It's Time for the Brutally Honest 2018 Oscar Ballot & Best Picture Honest Trailer
Our favorite infuriating tradition is back!
Voting has now closed for Sunday's Academy Awards. That means The Hollywood Reporter is ready to share its Brutally Honest Oscar Ballots. They share at least one every year, and they tend to be quite juicy.
That's what happens when Academy members have anonymity -- they take open shots at Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep, when they otherwise wouldn't dare. (Only Jennifer Lawrence is candid enough to just say what she actually thinks on the record. Bless her.)
Also on the honesty theme, Screen Junkies shared an Honest Trailer mocking the nine Best Picture nominees.
Let's start with that:Back to THR's Brutally Honest Oscar Ballot. It looks like we might just get one this year, and it's from a male member of the producer's branch.
Here's a portion of his brutally honest thoughts on the Best Picture nominees:
I didn't like Call Me by Your Name. From what I understand, there was less of a difference between the ages of the young boy and his lover in the book, but I have to tell you, in the movie version it looked like a 35- or 40-year-old guy was hitting on a 16- or 17-year-old boy, and it just seemed wrong. It would have been wrong if they were heterosexuals.
With The Post, Spielberg couldn't get out of his own f*cking way. He gave every actor business. ["Business" meaning physical actions beyond delivering lines.] I felt like he saw Birdman and said, "Let's do that, only I'm gonna make everybody fiddle about with something in their pocket or a cigarette or whatever." It killed me. It was a great story with a great cast that got over-Spielberg-ized.
Three Billboards [Outside Ebbing, Missouri]? Nothing was honest about that movie. The acting was superb, but the characters didn't seem real and the story seemed exactly like what it was: a Brit's version of America. I don't feel that if I went to Ebbing, Missouri, that is how it would be. Get Out was a great, fun, entertaining genre film, but I don't read as much into it as others do.
Dunkirk looked great, but it was a little confusing, there wasn't enough of an emotional thread, and the drone of the airplane through the whole f*cking movie just drove me crazy. For me it just didn't fully work.
I liked Lady Bird — even though it's about a mother and daughter, and even though I'm a guy, there were actually elements that reminded me of me and my parents — but I grew to dislike Lady Bird because of its f*cking social media campaign. They pounded the drum too much. They put a magnifying glass on everything — like, how they shot the scene at the airport in one take. They shot the scene at the airport in one take because they f*cking stole it! ["Stealing a shot" means filming on location without permission.]
There's a lot more in this category. Ultimately, he voted for "The Shape of Water" as No. 1, followed by "Darkest Hour," "Phantom Thread," "Lady Bird," and "Dunkirk."
Here are the grumpy old dude's thoughts on the Best Actor nominees:
I don't understand why everyone's so crazy for [Get Out's] Daniel Kaluuya. Timothee [Chalamet, of Call Me by Your Name] is a brave little actor — I can't say I liked the movie, but he's a huge talent. Straight or gay — I don't know his orientation [ed. note: he's straight] — he did a great job. I happened to really like Denzel Washington in Roman J. Israel, Esq. — it was one of the freshest things I've seen him do in years — but the movie itself just didn't stand out. Daniel Day-Lewis was brilliant, but not Oscar-winning brilliant.
This one was easy: [Darkest Hour's] Gary Oldman was so good that I don't care if he hit his wife with a telephone. [In 2001, the actor's then-spouse alleged that he beat her with one; he denied the allegations and was never charged.] I hate when people use words like "transformative," but what they did to make him look like Churchill and what he did in that role can only be described as that. He blew it out of the water.
My Vote: Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour)
Read the full ballot for more. He thinks "The Florida Project" should've been nominated for a lot more, and wishes Willem Dafoe would get the Best Supporting Actor win. "Man, that movie got f*cking screwed."
The 90th Academy Awards, hosted for a second time in a row by Jimmy Kimmel, will air Sunday, March 4 at 5 p.m. PST on ABC. Here's the full list of nominations.
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