Occupy Wall Street in Rises? Check. The photochemical processes involved in IMAX film production? Count on it.
The thorough and immensely enlightening interview is worth reading in full, but in case you can’t spare the time we’ve gleaned some of the best bits. Check them out after the jump.
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